Warhammer 40: Shattered Steel Soul

Chapter 399 Run

"You have repeatedly warned people in their ears through their parents, their friends, their opponents, and everything that happens around them. Only those who are moving away from you dare to shamelessly complain that you are silent because they are silent. I have never wanted to hear your voice." - "The Book of Lorgar".

Hammer kills his first enemy today not with a bolter, but with the power sword in his hand.

Something crawled out of the sand underground, bringing with it a worm-like rustle. The sound itself was hidden in the howling wind in the night, but the warrior quickly thrust his sword into the sand, piercing some kind of hard chitin. The qualitative structure lifts the swimming life forms out of the sand. It was a fish-shaped creature with spider legs. Dark yellow juice dripped from its body, accompanied by a strong pungent smell.

He then tore it into two pieces with his sword. The particularly obvious neural structure inside the monster hung out of the body. It twitched violently and suddenly stopped moving.

This brief encounter ended quickly. Although the Randan alien branches they had seen so far were of various shapes and forms, they also had a common feature - damage to their limbs would directly affect their combat thinking. Sometimes they were lucky enough. Well, tearing off one of their limbs is enough to turn the other party into a puddle of rotten flesh that doesn't know how to move.

Correspondingly, the weaknesses of biological creatures under normal circumstances are not obvious in their bodies. No matter where the hit point is, the power of penetrating damage is approximately equal to nothing when there is insufficient luck.

Samples were sent to the rear of the legion one after another, and reports sent to the front gave speculation that these abnormal nerves functioned in their bodies equivalent to biological brains.

"I think if a fight breaks out, the Emperor's Children will definitely suffer the most pain," Jack said. "Compared to slicing the enemy's limbs or eight limbs, their beautiful swordsmanship with one blow through the heart is better here..."

He swung his claws to grab the second crawling fish monster. The tips of his power claws penetrated the side of its chitinous head shell, avoiding the hard parts, and penetrated deep into the gaps between the carapace and bones, inserting the soft inside. The material was pulled to the outside, and then the head shell and abdominal cavity were completely torn in half. The fish monster trembled at the tips of his hands, leaving Jack a little time to observe carefully before it died.

“There’s no feeling,” Hashem paused before describing it, although there was guilt and reluctance in every syllable. “It just appears.”

"What does that feel like, Hashem?"

This kind of juice does not even have the powerful corrosiveness that is commonly found in alien bodies, and when its spider legs scratched across Gerry's leg armor, the seemingly sharp ends barely scraped off even a layer of black paint. It is completely opposite to the harmful characteristics of the combat structures encountered before.

The rustling sounds faded away underground, as unnoticed as they had come, but still felt by Hammer. He frowned in confusion and told the rest of the team what he had discovered.

"...It's useless," Jack said persistently, "So what is this thing? I can't see what attack it relies on."

"Oh, psyker." Gerry nodded.

"It's broken...why am I as insensitive as Kroger..." Luna Wolf muttered in frustration, "I thought I was quite emotionally sensitive-"

"How do you know?" Jack asked strangely, fidgeting with a piece of the fish monster's head shell in his hand. He knew that some battle brothers had picked up the alien sharp bone blade stumps as their trophies and frequently replaced weapons. Horus Luperkar did not forbid this, but merely reminded them to be careful with the weapons in their hands.

They killed a few more fish monsters, grabbed them out of the sand sea in various ways, and then simply destroyed them. This was the simplest kill in their recent missions. It was not even enough to activate their combat senses, and everything ended easily.

Hashem retracted his unfinished words and said bitterly: "Ran Dan's alien emotion entered my perception range, and it interfered with me!"

"You can tell me what happened before you confess," Kroger said, adding politely, considering the Word Bearers' good behavior in the group, "Please."

"It's probably a good thing to be able to kill all the enemies without being attacked." Gerry replied, also killing a fish monster and shaking off the juice on his sword.

Kroger gave Jack a friendly pat on the shoulder armor. "You really aren't sharp enough, now, move on."

"They ran away," Hammer said.

Hassem glared at the Luna Wolf who asked the question through his helmet. Without him saying anything more, the Luna Wolf consciously tapped the breathing grid on his helmet to indicate that he would shut up.

"I need to correct myself," he said anxiously, reluctantly putting aside the anger in his heart. "I have experienced the emotions of the pagans...I have almost defiled the grace I have received, and my weak will has been invaded and I am not free. Know, 'He upholds all who fall, and lifts up all who are pressed down'..."

"Okay, we'll help you pay attention to what you say," Gerry said. "I hope you will pay attention to mine. I feel the same emotion, very vague and difficult to identify. Also, the psychic energy shown by the scanner Environmental indicators are rising."

Hashem froze for a moment at his question, which was unusual for a Word Bearer capable of launching into a eloquent speech at any time. He tilted his head slightly under his helmet, thinking silently, reviewing his inner thoughts when the words came out of his mouth just now. When he noticed that invisible touch, a trace of panic filled with regret rose in his heart.

Jack looked at the two battle brothers in confusion, and then quickly turned to the two Iron Warriors: "Don't you feel that emotion too?"

"They don't come for battle, but they are just lost heretic cubs who encounter us by chance." Hashem said, using sand to try to wash away the juice on his power hammer.

"Yes," Hammer said, and Kroger shook his head.

They had been advancing in the sandy plain for a long time, and the sky was getting darker little by little. The bloody horizontal line on the edge was like a black and red centipede climbing at the angle between the skyline and the sandy plain. Judging from the instruments, they had already traveled a distance of well over three miles, but the distant signal source still stayed at a fixed point on the scanner, which made the team begin to doubt the authenticity of the towering shadow.

But the shape of the shadow is indeed becoming clearer, as if it is constantly being refined by a paintbrush. From the dark color block, subtle light and dark evolutions gradually appear, and some translucent substances are like a dim and dying storm, shrouding the shadow. of the upper level. It is those changes that can be detected by the naked eye that support the team to continue moving forward and cross this vast open space.

Hashem was the first to notice the unsettling sound of water. It lurked at the edge of consciousness, making a distant sound like an eternal falling water, sometimes swirling rapidly, sometimes rushing away with great force. "Did you hear it?" He asked in a low voice, his voice cold, "There are some sounds."

"Hear that," Gerry said, looking around at the desert, trying to identify anything that could make the sound of water flowing. He found nothing.

"Be prepared," Krog said calmly, raising his gun, alertly prepared for any shot, and listening to the Word Bearers' interpretation of their perceived environment.

"There's a natural smell of vegetation," the Word Bearers whispered, "but there's still the scent of blood, primal, and ancient."

"Some creatures... four-hoofed beasts, covered in fur instead of flesh and blood, walking along the river." Gerry said, taking over the words of the Word Bearer, "I see another color gradually covering this place. A piece of sand... dark yellow, no, green, showing some undulations, grass? Yes, grass..."

"A river," said Hammer, who could still give people a unique sense of silence even when he spoke, "is in front of us. The water is deep, bloodshot, very cold, but very peaceful. Next to it, the ground is It becomes uneven, the grass and the rocks on the river beach are connected to each other, transitioning from dark blue to gray black, the color evolution is gentle and slow.”

Kroger frowned. In his field of vision, the sand was still unfolding unobstructedly in his eyes. In the dim sky, it looked like black snow falling to the ground.

He didn't know whether it was an hallucination caused by the scene described by his companion. He felt some restless moving sounds sliding on the sand, but they were so far away that they resembled some vague memories recalled by narratives at the edge of consciousness, rather than A realistic voice. After a few seconds, he suddenly raised his gun and unleashed fire on the ground: "Here we come!"

The loud bang caused by the weapon in his hand instantly broke through the false perceptions of the three Astartes behind him. Hashem was very grateful that the Emperor had brought them a reliable Iron Warrior, so that they could escape from the infidels. Easily awaken from the influence.

In the hallucinations he saw, an endless and unusual peace lingered over all the atmosphere. It was joyful when immersed in it, but it instantly turned into endless nausea and distortion after leaving it.

The fire in his hand roared out with a roar of anger: the information they obtained at the beginning was correct. The fish monster was indeed the cub of the fighting creature in front of them, or these monsters on the ground were like The long-tailed, four-legged crustacean creature that travels like waves is an evolutionary direction of the fish monster. It is covered with a dark and shiny hard carapace, and the teeth in its mouth are sharp and reflect cold light. Every shot of the bolt can cause some shiny metallic fragments to fly from the creature's body. Fortunately, his power hammer is enough to smash the carapace inwards.

The limbs of the fish monsters are far stronger than their cubs, and the claws are enough to shatter one side of Kroger's knee armor in one blow. The Iron Warrior roared and stuck the bolt gun into the opponent's huge mouth full of fangs. , fired one after another, blasting through every layer of the diaphragm inside its carapace, shattering it from the inside to the outside, and then throwing its body, about two meters long, heavily into the pile of corpses composed of its companions. middle.

They chased forward in the sand, and the shadows in the distance seemed to tremble in the violently shaking perspective, twisting in the shadow caused by the black-shelled monster rising from the ground, even though it itself did not change.

This round of fighting ended in about ten minutes. One of Jack's power claws was broken. He cursed and kicked the limb of the fallen large fish monster, then crouched down and broke one of the alien's claws with some wildness. The beast's claw, roughly digging his hand into the beast's claw, wearing it like a large glove.

"Black carapace," Jack growled, "What is it this time? Those amphibians from the ocean world? I'd rather see your black carapace a second time, Gerry."

"Don't look around," Gerry replied, checking his robotic arm. The parameters of the scanner had not changed. He began to believe that there was some kind of electromagnetic interference nearby that the human body could not detect. "Your eyes are not polite enough. You must learn to treat the knight Be respectful."

When they looked up from the fragments of limbs and carapace, the shape of the shadow was already clear, and the specific image of the giant thing created some unexpected shock in the hearts of the Astartes.

After several months of fighting, everyone has become familiar with Ran Dan's flesh-and-blood style to the point of immunity. The twisted giant face, blood-dried skin, and stiff bone-white carapace are tiresome. They have long been repulsive to these abnormal flesh-and-blood structures. Transformed into a burning fighting spirit in the face of the enemy; soldiers who came down from a surprise battle could even change their clothes and walk into the canteen, feasting on various meats - if there was really meat in the supplies they received.

But this colossus is different.

Its huge body stretches horizontally for several kilometers, wrapping it here. The outer metal that makes it a living battleship of Randan has already peeled off over time due to weathering and erosion, piled on top of it like dry gray embers. The lower part of the bone body was soaked in the gravel together with the red color of the blood, silently stretching into a bright red spring that no longer flows.

The flesh and blood has long since disappeared over the years, whether it was rotten or eaten, and all that remains is a large, crystal-white skeleton as pure as a fallen giant tree of life, with multiple thin white bones branching out from the tail of the trunk. The lines are smooth, like tail feathers spreading out. On both sides of the torso are two giant twisted bones, hanging feebly on the ground; the links and turns of each white marble-like joint are exquisite, more exquisite than any specimen that humans can make. More refined.

A translucent jellyfish gauze-like colloid layer covers the magnificent skeleton, like a mourning gauze hanging from the sky, quietly wrapping the lost skeleton of the colossus and freezing it in time. When they got closer, they saw clearly that it didn't seem to be a single piece of gelatin, but two pieces that also grew outward from near the giant bone in the middle, and finally hung down from the giant bones on the two wings like wings.

It would almost be beautiful, if the race to which it belonged had not been enemies of mankind.

"Prairie..." whispered the Word Bearer, "it landed here when it was still prairie, with rivers, trees, and other creatures - its flesh split into younglings and burrowed into the earth. The land dried up and the climate changed. , the divided cubs re-evolved in another direction, with black carapace appearing, or mountains degenerating into flesh and blood... There are many more, under this land... It is waiting, waiting, reuniting, waiting for new blood With meat..."

"Under the earth?" Kroger asked warily, "Where?"

Hammer suddenly yelled: "Trap!"

In an instant, the sand beneath Gri-Gris suddenly collapsed, causing the warrior to temporarily lose his balance. A cavity suddenly appeared in the quicksand, and instantly expanded into a hole several meters in diameter. A ring of bone sharp teeth shone coldly at the edge of the hole.

The cavity moved upwards, and the black carapace on the outside of the giant beast protruded from the sand, followed by more than a dozen blood-stained sharp bone spurs thrust upward from the inside of the cavity that was actually a huge mouth, like sharp swords intertwined, from the Death Wing Every weak point and non-weak point of the armor pierced, half breaking off the surface of the armor, half digging into dangerous gaps, piercing the warrior's flesh and blood, impaling the Dark Angel high and lifting it into the air. Space Marine blood splattered along the bone spurs.

The beast's mouth quickly closed and sank back under the sand. Without a scream, the impaled Dark Angel disappeared into the darkness.

"Run!" Kroger roared.

(End of this chapter)