Dozens more Iron Warriors were spilling into the ravelin itself. Yellow armoured Space Marines were like tiny islands of stubborn resistance, but Honsou could see they would soon be overwhelmed.
Ahead he could see the massive golden gate of the citadel, flanked by two high towers and topped with battered gun turrets. Without siege tanks it was inviolable, but to the right of the gate was the great breach and Honsou could see fierce fighting raging at its top.
'Iron Warriors, rally to me!' roared Honsou, bellowing to be heard over the din of battle. Raising his bloody sword, he set off at a run towards the breach.
The Primus Ravelin had fallen.
'FORWARD!' SCREAMED FORRIX from below the crest of the breach, his power glove crackling with deadly power. They were so close he could taste victory. His armour was dented and torn open, but he felt nothing, the arcane mechanics of his newly augmented body impervious to pain. He felt another impact against his chest and laughed insanely as the bolt exploded against his breastplate, the shell fragments scoring shallow gashes in his helmet.
The breach was wreathed in the smoke and confusion of battle. Bodies lay strewn about, both friends and foes. Three times they had taken the crest of the breach and three times they had been hurled back by Dorn's lapdogs.
He clambered up, pulling himself forward in great powered strides.
Then he was hurled backwards as a buried mine exploded beneath him, the ground rearing upwards in a pillar of smoke and fire. A chunk of rock smashed into his newly repaired helmet and shattered the visor, cracking it too badly to see through. Forrix rolled a few metres down the breach, before sliding to a halt in the loose rock.
Angrily, he pushed himself to his feet and wrenched off his ruined helmet, hurling it into the smoke above him. He could see dim shapes ahead and opened up with his combi-bolter, spraying the breach with fire. One figure dropped, but the others swung their weapons to bear at him.
A blast of gunfire ripped into the hazy figures, deadly fire from a reaper autocannon that swept them away in a hail of shells. Forrix glanced around him, seeing that his company had suffered fearsome losses to get this far. It would all be for nothing if they should fail now. Iron Warriors climbed past him towards the top of the breach.
He heard a great roar of victory from below and knew that the half-breed had succeeded in capturing the ravelin. But how Kroeger's attack on the eastern bastion was faring, he had no idea. He snarled and resumed his climb, shooting blindly into the smoke above him. Nearly twenty Iron Warriors in Terminator armour climbed with him, firing their weapons into the breach.
Las-bolts and bullets spat from the nubs of wall to either side of him, but Forrix ignored them. The breach was all that mattered.
His powerful strides had almost taken him to the top of the breach when a deafening roar erupted from beyond the crest and the rocks before him exploded, huge chunks of rockcrete blasted to powder by shell impacts. Six Iron Warriors were obliterated in a single, devastating volley as a searing energy beam vaporised another's upper body, leaving his legs standing for a second before they toppled back down the rubble slope. Forrix dropped and crawled towards the edge of the breach, lifting his helmetless head over the rocks.
The beast of legend was before him, not just one, but two of the agile Scout Titans darted back and forth in the gap between the citadel's inner and outer walls. Constantly in motion, the Warhounds loped back and forth like caged beasts, pausing every now and again to spray the breach with murderous fire from their Vulcan bolters.
Forrix's heart sank.
While the Warhounds covered the breach, there was almost no way they could cross it.
THE THING THAT had once been a determined lieutenant in the Jouran 383rd, but was now something infinitely older and more malevolent, pushed its way forwards over the jagged steel and rockcrete of the Mori bastion's breach. The Avatar of Khorne roared in primal lust as it drank deep from the well of hatred supplied by Larana Utorian.
Hatred of the Guard for shelling her.
Hatred of Kroeger for driving her to this.
Hatred of the Emperor for allowing this to happen.
Larana Utorian now had hatred carved upon her heart.
The warriors of Kroeger's company followed the thing they believed to be their leader, fighting their way through the hell of gunfire and explosions, in awe of the ferocity and sheer good fortune he displayed.
Bullets seemed to float around him, lasers passed through him and explosions that should have ripped him in two pattered like rain against his pristine armour. Where they struggled up the steep slope, their leader ascended as effortlessly as if he walked on level ground. The distance between the Avatar and the Iron Warriors widened as it powered ahead to the top in easy, loping strides.
As the Avatar leapt to the top of the breach, its sword sang out in dizzyingly beautiful traceries, and wherever it struck, an enemy died. The Iron Warriors were still some distance behind, and soon Imperial Fists surrounded the Avatar, their swords bright and deadly.
The Avatar cared not. It welcomed this. It needed it. It vaulted over the heads of the lead warriors, decapitating two before it landed behind the others. It kicked out, snapping a warrior's spine and clove another in half with a two-handed sweep. Imperial Fists and Guardsmen clamoured around it, but none could land a blow.
The Avatar pistoned its fist through the skull of a screaming soldier, gripping his uniform jacket and hauling him upwards to allow the jetting spray of blood to drench its gleaming armour. The blood hissed as it landed, seeping within the armour with a monstrous suckling noise.
Yet more foes closed in, and each died at the hands of the Blood God's Avatar.
A rippling haze formed around the Avatar, its form bulging as though unable to contain its sheer vitality. A booming laugh, redolent with the malice of ages echoed across the Mori bastion, and the Imperial defenders quailed before such evil.
The Iron Warriors finally clambered over the lip of the breach, spreading out from behind the Avatar, drawing their weapons and hurling themselves into the fight.
The Avatar watched it all, feeling the waves of hatred and aggression washing through it like a tonic, nourishing its new host with pain and death.
A sharp jolt of cold pain startled the Avatar from its reverie of carnage and the white glare behind its helmet burned with the fire of a sun as it sought out its attacker.
A Space Marine in the spartanly embellished armour of an Imperial Fists Librarian advanced towards it. He carried a crackling force staff and the Avatar laughed as it recognised the power of a psyker. Here was a death worth inflicting.
Glittering haloes of psychic energy flared from the Librarian's helmet, engraved with hexagrammic sigils of great potency and scrimshawed purity seals.
'Abomination!' hissed Librarian Corwin. 'I shall send you back to the hell from which you crawled!'
A beam of coruscating light lanced from the Librarian's force staff and struck the Avatar in the centre of its chest. The Avatar staggered, dropping to its knees as it was bathed in flickering balefires. It bellowed in pain, suddenly thrusting with its sword and impaling an Iron Warrior on its blade.
Blood sprayed along the weapon and the Avatar roared as it fed, rising to its feet as the drained Iron Warrior collapsed to the ground.
Flaring washes of energy erupted from the Avatar's body as the power earthed through its armour. The Avatar laughed again.
'You are deluded,' grated the altered voice of Larana Utorian. 'Do you not realise that Khorne is the bane of psykers?'
The Librarian braced himself against the rocks as the desperate struggle at the top of the breach swirled around them. Neither side was willing to intervene in this battle that was fought in the realm of the spirit.
'The power of the Emperor commands you!' bellowed Corwin, striking the Avatar with another blast of light and driving it to the ground once more. 'Begone, foul daemon!'
Again and again he fired searing bolts of psychic power a
t the figure of the Avatar, sagging against the side of the breach as his reserves of energy dwindled.
His very soul was being drained as he fought to destroy this monster.
The Avatar spread its arms and gave vent to a shout of hatred that shook the very walls of the bastion with its fury. A rippling whirlwind of raw, red hunger swept from the Avatar's armour, spreading throughout the breach like the pressure wave of an explosion and scything through every warrior within a hundred paces. A lashing storm of hate-fuelled energy whipped around the interior walls of the Mori bastion, and every man touched burst apart in an explosion of red, his blood swept up in the etheric whirlwind as it howled back to the Avatar at its epicentre.
The Avatar swelled to monstrous proportions, its armour creaking and groaning as it sought to master the energies ripped from the deaths it had just caused.
Dry, fleshless husks surrounded it, Iron Warriors, Jourans and Imperial Fists, their vital fluid drained to feed the monster that had killed them. The Avatar rose to its full height, towering in the breach, its armour and weapons blazing with barely-contained power.
Only one figure remained standing: Librarian Corwin, his knees buckled and the sacred sigils on his armour little but faded scorch marks. He supported himself on his staff, swaying unsteadily as the Avatar's pounding footsteps crashed towards him across the breach.
'Not dead yet, psyker?' roared the Avatar, raising its sword. 'Soon you will wish you were.'
Corwin looked up into the blazing eyes of the Avatar and saw death.
The Avatar swung its sword, the passage of the iridescent blade cutting through the fragile veil of reality with a dreadful ripping sound, like tearing meat.
A black gouge torn in the walls separating realities opened, filling the air with sickening static, as though a million noxious flies had flown through from some vile, plague dimension.
Librarian Corwin closed his eyes and died without a sound as the Avatar's blade split him in two, both halves of his body sucked into the black tear opened in space and time.
The Avatar feasted on the slaughter it had caused, sensing the oceans of blood yet to be shed through the gateway its sword, bloated with death, had torn in the world. Galaxies of billions upon billions of souls awaited harvest and feeding to the Blood God. There were realms where the time it had wasted here was but the blink of an eye, where there were slaughters that would perhaps one day assuage Khorne's hunger.
The Avatar laughed, knowing that such a thing could not come to pass: the Blood God's hunger was a depthless ocean and would never be sated. New life and new purpose thundered through the bulging fabric of its armour as the pull of fresh souls suffused it.
Larana Utorian continued to scream inside her mind as she saw the eternity of slaughter that lay before her, and all the deaths to come.
She screamed because she realised that some vile part of her soul desired this.
Without a backward glance, the Avatar abandoned Hydra Cordatus to its fate, stepping through the dark portal to a time and place beyond mortal understanding.
An age of battle awaited, and it had time without end to be part of it.
HONSOU SCRAMBLED UP the slopes of the breach, his blood afire with killing. Iron Warriors gathered at the crest of the breach, the rocks there enveloped in clouds of explosions pierced with stabs of flame from some unseen weapon. Already he could tell that the gunfire had to be coming from a Titan.
Forrix saw him coming and waved him forward, shouting over the din of the sawing fire of the Warhounds' Vulcan bolters.
'We cannot go further!'
'But the guns of the bastion will cut us to pieces if we stay here!' retorted Honsou. 'We must carry the breach!'
Forrix pointed through the smoke to the shadowy outline of the Mori bastion and Honsou suddenly noticed the complete absence of any sounds of battle. No gunshots, no screams of wounded men and no clash of steel on steel. Only then did he notice the slowly shrinking wound torn in the air that hung in the breach, a veil of stars glittering from beyond.
'What in the name of Chaos is that?'
'I do not know, half-breed, but it is where Kroeger has gone.'
'I don't understand,' said Honsou as the shimmering vision faded to nothingness.
'Nor I, but the whereabouts of Kroeger is the least of our worries. We need something to shift these thrice-damned Warhounds.'
As if in response to Forrix's demand, the thunder of something impossibly vast slamming against the earth shook the ground, loosening giant rocks from the breach. The massive vibration hammered through the ground again and Honsou turned as he felt the presence of something ancient and fearsome approaching.
More rocks tumbled downwards from the breach as the tempo of the thunderous impacts grew.
The smoke parted and the Dies Irae limped from the smoke and strode towards the citadel.
HIGH IN THE command bridge of the Warlord Titan, Honoris Causa, Princeps Daekian heard the excitement in Princeps Carlsen's voice even over the vox, and smiled with grim resignation.
'It's the Dies Irae, it's mobile again. Emperor knows how, but it's coming straight for Vincare bastion, princeps!'
Carlsen's warning was unnecessary; Daekian's forward observers had already reported the appearance of the corrupted Emperor Titan. He could sense the unspoken desire of Carlsen to come and join the fight against the Dies Irae, but even a cursory glance at the tactical plot told Daekian that Carlsen's Warhounds were best employed covering the breach.
'Hold fast, Princeps Carlsen. Stay where you are,' he ordered.
'Aye, princeps,' replied Carlsen, his disappointment plain.
Daekian expertly walked his Warlord through the gateway of the inner wall, ducking the Titan's massive head to avoid losing its carapace weapons. The two Reavers that followed him, the Armis juvat and the Pax Imperator, were smaller and passed below the gate without trouble. All three Titans had undergone hurried repairs after their first engagement, but none was yet fully operational.
Daekian had faith in his crews and the fighting spirit of the Honoris Causa, but he had made his peace with the Emperor before climbing to the bridge of his Titan. He had long known that it would come to this and though he was sure it would mean his death, he was honoured that it would fall to him to avenge Princeps Fierach.
Already he could see the effect the Dies Irae was having on the battle. Imperial troops were streaming back in terror from the gargantuan apparition that had emerged from the smoke. The Imperial Fists fell back in good order, even the Space Marines realising the futility of standing before this beast. Their ramparts were no protection against such a towering monster, able to cross the bastion with a single step, able to obliterate the walls with a shot.
Daekian cursed as the troops fled beneath him, unable to step forward for fear of crushing whole platoons beneath his tread. The Dies Irae had reached the third parallel and was barely seconds away from reaching the walls.
'Moderati Issar, take down that abomination's shields!' he yelled, raising the massive foot of his Titan and praying that the men below would get out of his way.
'Engineering deck, give me slow striding speed.'
He watched as flaming traceries of staccato gunfire pumped from his carapace-mounted Catling blaster, the high velocity shells ripping across the body of the Dies Irae. Bright pulses flared as void shields collapsed, but Daekian knew that it would take more than the gatling blaster to finish this beast off.
The Armis Juvat and Pax Imperator spread out to his flanks, firing as they went, as he gracefully manoeuvred the Honoris Causa through the mass of fleeing troops. A massive explosion threw up chunks of rockcrete as the enemy Titan's plasma annihilator opened fire and vaporised a corner gun tower on Vincare bastion, melting the rockcrete of the walls and causing them to sag under the intolerable heat.
Daekian grunted as he felt shields collapsing under the weight of fire from the Dies Irae, cursing as he swung his Titan left into the bastion, stepping over the lines o
f entrenchments.
His monstrous foe was before him, and a cold, lead weight settled in the pit of his stomach as he clearly saw the terrifying form of the Dies Irae over the jagged top of the broken ramparts. Its body was blackened and scorched by fire and its head was a molten, dented mass, green fire blazing from behind its single remaining eye. Gunfire blazed from its weapon mounts, sawing through the ramparts and hammering the Titans of his battle group.
The Armis Juvat staggered, a round from the enemy Titan's hellstorm cannon defeating its shields and clipping the knee joint of its left leg.
'Armis Juvat and Pax Imperator, brace for firing!' shouted Daekian as he increased speed and thundered towards the bastion's flank.
The princeps of the Reavers planted their Titans' feet squarely on the ground and unleashed a deadly volley of fire at the Dies Irae. The enemy Titan returned fire as it continued to advance. Daekian initialised the linear accelerators that powered the Volcano cannon and took command of the weapon himself. Not that he did not trust and respect the Moderati who controlled the weapon, but if there was to be a kill shot, he would be the one to make it.
Another shot from the Dies Irae's plasma annihilator blew apart a further section of the wall as it stepped down into the ditch, crushing hundreds of corpses with every ponderous tread. He flinched as a flare of bright light to his side briefly illuminated the bridge and he craned his neck to see what had exploded.
The Armis Juvat toppled backwards, the top half of its upper body blown away. Geysers of plasma fire spilled from the ruptured reactor as the slain Reaver crashed to the ground. The Pax Imperator was suffering under the barrage of fire from the daemon Titan, but was still fighting.
'Void shields failing, princeps!' shouted Moderati Issar as a volley of shells struck the Honoris Causa.
'Full speed! We must close with the monster before we suffer a similar fate!' replied Daekian.
Iron Warriors - The Omnibus Page 29