Disclaimer: I don't own warhammer, that belongs to GW. All technologies and characters native to 40k and the Horus Heresy, not made up by me, belong to Gdubs too. I do not own any aspect of Attack on Titan, those belong to Hajime Isayama.
Claimer: I do own the original character Warsmith Phidias Longinus of the 86th Great Company of the Fourth Legion Astartes, as well as all original characters and organizations of unspecified origin, i.e. not created by the wider warhammer community or GamesWorkshop, associated with the 86th Great Company and the attendant Expeditionary Fleet, including, but not limited to, the Legio Cauchinium and all characters directly under the umbrella of the 86th Great Company of the Iron Warriors.
AN: Good evening friends! I'm sorry for the delay, holidays hit me hard aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I also got really sick towards the middle of the month. Better now though. This chapter took a long time to write, and I had to cut a lot of plot points out just to make it into a reasonable task for current day me. It'll take me a while to get back to where I can write those fifteen thousand monstrosities, but goals!
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Doom King of Latveria: I'm working on the details! I used to be good at them, but I'm super out of shape at it right now. Been mostly reading light novels, and they can be choosy about what they decide to go into deep detail on. Here's the next chapter.
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Petrified with fear, Historia watched as the self-proclaimed Warsmith strode away from her, the ultimatum the giant had left ringing through her head. "Unconditional surrender… is that even an option?" She shook her head, they'd been planning the operation to return to Shiganshina and plug the hole in the wall, but now retaking Wall Maria seemed like a distant fantasy. Wall Rose was now under threat from the titans and the giants assembled outside the districts, and the people within the wall had moved from the final planning stage of an offensive push to the middle of a brand-new crisis.
She shook her head to clear it of the defeatist thoughts, then addressed Dot Pixis. "Send someone to cut Eren out before things escalate any further." Historia addressed the rest of the assembled officers, "I think Shiganshina is the least of our concerns now."
"We need to deploy observers immediately. If they can conjure stars and throw them at titans, they could be an asset when we can move on Shiganshina." Erwin stated, a hungry glint in his eye. "Why, if they're keeping the titans busy, then now would be the perfect time to move on Shiganshina. We just have to scale the wall someplace to the northeast or the northwest of Trost, cranes could lift our horses right over." He mused largely to himself, but Commander Pixis and General Zakly seemed to be nodding along.
"That seems like the way to make the best of a bad situation." Dot agreed, waving one of the MPs out to cut Eren free of his titan. "If we use Eren we could scratch-build the cranes somewhere out of sight of the giants' lines." He began to stroke an imaginary beard, a thoughtful look on his face.
General Zakly nodded, "I would endorse such a venture." He seemed a little distant from the consequences. He knew it wouldn't be his life on the line, though the old man seemed a little shaken by the appearance of the giants.
Shaking her head at the scheming men, Historia ran outside to make sure Eren was okay. She realized she probably should have cut him free herself, but her mind had been racing through the potential consequences of Eren's actions. Having seen him felled in one blow, even if he hadn't died, she feared that her people would not be able to fend off these 'Envoys of the Imperium,' and they'd be hard pressed to defend against them, "But we cannot submit."
As the MPs ripped Eren from his titan's nape, he let out a scream of incoherent rage. "They took Mikasa!" he shouted. He shook himself, attempting to reassert his self-control. "What's going on? What happened to my head? The last thing I remember is heat, and then nothing."
Historia looked over at him and released a sigh. "The Warsmith, as he referred to himself, hurled some kind of luminous ball at your head and it vanished in a flash of light." She explained. Her tone became more critical, "What did you think you were doing? They weren't hostile! They offered to exterminate the titans!"
"But they have Mikasa! Why do they have Mikasa?" Eren asked, growing frantic once more. He tried to grasp for his hair, but his arms were still mere stumps. Needing to release the nervous self-loathing, he began to gnash his teeth, inadvertently biting his cheeks.
"We didn't get a chance to ask before you attacked them." Historia's exasperated response came through slightly clenched teeth. "Now, if we oppose the giants, they have her as a prisoner."
Eren looked crestfallen as he began to understand the situation he'd caused. "So I… I gave them leverage?" His eyes went wide and a tinge of shame colored his voice as he continued. "We have to get her back!"
"We can't do anything rash, Eren." Historia cautioned. "For now, you need to refrain from assuming your titan form until after they've come back. It seems to arouse the suspicion of the giants."
The sound of distant explosions brought Reiner Braun, Bertholdt Hoover, and Zeke Yeager to the top of wall Maria. The trio of tall men were greeted by flashes of light in the distance, and the tallest of the three, Bertholdt, produced a pair of binoculars. As the tallest of the three, bertholdt could see the furthest. Though it would be a marginal difference at the bottom of the wall, the dark haired, severe featured youth could see about a kilometer further than his compatriots from the top. A disturbed look crossed his hollow features as he took in the fortifications he estimated to be about ten or twelve kilometers away. Three concentric lines of trenches encircled what looked like an airship landing site: two that appeared to have been reinforced with concrete, while the outermost line appeared abandoned, and consisted of earthworks. The distinctive trails left by extremely large tracked vehicles, likely earthmovers, radiated outward from the landing site, though they stopped abruptly after the second line. The lines were populated by oddly dressed men and grey figures nearly as tall as the smallest titans, and sometimes broader across, holding the trenchworks against waves of the man-eating beasts.
A flash of bright red light lanced through the distance and collided with a fifteen-meter-tall titan, vaporizing it and the surrounding area. The source of the flash was, or at least appeared to be, some kind of mechanical construct that towered over the battlefield at about the same height as the Armored Titan. Muzzle flashes drew his attention to the mechanical monstrosity's other arm as it spat high speed death at an uncountable rate. Every time a flash crossed Bertholdt's vision, a titan disappeared or clots of dirt and chunks of rock sailed through the air. "Reiner, you have to take a look at this." Bertholdt said, looking more hollow by the second, an ever so slight quaver in his voice as he passed the binoculars to the broad shouldered, blond young man.
Reiner accepted the binoculars and brought them to his eyes. A brief look of terror crossed his face before something almost like relief took its place and was quickly suppressed. A distant ball of blue-white light sailed through the air before colliding with a knot of titans, vaporizing some and sending the rest flying. "Too many of those titans aren't getting back up." Reiner commented, sounding a little nervous. Massive gouts of flame coming from the Titan sized machines caught his attention as titans turned torches fled away from the monstrous mechanism.
The bespectacled and bearded blond man, Zeke Yeager, tapped Reiner, indicating that he'd like the binoculars and his fellow infiltrator complied. "Let me see what's going on…" He trailed off as he brought the binoculars to his eyes and saw the sheer devastation wrought by the interlopers. "Here... We needed those titans for the ambush…" Zeke spun around to check to see if the titans he'd herded outside Shiganshina were still there, and was relieved to see that they still stood in place. They looked anxious, as if there were humans right in front of them and they wanted to resist Zeke's compulsion.
Zeke handed the binoculars back to Bertholdt. "Well we've got to do something about this." Zeke said, sounding almost cheerful. He looked at Bertholdt, then looked at Reiner. A severe expression overtook his face and a stern, though playful glint shone in his eye. He pointed at a large barrel standing atop the wall nearby. "Climb in, I'm inserting you from the air."
His subordinates reluctantly agreed and climbed into the large barrel. They both fit but it wasn't comfortable. "Bertholdt, assume your titan form after you've been in the air for about sixteen seconds. Considering the drag on your titan body, you should have a matter of seconds to determine a suitable target behind their lines and throw Reiner in. We'll use the Armored Titan like a bunker buster." Zeke finished, then with a hard shove he closed the barrel.
A cloud of steam fell over the wall as the commander of the warriors shifted to his Beast Titan form. The fifteen-meter-tall hairy titan looked like a cross between a hirsute man and an oversized gibbon, and he reached down with his overly long arm to grasp the barrel containing his subordinates. With something of a jaunt to his motions, he cradled the barrel in the crook of his neck like a shot as he travelled the short distance to a cannon emplacement, where the wall protruded back into Shiganshina and outwards in a sort of cross shape.
He walked to the inside edge of the wall and faced Shiganshina, skipped backwards twice, pivoted on his foot and put the barrel into the air. His eyes followed the barrel as it traced a high arc towards the ongoing conflict. "Now where did Pieck get off to?" Zeke mused to himself.
Following Zeke's orders, Bertholdt reached a count of sixteen seconds and drew a knife across his palm. Lighting struck the barrel, destroying it, as his deceptively lightweight, gargantuan body caught the air like a sail and descended towards the ground through a humongous pall of steam. Holding Reiner in his right hand, Bertholdt lined up a throw and spun his body to build up momentum before releasing Reiner in the direction of the airship port.
At a breakneck pace Princeps Amelie of the Leibniz' Resentment sprinted across the battlefield, baiting a herd of the false-titan creatures behind her as she zigzagged north away from site zero. Her vox buzzed to life as a signal came in from Jean-Claude, his binaric cant was clipped and she perceived it almost as a growl as the aggression of his machine bled through the vox-net. "You're ranging too far from the pack. Maintain awareness of your promethium reserves."
"You worry too much Princeps Captain," Amelie's response came back as a rumbling chuckle as her machine spewed flames at the swarm of creatures trying in vain to overwhelm her. The creatures didn't seem to learn from the mass demise of their cohorts, further underscoring to Amelie that they merely aped the human form like many of the other unfortunate, unstable off shoots of mankind the expeditionary fleet had encountered across the stars.
Leibniz' Resentment took joy in reducing these perversions of humanity to cinders, and this primal jubilation made it that much easier for Amelie to bound around the parodies of the human form as she strayed ever nearer to the uninhabited hold to the north. Leaving the only mutants nearby large enough to present a threat rolling on the ground attempting to extinguish the jellied-prometheum fueled flames, Amelie and her crew noted a shadow had fallen over the battlefield.
The Resentment turned its optics towards the sky and was met with an expansive cloud of opaque white steam slowly drifting towards the ground. Amelie cycled her optics to full spectrum and turned her head to sweep it across the firmament. Sensor returns were fuzzy, something about the cloud precluded the signals from returning in a coherent fashion.
"Detecting a sizable warp anomaly on the augur array. The signal is garbled but appears to be descending towards us." Guillaume, one of the Resentment's Moderati, chattered to Amelie.
A powerful gust of wind pressed down on Leibniz' Resentment, bringing the cloud of steam down with it as a loud thud rang out, signifying a nearby impact. Amelie swung her head back and forth, finally getting a read on something through the infrared spectrum. Distorted though it was, Amelie could just make out a towering heat signature, only differentiable from the steam because of the massive temperature differential between the cloud of superheated water vapour and the figure within it.
Fires flashed up around the massive feet of the figure as vegetation spontaneously combusted around its feet. It was clear that the Warhound was vastly outsized, though there was no indication to the crew that it would be any more dangerous than the smaller mutants they'd already encountered.
The relative ease with which she'd felled the other creatures during this skirmish coloring her judgment, Amelie struck out towards the behemoth figure at full tilt even as the figure drew nearer.
"IMPACT WARNING!" Guillaume's voice cut through Amelie's battle lust. A massive, flayed foot collided with the bubble of the Resentment's void shields before, seconds later, the titan's void shields fizzled and collapsed and the foot collided with the body of the Warhound, sending it flying.
The small titan skidded across the ground, optics and sensors cutting out for a moment as Amelie struggled to regain her wind. Considering that she felt like her chest had nearly been stove in and there was blood dribbling from her nose, she prioritized her computing power towards retrieving a damage report.
Leibniz' Resentment's sensors came back online just in time to warn her crew as a pair of gargantuan hands closed around the mechanism, though a glimmer of hope flashed through Amelie's mind as a friendly return came through on the augur arrays.
Moments before
The smell of ozone crept through trooper V3967-1's gasmask to assault his nose as he continued to direct vox traffic across site zero and the entire island theatre. Grim reports were coming through from the other sites, though none were as overwhelmed as site zero. V3967-1 gathered from the various reports that the other sites were holding out better, considering their larger compliments of troops.
The ozone scent intensified as V3967-1 scoured his equipment for a blown transistor or some kind of short. He cast about to examine the bank of equipment behind him only for his attention to be grabbed by the scene outside the vox controller dugout. He'd found the source of the ozone smell.
An arc of electrical discharge reached out from the spaceport's void shield generator, grounding itself in a Mechanicum adept as the massive figure of an armored mutant collided with the bubble of the void shield feet first, almost like a massive dart. A fraction of a second later, the void shields collapsed in a crackling electrical fire and a brief flash of violet unreality as the massive figure of the false-titan dart fell to the ground, rolling to a stop and rising from a crouch.
"All available units," V3967-1's eerily calm voice rang out over site zero's emergency frequency, "Contact at the spaceport." Holding his vox handset to his ear, the signals operator watched the towering mutant wreak havoc across the command post, his shaken expression hidden by the impassive faceplate of his gas mask.
A look of relief fell across his obscured face a moment later as the reassuring, though vexed, voice of the Warsmith crackled through the vox over site zero's command channel. "Sitrep."
Soaring above the ground, Phidias' stormbird sped towards his beleaguered command post. Mere moments after receiving the distress signal from his command post the signals operator aboard the stormbird conveyed to him that one of the Warhound titans, Leibniz' Resentment, was requesting aid across all channels. Noting that the titan's location intersected almost perfectly with his flight path for his return to site zero, Phidias blink transmitted an order for a contingent of assault legionnaires to prepare for drop and ordered his pilot to slow the stormbird to a safe speed to deliver a payload of jump pack equipped close combat specialist Iron Warriors.
A squad of ten assembled at the cargo door, jump packs idling, ready for the drop. Noting the affirmative from the squad sergeant, Phidias returned to his conversation with the vox trooper. "An armored false-titan has breached the perimeter of the spaceport. Patch me through to Sergeant Gnaeus and Colonel Jowalis," he ordered. He glanced over to Barbarossa and blink clicked into a private vox-channel with his chief librarian. "Do you sense anything from the colossus assaulting the Leibniz' Resentment?" he asked quickly.
Barbarossa nodded an affirmative. "I'm sensing a witch, yes, but this one feels different. Twisted somehow." Barbarossa seemed slightly disturbed by this witch; something seemed distinctly off to him compared to the other active psyker he'd encountered on this planet. More bloodthirsty, almost like a small sore in the warp. While the trooper from the capital had evoked memories of the controlled warpcraft of the Thousand Sons, this massive creature seemed to be driven by uncontrolled rage like a species of xeno-barbarians they'd exterminated a dozen or so compliances ago. "This one seems dangerous, Warsmith."
Phidias nodded and blink transmitted updated orders to his assault squad to be more wary of the giant mutant than they otherwise would be. As they reached the hastily calculated drop site, Phidias heard the power fields of his assault squad's weapons snap to life. After ensuring that everyone was firmly strapped in or maglocked to the hull, the cargo door opened and the assault marines were sucked out of the hold.
Returning to his conversation with site zero, Phidias addressed the two men holding down the fort. "Sergeant, Colonel." Phidias began, taking note of the distance from the landing site. "We are beginning our descent, and will arrive with 56 battle brothers as reinforcements, with ten assault legionnaires to follow. Hold fast for now, relief is on its way."
A wave of relief crashed through Amelie and her crew as the IFF returns for ten legionnaires appeared on the scanner. Her vox crackled to life, the gruff voice of a legionnaire coming through. "The Warsmith has plans for your engine, Princeps. It will not fall today." Imaging showed a squad of assault marines diving through the air towards the giant holding the small titan in its hands. Armed with lightning claws, power swords, power fists, a thunder hammer and bolt pistols, the close quarters specialists engaged their jump packs and vectored towards the captured titan.
Amelie watched on in a mix of glee and ineffectual indignance as her relief flew through the air and lashed out at the giant's arms. Power fields disrupted the creatures flesh as the assault marines flitted from point to point on the flayed mutant's body. The giant seemed almost at a loss for what to do about the armor clad figures darting about its form. It would have to drop Amelie to lash out at the Astartes with its hands, but it was making no move to do so.
As the massive creature moved to stand, the legionnaire bearing the thunder hammer planted his feet on the back of its knee and smashed his matter shredding maul against the mutant's flesh. A geyser of steam and gas flowed out of the false-titan's knee cap as the combination of the force of the marine's strike and the disruptive effect of the hammer's power field sent everything below flying away. As his foothold fell from beneath him, the Iron Warrior triggered his jump pack and leapt back into the air, the mammoth false-titan toppling to the ground beneath him as it refused to let go of its prey.
Nearby, with the creature now grounded, Amelie could feel the ground beneath her machine's feet again but she was still constricted by the beast's hands. Now with a measure of leverage she brought her twinned inferno guns together pointing at the mutant's face, presently in front of her as it had stretched its arms forward when it collapsed.
With a feral grin, she clenched her fists and sent a hellscape of blazing promethium jetting towards the creatures face, though she only managed to set its arms alight. Just as her weapons discharged, she received a notification from her enginseers that the void shields would soon be back online and the frequencies had been appropriately tuned to reject the mutant's particular matter wavelength. With a measure of surprise, the enginseer conveyed that the titan appeared to be less massive than the Leibniz' Resentment, and that scans indicated it was primarily a lightweight silicon composite suspended by a system of brittle bones insulated and protected by bladders filled with heavier than air gas, likely a combination of Argon and Neon.
Amelie cut the enginseer off with a grunt, too distracted by her Warhound's blind fury to care about the composition of her foe. What mattered was that the void shields had been precisely tuned to reject the mutant, and as soon as the protective bubble popped back online she'd be free. She opened a channel to the assault legionnaires, "Go for the hands! Free me and we'll slay the beast!" Her mildly disused vocal chords made her words come across as a feral sounding growl.
Moments later, a pair of astartes landed atop the Resentment, one bearing lightning claws and the other armed with a power sword. The pair set to work hacking away at the giant's hands, the power field shrouded blades parting the strange flesh of the monstrosity easily. One of the troopers spoke up on the vox-net, "I've heard reports that these things will get up from injuries like this. We should make this quick."
Soon after voxing her agreement, Amelie felt her machine come free from the mutants hands. A look of frustration crossed the creature's face as it realized that its quarry had escaped. It looked almost crestfallen for a moment before a malicious glint crept into its eye, then everything vanished in a flash of heat and white light.
AN: Everyone thank Holya. DO IT NOW!
Guess who's back, back again. Swiftpaws back, tell a friend. I've got both of my best betas back now guys, which means tSoT will be moved to the back burner, but not forgotten, while we begin the work in earnest on the next installment of Inside Out, Upside Down. This is a good thing.
I did not enjoy writing this chapter, probably because I was feeling kinda crappy the entire time I was writing it. Still, I think it turned out alright. Looking decent so far, so let me know what you thought. Questions or ideas hit me up.
Postscript: Should I just tell you guys?