Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 188: Strangulation (1)

A crudely shaped warship was burning.

In the void, it listed agonizingly as gases and particulate matter sprayed like blood from its massive conduits.

Sailors navigating the vast, deep oceans often compared their colossal sea vessels to giant beasts.

They endowed the ships with souls, infusing willpower and presence into the frameworks of wood and steel.

Whenever emergencies arose—whether caught in a storm or endangered by a sea monster from the abyss—these sailors would call upon that soul to save them, pleading for it to let them narrowly escape death once again.

To those entities capable of observing this warship's destruction, this vessel that had just broken through the atmosphere indeed looked like a beast. But amid the throes of its death, it was powerless to save its crew, no matter how desperately they roared.

Vorenus Prime had been blockaded for over two weeks. The Greenskins on the planet had organized several breakouts, attempting to escape this hopeless death trap.

Using inconceivable engineering techniques, they constructed warships with exaggerated engine output on the planet's surface, intending to use them to flee.

But the orbiting Imperial warships merely waited like fishermen, dealing fatal blows only when the Greenskins broke free from gravity's pull and entered the void utterly exhausted.

Even so, the stubborn nature of the Orks kept them from giving up completely.And the warships launching into space were only growing larger.

Given time, it wasn't out of the question that they might even manage to fly the entire planet away.

But they didn't have that much time left.

On the armored shell of the broadside, scars were as dense as a sieve, with sheets of metal plating sloughing off like scales.

Exposed beneath was a layer of fragile "flesh" where fleeting flames burned—fires that seemed as though they would extinguish upon ignition—greedily devouring the sparse oxygen lingering within the shattered hull.

On the beast's back, the turrets standing proudly along the keel collapsed and shattered, hurling wreckage like severed limbs deep into the starless universe, leaving them to drift aimlessly like rootless duckweed.

The massive breach deeply carved into the ventral compartment was the fatal strike, a precise attack that had annihilated the majority of the engines.

A moment after being sliced open, the ruptured underbelly began constantly venting flash-frozen corpses into the void.

These corpses were all Greenskins, riddled with burn marks like sieve holes.

They floated motionlessly, forgotten among the rest of the debris.

The warship's void shields had long since failed. The surgical, lethal strike was meant to cripple and damage, not to kill in a single blow.

Viewed laterally, a string of deep wounds pierced straight through the weak armor layering on the ship's starboard side; several assault boats had reached their target, latching tightly onto the ravaged flank.

Aside from this external damage, the main culprit responsible for weakening the Ork warship to this extent came from the relatively inconspicuous landing craft.

It was from there that the fatal blow had been delivered.

That deadly "cargo"—the Astartes—had already entered the interior.

During the siege of Vorenus Prime, Soshyan had not let the warriors remain idle; instead, he constantly used live combat to temper their boarding tactics and their ability to fight in confined spaces.

Soshyan ran down the corridor from the ventral entrance, keeping one eye on the glowing radiation counter on the left side of his helmet visor.

He was heading for the lower decks at the stern, where the Warp engines were housed.

"Sol."

He arrived at the first transverse intersection in the corridor as he opened the vox-channel.

They had to press forward rapidly before reinforcements could be rallied, but the moment they crossed the junction, the warship's lighting and vital life-support systems failed.

Gravity barely held on, meaning mag-locks weren't strictly necessary to stay attached to the deck, but visibility was already becoming a serious issue.

Within seconds of being summoned, Sol arrived, holding a bio-scanner as he swept for potential threats.

"Detecting contacts, count of four."

Nodding to Sol, Soshyan tapped the vox-bead embedded in his gorget.

"Farzad, your squad takes the vanguard. Armin, you and your men take the flanks. Ustad, your squad is the rearguard."

A rapid series of confirmation cursors flashed across Soshyan's retina; they were ready to proceed.

Farzad stepped up from the rear, wielding a snub-nosed meltagun at the hip.

"Advance."

As he led nine warriors forward, he received a brief nod from Soshyan as an acknowledgment.

"We don't know what might pop out from in there, stay sharp."

Under these circumstances, caution was necessary.

A quarter of the way down the corridor, their first warning appeared in a spacious maintenance area: a streak of arterial red light reflecting off Farzad's armor.

"Contact."

He reacted swiftly, spinning around and unleashing a high-density stream of melta fire from his weapon.

The white-hot beam illuminated the darkness, and chunks of the corridor's reinforced structure warped and dissolved under the extreme heat, as if crushed.

A murderous Greenskin Nob was enveloped in the blazing flames, taking the hit. Its chest plate and left pauldron caved inward, emitting sparks and a pungent stench.

But this didn't stop it from hurling its chainaxe. Even before embedding itself in the wall, the chain teeth were revving in a continuous cycle.

The other xenos lying in wait responded to the roar crackling through Farzad's vox, though their bellows were born of bloodlust rather than pain.

Three heavily armored Greenskin Nobz charged before the assault squad.

Two of them wore filthy, battle-scarred, crude armor painted in yellow and black, while the other was a pure, deep green, hunched over, its grotesquely twitching musculature barely contained by armor bristling with drills and buzzsaws.

This was an over-modified Greenskin, likely a Mekboy. In addition to its natural two arms, it sported two extra mechanical appendages, and its sensor-laden head practically merged with its antenna-equipped helmet, making it impossible to distinguish one from the other.

It didn't need swords or blades; those rapidly spinning drills and saws were more than enough.

Farzad briefly summarized the damned creature and spoke loudly:

"Purge the xenos!"

He fired a second melta blast at the Mek, but it was dissipated by the enemy's deflector field, seemingly nothing more than a minor provocation.

Old enemies, old methods.

Farzad drew the twin power axes from his back. With a light press on the actuation studs on the hafts, he ignited the power fields crackling along the blades' edges and faced the enemy.

"Come!"

From the retinal display within his helmet, he saw the other warriors opening fire on the other Greenskins. But those heavily armored behemoths ignored the incoming fire and charged straight in, eventually forcing the warriors to draw their power swords for close combat.

Farzad shifted his gaze closer, seeing that the Mek had already shoved aside the steaming corpses on the deck, finding the Astartes standing tall in defiance.

Words could not enact justice, so Farzad roared in fury and swung his battle axes at the behemoth.

The strike was like hitting the adamantium hull of a Thunderhawk. The recoil traveled down the hafts, painfully jarring Farzad's arms.

"'Ard one! I like it!"