And the battle on the city streets entered a new phase.
The Diwuzu Astartes served as the vanguard and hammer, tasked with smashing the main clusters of corpse-mutants and the most troublesome foes.
The Auxiliary Army acted like a shield and a comb, consolidating positions, clearing remnants, and, most critically, protecting and evacuating unarmed innocents.
The golden imperial dragon crest flickered amid the smoke, bringing a glimmer of order to the dying city.
However, the corpse-mutant waterfall pouring from the blood moons continued, more threats were closing in, and the fighting on the ground was far from over…
…
What the Diwuzu displayed on the surface streets was a complete, overwhelming purge.
They were like red-hot brands plunged into a filthy tide; wherever they passed, the waves of corpse-mutants howled, broke, and vanished.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The roar of bolters was the main melody of the battlefield.
Each bolt round flew with destructive kinetic force and an internal charge.
Against corpse-mutants that retained a humanoid shape, it could blast their upper bodies into flying chunks of gore in an instant, foul blood and ichor splattering ruined walls and pavement.
Against limb-twisted, deformed, reinforced variants, it easily tore open their tough outer hide, broke their load-bearing bones, and reduced them to heaps of helpless rot.
Muzzle flames lit the Astartes' expressionless helms—cold and efficient.
The overloaded hum of plasma cannons was like the sigh of Death.
Ghost-blue plasma orbs trailed air-warping tails into the densest packs of corpse-mutants; the next instant came a blinding flash and a deafening blast.
Superheated plasma expanded in a heartbeat, vaporizing or melting every organic form within range, metal included, leaving only glassy, blackened craters and an air thick with scorched stench.
Swarms of lesser corpse-mutants were simply erased by that annihilating energy, with no chance to convert anything new.
Vrrr—kzzz—skrrch!!
The chainsword's bellow was the coda of close combat.
When corpse-mutants broke through the fire net, the Astartes drew those terrifying melee weapons.
Their high-speed teeth ripped the air with tooth-aching shrieks. Tough tendrils, mutated bone blades, twisted trunks—under the powered bite of the chain edge, all parted like butter under a hot knife, then were churned to mince.
Flesh flew and bone chips sprayed. Every swing of a chainsword cleared a brief vacuum in the onrushing tide.
In this bloody tableau, there were the occasional touches of human warmth.
In the ruins of a large supermarket, shelves had collapsed, goods lay scattered, mixed with congealed blood.
A ragged father clutched his young daughter, curled behind a broken checkout counter.
The girl trembled uncontrollably with fear. The father kept a hand over her mouth, terrified that even a sound might draw the wandering, inhumanly howling monsters outside.
But their hiding spot was imperfect. A few keen-nosed corpse-mutants seemed to catch the scent of the living. Dragging broken bodies, they crashed aside obstacles with snarls and staggered toward the corner where the pair hid.
Despair filled the father's eyes. He pushed his daughter behind him and raised a metal pipe scavenged from a shelf in a futile guard.
Just as a bone blade was about to touch them—
Boom!
A section of the supermarket wall blew inward under a massive impact.
Through the flying rubble, a steel giant stormed in like a descending god—it was a Diwuzu Astartes tactical squad sergeant.
He didn't even use a firearm. A Titan-armor-clad giant hand flashed out, clamping the nearest corpse-mutant's neck with precision. A slight squeeze, and brittle vertebrae and rotten flesh shattered in an instant, the head bursting like a rotten melon.
The others rushed him with snarls.
The weapon in his other hand roared—
Vrrr—skreee—splutch—!
It was not a standard chainsword, but a more archaic, weighty chain greatsword shaped like an ancient two-handed Han heavy sword.
Teeth along the blade whirled rabidly, raising a heart-thudding roar.
He swung with concise, domineering motion.
One horizontal cut, and the three charging corpse-mutants went down like harvested wheat, bisected at the waist, foul blood and viscera splashing the floor.
He reversed the next swing and cleaved a bat-like corpse-mutant dropping from a side shelf clean in two.
In mere seconds, the threats in the supermarket were gone.
The sergeant turned. The cold gaze of his helm swept the shaken father and daughter. He said nothing, just indicated with the tip of his sword a relatively safe direction outside.
Then he turned again, his bulk filling the breach. The chain greatsword whirled, and the corpse-mutants converging from outside were carved down like melons, steel and death forging a brief safe corridor for the pair.
Soon, a squad of Imperial Auxiliary soldiers in standard powered suits hustled into the supermarket along the path the sergeant had cleared.
"Come with us! Now!"
The squad leader's tone was urgent but steady.
They helped the near-collapsed father to his feet, scooped up the terrified little girl, formed a protective wedge, and quickly, orderly evacuated them from the danger zone to a rear staging evacuation point.
When the father looked back, the giant still stood in the breach, a back as unshakable as a mountain in the smoke and fire.
From high above, the war painting of the city was grander and more complex.
The entire city had sunk into fierce close combat.
The Diwuzu Astartes, each like a moving fortress and firepoint, advanced steadily through the corpse tide, leaving gore-drenched paths in their wake.
Auxiliary units spread around them like roots, raising lines, clearing streets, pulling clusters of survivors from ruins and dead ends, and feeding them into evacuation flows.
EDF rank-and-file—paralyzed by command collapse and leadership chaos—gradually steadied after witnessing the Diwuzu's power and the auxiliaries' effective rescue work.
Many had joined up to defend home and country.
Now, their home was being devoured by monsters, their compatriots slaughtered, and powerful outsiders were fighting to save them. It awakened whatever conscience and duty remained deep within.
Though the upper echelon was rotten, most of these rankers still held a moral bottom line.
They began organizing themselves, leveraging their familiarity with the terrain, and firing what weapons they had—assault rifles, machine guns, even rocket launchers—at the corpse-mutants.
They helped the auxiliaries emplace barricades, marked evacuation routes, and even risked death rushing into corners the Diwuzu fire couldn't reach to rescue trapped civilians.
Their firepower had limited effect against corpse-mutants, but the rekindled will to fight and protect the populace injected a slight yet precious strength into this desperate defense.
The ground battle remained chaotic. Corpse-mutant numbers seemed inexhaustible. The waterfall from the blood moons replenished losses. The fight became a grinding slog.
Yet no matter how the tide surged, it could not budge the Diwuzu line in the slightest.
The reason was simple: absolute disparity in power.
More than fifteen thousand Diwuzu Astartes deployed to the surface with the fleet.
That is a force sufficient to subjugate an entire star system hosting a powerful xeno civilization or a gathering of heresy and chaos.
Now that strength shielded a single planet against enemies who relied mainly on numbers and terror. Individually, they were brittle before the Astartes. The outcome was foregone from the start.
The Astartes line was a rockbound coast; the tide could crash forever and not move it, while the enemy was "evaporated" at a steady rate.
Meanwhile, the fight in near-Earth space had gone white-hot.
The Diwuzu fleet and the massive blood moon host were locked in a brutal exchange.
Energy lances—whips of divine judgment—lashed the blood moons' titanic bodies again and again, cutting deep enough to bare "bone"… if that twisted matter could be called bone.
Macro-cannon barrages—metallic storms—kept shaving and stripping the moons' outer layers.
Plasma cannons and hard-light batteries occasionally loosed silent fury that ripped smaller blood moons to shreds in an instant, scattering them into star-grit.
The blood moons were hardly passive. Corrosive energy jets, gravity-warp traps, and summoned physical tendrils put the Diwuzu fleet through trials of their own.
At times, an escort or even a cruiser lost shields under concentrated fire, suffered hull breaches, or went up with the drives in martyrdom.
Debris from both sides drifted through the battlespace, silently telling the battle's ferocity.
But with superb kit, excellent tactical coordination, and the shelter of that faint golden psionic barrier, the Diwuzu fleet steadily seized the upper hand.
At considerable cost, nearly half the blood moons had been pulverized and erased by the Empire's ferocious guns, becoming a band of fragments circling Earth.
The remaining half were still huge and dangerous, but the suffocating pressure they had exerted was torn open by the Imperial fleet's iron and fire.
The balance of victory tipped slowly and firmly toward the Human Empire.
As the battles on the ground and in low orbit reached a boil, the flagship Renwei Yonggu itself became a new focus.
Atop its massive hull, a flat area designed for special operations saw thick external armor plates slide back under hydraulic force, revealing an airtight inner gate.
The gate opened in silence. A giant figure, clad in a bespoke, resplendent, and deeply intimidating panoply, strode out into a section directly exposed to the vacuum.
This was Sui Meng, the genetic Primarch, helm sealed, only the severe outline of his oculars visible.
He stood upon the hull, a vast war-fortress underfoot, a boundless—yet profaned—starfield before him.
From his vantage, though the Diwuzu fleet had destroyed nearly half the blood moons, the remaining scarlet bodies still numbered shockingly many. Their vast, twisted silhouettes filled every view, greedy sharks circling the Earth of Dead Space and his fleet, trying to consume and digest them by the sheer weight of numbers.
Flashes blooming in the distance marked Diwuzu losses under the blood moons' frenzied lash-backs—shields overloading, hulls ripped, engines dying in fire—and even across the vacuum, the tragedy seemed to thrum on the skin.
A fleet—especially a newly-formed legion fleet—cannot avoid losses when ambushed by enemies on this unanticipated scale.
Yet to Sui Meng, these losses were not without value.
His legion—his children—were showing iron will and exceptional growth in this sudden, hell-grade trial.
Far from collapsing, they fought harder, paving a stair of foes' wreckage to climb higher.
This baptism of blood and fire was granting the young legion priceless combat experience beyond any simulation's worth.
More importantly, the blood moon invasion and attendant corpse-mutant catastrophe laid bare the Earth Federation's impotence and rot, while the Diwuzu fleet and ground forces' determined resistance and rescue shone like a lighthouse in the dark, showing a different possibility to the frightened, helpless humans on this world—
to live under the protection of a powerful, orderly Empire.
This greatly accelerated the Diwuzu Legion's consolidation of the human civilization of Dead Space.
In a flicker of thought, Sui Meng's gaze sharpened under the helm. The decision was made.
He could not sit and watch fleet and ground forces take needless losses. He would break the deadlock himself and smite these star-profane xeno constructs with thunder.
His right hand gripped his personal power war-spear—majestic and murderous—shaped like an ancient Huaxia guandao.
In the next heartbeat, a mutation erupted—
Centered on Sui Meng, pure, surging psionic force—seemingly springing from the well of life itself—boiled into being.
Dazzling golden radiance burst from every seam of his armor, rendering him in an instant a giant bathed in holy flame.
The light was not blinding, but carried a "warm," awe-stirring majesty, like the first glow of a newborn star.
Then, under an ineffable might, Sui Meng's body began an impossible "expansion."
It was not mere magnification, but a temporary elevation of life's tier—a reconstitution of matter and energy under an exalted authority.
Bone stretched and strengthened under psionic tempering. Muscle fiber swelled and multiplied like coiling dragons. His bespoke power armor extended and reshaped in sync, as if alive, adapting to the rapidly growing grandeur of his frame.
In the span of a few breaths, the already giant Sui Meng broke past physical limits, climbing to a more majestic scale—
One hundred meters…
One thousand…
At last, a ten-thousand-meter colossus stood over the Renwei Yonggu, its shadow briefly cloaking vast swaths of the hull.
Sui Meng's image had transformed utterly.
His cloak had become roiling golden psionic flame, snapping behind him like a mythic solar disc.
His faceplate took on a more severe, solemn aspect—planes hewn like with axe and chisel—his eyes like twin miniature stars, radiating a divine pressure none dared meet.
His pauldrons thrust outward, forming savage guards like a dragon's talons, tips gleaming cold, as if they could rend stars with ease.
Golden psionic tracery flowed over him, weaving profound, potent Han-script runes. Each pulse of energy set the nearby space to a subtle tremor.
He stood there no longer merely a mighty genetic Primarch, but like a war-and-guardianship god out of ancient legend, bearing supreme authority and power, descending upon a ravaged starfield.
Clearly, this was not only the expression of the Primarch's own nature. It also came from his mother, the war goddess Athena—an Olympian chief-god-level Colossus-Form technique.
An ancient spell that temporarily synchronizes oneself with a concept or vast energy, becoming a battlefield-swaying incarnation.
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