Zehaka took a grim tally of his losses.
The Imperial garrison had managed to inflict considerable casualties on the Primal Zerg, primarily among the Primal Hydralisks. Despite their increased size and terrifying damage output, the Hydralisks' evolution hadn't solved their inherent fragility; they remained glass cannons in the face of sustained heavy ordnance.
"Defense remains the Swarm's greatest hurdle," the Overmind mused.
He felt a rare moment of helplessness. Abathur had already reinforced the Swarm's carapaces using a blend of the Tiamat Hive Fleet's energy-resistant plating and the Swarm's own chitin-tech. However, the yields of Imperial macro-shells were simply ridiculous. In the galaxy of Warhammer, if a gun was big enough, physics usually took a back seat to sheer destruction.
Yet, in terms of offensive power, the Swarm now completely overwhelmed the local defenders. Against Zehaka, the Imperium's tank armor was practically decorative. Unless a unit was equipped with a specialized shield generator, they couldn't hope to survive a direct blow. And as every veteran knows: Void Shields are useless in a melee.
"Zehaka, push forward!"
"Yes, My Sovereign."
You might be wondering about the Sisters of Battle and the Storm Trooper commandos who launched that daring boarding action on the rear of the train.
To put it bluntly: they were gone.
Only one Battle Sister remained "alive," preserved by the infected's parasitic stinger. The rest had either been consumed by the pack or turned into shambling vectors of the Hyper-evolutionary Virus, wandering the gore-stained interior of the railcars.
Rewind 30 minutes to the moment before Zehaka breached the gate.
While the Primal Igniters were suppressing the wall turrets, the Imperial strike team had just fought through the Hydralisk ambush. They expected more monsters. Instead, they were met by their own kind.
Or rather, what used to be their own kind.
"What are those things?" a Storm Trooper hissed, raising his lasgun.
"Mutants! Open fire!"
The Infected were no longer human. Shambling forward with hollow eyes, these former PDF soldiers opened fire on the Commandos with rusted autoguns and scavenged las-rifles. The Storm Troopers dove for cover, but two were caught in the initial volley. One fell dead; the other, his leg shattered, crawled toward the enemy lines and detonated a final thermobaric bomb.
The explosion tore a hole in the floor of the car, sending limbs flying. But as the smoke cleared, the survivors saw a massive, bloated shadow looming in the corner.
An Infested Terran Specialist—twice the size of a normal man—had been shepherding the horde from the bottom nest. As one wave of cannon-fodder was vaporized, he simply "birthed" another batch of parasites and viruses into the corpses around him to keep the pressure on.
Then came the Volatile Infected. These wretches moved with a rhythmic, limping gait, their bellies and shoulders glowing with a sickly green bioluminescence. A Battle Sister, recently catching up to the front line, spotted one and fired.
PANG!
Like a pressurized gas cylinder exploding, the infected detonated. The blast showered the area in jagged bone fragments and caustic fluids. A Storm Trooper was struck in the visor by a shard and killed instantly.
"Watch out! They're walking bombs!"
While the commandos focused on the "boomers," more agile threats emerged. These infected didn't shamble; they sprinted on all fours, some skittering across the ceiling like insects to drop into the middle of the Imperial formation.
The Storm Troopers and Sisters of Battle were elite, and for a moment, their discipline held. They picked off the climbers with precise shots. Had this been a simple physical fight, they might have won.
But the Zerg don't just fight the body; they fight the mind.
One Infested specialist scanned the column, its lidless eyes settling on a Sister of Battle at the very rear. She had made a fatal error: in the heat of the boarding action, she hadn't properly sealed her helmet.
Even a daughter of the Emperor, possessed of iron willpower, could not ignore the microscopic invasion of the Zerg virus. Under the specialist's psychic "care," she began to hallucinate. Her teammates looked like flayed heretics; the shadows became grasping claws.
She pulled the trigger.
In the close quarters of the railcar, no one expected a bolt-round from behind. A second Sister fell, her backplate shattered.
"Sister Anjieli! What are you doing?!" the Dialogus officer screamed.
Anjieli didn't answer. She continued to fire wildly into her own ranks. Before the officer could execute her for heretical madness, another Sister next to him also turned her weapon on the group. The infection, carried by the spores they had inhaled hours ago, was finally reaching its zenith.
"When were they infected?!"
"The landing... the spores..."
Actually, the virus wasn't fast. Compared to Tyranid toxins that kill in seconds, the Zerg strain—taking hours to gestate—was considered "slow." But it was thorough. The victims retained their combat muscle memory and enough intelligence to use their weapons.
Chaos erupted. With everyone wearing sealed helmets, it became impossible to tell who was still loyal and who was a puppet of the Hive.
The Swarm sensed the moment of maximum weakness. Ravasaurs—the "Dreadnought-sized" evolved Zerglings—smashed through the interior bulkheads. They didn't need cover. They simply trampled the Imperial position.
The railcar became a slaughterhouse. Even the Storm Troopers' desperate jetpack maneuvers and melta-bombs couldn't stem the tide. The Ravasaurs were too numerous, and the Infected were already among them.
The Sisters of Battle fared even worse. Their Superior had been subdued, a pulsing, tube-like parasitic stinger inserted directly into her spine through her neck-seal. Controlled like a macabre marionette, she began to cut down her own "daughters" with 100% of her augmented combat power.
Unless the God-Emperor himself intervened, there was no escape.
But the Emperor remained silent. Within minutes, the boarding party was extinguished, their biomass already being repurposed for the Swarm's next evolution.