The first day of fighting passed quickly.
The Nordics left the ground strewn with wreckage and had seized only roughly two kilometers of ground.
And that was only because the Adeptus Custodes had chosen a flexible defense.
If they had held firm, Bonar thought the Nordics might not have taken a single trench.
But the casualties were far too heavy.
The bodies of mortal soldiers had literally filled the open ground.
Remains and tissue lay scattered everywhere, mixed into the dirt, bloated, shapeless, like fat earthworms churned up from the soil.
Bonar didn’t know if they could hold for the next two days.
The artillery to the south hadn’t stopped since last night, and pillars of light kept flaring up to illuminate half the sky.
CLANG,
The Sisters of Silence beside him immediately raised their weapons and rushed forward.
Bonar got to his feet and saw,
A small girl, standing there trembling, a dirty toy dog clutched in her left hand, a metal shard in her right.
Her legs wouldn’t stop shaking.
A mother came running over in a panic from nearby, stumbled, and fell.
“My lord — I’m sorry, I’m sorry, we were only passing through, we didn’t mean to disturb you, please forgive us,” the mother said in a frantic rush, unable to stop trembling even with gun muzzles leveled at her in the dark.
Bonar walked over.
“Lower your weapons.”
The Sisters exchanged a glance.
Two of them stepped forward, searched the pair thoroughly, and nodded.
“Thank you, thank you, I — we’ll leave right away,” the mother said, grabbing the little girl’s hand and turning to go.
“Stop.”
They froze, staring at Bonar in terror.
Bonar looked at the little girl, her face caked with grime, and at the mother beside her, gaunt to the bone, arms no thicker than dry branches.
The fear in both pairs of eyes was impossible to hide.
It made sense.
The warlords who had ruled this place before had treated the people under them little differently from tools.
Tools: useful ones you work to death, broken ones you throw away.
Bonar took his own rations and gave them over.
Nothing more than a few coarse starch cakes.
But out here, the same amount could hire a gang of able men to kill for coin.
“Eat well.”
He gently stroked the little girl’s head.
The little girl’s face was blank with confusion.
The mother pulled the child down and knelt.
Bonar said nothing more.
He turned and walked away.
He didn’t know how to face them.
“Our rations are still plenty, aren’t they?”
The Sister of Silence at his side nodded.
First-day combat losses had already hit 40%.
Rations and ammunition were, for now, genuinely not in short supply.
“Share some with those refugees.”
Bonar looked toward the distant, half-visible outline of the town, and walked back with heavy steps.
These past days, the only thing keeping him going was his own will.
Every extra hour they held here was another ten thousand people who could escape the battlefield.
…
The second day,
Bonar watched the pale light slowly spill across the horizon and rubbed his eyes.
His head felt foggy.
The gunfire hadn’t stopped all night.
The Nordics had kept launching night operations almost without pause.
The Nordics’ night-fighting was decent enough, against ordinary mortal Imperial troops alone the line might well have broken, but they were nowhere close to the Astartes’ level.
Bonar had watched it himself.
The Astartes split into several teams.
One team deliberately opened fire to expose themselves.
The other two flanked and charged in, and just started cutting those fighters apart.
Bonar hadn’t been idle either.
He had just finished adjusting the ammunition allocation, halving the heavy munitions supply for regular mortal troops, Heavy Bolters included, and pushing the freed-up rounds to the Astartes and Thunder Warriors.
Then, without any warning, a blazing sun appeared in the sky.
The light it unleashed was blinding, a great sharpened sword cleaving straight through the dark, turning the earth bright as noon in a single instant.
When that searing white light came down, it came like a storm, leaving no time to react.
In the blink of an eye the radiance detonated across the defensive line, a roaring flood surging outward in all directions with nothing to stop it.
The mortal soldiers caught in that blaze had no chance to cover their eyes.
The light drove into their eyeballs like ten thousand needles at once.
But they weren’t given long to suffer.
The high-pressure incendiary shockwave flattened them into the ground an instant later, reducing them to pools of blood.
Bonar’s position was far back.
He was still hurled out of the trench.
He rolled across the ground more than ten times before stopping, ears ringing in waves.
He dragged himself up.
Everything was spinning.
In the distance, a massive shape emerged slowly against the sun.
It looked as though someone had crammed three enormous cannon barrels into the top of a city block, then jammed six skyscrapers in as legs, grotesque, absurd, impossible.
A city of steel.
Advancing at a slow and measured pace.
The heat radiating from those colossal cannon barrels distorted the air around them until even the sun looked flattened and wrong.
A cold rush swept through Bonar from head to foot.
That thing was not a Reaper.
It was a War Fortress.
The mortal soldiers broke.
They threw down their weapons without a second thought, screaming, scrambling out of the line and fleeing.
It wasn’t that they lacked courage.
It was simply that against something of that magnitude, they were helpless.
The cannon muzzle flared again.
Light descended from the clouds.
The last defensive line they had held at such cost ceased to exist in any physical sense.
Bonar watched the Adeptus Custodes get blown off their feet.
They had already broken into a sprint after the first shot, trying to scatter and survive.
Boltgun flashes flickered across the forward positions, but bio-constructs mixed in with masses of ordinary soldiers came surging forward and smothered those noble warriors under sheer weight of bodies.
Bonar sat on the ground.
Helpless.
His head buzzing.
They had bought only one day.
He had failed his father.
He had failed the Imperium.
Then Bonar saw the War Fortress’s cannon muzzle tilt upward.
He shook from head to toe and turned to look at the town behind him.
No.
No no no no.
He scrambled up and ran.
Full sprint, toward the town.
“Move!
Run!” he screamed.
With a blinding flash, the town was gone.
The shockwave caught Bonar mid-stride and sent him flying.
He tumbled like a stone hurled by a giant.
Like garbage, rolling.
Bonar went still.
Something fell and struck him in the face.
He picked it up in a daze and looked at it.
A toy stuffed dog, burned to black char.
Heh.
Heh.
Ha ha ha.
Humanity.
Why does it always love this so much.
War.
Why does it love slaughtering its own kind?
Bonar didn’t understand.
But,
If he killed them all.
There shouldn’t be anyone left to die.
Right.
Malak came running over from nearby, shouting something Bonar couldn’t make out.
Bonar didn’t care.
He only wanted those people dead.
Malak stared in shock as Bonar stood up and walked toward the War Fortress, blank-faced, hollow, like a dead man still moving.
Malak tried to rush after him.
A tremendous crushing pressure shoved Malak to the ground.
It was over.
Malak looked around desperately for the Sisters of Silence, but they were nowhere to be found.
Right now, more than anything, Malak needed them to still be alive.
“Bonar!
Calm down!
Listen to me!
—” Malak screamed everything he had.
Bonar walked forward like someone whose soul had already left.
He could hear them, ten thousand wronged souls wailing in his ears, the passing of countless lives playing out before him in flashes, one after another.
Every soul.
Their memories from childhood, moment by moment, spread open before him.
All their joys and sorrows and laughter and fury, felt one by one.
Those departed souls, innocent civilians and brave soldiers alike, their despair, their bitter unwillingness, their rage in the moment of death all came surging like a river, crashing against him without mercy.
Their shared cry echoed between heaven and earth.
VENGEANCE!
Vengeance,
VENGEANCE!
…
To the south,
The Emperor of Mankind suddenly stopped.
In the midst of everyone’s astonished gaze, a golden bolt of lightning flashed and shot northward.
Far behind, in the rear, Malcador the Sigillite closed his book and looked quietly into the distance.
“Is this fate?”
He reached to write something down.
Then he set the pen aside.
➤ Next: Psychic Storm