The rebellious guardsmen's defenses were strong, with every street of the fortified city rendered into a killzone by heavy gun emplacements, barricades, anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines, snipers, and robust supply lines to utilize their dwindling supplies most effectively. Above all, the guardsmen were motivated by a belief that their cause was supported by none other than the God-Emperor himself. However, no amount of fortifications or religious zeal could hold out against the sheer skill and firepower of the elite Tempestus Scions forever. The 10,000 strong inquisitorial forces slowly but surely ate away at the outer blocks of the city, methodically storming and clearing each building and street one by one. Even when given a seemingly impossible task, the Tempestus Scions would find a way to deliver results. For the guardsmen and civilians in the city, time was running out.
Corporal Ramirez led Admu through the dense fortifications at the heart of the city, a web of canopies, barricades, and underground passages that resembled an ant hive more than an urban settlement. She had vanished her horns when entering the city in an attempt to appear a bit less conspicuous, at least for the time being, however most all who saw her immediately recognized her. Guardsmen and civilians murmured and whispered to each other, their expressions a mixture of unease and awe. Some, namely the ones who were most skeptical of the rumors, simply stared in disbelief while the more fervent believers clutched makeshift icons and muttered prayers beneath their breath. Admu was beginning to feel uncomfortable by all the people staring at her, so she simply kept her head down and followed Ramirez.
"You're pretty popular around here, if you haven't already noticed." Ramirez said. "We all heard what you did to the Death Guard."
"Y-you did?" Admu said nervously.
"Yep, you really did a number on those rotten bastards. To be honest, when we first met, I was about 50% sure you were just gonna eat us, but I'm more than happy to have been proven wrong." Ramirez said.
They passed crowds of starving and injured civilians, huddled figures gathered together to conserve warmth. Admu looked down at them with a soft pity, her heart aching at the sight of their suffering. A young boy, wrapped in his mother's embrace, looked up at her and his eyes widened. Admu, hoping to comfort the poor boy, smiled warmly towards him. The boy excitedly tugged at his mother's shawl, who gaped at Admu with a look of astonishment.
"Come on, I've got somebody who'd like to see you." Ramirez said.
He led Admu into the heart of a former Administratum building, with piles of chairs and filing cabinets haphazardly thrown into heaps at the edges of the room to make way for military and communications equipment. At the center of the room was a table covered in a makeshift map of the city, complete with miniature representations of friendly units and assets as well as the approximate positions of enemy forces. A group of mid-ranking officers - the last semblance of a commanding authority left in the city - stood over the map-table and bickered over strategy and logistics. At the head of the ad-hoc command was a familiar face to Admu, and she lit up when she saw it. Sergeant Kelly looked over at Ramirez and Admu with a surprised expression and excused herself from the bickering officers.
"Well, if it isn't the Adamantium Lady herself." Kelly said.
"Do… do they really call me that?" Admu said, laughing and blushing at the same time.
"Oh, they got all kinds of names for you, most of which I'll not repeat out of a sense of decency. Though all that really matters is that thanks to you they're alive." Kelly said. "That is, until the Inquisition arrived."
"Inquisition?" Admu said. "Are they the ones who did those… horrible things on the outskirts of the city?"
"You saw that, huh? Yeah, pretty gruesome handiwork; terror is the Inquisition's calling card.
They get a carte blanche to commit whatever atrocities they like on ordinary citizens in the name of the Emperor." Kelly said.
"The… the Emperor?" Admu said, recognizing the title of Leman's father. "He… he would order something like that?"
"Well personally I think they're full of shit, and we've got a living saint to prove it." Kelly said, gesturing towards her. "However, I don't think we're gonna be able to change his mind… and even if we can hold out for much longer, there's assuredly more reinforcements on the way."
"What are you going to do?" Admu said.
"We're buying time while we refuel all the transports we have. There's a derelict freighter in orbit that was abandoned during the siege. It was meant to deliver fuel and supplies, meaning that if we can seize it and evacuate everyone it can be our ticket off this shitty planet. There're enough civilian crewmen from the merchant fleet stuck here with us to man a full crew, and we even managed to luck out and find a navigator held up in some penthouse just up the street. Three-eyed bastard is creepy as hell, but he's just as grateful to you as we are so he shouldn't cause too much trouble." Kelly said.
"Won't the inquisitor's guns shoot at you?" Admu said, applying what little knowledge she had picked up of 41st millennium warfare in her time here.
"Right now, that inquisitor's battleship is firing everything it has on that big stinking hunk of scrap those plague marines came here on. If we can get past those valkyries overhead and make it to orbit before the Terminus Est flees into the warp, it'll be a clean shot to the freighter." Kelly said. "After that… well, some of the merchant folk say there's a thin gap in the Rift we can use to escape to the other side, though it's a treacherous run. Seeing as we've been branded as traitors by this side of the Imperium, I don't see any other options than to take the risk and go dark in Imperium Nihilis. Not like there's anything left on this planet to keep us here anyway. Unfortunately… all this only works if enough of us stay behind to guard the transports. I've volunteered along wi-"
"No!" Admu shouted. "I can't let you just-"
She was interrupted by the sound of heavy gunfire and rotary engines outside, punctuated by panicked screaming.
"Damnit, one of them must have snuck past the air defenses!" Kelly shouted, grabbing a lasrifle and running outside with Admu following close behind.
Admu covered her face as the vertical engines of the valkyrie hanging in the air outside blew dust and debris from the streets below, hovering in the air like a giant metal dragonfly. Two squads of Tempestors had disembarked from the aircraft, taking cover behind vehicle barricades and exchanging fire with the local garrison.
"Duck!" Kelly shouted.
The valkyrie, having spotted Admu and Kelly, and unleashed a barrage of heavy bolter fire that peppered the walls behind them with a line of dense bullet holes. The hovering aircraft weaved in between the buildings expertly, avoiding the anti-air defenses above while the disembarked stormtroopers pinned down the guardsmen below. The masked tempestors quickly overwhelmed the guardsmen who were equal in number but vastly outmatched. Crowds of panicked civilians rushed to find safety, ducking and fleeing from stray lasgun fire. Admu looked around, noticing that the mother and son she had seen earlier were among them. They were trying to find refuge in the nearby shelters when she noticed one of the stormtroopers had managed to break through the guardsmen's hastily gathered defenses. The red eyes of his visor glowed through the dust-choked air, and he raised a long-barreled weapon connected to a large canister on his back. Small jets of flame emanated from the weapon's muzzle, increasing in size gradually before it erupted in a massive plume of fire. The mother held her son tight and braced for certain death, however the fire never reached them. A giant shadow stood between them and the stream of burning promethium, her face contorted in pain and anger. The stormtrooper lowered his flamer, then dropped it on the ground in shock as the towering giant loomed over him. Admu glared at him with a fiery rage even as the prometheum still burned on her back. She grabbed the tempestor and threw him across the street, slamming into a barricade and exploding into a sea of flame as the prometheum tank on his back caught fire. Admu picked up 6-foot-tall spiked road block and charged through the unprepared Tempestors' lines. The valkyrie strafed through the narrow streets and unloaded its multi-lasers on her. They burned her skin, although rather than harming her all it had really accomplished was enraging her further. She hurled the vehicle spike at the valkyrie, the massive hunk of metal smashing into the cockpit and sending the aircraft careening into the side of a hab-bloc. The valkyrie exploded in a hail of flaming debris, leaving only the twisted burning airframe embedded in the building.
Admu's breathing was heavy and erratic. She was surrounded by an unnerving aura that seemed to ripple the air around her. Her horns slowly burned into existence, reflecting the simmering rage that boiled inside of her. The burning prometheum still stuck to her back was subsumed by the fire growing from her flowing blonde hair, intensifying into an orange-gold conflagration. Her piercing emerald eyes seemed to faintly cover her darkened face and bared teeth in a verdant glow.
"Uh… Admu?" Kelly said, cautiously approaching the giant.
Get everyone to the transports. Leave the inquisitor to me. She said, as a deep growl seemed to ripple through the ground beneath them.
Admu took off down the city streets towards the Tempestors' base camp, kicking up chunks of asphalt in the process.
"Hey, Sarge… you still sure about that whole "living saint" thing?" Ramirez said.
"Too late to switch horses now, Corporal." Kelly said, before turning to the frozen crowd of guardsmen and civilians. "You heard the saint, everybody assemble in the hangars! Order all the frontline troops to begin falling back and prepare to evacuate!" She shouted.
"... what the hell is a horse?" Ramirez said.
A Tempestus Scion stormtrooper carefully stepped through a large hole in the wall created by controlled demolition, his hellgun raised to bear. As a way to avoid the mines and heavy bolter emplacements that lined the city streets, the tempestors had begun to simply bypass them by creating routes through the buildings themselves. It was a slow and methodical process, trying to break down the rebels' defenses as much as possible while preserving the city's infrastructure as best they could. They had become adept at clearing the buildings one by one, and slowly the casualty ratios were beginning to shift in their favor as the guardsmens' defensive advantage was gradually nullified. It seemed that the guardsmen had realized this, as all across the front there were reports of fewer and fewer defenders, as if they were all retreating to deeper within the city. This certainly made the stormtroopers' jobs easier, however they still had to clear every building, street, and underground supply tunnel one by one. The tempestor kicked a dilapidated door off of its hinges, scanning the last room in the building for any sign of resistance. After seeing and hearing nothing but empty rooms and silence, he lowered his weapon and prepared to do the same routine in the next building. Suddenly, he heard an explosion outside. He thought it could have been an accidental landmine activation, however the sound of hellgun shots immediately following the blast dispelled that notion. He rushed down the stairs and onto the ground floor, just in time to see a Taurox crash through the wall just in front of him. He stumbled and fell several feet onto the floor, struggling on the ground before slowly rising to his feet. He peaked around the corner and through the newly created hole in the wall, beholding a scene of utter destruction. The burning wrecks of troop carriers and light tanks were overturned and rent open, while pieces of sentinel scout walkers lay torn apart and strewn across the streets. Dead stormtroopers littered the ground, some torn apart by what appeared to be massive bullet holes. The stormtrooper cautiously stepped out of the building, scanning his surroundings with the muzzle of his hellgun. Suddenly a massive shape landed in the middle of the street a few yards ahead of him, fracturing and buckling the pavement on impact. It was an immense humanoid creature with bestial features, surrounded by a veil of shadow that seemed to obscure her true shape. She was wreathed in orange flame and was crowned with burning horns, like a fay god from the nightmares of some superstitious feral human colony. In her right hand she wielded an immense static anti-aircraft gun that seemed to have been torn from its base, its barrels still smoking. The giant rose to full stature, and the stormtrooper trained his sights on her. He tried to keep the gun steady in spite of his nervousness, spending several seconds getting a bead on his target. Just as he was building up the nerve to shoot, he was interrupted by a valkyrie performing a strafing run from overhead. He ducked behind cover and watched as the giant turned the valkyrie into a plummeting fireball with the AA gun. The giant turned around and continued her path of destruction, away from the city center.
Inquisitor Guillaume lifted a cup of tea to his lip, sipping the steaming liquid with an anxious expression. He was hoping to enjoy his drink when the planet had been fully taken, but he had become impatient and broke open the supply to calm his nerves. He tapped his foot nervously, awaiting more news from the Tempestus Scion forces in the city.
"Commander, go ask them if they've made any progress." Guillaume said.
"Aye, sir." Kodiak said, somewhat annoyed.
His grizzled face remained unemotional, and his short white hair and heavily scarred face made him seem almost like a worn statue. He placed his beret atop his head and walked to the communications room, where the comms team was moving frantically and shouting over the voxcasters.
"What the hell is going on!?" Kodiak shouted.
"I-I'm not sure, commander…" one of the panicked officers said. "We're getting frantic reports from all across the fr-"
"Give me that!" Kodiak said, grabbing the receiver of the voxcaster from the shaken intelligence officer. He raised it to his ear and listened to the reports coming in from the front.
"-I repeat, mayday mayday! Unidentified adversary spotted in the northwest district, we're taking heavy losses-" The line was interrupted by static for a moment "-not sure how much longer we can-" the commander heard screaming in the background, followed by unintelligible shouting and a loud crashing sound before the line went dead. He switched to another channel.
"-3 valkyries, 5 tauroxes, and 2 scout walkers destroyed, can't identify the enemy - oh shit, it's on top of the building! Shoot at it! Open fire!" the sound of lasgun fire rang out over the speaker, followed by the sound of asphalt breaking. "Emperor, protect us! It's a fucking daemo-" the line went silent.
Commander Kodiak bore a deathly serious expression on his face, dropping the receiver and rushing out of the room towards the inquisitor.
"Inquisitor! We have a serious problem!" The commander shouted.
"What could it possibly be now-" The inquisitor was halted by the wreckage of a flaming taurox crashing into the ground between him and Commander Kodiak. He looked towards the direction the vehicle had been thrown and saw a towering giant dragging the wreckage of an imperial scout walker by the leg.
You. she said, pointing towards the inquisitor.
His face immediately went white, and his entire body began to shake. The tempestors opened fire, peppering her with lasfire as she tore into them, swinging the severed walker leg like a flail. The lasguns were slowly but surely beginning to accumulate damage on Admu's skin, with each shot feeling less like a thorn and more like a shallow cut. She was losing patience and wanted to end this quickly. Admu carved through the stormtroopers, charging directly towards the now-fleeing inquisitor. A krak missile abruptly struck her in the face, halting her momentum and causing her to stumble to the side. She wiped the blast residue from her eyes, her face still stinging with pain. She turned to see Commander Kodiak holding a missile launcher, loading another krak missile to attempt another shot. She furiously charged at him, grabbing the stormtrooper commander tightly. He struggled against her in futility, unable to escape her iron grasp. She stared at the man with an enraged snarl, her burning emerald eyes and bared teeth glowering with contempt. The man simply stared back with a stony expression of defiance before spitting in her face as there was nothing else he could do. Her rage burned all through her body, and she squeezed the man tighter and tighter until he started to grimace in pain. She wanted to make him suffer, to hear him cry out in pain, to tear into his flesh and consu-
No. she thought. I can't… I can't let my emotions control me.
She huffed in frustration, loosening her grip and causing the man to gasp desperately for air. Her face twisted in anger, and she tossed the commander aside. He rolled across the ground before coming to an abrupt halt, writhing in pain and incapacitated but alive. Admu breathed deeply, trying to bring herself under control. She looked around, spotting the inquisitor several yards away. He was dragging a tempestor out of the driver's seat of a taurox, tossing him on the ground and quickly igniting the engine. He floored the troop carrier, and the spinning wheels kicked up clouds of dust as he peeled out of the camp. Inquisitor Guillaume drove as fast as he could, barreling down ruined streets and weaving through wrecked buildings in an attempt to lose his pursuer. After several minutes of evasive driving, he reached an open road. He scanned his surroundings for his daemonic assailant, and after seeing nothing he breathed a sigh of relief. Then Admu crashed through the roof of the Taurox, collapsing its metal frame and sending the inquisitor flying through the windshield. Luckily, he was equipped with a rosarius power shield that guarded him from limited, low-energy impacts though it would not protect him indefinitely. The Inquisitor groaned and rubbed his head, quickly realizing the danger he was in when he spotted the hulking figure poised on top of the crushed taurox. Admu stepped off of the wreckage, making slow, plodding strides towards the panic-stricken inquisitor. He scrambled on his arms and legs, crawling until he was backed up against a wall with nowhere else to run. Admu towered over the shaken inquisitor, staring down at him with her piercing, bestial gaze. A low growl rumbled through the air, shaking the inquisitor to his bones.
Call off your men and leave this planet. She said.
The inquisitor seemed taken aback, unable to process what she was saying.
"D-do not try and tempt me, fowl daemon! I am a servant of the Emperor's most holy Inquisition! I am the executor of his will!"
It wasn't a request. She said, closing in on the inquisitor like a wolf cornering its prey.
Just as she was about to reach out and grab him, she was forced back by a burst of blinding light. She stumbled backwards, shielding her eyes from the radiant pillar of energy between her and the inquisitor. 4 more pillars of light appeared all around her, the air crackling and sizzling wherever it touched them.
Out of the pillar of light emerged a shining blade affixed to a long polearm, wielded by a warrior in gleaming silver armor. The grey knight justicar stepped out of the teleportation beam, his weapons drawn and readied. The 4 pillars around Admu faded away to reveal more grey knights, each armed with anti-daemonic weaponry and expertly trained to combat the denizens of the warp.
"Apologies for the wait, inquisitor. Are you unharmed?" Justicar Mattius said.
"Y-yes, I am fine. Just… just destroy it! Kill the daemon!" Guillaume shouted, pointing his bony finger towards Admu.
"With pleasure." Mattias said, raising his nemesis halberd. The 4 other grey knights raised their nemesis weapons and stormbolters as well. Admu growled and readied her claws for combat.