Warhammer 40k: Shattered Steel Soul

"The Romans made Caesar emperor to praise the ancient republic: they used the praise of freedom to decorate their own despotism." - "The Book of Lorca"

He checked his equipment, first of all the bolter. It might not be powerful enough to destroy all the obstacles in front of them, but after rapid-fire training, more ammunition can be dumped within the range at once. out. Its speed and precision are as comforting as the right temperature on the anvil.

In terms of the choice of secondary weapons, he brought a melta, which was used to break armor, making up for the responsibility of breaking armor that explosive bombs could not do.

Then there is a regular power sword. Like most Iron Warriors, he can use swords, axes, hammers, spears, and power fists in any of them, but he is exceptionally non-biased. Just like the whole process of joining this legion.

Like other children born into the surrendered gun tribe of the Oro Highlands, he was turned over and examined, and when the recruiting officer asked his name, he gave an answer, but his voice was drowned out by the noise around him. The recruiting officer took one look at him and, by some internal logic known only to himself, registered him as Hammer.

Later, he implanted those highly adaptable gene seeds without any rejection, and then became a warrior, crushing the enemy's skulls with a gun. He doesn't care about reputation or who he is, he only cares about completing his mission.

There were only two moments when his calm heart would ripple.

One was when he felt his gun sing in the palm of his hand as he slew the Emperor's enemies in the shadows. Orpheus, each of his guns share the same name, like it's in his genes.

The second was when the battle brothers beside him were chatting and laughing. The waves he felt at this time had no reason, he just felt good.

"I always thought it looked a little different here than in orbit," Jack said in his characteristic chatter, and even if the Astartes didn't easily become thirsty from talking too much, he still talked a little too much.

He looked at the map calculated from the orbital images in the helmet, then looked at the bare sandy surface in front of him and made a disgusted expression.

"Would you rather wallow in flesh and blood, Jack?" As always, Gerry Gris was the one who answered him. Maybe he was infected by Jack, or maybe he was just showing his true nature to the fullest. "The sand blocks the spread of alien flesh and blood."

An inappropriate metaphor, but the only one Hammer can think of: Jack is more invasive to the Space Marine psyche than the virus "Randan's Seed". He smiled into his helmet at that.

"What if we pour all the radiation sand from Baal's third celestial sphere into this place?" A strange idea suddenly came to Jack's mind, "Can we choke Ran Dan to death?"

"Jack," their de facto captain Kroger couldn't help but whisper warning the moon wolf to be careful and not to make random jokes on other legions.

"No," Gerry judged majestically, "Baal only has two satellites, but the territory we established after passing through the corridor already includes eleven planet-level cosmic structures. You can't do it with Baal Sand fills the Randan Empire..."

"And you, Gri-Gris!"

The winged helmet of the Dark Angel turned innocently to the Iron Warriors: "We have never broken our battle oath, Kroger."

"We are on a search mission this time, Kroger, not a combat mission. Maybe we can actually take it easy."

Hashem the Word Bearer meekly found an opportunity to join the conversation, this time siding with two warriors whose Primarchs both went by the nickname of Beast.

This time it was the Iron Warriors' helm's turn to turn toward the Word Bearers' inscribed gray helm with a sense of betrayal.

“We are to have a tolerant patience with our friends, ‘by patient waiting,’ and faith must be nourished by patience.” The Word Bearers continued, “When things don’t happen according to our hopes and joys We should not grow tired of our situation or lose our patience when this is a visible complaint against Him..."

He gradually stopped talking as the others fell into a blissful silence as he calmly chanted, and there was peace among the ranks.

To be honest, this is actually Hashem's purpose itself. He had long since stopped counting on his fighting cousins ​​to truly listen to him.

The surface layer of sand flows slowly around their boots. The sky is dark, and the gravel occasionally reflects the dim crimson light from the two natural satellites in the sky. As the sand moves as a whole, it shimmers like a veil. , gently hitting the Space Marine's leg armor.

The outline of the shadow floats vaguely on the horizon. It is most likely a hill of sand that glows with dried blood, but there is also a very small possibility that it is what they are trying to find - a signal source that continues to emit The electromagnetic waves are similar to the Randan biological ships the fleet has encountered in space, but are weaker.

The moment Horus detected it, he sent out several agent teams with extremely good mission completion rates in recent times.

In principle, Team 23 is actually a combat assault team. They have other battlefields to go to than agents who act as reconnaissance and exploration agents.

But the injury Gris-Gris sustained on his arm inside the ship suffered some kind of malignant infection.

After he passed the Iron Warriors' initial disinfection standard process, he was stuffed into the infirmary and underwent strict examinations by the best pharmacists of all four legions. It was finally confirmed that he was one of the very few Space Marines who could be infected by the seeds of Randan.

After a series of ineffective treatments and day and night research, the pharmacists decided to replace Gerry with a new mechanical arm with a small piece of steel shoulder. As for how they planned to divide the arm equally among the four legions, that was obviously not a problem that the patient should consider.

In a nutshell, after that, the entire team turned to the agent exploration mission. This does not mean that their combat effectiveness decreased because of Gerry's replacement of his arm, but that the mechanical arm provided by the Iron Warriors encapsulated too many unique modules, so that it would be a waste to use it only for fighting and chopping.

"If they hadn't given it that name in advance, I think your name would be a good name for a disease," Jack had said. "It's long and hard to remember."

"You can try to remember it, it's good for your memory." Gerry-Gris Sean Georgiev Pat O'Sullivan said, and then his mechanical arm began to move quietly.

At this time, Gerry's mechanical arm was also working quietly, and the augury scanner installed on the front helped him ignore the dim light conditions at night, the limitations of using the naked eye to assist shooting, and any potential infiltrators around that might suddenly jump out of the sand.

It helped Gerry a lot, although the Dark Angel sometimes still missed his flesh and blood arm in his dark room.

They groped in the sand for a while, the sky became darker, and the blood-red light inside the sand became dimmer.

This echoes with some areas of the planet that are severely invaded by aliens - from orbit, those areas are completely fleshy, the mountains are undulating giant faces, and the rivers are filled with huge eyeballs staring at the sky.

The first mortal communicator who saw this scene calmly forwarded the picture to the Astartes' combat command, then turned around and knelt beside the coffee machine to vomit until he was carried out of the hall and thrown into the corridor by his angry colleagues.

"I heard that they had completed the new training course before taking charge of this work. How could they have such an obvious reaction? This task is harmful to them." Hasem said worriedly, crossing his index and middle fingers and making a cross.

"If there is no training, it will probably not just vomit. Maybe we can refer to those communicators who have not been trained when we just passed through the corridor?" Jack shrugged his shoulders and moved his shoulder armor slightly. "Don't always worry about too many things, Hasem, look at me, I've always been like this..."

"No sensitivity." Gerry said.

Kroger's eyes swept over the three warriors in turn, and the slow rotation of his helmet gave people a sense of weakness.

Anyone who knew Krog would be surprised to hear that he could now tolerate three noisy warriors accompanying him.

If a Word Bearer knew about this, Krog assumed, the Word Bearer might happily admire another warrior who understood the principles of balance and moderation, and understood how to use pious faith to constantly gain comfort from His glory and calmly accept all the arrangements he received...

Krog quickly deleted the above paragraph from his mind and concentrated on enjoying the rare quiet moment in the team.

After the four legions opened up the corridor, the four Primarchs held a meeting in the strategy room again, but no one else was allowed to accompany them during the meeting, and the door of the Halhabet strategy room was always closed. And when it was sorted and cleaned afterwards, everything in the strategy room was placed as usual, and there was no clue.

Perhaps only the Primarch himself knew whether it was a peaceful negotiation or a fierce quarrel that took place in that room.

After walking out of the conference room, Horus Lupercal led the Luna Wolves to break into the inner part of the star zone, followed by the Word Bearers and Iron Warriors holding the Sky Eagle banner. Lion El'Jonson's Dark Angels temporarily stayed behind until a group of new Astartes from Caliban joined the legion, replenishing fresh blood among the Terrans of the First Legion.

In the report submitted to the Imperial Chancellor, the four legions made great strides. After several months of reorganization, investigation, exploration and planning, even if the destruction of the outer outposts made Randan's vigilance a step higher, dozens of magnificent victories were still successfully completed in the next few weeks.

Horus Lupercal personally went to the front line, walked into the ever-changing war situation, and put a final end to every key battle he was in.

If everything that happened in Randan can be made public in the future, the achievements of the Wolf God will undoubtedly be the most dazzling legend of this stage, and every command order he issued will be a sample for countless imperial soldiers to learn from and be remembered for a long time.

He moved quickly through each campaign, moving from one location to another, focusing on the conquest of new territories, leaving the finishing touches to the Iron Warriors and Dark Angels.

His brother Lorgar Aurelion accompanied the Wolf-God, his peaceful eyes reflecting the burning sky. The Ring of Ashes carried jump packs and heavy flamethrowers, burning the Emperor's enemies with anger.

No one knows how many Word Bearers' skeletons accompanied the charred corpses of their enemies in their radical advance. However, the only place Lorgar Aurelion went after leaving the battlefield was the Wandering Temple, which has been burning incense for a long time recently. Perhaps a few inferences can be drawn from this information. But their record is indeed amazing.

However, temporarily forgetting the perfect battle reports and discussing everything at a microscopic level, the Astartes encountered difficulties in the battle at the beginning. Even if they could break through the orbital air defense of Randan, ground-based air strikes were also a difficult problem, and the battle after landing on the ground was even worse.

Although the Astartes had been warned that they might encounter larger flesh and blood structures, when they found that those flesh and blood structures were large enough to cover half of the continent, a kind of trouble that they had no idea where to start still blocked their progress and conquest.

The Randan aliens that could overturn the world made it impossible for them to land. From the ground to the sky, there were flying objects that could fire lasers, spreading the smell of blood in the humid air. On the ground, any dirty structure with white skin could suddenly tear a crack in the middle and swallow the space warriors walking on it into its cracked fangs.

They - or it, or in Jack's words, "that group of Randan", in some areas where they were rampant enough and eroded the planet deeply enough, if you want to fight them, it is equivalent to fighting a planet itself. Sacrifices always exist before victory. They will be recorded, but at the same time, they will be too dim under the glory of victory and will not be noticed.

"So," Jack said, his voice floating on the evening wind, "what exactly is that mass powered by? They live in a place where they are alone! They can't eat each other, or extend downward until they are full of dirt."

Grey said after a while: "Not necessarily. We all know that these connected structures are not completely integrated."

"Wait, which we?" Jack looked at Gerry in surprise, and so did the others. Shadow Moon Wolf stood back and pointed his finger at himself, "Isn't it that I am the only one in the 'we' in 'what are you talking about we don't know'?"

"I think Gerry's 'we' refers to the Dark Angels." Hashem said.

"This is the latest news from our First Legion," Gerry said, lowering his voice and holding up the scanner on the mechanical arm, as if he was worried that a few professional Dark Angel interrogators would suddenly jump out from the ground around him.

"We can analyze different consciousness fluctuations from the interconnected constructs, and the intensity of the fluctuations is randomly distributed. It is very likely that not every piece of flesh and blood has its own independent consciousness, but it is not that the entire construct has only one independent consciousness."

"How did you analyze it-well, the mysterious arsenal of the First Legion." Jack gave up thinking.

Grey continued: "Father ordered us not to tell the Moon Wolves directly before the situation is clear, so you'd better pretend not to hear it."

"What about them?" Jack pointed at the others aggrievedly, and his slightly curved goggles reflected some sparkling light.

"No, who made the charge of the Moon Wolves so impatient? Some losses could have been avoided, and the Primarch Lion did not want us to sacrifice for false merits... I detected an electromagnetic signal." Grey said, raising his mechanical arm flatter and looking up into the distance.

There, a vaguely sharp outline appeared at the end of the empty sand plain, about three miles away from them.