If Nolan had to choose a single word for what Tyberos did inside that corridor, it would have been brutal.
Not brutal as in reckless, or brutal as in angry. Brutal as in the way a geological event is brutal: vast, efficient, entirely without malice, and completely indifferent to the preferences of whatever happened to be in its path. Nolan had fought beside a great many powerful individuals. He found himself watching Tyberos with his eyes a little wider than usual.
The Hydra agents at the fire position had prepared well. They had heavy machine guns, energy weapons, coordinated arcs of fire, and approximately thirty seconds of combat effectiveness after Tyberos reached their barricade. The lightning claws, "Hunger" and "Slake," moved in wide arcs at a speed that mortal reflexes could track but not respond to, and each arc cleared space. Armored bodies came apart at the joints, at the torso, wherever the claws happened to find them. The agents who tried to roll clear found that the geometry of their defensive position, which had been designed to funnel attackers into kill zones, worked equally well in reverse.
One agent, still shouting "Hail Hydra" with the particular focus of a man who has decided that dying for a cause requires audible commitment, pulled three high-explosive grenades from his belt and went for the blind spot behind Tyberos. Tyberos caught him on the backswing, one-handed, and the explosion that followed consumed what remained of both the agent and the attempt.
Another group tried to physically redirect a heavy machine gun, turning the tripod to find a new angle. The claw that swept through them took the gun with it, and the two were separated from each other midair and struck different walls.
Nolan had stopped firing.
He noticed, after a moment, that all five guards had also stopped firing. They were standing in a loose group, weapons at rest, watching. It was not a conscious decision, more the natural response of experienced fighters who could see that a situation had been resolved and that adding to it would serve no purpose.
Forty seconds after Tyberos had reached the barricade, the corridor beyond it was quiet.
What was left of the Hydra fire position was distributed across approximately ten meters of floor, walls, and, in several places, ceiling. Bright threads of red dripped from the strips of internal overhead lighting. The space smelled of ozone and scorched metal and the specific, dense warmth of freshly shed blood in a cold building.
Tyberos straightened. He shook both claws once, and the blood that had accumulated on the blades scattered in a brief arc across the surrounding floor. Then he turned, walked to the freight elevator at the corridor's end, and pressed the call button with one enormous, blood-soaked gauntlet, using the careful deliberateness of a person who is aware that the equipment was not designed for their hands.
The mechanical winch engaged below with a low, grinding hum.
Nolan and the five guards crossed the corridor and took up positions behind Tyberos, stepping over and around what the corridor now contained. Nobody spoke. The Carcharodons fought in silence and apparently waited in silence as well, and standing among them, Nolan found himself absorbing that quiet rather than fighting it.
He thought, while they waited, about what he had just observed. He knew Tyberos was not a standard Astartes. Chapter Masters were among the most capable warriors in the Imperium, and the Carcharodons in particular were not a Chapter known for producing commanders who had achieved their rank through political acuity. But there was a gap between knowing that intellectually and standing in a corridor watching the evidence dry on the ceiling. Nolan was honest enough with himself to ask whether he could have moved through that position with the same fluid, total efficiency, and honest enough to conclude that, at his current level of enhancement, the answer was no. Not yet. He filed the observation without discomfort and let it settle.
The elevator arrived with a soft chime that was comically at odds with its surroundings.
The doors opened. Everyone stepped inside. The doors closed. Soft music began to play from a small speaker embedded in the elevator's ceiling panel, something instrumental and inoffensive chosen by whoever had originally furnished the facility back when it was a scientific research station. The elevator descended.
It took about a minute.
The doors opened again onto a wide underground plaza, and Nolan's helmet display immediately began cataloguing threats.
Hydra had positioned single-occupant tanks in a loose perimeter, their guns already tracking the elevator entrance. Interspersed between them were robotic units built along an octopus body plan, eight articulated limbs radiating from a central chassis, each limb ending in a different weapons configuration. The plaza was large, the ceiling high, and there were a great many of both.
"Defensive formation," Tyberos said, low and immediate. "Protect the Primarch."
He pushed out of the elevator first, going right, angling for open ground where the Terminator could build momentum.
Nolan went left, through the forming gap in the guards' positioning, and pulled the Warscythe from his back in one smooth motion. The green light along its blade painted the metal floor in shifting emerald as he closed the distance to the nearest tank. The first laser burst from its gun hit the air to his left, thick as a column and hot enough to leave a visible shimmer. He was already at the tank's flank by the time it recalibrated.
The Warscythe's blade went through the armour as though the armour had simply decided not to be there.
Behind him, one of the guards caught a laser hit squarely on his breastplate and rocked back a step, the ceramite darkening from the energy transfer. He steadied himself and began firing, working the bolter in precise bursts at the tank's thinner rear armour panels. Explosive bolts penetrated at the joins, found the engine compartment or the energy cells, and the result was fire. The guards fanned out from the elevator, each picking a priority target, each moving to negate the advantage of the tanks' standoff range by closing it immediately.
On the far side of the plaza, Tyberos was dancing.
It was the only word that fit. The lightning claws moved continuously, never stopping, the arcs of blue-white energy trailing behind each swing like afterimages. The octopus robots had identified him as the largest threat, which was accurate, and had concentrated their attention accordingly. They tried to use their numbers, climbing over each other, coming from multiple angles simultaneously, attempting to get above the Terminator where the angle of attack would be more advantageous. Each one that left the ground met a claw on the way back down and came apart at whatever point of contact the claw found first. The pieces clattered across the floor and twitched.
Nolan split his focus between his own targets and the room, reading the flow of the engagement. The tanks were the priority. Their armour was thin where it mattered, and the Warscythe's edge made short work of the critical joints once he could reach them. He moved from one to the next, opening each one along whatever line presented itself, dealing with the pilot inside, and moving on.
Then the floor shook.
Heavy footsteps, the kind that announced structural weight. Something had entered the plaza from a far corridor, and it was ten meters tall and shaped approximately like a person, and it was walking toward the center of the fighting with the intent of someone who owns the building and is not pleased to find it occupied.
The screen mounted in the center of its chest flickered with a green-pixel face, distorted and furious, the features constructed entirely from light.
"Damn intruders!" The voice that came out was massive, broadcast through external speakers at a volume that bounced off the plaza walls. "This is my personal territory! I am Arnim Zola!"
A pause, during which the pixel face contorted into something that combined rage with genuine indignation.
"Who sent you to kill me?! Was it Strucker? Or that filthy, ugly alien bug?!"
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