Through his visor, the recon squad's sergeant locked onto the attacker, a black-armored Ogryn wielding a black tal staff.
The mont he locked onto the target, he pulled the trigger.
Simultaneously, the three recon troops and two veteran astartes further behind also fired in unison.
The Ogryn psyker raised one hand. The bullets halted mid-air, ters away from him.
With a swipe and a push, he sent them flying back.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The returned bullets pierced power armor, and one recon trooper collapsed into a pool of blood.
At that mont, a black blur shot forward.
The Hunter reacted instantly. Sanchez launched a high-speed charge, now faster than ever, his body under even greater control.
While sprinting, his form flickered, dodging a massive falling boulder from above.
BOOM!
The stone smashed down, shaking the entire cavern.
Though the Ogryn's psychic attack missed him, it cut him off from his squad.
But the tremors didn't faze the Sanchez. He charged directly at the psyker and slashed down with his chainsword.
The psyker, though a psychic Ogryn, was still an Ogryn, and an exceptionally strong one. He raised his staff to block.
Sanchez didn't try to clash strength for strength. With razor-sharp instincts, he judged from the force of the swing that even with his enhanced strength, he couldn't overpower the Ogryn.
He sidestepped swiftly, dodging the blow, then, with a supernatural awareness, spotted a brief vulnerability, the neck area, where the armor was thin.
Probably designed that way to allow easier breathing and eating.
He quickly spun his chainsword and, recalling the 23rd form of the Otsberg-Vaya technique he'd witnessed from his Primarch, unleashed a swift, precise strike.
RrrrrrrrRRRRRT!
With a roar, the chainsword bit into the Ogryn's neck, severing the psyker's head in a single blow.
...
While Sanchez was using Spirit Vision to find and eliminate the enemy's weakness, Arsena and the legion's psykers had also found a solution with the tech-sergeants.
They inscribed mystic prayers with special runes onto their eye-screens, disabling the spy fly's projection function.
Nareth imdiately distributed the spy flies to all ten companies, issuing the command to scatter them across the region and begin an active forward search.
Arsena and the five psykers of the First Company each held a polyhedral eye-screen device, channeling psychic energy into it to establish a psychic link.
Hundreds of mosaic-like micro-displays lit up across the screens, activating the spy flies' vibration crystal chanisms.
They buzzed into the air like a swarm of flies, rising with a faint hum.
Six swarms dispersed in all directions, rapidly covering a 20-kiloter radius in every direction.
Nareth's black eyes scanned the six screens, his superhuman perception processing the hundreds of video feeds each screen displayed.
Thousands of images surged through his mind, and within five seconds, his powerful brain had already compiled and analyzed the data.
The spy flies' aerial imagery revealed that the terrain ford a fan-shaped region.
Nareth stood at the outer arc of the fan. The terrain narrowed inward as jagged black rock formations converged toward the center.
'If signals are disturbed here, then there must be a source of interference located at the center.'
Having made his assessnt, Nareth issued his order:
"Three o'clock direction, advance."
The First Company moved forward, leaving hill after hill in their wake.
Other Companys, after decoding the data, also locked onto the center and advanced.
From a bird's eye view, ten black serpents, the legion's companies, were converging on the center of a nearly circular mountain zone.
Along the way, they encountered increasing numbers of Ogryn psykers, at ever-shorter intervals, and their powers kept growing.
But the Shadows of Order quickly realized: while the Ogryns had psychic powers, they lacked matching combat intelligence.
They cast spells following rigid, predictable routines. Once those patterns were identified, they could be countered and crushed.
Progress accelerated sharply, especially for Nareth's personally led First Company.
On the fifth cycle day of entering the mountain, Nareth and his forces reached the center.
There lay an imnse, bottomless pit. Even a Primarch's senses couldn't gauge its depth.
Yet Nareth detected sothing strange: the shaft below trembled with a subtle frequency, gradually intensifying.
He also noted an ultrasound radiating from the pit. While it was faint at the surface, deeper below, it was much clearer.
He raised his head and visualized the landscape.
Ogryns crawled like ants, so ascending, so descending, inside what resembled a giant black cauldron, where curved rock paths spiraled downward.
"Move out."
Nareth gave the order and stepped forward, descending the black crystal slope.
After descending over a thousand ters, the psykers and officers like Cezak and Dixon simultaneously furrowed their brows.
They felt a tremor underfoot and a subtle vibration in their ears.
"It's magnetic resonance," Arsena explained after finding the term in a book. "In areas with magnetic enrichnt, natural resonance phenona occur."
"It's commonly associated with signal interference, ultrasonic vibration, and seismic tremors."
"Maybe this resonance affected the Ogryns… gave them psychic powers."
He shrugged. "It's not written anywhere, but it's possible."
"You're partially right," Nareth replied, shaking his head. "But not entirely."
"At the center of this pit lies a massive black crystal. After eons of resonance, it underwent a peculiar transformation."
"It's a psychic resonance material. That's what gave the Ogryns their powers."
Just then, Nareth's tone shifted sharply. He shouted:
"Psychic shields!"
The five psykers reacted instantly, unleashing full psychic barriers at the Nareth's command.
Arsena was slightly slower, but managed to activate a forcefield shield just in ti.
FWOOM!
Like a volcanic eruption, a blast of psychic fla surged upward from below.
As it clashed with the shields, the air cracked with a violent snapping sound.
Nareth's gaze locked onto a towering black Ogryn erging from below, as tall as Horus himself.
He was the strongest psyker in the pit.
Propelled upward by rocket-like psychic fire, the massive Ogryn drew ever closer.
Nareth sensed the creature was channeling power directly from the crystal; it had to be destroyed imdiately.
Nareth leapt into the pit, diving headfirst like a missile.
In mid-air, the Briber shouted at the giant Ogryn, still shorter than himself:
"Hey runt, here's a gift: one explosive round!"
.....
If you enjoy the story, my p@treon is 30 chapters ahead.
[email protected]/DaoistJinzu
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