The Hammer of War, Chapter 59

Name: Amir Azad
Title: War-Summoner
War Points: 0
STR – 88(300)
DEX – 80(300)
VIT – 202(300)
—

The air tasted like hot iron.

The [Khornate Dungeon] opened under my feet without preamble: a plain of packed dirt slick with blood, cut by rivers of fire that hissed and popped as they chewed through channels of blackened stone. The sky overhead was a flat, washed-out white—no sun, no clouds, just a blank lid—and everywhere I looked I saw bones. Skulls piled in drifts. Ribcages stuck upright like crude fences. Spines laid in crooked lines that suggested roads trod by things that didn’t care what they walked on.

In the distance, a citadel squatted on a low rise. Brutal, thick walls. Square towers like clenched knuckles. It looked like a place that existed for one purpose: to hold something very strong that wanted very badly to leave. The boss would be there. Of course it would.

The ground trembled. A red tide rolled over the nearest ridge and poured into the basin below me.

[Bloodletters]. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Red-skinned, horned, grinning too wide, each dragging a long cleaver that left a smoking groove in the dirt. Intermixed with them were [Flesh Hounds], all muscle and bone and slavering mouths, running low and fast and eager. Behind them thundered [Juggernauts], brass-armored beasts with blunt heads and piston legs, the ground cracking beneath each step.

They saw me. They screamed. They charged.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

Two hundred thousand [Hormagaunts] answered my call like a dropped stone answers gravity. The plain behind me filled in a breath—claws, carapace, and the high chitter of a species that knew only forward. Ranks deep and then deeper, an ocean of six-limbed hunger bristling with scythe-blades. They did not hesitate. I did not need to tell them how to hate.

“Everything,” I added aloud. “All of you. Go.”

The heavy hitters flickered into place around me in a storm of pale light.

My [Custodian Guard] loomed to my right, gold armor blazing even under that colorless sky. He inclined his helmet a fraction, guardian spear balanced with casual certainty. To my left, the [Baneblade] howled alive as its engines spooled, massive tracks biting into the dirt. Turrets swung, hatches locked, the main gun settled with a promise. The three [Carnifexes] arrived scattered across the line, tails smashing the ground in irritable sweeps; the [Exocrene] slumped behind them, already boiling acid in its living artillery. My two evolved Ork [Nobz] bellowed and started running before their boots fully solidified, the wordless challenge rolling out of them like a shock. Five [Carcharodons Astartes] clicked into place next, gray armor dull, movements precise, chainblades idling at a hungry purr. A full squad of [Cadian Stormtroopers] slotted in at the Baneblade’s skirts, rifles up, optics blinking. A pair of [Drukhari Incubi] stood absolutely still because of course they did. And the [Culexus Assassin] just was, and every daemon within fifty meters twitched; even the air seemed to think twice about existing near him.

I let my [Blank] off the chain.

Pressure rolled out from me in a steady, widening ring. The world didn’t dim, exactly, but color gave ground. The warp-stink on the incoming horde curled, thinned, and tore. The front ranks stumbled. The [Flesh Hounds] snarled, confused by a scent they couldn’t track. The [Juggernauts] didn’t slow, but hairline cracks crawled and popped in the brass plates that cased their flesh.

“WAAAGH!” one Nob roared, delighted. The other didn’t bother with words; he laughed and swung his cleaver in a circle that cut a [Bloodletter] in half as the first lines met.

Two hundred thousand Hormagaunts hit at once.

The sound turned into a single thing—impact stretched into a wall of noise. Daemons vanished under a tidal cut of chitin and claw. Bloodletters tried to raise their blades and found no space for a backswing. Flesh Hounds leapt and were taken out of the air by six blades each. Juggernauts trampled, and died. It wasn’t clean. It never was. It worked.

I climbed the howdah of my Squiggoth—the beast was as colossal as ever, leathery hide cabled with scar and metal plates riveted wherever a plate would fit. The howdah’s rails were plated steel, pitted and blackened from use in places like this. The Squiggoth rumbled forward with the slow certainty of a moving hill.

I pulled the [Exitus Rifle] from my [Inventory], seated it on the howdah’s front brace, and settled behind the scope. The reticle found a [Bloodletter] captain snarling orders, horns curled back like hooks. I cycled a [Hellfire Round], exhaled, and squeezed.

The daemon’s head ceased to exist. The round detonated inside the chest behind it for good measure, punched out the back, and kept going.

Another target, another squeeze. A [Flesh Hound] collapsed mid-leap and skidded into the Hormagaunts that were already carving its pack apart. A Juggernaut took a round in the mouth; its head blew through its own neck plates like a cork. The [Baneblade] spoke to my right, the main gun belching a slab of pressure that shoved the air against my teeth. A dozen Bloodletters went down in a line that looked like a god had drawn it with a ruler.

“Left sponson, rip that pack,” I called in reflex. The Baneblade’s commander answered with the curt click of acknowledgment, and the heavy bolters to the left lit the charge into confetti. The Stormtroopers picked off stragglers with tight three-round bursts, their discipline impossible to miss even in this mess.

The [Custodian Guard] advanced like a slow avalanche. Where he walked, Bloodletters died. It was that simple. His spear blurred, and every blur removed a head, then a torso, then an entire enemy. Nothing got to his flank. The air just didn’t agree with the idea.

I put another Hellfire round through a Bloodletter that had managed to find space to swing. Head. Chest. Knee. Reload. The rifle’s recoil came back smooth, heavy, steady—good engineering buried under all the myth. I didn’t stop. The [Exocrene] hunkered and lobbed a glob of incandescent acid into a Juggernaut knot; the detonation painted everything under it in steaming green and left only smoking brass and a pit. A Carnifex plowed into a fresh patch of Bloodletters and kept going, its claws working like a machine, its carapace already packed with blades that had tried to cut it and failed.

The Hormagaunt tide kept moving. My [Blank] kept chewing holes in the warp. The daemons hated it, hated me; I could feel it in the way their eyes tracked, the way every line tried to crook toward me even when logic said go for the softer underbelly of my horde. They didn’t make it. Too much meat between us. Too many blades.

A Flesh Hound pack broke through the first gaunt line and sprinted for the Squiggoth. I had shots ready and took them head to chest, chest to hindquarter, then head again. The pack folded. One got close enough to try a jump. It hit the Squiggoth’s tusk mid-arc and turned into two pieces that kept trying to find each other as they fell.

“More left,” I said, habit again, not because anyone needed the reminder. The Baneblade’s coaxial lascannon stitched a red seam through three hounds and a Bloodletter that happened to be in the wrong place, then walked the line into a Juggernaut’s eye.

The [Carcharodons] moved like they’d been born in a battle exactly like this. Silent. Efficient. They waded in chest-deep and started carving with chainblades and short, brutal strikes. A Bloodletter cut in, blade raised high, and the nearest Astartes sheared its arm at the elbow, palmed its snout, and drove a knife through its eye in the same motion. No flourish. No pause.

The Nobz laughed and collected trophies even as they killed, because that was what they were. They ripped a Juggernaut’s brass plate off with two hands and wore it over one shoulder like a proud idiot and then smashed another daemonic skull with it as if it were a club. They were effective. That was all I asked.

The [Culexus Assassin] drifted in the middle distance, and I saw Death look up and remember a face. Bloodletters near him slowed, then shook, then fell as if someone had unplugged them. The warp recoiled around him; my [Blank] met his null in a cold bloom between us and everything horrible went thin and weak and very tired.

Ammo counters ticked. I swapped magazines blind, the Exitus never leaving the brace. My wings—[The Wings of Sanguinius]—wanted to move, but I kept them cold and hidden. No need. They’d bring too much focus in a place like this. One thing at a time.

A Juggernaut hit the Squiggoth’s foreleg. The impact sounded like a truck wrecking itself against a mountain. The Squiggoth swung its head and gored the thing up to its chest; plates crumpled, bones snapped, and the Juggernaut slid off the tusk in two parts that didn’t agree on direction. The beast rumbled. I patted the howdah’s railing and fed the weapon again.

Rage had a way of making things predictable. These creatures didn’t feint. They didn’t probe. They wanted direct violence, and they got it. That suited the Baneblade. It suited the Custodian. It suited my swarm best of all.

I stitched another row of headshots across a line of Bloodletters trying to organize around a banner. The banner bearer lasted long enough to lift his standard, then spun away without a head, the cloth wrapping his corpse like it was shy. Two Hormagaunts went up the pole like spiders and tore it down anyway. The Exocrene threw a shot at the base of the standard for spite and turned that patch of ground to soup.

Something screeched overhead. I tracked it and found a brass fly that wasn’t a fly—it carried a rider with a chain in one hand and a butcher’s axe in the other. A [Skull Cannon] shuddered across the far ridge and began vomiting shells that looked like they had teeth. It didn’t matter that much. The Baneblade cranked ninety degrees and took the first shot out of the air with the main cannon. The second shell landed short, dug a trench of meat through a clot of Bloodletters—and absolutely nobody I cared about—and the third shell never left the barrel because my Custodian put a shot from the spear’s bolter into the cannon’s mouth and the whole machine buckled and burned.

“Good,” I murmured, then refocused and kept shooting.

Bodies stacked. The ground turned from dirt to something worse. The rivers of fire ate whatever flowed into them. The Hormagaunts didn’t care. They died, and they died, and they died, and the rest climbed over them and bit deeper. That was their job. That was why I had two hundred thousand of them.

A small part of me kept count of losses. Another watched angles. Another kept my [Blank] steady so I didn’t overload the front ranks and strip my own tide of momentum. Multitasking felt easy with the [Custodian Augmentations] purring under my skin. My bones didn’t creak. My breath stayed steady. My arms kept the rifle exactly where I wanted it without thought.

Still, a thought stuck.

I didn’t have a dedicated melee weapon. Not really. The [Exitus Pistol] would serve in a pinch up close, the [Tau Rail Rifle] was too much gun in a crowd, and anything else I owned was either an enemy’s spine or a gun-shaped solution. I had fists, of course, and they were very good, but there was value in steel you could swing and forget.

“Note to self,” I said, adjusting for wind that didn’t exist. “Fix that.”

The Custodian reached the heaviest part of the press and stopped pretending he could be surrounded. He began carving a wedge one precise thrust at a time. The Carcharodons slid into the space at his back and made sure nothing remained standing long enough to be a problem. The Nobz tried to keep up and failed, but loudly.

I put a round through a Bloodletter’s teeth as it screamed in my direction. I put another through a Flesh Hound’s spine as it tried to shoulder past a knot of Hormagaunts. The Baneblade put a solid slug through a Juggernaut that made a sound like a bell being struck underground.

The wave broke and reformed. Then it broke again.

I waited for the boss to show itself early, some bad-tempered lieutenant that wanted to impress the thing inside the citadel. Nothing. Just more bodies. Fine.

“Push,” I said. The Squiggoth answered me with motion. The big beast raised a foot and flattened three Bloodletters that hadn’t recognized the shadow until it was too late. The howdah swayed. I braced. The rifle barked twice more and two more daemons died respecting the process. My [Blank] throttled up a notch and a ripple traveled through the front lines as a whole section forgot why they held their blades and stood still just long enough to die.

The Stormtroopers stepped to a new position along the Baneblade’s right side like they’d choreographed it yesterday and hadn’t slept since. A Carnifex bled from twenty cuts that smoked where warp metal had bit, then tore a Juggernaut’s head off and threw it into a crowd without looking.

The Culexus walked through a cluster of Bloodletters that tried to pretend they were a wall. They moved like they’d hit water they couldn’t see, then collapsed, blades falling from nerveless hands. The Incubi shadowed the fringes and lanced in where leaders tried to form. Heads came off. Nobody heard them coming because there was too much noise already.

I kept shooting until the magazine spread at my elbow was down to three. I glanced left and hesitated for half a second.

Something bigger than the rest barreled along the far flank, a Juggernaut pulling a chariot that wasn’t a chariot—more a block of spiked iron dragged fast enough to burn a groove in the dirt. A Herald rode it, or close enough: taller, redder, blade longer than made sense, horns like scythes. It looked at me like it knew the upright shape I wore and wanted to bend it.

“Not yet,” I told it, and put a round through the Juggernaut’s knee. Brass exploded outward. The beast crashed and slid, flipped, crushed its rider under half a ton of its own personal religion, and vanished under Hormagaunts like a carcass in piranhas.

“Later,” I said, and finished the magazine.

We advanced. The citadel didn’t look any closer, but I could feel the pull of it on my teeth. The field between was clearing. Our dead made the ground soft and uneven. Theirs made the ground mean. The rivers of fire hissed as the tide shoved against them and redirected around. The white sky stayed white. The heat tried to rise and I told my body to ignore it. It did.

A Bloodletter climbed the Squiggoth’s flank and snarled at me. I didn’t bother to shoot it. The Hormagaunt that had gotten there before it lanced up under its chin and peeled its head backward, then kept going. The daemon’s cleaver fell, edge-first, and stuck in the howdah’s railing with a thunk.

I looked at the blade. I looked at the fight.

I stood, slung the [Exitus Rifle], and jumped.

The fall was easy. I hit the ground hard enough to throw chunks of it backward, rolled once, and came up next to the corpse that had dropped the cleaver.

Up close, a Bloodletter’s sword looked worse than it did through a scope. The metal had a grain to it like wood, but the lines moved—subtle, curling along the edge when I wasn’t looking straight at them. The heat it gave off wasn’t fire. It was something like breath. My [Blank] pushed against that breath. The heat backed off. The blade looked smaller in my hand than it had a moment before.

I wrapped my fingers around the hilt and lifted. It balanced wrong, a fraction toward the tip, eager to pull. I could work with that.

Something screamed and came at me from my left. I turned and cut. The sword went through horn, cheekbone, neck, and kept going. The Bloodletter fell in two pieces that smoked and didn’t bleed much. The blade hummed in my grip, happy I’d let it do what it wanted to do.

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’re hired.”

The next daemon didn’t wait. It lunged with its cleaver held low and sideways, aiming for my gut. I stepped on the flat of its blade mid-swing, felt metal give, and took its head. The corpse kept going another two steps before it remembered to fall. I gave the sword a short test cut and turned a third Bloodletter’s wrist into two half-wrists that didn’t hold anything, then put the tip through the throat, and pivoted. The press became clear in a ten-foot circle around me, just enough room to breathe, just enough room to move. More came to fill it, because that was who they were.

I swung again.

The blade pulled at me, always forward, always through. It wanted to bite deeper and for once I didn’t argue. My bones didn’t complain. My muscles didn’t stutter. I had enough STR to bend a car and enough DEX to put the tip of the sword exactly where I wanted without thinking about it.

I cut low to sever a Flesh Hound’s forelegs. It skidded past me, teeth snapping at air, and Hormagaunts finished it. I took a Juggernaut’s driver’s ankle and let two hundred thousand points of leverage pull the beast sideways and into a pit of dead that had become slick. It crashed, and I stepped along the angle of its fall and took the head off a Bloodletter that had been using it for elevation.

“Come on,” I said, to them or to the sword or to myself. I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. The line pushed. I pushed. My [Blank] ate warp and spat out nothing. The [Custodian Guard] carved a path like he was cutting shapes out of red paper. The [Carcharodons] kept pace, and the Nobz thundered forward behind me, their laughter raw.

A Bloodletter tried to parry me. I let it. The swords met. Sparks jumped. Mine didn’t care and kept going. The daemon’s blade split. The arm behind it went numb. My follow-through took the shoulder, and the cut stopped at the sternum because there was nothing left to resist.

I turned and met a Flesh Hound’s jaws with the flat of the blade, shoved its head down with my left hand, and brought my knee up into the back of its skull until bone collapsed. I stepped past its twitch and cut a captain off at the waist because it had been polite enough to raise its sword high.

“Lord Amir!” one of the Carcharodons called, voice flat through his vox. “Left.”

I didn’t look. I trusted the word, stepped right, and slashed. The sword met a Bloodletter that had come in for my kidneys. It lost interest in kidneys. I nodded to the Astartes without glancing. He didn’t waste time acknowledging it.

The Baneblade rumbled up behind us. Its hull crushed a pile of bodies into a level that counted as stable. It stopped firing long enough for the turrets to tick hot gas, then resumed. The Stormtroopers ghosted around it and kept anything with horns from climbing the tracks. They were efficient like my heart.

I let my [Wings of Sanguinius] flare a handspan—just enough to flick gore from my coat and keep my balance on a turn that would have slid me into a dead Flesh Hound—and then shut them down again. Not here. Not now. The blade in my hand was enough.

I sidestepped a Juggernaut’s charge that had somehow made it this far, took the rider’s knee, then his elbow, then his head, all on the same line, and kept walking. My boots slid once on something that made a squelch I didn’t want to identify. I adjusted and kept cutting.

If these things had souls, I’d have been eating well. They didn’t. 

The press eased a fraction. The Hormagaunts were still engaged, still dying in numbers that would give an accountant a seizure, but the churn in front of me thinned. The citadel finally looked closer. The boss inside it breathed the way a storm does when it thinks nobody is listening. I heard it.

I tightened my grip on the Bloodletter’s sword, lifted it into guard again, and moved forward into the gap.