Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 224: Bloodbath at the Temple

"I still can't reestablish contact with the Chapter Master!"

Listening to the hiss of white noise feeding through his vox-bead, Armin's voice was tight with profound concern.

But compared to the sudden disappearance of the Chapter Master, what caused him infinitely more worry was the tactical situation unfolding before his eyes.

He couldn't precisely pinpoint the exact moment the xenos had begun to amass. The first indicator that had spiked their vigilance had been a single gunshot. That initial crack had been immediately followed by the eruption of a furious, ceaseless firefight that continued to rage with increasing intensity.

The previously silent, echoing cavern had suddenly boiled over like a stirred hornet's nest.

The Space Marines holding the temple entrance initially had no idea what was transpiring in the gloom beyond. It was only when the hab-blocks in the distance were set ablaze, one after another, that the dancing flames finally drove back the oppressive darkness, allowing them to comprehend the horrifying reality of the situation.

The Genestealer Cult had launched a massive, full-scale offensive against the settlement!

The vanguard of the assault was comprised of vast, surging hordes of first through third-generation Hybrids. Hoisting blasphemous icons and wielding an assortment of crude, improvised weaponry, they poured out from every conceivable direction, launching a devastating surprise attack against the Cult of the Raven Lord.

Desperate to defend their homes, the inhabitants chose to fight to the bitter end. Throwing up makeshift barricades across the streets, they brought every conceivable weapon they possessed to bear against the oncoming tide.

But the Genestealers had evidently come entirely prepared. They fielded a terrifying array of heavy weaponry, including military-grade heavy bolters, rocket launchers, and heavy lascannons.The battle escalated to an extreme pitch from the very first moments. The Genestealers hurled themselves in relentless, suicidal waves against the disciples of the Raven Lord, fueled by an infectious, hateful fanaticism. Yet the heretical cultists stubbornly refused to yield even a single inch of ground, preferring death to retreat.

However, the defenders' numbers were simply too few—at least when compared to the overwhelming, nightmarish tide of xenos flooding the cavern.

Armin had briefly considered rallying the surviving cultists to the temple for a consolidated defense. But after careful deliberation, he decided against risking his squad's cohesion by attempting to fight alongside heavily armed, highly dangerous, and entirely unpredictable heretics. The single, most effective course of action available to the squad was to topple the heavy stone candelabras and several smaller statues flanking the entrance, utilizing the shattered masonry to rapidly construct fortified firing lines to weather the inevitable assault.

The distant gunfire didn't last long before fading out entirely. Eventually, the only sounds remaining in the cavern were the crackle and pop of burning hab-blocks, entirely drowned out by the terrifying, alien shrieks of the xenos.

"For the Four-Armed Emperor!!"

A blasphemous war cry echoed from the darkness. Armin drew a deep breath; his entire field of vision was suddenly overflowing with monsters.

The multi-limbed beasts bounded across the burning streets with terrifying agility, their guttural snarls echoing through the stifling air. A secondary tide erupted from behind the front lines—streaming from alleyways, vaulting out of shattered windows, and pouring through ruined doorways. These were abhorrent parodies of humanity, wielding scavenged or roughly manufactured weaponry.

They thrust xenos standards high into the smoky air, adorned not just with dripping blood, but with freshly amputated limbs and the severed heads of the fallen.

Armin had seen enough. In response, he leveled his bolter directly at the approaching horde.

"Hold fire until they enter effective kill-range. Wait for my command."

As the squad leader, in the absence of the Chapter Master, Armin was the highest-ranking commander present.

But another, deeper anxiety gnawed at his thoughts.

He didn't know exactly when, but little Nick had suddenly vanished. Armin had been just about to instigate a search for the boy when the xenos had sprung their ambush.

Left with absolutely no alternative, he was forced to hold the line and fulfill his duty. But he swore a silent oath to find the boy the moment the battle concluded, fervently praying the child had merely found a secure place to hide.

"For the Emperor! Purge the xenos!!"

The moment the first xenos set foot upon the lowest tier of the temple stairs, Armin roared his war cry as the command to execute. Simultaneously, he depressed the trigger of his bolter, unleashing a torrent of explosive death into the vanguard of the Genestealer advance.

The sacred roar of Imperial wrath echoed deafeningly through the cavern. With almost every trigger-pull, Armin dropped a smoking corpse at the feet of its kin, occasionally blowing two xenos apart with a single, perfectly placed shot.

But there were simply too many of them.

Ten kills, twenty kills, thirty kills...

Armin emptied an entire magazine, yet there was absolutely no discernible dent in the approaching tide.

"Conserve ammunition."

Given the vastly overwhelming enemy numbers, Armin forced his battle-brothers to suppress the urge for sustained, full-auto fire, ordering them to unleash everything they had only when the enemy closed the distance.

Blinding muzzle flashes illuminated the stalactites clinging to the cavern ceiling. The heavy, concussive thumps of detonating bolt rounds filled the air, mingling sickeningly with the rapidly thickening stench of charred flesh and cordite.

The first wave of the assault consisted entirely of first-generation Hybrids, beasts possessing minimal intelligence. Numbering in their thousands, they stampeded forward, trampling the corpses of their fallen kin without a second thought. Had the temple stairs not naturally funnelled the assault, they likely would have completely overrun the defensive line already.

However, a portion of the horde began scaling the vertical stone walls flanking the temple approach. This forced Armin to detach two warriors from the primary firing line to secure their flanks.

Excluding Soshyan, the squad had originally numbered ten. Setting aside Soshyan and Sol, there were only eight warriors remaining. Sending two to cover the flanks meant the frontal defense was held by a mere six Astartes.

Six men against an innumerable, chittering tide of xenos. The sheer difficulty of holding this position was staggering. For Armin, at least, this was undeniably the most desperate and grueling engagement he had faced since his ascension to the Adeptus Astartes.

"Tara, is the plasma primed?"

"Primed and ready, brother!"

"Teach them a lesson in Imperial wrath!"

Though they had only deployed a single squad for this mission, Soshyan had anticipated encountering heavy resistance. Therefore, he had specifically requisitioned a handful of specialized heavy weapons from the armory to significantly bolster the squad's firepower.

The plasma gun clutched in Tara's hands was one of the incredibly rare plasma weapons belonging to the Astral Knights Chapter.

Upon hearing the familiar, rising wine of fully charged capacitors, Tara leaned out from cover, leveled the heavy weapon directly at the dense throng surging up the stairs, and pulled the trigger.

The subsequent instant, the air itself seemed to crackle and pop as superheated plasma gas flooded the atmosphere. The weapon's flared muzzle unleashed a blindingly incandescent, devastatingly destructive orb of energy.

The miniature sun of searing plasma instantly bored a molten path straight through the Genestealer ranks. Given the sheer density of the horde, each blast of superheated matter literally atomized dozens of xenos.

With merely two shots, Tara completely vaporized a massive swath of the advancing enemy, momentarily clearing the stairs.

But the gaping void was filled almost instantly by the relentless press from behind.

"Wall, you're up."

The warrior named Wall offered a curt nod before stepping forward. He unleashed a roaring geyser of incandescent, liquefied promethium directly into the heart of the surging horde, incinerating a dozen xenos outright and forcing the rest to recoil—except the sheer, crushing pressure of their own kin packed tightly behind them gave them absolutely nowhere to run.

In the scant few seconds the flamer roared, the ravenous flames inflicted staggering casualties upon the screaming xenos.

Simultaneously, whenever the enemy began to press too closely, the Space Marines decisively hurled their primed frag grenades.

BOOM——————!

Following the heavy detonations, localized storms of lethal, razor-sharp shrapnel shredded the enemy ranks, butchering hundreds of xenos. The combined kinetic force of over a dozen high-explosive frag grenades detonating in rapid succession caused the entire temple structure to tremble violently.

While the kill-efficiency of these tactics was incredibly high, the squad's ammunition reserves were rapidly dwindling to critical levels.

The first resource to be entirely exhausted were their grenades.

Armin's mind processed these disparate tactical details with transhuman speed, constantly calculating the optimal firing vectors and assessing where their defensive line was stretched thinnest—and how to reinforce it, if possible.

His bolter roared relentlessly, each shot consistently reducing an alien cranium to a blossoming mist of blood, brain matter, and shattered bone.

However, despite their immense focus and punishing efforts, a handful of the xenos inevitably managed to slip through the blistering kill-zones, cresting the final step of the temple stairs.

Armin tightened his grip on the power sword in his hand.

As a four-armed xenos, its exceptionally long tongue lolling wildly from its maw, vaulted the barricade and lunged directly for him, Armin executed a devastating, multi-strike sequence taught to him by Sol. Sol had ingrained in them the vital importance of exploiting the enemy's vulnerabilities, identifying the perfect moment to ruthlessly dismantle their offensive momentum.

Holding this core tenet firmly in mind, Armin delivered a precise, masterfully angled thrust.

A single breath later, the xenos rushing him with bared talons was systematically relieved of an arm, and then its head. The decapitated corpse slumped heavily to the rockcrete deck.

But the horde simply kept coming, their sheer numbers driven to relentlessly crush the Space Marines.

This was the grim reality of combating this particular xenos breed. Short of catastrophic destruction of their central nervous system or vital organs, they were virtually impossible to put down permanently.

Armin voxed orders for the squad to tighten their formation. Anchoring themselves firmly against the improvised barricades and standing back-to-back, they formed an impenetrable, bristling semi-circle, resolutely refusing to yield the temple entrance.

As the unending tide of xenos crashed upon them, the Astartes answered with armored fists and humming blades, fighting with absolute, fanatical devotion for the survival of the Imperium and the glory of the Emperor.