Warhammer 40k: The Men of Iron Return to the Galaxy Chapter 195 195: Purge and Extraction

"What happened!?"

A strange, heavy silence descended upon the smoke-shrouded battlefield. Amidst the lingering spore clouds, there was only a deathly stillness.

An Imperial Guardsman clutched his Lucius-pattern lasgun with white-knuckled intensity, staring into the hazy, yellowish miasma, desperate to identify his next target. The trenches were a mosaic of ruin: fragnted human remains lay alongside the mangled carapaces of Hormagaunts that had been hacked apart by chainswords upon breaching the line. Near the mouth of a reinforced dugout, the carcass of a Tyranid Warrior lay slumped at an unnatural angle. In the troughs of the trenches, blood had pooled into dark, stagnant res.

"Did we lose? Has the swarm moved past us?"

From another firing slit a few ters away, another soldier dared to lean out from his cramped position, peering into the gloom. Ten ters behind them, soldiers in the secondary support line were also looking about, their weapons held in a state of wary readiness. n called out to one another, their voices rasping as they asked if anyone had seen anything.

There was only silence.

The frontline commanders had also taken note of the anomaly. Though the spore-choked fog had not yet dissipated, the guttural shrieks of the swarm had vanished. The perpetual, maddening drone of leathery wings in the sky had fallen mute. The Tyranid aerial organisms had simply disappeared.

The Imperial air elents had long since been expended. Countless Valkyries and Avenger Strike Fighters had taken flight only to never return. With the enemy's status unknown, it was deed an unacceptable risk to use precious remaining Arvus Lighters for reconnaissance. As the Emperor's cheapest currency, human life was often valued less than a functioning machine; thus, dozens of scout squads across the sectors donned their respirators and advanced into the fog to uncover the truth.

Within the spore clouds, the dead of both sides were piled high, filling every trench. The craters left by detonated lta-mines had beco basins for gore. The scouts moved with agonizing care, their limited vision heightening every instinct.

After navigating countless trenches and mountains of corpses, the shattered, towering bastions of the Hive finally lood before them.

There were no xenos. Not a single living organism was to be found.

Emboldened, the scouts began the arduous climb over the mounds of chitinous dead clogging the breaches in the wall. When they finally crested the jagged ruins of the outer ramparts, the scene beyond was laid bare before their eyes.

The vast expanse outside the Hive walls had been divided into eight distinct sectors. The spore clouds had been forcibly dispelled. Upon each blackened stretch of earth stood a tallic structure of alien geotry. Legions of machines, gleaming with a cold, burnished silver, marched in and out of these hubs.

Surrounding this blackened ground were the incinerated remains of a Tyranid host beyond counting.

…

A Destroyer-class Heavy Automaton casually crushed the skull of a synapse creature in its power claw. Upon landing, the Hive Tyrant that had been leading the assault at the breach had been snuffed out by the automaton with effortless brutality. A Gravity Shredder had pinned the beast in place; though the Tyrant's bio-engineered resilience had kept it from being instantly pulverized by the sudden gravitational shift, it had been rendered immobile, unable to evade the massive power claws that stood nearly as tall as the beast itself. A single sweep of the pale-gold talons had rendered it into a pile of offal.

With the synapse link severed, the swarm began to fracture. So beasts blundered mindlessly toward the Imperial lines, while others scattered in a primal panic. As the Iron Man legions deployed, they ford a net-like battle line that covered every vector of the xenos' advance.

The sounds of this new slaughter were swallowed by the thunder of the Imperial artillery in the rear. Densely packed beams of light acted like scythes through wheat, reaping the swarms that the Imperial defenders had viewed as inevitable doom. The Vengeance-class units unleashed their hybrid beams in interlacing patterns; with their turrets rotating slightly, entire swathes of Tyranid organisms collapsed as if their strings had been cut.

These xenos had not been biomorphically adapted to face the Iron n. Against such chanical precision, they were helpless. The Destroyer-class units rampaged across the field, their nine-ter power claws spread wide, reducing everything they touched to molecular dust. Aerial swarms attempted to dive-bomb the titans, only to be erased mid-air by the discharge of Energy Shockwave Weapons. Against such dense biological clusters, a single pulse sufficed for total eradication.

The lee-pattern Armored Wardens followed in the wake of the Destroyers, their power blades singing as they conducted a unilateral massacre. Within a few hours, Axion's chanical army had driven the remnants of the swarm back into the contaminated oceans.

Oceanic combat presented a mixed variable for the chanical legions. The advantage was that heat dissipation was no longer a concern. The disadvantage was the significant energy attenuation of beam weaponry underwater and the increased drag on locomotion. While Axion's databanks contained no ntion of specific Tyranid aquatic sub-species, he made a cold, logistical decision regarding the environnt.

Rather than engaging in the depths, he would simply evaporate the sea.

The Iron n knew nothing of impatience. It was rely a matter of ti.

From orbit, plasma batteries began a high-energy bombardnt of the ocean. The chanical army stood sentinel along the coastlines. Arcs of violent electricity surged through the water, electrocuting smaller Tyranid organisms instantly as the surface began to boil.

The Destroyer-class units lined the shore, their Heavy Destroyer Incinerators spewing pillars of white-hot ion-fla into the surf. Tyranid spores were incinerated on contact. The water itself began to undergo thermal dissociation, triggering secondary explosions that tore through the subrged xenos.

Massive white clouds of steam billowed into the atmosphere, only for Axion to detonate orbital plasma charges to blow the vapor out of the atmosphere or toward the planet's uninhabited poles. To balance the rapidly rising planetary temperature, Axion utilized his transports' gravity well systems to drop a massive ice-teor onto the far side of the world.

After a brief period of "distilling" hundreds of millions of cubic ters of water, and physically purging the "residual impurities," the planet's an temperature had risen by only thirty degrees.

Axion watched the planet, which was effectively experiencing a rain of boiling water, with total indifference. While the Imperial survivors on Aurelis were still trembling in fear of a new enemy, Axion was already recalling his legions and generating his combat theater report.

[In accordance with the request of Lord Regent Roboute Guilliman: Swarm eradicated. Combat operations concluded.]

With the broadcast of this wide-band signal, Axion's fleet broke orbit and vanished once more into the Immaterium.

The Imperial forces tentatively dispatched several Valkyries for reconnaissance. They returned with reports that the strange machines and tallic hubs had vanished, leaving behind at least a billion xenos corpses. Most baffling of all was that the planet's forr ocean had been reduced to a vast, parched basin of vitrified glass.

Though this had not been a designated mission, Axion did not believe Lord Solar Leontus would reject the combat log. With his expanded forces and a single unified battlefield, the total expenditure had been a re day of operations. To an Iron Man, ti held no intrinsic value outside of a mission paraters. Machines do not age; steel can be replaced.