Challenger-class Assault Ship, Angry Crow Takes Flight.
It seized upon the Swarm's brief frenzy of confusion, cutting through the Zerg's all-encompassing blockade like a dagger thrust straight into the heart—toward the Primal Queen of Blades, Sarah Kerrigan's Leviathan.
In a torrent of fire, it executed a textbook orbital hairpin maneuver, slamming nearly ten kilometers of fortress-plated steel against the Leviathan's abdomen.
A soundless collision.
The sheer force rippled through the vast organic mass. Folds and waves coursed across its flesh; bloated cysts swelled upon its hide, spreading from ruptures across its body.
The living warship howled—its fleshy ridges glowing, tendrils writhing in agony.
One by one, the cysts burst under pressure, spraying pale-yellow pus and disgorging parasites and grubs—Zerg units of every size—into the void.
Clinging tight to its target, Angry Crow Takes Flight displayed its nature: rough, massive, unyielding, scorching. It ignored spore cannons, autocannons, plasma, corrosive bile, and suicidal Banelings raining upon it.
Like an oversized boarding torpedo, its portside gun arrays—still entwined with tendrils and mucus—emerged with grinding mechanical groans, pressing directly into the Leviathan's torn carapace of chitin and tissue.
The next moment, molten torrents roared forth, kaleidoscopic brilliance scorching the twisted void around them.
Slow the scene by hundreds of times, and one would see clearly: the weapons arrays, designed for boarding and point-blank duels, unfurled their armored housings. The macro-cannon barrels extended, fitted with monomolecular serrated tips, and drove deep into the Leviathan's flesh.
Like a colossal meat grinder, the whirring blades shredded gene-forged armor and organic mass dozens of meters thick. From the cavities burst scorching jets of molten fury—fiery brilliance lighting all.
With a seething hisssss, like water brought to boil, Zerg caught within the beams evaporated in seconds.
The Leviathan's inner chambers—where swarms had waited, ready to crawl through its tendril-hallways to board the Imperial vessel—were instantly scoured clean. A flood of Zerg boiled away like butter melting on a hot pan.
In the Imperial Navy's arsenal, melta weapons were rare. Beyond melta shells, torpedoes, and rockets, few such arms graced warships.
The reason was simple: range too short, speed too slow. Meltaguns were weapons of infantry and atmospheric craft.
Unlike their cousin, the plasma weapon—with its speed, range, and versatility—meltas lacked competitiveness when weighed against size, firepower, endurance, and consumption.
Yet the Empire's auxiliaries and vassal troops, even the mighty Astartes, reveled in their meltaguns.
Administratum clerks, Arbites, and tax enforcers all adored them too, calling them the perfect tools for "office work"—be it suppression, law enforcement, or tax collection.
In urban warfare, a melta pistol's effective range might be under a kilometer, yet that was enough. Scale it larger—to Titans, with multi-barreled melta cannons—and with a squeeze of the trigger, wildfires stretched kilometers, even tens of kilometers.
But in the endless void of space, where warships battled across horizons, such range was… a drop in the ocean.
Fitting a warship's broadsides with compressed melta batteries was unheard of—save for a few Forge experimentals or the eccentric whims of private refits.
...
The stench of charred flesh mixed with cloying organic fumes.
A massive breach yawned in the Leviathan's abdomen, its tissues scorched to lifeless ash. The sealed psionic network of its inner cavities was torn open, now exposed naked to the void's radiation.
The kilometers-long depression resembled towering cliffs and a barren valley—a perfect landing ground.
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
The tremors reverberated through power armor, announcing their departure from the boarding deck.
A thunderous march of heavy boots struck the blackened, hardened "ground." The heat had baked the Leviathan's inner flesh dry, its walls rigid as iron. To the ear, it sounded like steel plating beneath their feet.
POP! POP!
Even before the teleportation beams fully faded, storm bolters barked. Half-charred, dying Zerglings collapsed, heads burst in sprays of ichor.
WHRRMMM!
A Zerg Queen, freshly hatched from its egg sac, was pierced through by a blazing beam, its body slumping lifeless back into the membranous clutch.
CRACK!
Another Hydralisk reared from the shadows—instantly shot through the skull.
Like a wall advancing, the giants in purple-gold plate pressed forward without glance, stepping past shattered corpses. Vigilant, spreading their formation, the Black Templars boarding Terminators filed inward.
The first ranks—bulwark squads—brandished storm shields and storm bolters. To their flanks, spearhead squads carried thunder hammers, lightning claws, and power blades. From the rear, destroyer squads emerged from the beams with assault cannons, autocannons, and other heavy arms.
Eyes cold, movements disciplined, steps resounding.
Even before the melta's residual heat had faded, the purge had begun. Every maneuver second nature, every motion precise, they expanded their perimeter in flawless coordination.
Where the Black Templars Terminators marched, only pulp fused with flesh-walls remained.
Soon, the landing zone widened step by step. As the beams ceased, all three thousand Terminators now filled the vast, blackened chamber.
"Captain."
"Spit!"
At the fore, with the mangled carcasses of Ultralisks sprawled across the passage, Hak Foo spat, a growl rumbling from his throat.
Beneath his magnetic steel boots, a mutated Hydralisk—its genes reforged for resilience—was slammed to the floor with a single backhand. Its spine shattered, its jagged crest flattened.
"Truly a stubborn breed…"
By all rights, such wounds should have killed any primate. Yet the beast still lived. One eye burst, the other glowed crimson, glaring hatred at Hak Foo's scarred face. Its jaws twitched faintly.
SZZZT!
"Tch! A sneak attack? Broodmother… watching from the shadows, are you? Don't fret. Soon, we'll meet face-to-face."
Crunching the needle meant to pierce armor plate, Hak Foo seized the mutant's head. With a laugh, SHRRRK! he tore spine from skull, drenching himself in reeking gore. Then he flung it down, stamping until the head burst to pulp.
"Drag the Broodmother from her nest! Let the slaughter begin!"
"For Selene—!" ×3000
HISSSSSSS—!
As if in answer to the Black Templars' unified war cry, the surrounding passages erupted at once. Dozens of Mutalisks, remnants of the earlier swarm, screeched as BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—explosions tore through them, shrapnel scythes ripping flesh into showers of gore.
Ultralisks surged from every corridor, their roars shaking the chamber.
SZZZZT!
A Terminator of the Destroyer squads hefted his plasma blaster, firing past the storm-shield wall. KRAK! A blast punched clean through an Ultralisk's head. Its body, still carried by momentum, slid forward until stopped by the shield wall.
Then came the flood—Banelings, Zerglings, Roaches, a tide of lesser beasts spewing forth.
FWOOOSH!
From that flank, a giant in purple-gold armor raised his weapon. Twin meltaguns twinned into an assault cannon roared to life. With a distinctive hiss—the sound of water vaporizing in air—a fine red beam lanced out, then blossomed geometrically into a fan of annihilation, filling the corridor.
Firestorms consumed all organic matter in seconds. Roars turned to explosions as the tide melted into blackened husks and molten slag.
Melta weapons resembled flamers, but in truth they were utterly different.
The Sacred Selene Empire's melta arms drew upon special fuels distilled from Honkai Cubes, triggering subatomic reactions. That subatomic fury was then focused into coherent beams, wave-lances of inconceivable heat.
Shorter range, but devastating power—the closer the target, the greater the destruction.
Flamers, by contrast, simply spewed combustible liquids—dependent entirely on fuel type.
Put simply: one was far more advanced, demanding technology, precision crafting, rare fuels. The other was cheap, easy, common—any backwater colony could build one.
The Zerg counterattack was swift, ferocious. But the Terminators' line held immovable.
No matter how their claws gleamed, their fangs gnashed, their shells thickened, their numbers multiplied—the Zerg could not shatter that wall of purple-gold.
Under Captain Hak Foo's lead, the three thousand Terminators drove like an unstoppable spearhead, piercing line after line of Zerg. They wasted no time in entanglement, pushing inexorably toward the Leviathan's hive core.
Their mission was summed in one word: Exterminate!
Laser cannons, ion cannons, gauss fission guns. Multibarrel meltas, heavy blasters, heavy flamers. Demolition charges, tactical earthshakers, missile batteries, grav-cannons.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
This was the kind of lavish slaughter that would make any underfunded 40K chapter weep with envy.
It was the definition of muscle over mind, of wealth made war.
Forget tactical finesse—just charge into the broadest passage, the thickest tide of Zerg!
Not the style of the Black Templar Legion. Not even of the proud Leiva. No, this was pure Hak Foo.
World Eaters, Iron Warriors, Iron Hands alike would beg him to join their ranks.
RRRRRRRUMBLE! The Leviathan groaned, its chambers filled with oxygen and sound. Kerrigan, her claws raking hardened carapace walls, muttered:
"Abathur, it seems you'll need new gene sequences—for hardness, for heat resistance."
Through the Leviathan's psionic lattice, she sensed it clearly: this firepower was beyond comparison to Terran Marines. On every front.
"Evolution never ceases," Abathur's voice droned. "Observe entity. Extract potential. Study lineage. Adjust sequences. Distort essence. Dissect limbs. Recombine anew. Ever perfection. This is my duty."
From the shadows, a creature resembling a segmented worm slithered forth—its pale-violet body bristling with irregular limbs and bony wings. Its voice droned low and measured, as green, tumor-like orbs along its head and spine glowed faintly.
"Their weapons… contain gene sequences the Swarm requires for evolution. My Queen, whether or not they are Amon's servants, devour them. Harvest their essence. It will benefit the Swarm."
"Perhaps… we must alter our strategy, my Queen. That is my counsel."
Even as it spoke, the torn cavities of the Leviathan echoed with shrill howls. A thousand flashes ignited at once.
Kerrigan narrowed her eyes, violet pupils contracting sharply.
"Psionics—all of them?"
A thunderous crash followed, the air filled with the crackling thrum of pulsing energy. Kerrigan felt the Leviathan's agony. Within the interwoven psionic lattice, she saw violet-red flares. Their presence was all too familiar—like Amon.
"You've brought this upon yourselves!"
...
Elsewhere, in the Korhal system, on Korhal IV.
Once ablaze with prosperity, the Terran Dominion's capital now held nothing but screams and chaos.
"No wonder you handed me Korhal IV so easily. Turns out you've got something better in hand," muttered Jibril as she descended into the atmosphere, her voice tinged with irritation. Suddenly her assignment felt far less rewarding. She, too, longed to fight the Swarm—the head of a Broodmother would surely be worth more than these Terran skulls.
But she had given her word. And Jibril kept her word.
"Well, the false emperor's head should make a fine trophy, at least."
So she consoled herself, gazing upon the metropolis below—Augustgrad, seat of the Dominion's palace.
—
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