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Fires dance and bolt-shells melt away upon my skin.
Three times these skirmishers have harassed me, striking from the shadows of these dwellings where they think I do not see them.
Three times I have split their weak armour and left them as nothing but smoking remains.
It feels so good to be here again. Here is not anywhere specific.
It is a battlefield, a place of slaughter, a space in which to do my work.
After all these aeons, they all seem the same.
There are few ruins this time. Collateral damage is too amateurish for Isha’s children.
These primitives have destroyed more of their own city than their enemies have.
They add to the devastation of their own making, detonating an array of chemical explosives to send an eagle-crowned spire crumbling down on top of me in a torrent of rubble.
It doesn't achieve much.
The first of these ants sprints toward me through the dust cloud, raising a buzzing chainsword high above his green-armoured head.
I swing the wailing doom low, sluggishly, and watch as he leverages every ounce of martial skill in his possession to dive downwards and out of the path of my strike.
I smile as I allow myself to skewer him like a pig. There isn't even a reason to obfuscate my attacks from creatures this feeble.
Even if they do know my lethal intent, there is nothing they can do to stop me from slaying them.
The incessant clattering of several firearms is quick to silence.
I can outrun them with ease.
I even pay them the courtesy of dodging a few of their utterly ineffective rounds, before cutting them down.
I feel a warmth from behind me. Like a roaring hearth, and discover that one of them is trying to burn me with a double-vented fusion reactor.
he gets a bone-pulverising kick for his idiocy.
I hear the next threat before I see it.
A large armoured walker, boxy and crude, unleashes a hail of missiles toward me from a rack mounted to the side of its chassis.
It is too far away to disrupt and as simple as heat-seekers are, I have no way of fooling them.
Instead, I dive for the cover of the ruined spire.
The rubble around me comes alive with explosions, yet only a few find their mark, punching small craters into my armour.
At last they have sent me something of some merit.
I launch myself forward and now I have the initiative. The twin laser is simple enough to evade, as the turret-like torso of the walker traverses just not fast enough.
The missiles flash past me in plumes of black smoke, starting to turn about and home in on me from behind.
Exactly as planned.
For this gun-platform is easy enough to drag off its feet, and armoured enough to absorb the blasts of its own missiles.
I let my unwilling shield serve its purpose, then run it through.
The walker falls, a smoking ruin, to the false-marble flagstones of the street.
it's kin lie butchered about it, as useless in death as they were in life.
I know what they want, what they have spent these lives for.
I can see the transport shuttles leaving into orbit, carrying the remaining populous of this world, firing up from the spaceport like shells from their toy guns.
They have concentrated their cruisers point-defense batteries, as well as substantial anti-air installations on the ground, to ensure this evacuation is successful.
They bleed for it.
Every second their cruiser is ravaged unopposed by my crimson hunters is a second closer to their doom, and even these primitives would not be so foolish as to surrender their only hope of escape.
That just leaves the spaceport.
I step out into the central plaza, cobbles melting to slag beneath my feet, and sidestep the shell that issues forth from the protruding muzzle of a tracked vehicle, the kind of slow-rolling tin can these apes seem to swear by.
They are entrenched atop a great stairway, huddling behind bags of sand and barbed wire before the gate of the towering spaceport.
My swooping hawks have already exacted a heavy toll upon the militia that cluster around the feet of their emerald guardians.
The latter brandish incendiary chemical-pumps and oversized bolt-throwers, just enough to keep my howling banshees hiding in the surrounding buildings, lying in wait.
Enough to keep them alive.
That is about to change.
I begin to run, letting my hot breath grow into a roar of joy as burning promethium pours over my body and, for a moment, I appear a being of flame alone.
Then I drive my blade straight down the length of their cyclopean tank, digging my heels into the softening ground as its magazine detonates and sends the green warriors reeling for a quarter of a second as their mortal peers collapse like wheat beneath a scythe.
They may as well have waited an eternity.
My banshees are on them in an instant, emerging from my wake with death-wails and lethal strikes.
The defenders are slaughtered to a man about my feet as I watch the spaceport entrance collapse before me. More explosives.
Alas, they think me a clumsy fool. I beg to differ.
I dig my fingers into the yielding stone.
It melts crimson beneath my touch, the blood of Eldanesh sizzling into steam between my fingers.
Then I pull myself skyward, up the perimeter wall, hand-over-hand.
The wind begins to caress my infernal form, fanning the flames that dance about me as I crest the summit.
Only then do I see them.
Beneath me, in the spaceport, are thousands of primitives, swarming together like a living sea. They are dirty and wretched, carrying with them small keepsakes clutched so tight in their crude hands that the knuckles turn white.
These things, it seems, were more important than anything else.
A transport shuttle is even now being filled with hundreds of them, scrambling up the access ramp in a mad dash for safety.
The green warriors stand at the door, regulating the flow of apes into the craft, but even they cannot stop them from trampling each-other in their desperation.
It’s nauseating.
Then I hear the first scream, penetrating the ambient din.
One of them, then two, have spotted me.
From there it’s nothing but screaming, as the shuttle hatch begins to rise, primitives clinging to its edge until their fingers are severed in its closing and they fall to the hard ground.
I jump down into the mass, watch as their clothing begins to ignite and weak flesh evaporates at my burning touch.
I need not even raise my blade.
The emerald warriors begin to discharge their guns, but that is barely an annoyance.
They rally, ten in all, near the back of the shuttle, daring me to harm its occupants.
I am rather more adept in matters of harm than they suspect.
I am on them before they can react, slaying two with the first sweep as they break formation, circling me in a futile exercise in evasion.
The next one is dispatched with an upward swing, carving him in two.
Three more follow suit, each earning his own thrust, beheading them one after another.
The next raises a green-glowing device, fine-tuning his aim as it focuses on the wailing doom. The sword grows heavy in my hand, and I am forced to grasp it with my second, supernatural blood dripping from its hilt.
This is getting irritating.
But the roar of fury I am about to unleash it eclipsed by the all-consuming scream of igniting primary thrusters.
A column of atomic fire thrusts forth from the shuttle, engulfing all in light and heat.
I feel it this time, the burning pain, slowing me down to a crawl as I take step after step to escape the blast.
The shuttle has driven itself into the wall of the spaceport, grinding itself against cold stone as it unleashes its final retribution.
The pilot is a madman.
But at last, I stumble from the path of the inferno, leaning against the great wall as the burning craft begins to fail.
Its engines start guttering, the flame growing weaker and the hurricane-roar cycling down until they sit inert, blackened and smoking.
The spaceport has been sterilised, every ape, every armoured abomination, down to the last microbe.
A thick fog composed of smoke and sublimated flesh fills the air.
Then the impossible happens.
Something flies forth from the fog, a green globe protruding within a skull, studded with steel embellishments.
The warrior who threw it sits behind a mass of ceramite and wrought flesh, shielded from the shuttle's final gambit by the carcass of his kin.
He has removed his broken helmet, luminous red eyes piercing the smog, guiding his one remaining arm.
But I have strength enough to raise my blade and bat aside this projectile, sagging back into my wounded lethargy as it sends a pile of rubble to warp-borne oblivion.
A D-charge, in its most base form.
I shudder to think what would have become of me, had I been any lesser warrior.
I watch as his grim expression wavers.
He turns away from me, looking down at something sheltered beneath his bulk.
The fog is beginning to clear.
White sunlight lances down from the heavens, as the ape’s cruiser begins to pull away, its shadow flowing over the burning city.
They have nothing left to give.
And my final foe still sits there with his back to me, gripping something close to his warm breastplate.
He is whispering a prayer, but not for his own sake.
“...And may He forgive us our transgressions,
for we walk in His name...”
I kneel behind him, plunging the wailing doom into the ground and resting my aching hand upon my knee.
“...for Him we live and for Him we lay down the lives He gave us,
for His mercy will find the faithful,
no matter the darkness into which we are plunged...”
I extend my bloody hand, boiling crimson dripping onto the scorched black ceramite of his armour. His fusion plant fails in the heat, the vents ceasing their quiet hum.
“...We pledge ourselves to His will,
beyond our temporary flesh,
and even in death,
we still serve...”
The power pack has melted down to slag, pouring in a bubbling river down his back as I begin to wrap my fingers around his torso, branding boiling fingerprints into the armour.
Something whimpers in pain, and the warrior begins to speak louder, whispers growing into shouts that echo above hiss of melting muscle
“... So we die without fear,
we live without doubt,
For we have faith,
that the Emperor protects!”
His last words are strained through boiling lungs.
I take his life, and a final gurgling scream echoes from the shadow of his remains.
The warrior was sheltering a pair of juveniles, now little more than a pyre.
He should have let them be annihilated in the shuttle's thrusters. It would have been quicker.
Yet I find I cannot fault him his lack of foresight.
But now I stand victorious, and the fire within me is once again waning.
The pain begins to dull, as my vision fades into monochrome, then to blackness.
And so I take my rest, until Biel-Tan calls me forth once more.
I know it won't be long.