Charnel Guardsmen had punched several holes in the fog bank with their lasfusils. The single bolts faded into the mist and the lance-lieutenant fell on the two soldiers with harsh and equally nervous words. The Charnel Guard officer was cut off in mid-stream by the
Kersh unclipped his chainsword and held the barbed tip of the silent weapon out beside Ishmael. He’d hoped the squad whip might return the battle-brotherly gesture and tap the back of his lightning claw against the weapon. Ishmael just gave the Scourge a look of sour disgust, slapped on his helmet and started advancing.
‘Sir,’ Kale called. Kersh didn’t know if the Excoriator had seen his squad whip’s snub. The Space Marine held up the auspex. ‘I’ve got nothing.’
Kersh grunted. Enemies that eluded the scanners were not good news for the Excoriators.
‘If you can see it and it moves, burn it,’ Kersh told Kale. Re-attaching the auspex to his belt and adopting his helmet, the Excoriator ran up the perimeter, adjusting the nozzle aperture on his weapon for a blanket burn.
Firing the chainsword to life, the Scourge gunned the weapon to shrieking lethality. Slipping his own helm over his head and firing the pressure seals, he watched monstrous forms swoop, bound and scuttle from the fog. As the warp-spawned swarm grew, more of the immaterial creatures made it through the gauntlet of the las-fire. Kersh watched the autocannon and heavy stubber continue to do good work, ripping up etherforms and blowing what appeared to be limbs and appendages from the fearless horrors. The storm of las-fire that had greeted the first appearance of the entities immediately began to thin, causing Kersh to march forwards. It was as he feared. As more of the myriad monstrosities revealed themselves, common Certusians had shifted from panic-stricken trigger pumping to mind-scalding horror. The cemetery worlders and a number of Charnel Guard proceeded to gawp at the spectacle, their fragile minds overwhelmed by the impossible vision unfolding before their eyes. Some recoiled and slammed their backs to the battlement ruins, refusing to believe what they were seeing. Others fell to weeping and vomiting. Many simply could not take their eyes of the gut-curdling sight of the warp-spewed nightmares and froze up, clutching their silent weapons uselessly to their chests.
Several flying beasts corkscrewed their haphazard way through the streams of heavy weapons fire and dissipating curtain of las-bolts. Their repugnance even stirred deep-buried feelings of disgust in Kersh, looking as they did like giant insects that had been turned inside out. They swooped in low over the battlement on deformed multi-wings. Ishmael ran at the monsters, leaping off a shattered arch and reaching for the open night sky with his lightning claws. The talons crackled and steamed as the first beast flew straight into them. The creature sliced into an ugly mess on the rubble behind the squad whip before raining skywards in a shower of immaterial dissipation. Ishmael landed and, risking a swift look over his shoulder, brought up his bolt pistol and hammered several rounds into a second oncoming glider.
A third fiend rolled into a spin with its ragged wings, bypassing Ishmael and coming at Kersh. The Scourge feinted right and then turned back, sweeping down with the angry teeth of the chainsword. The weapon chugged through a large wing and tore a rent down the monster’s flank, causing it to stream entrails across the crumbling masonry and smash its remaining wings in a crash-landing. The corpus-captain watched the mess stream into a cyclonic scattering of dark emotion and wastage. Bethesda ran forwards from her position protecting the ammunition supply line. Holding the chunky laspistol in both hands like a carbine, cable trailing to the humming powerpack on her belt, the absterge lanced the downed entity with automatic las-fire.
Following Ishmael to the palisade, Kersh saw the squad whip roar savagely down the line of militia and Charnel Guardsmen. As encouragement to keep firing, the Excoriator stepped up onto the parapet and blasted single bolts from his pistol down the steep rubble of the battlement, plugging the swollen abdomens of obscene scuttlers.
‘Fire, you worthless wretches!’ Ishmael bawled, stabbing the talon-tips of a lightning claw down the line in accusation. ‘Fire or I’ll make you wish you had, you merelings! I’ll feed you to these beasts to give the rest something to aim at!’
A wall of insanity came at the battlement. Spindle-limbed arachnid-maws that jumped from gravestone to gravestone. Fleshy urchin-like beings that rolled across the ground on pneumatic spines, spearing all in their path. Osseous shafts growing out of the mist and impaling Guardsmen, before violently projecting hydric stalks of cartilage into the bodies of nearby victims to create a reticulated network of skewered bodies. Conical torsos, twitching with single-clawed stumps and slimy mouths that stream-vomited corrosive bile all about them. Blooms of floating cephalogeists, draping their victims in manes of life-sapping tentacles. Voracious, protoplasmic absorbers. Beasts that were claws and nothing else. Cancroid growths that spread across the ground, rocky surfaces and living tissue with sickening speed. A carpet of larval horrors that escaped the worst of the suppression fire and wriggled up through the loose rubble. Kersh saw cemetery worlders tearing at their own faces as the glassy elvers slithered into ears, mouths and eyes before writhing and exploding in a bloody, reproductive shower of empyreal birth.
Kersh fought through the spray of ichor and gobbets of warpflesh. He sawed through bestial nightmares and chopped limb-things from corporeal entities that simply grew back. He took the head from a Khymeric carnivore before cleaving the helical tusk from a screamer that swooped at him on triangular, pectoral wings. The Scourge booted aside a spongy mass of stubby eye-stalks before stamping down on the disappearing tail of a slinking gorgopede. He cut a fat, serpentine fluke from the lance-lieutenant’s back only to find that it had already eaten his head and had been pushing down into his body. The air was thick with death. The battlement was swamped with horror. Immaterial entities – hungry for souls – were everywhere, and the Scourge was enveloped in a whirlwind of blade-banished dissipation as monstrosities about him died and departed reality.
The Scourge didn’t know how long he had been fighting. The sea of spawn had just kept coming – monsters buzzing above, crawling over and slithering through the flesh-mounds of the slain. He had barely been allowed a moment’s independent thought. His superhuman body had been enslaved to necessity – arching, reaching, barging and slamming his way through the havoc. The chainsword shimmered in his grip, so hot was the weapon in its constant state of carnage. Over the vox-bead he’d heard a similar story from around the entirety of the perimeter. He thought he’d heard reports of cemetery worlders and Charnel Guard abandoning their posts in mind-numbing terror. He’d heard of Second Whip Azareth and Brother Lemuel’s sections pushed back to the second perimeter battlement and Techmarine Dancred’s completely overrun.
Suddenly the path ahead of Kersh was clear. Misshapen entities became even more so as they dissolved into a blur of cannon-blasted mess. The corpus-captain thought of Oren, the moody serf proving himself behind the stock of the heavy weapon, feverishly twisting the autocannon’s length this way and that on its squat tripod, mulching otherworldly miscreations in tight, controlled sweeps. Through ichor-spattered optics Kersh could see Kale doing his worst with his flamer. The Excoriator was holding part of the palisade all by himself, indulging in broad burns that sanitised the tainted rubble and roasted a labyrinthine network of bodies, shot through with the explorative shafts of a bone monster – gargling, corrupted Guardsmen and all. Brother Micah was working his way down to him, sweeping a swarm of spindly spider-creatures from his path with conservative bolter blasts while bludgeoning his way through the spiny legs of a larger chitinid with his barrel and combat shield attachment.
From what the Scourge could see, the autocannon emplacement with Brothers Micah and Kale were the only contingent holding the battlement. The cemetery worlders had fled through the rat-run, back towards the city. Some of the Charnel Guard had held their ground but had been overwhelmed by warp entities that stripped their flesh and picked their bones. Spinning around, Kersh ducked beneath the legs of a fang-faced strider. The thing had been charging at him and had snapped at the corpus-captain with an elongated jaw, malformed and twisted with surplus teeth. The Scourge heard who he thought was Micah over the vox, but couldn’t make out what the company champion was saying. Kersh flicked out his wrist and brought the raging tip of the chainsword up, shearing off one of the strider’s gangly legs.
Peering through the mist, the corpus-captain spotted Ishmael down amongst the gravestones of the necroplex. The squad whip was fighting like a cornered cat, his lightning claws flashing through warpflesh, slicing and stabbing.
‘Ishmael!’ Kersh yelled, but the Excoriator was too far out. Looking along his faltering section of the battlement and then down at the struggling squad whip, Kersh came to a decision. ‘Pull back!’ he yelled across the thunder of the autocannon. Riddling ground-hugging abominations with automatic las-fire, Bethesda covered the retreat as Oren and Old Enoch began separating the cannon from its mount and running the length of the white-hot
