The Red Knights had fallen, and even their mortal auxiliaries were granted no mercy. In the brutal aftermath, the remnants of rebel forces were torn apart by the Catachan warriors, who had regained their full strength and ferocity.
Against the Empire's exo-armored might, the rebels' flesh-and-blood bodies—clad only in pitiful bulletproof vests—stood no chance.
Soon, the echoes of gunfire faded into a grim silence.
The rebels' volleys grew sporadic and weak. In the merciless crucible of battle, the bravest among them had already perished. Only a few deranged traitors continued to hurl themselves at Marbo and his comrades in a last, desperate frenzy.
Many threw down their weapons, dropping to their knees, pleading for mercy.
But Marbo and the Catachan assault team showed none.
It was not cruelty, nor bloodlust that stayed their hands from offering clemency. It was duty. As soldiers of the Imperium, they had no right to forgive.
With Warmaster Dukel's unrelenting fury before them, and Saint Efilar's ruthless orders behind them, only the Emperor Himself could grant absolution. The soldiers of Catachan were merely the instruments that returned the souls of traitors to the Throne.
Most had never even seen the Warmaster in person—yet none hesitated to obey his will.
There was no bitterness among them for the harsh orders they carried out. Only iron resolve. Only by inflicting brutal punishment could the restless worlds of the Imperium learn the true price of treachery.
The blood shed today would prevent far greater slaughter tomorrow.
The betrayer must be taught: no forgiveness awaits.
"There is no forgiveness here," the Catachan commando captain said coldly, his face as unmoving as steel. His gaze did not waver as the rebels begged for their lives. "No betrayal is too small to overlook. Death twice over would be a lighter fate than betraying the Imperium. From the moment you pledged yourselves to the High King's rebellion, your doom was sealed."
With a metallic shriek, the exo-armor's mechanical arms deployed wicked blades. The Catachans did not waste precious ammunition. Instead, they advanced with brutal efficiency, cutting down the kneeling traitors where they begged.
Blood painted the ground crimson.
They smashed through the outer defenses of the reactor complex, trampling over the corpses of fallen traitors. With a deafening blast from a melta charge, the heavy metal gates collapsed.
Under the cover of smoke and dust, the assault team poured inside.
Marbo led the way, sprinting through the narrow corridors, gunning down the last pockets of resistance.
They planted demolition charges at precise locations—crippling the energy grid without destroying the vital core of the reactor.
The Imperium's armies always sought to preserve resources where possible. Their goal was never to ruin a world, but to cleanse it of betrayal.
As the timers began to count down, the team swiftly withdrew.
"Marbo," crackled the vox-unit, "you and 222 Assault Team are ordered to redeploy. Proceed immediately to Darok's capital fortress. Link up with the other teams. Priority target: Supreme King Caligus."
Mission complete. A new order received.
Across Darok, Imperial strike teams reported in. One after another, critical rebel installations were neutralized. The entire world teetered on the brink of collapse.
Now, the Emperor's justice turned to its true quarry—Supreme King Caligus, the architect of this rebellion.
Countless loyal Imperial citizens had died due to his treachery.
Now, an all-out airborne assault was mobilizing to storm the royal fortress and end the insurgency at its source.
Without delay, Marbo and his team moved to link up with the other strike forces.
The world of Darok was vast, its continents sprawling. Even at full speed, it would take several Terran hours to reach the royal city.
By the time they arrived, the sky was already blood-red.
Whether it was the dying light of the stars or the blood of the fallen staining the heavens, none could tell.
The High King's palace crowned Darok's highest plateau, a towering edifice shielded by a fortress-field and bristling with heavy defenses. Dozens of artillery emplacements and gun batteries encircled it.
Here, Darok's surviving elite had gathered to make their final stand.
Once, the palace windows reflected the gentle turning of the stars, and palace maids had marked the passage of time by their celestial dance.
Now, that dance had been replaced by fire and ash.
The sky above the fortress churned with black clouds, heavy with the smoke of war, foretelling the end of the High King.
Searchlights probed feebly through the gloom.
Above, the planet's upper atmosphere blazed with dueling starships. Light and shadow flashed wildly as fighter squadrons engaged in a furious melee, the beams of their weapons tracing ephemeral, dying constellations across the void.
Outside the fortress walls, the grand square of polished metal had become a slaughterhouse.
Gunfire raged. Loyalist forces unleashed a relentless storm of bullets, turning the battlefield into a howling maelstrom.
Energy beams occasionally lanced skyward before vanishing into the clouds. Wrecked gunboats rained down in fiery wreckage.
Even the battle-hardened Catachan Suppression Corps, clad in the latest Destroyer I armor, suffered losses against the entrenched defenses of the Royal Fortress.
But there would be no retreat.
The Imperial fleet's ultimatum had been rejected.
Supreme King Caligus had defied the will of Warmaster Dukel and the Imperium itself.
Now, vengeance would be swift.
The fortress walls loomed hundreds of meters high—monolithic bastions of stone and ceramite. Only by breaching them could the heart of the rebellion be ripped out.
Only by slaying the traitor king could the galaxy be made whole again.
A colossal armored spearhead formed: Astra Militarum tank formations, supported by the towering war machines of the Adeptus Mechanicus, ground forward, their cannons roaring.
The Catachan Corps, in six divisions, targeted different sections of the fortress perimeter—probing for weaknesses, forcing the defenders to split their attention.
And, looming further back in the smoke and flame, the shadowy forms of Imperial Knights emerged.
Their titanic frames moved with ponderous might, step by inexorable step, advancing under the guns of the Imperial Army.
Each step brought them closer to the walls. Closer to vengeance.
Closer to the end.
Their silhouettes were a crushing presence, like Titans striding across the earth. Each one towered over forty meters tall.
Even from a distance, mortal soldiers quailed before their mountain-like forms.
They were the embodiment of the Imperium's supreme might on the battlefield—the legendary god-machines of the Collegia Titanica.
Efilar deployed twenty-two Titans to the surface in quick succession.
The revered Rust Tanks—kings of the land war—were but ants compared to the steel-shod feet of these towering war engines.
The front lines stretched across hundreds of kilometers, their ranks spaced deliberately wide to minimize the devastating effects of enemy artillery.
Above them, Thunderhawks screamed through the sky, flying low alongside the marching Titans.
The gunships unleashed streams of incendiary bombs onto enemy formations, and pillars of smoke twisted into violent vortices against the wind.
Within the vox-channels, information flowed with rigid precision. Amid the flood of data streams, every soldier received only the orders they needed, no more, no less.
Far above, in high orbit, the command center aboard the fleet's battleship monitored the planet's every breath. From this vantage, commanders simulated the evolving battle in real time, directing forces to strike where the enemy was weakest or to reinforce beleaguered allies.
Dozens of unfamiliar regiments, drawn from a thousand worlds, now fought as one seamless blade, wielded by the Emperor's will.
The Imperial forces advanced steadily and relentlessly. With the harassment wings attacking from multiple directions, they managed to tear open a massive breach in the towering city walls.
Out of the dust and ruin emerged the brutal visage of a Titan, striding through the smoke. It shrugged off the rebels' lasgun volleys, driving its massive iron fist deeper into the breach.
The Titan's rupture field—a force potent enough to tear apart a small voidship—flared into life, unleashing an ear-splitting shriek across the battlefield.
The section of wall, already cracked, gave way completely. As the shattered ruins crashed down, countless Catachan Jungle Fighters surged through the breach like a living tidal wave.
Sly Marbo had infiltrated the fortress long before the main assault, aiming to strike directly at the High King.
The inner gates of the fortress-palace were heavily defended. The instant Marbo revealed himself, the defenders unleashed a storm of crossfire.
Tracer rounds filled the air, weaving bright, deadly lines through the dark skies of Darok.
An automated mortar system locked onto him, launching a stream of micro-missiles that arced lazily toward his position.
Even as he sensed the targeting systems fix on him, Marbo's heart raged—but his face remained impassive and cold.
With movements no ordinary man could hope to replicate, Marbo dodged the missiles with effortless precision. Then, he raised his hand, flashing a silent gesture to the assault team behind him.
It was not a codified Imperial Guard signal, but a hand-sign born of Catachan's lethal jungles—a silent language developed for survival against the world's monstrous predators.
The Catachan veterans instantly understood. One of them, a hulking warrior clad in Destroyer-pattern armor, hoisted a plasma laser cannon nearly as wide as his torso.
When he pulled the trigger, a beam of searing energy flashed out, linking the gunner and the automated mortar in a blinding line of incandescent fire.
The mortar vanished in an explosion that lit the night like a second sun, consuming the inner wall in fire and molten shrapnel.
A dozen rebel soldiers were hurled into the sky, their blackened corpses tumbling like broken dolls onto the charred earth.
"Advance," Marbo growled, his voice as sharp and brief as a knife strike.
The Catachan assault team pressed forward. As they neared the heart of the High King's palace, resistance intensified.
Enemy fire raked across them in brutal sheets. The hail of rounds gnawed at their armor, making every step forward a battle.
They fought on undeterred.
After several failed probing attacks, the assault leader snapped a quick vox-call for air support.
Two minutes later, a Thunderhawk roared in overhead, its engines howling against the punishing storm of enemy fire. In a daring dive, it loosed a bomb squarely onto the entrenched rebel gun emplacements.
The gunship pulled up sharply, leaving a trail of white contrails against the darkened sky.
The explosion that followed was a thunderous hammer-blow. Rubble and shattered stone rained down in deadly showers, forcing Marbo's team to duck behind what cover they could find.
When the smoke cleared, the enemy firing points had been annihilated.
Marbo led the charge, sprinting through the swirling black smoke. Rebel soldiers, their courage broken, fled in disarray.
Without hesitation, Marbo lifted his machine gun and picked them off one by one, his short, brutal bursts cutting them down with ruthless efficiency.
Each muted thud of his gun marked another rebel falling forever silent.
The assault team matched him, raising their rifles and firing disciplined bursts, feeling the hard, brutal recoil of Imperial weapons.
Their high-velocity rounds didn't merely pierce flesh—they shattered it. Each impact sent blood and viscera spraying in gruesome crimson mists.
"Push forward!" Marbo roared, voice slicing through the chaos. "Victory calls! In the name of Catachan, for the Emperor! For the Warmaster!"
The rallying cry echoed through the battered halls.
Far above, the Titans of the Collegia sounded their annihilation horns, a deep, bone-rattling blast that heralded destruction.
Marbo's figure, almost invisible among the fierce Catachan fighters, surged with them toward the inner sanctum. They were mere meters from the High King's throne.
But here, the defenders made their final, bloodiest stand.
Elite rebel troops poured withering fire into the breach.
Then, a sudden, blinding flash erupted ahead—an immense hemispherical blast of pure light—soaring into the heavens like a second sun.
The blinding light was enough to sear a mortal's eyes instantly, causing permanent blindness.
Fortunately, the goggles integrated into their Destroyer Armor automatically adjusted for the sudden brightness, shielding the warriors from harm.
Then came the next danger: mines.
The enemy had buried powerful explosives across the palace grounds—mines far deadlier than anything sanctioned for use within the Astra Militarum. These were black market weapons, rare and costly, a final act of desperation from the defenders of Darok.
They intended to bring the Imperium's soldiers down with them in a blaze of mutual destruction.
"Fall back! Quick, retreat!"
"752nd Assault Team requesting medical support! 752nd Assault Team requesting immediate medical support!"
Thanks to the robust protection of Destroyer Armor, the ambush did not claim many lives outright, though many were injured. Inside the comms channels, every squad began reporting their status to the command grid, their voices layered over the virtual interface.
As the smoke cleared, Sly Marbo scanned the devastated courtyard. Many of his brothers lay scattered across the fractured ground, wounded but alive.
A commando captain rushed to one of his squadmates, helping him up, his voice rough but steady.
"Brother, where's your arm?"
The wounded Catachan glanced around, then casually pointed with his remaining hand. "There. Hanging off that burning wall."
Indeed, a severed arm dangled from a melted slab, smoke curling off it.
"Looks medium-rare," the soldier quipped dryly.
"No problem. Still usable," the captain said, striding over and retrieving the limb without hesitation. In the Imperium, with its mastery of battlefield medicine, an injury like this was no death sentence.
Catachan warriors rarely accepted prosthetics unless absolutely necessary.
"It's definitely seven-tenths rare, brother," the captain said with a grin as he slapped the severed arm into the soldier's good hand. "And it smells damn good."
The wounded trooper held the arm for a long moment, taking in the scorched scent. After a beat of silence, he gave a wry grin.
"Call me Fragrant-Hand Karen from now on."
"Alright, Stinky-Hand Karen," the captain shot back without missing a beat.
Even amid the brutality of war, Catachan soldiers remained unfazed. They had survived horrors far worse during the endless conflicts across the stars. Survival alone was a blessing—and this time, they owed it to the armor and weapons bestowed by the Warmaster.
Their spirits remained high, unbroken. Even injuries became the subject of rough humor among them.
Sly Marbo stood quietly, watching them.
But something gnawed at him.
This time was different. The pain and bloodshed they endured had not come at the hands of xenos or heretics...
It had come from fellow men—from their own kind.
A new kind of fury burned within Marbo's heart, deeper and more bitter than anything he had ever known.
...
TN:
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