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flamestorm cannons rotated meaningfully before it. Tsu’gan guessed this was the reason for the greenskins

eschewing the main route into the fortress.

“You’ll still burn,” he hissed beneath his breath, and listened to the static crackle down the comm-feed.

N’keln’s order would unleash them into the enemy.

“Come on…” Tsu’gan muttered, gripping his bolter as if it was an ork’s neck.

Dak’ir crouched in the darkness of the tunnels. Ahead of him came the echoing screech of the chitin-beasts,

followed by the roar of Ba’ken’s heavy flamer. The flare of fire lit the Salamander’s imposing silhouette,

roughly fifty metres in front, as he corralled the creatures with careful bursts.

Illiad hunkered down beside Dak’ir with fifty of his men. He huddled a lasgun close to his chest and

watched the driven chitin intently as they became lost in the darkness.

The scent of something sharp and acerbic bit at Dak’ir’s enhanced senses. It was pungent, sulphurous and

held the trace of a lingering memory. It put him in mind of smoke and cinder…

“How close are we to the mines from here?” he asked Illiad.

Illiad shook his head. “Not very,” he said. “The mines are much closer to the core and several kilometres

distant.”

“Distant enough so as not to hear the battles above us?”

“Definitely. The rock face is shored up by reinforced struts and metal plating to keep out the chitin. It also

insulates the mining chamber against ambient sound. In any case, they are far from here.”

Yet the acerbic tang remained.

Illiad’s expression suggested he craved an answer.

Dak’ir wasn’t about to give it to him. Instead, he signalled the advance.

The Salamanders at the Vulkan’s Wrath only had four squads at their disposal. The Thunderfire cannons

were ill-suited to close assault warfare and so stayed behind in a small concession by Agatone to help protect

the crash site. The rest were divided up into combat squads; with injuries some were only four men strong.

Settlers accompanied them, both as guides and reinforcements. With their help, the Salamanders had found

the chitin burrows swiftly and set about stirring their nests.

As Dak’ir moved, he heard the ruckus of battle above them like muted thunder. It was getting closer all the

time.

The wall was in danger of being overrun. Even the Devastators, aloft in the high towers, were coming under

pressure. They targeted the orks assailing the fortress directly now, going to their bolters and ignoring the

distant wagons and trucks that jostled their way from the back of the horde. Desultory cannon fire from the

far off vehicles carrying most of the greenskins’ heavy guns occasionally raked the parapet but was

mercifully ineffective.

A rocket exploded overhead, showering Tsu’gan’s armour with debris. He half-glimpsed snarling ork faces

through the tiny fissures in the makeshift gate. Still they refused to assault it. All their efforts were bent

against the wall. The pressure there was building to breaking point. Tsu’gan’s battle-brothers were holding

on tenaciously, heaving orks bodily into the green surf pounding against the foot of the wall below. The bite

of chainswords ringed the air in a churning chorus. On the opposite side, the wrecked corpse of a

Salamander crashed down into the courtyard. It was Brother Va’tok, his power armour cloven, battle-helm

staved in by an ork mace. The dead Salamander’s fingers were still twitching in his gauntlets when Fugis

rushed forwards to extract Va’tok’s geneseed.

Tsu’gan raged at the death. It took all of his willpower not to turn around and climb up to wall to vent his

fury.

“Vulkan’s blood!” he snarled, forcing as much venom as he could into the invective.

Elysius felt it too, rotating his crozius in small arcs to keep his wrist loose and muttering spleenful litanies

under his breath. The Chaplain would wait for the opportune moment to give his canticles of hate full voice.

“Raise shields!” Tsu’gan heard Praetor cry out to the Firedrakes from the other side of the Land Raider. The

clank of metal resounded in the courtyard as the Terminators’ storm shields met their pauldrons and locked

in place.

The order from N’keln was imminent. Crackling static in Tsu’gan’s battle-helm gave way to the captain’s

steely voice. “Unto the anvil, brothers!”

The gate came down. A long burst from the Fire Anvil’s flamestorm cannons burned clear the immediate

area beyond it.

Led by Praetor, the Firedrakes were the first out, tramping onto scorched earth, smoking husks of orks

crushed in their sudden charge. Thunder hammers filled the air with flashing discharge from their power

generators. Trying to respond, the greenskins hurled themselves at the Terminators but found an unyielding

rock against which they were smashed.

The Firedrakes were devastating, and Tsu’gan almost found himself agape at their fury. They moved amidst

the greenskin horde, pummelling with their shields, crushing skulls with their hammers. Praetor extolled t he

glories of the vaunted 1st Company as they killed, his sheer presence impelling his warriors to even greater

efforts. Tsu’gan saw the veteran sergeant’s plan at once. He had his sights set on the ork warboss.

“To the fires of war!” roared Elysius, once the Terminators had cleared the threshold.

Tsu’gan ran with him, closing the gap behind their 1st Company brothers swiftly. Close-ranged bolter fire

tore into the orks, as Tsu’gan ordered “weapons free”, and blasted the greenskins apart.

Expulsed promethium merged with the stink of burning ork flesh as Honorious unleashed his flamer. To the

rear of the assault group a combat squad made a staggered advance, allowing M’lek to loose his multi-melta.

A brutish greenskin, two heads taller than Tsu’gan, its body an armoured shell of plates and whining servos,

had its torso liquidised to visceral slag by the multi-melta’s beam. It fell back into a steaming heap, crushing

two of its smaller brethren.

Tsu’gan heard the bass tones of Sergeant Typhos as he sang a Promethean battle anthem, describing bloody

arcs with the rise and fall of his thunder hammer.

As the three squads slowly converged, forming into a spear shape with Praetor and the Firedrakes as its

burning tip, the ork attack on the wall was stymied. Without constant reinforcements, the greenskins already

contesting the fortress were left isolated. It allowed the defenders to cleanse the parapets.

Overhead, the warriors of Vargo’s Assault squad soared on wings of fire. Plunging down amidst the

greenskins, they released bolt and blade with a zealot’s fervour, small bursts from the squad’s flamer adding

to the carnage. They were the last element of the Salamander assault force, and in their wake the Fire Anvil

rolled into the breach left behind by the fallen gate. The tank’s bulk easily filled the blackened arch.

Sporadic spears of flame from its sponson guns kept the orks at bay. When the initial shock of the

Salamanders’ attack had waned, they found themselves locked in a deadly melee. Ork bodies pressed on

every side, raw aggression lending the beasts the impetus they needed to get back on an even footing. Only

now, wading in the belligerent sea of green, did Tsu’gan fully appreciate what they were up against.

Between bolter bursts, he heard a muffled cry and saw what he thought was one of Vargo’s brothers falling

into the morass of orks. The Salamander didn’t resurface. Another, Typhos’ special weapons trooper Urion,

took a chainblade to the forehead. The exultant ork was shredded by return fire from the dead Salamander’s

battle-brothers, and the body was left quivering with the still churning blade that the greenskin had lost its

grip on wedged in the wound. Soon Urion was swallowed up by the ork horde too.

They gained about three hundred metres from the gate when the Fire Anvil’s engines stirred into life. The

assault tank barrelled into the killing field, barging greenskins aside with its hull or mulching them beneath

its grinding tracks.

This was “hammer”, the second phase of N’keln’s assault stratagem. The captain was embarked in the Land

Raider with the Inferno Guard and the Tactical squad of Sergeant De’mas. Filling the void left behind by the

tank was Clovius and his squad. They would hold the gate, whilst the Devastators, utilising the respite

bought by Praetor’s and the assault force’s bravura, would abandon the towers and defend the walls in the

absence of the Tactical squads. Lok assumed command position over the gatehouse and was charged to hold

the iron fortress in case N’keln needed to order a retreat.

Even as ork blood spat across his visor, Tsu’gan knew there would no such retreat. The Salamanders were

committed now. It was a simple matter of do or die.

A cleaver rang against his pauldron, spitting sparks, and he staggered. The ork assailing him lunged forward,

strings of spittle punched from its maw on stinking breath. Tsu’gan rammed his bolter’s muzzle into the

beast’s mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter burst out the back of the ork’s head, mixing

with skull fragments.

Tiberon came in from the left and smashed the greenskin corpse aside, allowing Tsu’gan to drive forward.

Iagon and Lazarus followed, maintaining pace with the implacable Firedrakes.

Praetor was battering his way to the ork warboss. Seeing prey and the prospect of a good fight, the immense

leader of the greenskins spurred its biker-mounted entourage forwards. A thickening horde of orks still lay

between it and the Terminators.

Assault cannon whining, the Fire Anvil scythed down a first rank of orks spilling from the throng with

blades raised. More greenskins came in their stead and Tsu’gan met them with a bolter storm from his

troopers.

Praetor exploited the slight gap, crushing the dead and wounded underfoot, as something huge lumbered into

view. Orks scattered before it, bellowing and roaring for more carnage. A steel-plated machinery loomed.

Trunk-bellied, resembling a can festooned with weapons and two razor-edged power claws, the greenskin

war machine thundered forward on piston legs. One of the Firedrakes charged into its path, hammer aloft

and crackling lightning. The machinery punched the warrior aside. Swinging its power claw, the crude

creation clove a storm shield in two, overloading its force field and smashing its bearer to the ground.

Buoyed by its own infernal momentum, the machine, with the band of orks following, drove a wedge into

the Salamanders’ spear formation. The Firedrakes’ tip fragmented apart. Praetor, desperate to close with the

war machine, was engulfed by greenskins. Capering gretchin, heedless of death, clung madly to his arms and

legs in an effort to slow the hero of Prometheus.

Honorious bathed the sergeant of the Firedrakes with his flamer, burning the diminutive greenskins off him

like they were an infestation.

The ork war engine was rampaging still. Its pilot was obviously deranged, so fuelled by the psychic energy

of the orks that the machine was almost unstoppable. It turned and fought in every direction, battering at the

Firedrakes who surrounded it, but couldn’t close.

Tsu’gan went to Praetor’s aid, rushing on even as the flames from Honorious were still dying, and forging a

bloody path with the rest of his squad. The pressure on the Firedrake sergeant lessened and he broke free,

ramming an ork aside with his storm shield as he approached the ork machine that had scattered them.

In the distance, something was happening. A thick cloud of dust spewed into the air and Tsu’gan swore he

saw a duster of orks disappear below the earth. Bestial screams followed swiftly as the greenskins reacted to

something in their midst. On the opposite side of the battlefield, another dust plume spiralled upwards, then

another and another. Grey columns of ash were erupting all across the dunes and orks were sinking down

into an unseen mire.

Behind him, the clang of the Fire Anvil’s frontal ramp announced N’keln’s arrival on the battlefield.

Tsu’gan turned briefly to witness the company banner unfurled by Malicant and his captain leading a fresh

charge into the enemy with the rest of the Inferno Guard and Brother-Sergeant De’mas.

Turning his attention back on the greenskin machinery, Tsu’gan went in support of Praetor. The Firedrake

sergeant faced off against the manic war engine, rebounding a blow from one its power claws with his storm

shield. The ork pilot had overreached itself and was off balance. Praetor shattered the claw arm with a blow

from his thunder hammer, before stepping in heavily to shoulder barge it. The ork pilot flailed at its controls,

emulated by the machine itself. Tsu’gan, blindsiding it, ducked beneath a madly swiping claw and attached a

melta-bomb to the war engine’s body. Throwing himself backwards, Tsu’gan felt the heat of the explosion

wash over his armour as the machine burst apart. Chips of debris fell like steel rain, a steaming pair of ruined

legs holding up an abdomen of sloughed metal all that remained of the machinery, collapsing onto the ash.

Praetor had withstood the blast and drove on almost instantly, whilst Tsu’gan was still getting to his feet.

The intensity of the ork assault was lessening. The guttural cries from those greenskins seemingly swallowed

by the dunes were much closer now. At last he saw the cause.

Swarms of enraged chitin were rampaging amongst the horde. The orks hacked away at the carapace bodies

of the subterranean creatures, their silt-blood mingling with the ash dunes in a grey soup. Sink holes

devoured greenskins by the score, the soft earth, churned up by the chitin, no longer supporting the weight of

the orks.

Familiar forms followed in the ash clouds, surging from the emergence holes bolters flaring. Agatone and

the Salamanders from the Vulkan’s Wrath had joined up with them, driving the chitin before them like cattle

to dig their assault tunnels.

Flame bursts spat through the murk, burning down orks in a fire-tinged haze of grey.

Through the dissipating ash cloud and the rampant pull and thrust of warring bodies, Tsu’gan saw an Assault

squad crest the edge of a fresh emergence hole. They took to the air immediately, jump packs screaming.

Orks were set ablaze in the violent discharge; one stumbled blindly into the gaping chasm made by the chitin

and was lost from view.

Then he saw Dak’ir amongst the reinforcements. The Ignean came out fighting, gutting an ork on his

chainsword whilst vaporising the snarling head of another with a shot from his plasma pistol. Tsu’gan felt