Chapter 276: Operation: Reclaim the Outer Wall (Patreon)

The Burning One joined the fight.

A single fragment of a star-god could not, by itself, annihilate every Tyranid besieging Baal in one sweep, but it changed the rhythm of the battle entirely, bolstering the defence immeasurably.

First, the void-shields were mended; the shimmering barriers once thought forever shattered pulsed back to life, turning the Tyranid bombardment into harmless bursts of light across the sky. The garrison, ragged and exhausted, no longer had to endure the endless fire raining from orbit. Then the Burning One entered the fray as a combatant.

Its mere presence alone eased the pressure on the defenders: none of those present called it a god, yet it moved with godlike force, and that force hardened the human defenders' confidence and steadied wavering hearts.

When the Tyranid swarm surged again toward the Fortress-Monasterium’s inner ward, the Burning One stalked the bastion’s outer curtain walls like a predator returned to familiar hunting grounds. Each motion of its arm sent radiant waves of fire arcing through the haze, cutting down Bio-Titans that the defenders could not hope to stop. Lesser Tyranid organisms were left to human weapons, for the Burning One reserved its wrath for the apex predator, those vast engines of chitin and rage that burrowed into fortifications like living siege towers.

It came first to the stretch of wall for which Phoros was responsible.

Even the inner walls of the Arx Angelicum’s core ran for kilometres; each stretch of rampart bristled with hundreds of firing positions. The Tyranid advance assaulted each point in turn, their numbers unthinkable. To the defenders above, the swarm seemed less an army and more a living planet, an endless plain of crawling hunger.

Against that ocean of chitin and the height of the ramparts, the Burning One could seem small, but it was by no means weak.

As Phoros fired his plasma pistol, punching a hole through a knot of warrior brood, while below, the Burning One carved a path through monstrosities the size of hab-blocks. Its flames weren’t fire as mortals knew it, they were the sun’s breath given form, pure fusion eating reality itself. Soldiers hundreds of metres away felt the heat on their faces, as if they stood before a forge-gate. A single gargantuan Bio-Titan shrieked as it was consumed; whether it became cinder or ash depended only on the Burning One’s whim.

Warrior-class Tyranids, tougher, more evolved than those seen at the war’s outset, their exoskeletons thickened with chitin, were nightmares for mortal defenders. To the Burning One they were merely things brushed by a wave of flame and turned to dust.

Phoros had seen this magnitude of destruction only twice in his life.

Once was now.

The other was in the past, during the Cadia campaign, when his Lamenters had fought the daemonic. When the Untouchables charged the crystalline dome, a figure had appeared and burned every daemon. That man, Qin Mo, had shown a violence that exceeded human comprehension.

Without warning Phoros’s concentration broke. “That thing’s been caught by a big one!”

A company commander from his Chapter came racing up, cradling a missile launcher and pointing toward the Burning One. They didn’t know its true name; everyone called it “that thing.” Phoros stopped firing and watched the struggle between the two titans.

The Burning One was lashed by a Bio-Titan’s tendril, a weaponized limb slick with obsidian mucus that absorbed light instead of reflecting it. Even the Burning One’s fire refused to cling to it, as if the tendril drank the flame. The Bio-Titan dragged the Burning One backward, its every step shaking the ground, its roar like a collapsing hive-spire. Around them, the Tyranid swarm closed in, drowning the Burning One’s radiant form beneath a tide of chitin and teeth.

The company commander tried to fire a missile to free it, but, as with every missile fired earlier, the projectile dissolved in the titan’s bio-electrostatic field before it reached its target.

“Call down artillery on them!” Phoros snapped to the commander.

The fortress’s long-range guns were manned by Blood Angels crews; any defender could request fire support. The company commander keyed a call to the artillery controllers, but as he did a blinding flare erupted at the heart of the swarm. A searing, crimson sphere blossomed from the ground.

The explosion painted the air a violent red across a kilometre. Light was followed by a thunderous roar, then shockwave and gale.

When the light faded, the Burning One stood alone in a clearing the size of a field, flames still licking from its form.

“This is far stronger than the thing we saw before,” Karlaen’s voice crackled over the vox. He had witnessed it once, in the Cryptus system, when entire starships had turned to glass under its fire. Now, Phoros saw it with his own eyes and felt the terrible truth: this was no weapon, no mere being, but a living shard of the cosmos.

Before Phoros could puzzle further, the Burning One closed the kilometre between them in an instant.

The air snapped and the temperature climbed.

The Burning One’s gaze fell upon Phoros, its twin eyes burning like captured suns within a shape barely human, a figure forged of molten glass and shadow, wrapped in radiance too bright to define.

Phoros returned the stare, looking into the two glowing orbs on the Burning One’s head that might been eyes.

〈“You are not another’s thrall,”〉 the Burning One said, its voice a resonance that seemed to echo through both armour and mind. 〈“Thralls do not look like that when they meet their master’s kin.”〉

“What’s happening?” the company commander asked, baffled. He did not believe that anything could read the expression beneath a suit of power armour of his Chapter Master.

But Phoros knew, in his bones, that the Burning One saw more than that.

〈“Do you recognise who created those weapons?”〉 the Burning One suddenly asked.

“No,” Phoros replied.

Burning One considered the negative answer for less than a second and nodded as if reaching a private conclusion.

Phoros asked, “Who is this ‘Maker’ you speak of? A mighty man? One of your own?”

The Burning One did not answer at once. It thought. If Phoros would not, or could not, name the Forgemaster, and yet had asked about the Maker, then he too must be ignorant of the Forgemaster’s identity. If the missiles were not scavenged from a ruin, the Forgemaster must be concealing his identity. Whatever reasons lay behind that concealment, there must be reasons.

Burning One had no desire to expose the Forgemaster’s nature to a mere mortal, not with what it intended to do next.

〈“You have already committed a grave sin by denying me answers,”〉 the Burning One said, bending to look down at Phoros. 〈“And yet you live. Kneel and thank me for my unusual patience and mercy. You have no right to question me.”〉

Phoros said nothing.

〈“I am neither your friend nor your ally,”〉 the Burning One continued. 〈“I linger only to extricate you from this. There is one reason I remain: after this war you will take me to the Talon Sector. If I cannot be taken there, I would have burned your kind and these bugs long ago.”〉

Phoros felt the thing regard him with hostility. If the Burning One meant to go to the Talon Sector, it would cause devastation beyond imagining.

He thought of Bellona with a private, hot anger. Whatever benefit she had gained by betraying the Talon Sector, if she had indeed betrayed it, could not outweigh the havoc she’d wrought. Perhaps she had acted from malice; perhaps from necessity. The thought still stung.

〈“You have my word, I harbour no enmity for the Talon Sector,”〉 the Burning One said, reading the small shifts of Phoros’s expression as easily as if the visor were gone.

〈“I only have matters to settle there, matters that need not be solved by further battle.”〉 It raised a hand and rained flame into the newly surging tide of Tyranids.

Phoros kept his eyes on the Burning One until Karlaen’s voice broke the tension over the channel.

“New orders.” Karlaen said. “See if you can parley with that thing and get it to cooperate in retaking the fortress’s outer wards.”

Phoros had been about to refuse, he did not trust the Burning One’s attitude toward humanity, but Burning One answered without hesitation.

〈“I will cooperate,”〉 it said. 〈“On one condition: this war must end quickly. And I must be allowed to burn… until I am satisfied.”〉