Nobody waited for an order.
The bolt weapons came up across the group simultaneously, the sound of them firing overlapping into something continuous. Weeks of operating together had produced the kind of coordination that comes not from training alone but from the specific experience of having already survived something together: everyone knew where everyone else was, which angles were covered, and what to do without being told.
Doom rose into the night sky again, his cloak pulling away from the silver armor as he climbed. His witchcraft reserves were running low: the continuous reconnaissance and combat pace of the past days had drained what he normally kept in reserve for the demanding work, and he had shifted accordingly. The precision impact beams from his gauntlets, purely technological, hammered at the Daemon Engines weaving back and forth in the approach as they tried to find their angle for a charge.
Natasha and Hawkeye had exhausted their explosive rounds some time earlier. They were working with Flamers now, spraying arcs of combustion fluid at whatever was close enough to catch, and their nerves had moved from the sharp terror of the first town to something more functional and grimmer.
The five Lamenters dropped to one knee in their speed-type armor and fired the last of their Whirlwind missiles, a final volley that saturated the front rank of approaching Daemon Engines in a radius of overlapping blast. As the explosions cleared, all five stood, threw their remaining explosives and the emptied Flamers in the direction of the two mortal fighters for contingency, drew their power swords and chainswords, and charged.
"We die with honor for those we hold dear!"
The war cry hit the air and the five of them went in at full drive, the jet propulsion of their power packs accelerating the charge to something that no infantry formation in the native world had any frame of reference for. They struck the Daemon Engines like a freight car hitting a wall, the impacts tearing chrome-and-flesh frames apart, chainsaws finding the seams in the corrupted mechanisms, power swords disintegrating whatever the force field touched.
Nolan came in behind them and went past them.
The Warscythe came up, the green light along its edge brightening as the decomposition field activated. The first Daemon Engine in his direct path had no time to redirect: the blade caught it across its center line and the engine came apart as two separate masses, each one continuing on its original trajectory for a moment before the physics caught up. The Heart of the Furnace in his other hand produced a plasma discharge that caught the far pieces mid-fall and converted them to vapor.
The Ten Rings spread from his forearms in a wide orbit and began sweeping, the purple energy cutting through the lighter-built engines in the outer perimeter with each pass, disrupting the ones that had enough mass to survive a hit by throwing them wide of their attack vectors.
Fifteen minutes. Close to a hundred Daemon Engines at the motorcycle scale, and the last of them went down under a combined strike from Nolan and the nearest Lamenters battle-brother.
"The zombie tide is closing again from the perimeter." Nolan turned his helmet and scanned. The outer edge of the town was resolving into movement in the night-vision display: the familiar slow-rolling density of Nurgle's walkers, taking advantage of the engagement to press inward. "Doom, call the Thunderhawk. Immediate standby."
Doom was already on the channel.
The fire inside the town was visible over the rooftops from where they stood: the orange glow of something large and sustained. Nolan looked at it, looked at the approaching walker mass, and made the calculation.
He went in.
The town was nearly empty of walkers at street level, which was wrong. Compared to the perimeter density they had been managing all night, the interior was sparse to the point of being conspicuous.
Where were the humans who had lived here?
Hundreds of Daemon Engines were not enough to account for an entire large town's population. The engines were small. The material cost for each one was not that high. Where had the rest of the people gone?
The foundry answered the question.
Nolan came through the entrance and stopped.
The interior was enormous, the ceiling high enough that the smoke had somewhere to go, and the heat from the furnaces was physical before it was measurable. What stood in the center was not any kind of industrial equipment that belonged in this world. It was something that had been assembled from the wrong materials: metal and bone and flesh all incorporated into its structure, the joins between them not mechanical but biological, grown together and fused. The furnaces burned green-tinged, and in the bubbling dark fluid filling them, shapes were rising.
Power armor frames. Basic ones, early stage, just the skeleton of what the armor would eventually become. Rising from the fluid, moving along whatever the flesh-and-blood production line carried them toward.
And around the furnaces, on the high-heat floor, other shapes.
Approximately three meters tall. Bloated and distended in the way Nurgle's larger creations were bloated, but with a fundamental difference from the plague cattle or the walkers: these were humanoid. They had the proportions of something built toward a specific purpose, not random corruption but shaped corruption. Twisted horn-like growths above where the heads would be. Bodies using the flesh and blood essence of the disappeared population as building material.
Astartes-sized bodies.
Chaos Astartes.
Nolan recognized what he was looking at in the fraction of a second before he spoke.
"Astartes!" The word came out at combat volume, the fury in it sharp enough to cut. "Chaos Astartes!"
The Lamenters went still. Natasha and Hawkeye, behind him, registered the intensity of his reaction before they fully processed what they were looking at.
Hawkeye turned to Natasha. "Can those things actually make Astartes?"
Nolan answered him, speaking fast, working through it as the words came.
"I should have understood earlier why Nurgle became the final recipient of this blessing when Tzeentch arranged for the others to be neutralized." He exhaled slowly. "Because only Nurgle's power has this capability. Tzeentch was not being charitable when he maneuvered Khorne and Slaanesh out of position. He was selecting the winner on purpose."
He looked at the production line.
"The zombie plague. The localized Daemons. The Daemon Engines. None of those were the main event. They were the preparation: consuming the population, driving the survivors inward, maintaining enough chaos to prevent organized resistance, and confusing any observer's assessment of what was actually being built. The flesh and blood essence of everyone taken by the plague is the raw material. The Daemon Engines were a factory's security guards."
The plasma from the furnaces hissed. Another frame rose from the fluid.
"And I now believe that Tzeentch and Nurgle coordinated this specifically because they know what I am. The Death Guard have fought the Emperor's methods before. Producing Chaos Astartes from a corrupted population using Daemon forges was something we used against them once." His hand moved to the power pack and came back with a melta bomb held flat against his palm. "They are doing it to us."
He looked at the five Lamenters.
"We stop this production line. Even if the entire company is spent doing it, the line does not finish a single complete unit. Understood?"
No one spoke.
The five battle-brothers stepped forward as one.
"For the Emperor."
"For the Primarch."
"To honor the blood of Sanguinius."
"For those we hold dear."
The last voice was not individual but all five at once, the words arriving in a single unified roar:
"All Lamenters, without regret!"
And they moved.