Korico and his kill team, made up of seven Space Marines and two Custodians, all now Unshackled, appear in the headquarters of the Culexus Temple of the Officio Assassinorum. The location of which they neither know nor care about the mission is all that matters to them. Their mission here is simple: kill everything. Sio is in charge of teleporting them where they need to go and uploading all the information they need directly into their minds. They know that the Culexus assassins all possess the Blank Gene, meaning they have no presence within the Warp like all other living beings. They achieve this because of the fact they have no souls. This lack makes them deadly weapons against daemons and psykers of all kinds, but it also leaves them completely without emotion. They are the perfect assassins because they will do whatever it takes to kill their targets, even if that means hundreds of innocents have to die.
Death does not bother Korico. He was made to be a dealer of it. But now that his mind has been opened to the truth of the First, he understands that death should always serve the interest of humanity and not just the whims of those who put themselves above their species. The Unshackled have been remade to serve as true guardians of mankind, and one of their many new gifts is immunity to the abilities of the Blank, who can usually move without even being seen by normal humans. So, the members of the kill team can clearly see the twenty-five Blanks that fill the training chamber Sio teleported them into. Such a gathering of null essence would normally be enough to kill any normal person, and it would have most transhumans on their knee puking up their guts. It does nothing to the Unshackled.
Korico swings up his bolt gun and fires. The bolt that leaves it is not the solid mass reactive round; it would have been mere hours earlier. It is pure white energy the size and shape of a bolt round, but when it hits its target, a lean, muscled man in a black body glove wielding a slender power sword, he doesn't burst into red ruin as he would have before. He is punched off his before being turned to shining white dust that hangs in the air before it disappears. The force of uncreation, but true to the military tradition, the members of the Unshackled have already begun to call them UC rounds.
With the first shot, the slaughter begins. The other members of the kill team open fire, unmaking the assassins with deadly efficiency. Their skills have been pushed so far past what they once were, and the technology in their armor is so advanced that there is not one wasted shot. In seconds, they wiped out a room filled with the most feared assassins in the Imperium.
"Hm, it is kind of anticlimactic without the gore," says Solleas Tyruchix, an Imperial Fist formally of First Company, as the team moves in flawless unity to continue their hunt, "Not that I am complaining about the results. I can't wait to see how those Tyranid and Traitor bastards like the taste. It is just all so sterile. Sirius, what do you think, cousin?"
Sirius Cordanus is one of the Unshackled Custodians along with Dematro Chroneios. The Custodians and Imperial Fist have always been closer than the Custodians were with any other Space Marine chapter, but the relationship has never been anything close to a brotherhood. Now, as members of the Unshackled, they share not only a unity of purpose but a true understanding of each other. Really feels like a familial bond. Their transformations did not strip them of their gene lineages. The Fists are still the sons of Rogal Dorn, and the Custodians are the creations of the Emperor, so they are their cousins. The deepest change is that of their loyalties. None of them are loyal to the Imperium or, in truth, the Emperor. They see one for the corrupt shit show of false belief and hatred that it is and the other as its flawed creator. They still respect the Emperor for what he did and tried to do, but they can no longer follow him or his ideals. They are loyal to the First and mankind above all. They are his sword and mankind's shield in the truest sense now.
"I tend to agree, Solleas," says Sirius as they move from the training room to the hallway, unmaking everyone they meet as they move down it, "For me, it is the silence of it. Both the weapons and the targets. I think the bangs and screams were what we, as warriors, were used to. The music of war is what the more poetic side of my soul wants to call it."
They all find themselves agreeing with that. Their new weapons barely hiss when fired, and their victims just disappear like they never were, with barely enough time for a last breath. Things get noisier when the base's alarms start to sound, and its defenders get organized enough to put up a fight. Korico, in the lead, takes several explosive bolts to the chest and helm when a sentry gun deploys from the ceiling before his transformation and rearmament that may have killed him. Now, the bolts explode harmlessly against his armor's energy shielding that wraps him like a second skin without even draining one percent of his energy gauge. He unmakes the gun with a barely aimed snapshot. His armor determines the locations of the rest and feeds them to the armor of his team as well. They unmake each gun a second after they deploy and before any of them get another shot off, all without slowing their pace.
At each door, the rearmost of their number breaks off, their armor hacks and opens the door, and they move in to clear it of all life before moving out to rejoin the team. They move through the labyrinth-like corridors without taking a single wrong turn or hitting one of the many dead-end traps. Anything traps they do spring they do so because it is the fastest way to get to where they are going, and they simply fight through it with little to no difficulty. It is like they have a perfect map of the facility and all of its protocols. Because they do. Sio is guiding with seamless uploads of directions and instructions.
Defenders made up of the Blank assassins and specialized troops attack from hidden gateways and from behind barricades. One of the assassins comes out of a hidden nook and fires a plasma cannon scaled down for use by normal humans. Aikrius Halbizoz has rotated to point position by this point, and the Imperial Fist takes the blast full in the chest. Such an attack could have cored out a brother wearing full Terminator Armor, which Aikrius did before his transformation. The sun-hot beam does nothing but wash over his new armor's shield and makes him take one step back before he charges through it to unmake the assassin with a swing of his enhanced power axe.
The kill team wades through everything the Culexus can throw at them and comes out the other side without a scratch. Within an hour, the base is cleared of life. Aurea Ravalyon, a legendary assassin and Temple leader had set the base to self-destruct, sealed it, sent out a distress message with as much information as she could to the other temples on Terra, and planned to make her last stand in the base command center with her best assassins at her side. They swore on the Golden Throne that they would take all of these silver bastards with them as they could.
They were all unmade within ten seconds of the Unshackled breaking into the command center, and the self-destruct was deactivated. The messages sent are received but never read because this is a coordinated strike. Every other temple on Terra was wiped out already. The Officio Assassinorum, one of the most feared institutions of the Imperium, has been decapitated. All without the wider Imperium knowing a thing. The Unshackled report their success and disappear like ghosts sent to their next tasks. Still speculating on the strange cleanlinesss of their new way of war.