The necrite horde moved quickly— perhaps at the speed of an unaugmented human’s sprint— even in her decayed state Anya’s perception could track them easily, and she was sure the same was true for all the rest of their unit. It was their misfortune to have been crossing an intersection at this time, but all things considered it could have been worse. There were no enemies on the ceiling, nor did they come from below. It was only down the four long halls that their foes awaited them from all directions. Anya looked first at Raethor for orders, then tracked his gaze to Peter who wore an expression like “we can’t just run to the armory.” and then back to Raethor, whose face had hardened and whose body language was masked in the long-worn composure of a hardened soldier. If he was going to die, every last drop of him would go before that was allowed to happen. There would be no reserves.
And so Anya understood and began issuing order 9 to her subunit. They instantly rotated counterclockwise (that is to say in the direction opposite their finger-clocks counted) and Anya positioned herself in the center of the rightmost hall with Will and Jesús on her respective right and left, able easily to follow her orders should she give them bluntly. She took out her rifle and heard the first shots begin to sound. BANG. Click. BANG. Click. BANG. Click. From all sides the same noises rang out as their unit began suppressing fire one. Tactics would soon begin to take shape, but for now they wielded their most basic arms— the autorepeaters whose rotation and charge cycle was all-too familiar to all of them by now.
One shot. One second to recharge. Pull out the next rifle. One shot. One second to recharge. Pull out the next rifle. Five rifles later the first would be ready again, and though Anya had considered taking only two ARs at first in the armory, she had ultimately decided on this number to allow for continuous fire through a charge-cycle’s duration. Because she had this role covered, Jesús was equipped with heavy ordinance and Will had taken a support role. So she lined up her first rifle for the first shot as the sounds of others’ shots had already begun to deafen all noise from the space. There was only her and the bared tissues of the enemy who felt close enough to touch as her iron-sight lined up the first target. BANG. Click. A hole appeared in the first skull and a gray liquid poured out as its head fell backward and the body fell limply into the shadows of the floor. But there were more bodies. Always more bodies. So many bodies on either and all sides.
She pulled out the second rifle and lined up its only-just covered barrel against her cheek. BANG. Click. A hole appeared in the next forehead. She reached backward and pulled out the third rifle, throwing the second to her left where an outstretched glove awaited the next rifle to cycle. It attached it to the next position and resumed an awaiting position from its post fixed to her nutrient pack.
BANG. Click. She aimed for the pupil this time. It bled grayly as before. BANG. Click. Another body. BANG. Click. Another true shot. BANG. Click. Too many bodies. Six shots per second and too many bodies. So at last she was the first to evolve her tactics in the first second of combat.
Anya looked first to Will on her right and it was understood the time for support had arrived. Will lobbed the first grenade forward as Anya’s gaze shifted leftward in continued disbelief and astonishment that Jesús would continue to shoot the shadows rather than whole beings even when their lives were on the line. His rockets fired hotly with the reckless abandon of a soldier lacking the care to conserve blood and nutrients, and yet their targets never quite found themselves true. He did hit targets, but rather than firing where the enemy was most thickly concentrated the damned racist fired on the place with the most black targets. That is to say he was an inverted light detector. Consequently, when Anya gave Will his first command, it wasn’t to lob a flesh grenade. That would be effective, yes, but would still leave their subunit at a low effectiveness. She therefore had Will procure a flashbang and lob it at the regions with the fewest enemies. This would prompt Jesús to fire in the opposite direction— therefore hitting the regions most dense with necrites. She hated having to do this, but Raethor was counting on her to defend his right side and Anya would be damned if a single drop of his blood got spilled from her side.
Will threw the grenade, and Anya shot it at the top of its arc to ensure a successful detonation. Yet another flash of artificial light filled the room, this time at least approaching some semblance of the brightness of the sun, even if its hue was all wrong and its magnitude was still far short of the real thing. All the bleeding corpses of living men were illuminated with harsh white light and Anya wretched at their foul appearances.
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She knew they were bleeding, but not this badly. Every surface was covered in blood. She knew they were mangled, but who knew what a blender to the face looked like? Apparently it was like squid. Open and bleeding and bleeding and bleeding red turned black in the desaturation turned gray by the harsh light of a flashbang. Inside the bloody squid-flower was a beautiful polished skull so white Anya almost thought it had been bleached. Its only exception was a small black dot on the forehead where cracks had emerged— perhaps where it had been pierced and controlled prior to its submission beyond death. Another of the flowers was blooming with the cracks of a broken skull. Shattered and destroyed. Broken and mutilated. Skulls and flesh and no eyes. Open and bleeding without sight of its impending destruction. And yet it marched forward anyway with the certainty of a thousand eyes. The horde did not care when their skulls were shattered. They did not care when their bodies were mutilated beyond the point of being able to walk. They would drag each other by the arms and crawl ever-forward unto Raethor and Anya and Jesús and Will’s deaths all the same. For every body destroyed there was another another another again.
Walking through the blood. Walking through the charred corpses left by Jesús’ continuous rocketry. But now Anya was faced with another problem— that he was firing on ashes— and so was forced to issue the second order to Will— he would now begin lobbing flesh grenades. “ONE!” he shouted at the first. It landed in the pile of ashes as intended, and exploded with the faint light of a muzzle-flash. This was the product of modern engineering. This was the product of the Third Tribulation. These were the fruits of Peter’s work and the work of those like him.
In the next instant the volatile gas inside the grenade began seeping out and corroding everything it touched. The world shattered like broken glass, and everything inside of it was reduced to the thing viewed from outside the windowpane. Cracked and obliterated. Turned to dust like it had never been whole. Called the reduction to flesh to signify that all things found inside its blast would be rendered mortal. Seen to fall in on themselves in writhing agony as blood and sinew and organs and bodies of black and white necrites reduced to atoms still found themselves pressing ever-forward, insatiably, unable to die. And yet they would be rendered nothing. Folded in on themselves and burned by the divine wrath of His Emperor’s might.
Nothing and no one could survive. And in the wake of the first detonation there remained nothing but an unsmoldering hole. Not even the vapor of that destroyed remained to be known after the fact. In its place was nothing. In its absence were more bodies that ran forward to fill it up. In their midst Anya threw another grenade, and another group of the skinless living was unwrapped all the way, but they didn’t matter. None of the bodies mattered. They were all replaceable. They were all meaningless. So many bullets and flesh grenades. So many rockets and shadows illuminated by Will’s projectiles. Every one found their target. Every one rendered some twelve or twenty of the bleeding less than a pile of flesh, but where once there was the living bleeding now there was nothing and the next group in their place forever. On and on down the halls with no end in sight. On and on through Anya’s sanity, with no bottom to be found.
Not because Anya hadn’t killed before, she most certainly had, but because despite the ambitions of the dead she had always had a purpose in killing them. They had besieged her homeland. They would rape their nation’s women and plunder the corpses of the fallen and those destined to fall. That is to say they would leave no living in the Imperial capital, only the bleached flags of an empire without janitors; only the dying remains of something once powerful enough to command a continent now left as the moon and stars— some orbiting colony whose only purpose was to be plundered and rendered a barren waste. But the moon and stars were out of reach. The Imperium was not; and for this it must be defended.
And yet the bleeding living corpses of unwrapped skin did not pulse with the ambitions of life. Their bodies bled as if there was no end to what was inside them, and yet there were no words shouting grand ambitions of conquest to those soon to die. There was only the silence of footsteps amongst the blood and the black and white dripping of the inside of bodies and bodies left without any purpose other than to destroy. There was no purpose in killing them. There was no honor, no end goal. She put a hole through their heads and it grew back on some other body that took the exact same steps to the exact same place. It didn’t matter that they died. It didn’t matter if they lived. What was a gunshot against infinity?
And so she shouted backward to Commander Raethor that they needed to retreat. Even if their ammunition was infinite in theory the practice of its use meant draining the vitality of the one producing it. Even if the guns could fire forever, their bodies wouldn’t be able to sustain it. They would starve or die of thirst. They would die to the enemy or a gunshot to their own head produced in a moment of terror in the pure dread that two and three and four and five nights without sleep would produce. Even if they could fire forever, Anya was certain it would come to an end long before they had passed through the first second of infinity.