Legion of the Damned

took everything the weapon had to punch through both metal and thick bone to reach what little brain the monster had.

As the abominate dropped and skidded past Kersh, the Scourge realised that the distraction had cost him. Three Angels Apocrypha had worked their way around the crashed Thunderhawk to surprise him from the other side. Helmless and sporting long hair and rapier-like blades that crackled with a dark energy, the Chaos Space Marines looked identical. Their skin was deathly pale against the sable blood-filth of their patched and studded plate. The renegades hissed and swept in with vampiric speed and appetite. Kersh barely had time to release his finger-cramping grip on the heavy bolters and slap a palm on his gladius hilt.

The first died without the blade having to clear its scabbard. There was a flash from the side of the first Angel’s head. He fell to one side and struck the gunship’s wing before falling and sitting in the grave dust. Half of his head had been burned out by a precision sniper shot. About the Scourge were the corpses of killers and cultists that Kersh couldn’t remember slaying. They too had the telltale head craters of Adeptus Astartes marksmanship. Up in the towers and steeples of the cemetery world city, a member of Squad Contritus had the Scourge in his sights and was watching his corpus-captain’s back.

The Angels were so fast that Kersh’s blade was still not free of its sheath as the second sped past his falling compatriot. He was met with an ugly kick from the Scourge. Reeling from the Excoriator’s boot against his chestplate, the Traitor stumbled some distance back. Throughout the body-piling carnage of the Scourge’s resistance, the Impunitas’s remaining engine had gone through the wretched and repetitive cycle of firing up and dying down. As the heretic Angel stumbled back into the rocket’s wake, the intense heat of the rhythmic burn set alight his hair and scoured the paint from his ceramite. His pallid skin melted from his skull, and as the engine built up to full intensity, sending a tremble through the crashed Thunderhawk, the renegade was lost in the air-scorching heat of the afterburner.

Kersh felt sudden and excruciating pain lance through his midriff. The third Angel Apocrypha had leant into a savage thrust, skewering his power blade through the Scourge’s stomach plate and though his side. As the Chaos Space Marine withdrew his rapier, Kersh let out a half-stifled howl of agony. The heretic seemed to enjoy the Excoriator’s suffering, until the Scourge drew his gladius out of its scabbard and the blade up across the Traitor’s face, wiping the spiteful satisfaction from it. With blood streaming into his eyes from the vicious gash, the Angel Apocrypha also failed to see the Scourge’s fist fly at him, the pommel of the sword held within it breaking the warrior’s jaw. The rapier vaulted for the Scourge again, but blood-blind the Angel struck wide.

Grabbing the Chaos Space Marine by the wrist and holding the crackling blade away from him, Kersh twisted the gladius around in his other hand before plunging it down through a ceramite patch on the Blood Crusader’s chestplate. The blade squealed through the weak spot, punctured reinforced ribcage and slid down into the Chaos Space Marine’s chest. Squirming the hilt around like an aircraft joystick, Kersh watched the Angel Apocrypha experience the blade twisting through his innards. Black blood gushed up and out of the sides of the doomed warrior’s mouth. Releasing him, Kersh allowed the weight of the warrior’s plate to carry him to a gasping death on the cemetery world earth and free his blade.

A grunt from the Anarchan Razorbacks was suddenly beside him, attempting to beat him with the stock of a shotgun, while a stitch-faced pirate raider – with her mouth sliced into a frown – started blasting away wildly with a pair of autopistols. Clutching his side, Kersh despatched her with shearing economy and speed. He took a step towards the twin-linked heavy bolter but found himself distracted by the bodies being tossed into the air above the advancing mob before him. A cloven-hoofed beast of living plate was thundering through the cultist throng at high speed, its brazen bulk a seemingly unstoppable force. The quadruped’s long head sported a thick brass horn, sharpened to a cruel spike, while its eyes were windows to a volcanic fury. Its broad body was a clinker-built nightmare of layered bronze plate and shredded octagon-mail. The infernal beast cared for nothing, trampling slave-soldiers, gore-swiping Bloodsaken berserkers and barging aside armoured Red Herald Chaos Space Marines with its heavy metal heft.

Snatching his bolt pistol from its sporran, Kersh thrashed the trigger, sending round after round at the daemon beast. It was the definition of an easy target and getting easier with every cloven stride, but the rounds simply glanced pathetically off the living bronze hide. With the infernal engine just steps away, Kersh threw himself painfully to one side. The beast continued its relentless charge, furiously goring the underplate of the Thunderhawk’s wing, before surging on and smashing straight through the twin-linked heavy bolters. The metal monster cannonaded past. On the ground, Kersh watched the beast weather a hail of las-bolts from Charnel Guard fusils, stubgun and auto-fire, as well as the slash of Scout sniper rifle blasts from the towers and belfries. An advancing wall of metal and sparks, the beast continued along its juggernaut path towards the break in the battlement.

Kersh felt a tremble through his plate. The ground was quaking again. As he got to his boots, the corpus- captain watched hate-jubilant cultists roaring the hellsteed on, before they were struck and impaled from behind – left broken-backed and crucified across the horned heads of newly arrived beasts. The Scourge shook his head in silent disbelief, witness to a diabolic stampede. Soon there were more armoured chargers than Kersh could count, and the Excoriator found himself backing towards the doomed front line.

Unclipping a krak grenade, the Scourge took several further steps backwards. As well as the living metal beasts – in the absence of the heavy bolter’s relentless murder – renegade Angels, berserkers and the Blood God’s champions were leading the cult armies of the Cholercaust back at Kersh’s decimated section of the perimeter. With grim resolve, the Scourge tossed the unprimed grenade into the silent booster exhaust of the cycling engine. As he ran back towards Obsequa City he heard the grenade bounce and rattle around the inside of the jet mechanism. He heard the engine begin its final, fruitless attempt to re-launch the downed Thunderhawk.

As Kersh reached the havoc of the destroyed battlement and the mess the unstoppable metal monster had made of his remaining sentinels, the corpus-captain looked back. The Thunderhawk’s remaining booster had built to a strangled screech. The engine fired. The grenade exploded. The wreck of the Impunitas shuddered. A staggered detonation rippled through the derelict craft: the engine, the fuel compartments, the ammunition stores. The gunship became a radiating blastwave of force, flame and armour-plate frag. Cultist soldiers were shredded where they stood. Renegade Angels and Chaos champions were cooked within their plate, and even stampeding daemon beaststeeds were knocked from their fleet footing and onto their clinker-constructed backs, where they remained, kicking out helplessly in a steam-snorting effort to right themselves.

Kersh found Brother Nebuzar dead – gored straight through by the rampaging bronze monitor train. The beast had ignored the irritation of las-bolts dancing off its hide and bypassed the remainder of the Charnel Guard, instead storming straight at the cemetery world city. As the brazen mount careened through the walls of chapels, hermitages and cloisters, bulldozing its frenzied way through foundations and keystones, towers began to topple and steeples fell in on themselves.

Looking back at the benighted battlefield, Kersh saw the Thunderhawk’s explosion die back to a flame- swathed wreck. The promethium-soaked mound of cadavers and daemonflesh upon which the crashed gunship had come to rest caught, and the Scourge watched the inferno race away in both directions. Within minutes Obsequa City would be surrounded by a furious ring of light and fire.

Along his section of the perimeter, the corpus-captain saw cultists and slave-soldiers thrashing in the flames. He saw a hammer-wielding Thunder Baron stride through the blaze in scorched plate as though it were nothing. The renegade Angel was followed by several lesser berserkers, who burst from the wall of flame at a sprint, flak and furs alight with the flesh melting from their cruel bones. They didn’t get far, the demented warriors succumbing to the firestorms they had become long before they reached the ruined battlement. The daemonherd would not, and could not, be stopped. Those monsters not caught in the initial blast had thundered on, shaking the ground upon which they stomped, shielded from the worst of the pyremound by their hide plating.

The corpus-captain had no idea how other sections of the perimeter had fared. They could have already fallen or – without crashing gunships and a daemon drove to worry about – have held against the Cholercaust’s murderous masses and madness. All he did know was that his vox had been a constant stream of messages and reports that he could barely hear above the rapid-fire cacophony of the twin-linked heavy bolters and Khornate battle-cries. Regardless of how his brothers elsewhere had fared, their first line of defence was about to fall. With the promethium holding the worst of the cultist furore back, but the daemon charge an uncontainable certainty, Kersh decided grimly that the battle wouldn’t afford him a better time to retreat. He set his vox to an open channel.

‘Fifth Company, this is the Scourge. The perimeter is breached. Prepare for close-quarters assault. Fall back