"Silence! Lackey of the False Emperor! A warrior's glory needs no conspiracies or tricks!"
The Khorne champion roared, his voice thick with bloodlust, as he intensified his assault. Yet, despite his ferocity, the rhythm of his twin axes faltered—just a fraction.
That was all the opening Raynor needed.
In the heartbeat where both sides were thrown back by the recoil of a violent parry, Raynor didn't reach for his sword. With a speed honed by survival, he drew a bolt pistol he had kept concealed behind his back.
The cultist's combat logic, primitive and centered on "honorable" slaughter, could not process the maneuver. To use a ranged weapon in the middle of a glorious melee was, in his eyes, an act of supreme cowardice. His face contorted with a mixture of shock, fury, and a twisted sense of betrayal.
"You—!"
Raynor didn't wait for the curse.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Three muffled barks of the bolt pistol echoed through the factory. At such close range, the self-propelled explosive rounds easily bypassed the heretic's toughened hide, detonating inside his chest cavity.
The massive body of the Khorne worshiper buckled. His bloodshot eyes remained wide, fixed in an expression of disbelief. He opened his mouth, perhaps to spit one last defiance, but only a crimson foam emerged. He collapsed into the filth with a heavy thud, maintaining his expression of "moral" outrage until the very end.
"Glory?" Raynor blew a wisp of non-existent smoke from the muzzle, his voice cold as the hive's steel. "Win the fight first. Then we can talk about glory."
The death of the leader triggered a piercing shriek from the altar. The Chaos Priest, a withered wretch draped in tattered, gore-stained robes, turned his fury toward Raynor. He raised a scepter carved from blackened bone, its tip crackling with dark purple warp-lightning.
"In the name of the True Gods, die! Heretic!"
The psychic bolt tore through the air, striking Raynor dead center. But the expected result—a man charred to cinders or a soul torn asunder—did not happen. When the lightning reached within inches of Raynor's chest, it struck an invisible barrier. It sizzled briefly, then vanished like a stone dropped into a bottomless well.
Instead, it was the Chaos Priest who recoiled as if struck. Through his second sight, he didn't see a mere man standing before him. He saw a shadow in the Immaterium: a gargantuan, multifaceted, and coldly devouring worm-like silhouette. It opened a maw of infinite teeth and let out a silent, soul-shattering roar.
"No... impossible!" the priest stammered, his eyes bulging as his mind fractured under the weight of the vision.
A second later, his head detonated like a ripened fruit hit by a sledgehammer. Grey matter and bone fragments showered his horrified followers.
In a secluded corner of District 8, Alpha—the Tyranid variable—slowly withdrew its psychic projection. A glint of predatory intelligence flashed in its compound eyes as it let out a low, satisfied chitter. It sensed Raynor was safe.
Raynor, feeling a strange, familiar warmth fade from his mind, understood what had happened. He had no time to dwell on it; the battle was still raging. With their champion and priest dead, the morale of the cultists shattered. The Enforcers and the hive-mobs swept over them like a tide.
"Sanitize the area," Raynor ordered ten minutes later, stepping over the corpses of fifty cultists. "Burn the altar. Leave nothing but ash."
His gaze, however, drifted toward the depths of the eighth sector.
The Abyssal Hatchery.
The conflict here had devolved from a tactical strike into a brutal war of attrition. Cassius and his two fellow Terminators stood like three unshakeable monoliths at the breach. Their Storm Shields hummed under the constant impact of bone-spikes and acid-spray, while their Thunder Hammers cleared bloody swathes through the chitinous tide with every swing.
But for every hundred insects they crushed, a thousand more scuttled from the dark.
Behind them, the Land Raiders and a detachment of Skitarii provided a blistering wall of fire. These were the "Skitarii Vanguard," the private army of Magos Cyrus. Extensive mechanization allowed them to operate in the Hatchery's lethal atmosphere without hesitation.
Sydonian Dragoons flanked the swarm, their taser lances discharging blinding arcs of energy, while the Onager Dune Crawlers—imposing red iron fortresses on spindly mechanical legs—pounded the densest clusters with phosphorus shells. High-explosive rockets from the Crawlers' pods bloomed in the darkness, turning the hatchery into a charnel house of green ichor and blackened meat.
The fire support was magnificent, but the Tyranid response was swift.
A series of heavy, guttural roars echoed from the depths of the organic pits, sounding like the ignition of massive biological engines. The ground groaned and buckled.
Two gargantuan horrors burst through the pulsating ceiling membrane. Standing over five meters tall, their bodies were encased in thick, tank-grade chitinous plating. Their primary limbs were massive, sickle-shaped bone blades that shimmered with a metallic sheen—blades capable of shearing through Astartes ceramite as if it were parchment.
They fixed their scarlet compound eyes on the Terminators, acidic bile dripping from their serrated maws.
The Executioners had arrived.