I Am Destruction!
13: Chapter 13 – I Am Purification!
I Am Destruction!
“For the Emperor!
For the Sacred Primordial Truth!” The battle barge Veteran of a Hundred Wars moved like a travelling mountain range of steel bristling with spikes and sacred reliefs, drawing brutishly close to its prey beneath the low, throaty roar of its Void Engine.
The alien warship’s hull was all fluid lines, shimmering with the strange iridescence of mother-of-pearl, and against the backdrop of the stars it resembled an elegant yet blasphemous work of art.
It was utterly at odds with the angular Gothic style of Imperial vessels, that aesthetic built to proclaim power and authority, and to the Word Bearers, its smooth curves were themselves a grotesque expression of an alien culture.
“For the brothers of our Ultramarines Legion!” “For those who sacrificed in our past, and for those who carry their legacy now!” “We bear the Emperor’s word!
We shall slay the Emperor’s enemies!” “Cleansing Flame, burn away all impurity!” The low, fanatical sermon of the Legion Chaplain echoed through the ship’s broadcast system, weaving together with the deafening chorus of macro-cannon fire into a symphony offered up to destruction.
Countless Point-Defense Turrets spat dense curtains of fire, forming a rain of death that tore apart any alien aircraft daring to approach, while simultaneously clearing a path for the true killing blow.
The ballistic trajectories wove a blazing net across the void; occasionally an enemy interceptor was struck and became a silent, brilliant fireball, its debris drifting through the frozen stars like ashes scattered at a ceremony.
“Battle-brothers!
The Primarch is with you!” The Chaplain clad in bone-white armour stood at the centre of the boarding party, gripping a staff of dissolution and taking position at the very front of the formation.
“We are the Angels of Death — we will never stand idle while mortals perish.
We fight for those who are not as strong as we are.
Word Bearers, advance!
For those we love!
For the Emperor!
For every future that has yet to come — we charge into death itself!” Dozens of gunships poured out from the vast ventral hangars of the Veteran of a Hundred Wars like hounds that had caught the scent of blood.
They were not graceful swifts, but savage things cased in heavy armour with engines that bellowed like beasts.
The armour plating of every gunship was painted with the dark-grey markings of the Word Bearers Legion and covered densely with sacred runic hymns and scripture-scroll patterns; their prows were carved with holy icons of the Emperor and the Primarch, now transformed into the most direct instruments of destruction.
Legion Chaplain Korol stood within the formation, raising the staff high, delivering a sermon to the Legion warriors around him in their Cataphractii Terminator armour.
A Chaplain does not cower at the rear, a true Astartes Chaplain leads the Legion warriors in the charge until every enemy has fallen beneath their weapons.
“Hold steady!
Legion warriors!
Lorgar is with us!” Korol’s voice, passing through the helmet vox, became a vast and piercing war cry.
In this moment, those gunships pressed through the warping pulses of twisted space and the dense bio-acid fire put out by the alien vessel and began their death run.
One gunship’s wing was struck by corrosive slime; the armour hissed and smoked white, but it drove forward in a frenzied rush regardless, until its engines were swallowed by subsequent fire and it finally burst into a blooming flower of expanded metal and flame.
The warriors inside were denied even the chance to speak a last word before they gave their lives for the Emperor.
Their sacrifice was not in vain, their deaths bought their brothers an instant that was minuscule yet utterly decisive.
“For the Primarch!
Punch through it!” The gunship assigned to lead the breach was the one belonging to the 3rd Heavy Assault Squad.
This gunship, codenamed the Truthhammer, was especially massive and brutal, its prow mounting a melta cannon that radiated a dangerous cherry-red glow.
Like a zealot in the grip of absolute conviction, it ignored the interceptor fire exploding around it in a near-suicidal approach, pouring all power into a dead-straight charge trajectory.
“Melta cannon!
Fire!” Chaplain Korol bellowed.
In an instant, every warrior looking toward the front of the battlefield was struck blind.
A torrent of pure, primal energy carrying the might of a stellar core erupted from the melta cannon’s muzzle.
It was not a simple energy beam but a condensed, boiling force of destruction; its light was so fierce that it momentarily eclipsed every explosion flaring across the battlefield, bleaching the dark-grey armour of the Veteran of a Hundred Wars and the pearl-white hull of the alien warship to the same deathly white, like the killing light that descends on Judgement Day.
In that instant, this sacred light of annihilation struck the alien warship’s smooth flank with unerring precision.
Upon the alien warship, the strange silver armour, capable of deflecting the impact of small meteorites, let out a groan of utter failure in the face of that extreme heat.
The metal did not melt.
It evaporated.
A massive breach was scorched open, its edges in a state of boiling, bright orange-red molten flux, exposing the internal structure within.
“Board!
Now!
For the glory of the Emperor!” The pilot of the Truthhammer let out a frenzied scream and drove the engine thrust to its absolute limit.
The massive gunship did not decelerate by a single degree; carrying the absolute resolve of something that would not be stopped, it used its reinforced armour to crash savagely into that freshly torn wound, still dripping with molten metal slag!
“BOOM —!” The violent impact sound drowned out even the shriek of the engines.
The entire gunship frame let out a teeth-grinding groan.
The internal dampening systems ran at full capacity, yet every Astartes warrior inside, standing over two metres tall and weighing half a tonne, was still thrown by the violent shockwave.
“Open the door!
Purge!
Leave none alive!” The hydraulic system screamed, and the boarding ramp smashed down, striking the alien vessel’s strange inner wall with a dull yet sharp crash.
The warriors of the 3rd Heavy Assault Squad, the Angels of Death wrapped in their heavy Terminator armour, were the first to set foot in this place of desecration.
Their armour was a deep, sombre grey, trimmed in scripture-engraved bronze and adorned with holy icons of the Emperor, with the sacred symbol of their Legion carved upon their pauldrons.
The tall plume atop the lead warrior’s helmet was already soaked with the steaming organic fluid that had splashed in from outside.
The bolt guns and melta guns in their hands had been hungry for far too long; the illumination lamps beneath their muzzles cast cold columns of light that pierced the thin mist filling the vessel’s interior, a mist that carried a strange, sweet-metallic odour.
Observing through their helmet lenses, even through the cordite smoke and vapour billowing from the breach, they could see the enemy’s true form with perfect clarity.
Their bodies were roughly humanoid, yet they bore arthropod features of an intensely unsettling degree.
The skin was smooth, rendered in an unnatural pearlescent white, as though fired from porcelain, yet it was unmistakably living flesh.
They possessed multiple pairs of jointed appendages, which made their manner of movement appear uncanny and swift.
Their repulsive faces held nothing at all, only a pair of large, jet-black Compound Eyes, and a sharp, writhing Beak-like Proboscis positioned at the very centre of the face, suited for suction.
Some among them were evidently a warrior caste, clad in form-fitting Bio-armour of the same pearlescent white, carrying strangely shaped pure-white weapons that appeared to be fashioned from some kind of Chitin or bone.
These weapons had no visible trigger mechanism or energy cell, and their operating principles were entirely unknown to humanity.
Yet no matter how inhuman their appearance, no matter how alien their technology, in this moment, within those inhuman Compound Eyes, amid their rapidly twitching appendages, and from the shrill keening of their Beak-like Proboscises, the warriors of the Word Bearers caught an emotion they knew intimately, one they could almost feed upon: fear.
The most primal, most pure fear.
They had seen the Angels of the Emperor.
They had seen the Emperor’s appointed heralds of death.
They had seen their warship torn open in the most violent and direct manner imaginable, and they had seen these towering giants in heavy armour, moving like great animated holy icons, step into their vessel carrying cold intent to kill.
“Alien filth!” Squad leader Slax of the 3rd Squad, the voice amplified by the helmet speaker, tolling like a cold death knell through that living corridor.
“Your very existence is sin!
Your very form is a desecration of sacred humanity’s perfection!
In the name of the Emperor and Lorgar, feel the cleansing!” — ➤ Next: Witness Me!
Father of Us All!