Beat came down, and BOOM, it was like a gong going off as the Hammer came down. The staggered head exploded, took out its foreparts with it, and Briggs continued right on down to the ground, burning Great Sluggor spraying ahead of and around him. The shocked Sluggor in front of him ate an entire salvo of Blessed Light to the face, blowing it apart in shock, and then Briggs was bouncing off to some bloated, shambling brute three times his size, Beat drumming happily as it flew through arcs almost too fast to follow.
I actually hit the ground after Briggs did, but it didn’t make too much difference. I slid under and jumped over a couple blows aimed at me, four limbs went flying, and Pusboys were exploding all around me as burning Spikes drove into misshapen skulls and leering mouths with murderous accuracy. Tracking, charting a path, and off to the races, Chalice a blur of golden glory sliding through small hills of corpulent flesh and leaving burning ruin in her wake.
Riggibuhl’s cheerful horde got a bit more depressed as we carved through them with explosive speed and relentless precision. I removed an arm, and Briggs came by to explode a head. He shoulder-slammed a hulking brute with a gut swollen like a tumor, and it staggered down in time for Chalice to whisper through its neck and keep on going.
Rapid Blessed fire was in every direction, and the numberless amounts of Pusboys began to thin out with shocking speed as we carved through the Sluggors and other middling demons with antipathy and Karmic hunger. Briggs met their blows head on and sent them sprawling... I just chopped their weapons apart and followed up lethally.
While all this was happening, the fire from those in the bunker up the hill hadn’t stopped, and was also thinning their attackers quickly. The larger demons were increasingly distracted as we tore through their rear, eliminating everything in our path and leaving a burning path as we tore right for them, completely unafraid of being flanked ourselves.
The burning, bloated bulk of the Greater Sluggor behind us was a good indicator of why.
And then one of the defenders within the bunker stepped into the doorway to the bunker after it was blown apart by some necroic blast from one of the demons, unloading plasma into the heaving bulk of the elephantine demon, which by the way its superheated innards went exploding out, it didn’t appreciate very much.
It wasn’t dead, but Briggs being an opportunist put two seconds of sustained fire into the gaping wound, and a lot of very pure light went off inside it, and came out of it, too, as it wailed, and collapsed in burning goo and sludge and worse things.
-Huh,- we /said at the same time.
Neither of us had ever seen one in person before, but the style of the power armor was unique, and reserved for them and them alone. Trying to emulate it was a good excuse to eat a bullet.
That there was an Imperial Legionnaire!
-Someone give me a color pattern verification!- I /downloaded the image promptly. Sure, I could go akasha dumping for it, but I had other things to do.
-Green and white patterns, black rank marks... Emerald Bull Legion, from the Boga System! That’s halfway across the galaxy... what are they doing here?- was the quick /reply from one of the Goldilocks.
-The Warp works in insane ways,- was my /reply, as I swept off my Band ID to the captain of the company in the doorway. I distinctly saw him freeze when he saw it, dumbfounded.
“Colonel Sama Rantha of Janus Prime?” a deep voice commed over, futzed with static from the Warp. “This is Captain Iliviar Donnal of the Emerald Bull Legion!”
“The Emperor Protects,” I replied kindly, not stopping with my rampage of killing. “My associate Commander Briggs and I will endeavor to lift this assault if you can keep your defense up another minute or two. We won’t be long.”
I could almost hear the ...... of his non-reply. Still, the firing of the defense became a lot more energetic suddenly, as the number of enemies attacking was being thinned precipitously.
-----------
Some broken-horned, lurching thing ten feet tall and a couple thousand pounds was the last decent-sized demon left on the field. Well, it wasn’t fast enough to run, and Pusboys, Slimers, and Imps were exploding around it as it swung a really big and gory Dire Axe at me. I calmly hacked the head off the spine-haft, continued on to bury Chalice in its chest and rip it open, stepped aside, and Beat came roaring in to explode through it violently and render it into many stinking, burning pieces.
I spun slowly, Tails still shooting and finding targets, but my running about turned into a casual glide as I focused on Paten picking off bouncing Pusboys in constant streams and flashes of golden light, while Briggs planted himself and his autolaser swept the entire hill repeatedly with pulsing, fanned swathes of death.
I bounced thirty feet up to the shattered roof of the bunker, looking in all directions. “Skies are clear!” I sent a couple more seconds of rapid-fire downslope, popping a few more targets. “I don’t see anybody else wandering this way for the moment!”
“Copy that,” Briggs murmured on comms, for the benefit of the Legionnaires. “We’ve got a few minutes before any Warp shift happens, I think, and they’ll have to reach us.”
I dropped back to the ground before the carefully watching eyes of a lot of armored men nearly as tall as Briggs, and with armor looking a bit more advanced.
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Imperial Legionnaires, the Emperor’s Own Space Marines. The most elite of the armed forces of the Emperor, second only to the Coronal Knights in military authority and respect within the empire; the special forces of the special forces, for all intents and purposes.
Six thousand years ago, their Primogenitors had rebelled against the Emperor, and a number of Legions had followed them right into insurrection. Hundreds of billions of people had died before the Primogenitors were driven off or slain, and the corrupted Legions still plagued the galaxy.
It was a huge stain on the honor and glory of the Legions, and led directly to the preeminence of the Coronal Knights and the Umbrans. The sons of the Emperor had failed him, and a shadow fell across all the Legions, even the ones that remained loyal.
I released my Tails, and they evaporated into ectoplasm. I felt the Legionnaires visibly relax when they saw that, alleviating any suspicions of me being a mutant. It would have put me at strange odds with the mindblade that was showing, of course, but now they just realized it was a psionic effect, nothing more, and I wasn’t going to tell them otherwise.
“Captain Donnal, you are a very long way from home,” I informed the eight-foot statue of durasteel power armor in front of me.
“I was going to say the same of you, Colonel,” he said warily. “I was not aware of a Janus Regiment being dispatched to Colgada.”
I eyed him carefully, as my trivia buffs pulled up the data in Marktell. “This is the Warp Intersection Zone of Janus Prime, not Colgada. Technically, we’re on the fringe of the Warp, which is why this battlefield is so damn crazy, and things that die are disappearing, while new shit appears, and the fighting never stops.” I tilted my head. “The last Imperial Records I know of list a Colgada suppression of a Warp Uprising among the factory workers of Colgada one hundred and thirty-seven years ago. There was a single company of Emerald Bulls in support, but they were reported lost on the battlefield during a Warp Break. That would have been in 7465 Imperial Reckoning.”
The Bulls turned to look at one another. “That... would seem to be us,” the Captain agreed slowly. I sent the battle reports to him, and he surveyed them with electric speed. “Yes, that does seem to be the battle we were at. We have been caught in this battlefield for nearly six months...”
A Legion company was nominally a hundred men, although that could change if armored vehicles were included. I saw twenty-three of them left. Rather amazing they were alive at all, given the surroundings. Of course, they had the option to hunker down and stay in cover, which their insane opponents largely didn’t.
“Well, you’re in luck, Captain. The Commander and I can lead the lot of you off this battlefield. It’s about a twenty-mile hike, but after such a long stay, I don’t think you’ll care much. The only thing is that once you leave this field, there’s a degradation in the physical laws, and most of your armor functions are going to cease.” I inspected the beaten, scarred, and half-mended armor of his men. “It looks like you’ve got basic psionic circuits to allow motion even if your main power goes off line, but you’re going to be losing all your energy weaponry, and it doesn’t look like you’ve got much ammunition left.
“Happily, anything we meet is also at a lower level of tech, so your armor and size should be enough to carry you through to the safe zone, which isn’t that much further. We should be able to shuttle you out of here and outside to Janus Prime. However, there will be problems getting you home.”
“What sort of problems, Colonel?” he asked quickly, staring down at me.
“Approximately twenty-some years ago, there was a Warp Break of unprecedented size, cutting across over half the galactic disk. Travel through the Break is impossible, and it has left Tellus on the far side from us... as well as your home system of Boga. The Bull Legions in the Taurus sector are all completely cut off from us here, so for the moment, you’re going to be stranded, even if you get out of here.”
I carefully didn’t listen in on the quick words between the captain and his sergeants. “We can work the details out of our duties when we leave this place, Colonel. If you can lead us out of here, I would be grateful.”
“That won’t be an issue. We’ll take a more circumspect route to spare you the amount of firepower we were attracting, but it shouldn’t be an issue.”
“If that tank battle resolved,” Briggs added in.
“That was six miles back. I bet even the blasted hulks are gone now.”
“And replaced by something else,” Briggs just grunted pessimistically, turning back to the captain. “How much time do you and your men need, Captain?”
“I have several wounded. We will have to–“
“-wait for me to heal them,” I waved off, slipping Grym out of my hair. “If it’s anything below lost limbs, I can take care of it. Who needs it?” I inquired.
“A healer too?” I didn’t have any identification as a medicae, of course, but in his enthusiasm, Captain Donnal didn’t mind.
---
Six of the marines had festering wounds. Their boosted systems were keeping them alive, but the injuries had been bad to begin with, and weren’t healing. The fact they couldn’t repair their armor and didn’t have sterile zones to treat the Warp-boosted disease certainly didn’t help matters.
Not an issue. Transferring the injury and the disease was certainly possible, and easily dealt with. They saw the gaping holes and stinking wounds open on me, and swiftly get burned clean, and close rapidly, leaving no trace nor scar behind. The fact I barely paid attention to the injuries transferred over got as much respect as taking them on in the first place.
“You’ve a Fast Healing Matrix.” Captain Donnal managed to keep most of the envy out of his voice.
“That IS generally a requirement for Empathic Healing,” I replied calmly, as I finished the first Marine, who rose with his moldering thigh now completely intact, delighted despite himself, and the gory, rotting wound on my thigh and dark veins extending up and down it hissed and burned as they rapidly vanished. I just gestured the next guy over, his left forearm and hand stripped of their armor, and looked gangrenous and bleeding pus. “I gather you ran out of healing crystals some time ago.”
He nodded shortly, glancing over at Briggs, waiting patiently up on the wall, shoulder cannon panning back and forth one way, helm the other. “Combat has been nigh-continuous. Defeat one foe, another arrives soon enough.” He paused. “Is this truly Janus III?” he pressed.
“No, HERE is a slightly erratic border area of chaotic space with the Warp, which is touching on combat zones with Warp influence across the entire span of areas infiltrated by the gods of the Warp from across the galaxy and likely centuries. Back that way, across the dimensionally stabilized path the Commander and I chewed through this combat zone, is Janus III. If you leave by some other path, I have no idea where you’d end up, but it will be somewhere with Warp influence nearby, which more than likely means a planet in The Abyss, under Warp control, or a very active combat zone full of things from the Warp.
“You should probably take your chances on Janus III.” My hand inflated with black and puke-yellow infections that spread rapidly up my forearm, as the same area on the Marine receded back to normal pale brown skin and muscle, no indication it had been infected at all. Unwhite flames hissed on my fingertips, and began to steal up my fingers towards my hand, eating away the disease aggressively, trailing falling mist as they did.