This Is Our Warhammer Journey Chapter 98: A Long Day

[741.M41-P - 13:13]

January the fourth by the Terran calendar. This was destined to be a long day.

The bombardnt from the Tyranid swarm had not ceased for three days. The churning dust clouds almost completely blotted out the light from the sky, plunging the noon ti zone where the reliquary was located into pitch-black night.

The dim light illuminated the soldiers' dust-covered weapons. As the artillery fire finally paused, the Crusade Force instinctively shook the radioactive fallout from their bodies. Yulia grabbed the New Recruit beside her, who was still screaming obliviously despite the lull in the bombardnt, and sprinted out of the bunker.

"Quick, fireteams back to your positions!"

A lasgun shot lted a stray Ripper that had slipped through the net as Yulia's voice crackled over the radio.

"Yes, Captain!"

Sporadic acknowledgnts echoed from the other end of the comms.

Yulia, however, let out a long sigh of relief.

Thank the Emperor. When the heresy first broke out, her electric stove at ho would not even turn on.

She then scrambled up to a firing point. The field of view here was sowhat narrow, but the advantage was the thick Steel flanking her, providing lateral cover. In the salient they were holding, that could save a life.

At the tip of the defensive line, the swarm had already breached the heavy artillery coverage zone. Scattered artillery beasts that had survived the Adeptus Astartes' precision decapitation strikes began firing directly from their dorsal cannons. anwhile, they drove massive hordes of troops forward in wave after wave of charges, refusing to give humanity even a mont to catch its breath.

The tal had already turned charred black. Flesh, carapace, and tal lted together after being scorched, fusing into a bizarre inorganic sludge. Wails, shouts, and roars drifted from afar. An Ard Zealot rushed to the front of the trench with a rifle in hand, but the mont he stood up, a stray projectile struck him, and his head exploded like a waterlon.

Flar troops tasked with close-quarters defense in the trenches sward forward, using roaring fire to reduce the corpse, along with the flesh-eating borers inside it, to drifting ash.

The horrifying sight did not frighten the others. Muscles tensed, they maintained a steady stream of suppressing fire. Las-beams tore into the densely packed swarm, stemming the tide of the assault.

"Fire flares at the swarm's position!"

Chewing on nutrient gruel, Yulia listened to the orders barking in her earpiece and hurriedly fired a flare toward the approaching vanguard of the hive.

At the sa ti, the other two fireteams also launched flares toward the most heavily concentrated areas.

The brilliant phosphorus illuminated three coordinates like beacons of light. Almost instantly, the realigned artillery rapidly blanketed the area once more.

The density of the enemy's firepower dropped.

'It seems the situation in other sectors is far more critical.'

Tossing aside an overheated power pack and snapping a fresh one into place, Yulia stared coldly at the swarm ahead, chanically aiming and firing.

As the war dragged on to this point, morale had plumted and rebounded several tis, only to beco the most stable elent in less than a week's ti.

This was because everyone had recognized a simple truth: these enemies were here to exterminate them completely, and the Adeptus Astartes would fight alongside them to the very last mont.

So, what else was there to say?

Fight! Fight until not a single enemy remained, or until not a single human was left standing!

War was cruel. It used death to eliminate the weak and select the strong. The corpses of the fallen were reduced to dust to prevent the swarm from reclaiming their biomass, while the surviving warriors bathed in the ashes of their comrades, only sharpening themselves like newly tempered blades.

If there was anything else to say, it was sheer, unadulterated exhaustion.

Lord Romulus had provided ample weapons, food, and dicine. Yet, fighting up to this point, their digestive systems were desperately wringing out every ounce of nutrition, and the combat stimms had been injected so many tis they were pushing people into delirium. Still, the bugs sward forward endlessly.

The intensity of it all reminded her of the platform below that had changed hands multiple tis. The corpses there had piled up into small mountains, carbonized under boiling flas, firmly anchoring a battle standard that had repeatedly threatened to topple.

To survive, life had already burned itself to cinders.

"Tss!"

Her palm brushed against the barrel of the gun. The scorching heat snapped Yulia out of her chanical trigger-pulling trance.

She quickly reached back to pat the dical pouch on her waist.

The stimms were empty.

Making minute adjustnts to her angle so her continuous fire could suppress more enemies, Yulia pulled another syringe of combat stimms from her collar.

According to regulations, the use of combat narcotics was not to exceed the biological threshold of the human body. But with the battle reaching this catastrophic level, the quartermasters had stopped caring about such trivialities.

Basically, everyone carried an extra ration of combat stimms. The only reason they were packed separately was to serve as a grim reminder: once you injected this, you were essentially dead. It would cause total organ failure that was utterly beyond saving.

Heh, but if she did not inject it, she would die right now.

Staring at the encroaching hive forces, Yulia prepared to jam the syringe into her neck.

Just then, the structure of the salient they were occupying violently shuddered.

To her imnse frustration, the stimm injector slipped from her grasp and clattered to the ground. As she instantly thrust a hand out, blindly fumbling across the floor beneath her, her fingers brushed against sothing else—a set of freezing cold armor.

What?

Yulia tilted her head, the finger that had been continuously pulling the trigger freezing in place.

The plasma from the Tyranid artillery beasts had blasted the elevation of this entire position down by ten ters. How could there possibly be any tal left that was cold?

At that mont, she heard the thunderous roar of Heavy Bolter Rounds firing.

Yulia was startled. She imdiately perford a combat roll, retreating into the designated safe fallback zone.

Then, shifting her gaze, she witnessed a scene she would never forget for as long as she lived.

It was a Space Marine, wreathed in raging fire.

She could not make out his armor heraldry, nor could she discern his face. There was only the ever-burning fla.

"Stand down, soldier."

He stepped forward, single-handedly taking over the role of their entire fireteam. The bolter in his hands unleashed a seemingly inexhaustible torrent of shells.

"Leave this place to us."

Yulia stared blankly at the shattered remains of the stimm injector on the ground before nervously pressing her comms to report.

"Report. I have encountered an unknown Emperor's Angel. Their bodies are engulfed in flas."

There was a bout of dead silence on the other end. Just as Yulia began to wonder if the commander had been killed in action, the middle-aged man—a forr factory foreman turned commanding officer—finally spoke in a slow, asured tone.

"...Yes."

From a higher vantage point on the battlefield, he stared dumbfounded at the warzone below.

Ethereal fires ignited across the trenches. From the drifting embers, one burning Space Marine after another materialized.

"I see them too."

——

"Lord Romulus, the defenders at the second salient have sustained forty percent casualties."

"Lord Romulus, Chaplain Oliver is confird KIA. Casualties for the 31st Ard Zealots cannot be determined. Their command node is offline."

"Lord Romulus, reinforcents for the rearguard are incomplete. Shall we collapse the defensive line?"

The atmosphere in the command center was incredibly grim. Orderlies constantly rushed in with updated teletry. Those cold, clinical numbers represented squad after squad of human beings dying on the front lines.

"Compress the defensive positions in the salient. Have the 14th Reserve replace the line at Outpost 31. The rearguard will abandon reinforcent efforts and push forward."

Romulus's gaze swept rapidly across streams of data lists as he issued the cold, uncompromising orders.

There was not much he could do. The quality of the troops and their organizational structure did not allow for complex tactical maneuvers. No matter how much dark age technology he had at his disposal, it could only be used for rigid, sweeping bombardnts. All Romulus could do was morize the soldiers' nas and then order them to their deaths.

"Yes, my lord!"

Thanks to the shadow cast by the swarm in The Warp, at least the irritating static on the comms was gone.

But the bad news was that the pressure applied by the swarm was growing heavier by the second.

"My lord! Ergency transmission!"

"Patch it through."

"Lord Romulus, a completely new unit of Emperor's Angels has appeared on the frontline. Their bodies are engulfed in flas."

Hmm?

Romulus frowned. His mind almost instantly jumped to the Legion of the Damned, and then instinctively, he thought of his two companions still fighting in The Warp.

"What is their location?"

"They are everywhere."

The frontline commander's response was sowhat incoherent.

"Nearly every defensive line is reporting sightings of these Emperor's Angels. They are taking over the defense of the salients. There are many of them, and they are ordering us to fall back."

"Understood. Have the troops withdraw to the reserve lines."

Romulus wore an expression of profound astonishnt.

His connection with a portion of the Space Marines had been severed.

He could still receive their visual feeds, but he could no longer perfectly puppet their actions. It felt as though he were controlling a video ga character while soone else wrestled him for the controller.

Just what kind of stunt was Rases pulling this ti?

Romulus paused his train of thought. He was just about to manifest two more Space Marines to investigate when the heavy thud of power armor boots hitting the floor sounded behind him.

Almost all of the Space Marine forces had been deployed. The only ones left guarding the command center were a ten-man squad composed of Company Champions detached from the Black Templars and the Carcharodons.

Everyone snapped their heads like they had been electrocuted, staring at the Space Marine striding into the command center.

Such a scene had hardly occurred in the nearly three months of the siege.

"The defensive lines are well-designed."

The figure first appraised the tactical data in the command center before offering his assessnt, "But they are not aggressive enough."

The Transmigrators inherently valued human life far too much—a fatal weakness in this universe.

"Let them in. Liberation of the trench-holding fireteams will allow us to concentrate firepower and bleed them dry."

The Space Marine seed sowhat unaccustod to his own height. He reached out a hand, awkwardly lowered it, and only then traced several new routing lines across the hololith.

Such a maneuver completely disregarded the lives of the salient's defending troops. Furthermore, it demanded an exceptionally high caliber of soldiers to endure the siege; they would need to weather attacks from all directions and imdiately provide suppressive fire the mont the enemy faltered from attrition.

However, the troops currently holding the salients did not seem to be human anyway.

"You can command the Legion of the Damned?"

Romulus frowned, eyeing this Imperial Fist clad in the raint of a Black Templar.

"I can."

The Space Marine nodded without the slightest hesitation.

"Are you still willing to fight for humanity?"

Romulus asked again.

"I assure you, no matter how much Steel remains in the Soul residing within this body, I will always fight for humanity."

The Space Marine nodded once more.

"I will show you how I repel such an assault."

"Command of the defensive operations is yours. I will handle the logistics."

Romulus decisively stepped aside, yielding his position.

"Good."

The Space Marine nodded. He imdiately began consolidating the forces, relying on the continuously manifesting Legion of the Damned to relieve the utterly exhausted mortal troops.

The reason for doing this was to secure the Liberation of a large enough Fighting Force capable of enduring the swarm's Shadow in The Warp.

Because on the distant battlefield, in an area not far from Karna, a high-energy entity was rapidly approaching, flanked by an overwhelming mass of the swarm.

The Hive Mind had sworn to strike down that blazing banner and completely drown humanity in absolute despair.

"Karna."

Romulus warned, "Another high-energy entity is approaching your sector."

"It doesn't matter."

Karna's response crackled over the comms.

"Let them co!"