"Futile struggles."
"You place such faith in the False Emperor, yet when has he ever granted you salvation?"
The leading Emperor's Children Legionary raised a warped, twisted sword that shimmered with an unnatural, eerie light. Its tip pointed directly at Victor, whose movements had grown sluggish from sheer exhaustion.
Under normal circumstances, an Astartes could fight continuously for days. However, that did not mean they could sustain unbroken, high-intensity combat without respite.
It had been more than half a day since Victor had planet-dropped with two tactical squads. As a tactical unit, their objective was explicit: locate the warp gate and destroy the daemonic conduit. Yet the sheer volume of daemons flooding the area made any tactical maneuvering impossible. Had they not been bogged down by the endless horde, they would never have been ensnared by the Emperor's Children.
Victor no longer paid any mind to the provocations of the traitors, remaining silent as he continuously swung his weapon. The sparse clashing of blades and the sputtering roar of bolt fire in his audio-bead were grim indicators that only a handful of his twenty-man detachment remained alive.
An incurrence of this magnitude made Victor suspect that the entire population of the planet had already been butchered in a mass living sacrifice. He felt a fleeting pang of regret; if he managed to return alive from this mission, he would suggest to the Chapter Master that they follow the example of other Chapters and equip some squads with jump packs. It might not strictly align with their Chapter's traditions, but perhaps it would allow them to better execute their duties.
Thoughts flashed through his mind like lightning as Victor surveyed his surroundings.
At his side was Lucas, who bore the melta bombs. The arm that once held his combat blade was entirely gone, but with his sole remaining hand, he gripped a heavy bolt pistol, determinedly unleashing the Emperor's wrath upon the foe.
A few meters away, two other brothers were swinging power swords whose disruptive fields had already failed, their power armor marred by a network of deep gashes. The wounds inflicted by the Slaaneshi blades, infused with the corrupting power of Chaos, nullified the legendary healing factors of the Astartes' demi-god physiology. Blood flowed in ceaseless torrents from the breaches in their power armor. Even the agonizing pain, which would normally be suppressed by a cascade of combat stimulants, was amplified by these cursed lacerations.
Blood and agony pleased the Dark Prince; torment and sadism were the very nature of Slaanesh's power.
The daemons' mocking laughter rang out, piercing and abhorrent. Some of the fiends lashed their mutated tongues, tasting the blood of the loyalists coating their blades in an act of supreme profanation. Nearby, the Emperor's Children stood watch, eager to spectate the final annihilation of these lackeys of the False Emperor.
Steeling his resolve, Victor swung his two-handed power sword once more. The disruption field had died long ago in the meat grinder of combat, and the blade's edge was now heavily notched like a saw, yet it refused to shatter. Paradoxically, while the damage required far more exertion for every strike, the jagged edge tore through flesh with a brutal, tearing lethality.
With a mighty cleave that severed the heads of several surrounding Slaaneshi daemons, Victor raised his ruined greatsword high.
"The Emperor guides my blade!"
"In the name of Holy Blood and Iron! For the Emperor!"
The severe exertion of the prolonged battle and the blood loss from his unhealing wounds caused Victor's consciousness to waver. Only a single voice rose to answer his battle cry.
Lucas, who followed closely behind, had fully depleted his bolt pistol ammunition. Holding a combat blade in his lone hand, he pressed his back against Victor's, fighting fiercely to cover his squad leader's blind spot.
Slightly further away, the other two battle-brothers who had been fighting moments before finally collapsed. Slumped back-to-back against each other, their bodies were scored with countless slender lacerations from which arterial blood sprayed in violent arcs. The daemons roared with heightened ecstasy as the crimson deluge splattered across their grotesque faces.
Twenty men, now reduced to just the two of them.
The daemonic horde continued to converge like an unstoppable tide, while the traitors of the Emperor's Children waited in the distance, lingering to watch them be torn to shreds.
"Lucas, prime your melta bomb. I will carve a path with everything I have left. My brother, make those damned traitors repent in the Emperor's fires!"
"Understood... brother," Lucas gasped, his voice coming through the vox-bead as a heavy, ragged wheeze.
Compared to Victor, a veteran sergeant, Lucas's combat experience was still somewhat green, and his physical stamina had deteriorated far more rapidly than that of the veteran who had been swinging a greatsword at the vanguard.
"To fight by your side, Brother... has been my honor. For the glory of the Emperor!"
As Victor suddenly surged forward, accelerating into a charge, Lucas dropped his combat knife and ran in his wake. His remaining hand punched the arming code into the melta bomb at his waist, slamming his thumb onto the crimson ignition rune.
A string of runes began to flash rapidly across the bomb's narrow display panel.
20 seconds.
The explosive yield of a melta bomb was catastrophic. Twenty seconds was the minimum safety delay, a standard feature designed to allow mortal auxiliary troops to escape the blast radius. Now, however, it felt agonizingly slow to Lucas.
WREEEEE—
BOOM!
A piercing screech cut through the air, followed by a brilliant streak of light. A colossal detonation erupted, accompanied by a blinding flash.
"Orbital bombardment?!" Victor froze in stark disbelief.
The ground-level vox-channels were choked with severe daemonic interference. Though they had successfully located the warp gate, they had been entirely unable to transmit their coordinates.
A deafening roar rushed toward them, and the resulting shockwave tore across the battlefield, the terrifying atmospheric backdraft nearly knocking both Space Marines off their feet. Further ahead, closer to the warp gate, the Emperor's Children traitors and the surrounding daemons were violently thrown to the dirt by the buckling earth.
Looking at the scattered ranks of daemons and traitors, Victor grabbed Lucas before the younger marine could lose his footing.
"Throw it!"
Seeing that Lucas was still momentarily dazed, Victor brought his armored boot down, crushing the skull of a crawling Slaaneshi daemon into paste. He ripped the primed melta bomb from Lucas's belt and hurled it toward the struggling Emperor's Children traitors who were attempting to stand.
BOOM!
A distance of barely a hundred meters was nothing to an Imperial demi-god; hurling a device weighing over a dozen kilograms was effortless. A small, searing mushroom cloud erupted into the sky.
More than a dozen Emperor's Children at the epicenter of the blast were instantly vaporized by the localized melta reaction. The few survivors were hurled across the fractured stone, grievously wounded.
Victor did not waste a single second checking the casualty count of the blast. He swung his notched two-handed sword once more, hacking apart several Slaaneshi daemons that shrieked as they lunged forward, reducing them to mangled viscera.
SNAP!
The overtaxed power sword finally pushed past its breaking point and shattered. The broken half of the blade spun through the air, pinning a daemon to the crumbling remnants of a structural wall.
Victor looked down at the ruined hilt in his hand, and a grim smile touched his lips.
"We shall all fight until our final breath for the Emperor."
He turned back to face the closing ranks of Slaaneshi daemons, letting loose a defiant roar that echoed across the ruined plaza.
"Taste the Emperor's fury, daemon filth!"
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