The channel closed. David had other things to manage.
That was always true. The people holding the rear of this operation, each one carrying their own weight of coordination and crisis and decision, were not having an easier time of it than Nolan was here among the plague walkers. The brief rest was already over anyway.
The Lamenters rose without needing to be told, checked their melee weapons one final time, and fell back into formation. Magnetic boots began to move. The road ahead was dark and smelled of rot.
Part of Nolan wanted to split himself into a hundred separate bodies and burn every flesh foundry in Uttar Pradesh to the ground before the next hour was out. A cleaner solution. Faster. Every minute a foundry ran was another step toward a Chaos Astartes that would have to be killed on a battlefield instead of dismantled before it drew its first breath. But Nolan was not an Alpha-level psyker, and wishing for abilities he did not have was a waste of time he could not afford. He had his armor, his Warscythe, his Ten Rings, and the five battle-brothers at his back. Under the eyes of the Emperor of Mankind, that would have to be enough to keep cutting down Chaos one small tendril at a time.
Several more hours passed. The sky deepened from gray to full dark.
They ran into the corpse tide at the edge of Uttar Pradesh's interior, a mass of plague walkers stretching wide across the road and the fields on either side, moving with the slow relentless pressure that Nolan had grown familiar with over the past day. He took the Warscythe off his shoulder and led the Lamenters into it from the flank, opening a path through.
But the walkers did not press the way they usually did.
In every previous engagement, breaking through a concentration like this meant committing to either a full route clear or a running fight extending for kilometers as the mass reorganized and followed. Not here. After the initial contact, the plague walkers simply... moved around them. Not attacking, not pursuing. Continuing in the same direction they had already been going, as if the combat team had been an inconvenience in a road they intended to travel regardless.
Nolan stepped back from the thinning edge of the mass and watched through his visor. The walkers kept moving. All of them, maintaining a rough collective direction.
He turned to the Lamenters and asked what they made of it.
Then he told them they were going to follow for a while.
If this tide was moving with purpose rather than simply spreading, something ahead was drawing it. And where Nurgle committed reinforcements, it meant something had already taken losses. Which meant something was fighting back.
They moved to the outer edge of the mass and matched its pace, neither too close to disturb the walkers' direction nor so far back they would lose the thread of it. The Lamenters recovered energy as they moved, the brief hours of reduced exertion doing what very little sleep was available to do.
Nolan watched the terrain rise ahead of them.
He had thought of the Carcharodons once, in the space between one stride and the next. If Tyberos's warriors had been at his side instead of these five, the decision would not have been the same. The Space Sharks did not move for survivors. That was not callousness exactly, more a product of everything the Void had made them. Nolan had felt it clearly during their time together, the way a Chapter's nature worked on you if you spent enough time inside it. A Primarch influenced his Astartes, yes, but the relationship ran the other direction too. Spend long enough with a Chapter and their way of thinking began to settle into the gaps in your own.
The Lamenters were different. Had always been different. And Nolan, who had no blood descendants, who would never be father to an Astartes line through direct inheritance, found something specific in that difference.
The thought passed. The terrain answered it anyway.
A town emerged in the visor's edge, set on naturally elevated ground, the kind of defensible position civilians sometimes recognized instinctively when things got bad enough. Building materials had been stacked into barricades along the outer perimeter, not elegant, not military, but solid. Something had been working at those walls for a while, and they were still standing.
Gunshots. Voices. The sounds of people still fighting.
The corpse tide was pouring toward it from three sides, the reinforcement Nolan had suspected, and more than a few of the walkers were already pressing against the barricades and the slopes below the town's raised edge.
Nolan raised the Warscythe and stopped thinking about anything except the immediate problem.
The Ten Rings released from between his forearms in a spinning outward arc, the metal bands catching plague walkers at neck and torso height as they spread, carrying through multiple bodies before returning. He drove the Warscythe blade into the mass ahead with his right hand and pushed forward, opening a corridor. Behind him the Lamenters poured through the gap, bolters firing at targets beyond the immediate press, each shot placed with the precision that only centuries of war produced.
The walkers went down in sections. Nolan moved through them steadily. Each swing of the Warscythe cut through two or three bodies simultaneously, the blade not slowing as it split bloated plague-swollen torsos apart. The Ten Rings returned to his forearms, cycled, released again into another cluster, turned Nurgle's foot-soldiers into a wet spray across the cracked ground.
At this scale of numbers, the walkers were not a genuine threat to him or the Lamenters. They did not need to be. Attrition was their purpose: the slow grinding down of weapons, of stamina, of the margins that kept a fighter alive against something that actually could kill them.
He felt it before he heard it. A subtle shift in air pressure on his left flank where there should not have been one.
The Plaguebearer came out of the press with a curved blade raised, its bloated body moving with more deliberate intelligence than the walkers around it, its face stretched into a permanent smile despite the rot that had taken most of the skin. It had worked its way through the mass using the bodies around it as concealment, close enough now that the blade was already coming down.
Nolan turned without looking. He put his fist through the upper half of its body.
The Plaguebearer came apart. What remained dropped.
"Everyone stay alert!" He did not break stride. "Plaguebearer present in this section!"
A Plaguebearer was not a plague walker. The souls that became Nurgle's lesser Daemons had gone to the Plague God willingly or under the extremity of terminal disease, and the things they became were smarter, tougher, and considerably more dangerous than simple infected corpses. They were priority targets. The Lamenters already knew this, but confirmation of sighting mattered.
He swung the Warscythe again and cleared another lane toward the town.
The survivors had seen them by now. He could hear voices on the barricades, shouting words that crossed several languages, the kind of noise that people make when help they had stopped expecting suddenly appears. Guns that had been firing in disciplined short bursts broke their pattern, some of them holding, others unable to stop themselves from expending rounds against targets Nolan and the Lamenters were already reaching.
Then a different sound from inside the barricade. Not a voice. Footsteps, but heavy enough that each one registered as a separate impact even through the chaos of combat around them.
Something launched itself from inside the town in a long arc, three meters of green, every part of it dense muscle, and came down into the densest section of the corpse tide like a boulder dropped from height.
The walkers it hit simply ceased to be organized as walkers. The ones adjacent to the impact point staggered and fell from the force of it.
The green figure straightened up from the impact crouch, both fists raised.
"Hulk, attack!"
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