The concentrated heavy fire from the fortress walls roared through the enclosed underground space and held the Hive Tyrant and the larger organisms from advancing. High-threat targets contained. Everything else, the Hormagaunts and Termagants, counted in tens of thousands, simply stepped over the bodies of the ones the fire had already killed and kept coming.
The massed assault hit the line and the line beca a atgrinder.
"Kill!"
Duvette drove himself into the rolling mass of organisms without hesitation, the chainsword howling at full throttle.
The monomolecular teeth tore through chitin, ground through flesh, and threw purple-black fluid and biological fragnts in every direction as he moved. He had no Limiter Break. Without it, he was a mortal officer with better physical conditioning and sharper combat technique than most, nothing more. The alien limbs cut through the fabric of his greatcoat and left marks on the body underneath. The impacts made each swing cost more than it should have. None of it stopped him from swinging.
The chainsword's roar was the only announcent he needed.
At so point Duvette stopped feeling the wounds in his right shoulder and leg. The thunder of weapons fire, the voices of soldiers dying beside him, the alien screams, they receded from his awareness degree by degree and went sowhere he could not hear them.
His world narrowed to the organisms in front of him and the blade in his hands.
Red-eyed and unstoppable, he drove through them. Each swing faster than the one before, the technique becoming sothing below conscious thought. The rage that had been accumulating since the mont he had arrived in this universe was finding its exit.
Why? Why was it always him standing in the throat of the impossible? On what basis did one ordinary mortal have to fight for his life again and again, in a universe full of alien predators, Warp daemons, and n who had lost everything that made them human, with no end in sight and no promise of survival at the far end of any of it?
He was not satisfied with that. The fury rising in him had a specific temperature and a specific target, and the organisms pouring at him from every direction were going to receive every last degree of it.
Another wide lateral sweep. The chainsword scread through three Hormagaunts coming in from the flank simultaneously, cutting them through at the midsection, their severed sections scattering in arcs of purple fluid.
Stroud and Anderson, fighting several tres behind him, exchanged one look over the carnage.
"Has the boss completely lost his mind?!" Stroud blew apart a Termagant attempting a flank approach with the combat shotgun and kept watching Duvette with the expression of a man who has just been shown sothing he did not know was possible.
He had fought alongside this commissar since Farrak IV. He had never seen him shed the cold precision for this.
Anderson did not waste ti on the observation. He swung the power maul and drove forward, the blue force field arcs tearing a corridor through whatever was in his path.
"Stay with him. He cannot be surrounded."
They both changed their bearing imdiately, pressing toward Duvette across the bodies accumulating between them.
From the left, out of the shadows along the passage wall, a shape erged that operated at a different scale entirely.
A Tyranid Warrior. Three tres of heavy carapace, compound crimson eyes locking onto the source of the most continuous killing in its imdiate area. The monomolecular bone sword in its grip ca up over its head and ca down toward Duvette's back with the particular velocity of a weapon that had been built to cleave through tank armour.
"Commissar! Behind you!"
"Boss! Back!"
The shouts from Anderson and Stroud were simultaneous and desperate.
Duvette had already felt it.
Threat Sense had delivered the warning as a physical sensation: the cold certainty across the back of the neck that cos before sothing lethal makes contact. He turned his head.
In the fraction of a second between seeing the Warrior and the bone sword reaching him, sothing surfaced from his mory with an unexpected clarity.
Cold Steel Ridge. A space in the engagent where the fighting had briefly opened up around two figures. Cato Sicarius, ornate armour and red cloak in motion, voice full of the absolute certainty of a warrior who had never genuinely doubted himself: "Stand back, Commissar! This one is mine!" Three strikes. The first deflecting the blade, the second opening the carapace, the third committed fully and complete.
Duvette did not think beyond that image. He did not step back.
He reversed his grip, cleared the last Hormagaunt in front of him with one clean diagonal, used the montum of the follow-through to complete his turn, and ca back around facing the Warrior with both hands locked on the chainsword's hilt.
He charged it.
Sidestep, drive forward, redirect the blade on contact, commit to the strike.
Sicarius's movents broken down and reconstructed in the space of a second.
I can do this.
The bone sword ca down at the angle that would have divided him from shoulder to hip. At the last possible mont, Duvette slid to the side at a degree that left almost nothing to spare, and the blade hit the tal floor instead, sparks scattering in every direction.
The Warrior's overextended swing had left it open for the half-second that was all he was going to get.
Duvette drove the screaming chainsword into the gap between its neck and the upper edge of the chest carapace.
The cutting sound the weapon produced in biological material was sothing he had heard many tis. He gritted his teeth and held it in place through the Warrior's violent, convulsive response, pushing the blade as deep as the housing would allow.
The motor nearly locked.
He released the hilt, stumbled backward, and found his footing on the blood-covered floor.
The Warrior stood for a mont with that catastrophic wound in its chest pouring purple fluid, its limbs still moving with the residual impulse of a body that had not yet understood it was finished. Then it fell, and the sound of it hitting the floor was final.
Anderson and Stroud reached him in the sa mont.
Anderson swept the power maul through the organisms pressing in from the sides, clearing the imdiate area with two strikes. Stroud covered the angles the maul couldn't reach with the combat shotgun.
Duvette went down onto one knee. He was breathing in hard, tearing breaths, his lungs burning, both arms trembling from the sustained effort of everything that had preceded this mont. The anger that had been driving him through the last several minutes had burned itself out on the Warrior. When he looked up, his eyes were his own again: the sa cold attention that had been there since Farrak IV, back behind the exhaustion.
Stroud had been about to say sothing.
"GRAAAHHHH!"
A sound that was less a noise than a physical event, sothing that the enclosed underground space transmitted through the floor and the walls as much as through the air, erupted from the far end of the passage and made the stone surfaces tremble.
All three of them turned.
The Hive Tyrant had stopped standing at the back of the engagent and was coming forward. It drove through the mass of organisms between it and them as if they were not there, the swarm parting ahead of it instinctively. The heavy fire from the fortress walls was landing on it from every angle. It walked through the barrage without slowing, the psychic shield rippling at each impact but absorbing everything the garrison could deliver.
It had a direction, and the direction was the three of them.
"Stroud!" Anderson's voice had a register in it Duvette had never heard from him. "Get the Commissar out! Run!"
Anderson shoved Stroud away from the trajectory. He turned to face the Hive Tyrant, planting himself between the creature and the ground where Duvette was still on one knee, and unlocked the power maul's output to its maximum overload setting. The force field along the weapon's head blazed blue-white, arcing and spiking with the energy the system was no longer regulating.
He had every intention of spending that energy on sothing that mattered.
The Hive Tyrant did not regard him as a significant obstacle.
The forearm it swung as a casual backhanded motion produced an impact that sent Anderson, his armour, his augnted mass, his master-grade weapon, fifty tres through the air in less ti than it took to hear the sound of it. He hit the wall with a crack that communicated clearly what had absorbed the deceleration, and slid down the surface to the floor.
In the upper-left corner of Duvette's vision, Anderson's status indicator shifted to the color that ant nothing good.
[Status: Critical Wounds]
"Anderson!"
Stroud's voice cracked.
Duvette pressed his blood-covered left hand against the floor and got himself upright.
The Hive Tyrant had not followed through. After removing Anderson, it had simply stopped.
The psychic shield around its body was visible now: a half-translucent barrier of Warp energy that caught every laser strike and solid round coming in from the garrison, spread the force across its surface in rippling concentric rings, and expelled it as heat. The organism stood in the centre of its own defensive field and looked down at the two figures below it. It was in no hurry.
This was not hunting behavior. This was sothing else. It was communicating sothing about the difference between what it was and what they were, using the only vocabulary it had for the concept.
The lower-tier organisms had cleared the space around it. They were operating in the surrounding passages, maintaining the pressure on the defensive line, keeping the mortal soldiers too occupied to consolidate. But here, in this specific section of the underground space, the Hive Tyrant had arranged for an audience.
Duvette stared up at it with bloodshot eyes.
He could feel the psychic pressure it was generating as pain that worked its way through the bones of his skull and pressed against his thoughts. The question that the pressure was pushing toward him was whether this was the end of the line.
It occurred to him, in the particular way that things occur to a man who has used up most of what he had, that it might be.
Everything around him slowed.
He heard Stroud's voice at his side, the bald veteran's hands pulling at his arm with the grip of soone who understands urgency at a physical level. He saw Finn at the far end of the defensive line, still firing his lasrifle into the Hive Tyrant's shield at maximum power with the single-minded determination of a man who refuses to accept that what he is doing is not working. He could hear Kleist across the vox, his voice stripped of the cool professional register that defined it, screaming for the entire 112th to charge and pull their Commissar out.
All of it happening. All of it not enough.
Duvette pulled Stroud's hands away from his arm. He reached down and found the chainsword, still running, still warm from the Warrior's biology. He picked it up.
If this was where it ended, then it ended on his terms. Dying in a forward charge was the only appropriate conclusion for a Colonel-Commissar. He would not be found facing away from what had killed him.
The Hive Tyrant lifted the bone sword that could have divided a battle tank into components, and looked down at the small human staring up at it with complete refusal to look anywhere else.
Then sothing changed.
Not in the physical space of the engagent. In the Hive Tyrant.
The scream it produced was categorically different from anything it had emitted before. Not challenge. Not hunger. Not territorial display. This sound ca from sowhere in the organism's biology that had never been used for anything except the response to catastrophic damage, and it was entirely involuntary.
The psychic shield, which had absorbed everything the fortress garrison had fired at it for the entire engagent, dissolved. Not under pressure. Instantaneously. Like glass struck from the inside.
The Hive Tyrant's enormous body went rigid as the scream built and then tore its way out through it, a total neurological event that hit every structure simultaneously.
And the sound spread.
Every Tyranid organism in the underground space, from the Hormagaunts and Termagants locked in close combat with the defensive line, to the Raveners operating in the side passages, all of them, at the sa mont, a single shared convulsion of pain and loss of direction. The swarm's coordinated pressure collapsed into individual organisms moving without purpose, shrieking without aning, so of them going still entirely, so of them attacking whatever was nearest including each other.
The underground fortress went from the sound of the most sustained close-quarters battle in its existence to sothing that had no na.
Duvette stood with the chainsword still in his hand, suspended in the middle of what had just happened.
His mind worked through it in the ti it takes to draw one breath.
In orbit above Macragge, the captain of the Planetary Overlord had made the decision. An Emperor-class battleship driving into the heart of the Tyranid main fleet, its reactors pushed past every limit they had been built with, detonating at the mont of deepest penetration. The explosion had torn the regional Synapse network in half. The hive mind's connection to every organism on and below this planet, the coherent intelligence that made a Tyranid swarm a coordinated weapon instead of a collection of biological impulses, was gone.
Fortune had not abandoned him.
He looked up at the Hive Tyrant standing without its shield, without its Synapse connection, without any of the things that had made it what it was sixty seconds ago.
And then Duvette laughed.
It was not a asured or dignified sound. It ca out of him as the involuntary physical response to everything that had just not happened, and he did not try to stop it.
He turned around.
He raised the chainsword above his head, the motor screaming at full power, and he drove his voice out with everything that was left in his lungs.
"Everyone! Charge! KILL!!!"
Death as promised?
No. Chaos as promised.
The alien fleet is gone. The alien mind has gone blind.
Now we are the hunters.
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