climb up to wall to vent his fury.
'Vulkan's blood!' he snarled, forcing as much venom as he could into the invective.
Elysius felt it too, rotating his crozius in small arcs to keep his wrist loose and muttering spleenful litanies under his breath. The Chaplain would wait for the opportune moment to give his canticles of hate full voice.
'Raise shields!' Tsu'gan heard Praetor cry out to the Firedrakes from the other side of the Land Raider. The
of metal resounded in the courtyard as the Terminators' storm shields met their pauldrons and locked in place.
The order from N'keln was imminent. Crackling static in Tsu'gan's battle-helm gave way to the captain's steely voice. 'Unto the anvil, brothers!'
The gate came down. A long burst from the
flamestorm cannons burned clear the immediate area beyond it.
Led by Praetor, the Firedrakes were the first out, tramping onto scorched earth, smoking husks of orks crushed in their sudden charge. Thunder hammers filled the air with flashing discharge from their power generators. Trying to respond, the greenskins hurled themselves at the Terminators but found an unyielding rock against which they were smashed.
The Firedrakes were devastating, and Tsu'gan almost found himself agape at their fury. They moved amidst the greenskin horde, pummelling with their shields, crushing skulls with their hammers. Praetor extolled the glories of the vaunted 1st Company as they killed, his sheer presence impelling his warriors to even greater efforts. Tsu'gan saw the veteran sergeant's plan at once. He had his sights set on the ork warboss.
'To the fires of war!' roared Elysius, once the Terminators had cleared the threshold.
Tsu'gan ran with him, closing the gap behind their 1st Company brothers swiftly. Close-ranged bolter fire tore into the orks, as Tsu'gan ordered ''weapons free'', and blasted the greenskins apart.
Expulsed promethium merged with the stink of burning ork flesh as Honorious unleashed his flamer. To the rear of the assault group a combat squad made a staggered advance, allowing M'lek to loose his multi-melta. A brutish greenskin, two heads taller than Tsu'gan, its body an armoured shell of plates and whining servos, had its torso liquidised to visceral slag by the multi-melta's beam. It fell back into a steaming heap, crushing two of its smaller brethren.
Tsu'gan heard the bass tones of Sergeant Typhos as he sang a Promethean battle anthem, describing bloody arcs with the rise and fall of his thunder hammer.
As the three squads slowly converged, forming into a spear shape with Praetor and the Firedrakes as its burning tip, the ork attack on the wall was stymied. Without constant reinforcements, the greenskins already contesting the fortress were left isolated. It allowed the defenders to cleanse the parapets.
Overhead, the warriors of Vargo's Assault squad soared on wings of fire. Plunging down amidst the greenskins, they released bolt and blade with a zealot's fervour, small bursts from the squad's flamer adding to the carnage. They were the last element of the Salamander assault force, and in their wake the
rolled into the breach left behind by the fallen gate. The tank's bulk easily filled the blackened arch. Sporadic spears of flame from its sponson guns kept the orks at bay. When the initial shock of the Salamanders' attack had waned, they found themselves locked in a deadly melee. Ork bodies pressed on every side, raw aggression lending the beasts the impetus they needed to get back on an even footing. Only now, wading in the belligerent sea of green, did Tsu'gan fully appreciate what they were up against. Between bolter bursts, he heard a muffled cry and saw what he thought was one of Vargo's brothers falling into the morass of orks. The Salamander didn't resurface. Another, Typhos's special weapons trooper Urion, took a chainblade to the forehead. The exultant ork was shredded by return fire from the dead Salamander's battle-brothers, and the body was left quivering with the still churning blade that the greenskin had lost its grip on wedged in the wound. Soon Urion was swallowed up by the ork horde too.
They gained about three hundred metres from the gate when the
engines stirred into life. The assault tank barrelled into the killing field, barging greenskins aside with its hull or mulching them beneath its grinding tracks.
This was ''hammer'', the second phase of N'keln's assault stratagem. The captain was embarked in the Land Raider with the Inferno Guard and the Tactical squad of Sergeant De'mas. Filling the void left behind by the tank was Clovius and his squad. They would hold the gate, whilst the Devastators, utilising the respite bought by Praetor's and the assault force's bravura, would abandon the towers and defend the walls in the absence of the Tactical squads. Lok assumed command position over the gatehouse and was charged to hold the iron fortress in case N'keln needed to order a retreat.
Even as ork blood spat across his visor, Tsu'gan knew there would no such retreat. The Salamanders were committed now. It was a simple matter of do or die.
A cleaver rang against his pauldron, spitting sparks, and he staggered. The ork assailing him lunged forward, strings of spittle punched from its maw on stinking breath. Tsu'gan rammed his bolter's muzzle into the beast's mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter burst out the back of the ork's head, mixing with skull fragments.
Tiberon came in from the left and smashed the greenskin corpse aside, allowing Tsu'gan to drive forward. Iagon and Lazarus followed, maintaining pace with the implacable Firedrakes.
Praetor was battering his way to the ork warboss. Seeing prey and the prospect of a good fight, the immense leader of the greenskins spurred its biker-mounted entourage forwards. A thickening horde of orks still lay between it and the Terminators.
Assault cannon whining, the
scythed down a first rank of orks spilling from the throng with blades raised. More greenskins came in their stead and Tsu'gan met them with a bolter storm from his troopers.
Praetor exploited the slight gap, crushing the dead and wounded underfoot, as something huge lumbered into view. Orks scattered before it, bellowing and roaring for more carnage. A steel- plated machinery loomed. Trunk-bellied, resembling a can festooned with weapons and two razor-edged power claws, the greenskin war machine thundered forward on piston legs. One of the Firedrakes charged into its path, hammer aloft and crackling lightning. The machinery punched the warrior aside. Swinging its power claw, the crude creation clove a storm shield in two, overloading its force field and smashing its bearer to the ground. Buoyed by its own infernal momentum, the machine, with the band of orks following, drove a wedge into the Salamanders' spear formarion. The Firedrakes' tip fragmented apart. Praetor, desperate to close with the war machine, was engulfed by greenskins. Capering gretchin, heedless of death, clung madly to his arms and legs in an effort to slow the hero of Prometheus.
Honorious bathed the sergeant of the Firedrakes with his flamer, burning the diminutive greenskins off him like they were an infestation.
The ork war engine was rampaging still. Its pilot was obviously deranged, so fuelled by the psychic energy of the orks that the machine was almost unstoppable. It turned and fought in every direction, battering at the Firedrakes who surrounded it, but couldn't close.
Tsu'gan went to Praetor's aid, rushing on even as the flames from Honorious were still dying, and forging a bloody path with the rest of his squad. The pressure on the Firedrake sergeant lessened and he broke free, ramming an ork aside with his storm shield as he approached the ork machine that had scattered them.
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