Shadows in the Sand (Warhammer 40k, story)

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Fifty Three

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Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

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'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."

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Fifty Four

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Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

The ruins of Megaborealis were a carcass, picked clean and left to rot. Dust clouds curled and unraveled in sluggish eddies as Koron passed by, his sensors pushed hard to comprehend the hive's massive scale. Spires rose for miles, jagged and uneven, clawing up into a Warp-storm choked sky, but the smog trapped in the lower hab-blocks refused to lift. Centuries of pollution clung stubbornly to the streets, unmoved even by the Immaterium pressing down from above.

Worse still were the corpses.

Entire roadways were dark with dried blood. Bodies swayed from chains strung between lampposts and balconies, impaled on iron pikes or nailed to walls in crude, ritualized displays. Young, old, man or woman, without pattern or mercy. Chaos had not merely conquered the city; it had performed upon it, turning suffering into devotion and death into offering.

The soundscape never rested. Distant artillery rumbled in staccato bursts, broken again and again by the sharp crack of thunder and the violent detonation of lightning striking the city proper. At the center of it all stood the orbital spire, a needle of defiance and corruption alike. Anti-aircraft batteries fired almost without pause from both the hive and the tower itself, saturating a narrow hundred meter cylinder of clear air around it with overlapping curtains of weapons fire.

Koron let out a low, involuntary whistle at the sight. The sheer volume of ammunition being burned to keep that sliver of realspace denied was staggering.

'No Thunderhawk, Storm Talon, or drop pod is getting through that without catching a few dozen rounds.'

'Yup,' Sasha replied absently, her attention still buried in threat vectors and incoming data. 'If I had to guess, I'd say the base of the tower is where they're anchoring the storm rituals. That's speculation, though. There's still an uncomfortable amount we don't understand about demons or their rituals.'

'Agreed.' Koron leaned the bike into a shallow curve, the whisper-quiet grav-plates carrying them smoothly along the outskirts of the hive's central district. 'We'll ask G for whatever files he has once we get a signal through the storm. Especially on that big one. That bastard's going to be a problem if it manages to leave the storm.'

He glanced at the tactical overlay. 'ETA to the far side of the city?'

Sasha didn't answer immediately. The map in the corner of his HUD flickered as pre-upheaval schematics were torn apart and reassembled against current sensor data. 'Looking at roughly a full day to cross the hive,' she said at last. 'Then another eight hours to Storvhal. Recommend staying low and slow. Want me to re-engage the cloak?'

'No.' Koron shook his head slightly. 'Most of the heavy fighting is clustered around the spire. We're, what, fifteen miles out? We shouldn't run into anyone. Still, keep the defenses hot.'

'Copy.' A route chimed green on the minimap, threading through collapsed structures and abandoned roads. Several alternate paths lingered as dim, translucent lines, ready to light up if conditions changed.

Koron eased the bike forward, then glanced back over his shoulder at the jagged breach in the hive's defensive wall—the cleft he'd slipped through.
'Think the Orks are still chasing us?'

'No idea,' Sasha replied, a long-suffering sigh coloring her tone. 'They should have been reduced to paste at the speeds they were pulling, but after what we saw? I'm not betting against stupidity with momentum. Let's just put as much distance between us and them as possible.'

'That's fair. Stupidity with momentum is basically an Ork's diploma.'

'Please don't make them sound educated. It encourages them.'

Three hours bled away as Koron threaded the bike through the city's lower arteries, keeping to shadowed streets and avoiding the wide transit highways that were being hotly contested even now. The smog hung thick and unmoving down here, a permanent twilight that swallowed sound and distorted distance. More than once he accelerated hard to escape roving bands of… things that prowled the depths, their bodies moving with the wrong kind of purpose, but for the moment, the overt forces of Chaos remained absent.

He eventually eased the bike to a stop at the edge of a vast gorge. The canyon split the hive cleanly in two, stretching for miles from rim to rim before vanishing into the distant sprawl of shattered towers. Koron leaned forward slightly and let out an appreciative whistle as he studied the scar carved into the planet itself.

'Damn. Judging by the profile, I'd say seismic rupture followed by an orbital energy lance.'

'Most likely,' Sasha agreed. 'But the damage pattern does present a unique opportunity.'

A new route option pulsed to life on the display.

Below them, the exposed sewer arteries of the hive-city yawned open into darkness. Massive tunnels gaped in the earth, their edges melted smooth in places, as if the stone had run like wax, while other sections had been torn into jagged, splintered teeth by violent tectonic forces.

Koron stared down into the depths, unimpressed. 'Okay. Explain why, in the hell, I would ever want to enter a sewer.'

'Biggest and simplest reason? Way less chance of being shot.'

'Yes, but, and here's my counterpoint: it's a hive-city sewer. A hive-city sewer.'

'A fair concern,' she conceded. 'Counter-counterpoint: still less chance of being shot.'

Koron closed his eyes for a moment.

'…Damn it. Septic systems were always my least favorite repair assignment.'

'I get it, but if you're alive to complain, you're still alive.' Sasha said, already shifting focus, 'Come on, it's time for a jump.'

The bike rolled back as the plasma thrusters deployed, igniting into brilliant azure light. Anti-grav plates locked in, holding the machine steady as power built through the frame and a thousand overlapping calculations raced through Koron's mind—trajectory, thrust, mass, margin for error.

'Hover changeover ready,' she said, the bike growling beneath Koron as stored energy coiled tight, waiting for release.

'Drop looks good,' he replied. 'Starting run in three…two…one…mark!'

The grav-plates whined. The plasma thrusters roared.

Koron released the brake—and the bike hurled itself out over the canyon's edge, the city dropping away beneath them.

As the earth fell away and the bike plunged in a whistling descent, neither noticed the warp-storm behind them cinched into a slow spiral, as if something vast had shifted its weight in the dark.

---

The scent lingered in the sewer's reeking air.

It lay beneath the rot and filth, beneath the layered stink of humanity and decay that had soaked into the underhive over centuries. Subtle, alien, and persistent. The Magus tasted it as much as she smelled it, drawing it in through senses her followers barely understood.

Her children moved carefully through the rubble-choked passages, weapons held ready as they followed the trail. The underhive had become a broken maze; vast stretches of the sewer system collapsed under the slow grind of time, the violence of war above, and the Primus's deliberate orders of controlled collapse. Entire arteries had been sacrificed, sealed and buried to hide the brood's presence from prying eyes.

It had worked.

Millions of the faithful lay scattered across the world, unseen and patient. Those who could still pass as human moved quietly among the surface populations, shuffling supplies and equipment toward the hidden nests, feeding the future one crate at a time. The arrival of Imperial and Chaos forces had forced a retreat, however. Neither the Primus nor the Magus had been willing to test the brood against reinforced armies so early in the cycle.

That calculus had shifted in the past week.

The upheaval of the planet's crust had shattered cities and ruptured supply lines, breaking organized battlefronts into a thousand isolated skirmishes. Forces that once advanced in strength now fought blind and alone, cut off from reinforcement. The Warp-storm overhead had been an even greater gift, strangling long-range communication to a whisper.

Yet the bond between the Magus and her faithful remained unbroken.

That alone would have been enough.

The question gnawed at her thoughts.

Her children could smell it now as well: It was meat and metal: ozone, hot polymer, the clean bite of antiseptic that didn't belong in a sewer, masked by some manner of cloaking that dulled their other senses. Their eyes found nothing. Their ears heard nothing unusual. Even the broodmind recoiled from it, unable to take purchase.

There was no fear.

No aggression or chemical haze of stimulants or the frantic static of a human mind under stress.

Only quiet.

That unsettled her more than any weapon.

Stranger still was the intruder's path.

It did not drift toward the supply caches. It did not linger to survey tunnels or mark junctions. It passed through the brood's territory as though unaware, or uncaring, of it. It moved with steady, unhurried purpose. A ghost, barely traceable, leaving only the faintest echo in the air.

The Primus—her brother in purpose, if not in blood—had ordered patrols to observe from a distance. To watch, not strike. He feared this was a scout, a single probe before a larger incursion, yet even he could not say for certain.

That uncertainty was the only thing restraining the brood.

To strike without understanding risked exposure. To reveal themselves too early would invite annihilation. And so far, the intruder's path led away from their nests, away from their stockpiles, away from anything vital.

And so the faithful followed.

Eyes narrowed, teeth bared.

Ready for the order.

---

'What do you think?' Sasha kept her voice low, even across the neural link, as if volume alone might carry through stone and filth. 'Genestealers are… famously direct when it comes to intruders. Why are they holding back?'

'No idea,' Koron replied. 'But I'm not interested in figuring it out the hard way. Let's not waste the time they're giving us.'

He pushed gently off the sewer wall, gliding forward in near silence. The tunnel around him was a narrow cathedral of decay, the arched stone slick with condensation, pipes ruptured and dangling like exposed veins. He drifted over a mound of twisted metal and shattered ferrocrete, debris left behind by collapses both natural and deliberate. Behind him, the Sentinel drone followed with effortless precision, its gravitic bias field smoothing the terrain into irrelevance.

'How long until we can get the hell out of these tunnels?'

'If the repeated collapses are any indication,' Sasha replied, 'the cult has been systematically cutting off surface access. Smart. It limits detection, funnels intruders and won't raise any eyebrows considering how decrepit hive-cities are.' She paused as projections scrolled through her analysis. 'So, to answer your question: best estimate? Several more hours.'

Koron grimaced. 'Fantastic.'

'Though…' she added.

He shot the little golden ball on his HUD a glance. 'Go on.'

'If we reverse their approach vectors and cut through their primary transit lines, we'll likely emerge close to the core of their operations. I would wager their leadership maintains rapid access to the surface, either for escape or for launching coordinated assaults.'

Koron slowed, one hand brushing the wall to steady himself, the faint wiggle of the bike in its storage state tapping at his kidneys. 'You mean the heart of the cult,' he said flatly. 'As in, where the leader is. The massive, four-armed monster that treats Astartes like popcorn. That location.'

'Look, I didn't say it was perfect,' Sasha replied, her irritation bleeding through. 'But the alternative is spending several more hours down here, hoping their restraint doesn't suddenly evaporate.'

Koron shook his head. 'Several hours. No contest. No offense, but I'm not gambling on a hypothetical exit that may not exist by driving straight through the center of their operations. Especially when they can already track us. We turn toward the core, they're going to lose their minds.'

Silence followed as Sasha ran simulations, branching outcomes blooming and collapsing in rapid succession.

'Then,' she said at last, 'what about sending the drone ahead? Let it scout the route. If there's a viable path forward, we'll know.'

Koron didn't answer right away.

He drifted up and over the lip of a fractured junction, the tunnel opening into a wider artery riddled with side passages. Darkness yawned in every direction. His sensors pinged movement—hybrid life signs, roughly forty meters out. Always distant. Always pacing him. Watching.

They were tracking him by means he didn't yet understand.

Not yet.

'No,' he said finally. 'If things go sideways, we're going to want every gun we have on hand. And besides—' he glanced back at the drone gliding faithfully behind him, '—I like Rover.'

'Please don't anthropomorphize the drones,' Sasha dryly replied. 'It only makes their eventual destruction more emotionally complicated.'

'Hey now,' Koron said, all cheeky grin. 'Don't be mean to Rover, she'll—'

'You named a girl Rover?'

'Seemed appropriate.'

'...I'm going to tell the ladies your child naming privileges have been revoked.'

Koron nearly lost a handhold.

'That's not—' he started, then stopped, heat creeping up his neck. He pushed off into the darkness instead, quietly filing away a note to run a diagnostic on Sasha's psychological training suite.

In the quiet that followed, a faint echo reached the edge of his sensor range.

It was the raucous, bellowing laughter of the Orks.

---

She sensed them before they truly crossed into the cult's domain.

The other presence—the quiet one—had moved through her territory like a held breath, barely traceable. Her divine senses slid across it and found nothing to seize, as though it were wrapped in some impossible veil. No psychic echo. No emotional wake. Her mind reached, searched, and returned empty-handed.

That alone had unsettled her.

The Orks?

They were nothing like that.

They announced themselves like a macro-cannon firing in low atmosphere, the shock of their arrival felt twice over: once in the moment of impact, and again as the reality of it spread outward. Only this time, the shell did not strike a distant target.

It struck her home.

They burst through barricades and collapsed choke points, detonating traps meant to slow armored columns. Sentries died where they stood, torn apart in a riot of bullets, blades, crackling energy lances, and—absurdly—howling Squigs flung ahead like living munitions.

Her chosen answered the intrusion as one.

From ducts and crawlspaces, from forgotten maintenance corridors and hidden shafts, the faithful surged into motion, flooding the prepared kill-zones the Primus had shaped with such care. Fortified nests opened fire the instant the Orks thundered into range, overlapping fields of death cutting the darkness apart.

Las-fire, stubber rounds, rockets, grenades, and roaring sheets of flame choked the tunnels. The stink of scorched flesh and charred bone surged outward, briefly overwhelming even the ancient, omnipresent reek of human waste.

The Orks roared in delight and charged straight into it.

Four rokkits struck a reinforced wall almost in unison, tearing it apart in a storm of shattered ferrocrete and twisted metal. Cultists were flung aside, their screams lost beneath the hammering of gunfire as bullets and crackling shokk-rays poured through the breach. Gretchin swarmed along the Orks' flanks, shrieking as the horde crashed forward, choppas slamming against blades while the greenskins laughed and bled in equal measure.

Nearly two hundred of the brutes had defiled her people's temple.

They would die for such sacrilege.

---

'Damn Orks!'

Koron ducked under the jagged edge of a collapsed sewer roof, metal screaming inches above his head as Rover skimmed through after him. The tunnel ahead and behind erupted into lethal light and sound, las-bolts and bullets tearing into ferrocrete, showers of sparks raining down as rounds chased his heels.

His cloak collapsed in a heartbeat as his shield popped in its place, the Sentinel's shields flaring to life a half second later. Koron slammed a boot into the service door ahead of him, the impact launching it down the corridor in a shriek of torn hinges as he and Rover burst through the opening at full sprint.

His map was full of red.

The cult had already been coiled tight, nerves frayed by his presence, and now, pushed past breaking by the Orks crashing into their lair, it snapped. Hybrids boiled out of the walls in a wave of pale eyes, purple-tinged flesh, and too many teeth, weapons rising as one.

Koron was already moving.

He slipped through the doorway as fire stitched the space he'd occupied a heartbeat before, sprinting into the vast maintenance catacombs branching off the primary sewer lines. Great work tunnels stretched away in every direction, the hidden capillaries of the hive's arteries.

Behind him, the hybrids charged. Above and below, more surged through access shafts and crawlways, converging with frightening coordination. The map updated in frantic bursts as Koron shoulder-checked another door, vaulted a low fence, then ripped a shelving unit free and sent it crashing down behind him—buying bare seconds.

Again and again they tried to funnel him, driving him toward kill-corridors and dead ends. Sweat slicked the back of his neck as his lungs dragged in hot, rancid air, but he stayed just ahead of the trap—predicting, adjusting, refusing to slow.

Six hybrids were racing for the door he'd marked as his next exit.

Las-bolts scorched past him as he hit it shoulder-first. The metal buckled inward and the first hybrid on the other side never even raised his stubber before Koron was past him, two fingers jabbed into his windpipe, leaving him gasping out a wet wheeze.

Koron stepped through the motion without pause. He bent low, all his weight settling into one augmented leg as the other shot forward, letting him slip under the spray of panicked fire. The stumbling hybrid behind him jerked and folded as his own people gunned him down trying to hit the intruder, purple-black ichor splashing the tunnel wall.

Flowing forward, his metal elbow caught the hybrid's thigh. Bone shattered as the thing screamed.

Before the remaining four could react, Koron never stopped his attack. Grav-plates engaged, carrying his momentum forward as his forward leg braced and pushed. His left hand flared, catching him with gravimetric curvature, skimming up and over them along the wall of the tunnel.

Weapons came up, far too slow to his accelerated perception.

Space folded.

Koron blinked past them, already moving, tossing a small matte-black sphere behind him as he ran.

The reinforcements hit the corridor's entrance just as the pinball struck the deck.

It didn't explode.

It bounced.

Internal sensors flared, and it pulsed.

Gravity flipped.

Everything not bolted down in a twenty-foot radius slammed into the ceiling for a heartbeat before the device bounced again, smacking a cultist square in the forehead and firing once more. Bodies tore loose of gravity's hold and crashed back to the floor in a chorus of bruises and bloodied faces.

Up, down, then snapped back up again.

The sphere ricocheted along the passage, flipping the vector with every strike, turning the tunnel into a washing machine of flailing bodies, enraged shouts and shattered formations.

Mid-bounce, it halted mid-air, then snapped sideways as Koron caught it in his gravimetric field, yanking it back into his hand, his footsteps echoing alongside Rover's metallic clank as they fled.

Behind them, forty cultists barely had time to groan before their brothers trampled over them in the charge.

'You're doing great, though. Like a violent pinball!' she said, watching the horde grow ever closer.

'Non-lethal pinball!' he replied as he grabbed a low-hanging pipe, kicking his feet forward to slide over a rubble pile. 'Low delta-g, short cycles, just enough to break formations, not necks.'

'You just inverted gravity several times in a tunnel full of people.'

'Hey, they're alive.'

'That is technically true, and deeply unkind.'

The run continued, an endless chase of near misses, sparking shields and broken bones as he continued to barely slip through the growing horde.

'We can't keep this up!' Sasha said, her voice tight as data streams stacked and collapsed across Koron's HUD. Pathways lit and vanished in rapid succession as she tracked converging threats. 'Genestealer cults don't operate in dozens. They operate in thousands. Sometimes millions. And this one's entrenched—old, organized. We need an exit now.'

'Suggestions?!' Koron barked back.

He caught a rusted support beam in both hands and swung, boots scraping sparks as he vaulted the guard rail. The floor vanished beneath him. He dropped thirty meters into darkness, slamming down onto the corrugated deck of a maintenance platform and rolling through the impact as Rover hit beside him without breaking stride. Above, the pursuing hybrids skidded to a halt, snarling as their path collapsed.

'Other than my original proposal?'

'Yes!'

A fraction of a second passed. Too long.

'…None you would like better than the first.'

Koron swore under his breath and turned toward the maze of tunnels leading deeper—toward the pulsing heart of the cult itself. Every instinct screamed against it.

He ran anyway.

Because sometimes survival wasn't about finding the safest path.

It was about choosing the one your enemy thought you'd never take.

---

She felt every failure.

Not as numbers or reports, but as pressure along the shared lattice of the broodmind—sharp flares of pain, panic, and disorientation as her faithful were battered aside again and again. Bones broke. Organs ruptured. Minds screamed and went abruptly silent, not with death, but with shock.

And yet…

None of them died from the intruder.

That realization crept through her thoughts like a chill.

The ghost moved faster than prediction, slipping through kill-nets before they could fully close, turning traps into chaos and ambushes into stumbling collisions. Her children fell, were crushed, flung, broken against walls and ceilings by forces they did not understand.

But they lived. Mostly.

A mind winked out here and there. Not by the ghost's hand, but by the faithful's panicked fire.

He was not culling them.

He was passing through.

Confusion rippled through the broodmind, followed swiftly by something far more dangerous.

Intent.

The ghost's path shifted.

She felt it immediately—not through scent or sound, but through alignment, through the sudden tightening of probability itself. It wasn't seeking escape anymore; it threaded the margins with purpose.

He had turned inward.

Toward the Patriarch.

Toward the heart.

Alarm surged through her consciousness, sharp and incandescent. This was no scout. No fleeing prey. Whatever walked her tunnels moved with purpose now, its vector narrowing with frightening speed.

The Orks were still crashing through her outer sanctums, a howling storm of violence and desecration, but they no longer mattered.

Not like this did.

Her will snapped outward, overriding hesitation, overriding caution.

Unleash them.

The command tore through the broodmind like a scream.

From deep chambers and sealed vaults, the Purestrains stirred. Vicious, perfect things coiled in the dark. They would fall upon the Orks like razors, carving the infestation out of her domain.

After that…

They would hunt the ghost.

Run it down.

Tear the quiet thing apart and learn, at last, why it had chosen mercy over slaughter.

Why it had dared to walk unchallenged toward her god.

---

The Orks laughed.

They laughed as bullets tore through green flesh and sent boyz spinning into walls, limbs flying, blood splashing hot and bright across rusted metal. They laughed as pain burned and bones cracked, because pain meant the fight was good.

They died, but they krumped back just as hard—choppas hacking, fists smashing, boots stomping cultists into paste. Every blow landed with a wet, satisfying thud, every scream another reason to swing harder.

They cheered as fire rolled through the tunnels.

Flames clung to skin and armor alike, promethium washing over them in roaring sheets. Boyz burned and kept charging, teeth bared in wide, feral grins, voices rising in wild, barking laughter as they and their enemies were reduced to smoke and screaming shapes.

Burnin' meant fun.

Burnin' meant someone was doin' it right.

They roared louder.

The tunnels shook with it—echoing, booming, multiplying—until even the walls seemed to beat with them.

The laughter paused.

The walls moved.

Stone rippled.

Metal flexed.

The ceiling dropped.

It hadn't collapsed, and it wasn't blown apart—just opened, like something had bitten it.

Passages clenched tight, corridors narrowing like jaws snapping shut. Floors bucked and twisted beneath stomping boots. Walls split open and birthed pale, fast things with too many claws and not enough noise.

Then the Orks roared louder than before.

"HAHA! NOW IT'S A PROPAH FIGHT!"

They surged forward into the moving dark, swinging and firing and burning, laughing as the world itself tried to kill them—because if the walls were fightin' back?

Then it meant they were doin' somethin' right.

---

The Purestrains hit like knives thrown by a god.

They poured from vents and ruptured walls, pale bodies unfolding mid-leap, claws already swinging. No war cries. No laughter. Just motion—fast enough to blur, sharp enough to end lives in a breath.

The first Ork never saw it.

A Purestrain slammed into his chest, momentum carrying them both backward as talons punched clean through muscle and rib. The Ork laughed even as he died, blood bubbling from his mouth while his choppa tore half the creature's shoulder away. Both hit the floor in a tangle of limbs and gore.

The tunnels vanished into violence.

Orks fired wildly, bullets chewing metal and flesh alike as Purestrains ran along walls and ceilings, bodies twisting, claws striking from impossible angles. One landed on an Ork's back, jaws closing around the base of his skull. The Ork howled in rage and smashed himself backward into the wall, pulping the creature with his own weight.

Another Purestrain leapt through fire, skin blistering black as it drove both claws into an Ork's throat. Promethium washed over them. The creature burned and did not slow. The Ork burned and gripped harder, grabbing it in a crushing embrace and tearing it apart as both collapsed into the flames.

Choppas rose and fell.

Claws answered.

Teeth snapped. Bones cracked as organs fell out in steaming piles of wet meat. Blood, green and purple-black, slicked the floors until footing became guesswork and momentum alone decided who stayed standing.

Purestrains flowed like water, striking, vanishing, reappearing behind the Orks in blinding arcs of speed. Orks responded with raw mass and refusal, swinging through wounds that would have killed anything else, dragging enemies down simply by being heavier and angrier.

A Purestrain severed an arm.

The Ork who had lost it used it to beat the genestealer to death.

An Ork was disemboweled and kept fighting, biting a genestealer's shoulder until a second set of claws finally opened his throat.

The broodmind howled in savage focus.

The Waaagh!!! roared in ecstatic fury.

The tunnels rang with it—screams, roars, tearing metal, grinding bone. Direction stopped meaning anything. Up, down, front, rear—everything smeared into the same violent geometry.

Just bodies colliding in the dark, the walls painted fresh with every heartbeat.

Neither side gave ground.

Neither side knew how.

And somewhere deeper in the hive, something vast and ancient stirred—aware that the feral noise was buying time.

Time, paid for in blood.

---

The Patriarch stirred.

It felt the ghost long before it should have been possible—felt it as a tightening in the broodmind, a narrowing vector of approach that cut straight through layered defenses with impossible speed. The thing was coming fast. Far too fast.

Guard lines collapsed in its wake; they weren't broken so much as ignored, slipped past like scenery.

Its children knew the ghost was coming. They felt it in the shared consciousness, positioned themselves with practiced precision, kill-nets snapping shut a heartbeat too late as the intruder slipped through gaps that should not have existed.

It struck, vanished, struck again, each impact followed by empty air.

The Patriarch tasted the aftermath through its brood: shattered bones, ruptured organs, crushed limbs. Pain flared and subsided. Minds reeled. Bodies fell.

But so few went dark, and even then, those were from its other children.

The ghost slid through them, leaving injury and disarray behind like turbulence in water, but it didn't kill. It didn't harvest. It only stopped.

That was wrong.

Humans killed.

Humans panicked.

Humans burned everything they touched in terror or rage. Even the clever ones culled, thinned, ended threats when given the chance.

This one did not.

The Patriarch's certainty wavered, a deep and ancient instinct finally stirred by unease. The ghost was not fleeing now. Its trajectory was focused, intent sharpened to a blade edge.

It was coming for it.

The Patriarch drew its massive form upright within its sanctum, muscles coiling beneath pallid flesh, psychic pressure swelling outward as it prepared to meet the impossible intruder, its psychic call summoning its children to its side.

Whatever walked its tunnels was not prey.

Not yet.

And not like any human that had ever come before.

---

The chamber opened around Koron like a cathedral grown rather than built. Two hundred meters across, a hundred high, threaded with machinery like rusted intestines.

Organic arches of stone and chitin fused overhead, ribbed and wet with condensation. Veins of bioluminescent growth pulsed along the walls, painting everything in sickly violet and bone-white. The air clung to him, humid and metallic with musk and blood.

The Patriarch waited at the center.

It stood atop a throne of fused wreckage and calcified flesh, immense in its stillness. Four arms spread. Sword length claws flexed.

Sixty Purestrains uncurled from shadows and alcoves, pale bodies dropping low, talons rasping stone as they formed a living guardrail around their lord, leaving a small open space at the center, ringed by the forest of metal.

This was the moment.

The Patriarch stared.

It expected something. A flinch. A psychic scream. A ritual. A challenge.

Koron gave it nothing.

He looked at the towering alien god, at the coiled Purestrains, at the slick floor, at the kill geometry already snapping into place.

Sasha highlighted the door on the far side of the room through a forest of machinery, gangways and support beams half-swallowed by organic growth and layered secretion.

Koron saw the problem immediately. It was entombed under a tumor of chitin and flesh, fused shut by a living siege-foam. Seconds to clear. Maybe more. And if the mechanisms inside had seized, seconds became a death sentence.

'You could shear through it.' she said, sensors locked on the genestealers.

'And then they'd have a clean hole to follow me through.' He replied, metal fingers flexing.

'Better them in a tight space than swarmed over and eaten?'

He shrugged. 'Blind jump into it?' Koron asked, eyes never leaving the ring of claws.

Sasha's projected lips pinched tight. 'Not with these schematics. The maps are off by up to twenty meters. Imperial architecture doesn't make small mistakes. I wouldn't risk a blink on bad data.'

Koron's gaze flicked up to the rat's nest of pipes, ducts, and dripping filth webbed across the ceiling. 'Anything up there we can scrape into?'

'Yes,' Sasha said. 'But nothing those claws won't shred in seconds. That door is blast-sealed. Straight shot up to the surface. Best option.'

Koron nodded once. Barely a twitch. 'Alright. Ready?'

'No,' Sasha replied. Then, softer: 'Do it anyway.'

A heartbeat before he moved, Koron felt it. The faintest vibration in the earth above. Dust shifted. Grit and metal particulates sprinkled down over the Patriarch's pallid crown. Under it all, a distant drumming began to bleed into the chamber, too low to be sound and too steady to be coincidence.

He didn't have time to make it a problem.

He had to survive these monsters first.

Koron broke left and back, away from the ring, into the forest of pipes, machines, and wet stone.

Not toward the door. He chose the line that looked wrong, because the line that looked right was where sixty bodies were already waiting with razored talons and gleaming teeth.

The Patriarch lunged.

The chamber erupted into motion behind it, Purestrains pouring forward in a tidal rush of clicking talons and chittering chitin, tongues lolling, saliva spattering stone. Koron didn't look back. He didn't have to. His sensors painted the chase in clean numbers and cruel angles.

Distance.

Closing rate.

Teeth.

His boots hit the slick floor and bit for traction. He took a corner hard enough that his shoulder skimmed wet stone. Condensation burst under his palm as he shoved off, using the wall as a runner's block.

The Patriarch's steps hit the ground like a dropped engine, every footfall punching vibration up through Koron's legs, a thought flicking across his mind at the sensation.

Nothing that size should move that fast.

He cut around a thick metal support pillar, four feet of reinforced steel, corroded but stubborn, a relic that had held up this ceiling for centuries, one of many that lined the chamber.

The Purestrains flowed around it.

The Patriarch didn't bother.

It hit the pillar and went through. Steel tore with a shriek. Rivets snapped like bones. The massive alien roared, and Koron's helm dampened the bellow automatically as shrapnel sparked across the floor behind him.

He ran harder.

Broken grating. Jagged flooring. Slime-slick patches that wanted his feet to go out from under him. He didn't hesitate. He didn't pick his way. He took the line he'd already chosen, stepping on the only solid points like the world was a schematic only he could read.

'Genestealer speed calculation complete,' Sasha whispered. 'They're fast. They won't reach you for another twenty yards. Blink vector ready on your mark.'

Koron counted three long strides.

He spun mid-step, moving before the turn finished, eyes cutting past the charging monsters to the sealed hatch beyond them.

The thin promise of escape.

Space folded.

Koron dove into it.

---

Above, on the broken lip of Megaborealis, Sergeant Erden stared across the canyon and tried, very carefully, not to swear.

The chasm split the hive like a wound torn open by a careless god. Seven kilometers of empty air yawned between the far edges, its depths lost in haze and drifting debris. Broken gantries and collapsed roadways jutted out over nothing, twisted and useless. There were no bridges or spans—only a gap that mocked the idea of crossing.

On the far side, the Orks had built scaffolding out of rubble and wreckage. A crooked ladder-city clung to the canyon wall. It climbed the canyon side, where the gretchin tried to climb after their brutish masters.

Altani tilted his helm, auspex sweeping the void again. "Seven kilometers," he said at last. "Confirmed."

"How the hell did they get down there so fast?" Qulan added.

Erden exhaled slowly. "My guess would be they just drove off the edge."

Altani snorted. "Crazy bastards."

They fell silent, watching dust drift lazily upward from the abyss as distant gunfire echoed from somewhere far below. The Orks had charged straight through their forward camp hours ago, howling and laughing as they went.

Tactics never arrived. Speed did.

Along with violence and enthusiasm.

And now they were on the other side of an impossible gap.

"They didn't slow," Erden said. "Didn't bunch up. Didn't hesitate."

"Orks don't do hesitation." Qulan replied.

"They do when gravity gets a vote," Erden said.

Altani was about to respond when the auspex screamed.

All three warriors turned as one.

The storm above split open—not with lightning, but with impact.

Something red punched down through the clouds trailing fire, wings snapping wide an instant before it struck. The ground detonated, shockwaves rippling outward as stone and ferrocrete were pulverized beneath the impact.

The thing rose from the crater.

Scarlet skin, stretched tight over corded muscle.

Brass and bronze fused to flesh.

Wings vast and furious, beating against the air like they wanted to tear the sky apart.

It roared, a sound that scraped across the soul rather than the ears, and drove both massive fists into the ground.

The earth gave way.

Stone screamed as it was ripped aside, bedrock torn free like loose soil. The creature began to dig—rending, clawing, hurling shattered rock aside with animal fury, carving a straight, violent path downward toward the underhive.

Erden felt his hearts stutter.

"…No." Altani breathed.

Qulan went still, his helmed gaze slightly turning towards Erden. "Sergeant?"

Erden nodded once, slowly. His voice, when it came, was flat. Certain. All of them knew the stories, had seen what the pict-recorders had captured.

"Angron."

The name sat in the air like a death sentence.

The Red Angel plunged deeper, wings folding tight as it vanished into the earth, every movement driven by incandescent rage. The canyon echoed with the sound of breaking stone, a thunderous, relentless descent.

Erden opened a vox-channel, boosting it to the max he could, eyes never leaving the rising plume of dust.

"All units. Priority alert. Primarch-level threat confirmed." He swallowed, trying to get around the sudden dryness at the back of his throat.

"Angron is here. He is burrowing toward the underhive."

A pause.

"If you hear something tearing its way up from below—"

The ground shuddered again.

"—Make him bleed before you die."

The storm swallowed the rest of his words as the planet itself began to scream.

---

Koron came out of the blink already moving.

He hit the far side of the chamber without losing stride, boots biting slick stone as he snapped to a stop at the blast-sealed door.

It bulged out of the wall, Imperial adamantine half-buried beneath glistening alien mucus and fibrous growth. Veins pulsed sluggishly through it, clinging, sealing, claiming.

Behind him, Purestrains shrieked.

Koron didn't waste a second turning to look.

He lifted both hands.

The gravimetric shear bloomed with a thin, near-invisible ripple, like air deciding it hated itself.

No flash. No heat. No drama.

The growth simply… stopped being one thing.

Mucus, chitin, sinew. The moment the shear touched it, it lost its relationship with itself. Bonds severed with clinical indifference. The layer sloughed away in wet, obscene sheets, collapsing to the floor in twitching piles as the ancient adamantine beneath was laid bare.

He hit the activation switch, which the hatch answered with an old, offended groan. Seals began to disengage. Teeth ground. Something deep inside the door remembered it was built to outlive empires.

The Purestrains closed.

Talons screeched across stone, furrowing it, throwing sparks. The air churned with their breath and spit. Koron kept his eyes on the hatch, on the widening seam, on the mechanical delay that felt like a timing cycle designed by sadists.

Then the ceiling in the center of the room ceased to exist.

A thunderous detonation turned stone, chitin, and centuries of careful construction into a spray of ruin as something crimson and furious punched through from above. The impact cratered the chamber. Shockwaves slammed into Koron's back like a giant hand, slamming him into the door, flinging Purestrains like broken dolls.

Angron landed in the Patriarch's lair.

Red skin stretched over corded muscle. Black brass fused to flesh. Wings snapped wide, shedding debris as he straightened to his full, impossible height.

He roared.

The sound didn't choose a target.

It condemned the whole room.

The Purestrains faltered mid-lunge, their perfect swarm timing shredding into chaos. Some stumbled. Some turned. Some froze as if the thread pulling them had been cut.

Angron attacked without hesitation.

He seized the nearest Purestrain in one massive hand and squeezed. Blood and organs erupted from its mouth in a choking fountain. Another launched itself at his throat. Angron caught it mid-leap, bit its head off, and spat the skull through a knot of its kin hard enough to splinter bodies.

Claws raked his armor. He laughed.

The Patriarch struck, four arms lashing out with killing intent, its bulk surging forward like a storm given bones.

Angron hit it like a meteor.

Stone exploded. Flesh ruptured. The ancient creature was driven back, throne shattering beneath it as Angron piled in with fists and teeth and the kind of hatred that didn't need strategy. Purestrains swarmed him, carving chunks from him, only to be crushed, torn apart, or grabbed by the limbs and used to beat other Purestrains into paste.

Koron didn't stay to watch.

The hatch blew open with a concussive bark of pressure and metal. Koron dove through the gap as the chamber behind him dissolved into screams, collapsing coordination, and the wet percussion of something that had never learned restraint being handed permission.

The door slammed shut behind him.

'Is it tracking me?' he asked, hands trembling even as he hauled himself up the escape ladder. The access tube ran straight up from the sanctum wall, a service artery meant for men, not gods.

Sasha had no words of comfort to offer.

For half a heartbeat, even through meters of adamantine, Angron's roars chased Koron up the tunnel.

It wasn't the frothing roar of something mindless. It had a shape to it, a low, rolling rumble that turned the ladder rungs into tuning forks under his hands and made the air press against his ribs. The sound carried through the bones of the hive like a joke being told by a god.

Koron climbed, desperate to outrun the battle.

Half throwing himself upward, boots and palms touching each rung only long enough to steal momentum. His gauntlets squealed against wet metal. The tunnel stank of condensation, mold, and old blood, a stew his filters could blunt but not erase.

He made it twenty feet before the wall under him split with a sound like a ship hull tearing. Ferrocrete spiderwebbed, plaster and grit bursting loose in a hail that peppered his armor. The tunnel shuddered as if the entire structure had flinched.

Another blow spread the cracks.

Koron was slammed sideways into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him. For a fraction of a second the pressure spiked, intimate and crushing as his plates tried to compensate.

A shadow moved in the breach below.

Clawed fingernails came through the shaft walls first. Too big. Nothing human about them.

Angron's fingers had closed around the tunnel's width.

And pulled.

The ladder jolted. The whole tunnel lurched like a lever being wrenched free. Koron's body pitched, his grip screaming as the rungs tried to tear out from under him. The structure groaned, rebar snapping somewhere close enough that he felt it in his teeth.

Angron ripped the entire escape tube out of the wall in one violent motion.

It came free as a single, brutal piece of hive anatomy, metal and ferrocrete and conduit, still intact enough to remain a weapon.

Koron had just enough time to register the absurdity of it. The tunnel—his exit—was now in Angron's fist.

The tube whipped through the air, a club the size of a bridge-span.

Centrifugal force slammed into Koron's limbs and spine. His stomach tried to climb into his throat. His fingers lost friction, lost meaning, lost the argument with physics.

The tube's open mouth yawned above him, back into the Patriarch's cathedral as he was flung out of the tunnel like a stone from a sling.

For a blink he was weightless, tumbling, the chamber below him blurring into mucous sheen and chitin ridges and the pale flash of moving bodies.

His suit screamed warnings. Stabilizers fired. His vision stuttered.

Koron reacted on instinct.

His wrist snapped out. The grapple line barked from his forearm and shot across the chamber towards the nearest pillar.

The magnetic disc bit into the edge of the nearest pillar, only to slide off the organic growth.

Drill spikes deployed and burrowed into the meat, hooking where the disc had failed. The line went taut and yanked him sideways so hard his shoulder joints filed for divorce.

He swung in a wide arc, boots skimming the wall, and the sudden change in direction nearly tore his arms out of their sockets. Dust slapped into his visor in gray sheets. He clenched his jaw until it hurt and rode the momentum, letting it slingshot him away from the wall.

Behind him, the tunnel hit home on the Patriarch's right side.

Metal and stone met chitin and muscle with a wet, catastrophic crunch. The Patriarch's brood exploded outward, Purestrains flung aside like scraps of paper in a gale. One of them cartwheeled across the chamber and came apart when it hit the wall. Blood sprayed in a fan. Chitin fragments clicked and bounced like thrown knives.

The Patriarch itself took the blow along its side, not slain, but moved—shoved by impossible mass, staggered, a beast struck by a falling building.

Angron didn't stop to admire the damage.

He held the torn tunnel in his fist like it weighed nothing and laughed, low and delighted, as if the hive had finally offered him a toy worth playing with.

Koron rolled to a stop and came up into a crouch, lungs burning, one hand still hooked around the returning grapple line as it reeled back into his forearm with a ratcheting whine. Dust clung to his visor in greasy sheets, turning the chamber into a smear of gray and motion.

He looked up through it.

The Patriarch was still there.

Crouched low amid the wreckage, one spinal fin chipped, plates cracked along its side where the tunnel had struck. It should have been a corpse. Instead it was a coiled spring made of hatred, its alien features pulled tight with fury that felt almost… personal. Around it, its children shifted and hissed, Purestrains pressing close in a protective ring, their attention split between their wounded monarch and the towering intruder who had dared to turn their sanctum into a playground.

Angron's laughter rolled across the chamber.

It was the sound of broken bones settling and rusted metal grinding under weight. It vibrated in the floor, in Koron's teeth, in the mucus-strung walls as if the hive itself was being mocked.

Angron reached to his left hip and drew the long blade free with one hand.

The weapon caught the weak light and returned it as a deep, hungry red. The air around it seemed to tighten. Moisture beaded and trembled on the walls. Koron's suit registered a spike it didn't have a neat label for.

Angron drove the blade up into the roof.

The impact rang like a struck bell. The chamber shuddered.

Scarlet energy spiderwebbed outward from the point of contact, branching cracks of light that raced into the torn hole he'd carved down into this place. Wherever those lines touched, the hive didn't simply fracture. It unmade. Ferrocrete softened into ash. Rebar blackened and flaked away. The Warp devoured matter with the indifferent appetite of fire.

The breach above began to collapse.

Chunks fell inward, trailing dust. The ceiling folded in on itself like a mouth closing. Seconds later the opening Angron had burrowed through was gone, sealed behind a ragged scar of scorched stone and twisted metal.

Koron stared, eyes wide, throat dry.

He hadn't expected intellect.

They widened further when Angron casually tossed the blade aside.

It clattered to the floor and skidded through gore and rubble to rest near the room's edge, its red shimmer fading as if it had never been there.

Angron unbuckled his belt, letting the massive chainaxe on it fall like dead weight. Metal hit stone with a heavy, ugly clang. The sound echoed in the sanctum like a verdict.

Then Angron curled his fingers.

Flexed them once, slow, testing tendons like a man warming up before a bout.

He raised his hands.

Open-palmed. Loose. Almost relaxed.

The fanged maw split as his lips peeled back into a smile that held no mercy.

It wasn't a berserker's grin.

It was the smile of someone who'd just decided this was going to be fun.