The first light of morning reached the battlefield in pale gray strips, falling across the rotting bodies of Nurgle's plague walkers where they had collapsed against the barricades and across the roads leading into town. The smell that came with that light was not improved by it.
On the horizon, shapes emerged from the haze. Blocky, low-slung, moving fast.
More than a hundred Taurus assault vehicles came in across the open ground at the edge of the battlefield, each one carrying Lamenters and loaded with a heavy Flamer and a pair of cyclone missile launchers. The formation spread as it advanced, finding spacing without slowing.
The first cyclone salvos went up all at once. The missiles climbed in tight screaming arcs and came down into the densest concentrations of the walker tide, and the explosions that followed rolled outward in overlapping circles of fire and displaced air. Before the smoke from those impacts had finished rising, the Taurus vehicles had formed a spearhead and pushed into the walker mass, the Flamers opening up at close range and igniting everything in a broad leading edge of the advance. Plague-swollen bodies caught and burned. The walkers pressed forward regardless, and the vehicles' heavy wheels ground through whatever fell in front of them.
The Lamenters on foot were out of the assault vehicles and moving before the formation had fully established itself, bolters raised in one hand, power swords and chainswords in the other, advancing through the mass with the unhurried mechanical efficiency of warriors who had done this particular kind of work many times before and expected to do it many times more.
Nolan stood on top of the town wall and watched. When Professor Hulk moved to step down and enter the fight, Nolan's hand came up.
"Wait."
He kept his voice brief. The Nurgle swarm surrounding this town was a clearing exercise for the Lamenters: the kind of threat that a well-disciplined mortal army could handle if Chaos corruption were not a factor. With full Terminator plate and fire support, it was not even a close contest. The only variable worth monitoring was time.
It took approximately one hour.
The walker tide that had besieged the town went into the fire and the bolters and the grinding wheels of the Taurus formation and did not come back out the other side. Even the Plaguebearers moving through the mass, relying on the bodies around them for concealment, were found and terminated before they could cause problems worth documenting.
When the last of the gunsmoke was still drifting, two figures in Terminator armor dropped from Taurus vehicles at the base of the city wall. The company commanders of the First and Second Companies came to rest on the ground, looked up at Nolan, and without hesitation raised their right fists to their chests in the Sky Eagle salute.
Nolan returned it with a slight motion of his helmet and came down to meet them.
He introduced Professor Hulk first, keeping it direct: an ally, confirmed capable, present for the duration. Then he asked the commanders to give him the full picture of everything they had seen on the approach.
What they reported was consistent with what he had already suspected. Walker concentrations were continuing to flow in the direction of Lucknow. The capital was pulling the plague mass toward it like a drain pulling water.
Nolan considered it while they spoke. A conclusion had been forming across the last several hours of observation, and the commanders' report aligned with it.
There appeared to be a ceiling on what Nurgle's group blessing could produce in this environment. The Chaos Astartes emerging from the flesh foundries represented the upper limit of what the blessing was capable of, not the first step in an escalating process. The thing he had feared most, uncontrolled Daemon proliferation growing beyond any capacity to contain it, was likely constrained by a factor this world provided that the Warp did not.
There was no true Warp here. The power Chaos drew on was present but rootless, a reservoir with no mechanism for replenishment. Chaos Portals could theoretically be forced open through large-scale ritual sacrifice, but the location and timing of any such attempt were unpredictable, and anything summoned through an unstable portal in a hostile native environment was not guaranteed to serve whoever opened it.
The threat was real and it was serious. It was also bounded.
That changed the operational calculus in a way that favored speed over caution.
The smoke outside the walls thinned and dissipated. The Lamenters of both companies completed their immediate repairs and formed up for the next push. Inside the town, the surviving civilians were not heavily contaminated: when the Wehrmacht Guards arrived, the Emperor statues and the holy water produced by dissolving panacea would be sufficient to treat most of what remained. The people here could be saved. The people in Lucknow were the question that needed answering now.
Professor Hulk crossed the ground inside the wall and stopped beside Nolan.
"The civilians have reached a functioning defensive consensus. They understand what to do if the walkers return." He looked at Nolan steadily. "We can leave without concern, Mr. Nolan. Your other forces will arrive and take over?"
"The Wehrmacht Guards and the Stormtrooper companies are within two hundred kilometers. They will be here." Nolan turned his helmet toward the road leading north. "The situation moves faster than we can afford to wait. We cannot stay."
"Understood." Professor Hulk's expression did not change, but the quality of his attention sharpened. "This is the first time I have observed the Lamenters in sustained combat. If your assessment of the Chaos Astartes presence in Lucknow is accurate, it needs to be addressed quickly. That kind of threat does not improve with time."
Before Nolan could respond, the sound arrived first.
A rolling peal of thunder broke out of a clear sky directly above the town, reverberating off every surface. Then the light, intense and blue-white, forking outward from a point of arrival just ahead of them. The impact hit the ground hard enough to send a crack through the packed earth, and the figure that straightened from it was wrapped in a fading corona of lightning, six armored arms unfolding from a Terminator frame.
"Did you miss me, brother Nolan?"
Thor's laughter came through the helmet's vox at full volume, carrying easily across the entire yard. The Lamenters standing nearby did not visibly react. They had been around Thor long enough that this had become a normal thing to witness. Among the civilians still inside the town, several dropped immediately to their knees, and more followed when they saw the lightning had not dissipated so much as settled.
Nolan walked forward and brought his forearm up hard against Thor's. The impact rang.
"Where's Tony?"
"David's satellite network and the servo robots have been mapping the area. The command center's assessment is that Lucknow will be the decisive location." Thor tilted his metal helmet back slightly. "Tony took the Iron Legion ahead to run reconnaissance. Director Niwa completed the final agreement with the local authorities. Once we provide specific coordinates, their forces will supply continuous long-range fire support. A meaningful contribution, by their own description."
"As long as they follow the coordination and stay out of the way when it matters."
Nolan turned and gestured toward Professor Hulk.
"This is the Hulk. Call him Professor for now. Professor, this is Thor: an ally from Asgard. A figure from myth and legend made physical, or an alien, depending on how you prefer to frame it."
The two of them looked at each other.
Professor Hulk's eyes moved across the Terminator frame with the reflexive assessment of someone whose mind organized new information quickly and without ceremony. Thor looked back with the open and uncomplicated interest he brought to most people who were not immediately trying to harm him.
Two enormous hands came together.
"Welcome to the fight, big green friend!"
"Hello, Mr. Thor." Professor Hulk's voice was measured and genuine. "I spent a considerable portion of my career assuming that mythology was metaphor. Current evidence suggests the prototypes may have been real all along."