Sktiarii Short Story - A Second Small Arc

The constant murmur of enslaved tech-thralls hummed with the predatory growls of chained Daemon Engines, barely audible over the wailing alarms of the damned forge. Turning his attention from a thrashing slave, her body rippling and bursting from the inside as the Daemon within her sort to transform its new host into a form more to its liking, the Master of Possession gazed into the distance. Linking his sense into the Empyrean, he could feel the foul existences of his Daemon Engines winking out in Chamber nine, the howling forms of the Neverborn banished back into the Immaterium as the metallic forms that housed them broke apart.

"Intruders," he hissed underneath the ghoulish mask that his helmet had morphed into, tainted by energies of the warp. With a thought, he unbound the restraints holding his Daemon Engines back, and they roared, trampling over the poor slaves and laborers who tended to them. The Master of Possession did not even think to warn the poor wretched workers. Their lives were inconsquential to him. He could get more from the rotting Imperium.

There would always be those who valued their lives over loyalty to their corpse god.

He glanced at the shadows, where the silhouttes of ancient warriors lay in wait. The black and gold of their baroque power armor allowed them to blend into the darkness, and at a nod from him, they quietly melted away into the darkness, as if they had never existed.

The dogs of the doomed Imperium would fall. Those foolish clockwork soldiers who had trespassed into his infernal realm would know the price of their recklessness.

*

Hexical 44-Luminen strode over the gantry, ignoring the clanking sounds that his metallic feet made against the flooring. They had cleared out the last chamber and were moving into the core of the infernal forge, after securing Sectors nine, two and four. The last one, in particular, was of utmost importance to his Tech-priest master. Magos Dominus Ares Taldorus did not give him any reasons, but Luminen never thought to ask. As Skitarii Alpha, his imperative was to obey the priesthood of the Adeptus Mechanicus, not to doubt.

To question was to blaspheme. Luminen's faith in the Omnissiah remained strong.

As the Skitarii moved mechanically into the next sector, flawlessly executing the cover-and-fire movements uploaded into their neural-ware, that was a bang. The Skitarii Ranger to Luminen's right pitched and fell, a mass reactive bolt piercing his carapace armor and detonating inside his ribcage. Even as the lights blinked out of his visual receptors, Luminen registered the loss of life through the noosphere.

Without any hesitation, for none of the Skitarii were capable of emotional responses, the surviving Rangers of Luminen's maniple opened up and fired a volley of galvanic blasts into the shadows. Unagumented men might not be able to see, but the occular augmetics surgically implanted into every Skitarii Ranger's lidless eyes allowed them to see in a variety of spectrums, including infared. They could spot the slight increase in temperatures among the cooler shadows, an anomaly amidst the infernally boiling forge.

However, the galvanic bolts harmlessly dissipated against the power armor of an ancient Black Legionnaire. The black and gold armored Heretic Astarte raised his boltgun and murdered another of Luminen's men with uncanny precision, the bolt obiterating his head. The Skitarii Ranger slumped down, headless, and Luminen registered his subordinate's loss. Not with regret, but anger. Anger that the efficiency of his dwindling force was being compromised, and loss of so exquisite the craftwork of his Draconian masters.

The Adeptus Mechanicus priesthood of the forge world Draconis IV, if anything, was renowned for taking pride in their craftsmenship and the melding of flesh with metal, often likening it to the Motive Force taking form.

Bluish-white arcs of lightning arced from four arc rifles, the Skitarii wielders having synchronized their aim through the noosphere, and collided with the Black Legionnaire before he could retreat. The devastating electricity fried the Traitor Space Marine's brain, reducing it to a mess of bubbling fluid in his skull. Even with his transhuman physiology, the ancient warrior was unable to survive that and he sank down in a hissing mass.

More Black Legionnaires were erupting out of the shadows now, taking out Skitarii Rangers with precise shots. One of the arc rifle gunners went down, but another Skitarii Ranger discarded his galvanic rifle and picked up the arc rifle. So precious a weapon would not be allowed to be left unused in the battlefield. Lightning sprayed and electrocuted yet another Black Legion Traitor Marine, sending him crashing down from the platform where he was standing and sprawling in an unnatural angle.

There was a thunderous bang behind him, and Luminen did not turn around. He knew, from the tactical uploads, that two of his Skitarii Rangers had set up their transuranic arquebuses and activated their Protector Doctrina Imperative, sniping the hidden Black Legionnaires from afar, and beyond the range of their boltguns. Their comrades with omnispexes had also hung back on his orders, providing them vision and targets.

Even though Luminen was losing men at an alarming rate, there were only ten Black Legion Chaos Space Marines, and despite taking a heavy toll upon his Skitarii, he was able to wipe out the majority of them. The two survivors fled into the shadows, evidently recognized the futility of resistance.

<None shall withstand the might of the Machine God,> Luminen canted, and his surviving Skitarii grouped up behind him. Even so, he couldn't help but feel disturbed when he saw the corpses of the Black Legionnaires. Their tactics did not make sense. They were known to be the more ruthless and merciless of the Traitor Legions, yet the survivors fled. Not only that, there were only ten of them, yet they threw themselves at a numerically superior foe, sacrificing their lives to take out a fraction of the invading Skitarii.

Why would they do that?

Luminen cycled through combat data and calculated several dozen tactical projections in the next few seconds, and only came to one conclusion.

They were buying time. But for what?

The answer came in the form of bursting doors and bestial bellows. The metallic structure was ruptured as scores of Daemon Engines poured through them, snarling and clanking. Maulerfiends. Forgefiends. Defilers. Venomcrawlers. Their heavy weapons cycled and poured out a continuous stream of punishing rounds from Hades autocannons, devastating shells from battle cannons and the excrcuiator cannons spitting out venom. Half of Luminen's Skitarii were gunned down, lost in explosions and the merciless barrage.

<Get to cover!>

Even before he blurted the order, the emotionless Skitarii were coldly abandoning their dead and diving for whatever makeshift cover they could find, hiding behind rubble or fallen gantries. The Skitarii Rangers from afar continued to fire their transuranic arquebuses, blasting through several of the Daemon Engines, and bluish-white lightning crackled and streamed from the surviving arc rifle gunners, electrocuting the nearest foul constructs and driving the screaming warpborn souls from within.

But there were far too many.

"Foolish mortals...did you think you can destroy one of the Warmaster's revered forges?"

The Master of Possession walked amidst his procession of Daemon Engines, his staff clanking against the metallic flooring. Ethereal energies swirled from his hand as he channeled them to imbue his Daemon Engines with tainted power. The ones nearer to him went berserk, their weapons glowing hot as they unleashed torrents of organic ammunition with enhanced accuracy. The ones in front seemed to shimmer, and to Luminen's surprise, the hypervelocity, armor-piercing rounds of the Skitarii snipers' transuranic arquebuses failed to penetrate what seemed like grotesque forcefields that surrounded a Venomcrawler. At a gesture of the sorcerous Master of Possession, a nearby Maulerfiend, still twitching from the devastating electricity from the Skitarii arc rifles that coursed through its body, recovered and stood straight with a defiant roar, its damaged components seeming to mend and heal before the mechanical soldiers' eyes.

<Omnissiah protect us,> Luminen murmured in binaric, frantically cycling through data-feeds and combat uploads in hopes of finding any precdent to this. The Master of Possession was unlike any Heretic Astarte he had ever seen before, and he directed his Skitarii snipers to take him out. They obliged, switching the aim of their transuranic arquebuses toward the malevolent character, but he was protected by the same cursed barriers that he conjured over his daemonic charges.

"You think your clockwork god will protect you?" The Master of Possession sneered. "This is only the beginning."

Slamming his staff against the ground, he raised his other hand and seemed to rip a hole in empty space. The two Venomcrawlers beside him seemed to writhe, tongues hanging out from revolting, organic faces that seemed more flesh than metal. Luminen felt sick at the sight of them, but that nausea increased when the Master of Possession slashed his hand through the air.

Ghostly laughter erupted through the space. The barrier between reality and the Immaterium, already weakened by the ghastly presences of the Venomcrawlers, collapsed, and hordes of Neverborn poured out. Crimson Bloodletters with blazing swords. Sickening feminine forms of Slaanesh Daemonettes. The flickering forms of vividly colored Horrors. Disgustingly resilient forms of Plaguebearers and Nurglings, that left trails of diseased ooze in their wake.

"Holy Omnissiah..." the words left Luminen's lips. With this fresh wave of reinforcements, he knew for certain that his remaining Skitarii forces would not hold. Could not hold. He would have to muster his surviving Skitarii and fall back...

<Hold your position.>

Luminen stood a tad straighter as Magos Ares Taldorus's binaric stream coursed through him, and his hesitation and fears were gone. Gone was the man Hexical 44-Luminen. The machine...the cold, calculating soldier took his place, assessing threat patterns and analyzing the optimal strategies that would allow him to sell his soldiers' lives as dearly as possible. They obeyed him without question, their loyalty to Magos Dominus Taldorous, as well as their faith in the Omnissiah unfaltering. They would sacrifice their lives to buy the time their Tech-priest master needed.

A thunderous roar filled the air and a torrent of liquid flame incinerated the first wave of Daemons, streaming from the incendiary combustors of marching Kastelan Robots. Behind them, Castellax battle-automata opened fire with their mauler bolt cannons and Darkfire cannons, the former erasing large swathes of chittering Neverborn and the latter punching holes through the advancing Daemon Engines through sheer firepower. As two Maulerfiends closed the distance, the vanguard of Kastelan Robots lowered their shoulders and charged, colliding with the Daemon Engines and knocking them flat on their backs. The Maulerfiends did not go down without a fight, their lasher trendrils whipping out and cracking against the repulsor grids and atomantic shielding that protected the Kastelan Robots.

The Kastelan Robots reached down and tore the Maulerfiends apart with the crackling mechanical digits of their power fists, ripping the thrashing Daemon Engines apart. Forgefiends with ectoplasma cannons and Hades autocannon turned their devastating firepower upon the Kastelan Robots, and two of them went down, smoldering hulks of molten metal.

The retaliation from the Castellax battle-automata was just as ferocious, the concentrated volley of plasma from their Darkfire cannons hammering into the Forgefiends and puncturing them. One of them detonated as the superheated stream of plasma touched off something in its core, its shrapnel raining down on its comrades and knocking a nearby Defiler off its feet.

The Venomcrawlers crawled forward, their excruciator cannons spitting warp-filled death at the robots of the Legio Cybernetica. However, from behind came the lumbering forms of the Thanatar siege-automata, their plasma hellex mortars saturating the area in a sea of superheated plasma. Daemon Engines screamed and died, the cursed entities leaving the seared and incinerated husks of their momentary hosts behind.

<You have done well to hold, Alpha 44-Luminen.>

Magos Taldorous crept forward, almost unheard. His volkite blaster punched a hole through an approaching Bloodletter and set its comrades on fire with the ancient technology, while a mechadendrite wielding a phosphor serpenta whirled independently, blasting holes in a wailing Daemonette. His Omnissiah axe decapitated a shuffling Plaguebearer, and even the disgustingly resilient creature could not survive without its head, its pockmarked form kneeling over and crumbling from existence.

"You..." the Master of Possession growled, and then realization dawned on him. "The Skitarii were just a diversion..."

"You are not totally wrong, but you are not totally correct either," Taldorous responded with his flesh-voice, a mechanical sound devoid of emotion. "Their duty was to open the gates for my Cybernetica Cohorts to march into your forge."

The Master of Possession raged, his dwindling forces of Daemon Engines routed by the approaching blessed robots of the Adeptus Mechanicus. He raised his staff to summon more reinforcements, but as he did so, a hypervelocity shell of depleted transuranium from a transuranic arquebus obliterated his skull, and the headless corpse fell as if his strings had been cut.

For a moment, the Daemon Engines froze, as if not knowing what to do with their terrible master gone. The Cybernetica robots continued to mercilessly butcher them, tearing them apart with crackling power fists, incinerating them with flames, high-caliber shells and plasma, or electrocuted by the lightning from the few remaining Skitarii's arc rifles.

"My, oh my...I did not think Morte would die so easily."

A scuttling sound from the chamber beyond seemed to galvanize the halting Daemon Engines, and for some reason, they were energized, fighting back in a manner more crazed than before. Taldorous frowned, his weapons all tracking the ruptured door.

A spidery form sauntered through the hole, a Warpsmith holding shimmering power lance up as he rode on a black Daemon Engine. More Daemon Engines crawled through in his wake, replenishing the fallen ones. The broken doors dented once again as something massive smashed through it, carving through the reinforced material and expanding the hole.

Through the enormous gap, the terrifying form of a Lord of Skulls lumbered into the chamber, its heavy treads crushing the maimed constructs of its Daemon Engine brethren without mercy or compassion.

"I guess it's up to me to clean up his mess," the Lord of Discordant remarked as he locked eyes with the cool, inhuman occular augmetics of Magos Ares Taldorous. The Tech-priest Dominus shrugged almost casually.

"I see that there's already...um, discord in your ranks."

The Lord of Discordant might have narrowed his eyes. It was hard to tell, especially when his features were masked beneath that robed helmet of his, which seemed to disturbingly mirror the Skitarii that had assembeld to face him.

"We'll see if your sense of humor survives when I chain you to the walls and bind your metallic form to a Daemon," he snarled. Without even looking back at his army of Daemon Engines, he issued the most cliched order imaginable. "Kill them."

With a ferocious roar, the Lord of Skulls rolled toward the cohort of Cybernetica robots that had massed before it, its titanic form flanked by a fresh wave of bellowing Daemon Engines.