Two enormous green feet hit the ground and kept going, sinking deep into the cracked asphalt before the impact finished spreading outward. The shockwave went in every direction at once, a flat invisible wall of displaced air that sent plague walkers tumbling away from the impact point in every direction, limbs cartwheeling, bodies piling up where they landed.
The Hulk did not wait for the dust to settle.
He was already moving, both fists swinging in wide arcs, and every connection with a plague walker's body launched it far enough to be someone else's problem. In tens of seconds, the ground within a hundred meters of the landing site had been cleared. He worked through the mass the way a large object works through water, everything in his path either hit directly or pushed aside by the displacement of something else that had been hit.
Then he stopped punching and started clapping.
His palms came together at full force and the shockwave they produced tore through a dense column of incoming walkers with the efficiency of a tool specifically designed for the purpose. Packed bodies folded and scattered. The clap repeated. Another lane opened. Another, longer one, extending back toward where Nolan and the Lamenters were working through the tide from the other side.
Nolan heard the roar over the sound of his own Warscythe connecting with plague-swollen torsos.
He turned his helmet, assessed the green shape battering a corridor open through the walker mass, and made the call without hesitation.
"Follow me. The big green one is always an ally."
The Lamenters activated the jet propulsion systems built into their speed-pattern plate without breaking stride, boosting forward with weapons still moving, clearing the bodies between their current position and the Hulk's path as they went. Thirty seconds later, they were through.
Nolan gave the next instruction simply and directly.
"Hulk. Open the way to the town."
The Hulk grinned at the cluster of metal giants around him, an expression that had nothing polite in it and seemed entirely comfortable with that. Then he turned and charged the remaining distance to the barricades with the straightforward commitment of something that had never needed to worry much about what was in front of it.
The Lamenters fell in behind him. Nolan ran with them.
He noticed it while they were still moving.
Plaguebearers had filtered into the walker mass in the minutes since the Hulk's arrival, drawn perhaps by the noise and scale of the disruption, or simply operating on whatever instinct guided Nurgle's lesser Daemons toward targets they could damage. Several of them had worked their way into range of the Hulk while he was focused on clearing the path ahead. Their curved blades fell on his back and shoulders with the full intent of the corruption those weapons carried.
The marks began to form. The telltale signs of Chaos taking hold in flesh, twisting the surface of whatever it touched, rewriting the material it infected according to Nurgle's design.
Then they were gone.
Not fought off. Not resisted through obvious effort. Simply erased, as if something underneath the Hulk's skin refused the change on a level that had nothing to do with willpower or faith or knowledge of what Chaos was. The corruption dissolved before it could root. The Plaguebearer blades kept falling and kept accomplishing nothing, and the Hulk did not appear to notice either the attack or the protection.
Nolan had seen the Emperor's blessing do something similar. He had seen Astartes with deep and genuine faith hold against corruption that should have broken them. But those cases always carried a psychic signature, some thread of the Emperor's will working through them, and he could feel that signature when it was present.
There was nothing like that here.
The Hulk had no connection to the Emperor. Almost certainly had no knowledge the Emperor existed. Whatever was turning Nurgle's corruption away from him had a different source entirely, something native to this world, operating without reference to the Imperium or the conflict Nolan had spent years learning to navigate.
The thought that settled with that observation was not entirely comfortable and not entirely unwelcome. This world was not ordinary. The number of individuals across it developing extraordinary capabilities had been climbing steadily, and not all of those capabilities were explicable by Astartes gene-seed or psychic potential in any Imperial sense. If the Four Chaos Gods had chosen a different world to corrupt first, a world without what this one apparently had underneath it, the outcome might have been very different from the start.
Perhaps the Emperor had known that when he chose this assignment.
Perhaps it did not need the Emperor at all.
The barricade cleared. They came over the top together, Hulk first, Nolan and the Lamenters landing heavily in sequence behind him. The ground inside the town was solid and did not reek of rot the way everything outside it did.
Civilians came from three directions at once.
They were wearing rough protective clothing that had been hand-modified rather than manufactured, layers of material sealed at the joints with whatever was available, and they moved with the purposeful urgency of people who had developed a protocol and trusted it. Before Nolan could say anything, the disinfectant bottles were already out. Spray covered the ceramite plating of the Lamenters' armor and the vibranium surface of Nolan's suit in overlapping passes, worked into every joint and recess with the focused attention of people who had learned exactly where contamination liked to hide. The flesh and matter that had accumulated across the power armor during the charge through the walker tide ran off in diluted streams.
Then the flamer teams came forward and ran high-temperature passes across every surface that had been sprayed. The protocol was methodical, practiced, and faster than it had any right to be given the circumstances.
Nolan was still processing his surprise at the degree of organization when he glanced toward the Hulk.
The Hulk was gargling disinfectant.
Not drinking it exactly, though the distinction seemed academic. He had gotten hold of a full container, tilted it back, filled his mouth, and was making a thorough job of cleaning whatever the spray had missed on his face and teeth. He seemed entirely satisfied with this approach.
That answered the question of how the survivors had figured out Nurgle's weaknesses fast enough to build a functioning quarantine protocol around them. Bruce Banner was somewhere in that enormous frame, and Bruce Banner's intellect was not a small thing to have on your side when the alternative was dying slowly in a plague zone.
Nolan stepped forward.
The civilians scattered immediately. Not in panic, but in the practiced automatic response of people who had learned that getting close to very large armored figures during an active emergency was not a good instinct. He stopped and let them go, then turned toward the Hulk.
"Hulk. My name is Nolan. My team and I are here fighting a large-scale operation to eliminate this Chaos pollution. We came to find survivors." A pause. "Would it be possible to speak with Dr. Bruce Banner for a few minutes? I have a number of questions that need answers, and I think he would have them."
The Hulk stopped gargling.
He turned his head slowly. The small eyes under the heavy brow ridge fixed on Nolan's visor with an expression that moved quickly from blankness to something that had edges on it.
"Hulk! Don't like Banner!" The voice that came out was not quiet. It was the kind of voice that carried across a battle and would have carried across a larger one without any difficulty. "Hulk is the hero! Hulk is the protector of this town!"
Nolan raised one hand, palm out, toward the Lamenters before any of them could shift position. They held where they were.
"Of course," he said. His voice stayed even. Patient, the way it had to be with an Ogryn who had gotten hold of a grievance they could not put into words. "Bad Banner. Terrible Banner. We will absolutely not bring up Banner."
The Hulk's volume remained elevated for another moment. Then some of the tension went out of his shoulders. The head dropped slightly. The disinfectant container dangled loose from one hand.
Then he raised his head again.
It happened between one breath and the next. The eyes were the clearest signal: the blunt aggressive focus that had been there a moment ago had been replaced by something slower and considerably more observant. The brow was the same, the green was the same, the three meters of dense muscle were entirely unchanged. But the intelligence looking out through those eyes now was a different instrument entirely.
The voice that came out was lower and measured its words.
"In my assessment, you are not a standard heroic response team." His gaze moved across the Lamenters, paused on the Warscythe, returned to Nolan. "That power armor configuration. Are you affiliated with the Guardians of Terra? Has the situation outside deteriorated badly enough that they are sending support?"