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“Soldiers!
For the Emperor!
Hold the line!” “Hold the line!
Hold the line!” The soldiers’ fervent cries filled the air as the lasgun array poured out a relentless stream of searing beams, burning small gaps into the ork tide, only for each gap to be instantly swallowed by the green figures surging in from behind.
Heavy weapon teams worked the cumbersome bolters and lascannons set behind the merlons, trying to knock out the orks’ heavy fire points.
More often than not, opening fire just bought them a fiercer counterattack moments later.
Autocannon turrets shrieked as they poured fire into the horde, shattering flesh and shredding metal, carving out small killing zones.
Against the scope of the whole battle, it was nowhere near enough.
Behind the city walls, the Legion’s artillery crews gave everything they had.
“Fire!
Fire!” “Damn it!
Load!” The gun crews loaded with crisp, practiced efficiency, then hurled the Emperor’s fury outward.
The Medusa Siege Guns bellowed with earth-shaking force.
Massive shells cleaved the sky and crashed into distant ork clusters, throwing up geysers of dirt mixed with severed limbs and shards of shredded metal.
Each successful volley cleared a small patch of ground, temporarily.
The orks were simply too numerous.
Their assault lines stretched for hundreds of kilometers, and the reach of the guns was laughably small by comparison.
For the Imperial Army soldiers holding this stretch, matters were worse still: the orks’ ranged firepower was equally ferocious.
Aim was poor, but the sheer volume and weight of fire meant shells and rockets occasionally found their way over the walls, landing inside the Hive City or striking the fortifications along the ramparts, triggering explosions and casualties.
“We have held for over ten days!
Over a hundred thousand brothers!
We have stopped these green bastards through more than ten full-scale assaults!” Colonel Wright’s voice carried a weariness on the edge of collapse, but underneath it was something harder.
Grinding.
Teeth-clenched resolve.
“Every day, every hour, we lose outstanding soldiers.
Loyal sons and daughters of the Imperium.
But we are still standing!
The Imperial Army is still standing!” Colonel Wright crossed to the tactical table and drove a fist down onto the section marked with the orks’ primary attack vectors.
The holographic display flickered.
On the map, the red tide representing the orks had nearly completed its encirclement, pressing tight against the blue defensive line marking the Hive City.
Only a handful of critical nodes still changed hands in brutal back-and-forth fighting.
The overall line had been compressed to its absolute limit.
“The last order was to hold and wait for reinforcement.” A nearby officer spoke quietly.
Face just as blackened with soot, a Tech-Officer insignia visible on the Carapace Armour.
The voice trembled with exhaustion.
“But the signal…
the signal from orbital space has been cut for four days now…” “Reinforcements?” Colonel Wright’s head snapped up.
A flash of bitter contempt crossed those eyes, then deep, hollow despair swallowed it whole.
“All we have now is the Emperor’s protection and our own bolts.
Tell every soldier, every sergeant — behind us is the last core district of Hive Forest.
Inside it are tens of millions of Imperial citizens.
Our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters.
We have nowhere to retreat!” A deep breath of scorching, throat-searing air, as though trying to convert that despair into one last surge of fighting will.
“How much ammunition is left in reserve?
Tell the Quartermaster — priority distribution to the heavy weapon teams and front-line sergeants!
Those wounded and unable to fight, if they can still move, put them to work carrying ammunition and reinforcing the fortifications!
We must…” The words died in another explosion that shook the earth and split the sky.
This one far exceeded anything before it.
Some ork superheavy weapon, or a suicide attack, something had scored a direct hit on a junction section of the wall.
The violent tremor set the entire command post shaking.
Dust and fragments rained from the ceiling.
The vox channels erupted with rapid, chaotic reports: the shouted voices of sergeants from every section of the line.
“East Sector Seven outer wall is cracking!” “We need support!
There’s a breach here!” “For the Emperor!
Hold them back!” Colonel Wright snatched up the helmet and snapped it on.
The integrated display lit instantly, locking onto the sections under heaviest pressure.
The power sword came free of its scabbard.
The blade hummed to life, radiating a field of deep blue energy.
“All Reserve Platoons!
With me!” The voice carried through the helmet’s vox-amplifier, cold, brooking no argument, transmitting across the entire regiment’s communication network.
“894th Regiment!
For the Emperor!
For our home!
Crush them!” The order given, Colonel Wright was the first out of the command post, charging toward the breach where the fire was thickest and death was densest.
That silhouette, like a steel reef cast into a raging green sea, knowing it would inevitably be submerged, yet still willing to be ground to pieces, to hold back that all-destroying tide for even one second more.
The eastern defensive line.
This stretch of alloy wall had been hammered by heavy artillery until its internal structure was long since crumbled to near-ruin.
It stood now on the very edge of collapse.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
One final explosion hit.
The wall’s own weight did the rest.
It gave out with a groan of terminal exhaustion and toppled outward, the debris forming a rough, steep ramp of rubble.
The billowing dust hadn’t settled when a massive, ugly figure rose from the crest of the wreckage.
It was enormous.
It nearly filled the breach entirely.
Green skin riddled with scars and crude metal implants.
A gaping maw stretched wide to reveal jagged yellow tusks, unleashing an excited, wordless roar.
In its hands it gripped a massive cleaver cobbled together from scrap iron and rivets, the blade caked with dried dark-red blood.
This beast had just set foot on the ground that humanity had bled to defend.
What greeted it was not screams of panic.
Not a frantic volley of shots.
It was the cold gleam of metal.
“Die, xenos!” A hoarse, furious cry.
That voice did not belong to a gene-enhanced Adeptus Astartes warrior.
It did not belong to a battle-hardened Legion veteran sergeant.
It came from a mortal, an ordinary soldier of the Imperial Army.
Features hidden beneath a standard helmet scored with scratches and soot.
But the eyes behind that visor burned with pure, undisguised hatred and the will to die fighting.
The movement was startlingly fast.
No wasted lasgun charge on a shot that might be deflected by thick muscle and iron armour.
Instead, the bayonet drill repeated ten thousand times on the training ground became a single lethal strike.
A dull, wet sound.
Metal tearing through tough hide, punching through muscle, grinding through cartilage.
The bayonet fixed beneath the lasgun barrel — bright Imperial Steel, drove with unerring precision into the side of the ork’s thick neck.
It bypassed the hardest frontal bone-plate, piercing instead from the comparatively vulnerable lateral angle, burying itself deep in the region of the trachea and the major vessels.
The ork’s massive body locked rigid.
In those small eyes, eyes full of savagery and the lust for destruction, a flash of disbelieving shock appeared for the very first time.
The great green hand tried to lift the heavy cleaver.
But strength was draining fast, pouring out with the thick, blackish blood jetting from the wound in the neck.
Its throat produced a wet, rattling gurgle.
It tried to roar.
Managed only a few leaking, hissing gasps.
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