Chapter Fifty Three
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Talon88.1
Getting sticky.
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Chapter Fifty Three
Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!
'Brake brake brake—god damn it, brake!' Sasha's voice cracked like a snapped guitar string across Koron's mind as the ground surged up at them, the altimeter numbers strobing red before collapsing into zero.
The desert met them with all the tenderness of a dropped anvil.
Dry grit exploded outward as Koron hit first, the Sentinel tumbling with him in a tide of gravitic cushioning and kinetic outrage. They rolled—once, twice—a brief impersonation of a boulder with complaints before friction finally won.
Silence followed, save for wind hissing through fractured dunes.
Both lay still, cloaking fields flickering for a moment before steadying. Above them, stormclouds twisted in slow, roiling convulsions that made the heavens look seasick.
A minute stretched thin.
Koron finally exhaled, a long, shaky pour of air. He pushed himself upright, sand sluicing from the alloy ridges of his armor plating. Beside him, the Sentinel shuddered once, mechanical tendons resetting, before folding neatly back into its quadruped frame. It shook itself, sending sand flying all over Koron.
He gave it a glare. 'Thanks.'
He tipped his head back, scanning the bruise-colored sky. 'Doesn't look like that thing's following us,' he said, keeping it to the neural link and refusing to trust air with anything important. He scanned again, as if daring the universe to contradict him.
'Good,' Sasha muttered, relief tinted with that sharp-edged sarcasm only she could make affectionate. A map unfurled across his HUD like a digital lotus. 'I say we head for the Salamanders' lines. They know us, we know them, and their drones definitely need adult supervision. We harden the Storvhal shields, build the relay tower behind friendly lines. All simple, safe, very boring. My favorite sort of plan.'
'Agreed, but—' Koron pulled up the geo-scale overlay. Their position blinked as a lonely blue dot amid empty wastes. Far off, Storvhal's geothermal crown pulsed dimly, a wounded star in the planetary gloom. 'Do we go around Megaborealis…or through it?'
Gothic script flickered as they skimmed the records—maps, mining logs, ancient hazard reports, and recent augur-results from the Voidclaw's upheaval.
Both grimaced.
'Geologically unstable before the gravity lance fired,' Sasha narrated, voice flat with academic horror. 'Foundations like stale sponge cake due to centuries of over-mining. Drills the size of cities. Cities on top of the drills. Cities being drilled by—honestly, I don't understand humanity sometimes.'
'Seriously,' Koron grumbled, rubbing grit from his pants. 'Why would anyone build there?'
'And now,' Sasha continued, adopting the chipper tone of a tourism commercial for masochists, 'it's an active warzone that vents superheated gases at random intervals, periodically drops whole districts into the glowing mantle, and may or may not contain unconfirmed alien activity. Possibly murderous. Possibly friendly. Probably murderous.'
Koron stared at the map.
'So…we go around?'
'Under normal circumstances? Absolutely. Wide berth. Several continents' worth.' Sasha paused. 'But…'
'We're on a time-sensitive mission.'
'Exactly.'
Koron closed his eyes, feeling the dust settle on him in a fine, judgmental film.
'…Shit.'
The landscape streamed past in tawny ribbons, a desert tapestry unspooling beneath the howl of motion. Koron felt the bike's anti-grav plates humming between his legs with a deep, satisfied thrum that resonated through frame and bone. The machine rode the wasteland like a prow skimming a storm-tossed sea.
But the desert had changed.
The storm overhead bruised the world in swathes of violet and sickly rose, Warp-light bleeding through the cloudbanks like bioluminescence from a dying creature. Dust devils spun lazily across the plains, rising and collapsing in hollow breaths. Jagged spine-rocks protruded from the sand like the ribs of something titanic long since fossilized.
Ahead, the first hint of Megaborealis pierced the horizon, not just a spire but a vast silhouette, its girders and scorched plating backlit by the churning sky. Heat shimmered off the geothermal vents clustered around its base, turning the distant skyline into a wavering mirage of molten metal and broken ambition.
Behind him, the Sentinel curled into the second seat, compact and watchful, its plating rattling every time a gust hit them. Grit hissed across its armor like sleet, bouncing off the flickering shimmer of its shield in tiny sparks of irritated light.
It looked vaguely offended every time.
'So,' Koron mused as he leaned the bike into a short lived, gentle serpentine sway, each lazy curve eating up entire football fields of dirt, 'besides the giant demon blowing up our ship, stranding us here, and turning our timetable into a sad joke… Lucia was right. This is a great place for a ride.'
Sasha huffed in his mind, the sound like static with opinions. 'Yeah, though I'd prefer it without the temperamental weather.'
"Honestly I wouldn't mind the weather. It's the demons I don't want."
'Fair,' Sasha muttered.
Stormwinds buffeted them as they crossed a jagged ridge, the air charged with electric violence. Sheets of dust rose and fell in ghostly curtains. Sunlight had been reduced to a weak, distant smear, the storm choking it to near invisibility and leaving the world to the strange purple-pink glow leaking from the Warp.
'How's the signal relay holding?' Koron asked, flicking his gaze to the HUD where a tiny bar crawled upward with the enthusiasm of a dying snail.
'Stable, just painfully slow,' Sasha replied. 'Atmospheric bounce won't work with this storm chewing the upper layer, and line-of-sight signals top out at the horizon. The Imperials might as well be whispering into wet wool.'
'Once we're inside the hive, we should be able to hijack their relay towers.' Koron shifted his weight, feeling the bike adjust beneath him with feline grace. 'Keep trying, but pin it to a subroutine on my processor. I want you free for sudden creative disasters.'
'Running it now.'
He felt the program settle into the back of his mind—an orderly, quiet presence gnawing industriously at fragmented vox-signals. Every few seconds it spat out a garbled chirp of near-pattern, then swallowed it to try again.
The next two hours blurred into wind, motion, and the steady grind of the planet passing under their stolen horizon. The spire grew taller, clearer—its skeletal towers clustering around its base, supplicants around a titan.
'Contact,' Sasha murmured—calm, but with that taut undertone that lived between her syllables whenever danger crawled close. A scatter of red dots blossomed at the edge of the HUD, six miles out, jittering with the frantic signature of fast-moving chaos.
'Readings inconclusive,' she continued, 'but between the total lack of comm chatter, the ocean of exhaust fumes, and what definitely sounds like small-arms fire? I'm guessing a warband of Orks ahead.'
Koron angled the bike slightly, posture shifting into alert poise. Desert wind clawed at his armor in sharp, petulant tugs. Ahead, dust plumes marked the distant movement of something large, something loud, something doing its best to murder the concept of subtlety.
'We'll skirt their edge,' he said, adjusting course with a smooth lean. The bike responded like a living thing under him. 'I'll take a few minutes of lost time over aggravating a warband of Orks.'
'You don't need much distance,' Sasha offered. 'You'd outrun any pursuers even with just the grav-plates. Their vehicles handle like angry refrigerators on wheels.'
'Switch from cloak to shields anyway,' Koron replied. 'I'd rather not get perforated by a stray bullet—or twenty—just for being nearby.'
'…Fair point,' she conceded, already rerouting energy. A faint blue ripple skimmed over his view as the shields flared, the air bending around him like a protective sigh before vanishing.
The bike accelerated, carrying them into a wide arc around the growing thunder of engines and gunfire, the desert heat drawing wavering curtains between hunter and hunted, and hopefully keeping the Orks as blissfully unaware as possible.
Sparks ricocheted off the shield in screaming arcs of orange, each impact ringing across the pale blue field like a spiteful bell. Heavy rounds chewed into the dirt around them, kicking up violent geysers of grit that peppered his armor. The air behind him had devolved into a single chaotic organism—gunfire stuttering in uneven bursts, crude missiles shrieking overhead, engines coughing black clouds of exhaust, and through it all the delighted, unhinged roars of Orks who had found their new favorite chase toy.
And they were gaining.
'You just had to jinx us!' Koron growled, flattening his body against the bike's frame. The grav-plates beneath him howled with strain as they poured every erg of thrust forward. Beside him, the Sentinel had shifted low, shields fully deployed in case the bike's own defensive field flickered.
'It doesn't make any damn sense!' Sasha snapped, her voice a frantic braid of logic and indignation as she tore through the data. 'They're on tracked vehicles, Koron—tracked—using friction instead of gravimetric curvature, half of them don't even have functioning engines, and one of them is literally powered by a charcoal fire stuffed into a metal box! How are they doing this nonsense?!'
Koron didn't look back, but the HUD helpfully painted the scene in lurid detail.
The warband behind them surged across the desert, a living avalanche of angry green. Over three hundred Orks, each a slab of muscle and bad decisions strapped to a murder-bike.
Their machines were nightmares of welded scrap and wishful thinking. One bristled with eight exhaust pipes that weren't attached to any part of the engine. Another sported a steering wheel stolen from a voidship's bridge. A third was completely on fire, its rider proudly beating his chest and shouting, "FLAMEZ MAKE ME GO FASTA!"
One bike had a grot strapped to the front like a figurehead, shrieking, "I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR DIS!"
The Ork steering it bellowed back, "SHADDUP, YER AERODYNAMIC!"
And guns.
So many guns.
Some were bolted on sideways. Some were fused together into improbable chimera weapons. One Ork held a gun by the barrel and fired it by smacking the trigger against his forehead.
Another launched a missile that immediately fell behind him with all the enthusiasm of a disappointed rock.
The Ork stared at it, offended.
"GET BACK 'ERE, YA LAZY GIT!"
All of it was working.
All of it was pointed at Koron.
And the only thing louder than the storm of fire behind him was the pure, uncut joy with which the Orks tried to kill him.
'Kick in the thrusters, damn it! Whatever they're doing, they shouldn't be hitting a thousand miles per hour!' Sasha yelled inside his skull, her voice climbing from alarm toward full-on existential offense as the distance gauge kept shrinking.
Koron didn't argue. He felt the tension of the bike's stabilizers, the way its systems braced like a sprinter crouched at the starting line. The twin thrusters mounted at the base of the stabilizer wings irised open with a mechanical hiss—petals of alloy peeling apart to reveal a core of brilliant blue.
Light bloomed.
Then the world detonated into motion.
The plasma drives ignited with a thunderclap roar that punched through his ribs. The bike surged forward so violently that the desert seemed to snap into a single streaked line, the horizon smearing into gold and gray watercolor. Trails of ionized light spiraled in their wake, phantom ribbons dancing as Koron tightened his grip and flattened himself even more to reduce drag.
The speedometer climbed—four hundred, five, six, seven—its digits flickering faster with each passing second. Air began to condense at the very tip of the bike's nose, forming a sharp halo of pressure, a shivering bubble of distortion that shimmered like a tiny, furious storm.
He could feel the world thinning around him, the air trembling, the frame humming, a blade just shy of resonance. His ribs buzzed as pressure collapsed into a tunnel around him, the sky narrowing to a vibrating throat they were being forced through.
And behind them—impossibly, absurdly, insultingly close—the Orks still came. A living thunderhead of metal and muscle, roaring over the desert like a landslide made of violence. Their engines bellowed in challenge, coughing smoke and fire as hundreds of machines hurtled after a bike that, by any sane measure, should have left them choking on dust miles ago.
But sanity and Orks had never once been introduced.
'They're gaining again?!' Sasha cried, her voice pitching into disbelief. The HUD confirmed it with cold indifference: inch by inch, the green tide crawled closer.
And then Koron saw why.
Around each wheel—well, around whatever counted as a wheel; some were bare rims, others were welded plates or rusty saw blades—tiny sparks of emerald energy crackled like mischievous lightning. Reality shuddered around them as the Orks' ramshackle machines lunged forward with bursts of speed they had no right to possess.
Weapons tech? Psychic nonsense? Pure Ork confidence denying the universe its say?
Probably all three.
'Shift to cloak?' Koron asked, throat tight as he flicked his gaze to the rapidly dwindling distance markers. 'Short bounce, then vanish mid-air. Coast down behind them before they reboot their tiny green neurons?'
'Maybe,' Sasha said, wincing audibly, 'but given how weird their tech is, I'm not convinced your cloaking field would fool them. They might just decide you're hiding in the sky, fire wildly upward, and accidentally hit you.'
'Which is worse?' Koron countered. 'Orks that might beat my cloak… or Orks doing a thousand miles an hour?'
Sasha hesitated for a long, thoughtful beat.
'Fast Orks are preferred,' she admitted at last. 'However, that's not the main problem.'
'What is?'
'We're still two hours from the outskirts of Megaborealis. At this pace, they'll overtake you in thirty minutes. And you're out of gears.'
Silence.
A long, suspicious silence.
'...You are out of gears, right?'
More silence. The worst kind. The "I have an idea and it's terrible" kind.
'…Hang onto my neurons for me, won't you?'
Her alarm spiked like feedback.
'Koron, wait- What are you doing?'
The handlebars folded away with a mechanical whisper, retreating into the bike's chassis as Koron flattened his body into a streamlined plank. He stretched his legs back and out, trusting the machine to reconfigure around him. Not the engine—never the engine—just the riding frame, the part designed to survive reckless ideas rather than cause them.
Metal flooded over him in a silver tide. It swept across his arms, chest, skull, down his spine and legs, knitting into a frictionless aerodynamic skin. The Sentinel compacted behind him, plates sliding and locking until it was a tight, shielded mass wrapped within the nanite sheath.
'Koron, what the hell are—OH MY GOD WHY IS THAT IN HERE?!' Sasha screamed as she got a look at the booting program.
Below him, the bike's undercarriage opened.
It wasn't dramatic. No thunder, no metal shriek. Just a soft, surgical shhk as a long seam opened along the bike's underside, running from nose to tail like a scalpel line.
A narrow intake widened — barely larger than a softball — smooth, predatory, unmistakably a ramscoop waking up.
It slid apart like a steel eyelid opening onto a forbidden dream.
A slim channel revealed itself along the bike's belly, exposing a crystalline interior threaded with impossibly fine microfilaments. It didn't look mechanical. It looked grown.
Alive.
Pale blue glow spilled out onto the blur of sand and dirt, the air around the scoop trembling as pressure folded inward.
Inside, thin strands of white lightning coalesced, drifting into graceful spirals. One filament. Then two. Then ten — hair-thin, star-bright, curling with the slow intent of a creature deciding whether to stretch or strike.
The filaments tightened.
Twisting.
Braiding.
A luminous helix took shape.
'You actually put a god damn Q-cycle missile engine into a racing bike??' Sasha sputtered, watching the activation software tick toward completion. 'Those are designed to hurl orbital kill-sat warheads hard enough to crack dreadnought armor, and you put one into your motorcycle??'
'Look,' he said, eyes closed as his sensors took over, 'my turning radius improves when my mass is half-decoupled from local momentum frames.'
'Oh my god. Guilliman was right. You are a war crime waiting to happen.'
He inhaled once.
The world pulled taut around him like a bowstring.
The filaments flared.
Light erupted.
Not a plume. Not exhaust.
A helix of white-blue starfire unspooled down the ramscoops length, a luminous DNA strand scribbling itself into the world.
A deep, resonant roar rolled outward, rattling pebbles across the desert floor and sending a tremor up Koron's spine. The sound wasn't heard so much as felt, as if the planet itself had taken a breath and then decided to object.
The desert didn't blur.
It ceased.
The ground collapsed into a single sheet of impossible color, a painting someone had dragged a hand across too fast, pulling every grain of sand into a smear of gold and ash.
The horizon bent inward, funneling toward his skull as if the world were trying to swallow him whole.
Reality hiccuped.
A second Koron appeared.
Faint. Translucent. Perfectly mirroring his posture. A ghost-bike overlaid atop the real one, their outlines just slightly misaligned, like a sketch with two strokes drawn a hair too far apart.
Then the world lurched.
The bike's speed didn't climb. It didn't accelerate in any sane sense. It simply doubled, as if someone had copied his velocity and pasted it on top of itself.
His heartbeat stuttered a half-step behind the acceleration, a soft internal glitch his implants rushed to smooth out. For three long seconds his inner ear insisted he was falling sideways, and his stomach tried to climb up through his ribs in protest.
Reality hiccuped again.
Another echo joined it, then another, each misaligned by microseconds. The world around him couldn't keep up. Sand blurred into a continuous sheet of molten gold. The cracked earth beneath them rippled like liquid skin. Shockwaves peeled backward from the bike's nose in widening rings, kicking up tidal crescendos of dust that the bike outran before they fully formed.
Even the sky distorted — cloud layers stretching thin, dragged into elongated streaks as if painted with a trembling brush across a too-wide canvas.
'Please tell me you're only going to three echoes.' Sasha pleaded, her voice pitching toward panic.
'I've made it to five before.'
The silence she radiated could have suffocated a star.
'…HOW many?'
Koron's silence carried the emotional timbre of a man remembering a bad life choice in slow motion.
'…Five.'
Longer silence. The kind that would make a Black Templar whisper a prayer.
Then—
'The limiters literally turn red at four,' Sasha hissed. 'Four is the "please stop, the spacetime mesh is crying" threshold. Four is the "this will void your warranty with reality" level.'
'Well,' Koron said, eyes locked on the shimmering smear of the world ahead, his sensors doing the heavy lifting as the desert degraded into abstract geometry, 'are the Orks keeping up?'
'What? No, of course they're not—WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!'
Sasha's shriek crackled through his neural link.
Behind them, the Orks had finally reached the breaking point of whatever unholy brew of physics, WAAAGH!!!, and reckless enthusiasm fueled their machines.
Dozens of Orks were pressed so far back into their seats that they looked welded to them by centrifugal malice. Their grips had devolved into desperate fingertip hooks, knuckles white-green with strain. Goggles had carved trenches into their faces, cheeks ballooning outward in grotesque ripples that exposed jagged yellow teeth to the punishing wind.
Others had left their seats entirely.
Legs flailed behind them like tattered banners, their bodies pinned in midair by sheer velocity as they clung to their handlebars with all the determination of creatures too stupid—or too delighted—to let go. They flapped behind their bikes like enormous, screaming, green-skinned pennants.
And their machines… their machines were dying glorious, stupid deaths.
Armor plates vibrated loose and shot backward like steel frisbees. Duct-taped guns ripped free, spinning into the air before being promptly inhaled by the unlucky Orks riding behind. Trophy racks shattered, sending skulls and bones ricocheting across the desert in macabre confetti.
Some bikes simply began shedding parts in long, glittering trails—bolts, spikes, sawblades, entire exhaust manifolds peeling off and shredding their comrades one by one.
One Ork had abandoned the concept of sitting entirely. He stood on the seat with arms flung wide, coat and armor whipping straight back, howling with the exultation of a lunatic saint while the bike disintegrated underneath him faster than it could carry him forward, screaming at the top of his lungs:
"I'M DA KING O' DA WOOOORLD!"
The warband was being unmade by speed itself.
And yet—between the explosions of debris and the chorus of delighted bellows—at least two dozen Orks were still trying to accelerate. Still leaning forward. Still urging their disintegrating rides faster.
Because to Orks, physics wasn't a rule.
It was a suggestion.
A rude one, at that.
And somewhere, the laws of conservation of energy went to lie down, gently, and cry.
Sergeant Erden Tsuvar drew one armored finger down the hololith table, the emerald projection washing soft light across the red-and-white paint of his gauntlet. The map flickered with the faint hum of strained power cells, casting jagged shadows across the command tent. Outside, the stormwinds bullied the canvas walls, snapping the flaps like angry banners and carrying the distant thunder.
"Captain Veyl's suggestion of hitting the supply depots is a valid one," he said, looking up at the shadowy figure beside him—Raptor Sergeant Lukan Varres. Even helmetless, Lukan's expression was carved from slate, eyes sharp as a hawk's in the flickering green light. "But I still say we skirt them, draw in their forces, and then blow the depot. Bleed out more enemies that way."
Lukan nodded slowly, his pale features lit an eerie green by the hololith. "Agreed. We have enough demo charges for this to work, but afterward our munitions will be depleted. My squad will try to secure enemy resupply caches before we withdraw. Send me your needs, my brothers will make the attempt."
Erden opened his mouth to answer—then the vox sputtered alive, the auspex operator's voice tight with controlled panic.
"My lord, contacts approaching at extreme velocity, over a hundred signatures and closing fast! Thirty seconds out!"
The tent seemed to hold its breath.
Erden toggled the squad-wide vox. "Incoming contacts! Defensive positions!" He pulled his helm into place as Lukan was already sprinting out, bolter raised, cloak snapping in the violent wind.
They did not get thirty seconds.
They barely got ten.
Erden had barely cleared the tent flap when something slammed past the perimeter — a streak of impossible blue light and metal that carved a trench of pressure through the camp. The air didn't rush around it so much as explode, collapsing into a vacuum wake that sucked at cloaks, banners, and loose debris.
A half-second later, the sonic boom hit.
It wasn't just a sound, it was a wall. It crashed into the camp with the force of an orbital drop, pancaking tents and sending their poles cartwheeling skyward. Crates burst open like kicked anthills, scattering ammunition and rations in chaotic arcs. Dust surged upward in a vast plume that rolled over the encampment like a tidal wave.
Two Rhino transports groaned on their suspension as the shockwave punched into them, their hulls rattling like struck bells.
Then the Orks arrived.
The ground itself shook, vibrating like a plucked wire as hundreds of ramshackle vehicles thundered past. Exhaust and gunsmoke churned together into a filthy haze, painted orange by muzzle flashes. Loose earth erupted around them in spraying fountains, and shattered machine parts rained from the sky like metallic hail.
The stormwind carried the laughter of mad engines long after they had passed.
Erden and Lukan stared after the receding dust plume, frozen in a rare moment of mutual disbelief. The desert shimmered with heat and the faint smell of burning ozone.
At last Erden turned. "Lukan, I believe that—"
Lukan cut him off with a chop of his hand. "Do not bother inventing an excuse. Go catch whatever that was."
Even through his helm, Erden's grin felt too large for his face. He slapped Lukan's pauldron—a heavy, brotherly thump—before sprinting toward his squad's section of the camp.
His brothers were already mounted, their jetbikes snarling with pent-up power, engines vibrating like hunting beasts straining against a leash.
Erden swung onto his own bike. The machine purred beneath him, its grav-lifts eager, its turbines coiled.
He gunned the throttle.
The jetbike roared forward, kicking up a spiral of dust as it lunged after the impossible streak tearing across the horizon.
Somewhere deep in his mind, an old challenge of the Khan's resurfaced, clear, cold and wild.
Catch the wind.
For a seven-foot titan of ceramite and scars, Fenrik Halftooth moved with uncanny silence. The ruins of Megaborealis swallowed even his armored footfalls, the once-crowded hive now a continent of devastation. Four days earlier, unnatural gravitational distortions had torn the district apart—warping steel beams like softened wax, folding ferrocrete towers into heaps of jagged ruin, and grinding entire streets into chasms of shattered stone.
Now, what had been a bustling commercial square was a graveyard of broken girders, crumpled skybridges, and pulverized masonry. Dust hung in the air in thin, shimmering veils. Nothing lived here except snipers, predators, and fools.
Fenrik—like all Space Wolves—was none of the three.
He stalked forward, senses sharpened to predatory clarity. Every crunch of glass beneath a loose pebble. Every metallic whine of a structure settling under its own broken weight. The whisper of fabric scraping over rubble in the wind. These things told stories.
Lately, those stories ended with sniper fire. Black Legion marksmen and their mortal cults infested these ruins, dueling with Templars and Wolves for ground no sane soul would claim.
To Fenrik's left, his pack fanned out in a hundred-meter crescent, each brother scanning their sector. Their helms' auspex feeds were half-blind, scrambled by the screeching warpstorms overhead, forcing them to rely instead on instinct, scent, and the old gifts of Fenris.
It was scent that had led him here.
A faint trace caught minutes earlier—wrong, uncanny, unsettling enough that even his transhuman instincts bristled. It had drawn them into this half-collapsed square. Bridges from the floors above lay broken across it like the bones of giants. Much of the plaza lay buried beneath dozens of meters of debris.
But the dust had saved footprints.
Human-sized. Booted. Not Astartes.
And the smell—
Fenrik's lip curled inside his helm. It wasn't the scent of a mortal, not truly. Too clean. Too sterile. Not sweat, not skin, not fear or blood. It was the odor of meat designed to be meat, not born of flesh and life.
It crawled up his spine, settling behind the base of his skull where his instincts howled warnings with teeth bared.
It came from the rubble pile.
He pinged the location with a curt gesture. His pack answered in soft vox-clicks, their runes converging on his display as they closed in with silent, lethal purpose.
Fenrik drew his bolt pistol but kept his left hand close to the haft of his power axe, the weapon humming faintly with caged lightning. He took a knee. Watched the pile. Listened.
The air grew a fraction colder inside his armor. The hairs at the back of his neck tried to rise against ceramite. Something in the ruin's silence felt too intent, like a held breath that never quite released.
The flatlining of his brothers' vitals was the only warning.
A whisper of shifting dirt—a tiny crumble—and Fenrik spun, power axe igniting in a crack of blue-white fury. The air warped. A shimmer of wrongness broke across his vision as though reality itself were rippling like heat haze.
He did not hesitate.
He struck.
The blade bit into the distortion, cleaving through the cloak of invisibility as the power field chewed apart its molecular bonds. The illusion dissolved—and the thing beneath was revealed.
A Sentinel, but corrupted. A blasphemous fusion of metal and meat, sinew threaded through alloy ribs, black ichor pumping through veins that steamed as it escaped. Its semi-organic eyes bulged wetly, unfocused and too wide, and the chainsword maw built into its skull gnashed wildly, chewing its own barbed tongue into ribbons as it snapped for his face.
The smell hit him a heartbeat later, a reek of hot oil and opened bodies with none of the honest tang of blood or sweat.
Something built to impersonate flesh without understanding it.
Fenrik was already in motion when the other six hit him.
They plunged out of the shadows, blurring through smoke and dust like ruptured nightmares.
The pack came low. Fast. Silent.
Claws unfolding like surgical instruments dripping Warp-fire.
Coil projectors laced with bone spat lightning that burned holes straight through ceramite.
Fenrik roared and met them head-on.
His bolt pistol found a skull — the round detonating inside the creature's cranium with a wet metal pop, spraying a fan of teeth and circuitry.
His axe sheared through another, carving limbs free in a shower of sparks, ichor, and sizzling steam.
But they were already inside his guard.
Claws carved through his chestplate like paring knives through fruit.
Warp-fire licked his throat.
Something stabbed into the soft seal at his ribs, pumping liquid ice into his bloodstream.
Then the howl hit.
Not a sound.
A violation.
A layered psychic shriek tore through his skull — ten notes, twenty, all wrong, harmonizing in frequencies that scraped the inside of his soul.
His vision warped.
His limbs jerked.
His hearts stuttered off-beat.
Fenrik dropped to one knee.
Still fighting.
Always fighting.
He fought until every nerve was ash.
He tried to rise — and realized he could no longer feel his legs.
A final drone loomed above him, dripping molten ceramite from its claws.
Its metal ribs rose and fell in a grotesque imitation of breath.
It leaned close — too close — its steaming maw inches from his visor.
Fenrik summoned the last of his strength.
"Fenris…" he growled, blood bubbling in his throat, "…remember me."
For just an instant, he let his mind go back home, tasting the sea-wind of Asaheim.
He swung.
The axe cut deep, the drone's chest carved open, its demonic engine screaming its death cry — one last arc of defiance — before his arm was severed at the elbow.
The machines tore him apart, pulling his hearts free from his chest in a burst of gore and smoke.
His blood boiled off the ground before it could drip.
His vision dimmed, shrinking to a pinprick of gold.
Fenrik Halftooth died fighting, eyes locked on the enemy, unbowed even in his final breath.
Whispers flickered invisibly between the drones—signals in spectra no mortal could detect. They reported their kill to distant masters: the Sorcerer of Tzeentch and the Arkifane, who watched through ritual lenses as their creatures continued their grim harvest.
But they were not the only watchers.
High above, in the shattered high-rises framing the square, other eyes blinked. Pale, glassy. Predatory. Magnoculars tracked the drones' retreat. Purple-tinged skin pulled taut over elongated skulls. Fanged mouths whispered into the vox with voices like dry leaves rubbing together.
"Inform the Primus. A new threat stalks the ruins. The forces of the Immaterium have unleashed machines… machines that may endanger the coming of the Star Child."
Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!
'Brake brake brake—god damn it, brake!' Sasha's voice cracked like a snapped guitar string across Koron's mind as the ground surged up at them, the altimeter numbers strobing red before collapsing into zero.
The desert met them with all the tenderness of a dropped anvil.
Dry grit exploded outward as Koron hit first, the Sentinel tumbling with him in a tide of gravitic cushioning and kinetic outrage. They rolled—once, twice—a brief impersonation of a boulder with complaints before friction finally won.
Silence followed, save for wind hissing through fractured dunes.
Both lay still, cloaking fields flickering for a moment before steadying. Above them, stormclouds twisted in slow, roiling convulsions that made the heavens look seasick.
A minute stretched thin.
Koron finally exhaled, a long, shaky pour of air. He pushed himself upright, sand sluicing from the alloy ridges of his armor plating. Beside him, the Sentinel shuddered once, mechanical tendons resetting, before folding neatly back into its quadruped frame. It shook itself, sending sand flying all over Koron.
He gave it a glare. 'Thanks.'
He tipped his head back, scanning the bruise-colored sky. 'Doesn't look like that thing's following us,' he said, keeping it to the neural link and refusing to trust air with anything important. He scanned again, as if daring the universe to contradict him.
'Good,' Sasha muttered, relief tinted with that sharp-edged sarcasm only she could make affectionate. A map unfurled across his HUD like a digital lotus. 'I say we head for the Salamanders' lines. They know us, we know them, and their drones definitely need adult supervision. We harden the Storvhal shields, build the relay tower behind friendly lines. All simple, safe, very boring. My favorite sort of plan.'
'Agreed, but—' Koron pulled up the geo-scale overlay. Their position blinked as a lonely blue dot amid empty wastes. Far off, Storvhal's geothermal crown pulsed dimly, a wounded star in the planetary gloom. 'Do we go around Megaborealis…or through it?'
Gothic script flickered as they skimmed the records—maps, mining logs, ancient hazard reports, and recent augur-results from the Voidclaw's upheaval.
Both grimaced.
'Geologically unstable before the gravity lance fired,' Sasha narrated, voice flat with academic horror. 'Foundations like stale sponge cake due to centuries of over-mining. Drills the size of cities. Cities on top of the drills. Cities being drilled by—honestly, I don't understand humanity sometimes.'
'Seriously,' Koron grumbled, rubbing grit from his pants. 'Why would anyone build there?'
'And now,' Sasha continued, adopting the chipper tone of a tourism commercial for masochists, 'it's an active warzone that vents superheated gases at random intervals, periodically drops whole districts into the glowing mantle, and may or may not contain unconfirmed alien activity. Possibly murderous. Possibly friendly. Probably murderous.'
Koron stared at the map.
'So…we go around?'
'Under normal circumstances? Absolutely. Wide berth. Several continents' worth.' Sasha paused. 'But…'
'We're on a time-sensitive mission.'
'Exactly.'
Koron closed his eyes, feeling the dust settle on him in a fine, judgmental film.
'…Shit.'
The landscape streamed past in tawny ribbons, a desert tapestry unspooling beneath the howl of motion. Koron felt the bike's anti-grav plates humming between his legs with a deep, satisfied thrum that resonated through frame and bone. The machine rode the wasteland like a prow skimming a storm-tossed sea.
But the desert had changed.
The storm overhead bruised the world in swathes of violet and sickly rose, Warp-light bleeding through the cloudbanks like bioluminescence from a dying creature. Dust devils spun lazily across the plains, rising and collapsing in hollow breaths. Jagged spine-rocks protruded from the sand like the ribs of something titanic long since fossilized.
Ahead, the first hint of Megaborealis pierced the horizon, not just a spire but a vast silhouette, its girders and scorched plating backlit by the churning sky. Heat shimmered off the geothermal vents clustered around its base, turning the distant skyline into a wavering mirage of molten metal and broken ambition.
Behind him, the Sentinel curled into the second seat, compact and watchful, its plating rattling every time a gust hit them. Grit hissed across its armor like sleet, bouncing off the flickering shimmer of its shield in tiny sparks of irritated light.
It looked vaguely offended every time.
'So,' Koron mused as he leaned the bike into a short lived, gentle serpentine sway, each lazy curve eating up entire football fields of dirt, 'besides the giant demon blowing up our ship, stranding us here, and turning our timetable into a sad joke… Lucia was right. This is a great place for a ride.'
Sasha huffed in his mind, the sound like static with opinions. 'Yeah, though I'd prefer it without the temperamental weather.'
"Honestly I wouldn't mind the weather. It's the demons I don't want."
'Fair,' Sasha muttered.
Stormwinds buffeted them as they crossed a jagged ridge, the air charged with electric violence. Sheets of dust rose and fell in ghostly curtains. Sunlight had been reduced to a weak, distant smear, the storm choking it to near invisibility and leaving the world to the strange purple-pink glow leaking from the Warp.
'How's the signal relay holding?' Koron asked, flicking his gaze to the HUD where a tiny bar crawled upward with the enthusiasm of a dying snail.
'Stable, just painfully slow,' Sasha replied. 'Atmospheric bounce won't work with this storm chewing the upper layer, and line-of-sight signals top out at the horizon. The Imperials might as well be whispering into wet wool.'
'Once we're inside the hive, we should be able to hijack their relay towers.' Koron shifted his weight, feeling the bike adjust beneath him with feline grace. 'Keep trying, but pin it to a subroutine on my processor. I want you free for sudden creative disasters.'
'Running it now.'
He felt the program settle into the back of his mind—an orderly, quiet presence gnawing industriously at fragmented vox-signals. Every few seconds it spat out a garbled chirp of near-pattern, then swallowed it to try again.
The next two hours blurred into wind, motion, and the steady grind of the planet passing under their stolen horizon. The spire grew taller, clearer—its skeletal towers clustering around its base, supplicants around a titan.
'Contact,' Sasha murmured—calm, but with that taut undertone that lived between her syllables whenever danger crawled close. A scatter of red dots blossomed at the edge of the HUD, six miles out, jittering with the frantic signature of fast-moving chaos.
'Readings inconclusive,' she continued, 'but between the total lack of comm chatter, the ocean of exhaust fumes, and what definitely sounds like small-arms fire? I'm guessing a warband of Orks ahead.'
Koron angled the bike slightly, posture shifting into alert poise. Desert wind clawed at his armor in sharp, petulant tugs. Ahead, dust plumes marked the distant movement of something large, something loud, something doing its best to murder the concept of subtlety.
'We'll skirt their edge,' he said, adjusting course with a smooth lean. The bike responded like a living thing under him. 'I'll take a few minutes of lost time over aggravating a warband of Orks.'
'You don't need much distance,' Sasha offered. 'You'd outrun any pursuers even with just the grav-plates. Their vehicles handle like angry refrigerators on wheels.'
'Switch from cloak to shields anyway,' Koron replied. 'I'd rather not get perforated by a stray bullet—or twenty—just for being nearby.'
'…Fair point,' she conceded, already rerouting energy. A faint blue ripple skimmed over his view as the shields flared, the air bending around him like a protective sigh before vanishing.
The bike accelerated, carrying them into a wide arc around the growing thunder of engines and gunfire, the desert heat drawing wavering curtains between hunter and hunted, and hopefully keeping the Orks as blissfully unaware as possible.
Sparks ricocheted off the shield in screaming arcs of orange, each impact ringing across the pale blue field like a spiteful bell. Heavy rounds chewed into the dirt around them, kicking up violent geysers of grit that peppered his armor. The air behind him had devolved into a single chaotic organism—gunfire stuttering in uneven bursts, crude missiles shrieking overhead, engines coughing black clouds of exhaust, and through it all the delighted, unhinged roars of Orks who had found their new favorite chase toy.
And they were gaining.
'You just had to jinx us!' Koron growled, flattening his body against the bike's frame. The grav-plates beneath him howled with strain as they poured every erg of thrust forward. Beside him, the Sentinel had shifted low, shields fully deployed in case the bike's own defensive field flickered.
'It doesn't make any damn sense!' Sasha snapped, her voice a frantic braid of logic and indignation as she tore through the data. 'They're on tracked vehicles, Koron—tracked—using friction instead of gravimetric curvature, half of them don't even have functioning engines, and one of them is literally powered by a charcoal fire stuffed into a metal box! How are they doing this nonsense?!'
Koron didn't look back, but the HUD helpfully painted the scene in lurid detail.
The warband behind them surged across the desert, a living avalanche of angry green. Over three hundred Orks, each a slab of muscle and bad decisions strapped to a murder-bike.
Their machines were nightmares of welded scrap and wishful thinking. One bristled with eight exhaust pipes that weren't attached to any part of the engine. Another sported a steering wheel stolen from a voidship's bridge. A third was completely on fire, its rider proudly beating his chest and shouting, "FLAMEZ MAKE ME GO FASTA!"
One bike had a grot strapped to the front like a figurehead, shrieking, "I DIDN'T SIGN UP FOR DIS!"
The Ork steering it bellowed back, "SHADDUP, YER AERODYNAMIC!"
And guns.
So many guns.
Some were bolted on sideways. Some were fused together into improbable chimera weapons. One Ork held a gun by the barrel and fired it by smacking the trigger against his forehead.
Another launched a missile that immediately fell behind him with all the enthusiasm of a disappointed rock.
The Ork stared at it, offended.
"GET BACK 'ERE, YA LAZY GIT!"
All of it was working.
All of it was pointed at Koron.
And the only thing louder than the storm of fire behind him was the pure, uncut joy with which the Orks tried to kill him.
'Kick in the thrusters, damn it! Whatever they're doing, they shouldn't be hitting a thousand miles per hour!' Sasha yelled inside his skull, her voice climbing from alarm toward full-on existential offense as the distance gauge kept shrinking.
Koron didn't argue. He felt the tension of the bike's stabilizers, the way its systems braced like a sprinter crouched at the starting line. The twin thrusters mounted at the base of the stabilizer wings irised open with a mechanical hiss—petals of alloy peeling apart to reveal a core of brilliant blue.
Light bloomed.
Then the world detonated into motion.
The plasma drives ignited with a thunderclap roar that punched through his ribs. The bike surged forward so violently that the desert seemed to snap into a single streaked line, the horizon smearing into gold and gray watercolor. Trails of ionized light spiraled in their wake, phantom ribbons dancing as Koron tightened his grip and flattened himself even more to reduce drag.
The speedometer climbed—four hundred, five, six, seven—its digits flickering faster with each passing second. Air began to condense at the very tip of the bike's nose, forming a sharp halo of pressure, a shivering bubble of distortion that shimmered like a tiny, furious storm.
He could feel the world thinning around him, the air trembling, the frame humming, a blade just shy of resonance. His ribs buzzed as pressure collapsed into a tunnel around him, the sky narrowing to a vibrating throat they were being forced through.
And behind them—impossibly, absurdly, insultingly close—the Orks still came. A living thunderhead of metal and muscle, roaring over the desert like a landslide made of violence. Their engines bellowed in challenge, coughing smoke and fire as hundreds of machines hurtled after a bike that, by any sane measure, should have left them choking on dust miles ago.
But sanity and Orks had never once been introduced.
'They're gaining again?!' Sasha cried, her voice pitching into disbelief. The HUD confirmed it with cold indifference: inch by inch, the green tide crawled closer.
And then Koron saw why.
Around each wheel—well, around whatever counted as a wheel; some were bare rims, others were welded plates or rusty saw blades—tiny sparks of emerald energy crackled like mischievous lightning. Reality shuddered around them as the Orks' ramshackle machines lunged forward with bursts of speed they had no right to possess.
Weapons tech? Psychic nonsense? Pure Ork confidence denying the universe its say?
Probably all three.
'Shift to cloak?' Koron asked, throat tight as he flicked his gaze to the rapidly dwindling distance markers. 'Short bounce, then vanish mid-air. Coast down behind them before they reboot their tiny green neurons?'
'Maybe,' Sasha said, wincing audibly, 'but given how weird their tech is, I'm not convinced your cloaking field would fool them. They might just decide you're hiding in the sky, fire wildly upward, and accidentally hit you.'
'Which is worse?' Koron countered. 'Orks that might beat my cloak… or Orks doing a thousand miles an hour?'
Sasha hesitated for a long, thoughtful beat.
'Fast Orks are preferred,' she admitted at last. 'However, that's not the main problem.'
'What is?'
'We're still two hours from the outskirts of Megaborealis. At this pace, they'll overtake you in thirty minutes. And you're out of gears.'
Silence.
A long, suspicious silence.
'...You are out of gears, right?'
More silence. The worst kind. The "I have an idea and it's terrible" kind.
'…Hang onto my neurons for me, won't you?'
Her alarm spiked like feedback.
'Koron, wait- What are you doing?'
The handlebars folded away with a mechanical whisper, retreating into the bike's chassis as Koron flattened his body into a streamlined plank. He stretched his legs back and out, trusting the machine to reconfigure around him. Not the engine—never the engine—just the riding frame, the part designed to survive reckless ideas rather than cause them.
Metal flooded over him in a silver tide. It swept across his arms, chest, skull, down his spine and legs, knitting into a frictionless aerodynamic skin. The Sentinel compacted behind him, plates sliding and locking until it was a tight, shielded mass wrapped within the nanite sheath.
'Koron, what the hell are—OH MY GOD WHY IS THAT IN HERE?!' Sasha screamed as she got a look at the booting program.
Below him, the bike's undercarriage opened.
It wasn't dramatic. No thunder, no metal shriek. Just a soft, surgical shhk as a long seam opened along the bike's underside, running from nose to tail like a scalpel line.
A narrow intake widened — barely larger than a softball — smooth, predatory, unmistakably a ramscoop waking up.
It slid apart like a steel eyelid opening onto a forbidden dream.
A slim channel revealed itself along the bike's belly, exposing a crystalline interior threaded with impossibly fine microfilaments. It didn't look mechanical. It looked grown.
Alive.
Pale blue glow spilled out onto the blur of sand and dirt, the air around the scoop trembling as pressure folded inward.
Inside, thin strands of white lightning coalesced, drifting into graceful spirals. One filament. Then two. Then ten — hair-thin, star-bright, curling with the slow intent of a creature deciding whether to stretch or strike.
The filaments tightened.
Twisting.
Braiding.
A luminous helix took shape.
'You actually put a god damn Q-cycle missile engine into a racing bike??' Sasha sputtered, watching the activation software tick toward completion. 'Those are designed to hurl orbital kill-sat warheads hard enough to crack dreadnought armor, and you put one into your motorcycle??'
'Look,' he said, eyes closed as his sensors took over, 'my turning radius improves when my mass is half-decoupled from local momentum frames.'
'Oh my god. Guilliman was right. You are a war crime waiting to happen.'
He inhaled once.
The world pulled taut around him like a bowstring.
The filaments flared.
Light erupted.
Not a plume. Not exhaust.
A helix of white-blue starfire unspooled down the ramscoops length, a luminous DNA strand scribbling itself into the world.
A deep, resonant roar rolled outward, rattling pebbles across the desert floor and sending a tremor up Koron's spine. The sound wasn't heard so much as felt, as if the planet itself had taken a breath and then decided to object.
The desert didn't blur.
It ceased.
The ground collapsed into a single sheet of impossible color, a painting someone had dragged a hand across too fast, pulling every grain of sand into a smear of gold and ash.
The horizon bent inward, funneling toward his skull as if the world were trying to swallow him whole.
Reality hiccuped.
A second Koron appeared.
Faint. Translucent. Perfectly mirroring his posture. A ghost-bike overlaid atop the real one, their outlines just slightly misaligned, like a sketch with two strokes drawn a hair too far apart.
Then the world lurched.
The bike's speed didn't climb. It didn't accelerate in any sane sense. It simply doubled, as if someone had copied his velocity and pasted it on top of itself.
His heartbeat stuttered a half-step behind the acceleration, a soft internal glitch his implants rushed to smooth out. For three long seconds his inner ear insisted he was falling sideways, and his stomach tried to climb up through his ribs in protest.
Reality hiccuped again.
Another echo joined it, then another, each misaligned by microseconds. The world around him couldn't keep up. Sand blurred into a continuous sheet of molten gold. The cracked earth beneath them rippled like liquid skin. Shockwaves peeled backward from the bike's nose in widening rings, kicking up tidal crescendos of dust that the bike outran before they fully formed.
Even the sky distorted — cloud layers stretching thin, dragged into elongated streaks as if painted with a trembling brush across a too-wide canvas.
'Please tell me you're only going to three echoes.' Sasha pleaded, her voice pitching toward panic.
'I've made it to five before.'
The silence she radiated could have suffocated a star.
'…HOW many?'
Koron's silence carried the emotional timbre of a man remembering a bad life choice in slow motion.
'…Five.'
Longer silence. The kind that would make a Black Templar whisper a prayer.
Then—
'The limiters literally turn red at four,' Sasha hissed. 'Four is the "please stop, the spacetime mesh is crying" threshold. Four is the "this will void your warranty with reality" level.'
'Well,' Koron said, eyes locked on the shimmering smear of the world ahead, his sensors doing the heavy lifting as the desert degraded into abstract geometry, 'are the Orks keeping up?'
'What? No, of course they're not—WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!'
Sasha's shriek crackled through his neural link.
Behind them, the Orks had finally reached the breaking point of whatever unholy brew of physics, WAAAGH!!!, and reckless enthusiasm fueled their machines.
Dozens of Orks were pressed so far back into their seats that they looked welded to them by centrifugal malice. Their grips had devolved into desperate fingertip hooks, knuckles white-green with strain. Goggles had carved trenches into their faces, cheeks ballooning outward in grotesque ripples that exposed jagged yellow teeth to the punishing wind.
Others had left their seats entirely.
Legs flailed behind them like tattered banners, their bodies pinned in midair by sheer velocity as they clung to their handlebars with all the determination of creatures too stupid—or too delighted—to let go. They flapped behind their bikes like enormous, screaming, green-skinned pennants.
And their machines… their machines were dying glorious, stupid deaths.
Armor plates vibrated loose and shot backward like steel frisbees. Duct-taped guns ripped free, spinning into the air before being promptly inhaled by the unlucky Orks riding behind. Trophy racks shattered, sending skulls and bones ricocheting across the desert in macabre confetti.
Some bikes simply began shedding parts in long, glittering trails—bolts, spikes, sawblades, entire exhaust manifolds peeling off and shredding their comrades one by one.
One Ork had abandoned the concept of sitting entirely. He stood on the seat with arms flung wide, coat and armor whipping straight back, howling with the exultation of a lunatic saint while the bike disintegrated underneath him faster than it could carry him forward, screaming at the top of his lungs:
"I'M DA KING O' DA WOOOORLD!"
The warband was being unmade by speed itself.
And yet—between the explosions of debris and the chorus of delighted bellows—at least two dozen Orks were still trying to accelerate. Still leaning forward. Still urging their disintegrating rides faster.
Because to Orks, physics wasn't a rule.
It was a suggestion.
A rude one, at that.
And somewhere, the laws of conservation of energy went to lie down, gently, and cry.
Sergeant Erden Tsuvar drew one armored finger down the hololith table, the emerald projection washing soft light across the red-and-white paint of his gauntlet. The map flickered with the faint hum of strained power cells, casting jagged shadows across the command tent. Outside, the stormwinds bullied the canvas walls, snapping the flaps like angry banners and carrying the distant thunder.
"Captain Veyl's suggestion of hitting the supply depots is a valid one," he said, looking up at the shadowy figure beside him—Raptor Sergeant Lukan Varres. Even helmetless, Lukan's expression was carved from slate, eyes sharp as a hawk's in the flickering green light. "But I still say we skirt them, draw in their forces, and then blow the depot. Bleed out more enemies that way."
Lukan nodded slowly, his pale features lit an eerie green by the hololith. "Agreed. We have enough demo charges for this to work, but afterward our munitions will be depleted. My squad will try to secure enemy resupply caches before we withdraw. Send me your needs, my brothers will make the attempt."
Erden opened his mouth to answer—then the vox sputtered alive, the auspex operator's voice tight with controlled panic.
"My lord, contacts approaching at extreme velocity, over a hundred signatures and closing fast! Thirty seconds out!"
The tent seemed to hold its breath.
Erden toggled the squad-wide vox. "Incoming contacts! Defensive positions!" He pulled his helm into place as Lukan was already sprinting out, bolter raised, cloak snapping in the violent wind.
They did not get thirty seconds.
They barely got ten.
Erden had barely cleared the tent flap when something slammed past the perimeter — a streak of impossible blue light and metal that carved a trench of pressure through the camp. The air didn't rush around it so much as explode, collapsing into a vacuum wake that sucked at cloaks, banners, and loose debris.
A half-second later, the sonic boom hit.
It wasn't just a sound, it was a wall. It crashed into the camp with the force of an orbital drop, pancaking tents and sending their poles cartwheeling skyward. Crates burst open like kicked anthills, scattering ammunition and rations in chaotic arcs. Dust surged upward in a vast plume that rolled over the encampment like a tidal wave.
Two Rhino transports groaned on their suspension as the shockwave punched into them, their hulls rattling like struck bells.
Then the Orks arrived.
The ground itself shook, vibrating like a plucked wire as hundreds of ramshackle vehicles thundered past. Exhaust and gunsmoke churned together into a filthy haze, painted orange by muzzle flashes. Loose earth erupted around them in spraying fountains, and shattered machine parts rained from the sky like metallic hail.
The stormwind carried the laughter of mad engines long after they had passed.
Erden and Lukan stared after the receding dust plume, frozen in a rare moment of mutual disbelief. The desert shimmered with heat and the faint smell of burning ozone.
At last Erden turned. "Lukan, I believe that—"
Lukan cut him off with a chop of his hand. "Do not bother inventing an excuse. Go catch whatever that was."
Even through his helm, Erden's grin felt too large for his face. He slapped Lukan's pauldron—a heavy, brotherly thump—before sprinting toward his squad's section of the camp.
His brothers were already mounted, their jetbikes snarling with pent-up power, engines vibrating like hunting beasts straining against a leash.
Erden swung onto his own bike. The machine purred beneath him, its grav-lifts eager, its turbines coiled.
He gunned the throttle.
The jetbike roared forward, kicking up a spiral of dust as it lunged after the impossible streak tearing across the horizon.
Somewhere deep in his mind, an old challenge of the Khan's resurfaced, clear, cold and wild.
Catch the wind.
For a seven-foot titan of ceramite and scars, Fenrik Halftooth moved with uncanny silence. The ruins of Megaborealis swallowed even his armored footfalls, the once-crowded hive now a continent of devastation. Four days earlier, unnatural gravitational distortions had torn the district apart—warping steel beams like softened wax, folding ferrocrete towers into heaps of jagged ruin, and grinding entire streets into chasms of shattered stone.
Now, what had been a bustling commercial square was a graveyard of broken girders, crumpled skybridges, and pulverized masonry. Dust hung in the air in thin, shimmering veils. Nothing lived here except snipers, predators, and fools.
Fenrik—like all Space Wolves—was none of the three.
He stalked forward, senses sharpened to predatory clarity. Every crunch of glass beneath a loose pebble. Every metallic whine of a structure settling under its own broken weight. The whisper of fabric scraping over rubble in the wind. These things told stories.
Lately, those stories ended with sniper fire. Black Legion marksmen and their mortal cults infested these ruins, dueling with Templars and Wolves for ground no sane soul would claim.
To Fenrik's left, his pack fanned out in a hundred-meter crescent, each brother scanning their sector. Their helms' auspex feeds were half-blind, scrambled by the screeching warpstorms overhead, forcing them to rely instead on instinct, scent, and the old gifts of Fenris.
It was scent that had led him here.
A faint trace caught minutes earlier—wrong, uncanny, unsettling enough that even his transhuman instincts bristled. It had drawn them into this half-collapsed square. Bridges from the floors above lay broken across it like the bones of giants. Much of the plaza lay buried beneath dozens of meters of debris.
But the dust had saved footprints.
Human-sized. Booted. Not Astartes.
And the smell—
Fenrik's lip curled inside his helm. It wasn't the scent of a mortal, not truly. Too clean. Too sterile. Not sweat, not skin, not fear or blood. It was the odor of meat designed to be meat, not born of flesh and life.
It crawled up his spine, settling behind the base of his skull where his instincts howled warnings with teeth bared.
It came from the rubble pile.
He pinged the location with a curt gesture. His pack answered in soft vox-clicks, their runes converging on his display as they closed in with silent, lethal purpose.
Fenrik drew his bolt pistol but kept his left hand close to the haft of his power axe, the weapon humming faintly with caged lightning. He took a knee. Watched the pile. Listened.
The air grew a fraction colder inside his armor. The hairs at the back of his neck tried to rise against ceramite. Something in the ruin's silence felt too intent, like a held breath that never quite released.
The flatlining of his brothers' vitals was the only warning.
A whisper of shifting dirt—a tiny crumble—and Fenrik spun, power axe igniting in a crack of blue-white fury. The air warped. A shimmer of wrongness broke across his vision as though reality itself were rippling like heat haze.
He did not hesitate.
He struck.
The blade bit into the distortion, cleaving through the cloak of invisibility as the power field chewed apart its molecular bonds. The illusion dissolved—and the thing beneath was revealed.
A Sentinel, but corrupted. A blasphemous fusion of metal and meat, sinew threaded through alloy ribs, black ichor pumping through veins that steamed as it escaped. Its semi-organic eyes bulged wetly, unfocused and too wide, and the chainsword maw built into its skull gnashed wildly, chewing its own barbed tongue into ribbons as it snapped for his face.
The smell hit him a heartbeat later, a reek of hot oil and opened bodies with none of the honest tang of blood or sweat.
Something built to impersonate flesh without understanding it.
Fenrik was already in motion when the other six hit him.
They plunged out of the shadows, blurring through smoke and dust like ruptured nightmares.
The pack came low. Fast. Silent.
Claws unfolding like surgical instruments dripping Warp-fire.
Coil projectors laced with bone spat lightning that burned holes straight through ceramite.
Fenrik roared and met them head-on.
His bolt pistol found a skull — the round detonating inside the creature's cranium with a wet metal pop, spraying a fan of teeth and circuitry.
His axe sheared through another, carving limbs free in a shower of sparks, ichor, and sizzling steam.
But they were already inside his guard.
Claws carved through his chestplate like paring knives through fruit.
Warp-fire licked his throat.
Something stabbed into the soft seal at his ribs, pumping liquid ice into his bloodstream.
Then the howl hit.
Not a sound.
A violation.
A layered psychic shriek tore through his skull — ten notes, twenty, all wrong, harmonizing in frequencies that scraped the inside of his soul.
His vision warped.
His limbs jerked.
His hearts stuttered off-beat.
Fenrik dropped to one knee.
Still fighting.
Always fighting.
He fought until every nerve was ash.
He tried to rise — and realized he could no longer feel his legs.
A final drone loomed above him, dripping molten ceramite from its claws.
Its metal ribs rose and fell in a grotesque imitation of breath.
It leaned close — too close — its steaming maw inches from his visor.
Fenrik summoned the last of his strength.
"Fenris…" he growled, blood bubbling in his throat, "…remember me."
For just an instant, he let his mind go back home, tasting the sea-wind of Asaheim.
He swung.
The axe cut deep, the drone's chest carved open, its demonic engine screaming its death cry — one last arc of defiance — before his arm was severed at the elbow.
The machines tore him apart, pulling his hearts free from his chest in a burst of gore and smoke.
His blood boiled off the ground before it could drip.
His vision dimmed, shrinking to a pinprick of gold.
Fenrik Halftooth died fighting, eyes locked on the enemy, unbowed even in his final breath.
Whispers flickered invisibly between the drones—signals in spectra no mortal could detect. They reported their kill to distant masters: the Sorcerer of Tzeentch and the Arkifane, who watched through ritual lenses as their creatures continued their grim harvest.
But they were not the only watchers.
High above, in the shattered high-rises framing the square, other eyes blinked. Pale, glassy. Predatory. Magnoculars tracked the drones' retreat. Purple-tinged skin pulled taut over elongated skulls. Fanged mouths whispered into the vox with voices like dry leaves rubbing together.
"Inform the Primus. A new threat stalks the ruins. The forces of the Immaterium have unleashed machines… machines that may endanger the coming of the Star Child."