Title: Victory or Death.

Author: Knife Hand

Feedback: Constructive feedback appreciated, flames unappreciated

Spoilers: General for 40K and SAO

Rating: R

Disclaimer: I do not own Warhammer 40K or Sword Art Online.

Summary: Four Hundred Thousand players log into the much anticipated Warhammer 40K Apocalypse Online, only to find themselves trapped inside with no way out. 40K SAO crossover.

A/N: The second scene in this chapter is extremely violent, more so than anything before. You have been warned. If you wish to skip it, there are notes as to where it starts and stops.

The four Tech Adepts carefully picked their way through the charnel house of bodies. Nox knelt down, running a spectral analysis through one of her ocular implants. Ramnos was standing back a little, trying to piece together the sequencing of the scene in front of him. Selath was crouched down looking at blood splatter against the walls while Technos, who was part of Sealth's Knights of Mars Guild, was running a cursory post-mortem on one of the corpses.

This was not some slaughter of Imperial NPCs or a Guild that had gotten ambushed. No this was a group of the enemy, and normally the Tech Adepts would be more concerned with killing them than they would be in studying the corpses. This group of fifteen had not been killed by any of the known Guilds operating in this Manufactorum, nor had they been killed in a fire fight.

"Does everyone concur that this is a Spectre attack?" Ramnos asked, getting affirmative nods from the other Tech Adepts.

There had been several recorded 'Spectre' attacks in the recent months, each indicated by entire enemy units being wiped out without a normal assault, instead by stealth close combat with Bayonets. While it had crossed all their minds to call the attackers 'Ghosts', they had dubbed them 'Spectres' instead in deference to the famous Tanith Regiment.

"Wound pattern is consistent with Imperial Guard Bayonet training patterns and trace evidence indicates the same metals used in a Guard Bayonet." Technos said.

"Blood spatter indicates that most of the victims were laying down when the attack happened." Sealth added, running her hand along a dried blood spray.

"I suddenly feel like I'm in an episode of CSI Hephaestus." Nox said, before cocking her head. "They were asleep."

Ramnos cocked his head and suddenly the pattern made sense.

"She's right." Ramnos concurred.

There was evidence that there were not many Spectres but most of the target units were of decent size. Hitting the target units when they were mostly asleep made sense of this. Take out the few sentries quietly and then stalk from sleeping figure to sleeping figure.

"A small Guild or a Solo Player?" Technos asked.

"Defiantly a Solo, and less than a full squad too." Selath said, looking at the scene again in light of the new perspective.

"As few as two or three." Ramnos added. "It looks like a Guard Player, most likely an Infantry Commander, who lost most of their squad, doing hit and run attacks."

"Agreed." Selath said. "The only other option is too scary to contemplate."

"What's the other option?" Nox asked.

"The remnants of a squad that lost their Player." Selath replied.

All of the Tech Adepts shuddered at the thought of Squad NPCs going rogue and killing like this after their Player died.

(Extreme Violence begins here)

Kilith knocked aside the Stinging Scorpion's Chainsword with his two handed Power Maul and then stuck the Eldar on the chestplate, sending it sprawling. Sheathing the Power Maul in his back, he bent down and picked up the Stinging Scorpion and held it over his head with both arms before bringing it down hard, as he dropped into a kneeling position, hearing the hard crack as the Eldar's spine snapped and the slightly wetter sound of the spike at the top of his shin guard penetrating through the green armour and into the Eldar's back. Rolling the not quite dead Eldar off his knee, Kilith stood up and took a second to look around.

The rest of his squad were finishing off the Stinging Scorpions. The female mutant with stone skin, one of his first recruits and still only dressed in cargo pants and a tank top, had taken one of the Stinging Scorpion's Chainswords off them and was proceeding to dismember them with it, leaving the head for last, and laughing at the long spurts of blood flowing from the stumps of its arms as she moved on to its legs. Three Eye, his other initial recruit was bleeding out about ten metres behind the fight, having been hit several times by the Stinging Scorpions' pistols as they had charged which had turned his chest into something resembling minced meat.

Two of his squad, both with strength enhancing mutations, were ripping a Stinging Scorpion limb from limb with their bare hands, with gloriously sickening pops as the joints were dislocated and the inhuman screams of their victim occasionally being joined by the wet ripping sound of muscles ripping or their connections being torn from the bone.

The last member of his squad, whose mutation was useless but he was ruthless enough to attract Kilith's attention, had his opponent on the ground, held down by one foot placed firmly on the Eldar's chest, and was proceeding to decapitate the Eldar using an entrenching tool he had picked up somewhere, using the shovel blade on the more vulnerable seals at the neck, as the Eldar struggled and gripped the shaft of the tool trying unsuccessfully to hold back the blade. The Eldar's grunts of exertion turned into gurgles as the blade cut through the neck and finally, with the sound of grating and cracking bone, the head came away and the shovel blade clinked into the hard ground.

Off to his left he could see Moria's squad of fifteen cultists, without Moria herself, charging into a pair of Fire Dragons. About a third of the cultists were killed by the anti-tank Eldar before they got close, being turned into a wet, smoking mess by the powerful Eldar weapons. Once the cultists reached them, the Eldar were overwhelmed by the Cultists primitive clubs, sword and low grade pistols in an orgy of hacking and slashing. The fight ended quickly but only four of Moria's cultists made it out alive, several of the dead cultists not killed by the Eldar but by their fellow squad mates in the violent mêlée, leaving the area around the fight drenched in blood.

Moria herself was back with Jarnith in a Command Bunker, protected by thick walls and Jarnith's squad of fifteen cultists, who were armed with Autoguns and a Heavy Stubber. Kilith could have taken command of the raid but he preferred to be deep in the fighting, so he delegated strategy to Moria and Jarnith. Well strategy was a bit of a misnomer when it came to the Chaos forces. Moria and Jarnith's job was really to order all the squads forward to their next targets and to decide which squads got sacrificed to force the enemy into deadly ambushes or exposed positions. The only squad immune from the sacrifice order was Kilith's; partly because he protected them and if he died the two women would be victim to some of the less… controlled Chaos Players; partly because they were afraid he would survive the fight anyhow and take vengeance and partly because he, unlike most other men, actually was that good in bed.

Having done their job, Moria's remaining Cultist retreated back to her position at the Command Bunker while some Chaos Vehicles and Demon Engines controlled by Warpsmiths began to advance through the gap that had no anti-vehicle defences anymore, firing their deadly weapons at the more anti-infantry aligned Eldar. Turning attention from the rumbling vehicles, Kilith looked over his blood splattered squad. His one female Mutant had finished dismembering the Eldar corpse and was idly examining the Chainsword she had acquired, with thick blood dripping down both her face and the blade. Unable to resist himself, his pulse and libido racing from the killing and blood, Kilith stepped forward and kissed her passionately, jerking her head back hard with one hand and pulling her close with the other. Although her skin was grey and as tough as stone, it was still warm and supple under his ministrations. He had naturally slept with her many times, as he had with Moria, Jarnith and a half dozen other female players and NPCs, with and without their consent. Braking the kiss, Kilith drew the two powerful pistols he kept in holsters at his waist and ran off to find more enemies to kill and more blood to bath in.

While Kilith was a Chaos Undivided Player, dedicated to the service of all four Chaos Gods and had done both quests and other acts dedicated to all four Gods, at the moment he was defiantly feeling the presence of Khorne, the Blood God.

(Extreme Violence ends here)

The tossing and turning woke the female Guard Trooper. Taking a moment to gather her bearing she saw that she was in the small, out of the way, section of ductwork. It was her Sergeant's tossing that had woken her, and she quickly but silently moved to his side and wrapped her arms around him, which slowly began to ease his nightmare and still his restlessness. She more than understood why he had nightmares, she sometimes had them herself. He had been happier and more outgoing once, not the grim and silent figure he had become. That had been before The Ambush.

The squad, and three other squads of Guard, had been amongst the first to leave Cadmian for Macros' Garden, had been in the bloody Raid against the Ork World Boss. They had been prominent in the early stages of fighting on Hephaestus, until The Ambush. In desperate fighting, against overwhelming odds, one by one the Troopers and Sergeants had fallen. Her Sergeant had been hit badly and she had been hit in the arm and leg. Having fallen to the ground, she saw an open grate into the ventilation system. By that time all the rest of her squad were dead, so grabbing the scruff of her Sergeant's collar in her one good arm, she dragged him along with her one good leg into ventilation duct and closed the grate behind them. The other squads were completely wiped out within seconds of her closing the grate.

Once the ambushers were gone, and with her Sergeant still unconscious, she had cautiously exited the ventilation shaft and salvaged what she could from the corpses of the squads, mostly concentrating on food and medical supplies. She had taught herself how to treat her Sergeant and herself and they had stayed in that duct, unable to move her Sergeant far and unwilling to venture far from him, for a few days until he regained consciousness. In that time another Imperial force had come by and been Ambushed by the same group, but this force was larger and had both Elite Storm Trooper and those scary Skittarii and were able to defeat the ambushers. She had thought about venturing out to talk to them, maybe to get help for her Sergeant, but she was afraid that if she emerged immediately after the battle they would take her for an enemy and shoot her, and they moved on quickly, denying her the chance to talk with them.

The months following his awakening, they had learnt a new way to fight. Not the stand up, guns blazing that they had once used, but silent and stealthy. They had not spoken since the Ambush, but over time they had gotten to the stage where they did not need to speak, they knew each other so well, almost perfectly. She just wished that he would realise that she loved him.

As he finally stilled, she snuggled up next to him and fell asleep with her arms wrapped around him. Maybe one day he would know. Maybe it was the one thing work speaking to him about.

TBC…

A/N: Wow. The first chapter where The Hand does not make any appearance.