"Huh," Suzuki grunted, not at all interested in Tanaka's conversation. Tanaka sighed and shook his head.
"According to intelligence, this world, Haysworth, is next."
Haysworth was an agri-world...or at least it was supposed to be before it would inevitably fall to the Genestealer Cults. The Cult of the Twisted Helix was far too strong, crushing both Imperial defenders and xenos alike. Already they had defeated the Sisters of the Sacred Ashes and Mechanicus forces on Chaska, and now they were hading for Haysworth to prepare the agri-world for being devoured by the Star Gods. Aka the Tyranids.
That...sucked.
"Our job is to crush them," Ogami snapped irritably, his Knight Preceptor lumbering forward. "So stop talking and start hunting!"
"Yes, sir!" Tanaka straightened up in his Helm Mechanicum and followed in his Armiger Warglaive. Kazan tracked the surroundings with its thermal spear, looking for...stuff to kill. Then he blinked. "What the hell is that over there?"
Across the fields and in the center of the Administratum town that served as the world's hub, he could see gigantic effigies. Statues of four-armed warriors rose proudly from bedrock, distorted variations of the Holy Emperor.
"False idols..." Ogami growled. "Topple them!"
"Wait," Tanaka began. "It might be a trap..."
He was too late. The Genestealer Cultists sprang the ambush. Mining lasers and heavy Punisher Gatling cannon shots rang against Okami, the Questoris Knight reeling from the heavy blows. Caught in the crossfire from all sorts of heavy weapons, Ogami attempted to adjust his ion shields to deflect the flaring energy beams and solid shots, but the adamantium armor was buckling.
Then Chiba screamed. Tanaka whirled around, only to see the Knight Moirax get knocked over by a monstrous creature. It resembled a Genestealer, but it was much larger. A Patriarch? He could feel hynoptic waves emanating from the foul xenos, a power that had dulled Chiba's senses and left him open to attack. The Patriarch tore into his Knight Moirax viciously, ripping out armor and cabling.
"Get away from him, you freak!" Tanaka shouted, his words reminsicent of that super famous warrant officer from the star freighter Nostromo who survived hostile contact with a black xenomorph. The Patriach turned toward him and lunged, but Tanaka swung his reaper chain-cleaver and cut a gruesome wound into the Patriarch. It hissed and reeled, only for Tanaka to vaporize the monstrosity with a shot from his carapace meltagun. The incandescent beam roared, cooking the shrieking xenos and turning it into ash.
Tanaka's eyes widened. "Whoa, that was a lucky shot...and he got super unlucky too."
"It's not over yet!" Ogami snapped. Okami was stepping forward, his las-impulsor thundering. Low intensity beams cut through a squad of Acolytes before he charged into a second horde, stomping on them with the Knight Preceptor's titanic feet. On the other side, Kanda's Knight Moirax fired, the graviton pulsars crushing a squad of cultist bikers into pulp. Suzuki's Armiger Warglaive then sliced apart the jeep with Hebi's reaper chain-cleaver, reducing the light vehicle to wreckage and sending severed pieces of the riders flying into the air in a mist of blood.
The stolen Leman Russ tank reversed and spatt projectiles and las-beams at the approaching Knight Preceptor, but Okami would not be denied. With a determined yell, Ogami swung the Reaper chainsword and cut the Leman Russ tank apart, the halves of the armored vehicle spinning away from each other and its occupants obliterated by the shimmering power field that enveloped the whirring blade.
The Atalan Jackal recklessly charged Suzuki's wounded Hebi, which had taken a few shots from the cultists' seismic cannons and mining lasers, but he cut her down before she could drill a hole into his cockpit with her sniper rifle. While he kicked the broken bike down, Tanaka finished off the Cultists with a sweep from his Reaper chain-cleaver. Whatever remnants broke and ran were finished off by graviton pulses from Kanda's Knight Moirax.
"Hey! It's not over yet!" Ogami warned. The bondsmen looked up, only to see Okami squish a reductor saboteur under its titanic feet. A few of the mines went off, exploding under the Knight Preceptor, but miraculously it shrugged off the damage with what appeared to be nothing but faith.
The benevolence of the Omnissiah, indeed.
"We won!" Ogami crowed. Tanakan frowned.
"That felt a little too easy," he warned. "I think the Cult has more forces hidden somewhere. Best to be more cautious."
"Don't be such a debbie downer!" Ogami snapped. "I say we press on and continue to drive the xenos filth from the planet!"
Tanaka had a bad feeling about this...
...that feeling manifested hours later when he lay in the cockpit of Kazan, watching helplessly as the Patriarch tore through his forces. An obliterated Leman Russ tank lay several dozen meters away, having been fried by the high intensity laser of Ogami's las-impulsor, and cultist bikers lay strewn about, corpses entwined with wrecked vehicles. Despite their best efforts, the Genestealer Cultists had pushed on, with the Patriarch a literal one-man army that smashed through the entire Lance.
"How the hell did the Patriarch survive so many melta shots pointblank?!" He demanded. He had watched the Patriarch eat a couple of thermal beams...only to shrug them off as if they were nothing. Instead, the Acolytes next to him suddenly died, as if they were the ones shot by the meltagun instead. The same thing happened when he cut the Patriarch apart with his Reaper chain-cleaver...only for the injuries to somehow transfer to the Acolytes not far from him instead. Tanaka shook his head in disbelief. "That's bullshit."
As the Genestealer Cultists ran rampant over the Knights' lines, Ogami gave a final order.
"Retreat! Get out of here!"
"We're trying to," Tanaka grumbled, fumbling with the hatch. Then he noticed something in the distance. A cloud of dust billowing upward and surrounding a horde of...squigs?
"WAAAGH!"
"Oh...things just keep getting better and better," he moaned. "God-Emperor, why must You do this to us?"
"Actually, this is a chance," Kanda said suddenly, halting his attempts to scramble free from his Helm Mechanicum.
"What do you mean?" Ogami demanded.
"The Orks and xenos cultists are going to fight each other. While the greenskins and mutants battle, we'll take the chance to get out of here."
"Already on it."
Everyone jolted when Magos Decimar spoke up, his cold, mechanical voice blaring through their cockpits. He had a bunch of salvage vehicles at the ready, including Atlas recovery tanks. Servitors were swarming over the downed Knights, hooking them up and pulling them away from the battlefield as the Genestealer Cultists turned to meet the Orks in combat.
"We calculated a 98.6% probahility that this would happen, and thus had the salvage vehicles on standby. You are lucky."
"Hmph." Ogami scoffed. Meanwhile, Tanaka breathed a sigh of relief.
"Looks like we live to fight another day." He then stared at the Orks and shuddered. "I sure hope we don't run into their walkers...I heard rumors that they scavenged fallen Knight armors from other Houses to build a bunch of their own walkers."
"Don't jinx us!" Suzuki whined. "You always have to jinx us, don't you?"
Personally, Tanaka would call it being a realist, but he decided to stay silent and wait for the Atlas tank to tow Kazan to safety while praying fervently to the Emperor that they wouldn't get massacred one-sidedly again like they did today.
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