Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 225: Out of Ammunition and Without Reinforcements

Armin's squad fought a grueling, desperate battle. They were being steadily forced back into the temple's massive archway, relying on their hastily constructed barricades to weather the relentless, tidal wave-like influx of xenos.

The relatively narrow bottleneck of the archway effectively limited the sheer number of enemies that could engage them simultaneously, but they were still forced to face at least a hundred xenos at any given moment.

Under these suffocating conditions, Armin was forced to consider a grim reality.

They might need to secure a secure line of retreat.

But before they could even attempt that, they had to break the enemy's current offensive momentum. His eyes fell upon the colossal raven statue looming behind them.

"Tara!"

By this stage of the assault, the primary composition of the enemy vanguard had shifted largely to second-generation Hybrids. Possessing slightly more human-like physiological traits, these monsters were capable of fielding crude firearms.

"Prepare for demolition!"

A small wave of these abhorrent parodies of humanity was surging toward them, wildly brandishing anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon—and the first smattering of low-caliber solid slugs had already begun ringing off the stone floor and their ceramite plating.

"Understood, Captain."Tara, currently wielding the plasma gun, quickly scanned their immediate surroundings. Clipped to his waist was the squad's single remaining melta bomb.

"Where, exactly?"

"The base of the statue, facing the enemy advance."

"Acknowledged."

Tara leveled his weapon and fired another searing orb of plasma into the shrieking throng closing in on them. Knowing his weapon was now entering an extended, mandatory cooling cycle, he smoothly drew the bolt pistol mag-locked to his thigh.

"Their numbers are only increasing."

He noted grimly, slapping the melta bomb onto the statue's base and twisting the arming dial to set the timer.

"Charge planted! Detonation in sixty seconds!"

"Fall back."

Armin barked the order. The squad immediately abandoned the forward archway, stepping backward over the mounting carpet of corpses to retreat down the short corridor spanning between the archway and the statue.

Throughout their retrograde movement, they maintained a relentless rate of fire. The resulting pile of xenos corpses clogged the archway like a rapidly coagulating wound. Yet the endless tide of xenos simply trampled over the bodies of their fallen kin, inching inexorably closer to the Astartes.

Armin remained at the absolute forefront of his squad's formation. Wielding his power sword in a textbook defensive guard, he continuously eviscerated and butchered the enemy—yet even this horrific display of martial prowess failed to stall their advance.

Simultaneously, while carving through xenos flesh with his blade, he continuously squeezed the trigger of his bolt pistol. The explosive rounds punched directly into alien faces twisted by absolute, fanatical hatred.

Their shrill, overlapping shrieks rendered their specific genders impossible to distinguish, just before their craniums violently burst apart like balloons over-filled with gore.

"Fuel depleted!"

At that exact moment, the squad's flamer was the first weapon to inevitably run dry. Wall, its operator, smoothly slung the heavy weapon onto his back, instantly switching his bolter to full-auto and unleashing a blistering hail of explosive suppression fire into the horde lunging at him.

However, an inexhaustible supply of xenos immediately rushed in to fill the gaps, showing absolutely no sign of faltering. His desperate volley failed to truly halt them.

"Fall back behind the statue! Re-establish the defensive line!"

Just as Armin was actively coordinating the squad's fighting retreat, an ear-splitting, completely inhuman shriek shattered the din. A massive, towering monstrosity violently violently tore its way through its own kin, charging directly at the Astartes line.

Its sheer physical bulk rivaled, perhaps even exceeded, that of a fully armored Space Marine. Its entire body was encased in thick, overlapping plates of chitinous armor, and the razor-sharp rending claws tipping its four muscular arms were as terrifyingly lethal as scythes.

Even more horrifyingly, its speed was completely disproportionate to its massive size. It closed the distance incredibly fast.

Armin barely had time to bring his sword up, his transhuman combat instincts entirely responsible for saving his life as he narrowly managed to deflect a sweeping claw aimed precisely to decapitate him.

Riding the momentum of his parry, he instantly lashed out with a decapitating strike aimed at the beast's neck.

The disruption field hummed furiously as it tore through dense xenos biology. Thick, foul-smelling ichor immediately erupted from the deep wound.

The monster staggered backward, an expression of very human-like confusion suddenly warping its hideously ugly features.

Evidently, it hadn't anticipated sustaining such severe trauma. It retreated with a low, guttural hiss, the thick slabs of muscle and chitin across its upper body visibly tensing into rock-hard ridges.

Armin immediately tracked it, dumping the remainder of his pistol's magazine toward the beast's center mass and head. However, this alpha-strain clearly possessed significantly higher intelligence than its lesser kin; it instantly ducked behind the surging wall of cannon fodder, resulting in the bolt rounds merely annihilating several entirely insignificant targets.

If he had just a single frag grenade left, Armin was absolutely confident he could have crippled it.

But the squad's entire supply of grenades had been completely exhausted ten minutes prior.

The squad solidified their new defensive perimeter behind the massive raven statue. The xenos crashed against them in unyielding waves, and the Astartes were forced to rely entirely on perfectly disciplined rapid-fire volleys to repulse them time and time again.

However, the moment their ammunition reserves finally ran completely dry, they would be utterly overrun by the xenos tide within seconds. And they couldn't harbor any hope for reinforcements—their only theoretical salvation lay with Soshyan and Sol.

"Thirty seconds remaining!"

"Ammunition depleted, Captain."

The very moment the battle-brother spoke the words, his bolter clicked empty.

"Understood... this is it."

Before the warrior could even attempt a reload, the enemy was upon him.

He smoothly, yet terrifyingly swiftly, brought his weapon around, brutally smashing the heavy casing of his bolter directly downward into the skull of an approaching xenos.

The sickening crunch of shattering cartilage and a brief wail of agony followed a split-second later.

But before the dying beast even hit the floor, a female-appearing Hybrid suddenly scrambled forward, violently seizing the warrior's ankle and jerking hard, desperately attempting to pull him off balance.

Seeing his brother's imminent encirclement, Armin rushed forward and cleaved the female xenos's arm clean off, preventing the warrior from being dragged down and consumed by the swarming monsters.

While they were still thoroughly capable of slaughtering the enemy in brutal melee combat, there was absolutely no denying the abject desperation of their current situation.

Even though the Astartes had already butchered thousands of their kin, the Genestealers simply continued to hurl themselves at Armin's squad in an endless, suicidal frenzy.

In a prolonged battle of attrition, the sheer, crushing weight of numbers would inevitably drown these demigods of war.

Perhaps the Astartes could prolong their inevitable demise for a few more bloody minutes using chainswords and combat blades, but the second a single warrior fell, the entire formation would collapse, leaving the rest surrounded and vulnerable on all sides.

The massive, alpha-strain xenos continued to prowl the edges of the melee, observing the Astartes squad from the safety of its subservient meat-shields—its predatory patience reminding Armin of an exceptionally malicious feline stalking a rat hole.

The squad's remaining firepower was currently enough to deter it from fully committing to the fray, but the absolute second their bolters fell silent, Armin knew with grim certainty that it would charge without a shred of hesitation.

Unfortunately for the beast, it was destined to be profoundly disappointed.

"Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five!"

A countdown echoed sharply across the squad vox-net. The Astartes immediately broke contact, sprinting in perfect unison away from the colossal statue, putting as much distance between themselves and the impending blast as possible.

"...Three! Two! One! Hit the deck!!"

BOOM————————————————————!

Amidst an earth-shattering roar that seemed to tear the very cavern asunder, an expanding halo of pure, destructive energy erupted upward, punching straight through the temple's vaulted ceiling. The painfully brilliant flash of the detonation temporarily blinded nearly every biological entity present.

The melta bomb instantly vaporized everything within a fifty-meter radius, transforming the kill-zone into a dazzling, superheated mist of sub-atomic particles. Every shred of organic matter within the blast radius was instantaneously carbonized, while all inorganic material—stone, metal, and ceramite—was flash-melted into a splattering, glowing slurry.

The xenos caught in the epicenter were erased so fast they didn't even have time to scream. Metal and flesh simply vanished without a trace beneath the torrential onslaught of thermal energy. Even the massive alpha-beast was instantly boiled into a cloud of superheated vapor by the unimaginably intense thermal shockwave.

Pinned flat against the vibrating rockcrete floor, Armin attempted to lift his head, but his every sense was entirely overwhelmed by the deafening roar and the blistering, suffocating heat...