Today was going to be an unforgettable day for the Governor’s personal guard, because they were about to be the first to face down Kaides’ armored spearhead.
The Governor had only a handful of Leman Russ tanks, deployed at a few critical transport hubs.
Everywhere else along the line, the defense was pure infantry.
There had been a time when their own heavy guns gave them confidence, but ever since reports started coming back from the front, that confidence had steadily eroded.
The accounts from the survivors, in particular, were enough to make anyone’s blood run cold.
Sentries would be standing watch one moment, and the next the enemy had already closed in on the position without warning, followed immediately by an overwhelming barrage of shellfire.
The Governor’s guard were stunned to discover the mutants advanced right along the edge of their own blast radius, close enough that a single mistake could get them killed by their own side’s fire.
But the enemy’s shells landed with unnerving precision every time, striking their trenches dead-on, and the sheer volume and variety of ordnance coming down on them was staggering.
Standard high-explosive shells, pulse rounds, plasma rounds, even psychic shells, they had it all.
Every defensive position that had once seemed solid meant nothing against this kind of firepower, and the psychic shells were the worst of it: a single hit could shred the souls of every ordinary person inside its blast radius, leaving them alive but mindless.
The Governor’s guardsmen huddled in their trenches, dropping to their knees to pray, hoping the God-Emperor would spare them from meeting the enemy too soon.
“Your Majesty the God-Emperor!
Watch over your children as they stand against these shameless xenos and heretics!
Grant me the courage to face this terrible enemy!”
No such luck.
Whether the God-Emperor’s gaze ever actually turned their way, no one could say, but Kaides’ shells were coming their way regardless, and very much for real.
Guided by stealth drones deployed well in advance, the rebel artillery had already locked onto the enemy’s position long before the attack, and at a single command from their officer, countless self-propelled guns and truck-mounted artillery opened fire all at once.
Shells of every kind rained down on the trench network like a storm, the sheer kinetic force of each blast sending earth churning and crashing like waves.
Some of the weaker trenches collapsed outright, burying the soldiers hiding inside under a wall of dirt blown loose from the walls.
As the bombardment tapered off, a swarm of suicide drones moved out first, cheap, sturdy units switching on their optical camouflage and heading straight for whatever heavy guns remained behind enemy lines.
The Governor’s own artillery crews hadn’t even caught their breath from the last wave before more explosions went off right beside them, precision strikes this time, courtesy of the drones.
The drones targeted the heavy guns and their ammunition stores directly, and the resulting chain of secondary explosions swept the entire battery, killing gun crews and destroying weapons alike in one violent sweep.
Two strikes were all it took to gut the defenders.
With their heavy guns gone, the Governor’s guardsmen, cornered and desperate, found a sudden ferocious will to survive, snatching up whatever light weapons they had and charging out to counterattack the advancing armor.
“For the God-Emperor!
Kill the traitors!!”
Cornered as they were, the defenders’ morale surged all the same.
They leaned out of cover without a shred of fear for their own lives, shouting the God-Emperor’s name as they emptied every weapon they had left.
But no amount of morale mattered.
The moment Andrallo pulled the trigger, all the Governor’s guardsmen saw was a flicker of violet light, a single violet streak burned across their retinas in an instant too short to register.
BOOM!!!
An earth-shattering explosion tore through the trench network.
Centered on the point of impact, bunkers, defenders, even the ground itself were ripped apart by the sheer force and hurled outward in every direction.
Blue-violet psychic fire caught among the trenches, flattening an area the size of a basketball court in an instant.
Any soldier caught in the shockwave lost their mind entirely; their souls had already been shattered beyond repair the moment it hit.
Anyone who could have entered the Warp at that moment would have found, with some shock, that the corresponding patch of the Warp had been utterly obliterated, reduced to nothing but a churning knot of raw, formless energy.
But Andrallo wasn’t finished.
Just seconds later, another sphere of violet light flew out, and the Governor’s position took a second devastating hit.
Andrallo followed up with more than ten psychic charges in quick succession, until the enemy position went completely silent, with only scattered, sporadic fire left, and even that was quickly finished off by the stealth drones circling overhead.
By the time Andrallo reached the trenches himself, there wasn’t a single living soul left among the Governor’s guard.
Every defender there had either been torn apart by the blast or had their soul destroyed outright by the Warp-based attack.
Looking out over the cratered, torn-up ground, Andrallo couldn’t help himself.
“These people have tech and firepower this strong, and somehow they’re still fighting like it’s World War One?”
“World War One?” Over the comm, Maen and Charlotte sounded thoroughly unfamiliar with the term.
“There’s a war happening somewhere in this galaxy every second of every day.
What do you mean, ‘World War One’?”
“Huh?
Don’t you nobles study history?
World War One happened back before humanity ever left its homeworld, back when Terra was still just called Earth!”
The Westminster sisters were even more stunned by that.
They’d never expected Andrallo to know anything about events from so unimaginably far in the past.
“My lord, wouldn’t that be something like forty thousand years ago by now?”
Andrallo didn’t feel like arguing the point with them.
Kaides, for his part, found the whole thing baffling too.
By any reasonable standard, with technology like this you could field an entire robotic army without breaking a sweat.
Why would anyone still be throwing living bodies into the mud like this?
Digging trenches in itself wasn’t the problem, that was a legitimate tactic after all, but blanketing an entire position in nothing but trenches was taking it to an absurd extreme.
But just as everyone was clearing the battlefield, an air-defense alarm suddenly went off. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Andrallo glanced at the display on his arm and saw dozens of airborne targets closing in fast.
A few of the more experienced crew recognized it instantly as an incoming missile strike and immediately pulled their squadmates into cover.
“Interesting!
Chief, that’s enemy missiles.
Finally, something with a bit of substance behind it.
Still way too slow, though.”
Even as Kaides talked it through, his other hand was already flying across the display at a dizzying speed, and within moments the vehicle-mounted point-defense laser platforms behind everyone finished deploying.
The warning light flared, and the targets on the display winked out one after another almost instantly.
The entire threat was neutralized in a matter of seconds.
“Incredible.
I didn’t even see the lasers fire, and the targets are all gone already!”
Kaides puffed out his chest with pride.
His tone stayed modest, but there was no hiding the satisfaction in his eyes.
“If you can actually see a laser fire, that means energy’s scattering into the air, which cuts the weapon’s real power significantly.
Our point-defense system puts nearly all its energy straight onto the target, so of course you wouldn’t see anything from off to the side!”
The veteran crew who’d taken cover waited and waited, but the explosion they’d braced for never came.
Laughter rang out around them instead.
When they finally poked their heads out from cover, they found themselves surrounded by mutants, every twisted, strange face lit up with mockery and amusement.
It was a total loss of face for the crew.
Their faces went red as a monkey’s backside on the spot.
Furious and embarrassed in equal measure, and with no way to salvage the situation, the veterans could only slink off with their heads down.
Andrallo found the whole thing hilarious too, but with his helmet on, no one besides Kaides could see the grin he couldn’t hold back.
“Chief, the Governor’s palace is right ahead now.
What’s the plan?”
Andrallo looked out toward the distance, a sly grin tugging at his mouth.
“Let’s scout it out first.
I doubt the Governor’s shown us everything he’s got.
He’s got to be hiding something big.”
Just as Andrallo suspected, inside his family’s palace, the Governor, desperate to turn the tide of the war, was in the middle of performing a sacrifice.
A sacrifice that was destined, in the end, to serve someone else’s purpose entirely.