Chapter 261: Talon’s Deadly Toys (Patreon)

The battle had raged for more than five unbroken hours, a ceaseless storm of violence that turned minutes into eternities and seconds into lifetimes. The blood-soaked stones of Baal’s surface had grown slick with gore, alien and human alike, while the horizon had vanished beneath the endless, writhing carpet of chitin and fang. What little sky remained was scarred by fire trails, collapsing spore clouds, and the contrails of gunships torn from the sky, their wreckage lighting the battlefield like falling stars.

The mortal auxilia and the wounded had long since been evacuated into the fortress-monastery’s inner bastions, escorted by servitors and serfs who muttered prayers to the Emperor as they dragged the broken from the field. The air itself was a choking haze of promethium fumes, acidic Tyranid spores, and the acrid bite of ozone from energy weapons.

The Astartes holding the central causeway had completed their mission and began their withdrawal in staggered formations. Every maneuver was measured, drilled into their bones by centuries of warfare: fall back five paces, fire, cover the brothers ahead, then repeat. The retreat looked less like men yielding ground and more like a living engine of war grinding backward with methodical inevitability.

Discipline held where flesh alone would have faltered. First to fall back were the successor Chapters, everyone except the Lamenters.

The Tyranid swarm was vast as an ocean, a living tide whose hunger knew no end, each organism driven by the will of the Hive Mind to drown the sons of Sanguinius beneath numbers beyond comprehension. Gargoyles screamed in the skies, casting skeletal shadows on the battlefield, while monstrous Carnifexes lumbered through the smaller beasts like living siege engines. Chapter Master Phoros held the line amidst the endless tide, even resorting to his ranged weapons to conserve strength.

Among the Knights of Blood, some warriors succumbed to the Black Rage. Howling with madness, they hurled themselves headlong into the swarm, vanishing beneath claws and fangs, never to be seen again.

Their Chapter was infamous across the Imperium, named Excommunicate Traitoris yet still loyal in heart, cursed children of Sanguinius who bore their flaws openly in battle. Where others fought with grim restraint, the Knights burned with a feral edge, always a heartbeat from frenzy. And in battles such as this, when the Black Rage whispered loudest, restraint often shattered.

Phoros never permitted his warriors to attempt rescues. Once the Black Rage claimed a son of Sanguinius, there was no return. None.

After vaporizing a leaping Tyranid Warrior with his plasma pistol, Phoros turned to check on his retinue. One of his Honour Guard was raking the swarm with his assault cannon, so focused on his fire discipline that he did not notice the battle-brother approaching from behind.

That “brother’s” eyes glowed crimson with madness. With a snarl, he drove his power sword toward the gunner’s back.

Phoros executed him instantly, a single shot reducing the frenzied Astartes to gory fragments. There was no hesitation, no pause, only the grim acceptance of necessity.

“Stay vigilant, brothers. Watch for signs of the Black Rage,” Phoros voxed across the Chapters net.

“Shouldn’t they be throwing themselves against the xenos instead of turning on us?” A young initiate, sixty years in service yet still green by Chapter standards, spoke up in disbelief.

Silence answered him. None would speak of the flaw in their gene-seed and the bloodline of the Gene-Father. The flaw was a curse whispered in chapels, taught in oaths, but never discussed openly in the heat of battle. To name it was to admit it, and to admit it was to feel the weight of their inevitable doom.

“The Black Rage! Were you not taught of it when you swore your oaths?” Phoros’ voice cracked with rare severity.

The rebuke struck harder than any gauntlet. It was the first time the novice had seen Phoros’ discipline falter into open fury.

At that moment, Captain Karlaen cut down two Tyranid Warriors and pushed to Phoros’ side, taking station at his back against the encroaching swarm.

“You must withdraw now,” Phoros ordered.

“We are sons of the Founding Chapter. We should be the last to leave,” Karlaen replied grimly, thunder hammer dripping with gore.

“You will fall back,” Phoros said with finality. His tone brooked no argument, the iron of command tempered by centuries of service.

All of Sanguinius’ scions had come to Baal’s defense. Without binding order, only bonds of blood and loyalty compelled the successors to obey the Chapter’s primogenitors. Thus it was right that the Blood Angels themselves should bear the heaviest burden.

But Phoros believed the Lamenters were an exception.

While the Blood Angels held firm in standard power armor, their boltguns thundering, the Lamenters’ warriors, armored in full Tactical Dreadnought Plate, turned their backs to the foe and trudged rearward, heavy steps shaking the bloodied stone.

If such a sight were witnessed, Phoros thought grimly, the Lamenters would not deserve their sophisticated wargear.

“So be it,” Karlaen said at last. He had heard of the Lamenters’ stubbornness and would not waste words. He signaled his company to fall back.

The Blood Angels withdrew fighting, their positions taken up by the Lamenters. Yet Karlaen himself remained, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Phoros.

He soon noted how these brothers from the Lamenters fought best alone, isolated, each warrior carving his own stand amidst the swarm.

“Tyrant!” Phoros’ warning snapped across the vox.

From the seething mass, a Hive Tyrant burst forth with its Tyrant Guard elites, charging straight for them. Some wielded scything bone-swords, others carried writhing symbiotic cannons fused to their limbs.

As they charged, one of Phoros’ honor guard died screaming cut in half by the Tyrant, while another was blasted apart by bioplasmic munitions. These monsters, grown from flesh alone, possessed strength enough to pierce even Terminator plate with ease.

Karlaen surged forward beside Phoros to meet them, thunder hammer raised. The two dodged sprays of bio-plasma, bracing for the clash with the towering xenos.

But the Tyrant and its guard were suddenly crushed flat, pulverized into gore.

Phoros turned. Behind him stood a Techmarine, his servo-harness bearing a graviton war-staff, its emitter coils still glowing, one of Talon’s deadly artifices.

The supplies bestowed by the Lord of Talon contained not only conventional arms but strange, perilous marvels, deadly relics of unknown science. Phoros recalled grimly how, on the journey to Baal, one brother had attempted to wield such a staff even with instructions, only to shatter his own legs beneath its gravity field. Since then, he had forbidden any but the Techmarines to wield the complexer Talon devices.

Now, he silently praised the Techmarine, at least the weapon had slain Tyranids and not himself or Karlaen.

Yet the death of the Tyrant did not break the swarm. Some other synapse creature had already seized command.

“Clear the field! Back, now!” the Techmarine bellowed at his allies.

Phoros and Karlaen obeyed without hesitation.

The Techmarine slotted the grav-staff onto a servo arm and drew forth a massive auspex-scope from his pack. Pressing it to his optics, he peered deep into the swarm and thumbed a trigger.

Reality split open. A rift tore above the swarm, and from the dimension tear emerged the broadside of the Daughter of Tempests. Particle lances screamed down through the rift, carving the Tyranid masses into incandescent ruin. The light was blinding, a sun of annihilation birthed for moments at the edge of reality. Every strike left afterimages burned into the eyes of those who dared to look.

The shockwave nearly toppled Phoros and Karlaen even within their Tactical Dreadnought Armor; only by jamming their weapons into the stone did they withstand the tremors.

By then, the Blood Angels had fully withdrawn. Phoros seized the moment of the temporary slowdown in the swarm's advance to order the Lamenters’ retreat.

The Lamenters gathered together, fighting and retreating, step by step, until the fortress-monastery’ inner curtain walls loomed before them.

The gates stood wide. At their head was a golden figure, wings of his armor catching the hellfire glow. Entire companies of Blood Angels arrayed behind him.

It was Lord Commander Luis Dante, Chapter Master of the Blood Angels, the Lord of Angels himself.

As they advanced to the monastery gate, Phoros saw at once that Dante’s frame trembled faintly beneath his armor. The venerable Chapter Master was wounded, perhaps mortally, though he would never admit it. Yet the Lord of the Host stood, hand raised in greeting to the Lamenters. His mere presence steadied the wavering line, the legend of Sanguinius incarnate holding despair at bay.

Phoros dragged his gaze away, focusing on the fight. He would not falter. He remained rearguard, the last to yield ground.

The Lamenters and Karlaen fought in retreat until the very threshold of the gates. But before the inner walls could be reached, the pursuing swarm had to be checked.

Then the Techmarine acted again. From his pack he hurled a strange grenade into their pursuers. It did not explode; instead, gravity itself unraveled. A sphere of null-gravity engulfed the xenos mass.

Tyranid Warriors and Gaunts alike clawed in futility, limbs flailing at the air as they drifted skyward.

Phoros’ armor locked him to the stone, anchoring him against the distortion.

The Techmarine turned, flipping through a dataslate as he ran, muttering curses at the weapon’s manual. After two steps he froze, eyes widening.

The field of null-gravity inverted. A shockwave of crushing repulsion burst outward.

Phoros, Karlaen, and the Techmarine were hurled bodily through the fortress gate as the pursuing Tyranids were blasted back in all directions.

All had made it inside and the great gates slammed shut.

The Lamenters, battered but alive, had reached the heart of Baal’s great fortress-monastery, the Arx Angelicum. The ancient bastion’s towers loomed above, carved with statues of the Angel in his glory, their shadows stretching across the blood-soaked field beyond. For now, the sons of Sanguinius still endured, but the night was far from over.