Demolitions Specialist Jan Glaron is a happy man. When he was growing up in the shanty town of tunnel 77-56-B he had to fight for every meal that came his way. Fists, knives, guns…bombs. Whatever he could get his hands on he used. The Imperial Guard just made his equipment standard issue. Now he's setting melta-bombs against a supposedly unbreachable gate while an entire Imperial Army Group waits behind him. The stink of fyceline and ozone is heavy almost obscuring the scent of scorched flesh. The magnetic hum of the melta-bomb in his hand practically leaping to meet the surface of the gate broadens his smile.
There's nothing he enjoys more than blowing something up. It was no surprise to B-Company that he was selected for the Company Command Squad and issued with both the demolitions charges and a Kantreal-pattern Grenade Launcher. His status as the premier breacher in the company affords him a carapace plate that protects his chest and back leaving the protection of his arms and legs to heavy flak-plates. A heavy bag slung over his back contains his collection of breaching charges, demolitions packs, and parts to make more of the same…along with another twenty rounds for his precious grenade launcher "Boomer."
Another bandolier of ten is strung across his chest and coupled with the five already loaded in the cylinder brings his count to thirty-five mixed armor piercing and fragmentation grenades. It's almost not worth mentioning the heavy laspistol on his thigh and the serrated combat knife with the spiked knuckled guard sheathed at his hip.
"Last charge is set! Cover me!" he barks into his helmet vox-bead. The lasfire whipping back and forth increases along the Imperial line peppering the battlements and driving the defenders back into cover. The breacher makes a break for cover muttering a prayer to the Emperor with every step that he isn't shot in the back. No one wants to get incinerated by the thermal backwash of their own melta-bombs. Arms and legs pumping hard he dives into the safety of a broken bunker and into the arms of Captain Malgren.
The rest of the Command Squad, along with two rifle squads, is packed into the same bunker that Jan breached himself with a brace of krak-grenades slaved to one detonator. The remnants of the former occupants are still splattered across the floor. The Captain drags the breacher away from the doorway just as a flurry of lasbolts punch fist sized holes in the dirt floor.
"A little close there don't you think?" the Captain quips with a grin.
"You know me sir, always on the edge."
"A mystery how you still have all of your fingers…" vox-operator Hansel Jalon mutters as he secures his set in the hard-sided case.
"I'm very good with my hands. Ask your sister."
"Lock it up! Blow the charges on my mark!" All levity is cast aside in favor of the stern professionalism hammered into their hearts and minds over their months of training and indoctrination.
"Fix bayonets and prepare to charge." Bayonet lugs rattle and click together at the end of lasguns while last prayers are muttered. Jan hefts the detonator. A mad grin threatens to split his grime smeared face wide open. A few of the other Acid-Dogs shuffle away from him…just as a precaution.
"Blow it." The detonator beeps once. The melta charges hiss as they detonate like a million snakes expressing their anger at once. One of the strongest materials in the galaxy melts like ice before the sun. Whole sections of the once impenetrable portal are incinerated leaving the gates open. The battlefield falls silent for a moment before Captain Malgren draws his sword and sucks in a breath.
"Charge!"
One word sends a million men and a hundred thousand tanks into motion. The 89th Mordant Acid-Dogs and B-Company leading the way. Seven thousand men and women roar their fury and charge across the battered fields towards the gate. Jan Glaron leads the way at full speed. Scorched corpses piled on the other side of the gate tell of the ramshackle defenses drawn up to slow the Guard before the gate. Jan grins and raises Boomer to just the right angle, sighting on a full squad emerging from a defaced Chimera.
The heavy grenade launcher coughs, stock kicking into his shoulder like a whipped grox, spitting a forty-millimeter grenade on a burst of compressed air…right into the Chimera's troop hold. The grenade detonates in the squad leader's lap killing the entire squad and detonating the power stack supplying the turret mounted multi-laser. The entire vehicle detonates in a storm of shrapnel and fire further wounding or killing a score of heretics. Acid-Dogs fill the air with searing lasbolts cutting down the undisciplined traitor PDF units and cultists with a mechanical efficiency. Months of training and combat experience honing their aim until ninety percent of shots fired hit their targets even in the heat of combat.
The charge doesn't stop. Thousands of roaring Imperials slam into the disorganized heretics. Bayonets first. Jan follows the Captain into the madness, firing his grenade launcher into emplacements and the few disciplined formations that he can find. Anything to break the enemy. With lasfire, bayonet, and rifle butt the 89th opens a breach. Bodies pile on both sides.
But the Imperials will not be stopped now.
Armor support rumbles through the gate; a company of Leman Russ Demolisher and Punisher variants along with Chimeras and their Cadian Shock Troops lending their weight to the Mordant advance. Jan grins savagely and fires the final grenade in his cylinder into a bunker's firing slit, landing the fragmentation charge on the gunner's chest and obliterating his weapon at the same time.
"For the Emperor and the 89th! Acid-Dogs, charge!" a familiar booming voices orders buoyed on the fires of faith. Commissar Falkner emerges from the press of bodies surrounded by the black armored forms of his cadets, his power sword ignited and raised as a banner. His coat flaps around him in the blast waves of mortar shells pounding the men in the gateway. The bolt pistol clutched in his other hand is as menacing as the enemy, the voice of the Emperor manifesting His displeasure. The men fight harder under his hard eyes driving the heretics back step by bloody step.
More and more men pour into the breach uncaring of their losses. Climbing over their own dead to get at the enemy. Jan calmly reloads Boomer beside the Captain slipping fat shells into the cylinder. Death is held in his hands. He spins the cylinder until the single krak charge is set in the barrel and brings it to his shoulder. The heavy weapon bucks like an angry grox against his shoulder spitting the armor piercing charge into a traitor Leman Russ' turret. The shaped charge detonates sending a lance of superheated copper through a weak weld above the mantlet and through the breach of the gun behind it. Just in time to set off the high-explosive shell being loaded into it and ripping the turret apart from the inside.
The tank grinds to a stop sparing a platoon from its cannon and three heavy bolters. The 89th carries on without stopping until the breach is well and truly secured. A halt is called for the regiment allowing for the logistics trucks to roll up with their beds loaded down with ammunition and armor.
Jan eagerly claims his replacement grenades and steps back. He takes only what he needs to replace his spent munitions…and replace the melta-bombs with conventional demolitions packs. No more gates for him to break. Demo-packs are more versatile anyways. After another fifteen minutes of patching wounds and taking water the 89th is given marching orders.
"Frak my life!" Jan snarls slamming into cover behind a fallen column. Faith Square was once the heart of the Holy Quarter of Damios City. The pride of Damios Prime with three massive cathedrals and statues of all the loyal Primarchs and major Saints carved from the black stone so common to the planet. It was the first place the heretics defiled. Wooden scaffolding set about the square are decorated with the flayed bodies of the priests and confessors that once spread the Faith. The macabre and infuriating display stretching as high as the grandest cathedral…and providing a perfect nest for a few snipers to aim down on B-Company who was assigned to take it from them.
"Frakking officers, and their frakking great ideas! Yeah…good ways to get us poor grunts killed," he mutters viciously as he drops his demo-bag to the ground between his legs. The Captain's grand idea, no doubt sent from Holy Terra by the Emperor himself, is to send poor Jan Glaron ahead of everyone else. And destroy the base of the scaffolding. Without getting shot.
By snipers.
Frak the good idea fairy. And officers. And snipers.
"I'm so going to die…bah! I'll haunt the Captain later! Make big boom now!" He piles three demo-packs at his feet and slaves all three to the same detonator in a flurry of button pushing and wire cutting. His arm strains to throw all three packs to just the right place, shifting along the length of the column to avoid popping up in the same place and getting shot. Lasfire digs divots in the fluted pillar peppering him with shards of stone. But he remains unharmed. A savage grin splits his face as he triggers the detonator and gets real friendly with the side of the pillar. The charges detonate with a sound like thunder and a savage shockwave that lifts him a solid five centimeters off the ground for a moment.
Fire and raw force shatter the scaffolding along one side. The whole structure sags and groans under its own weight. The snipers fall like rain to hang at the ends of ropes wrapped around their waists. Helpless to escape their deaths when the entire thing falls like a house of cards. For a solid thirty seconds all Jan can hear is the crashing, cracking, booming of the thick beams slamming into the ground around him. Splinters patter against his armor and he presses closer to the stone. A beam slams into the pillar above him and cracks in half slamming one end into his pauldron and bruising the muscle beneath it.
By the time everything settles down he can finally open his eyes. Only to find that what hit his shoulder wasn't wood at all: but the flayed skull of one of the priests hanging from that beam. He freezes and stares at it for a long moment. His mind ground to a halt in shock. When the rest of B-Company comes forward one shakes him by the bruised shoulder starting it again. He blinks behind the dark sunglasses every man in the 89th is forced to wear to see through the bright sun. Living in a darkened tunnel for your entire life doesn't endear you to a flaming ball of gas and light.
"Throne…am I hit that bad?"
No one manages to laugh.
The final barrier to the reclamation of the city is a monster of iron and ferrocrete. A fortress with a still broken gate but guarded by a lot of really. Big. Guns. Almost a million men are halted by this monster and the three-hundred thousand corrupted souls within it.
Safe in their command bunker, the General and his staff plan the final assault. Regiments are shifted to better follow each other into the meat grinder sure to come. There are no tanks in the vanguard. The General exemplifies the cruelty of war by sacrificing an entire Regiment…just to probe the defenses. Not trusting any of the hundreds of spotters and snipers in his army to give him the information he needs he'll buy the intelligence with blood.
The 89th Mordant breathes a collective sigh of relief at being put in the second wave behind the Penal Legion being sacrificed to the brutal calculus of war. The hardened tankers of the Minnervan 3rd stand with them in their hundreds of Leman Russ main battle tanks. The priests prowl around the squads giving their final benedictions and swinging incense about the lines. Jan retreats from the others for a time to say his own prayers.
A simple ritual he undergoes before every assault. Boomer is slung over his shoulder in exchange for his combat knife which he rams into a building's wall. He reaches under his chest plate and removes the silver Aquila necklace he keeps around his neck. A simple and battered piece that isn't worth much…but the Regimental Ecclesiarch blessed it himself with a bath of holy water and a quick prayer before the Regiment's first drop. He hangs the necklace on his knife's hilt and makes the sign of the Aquila and bows his head.
His prayers are not for salvation of his soul, or those of his comrades. The priests are bothering the Emperor with those more than enough. No, he prays only that he completes the tasks set before him: the breaking of the enemy with demolition pack, grenade, and blade. The words tattooed across his back on a flowing banner, above the Saint Celestine herself, are his way of life. He knows no other way to live now.
The call is spread and the Penal Legion charges forward. To their redemption and absolution. To their deaths. Demolitions Specialist Jan Glaron hefts Boomer and joins the lines. There will be more killing to be done before he can truly rest.
The Gallery of Conquests was once a grand affair. Banners stretched from the vaulted ceilings to the mosaic floors. Each a triumph of Hydratus Prime's past. Guardsmen fighting alongside Astartes and other forces of the Imperium. Orks, Eldar, Heretics, Tyranids. All have their place beneath the boots of the Guardsmen. Magnificent busts of leaders long past sat in alcoves to be admired and have their stories told to each generation of PDF troops that tread the gallery.
That time is gone.
The banners are burnt.
The mosaic floors are smeared over with grime and blood in the twisted characters of Chaos' many dialects.
The busts are shattered or used as target practice. Some decorate the now shattered barricade as part of the defenses hastily constructed by the last resistance before the Imperial Reclamation.
Jan sighs and reloads Boomer. Bruises along his legs and arms throb where his armor deflected solid shot…or the heavy recoil of Boomer turns his shoulder blue. Exhaustion drags at his limbs, but he carries on without complaint. As does the rest of the 89th. No respite or mercy.
Stepping over the corpses of the Penal Legionnaires presents a new challenge as they managed to clear the first barricade but not the second before the 89th moved into support. Their bodies paved the way to enter the fortress…but now they slow the advance enough that the enemy can take potshots all they like. Acid-Dogs storm forward using the barricades meant to keep them out as cover.
Lasfire ripples from the Mordant line peppering the hostile position deeper within the gallery. Jan sucks in a breath and pops to his feet with Boomer pressed to his shoulder. A lasbolt sears past his shoulder shattering the flak plate forming his pauldron and jerking his aim. He corrects it and fires while taking another pair of lasbolts to the chest. Neither shot manages to penetrate the carapace plate but they do knock him down on his ass. Air leaves his lungs in a whoosh while his grenade sails through the air. It lands between a pair of poorly secured mobile barriers, the kind kept in storage closets for later use in the heat of combat, and effectively blows a hole in the once solid barricade.
"You alright!?" Vanderfiend, a rifleman in 2nd squad asks while firing a flurry of lasbolt over the barricade. Jan beats his fist against his chest plate and nods before pushing to his feet.
"Alright B-Company! It's been a long day so let's finish this quick! Prepare to charge!" the Captain stands tall and proud behind the cover of a spar jutting the mess of piled junk the heretics called a barricade. His sword is gripped in his hand, shaking ever so slightly. The only sign of the nerves thrumming through him like the rest of the men. B-Company has been at the tip of the spear for the entire assault and it's starting to wear on them. But they're Acid-Dogs. No one tougher.
Jan pops Boomer's cylinder and slips in a pair of replacement grenades. It snaps shut and he slings Boomer over his head. His hands slip his pistol and blade free of their confinement to the beat of his thundering heart. A deep breath rattles through his smoke ravaged lungs.
"Emperor guide my steps…"
"Charge!" Acid-Dogs roar in challenge and savage battle lust. Leaping over the barricade while firing their weapons at max cycle peppering the heretic positions. It doesn't save many of them. Good men stumble and die in the face of the return fire. Red mist puffing from their wounds as their flesh is flash cooked by the intense heat of lasfire. A man beside him losses his head when a lasbolt slams into his face.
The man's skull popping like a melon and spraying him with bits of bone and brains and blood. He doesn't stop. A feral madness has gripped his mind propelling him forward through the torrent of lasfire and solid shot while his brothers fall around him. Something smacks into his thigh and he stumbles for a step. Those forty meters seeming to be a thousand. But then, seemingly without warning, he's there.
Instinct takes over. Instinct and the experience of living through years of savage gang-on-gang fighting that blazes throughout his home. His laspistol spits death seemingly with a mind of its own, directing his hand without conscious thought. A foot lashes out crushing a crouched traitor's throat making her eyes bulge among the eye-itching markings cut into her skin. His knife, sharpened to a monomolecular edge, opens a man from balls to throat then turns to disembowel another before he can fire the crude scattergun in his hands.
Again, and again, and again he kills. Targets seeming to appear of their own free will. He welcomes them with blade and lasfire and clenched fist. Never relenting. Some small part of his feral mind recognizes the men of B-Company as friendlies and ignores them. There are plenty to kill without turning on his own.
A bayonet rips into his arm holding his pistol. The cold pain of the wound only serves to anger him. That rage turns to strength in his left arm driving his blade through the heretic's skull with enough force to pierce the flak helmet on the other side of the skull. A savage snarl twists Jan's lips when the bayonet rips free further tearing the muscles in his arm. His wild eyes flick around searching for the next target but find none. A disappointment.
"B-Company on me! The rest of the Regiment is pushing up. If you're cut call a sawbones, no heroes!" the Captain barks. His blade hissing with the blood of heretics boiling away against the energy field. He gives no hint of the exhaustion that must be dragging him down like the rest of his men, something that maintains his image as the indomitable Captain and leader of his men. But not something that escapes the attention of a roving medicae who instantly zeroes in on the wound along the Captain's thigh. The officer's complaining is humorous…right until another one forcefully pushes him down.
"Dumbass grunts always getting hurt and making me do work…do you know how close this blade was to the brachial artery?" the old man grunts rummaging around in his blood slicked medical bag.
"No but you're about to tell me."
"Don't sass me boy! You bleed out and see how you can kill heretics then!?"
"The Emperor will raise me as a Saint of course." He dodges the expected cuff to the head with a small grin. The medicae grumbles and pulls a little harder than necessary on the stitches.
Three hours. For three hours the 89th has pressed against the heretic lines without respite. Jan's collection of bruises and cuts grows by the minutes while his ammunition drains steadily. Many places require him to take up a standard lasgun when Boomer becomes more of a liability to himself and the rest of the 89th. The standard issue Kantreal piece is a good rifle but it's not Boomer.
Somewhere along the way a bullet managed to slip between his flak plates and score a gash along his thigh just above his knee and required a massive patch to keep it from bleeding too much. That of course just ends up hampering his movement rather than only stopping the bleeding but that's better than flooding his boot with his own blood.
A heretic appears from the piles of dead littering the halls and attempts to ram a rusty blade into the Captain's back only to receive Jan's rifle butt to the head and a half-dozen lasbolts to the face. No one reacts to it. Until lasfire and solid shot comes screaming through the air cutting down the point-squad.
A solid slug slams into his lasgun rendering it inoperable so he throws it at the charging heretics. A sort of grim satisfaction grows in his chest when the weapon explodes in their faces, a fitting end for the faithful weapon. He rips his pistol and knife free again and leaps into the fray. Stab, shot, slash, punch, kick, bite. Savagery incarnate.
A backhand with the side of his heavy pistol snaps a heretic around and onto the shimmering edge of the Captain's blade. A pair of searing lasbolts punches a massive muscle-bound mutant back into the arms of its fellows with a piercing screech of pain. Jan is among them in a heartbeat plundering their tainted flesh with the edge of his blade.
Lasfire, shouting, and the sound of ripping flesh fills the air of the narrow tunnel. A man stumbles past Jan with half his face missing. Blood shining against the exposed muscle. He pushes aside his revulsion and charges the one responsible driving his weight behind his shoulder into the burly mutant's chest before it can bring its heavy cleaver to bear. He rears back and roars his anger while driving the spiked guard of his knife into the mutant's face nearly caving its skull in on the third blow. He steps back and fires a single lasbolt into its skull.
The skull comes apart under the force of the rapidly expanding brain behind it. He ignores the brain matter that splatters across his front and moves on to the next threat. A screeching split-faced monster appears in his face. Instinct brings the knife up in a slashing motion that cuts through the branded flesh of the mutant's stomach. The laspistol snaps up emptying the last five shots in the power cell into the mutant's chest. It is thrown back trailing red mist and throws off another's aim that would have killed a wounded Vanderfiend.
Jan shoves the pistol back into the holster and leaps onto the fallen mutant. His knees pin the creature's arms down and he plunges his knife into its chest over, and over again. It screeches and thrashes until he finds its heart. Tainted blood coats his hands and arms while he takes heavy breaths.
Silence descends on the corridor, broken only by the heavy breathing of the survivors trying to regain their senses.
"On your feet 89th! The Emperor's work is not yet done today!" Commissar Falkner, as indomitable as ever, snaps. His boots thumb loudly in the silence of the charnel house the corridor has become. Slowly, weighed down by their exhaustion, B-Company gains its feet. Jan sighs heavily and picks up a new lasgun.
The Commissar is right: their work isn't done yet.
Two hours later, five hours into the assault on the Gallery of Conquests, they arrive at the final chamber. All the bleeding, and dying, and killing has led to this.
"Should have kept the melta-bombs…" Jan mutters to himself. While jury-rigging a shaped charge using three pieces of sheet metal, a kilo of high explosives, and a roll of tape. Ugly, and cobbled together as it is it should be enough to blow the heavy door off its hinges. He does his best to ignore the unholy iconography that replaced the images of Saints which leer down at him as he withdraws from the blast radius.
"What do you think?" the Captain asks tiredly. Jan shrugs and pops the cylinder on Boomer open. Experience has proven that whatever is on the other side of the door will not be the normal heretics and traitor Guardsmen that they have been fighting. It never is when the Archenemy makes their last stand. There is always one last horror, one last unstoppable monster that can be unleashed.
"We're in for a hard fight and then some shore leave. Either way I get to blow the door."
"Of course, that's what you care about."
"Never pretended otherwise sir. Ready to finish this dance?"
"Set the beat mister Glaron." The cobbled together charge detonates and blows a hole through the center of the gate shattering the bar set across the two halves. The gate flops open and immediately the air changes. Hoar frost grows around the edges of the door rapidly cooling the glowing metal about the breech. An invisible charge crackles through the air making the hairs on the back of Jan's neck stand on end and a shiver down his spine.
Whispers in the shadows drip sweet seduction and maddening incomprehensible offers. A shadow moves in the corner of his eye making his hands shake for a moment before hatred burns away the fear in an inferno. One word spreads throughout B-Company, spat like a curse and whispered like a prayer.
"Psyker."
A torrent of lasfire, bolts, grenades, and flames bathes the gateway. Enough firepower to kill an Astartes encased in Power Armor several times over. The Commissar bellows curses against the witch and heretic alike alongside the bolts screaming from his pistol. Standing tall and proud in the face of the Archenemy's last horror on the field. A paragon of Imperial might, fighting spirit, and nobility.
He is the first to die.
Bolts of eldritch lightning, jagged and searing purple, burst from the gateway and strike the Commissar center mass. His body comes apart in an explosion of gore, pieces of him raining over First Platoon and the Company Command Squad. The fire doesn't slacken when the cackling Psyker floats through the gate. Lasfire washes off a crackling shield of raw Warp power leaving the chained and tattooed abomination behind it untouched.
Its eyes are a milky white but glow with the same eldritch power swirling about its in a personal storm. Tattered robes likely defaced priest vestments hang from its waist and shoulders. Every inch of skin and cloth is daubed in eye-aching symbols from a language that shouldn't exist. Pale skin gleams like quicksilver in the light of the crackling lightning. Chains jingle from hooks through the skin of its back and trail against the ground.
Jan snarls and empties Boomer's cylinder as fast as he can before popping it open to reload. Spent casings tumble to the ground at his feet even as he rips the next fresh shell from his bandoleer. He doesn't load the full cylinder, that would require pausing to take off his pack to access the rest of his shells. Instead he snaps it shut with just three in the cylinder. Lightning snaps and crackles through the air around him incinerating more of B-Company.
The cylinder snaps back into place with a hearty, hollow chunk. Time seems to slow for a moment as he looks up Boomer already pressed to his shoulder. Lightning flashes so brightly that his eyes hurt even behind his sunglasses. Later he'll blame shock for how quickly his finger pulled the trigger.
The familiar recoil hammers his shoulder and spits the krak grenade into the Psyker's chest the moment its shield flickers. The world disappears in a haze of purple.