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“May the Emperor guide your soul back beneath His light.
Your suffering has been witnessed.
Your vengeance will be repaid by our hands.” Korol glanced at the corpse and spoke.
Then Korol’s head snapped up.
The compassion in those eyes was gone in an instant, consumed by a fury reignited, fierce enough to incinerate the stars themselves.
Korol raised the scepter high, still dripping with xenos blood and nutrient fluid, and swept it toward the entire laboratory, toward those endless rows of living containers holding the boundless suffering of humanity.
The voice became thunder again, rolling through the desecrated hall.
A proclamation of final judgment: “Brothers!
Burn this place!
Burn everything in it!
Leave not a single trace!
Let not one fragment of these desecrated creations defile the Emperor’s stars!
Let the purifying flame be the only elegy this place deserves!” No second order was needed.
Every Space Marine bearing a Heavy Flamer stepped forward in unison and raised their weapons.
Their movements were perfectly synchronized, the solemnity and coldness of a ritual.
Triggers pulled.
Not one column of fire, but many.
Incandescent, roaring, erupting forth all at once.
These reinforced flamers could unleash Melta Fire reaching tens of thousands of degrees, flames that embodied the most extreme hatred and purifying will of the Imperium of Man.
The fire swallowed the first row of containers instantly.
Glass vaporized under the heat.
The nutrient fluid within evaporated in moments.
The imprisoned, modified human bodies burst into violent combustion the instant the flames touched them, carbonizing, twisting, reduced to drifting ash.
In a single heartbeat, the entire laboratory became one enormous fireball.
The heat warped the air.
Pale walls scorched black and began to peel.
Green conduits exploded apart.
Wailing rose again, not from the brood-mothers already long dead, but from xenos researchers consumed by the spreading flames, and from the still-functioning, sentient living-experiment devices caught within it.
But through that symphony of roaring fire, crackling burning matter, and the death-shrieks of dying xenos, the warriors of the Word Bearers caught something else.
Their superhuman hearing picked it out from the chaos, faint, brief, unmistakably clear.
From those human remains rapidly turning to ash, there came a sound.
Barely perceptible.
A faint, relieved…
laughter.
It carried within it the liberation of boundless suffering finally ended.
As though imprisoned souls had at last, within the purifying flames brought by the Emperor’s angels, received their final, cruel mercy.
The souls of the xenos would burn beneath humanity’s wrath forever.
……………
The Third Heavy Assault Squad advanced unimpeded, until they reached a gate.
Exceptionally sturdy.
Cast, by its appearance, from some Xenos Alloy mixed with Bio-polymer.
Here, it became the last and only obstacle the Word Bearers’ Third Heavy Assault Squad would face.
It was unlike the pulsing silver structures found elsewhere throughout the vessel.
Cold.
Silent.
Faint Energy Runes flickered across its surface, marking whatever lay beyond as something of particular importance.
“In the name of the Primarch — break it open!” Sergeant Slax’s roar rang through the corridor.
The voice was rougher from the successive bloody battles, but not one measure of fanaticism had left it.
Two Cataphractii Terminators bearing Heavy Assault Weapons stepped forward.
Their armor was covered in explosion-scored scorch marks, acid-etched corrosion stains, and long-dried pale-blue blood scabs, making the scripture engravings carved into the plating appear all the more savage.
The hammerheads in their hands gathered devastating energy.
Servo-systems drove to full power with a rising hum.
The hammers came crashing down.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!
Each impact shuddered through the entire corridor.
The shriek of twisting metal and the crackling of overloading energy shields rang without cease.
Under that repeated, merciless battering, the seemingly impregnable gate finally let out a groan.
A massive depression formed at its center, cracks spreading outward like a spider’s web.
Then, in one coordinated strike, the locking system gave out entirely.
Half the gate twisted inward and tore apart, revealing the dim space beyond.
What poured through the breach first was not the Space Marines’ wrathful battle-cry.
It was — BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
An autocannon roar.
Extraordinarily dense.
Savage beyond measure.
A torrent of fire consumed the breach in an instant.
A lethal metal storm howled into the corridor, hammering the Terminators’ thick frontal armor, sending brilliant sparks and ear-splitting impacts cascading in every direction.
An ambush.
The surviving xenos guards had built one final firing position here.
A ground-mounted, multi-barreled rotary Xenos Autolaser poured fire in a frenzy, trying to turn this sole entry point into a kill zone.
“A pitiful death-rattle,” the squad’s adjutant sneered through the storm.
Cataphractii Terminator Armour earned its reputation as a fortress.
The ferocious fire couldn’t penetrate it immediately, but it did press them back, temporarily halting their advance.
“For the Emperor — purge them!” No further orders.
The squad’s heavy weapons bearer pushed up from the flank.
The warrior carried a Heavy Autocannon, the kind of ferocious weapon ordinarily mounted on vehicles, holding it as steadily as though it weighed nothing.
The warrior met the enemy’s uproar with a brief, deliberate silence.
Then pulled the trigger.
THOOM.
THOOM.
THOOM.
THOOM.
The heavy rounds’ report was nothing like the sharp screech of the xenos laser weapon.
Lower.
Heavier.
Each shot carrying matchless kinetic force and the destructive will of Emperor and Primarch alike.
The barrage landed precisely at the source of the autocannon’s muzzle-flash.
Those hastily assembled barricades, workbenches, instruments, whatever biological material the xenos had thrown together, tore apart like paper under the pounding.
The dozen-odd xenos soldiers sheltering behind them never had a chance.
Their Pearlescent White armor and fragile bodies meant nothing before that metal storm.
They, their weapons, and their barricades were reduced in one sharp, violent detonation to scattered metal fragments, chunks of biological tissue, and a mist of fluorescent-blue blood.
The laser cannon’s roar cut off.
All that remained was a twisted barrel trailing pale smoke, and a floor covered in wreckage.
The gun-smoke had not even cleared.
Five deep-grey iron giants were already moving, heavy, unstoppable steps crossing the still-smoldering ruins, formally entering the final room.
“In the name of the Emperor!
Sweep the stars clean!” Their battle-cries mixed with static noise and the mechanically-distorted rumble of their vox-grilles.
They filled the entryway.
The blood of desecration coating their armor glinted with an eerie sheen in the dim light, Judicators striding forth from the depths of hell.
The two xenos soldiers nearest the doorway came forward.
Whether from desperate courage or the last command of some programmed directive, they screamed and charged, brandishing pale Beam Weapons and Bio-blades.
Like a mantis trying to stop a chariot.
There was no need to raise weapons.
The two lead Terminators simply used their massive bodies, pure contempt as a fighting stance.
Power Drive System-enhanced pauldrons and vambraces slammed directly into them.
CRACK.
SQUELCH, The dull impact.
Then the horrific sound of flesh and carapace crushed and burst apart by absolute force.
Those two xenos soldiers didn’t slow the Terminators’ advance by a single step.
The immense kinetic force smashed them apart, reduced them to two splattered patterns of filthy gore across the walls and floor.
Silence fell over the room.
Only the low hum of the Terminators’ Servo-systems remained.
The faint crackling of power weapon energy fields.
The sharp reek of ozone, blood, and scorched xenos tissue hanging thick in the air.
Within the entire range of sight, only one living xenos remained.
It was huddled in the farthest corner of the room, beside a control console that had already been destroyed.
The Bone-white armor on its body was more refined than any of the soldiers encountered before, perhaps a technician, perhaps a low-ranking official.
Its arthropod body trembled violently.
The multi-lens compound eyes reflected five encroaching iron giants, each one a nightmare given form, drawing closer with every passing second.
A small sidearm slipped from its grip and clattered to the floor.
It let out a series of sharp, rapid, desperation-filled screams.
Multi-jointed appendages scrabbled helplessly backward, as though trying to merge with the wall itself, to escape the end bearing down on it.
A Word Bearer raised a Bolter.
Sights locked steady on that Pearlescent White skull.
“Stand down.” Korol’s voice cut through.
Cold.
Absolute.
The warrior lowered the muzzle immediately, but held the posture of a threat.
Korol strode forward.
The shadow cast by that massive, blood-soaked frame swallowed the xenos whole.
Korol looked down upon it the way one looks down upon an insect.
No weapon was raised.
Instead, a massive power armor-encased gauntlet extended toward it.
The xenos screamed.
Appendages flailed in wild, frantic attempts to block.
It made no difference.
Korol’s gauntlet broke through its feeble defenses without effort and wrapped precisely around its torso.
The subtle hum of the powered gauntlet sent the xenos into convulsions.
Its smooth carapace produced a faint crackling sound under the pressure.
But it did not die.
Korol held it in an iron grip and lifted it from the ground, bringing those compound eyes, filled with absolute terror, level with the cold, merciless eye-lenses of Korol’s helmet.
“You are afraid?” Korol’s voice was low, heavy with a pressure that bore down like weight itself.
“This is only the beginning.
Your desecrations, your crimes, they must all be brought to reckoning.
And that reckoning must reach your homeworld.
Your source.
Your root.” The words came through the vox-speaker.
Cold.
Devoid of all emotion.
And somehow more chilling for it than any battle-cry.
“The Legion does not want your death, xenos.” Each word landed like a hammer on a death-knell.
“The Legion wants everything you are.
You will tell us your homeworld.
You will give us the coordinates of every filthy nest your kind has buried away.” Korol tightened the grip slightly.
The xenos let out a piercing wail.
“Then you will have the privilege of witnessing—” Something resolute entered Korol’s voice.
“We will take the annihilation you fear, the despair you feel at this very moment, and amplify it a thousandfold.
Ten-thousandfold.
And we will deliver it with precision upon your homeworld.
The existence of your race will, beneath the full fury of the Emperor, be utterly erased.
This is the final fate of those who desecrate humanity and defy the Emperor.” Korol turned, holding the struggling, screaming prisoner up for the warriors to see.
“Take it.
Ensure it reaches the Interrogation Chamber of the Hundred Victories Return alive.
Have the Apothecary and Techmarine prepare to…
question it.
We must have the coordinates of that accursed star.” “Understood, Chaplain.” The squad answered without hesitation.
➤ Next: The Use of Psychic Power