Bad news everyone. I failed to take over the country of Estonia. In other news, the newest chapter if CitP is to be released any moment now. It makes more sense if you consider that I am writing this AN just before uploading this chapter.
Chaos is the Prize Chapter 52
"Fear has its use but cowardice has none."
-Mahatma Gandhi
"Not to call you a coward, master, but sometimes cowards do survive."
-Starscream
Orchid rushed into the corridor and instantly spotted Azuhrius and two of his operatives. Azuhrius was carrying one of the girls over his shoulders for a reason Orchid did not care to hear. He was in a hurry.
"Azuhrius!" Orchid cried out as he ran through the corridor.
Azuhrius and the two Hydra Network operatives turned to look at him. "Ah, good, you are here. We are heading for-"
"Where is the aircraft the White Fang bastards flew here with?!" Orchid cut him off as he pulled to a halt next to Kaltrina who took a couple of cautious steps back.
Azuhrius started to speak. "What? That does not matter. The White Fang is no longer a relevant factor for this mission, we are in the middle of-"
"It is important. Now tell me where their ship is!" Orchid pushed on, his voice filled with hurry. If he did not act fast, the remaining White Fang animals would leave and take her with them.
Azuhrius stared at Orchid for a moment, his green eyes narrowing with displeasure, but Orchid did not care. He had to find her again before it was too late, Azuhrius and the others would have to wait.
For a moment Azuhrius looked like he might refuse to give that information, but eventually, he turned to Kaltrina. "Show him the location," he said without emotion.
Kaltrina pulled out her scroll and started manipulating it.
Come on hurry up, Orchid thought.
Azuhrisu glanced back into the corridor where Orchid had come from. "Where is Mizudori?" he inquired about the meddlesome operative he had sent after Orchid. The one who had gotten in the way of Orchid and the parasol girl.
"The Atlesians shot her," Orchid said dismissively.
Kaltrina was finally done and showed her Scroll to Orchid. His eyes quickly pinpointed the hangar bay indicated by her, and he turned around as soon as he knew where to go. It was not far, maybe he could make it.
"Orchid! We are leaving!" Azuhrius cried after him, but Orchid ignored him for once. This was something he could not let slip from his fingers.
"Kaltrina, follow him and make sure you are back when it is time to go," Azuhrius said, and Orchid could hear Kaltrina running after him, but he ignored her tailing him. He had more important matters to focus on.
Sangur was sent flying across the massive loading deck and crashed against the far wall. He fell to the floor, rolled and was up on his feet in the next moment. The Paladin on the other end of the vast space started to close the distance again. Sangur did not let the hulking machine wait and charged forward to meet it in the center of the room once more.
The teeth of Skalathrax bit into the steely arm the machine used to protect itself, while the other metal hand came at Sangur with a devastating force. He managed to dodge the blow with instinct and battle reflexes and pushed on as much as he could, hammering with his axes and roaring with rage.
The Atlesian mech was so much bigger than Sangur. It was using its superior size, strength and reach to completely overpower him. It could not easily use its guns inside the station without damaging the surroundings especially when the enemy was close, but its metal fists were quite enough. Sangur's axes ground against the metal frame, doing little actual damage. Sangur could feel his Aura chipping away, while the Paladin could do this all day.
Sangur did the only thing he knew to do in such a situation. He attacked. He attacked and attacked and attacked, pushing forward with all the brutal violence he could muster. The Paladin was full of marks from his chain weapons, but he did not manage to break anything of actual consequence. This enemy did not bleed, it did not tire, and it did not relent.
The Paladin extended its arms and spun around, smashing one of Sangur's axes from his hand. The weapon flew across the deck, screeching to a halt on the of landing pads that were open to the air in four directions of the vast loading deck. Sangur glanced after his weapon, right before he turned his eyes to the metal fist coming for him.
Overwhelming combative dominance granted by superior technology, my one weakness, his nail-bitten and burning mind somehow managed to put together as a thought before he was sent flying after his weapon.
He crashed hard and rolled across the landing pad, pulling to a stop couple of meters before the ledge that would have sent him falling to the lower half of hourglass shaped station, maybe even far enough to toss him off the station completely. His mind felt concussed, and he slowly managed to turn over and pull himself to his hands and knees. He was still holding on firmly of his other axe.
Blood splattered the deck below him. He looked at the red liquid and hazily realized it was his own. His Aura had been broken. He was bleeding, though he was not sure where droplets of red were leaking across his breastplate were coming from. The faint lines of red reached the brass skull symbol in the middle of his chest before falling down to stain the metal deck, faintly staining the platform under him, filling his nostrils with the metallic stench. But blood was welcome. All blood was welcomed by the God on the Skull Throne.
Sangur raised his head and saw the Paladin approaching once again, emerging from inside of the station onto the landing pad. Sangur glanced to his side and moved to reclaim his other axe. He stood up, throwing his head back before focusing his bloodshot eyes onto the machine coming for him. His fingers started gunning the triggers of his axes, and the teeth roared.
The Paladin was still some distance away when the air was suddenly filled with the sound of large thruster engines. In the next moment, a hail of heavy caliber gunfire erupted from somewhere, raining against the Atlesian battlemech. The heavy armor was shredded and the joints were torn asunder by the relentless firepower, and soon the center frame of the Paladin erupted in a storm of metal wreckage. The machine fell down in pieces and stopped moving.
Sangur stared at his downed enemy for a long confused moment, stupidly standing his ground while the teeth of Skalathrax roared uselessly. Then he turned to look up at the sky.
A lone gunship of Atlesian design drifted in the air, its gatling gun still pointing at the destroyed Paladin. Sangur instantly recognized the Nostraman runes painted in the hull of the aircraft, spelling out its name. Night Reaver.
Sangur took shaky steps towards the edge of the landing pad as the gunship hovered closer, landing on to the pad right in front of him. The thrusters powered down, and the rear hatch of the thing started to open.
"Why fight fair when you have a high caliber rotor canon," Nox chuckled as he descended down the ramp to onto the pad and moved towards Sangur. "I see you are alive. I think we got out and into our craft right in time."
Sangur almost said he could have taken the Paladin, but he did not. Instead, he just grunted in acknowledgment.
"Well, I think it is starting to be past our welcome, time to get the hell out of here," Nox said as he looked at the station. "We already scavenged fuel from one of the other docks, so we got what we came for. I heard the Alpha Legion guys failed to take out the larger Anti-Air guns, so I think the others are in deep shit with their large airship. Unlike us with our nimble gunship."
"Fuck them!" came a shout from inside the vehicle, and Sangur saw Cerin's head popped out from the rear hatch.
"Yes," Nox agreed. "Let the Warp take them. We did our part, they failed with theirs. We are not going down with them so let's go before that Warp core explodes and literally breaks the hell loose."
Sangur threw his head back, adjusting his worn stance. "I am not leaving yet," he said.
Nox narrowed his eyes. "What did you say?"
"I am not retreating. I am going forward. I am going to kill our enemies..." Sangur said as blood dripped from his wounds, making his head feel light. "Blood for the Blood God…"
Nox looked at him for a long time, before nodding. "Okay. Sure, go on and get back to the killing. But before that…" He raised one of his talons that were closed into a loose fist. "Fist bump?"
Sangur frowned with confusion. He looked at the first offered to him, and then back at Nox. Then his put one of his axes away and lifted his own first. "Sure…" he said as he clumsily poked the silvery talons with his hand.
ZAAAPP~
Cerin looked as Sangur's frame went slacked and he crashed to the ground from the electric discharge of Nox's weapon. The one axe still in his hand fell to the deck. His eyes just went instantly empty and he folded like a pile of bloody bricks.
Nox did not waste any time. He moved to Sangur, used the dexterity of his raptor legs to throw Sangur's fallen axe onto him before he picked up the leg of the much bulkier Venatore. Nox started making his way back to the gunship, towing the unconscious Sangur after him and up the landing ramp.
"You know what I say to the God of Blood?" Nox quipped as he passed by Cerin and dragged Sangur into the cargo bay. "Not today."
The door was stuck half open, and the controls had been smashed, so Orchid had to push his hands into the opening and push the doors back with raw strength. The moment he spent opening the door allowed Kaltrina to catch up to him, but he paid her no mind. She peeked through the opening, and managed to catch a glimpse of White Fang members running away towards a cargo hauler at the end of the docking bay. Sh thought there was no way that Orchid could catch them.
Orchid pulled the door open with an angry shriek and pushed forward. "Find a way to close that bay door!" he barked at her almost desperately.
Kaltrina slipped into the room and right into cover as some of the White Fang thugs started shooting at their pursuers. She spotted a control station at the corner of the room near the door, and so she ran along cover to reach the station.
The station was a small closet-like space that covered her from weapon fire. She did was not familiar with the controls, but fortunately a large switch was very helpful tagged with a text that read "door" as well as its possible settings. It was currently open, so Kaltrina very quickly yanked it in the opposite direction.
The cargo hauler of the White Fang was already in the air and turning as the docking bay doors started to slid shut, cutting off the way to the clear sky. The aircraft turned, but it was too big to slip through the doors that were already too narrow for its large bulk.
Orchid had stopped running and was now carefully making confident steps towards the hovering aircraft, loosening his muscles and spinning the sword in his hand. It seemed like he had realized his prey could not escape and was now stalking towards it like a predator taking its time.
The dock doors were half closed when the cargo bay of the aircraft opened and turned towards the closing bay doors. Some White Fang uniformed figures leaned out and apparently activated their semblance. There were multiple flying balls of strange light that flew against the closing doors. They unraveled to form web-like strings that ensnared the door mechanism and halted its movement by pushing against them. Another semblance was a large appendage made of ice like energy that smashed against the doors, and together with the light web started to push them open again. The system started letting out warning sounds, and before Kaltrina knew what happened the doors slid open as the mechanism disengaged them from meeting resistance. The system was probably programmed to open the doors if it seemed like they were colliding with something.
Orchid let out an outraged cry, but it was already too late. In the next moment the doors were fully open again, and a moment later the cargo hauler had flown out and disappeared from sight.
Kaltrina carefully exited the control station and approached Orchid. The Venatore was standing in the middle of the bay, staring out from the open doors at the blue sky, not moving a muscle. Kaltrina reached him but stayed cautiously away from sword's reach.
"We need to get back to Azuhrius," Kaltrina said after a moment, trying to sound neutral enough not to agitate a violent response from Orchid.
Orchid stood there for a while longer, simply staring after the ship that has slipped away from him. Then he attached his sword to his belt, calmly turned around without sparing a glance at Kaltrina, and almost sadly started walking away with his shoulders down and hands behind his back.
Maroos reached a junction of corridors, checked all directions for enemies and continued on. He came across broken androids all around. Vermilion was a few steps after him, clenching his icon that had been splattered with blood from his enemies.
The way they had tried just a moment ago had been overrun by the Atlesian machines, and so they had to take a longer route to the airship dock. Thought what use it would be with the station's anti-air guns still fully operational remained to be seen. Maroos uttered a prayer to the Gods just as they turned a corner and suddenly found the floor missing from under them.
They fell to the vast loading deck bellow through a whole that had probably been created by the explosion a while ago. The whole floor of the corridor was simply torn right open, and in their hurry Maroos and Vermilion failed to stop and just went along with that change in the path ahead, jumping down without much effort. That carelessness soon backfired them, literally, when a huge energy bold hit Vermilion center mass and send him flying across the vast loading deck with tremendous force.
Maroos barely managed to catch a glimpse of Vermilion hitting the side of one of the doors open to the air, and in the next moment the momentum had carried him out into the open air and over the edge of the platform. Maroos quickly decided he could do nothing for Vermilion and kept on running, even as he spotted the Paladin moving at the other end of the vast space, its gun moving to track him.
Maroos made some evasive jumps that made him harder to target, and the Paladin failed to fire before he had made his way to the nearest portal that leads out of the loading area. When he had made far enough that he was safe from the Paladin that could not follow into the tight corridors and stairs, Maroos stopped to check his heading.
The sudden encounter had made him lose his direction, but he soon saw floor markings that allowed him to get a pretty good idea where he was in relation to the airship. He was getting ready to move again, for if he did not hurry, the other Legionnaires would undock the airship and leave him behind. A sudden sight, however, stopped him.
There were a couple of Atlesian corpses by the stairs he was about to take. They were of little interest to him, but his eyes caught something that made him halt in his steps. There were blood splatters staining the floor and the rear walls. And past the stairs at the start of a mew corridor, was a blood splatter in almost perfect form of an eight-pointed star.
Maroos recognized it immediately and he moved to take a closer look at the blood signs that was far too elaborate and smear free to be pure happenstance. It was the bloody eightfold star Maroos had seen in his visions, the very visions that had been the start of this whole endeavor. The Word of Lorgar and the will of the God had shown him a fortress in the sky, the prize that was the airship, the metal army that was the androids. And finally, the holy eightfold drawn in blood that would show the way…
Maroos breathed in deep as his heart kept hammering. This was it. This was the sign. The way to escape was through the stairs, but it was the corridor into another direction that was marked by the divine.
Maroos considered this half foreseen choice but a moment. This was the sign. Yes, he was fully aware he would probably die if he did not reach the window of escape. The Atlesian would eventually run him down and kill him. Perhaps that would happen if he did not take the stairs.
But above all things, he needed to follow the path indicated by the Word of Lorgar.
So Maroos took firmly the step past the stairs and continued down the corridor towards whatever waited for him, prayer on his lips.
In case you don't remember, Maroos is referring to the visions at the start of chapter 31. Still the finishing chapters of 2.5 to be written, but we are getting there.
Leave a review if you fee like it and have a nice day.
