Green zipped by his head as he opened up with his lasgun unloading the rifles magazine in the general direction of the Xeno attackers that had been on the attack for the last hour. His body was covered in sweat and blood, some of it his own, most of it the blood and guts of his fellow cultists.
The attack had come unexpectedly during his shift with many of his fellow adherents in the midst of an orgy when the first man had died. He remembered the high pitched hiss of the bullet passing him by before slamming into his friend, blowing a hole through his chest and sending him flying into the walls of the safehouse.
Not that the attack would have been any less effective at completely devastating their lines with or without the element of surprise. He had only seen the vague outline of the attackers once or twice, and certainly never long enough to take aim and shoot them. Instead he had been forced to spray and pray in the general direction the shots came from, hoping to the dark gods that just one of his bolts would score a hit and slow down the volume of the enemy's fire.
"Yaelik! Yaelik can you hear me!" His wife was screaming his name, causing him to turn from his position to see what she needed. She was carrying a rifle of her own, he wished she had some clothes at least to protect her but she had been part of the orgy in worship of slaanesh so he could understand her state of undress.
Either way with his eyes on her she reached behind her and pulled out two small objects and tossed them to him. His eyes widened when he caught sight of what they were, Krak grenades. He didn't know where his wife had gotten them from, and honestly he didn't care. He sat his rifle beside him and prepared himself for the little stunt he was about to pull.
With a small but deep breath he centered himself, sent a prayer to the gods, and pulled the pin on the first grenade. He knew that they weren't meant to be used like a frag, but he didn't care, he needed to catch the attackers off guard and the bang of a krak should be more than enough to do that.
With a swiftness he didn't think was possible he stood up and threw the grenade with all of his might before ducking into cover once more, he wasn't going to die to a rogue green bullet just to get the chance to watch the explosion. His instincts were proven correct just a second later when he heard the zip of a bullet above him and heard rockrete crack right behind him.
The boom of the krak followed only a few seconds later and he was met with silence for the first time in over an hour. The sound of hissing green bullets killing his fellow cultists had stopped and as nothing happened for a full minute he slowly peaked his head out the side of his cover. A wall had collapsed, shards of plasteel were buried in various buildings, and the sight of golden blood was enough for his breath to catch in his throat.
It only got worse when he looked up slightly and saw the impaled form of one of the attackers. It was a Xeno of some kind that looked disturbingly human, he almost mistook it for an Eldar before he saw the eyes, its seven foot frame combined with its otherworldly beauty made him almost feel bad for the thing as it gasped out ever more golden green blood. It was obviously trying to catch its breath but the plasteel sheet of metal skewered through its chest was making that a bit of a problem.
As much as he was astonished at the fact that he had managed to kill one of the things, he also wasn't stupid. He had served nearly twenty years in the guard, he had been involved in multiple campaigns before he settled down here, and he had seen real combat. The death of one wouldn't stop the many, something the rest of the cult obviously didn't realize as they began to celebrate.
He ended that quickly when he used his rifle to put a hole in the Xenos' head. "Stop celebrating you fracking idiots! That was just one of the fucking Xenos'! There were multiple shooting at us. get the frack back in cover!" His words were ignored by the majority of the cultists as nothing happened for a few minutes, thankfully his wife was wise enough to listen to him along with most of those who had fighting experience.
A lucky break not, because even five minutes after the first of his fellow cultists began to walk towards the body of the Xeno to celebrate their supposed victory a wave of green slammed into our positions. Eight died in the initial volley, five more to the follow up fire while more died every second that followed. Not only had the intensity of the fire striking their positions increased but so had the angles from which it was coming from.
At one point he was sure he saw a few shots come from the behind before he opened up on the ceiling itself, hopefully scaring the Xeno away. As more and more of his comrades died he made a choice, he could either die trying to defend a doomed effort, or he could grab his wife and run to the nearest safe house and warn them of what was coming.
He chose the second option.
Rifle and Krak in hand he sprinted from his position and over to his wife idly noticing that she had taken a grazing shot to her shoulder and leg. She would have to push through it. "We're going, don't fracking argue just hold onto me." His words were like acid to her ears, but years together had taught her to trust him and she nodded, dropping her rifle before jumping onto his back.
With his wife secured, his arms in hand, and death following behind, Yaelik abandoned the defense. He ran, and ran, and ran for nearly an hour before his legs gave out and he was forced to rest. Not long after he would grab his wife's hand and they would journey to the other safe house nearby, reaching it thankfully before the Xenos' had the chance to attack it.
He brought the news of the fall of the other safe house and the extermination of their fellow cultists, along with much sought after information on just what their opponents were. Safe houses and cults had been under attack for weeks at this point and any information was desperately being sought after by the higher echelons of the cults.
Yaelik, his wife, and everyone in the safe house would die three hours later under yet another assault by the green hunters. Unfortunately not before they had spread word of their foes and that they could in fact be killed.
-
She breathed heavily as she rushed down the Xeno warrior, it was one of the many attackers that had been besieging the various safe houses and cults which called the under hive home. Despite the terror running through her brain she didn't back down as she closed in on the Xeno. It didn't see her coming up behind it as it continued its slow advance towards their lines.
Her rifle felt heavy in her hands, and it only got heavier as she brought the large weapon up and took aim at the things back. She trembled as time slowed down and her finger slowly compressed the trigger. The boom felt like it shook her very bones as the bullets left the barrel and slammed into the back of the far too large Xeno, slamming into its armor first, catching four rounds before it broke and the Xeno cried out in pain as Golden green blood ran down its back in rivers.
Pleasure filled her body as she continued to fire into the things back, unloading a fill magazine before she stopped. And even then she held down the trigger for a while more despite the clicks coming from her weapon so caught up she was in her own euphoria. A soft hiss rang out, and suddenly there was a hole in her stomach the size of a baseball.
She died there with tears in her eyes as the pain and pleasure mixed together.
-
Hinuth slowly picked himself up even as pain rocked his body, his magic was powerful, more than powerful enough to save himself from death by a cowardly humans' attack but it was also nearly overwhelmed as the various other wounds across his body demanded more and more of his limited reserves ability to heal.
Still he blamed Kyrem far more than he did himself for not noticing the cultists' flanking movement, he was far more focused on his advance and drawing the fire of the cult's defenders than he was on monitoring his flank which should have been protected by a dedicated team of Jaegers'. He would have to have a talk with their Märchenfürst about their negligence.
If he weren't one of his Lords knights it's likely that he would have been killed by the cultists, and they had already suffered far too many casualties over the last week. It had begun with poor Firue, she had been caught in the blast of a grenade while on the move and she was completely impaled upon a piece of debris created by the blast.
Sometimes he could still hear her laughter in his dreams.
Back to the present, their assault of the cultist base was going well, they had taken out the perimeter guards first through the use of the Attenater, and he along with one of his brothers who was assaulting a different part of the base bulldozed through the outermost defenses, slaughtering tens of cultists in their path.
A few had thought to engage him in melee combat, obviously lost to their own fanaticism, He cut them down swiftly and continued his assault with the rest of his Kleine Jagd at his back. That had been two hours ago and by this point their assault had completely stagnated. The cultists had been ready for them, hiding a large number of their own deep inside the base where their scouts had been unable to find them.
Which was why he was acting as a bulwark and a sponge while the rest of his brothers and sisters were hard at work providing counter fire against the ever increasing number of cultists that were arriving.
A small pain in his leg was his only warning before his entire body collapsed out from under him. One look down told him that his entire lower leg was simply gone, destroyed. He looked back at the cultist line and there he saw it, a large cannon of some kind with a smoking barrel.
The cultists weren't keen on wasting their chance to kill him and soon enough he was huddled behind his shield, desperately trying to protect himself from the onslaught even as his siblings vastly increased their volume of fire to try and suppress the cultists, an attempt doomed to failure as the cultists' cannon let loose upon their vague positions, suppressing them in the process and leaving him without any kind of fire support.
He abandoned his shield, they wouldn't be able to use it and he would reclaim it in time with a simple summoning spell. Using his hands and remaining leg he forced himself up and began to crawl towards cover. The cultists were none too interested in letting him escape and his back erupted in agonizing pain as las bolts and bullets slammed into him by their tens and then their hundreds.
He could feel himself growing weaker by the second as his magic ran itself dry and his body's natural regeneration failed to keep up with the volume of fire tearing into his body. Eventually his strength failed him and the darkness began to close in around him, for some reason he felt as if he had been freed from some kind of great shackle upon his soul. He didn't know what that shackle was but he was glad to be rid of it at last.
-
Celras scowled as she watched Hinuth die on the floor of the hive like a dog. She had been watching the entire battlefield through divination and while she wished to help the team that had been assigned to the southern flank the vast majority of her attention was focused on the north where the vast majority of the cultist forces were concentrated. And wasn't that just the neat little surprise? Somehow the insects had been smart enough to hide away hundreds of themselves like rats, waiting for the cat to pounce so that they could overwhelm it.
The northern Jagd was slightly larger than the southern one, but only with the addition of the Attenaters who had been forced by her command to stay in the north and defend their foothold in the cultist defenses. This is where she was using her magic most effectively. It was an underappreciated art but fate manipulation was a power that she had much knowledge and practice with and she used it to the fullest.
Everything that could go wrong for the cultists did from friendly fire, to jams, to orders being misunderstood, and so much more. While everything went right for her hunters, shots that would have hit missed by the narrowest margins, their weapons pulled slightly less magic with every shot as they worked a tiny bit more efficiently with the magic in the air, their own shots hit more often, and they worked together with seeming perfection in the face of ever mounting pressure.
It wasn't enough. No matter how much magic she poured into the front her hunt was simply too outnumbered to keep their foothold let alone counterattack and finish their mission.
She grit her teeth in rage, these rats, these pests, these pathetic men had pulled a trick on her, a lord of the fey! Oh she would have her revenge, she would destroy this cultist base even if it was the last thing she did. For now however she knew when she had been beaten. In a moment of defeat Celras called for the retreat.
She burned the bodies of the dead to ensure the cultists would not be able to desecrate them and she called upon the equipment of the dead, it was all soul forged gear, not something to simply be discarded. It could be used by their newest brothers and sisters that the Lord Hunter had said would be reinforcing the line soon enough.
-
The Green was expanding, that was obvious enough to her. Its pulsing waves of nauseating light had been growing stronger and stronger in the past two weeks and she would have been a fool not to notice such, especially with the hundreds of reports that were flooding her office daily. Most of them were the same, a sub-cult or safehouse destroyed by attackers the cultists themselves couldn't even see let alone fight against.
But after the first week of the assault things had started to change, those she put in charge came to her with new reports, better reports. First it was a single one of the Green's agents, a so-called hunter from what her cultists had taken to calling them. A cultist had somehow managed to kill the thing before their safehouse was overrun and they fled.
From there things had started to turn, the cult leaders began to change the way they were fighting, they began to treat the expansion of the Green as what it was, a war with front lines and soldiers on both sides. She would have been proud if it wasn't for the fact that she would have to replace them with less intelligent leaders after all this, she didn't need rebellious followers. Especially with the governor dead and the General slowly coming to believe that the reports that had brought him and his regiments to this world held no real substance.
While the slowly turning tides had been interesting enough on their own in the middle of the second week of the Greens rapid expansion they failed. They were lured into an assault on one of the main cults' bases under the impression that it was a much smaller, much less well defended base than it actually was.
The Agents of the Green had been slaughtered from what her reports said. At least three confirmed hunter kills, with five more unconfirmed. It was a victory by every metric, even if it cost them the lives of two hundred cultists just to pull it off it was a victory nonetheless. It was a major morale booster and across the underhive she began to receive reports of similar happenings as the cult press ganged more of its members into the fight and even began to pull from the local population for conscripts in the fight.
She approved of it, but she was also nervous. If the General caught wind of the war that was going on in the depths of one of the hive spires he would surely send soldiers to investigate, and she did not need him staying any longer than he already had. She had no choice, she would order them to stop conscripting the citizenry for the moment, at least until she could ensure the Guard was well away from her city.
Sure it might mean a few thousand more cultists lost and a hundred safe houses destroyed, but she was fine with that loss. It would be childs play to conscript millions in the fight against the green with the general and his armies gone.
Yes, yes it was only a matter of time before she won this war, the Green wouldn't be able to stop her, and the General would be long gone by the time he realized the planet had been lost to the powers. Everything was coming together and she could feel it. She didn't even try to stop the shakes that overtook her body as pleasure and pain both racked her body.
Moans sounded out from the office high above the hive's lower spires and all passing by simply went about their day, unknowing or uncaring of what was going on behind its doors.