The bolt rounds blew through the low fog in a sequence of overlapping detonations, each one finding the swollen flank of a creature and expanding inside it in ways that bolt ammunition was specifically designed to produce. The bloated cattle reacted to the impacts differently from anything with normal physiology: the explosions tore through rotten flesh and sent dark fluid in all directions, but the things kept moving, kept lowering their twisted-horned heads, kept building toward the charge.
Doom had seen Chaos Daemons for the first time thirty seconds ago.
He had spent two of those seconds on the psychological adjustment and was now in the air, his dark green cloak trailing below the silver power armor, both ceramite palms moving. Hellfire poured from his hands in controlled cascades, wrapping across the front rank of cattle and finding the wet, corrupted material of their bodies extremely willing to burn.
The herd charged.
Hundreds of bloated shapes with human heads listing on their necks, hooves striking the concrete in an irregular thunder that built and built as they closed the distance.
From the edge of the street behind, Natasha and Hawkeye arrived at a run, the Lamenters heavy firepower team two steps behind them. The two Astartes with Whirlwind racks on their power packs dropped to one knee simultaneously. The other three brought their bolt weapons up without instruction.
Natasha had her bolter up and firing before she was fully stopped. Hawkeye pulled the metal bow from his back and had three explosive splitting arrows on the string in the time it took most people to locate a target. His eyepiece calculated the angle, his arm adjusted without conscious input, and he loosed at the center mass of the herd at the same moment the Whirlwind missiles fired.
The combined strike hit the center of the formation and reorganized it significantly.
"Nat!" Hawkeye called across the combat link. "Scenes like this always remind me of Budapest!"
"Budapest?" Natasha's voice came back between bolt pulls. "I don't know what version of Budapest you're remembering, but it isn't the same one I was in." A brief pause, the sound of a magazine change, then the bolt fire resuming. "That thing is smiling at me. The one with the head that's mostly mouth. It's smiling at me."
"Don't acknowledge it."
"For Nolan!" Natasha's voice went up slightly, the bolt fire intensifying. "For the Emperor!"
It was not, in any theological sense, a prayer. It was what the fear needed to be, and it became the cry instead. In the immediate vicinity of where she said it, five Lamenters Astartes who had been firing from disciplined range suddenly put away their weapons and drew their blades.
Antarctic vibranium power swords. Chainswords in the other hands. No change in expression. No ceremony. They simply charged.
At the front of the entire engagement, Nolan let the Ten Rings come back to his arms and settle, took the Warscythe from his back one-handed, and moved forward into the herd.
What followed was not something that resolved into individual moments. It was continuous and immediate: the Warscythe moving in long low arcs, the decomposition field making contact with the bloated material of the bodies and achieving results that were much more complete than conventional bladed weapons, the Lamenters working through their targets with the focused brutality of warriors who had been fighting things like this for decades and had no remaining emotional weight to expend on the encounter.
Doom remained airborne, impact beams from one palm and hellfire from the other, precise enough to be useful and elevated enough to avoid the close-quarters mass of the melee.
Heads and limbs in quantities that were difficult to track.
And then the last one, which had somehow retained the ability to move after everything else was down, and Nolan's Warscythe coming across flat and final.
Silence, the particular kind that arrives after sustained noise.
"Doom." Nolan's voice in the combat link was level. "Air and soil samples. Double isolation: scientific and witchcraft containment both. No tissue samples from anything we haven't seen before. Contamination risk from unknown Daemon forms is too high. Image records only."
"Understood."
"Heavy firepower team." The Lamenters acknowledged before he finished the sentence. "Full search of the town. Every building, every room. If you find anyone alive, including children." He said the next words without any change in tone. "Kill them all."
Doom had already landed and was moving through the wreckage with several small transparent sample tubes drawn from the storage compartment in his power pack, collecting and sealing. He wrapped a thin cord of hellfire around each sealed tube as a second containment layer before putting them away.
The Lamenters spread into the town without another word.
Natasha and Hawkeye came forward through the debris.
Nolan turned his eyepiece toward them.
"How are you holding up?"
Natasha was quiet for a moment before answering.
"They always told us in the early briefings that our purpose was to fight things that threaten humanity in ways conventional forces couldn't address." She looked at the ground where the last of the creatures had been. "I had my own understanding of what that meant. Things that were dangerous. Strange, even. But." She stopped. "Standing here looking at that and knowing it was real." She looked up at him. "Does it become something you get used to, Lord Primarch?"
"If you kill enough of them," Nolan said, "yes."
He said it lightly. Not dismissively: there was something in his tone that acknowledged the reality underneath the question without dwelling in it. He had gotten used to it. The process of getting used to it had not been painless.
Hawkeye had been watching Doom move through the debris.
"The burning," he said. "He's removing all of it. Physical evidence, remains, everything. Is that because what killed them can spread through contact? Some kind of plague or mutation agent that works on any organic material?"
"Physical contamination is one concern," Nolan said. "It can be addressed. Quarantine, incineration, proper decontamination protocols. We have the tools to manage it."
He raised one hand and tapped the side of his vibranium helmet with one finger. The sound of metal on metal rang out clearly in the quiet street.
"The thing that cannot be managed as easily is here. The soul. The mind. Chaos does not only corrupt the body. It corrupts what is in here." He lowered his hand. "You asked whether the Astartes believe in the Emperor for religious reasons. Strip away everything else: the ritual, the iconography, the ten thousand years of accumulated doctrine. What remains is the honest answer. They believe in the Emperor because without it, Chaos has a door. Not a metaphorical door. A real one. Belief is not optional when the alternative is that you open yourself to something that will make your mind its home."
He looked at the town around them, empty and still.
"That is what makes Chaos terrifying. Physical damage can be healed or removed. A corrupted soul is a different kind of problem entirely."