The gap between the convoy and the city edge closed fast.
Cyclone missiles went up from the launcher mounts on the vehicle frames, arcing overhead in tight climbing lines before descending into the densest concentrations of the walker tide ahead. The detonations came back as sound and pressure against the hull plating a moment later. The Taurus vehicles did not slow for any of it: the heavy wheels hit the bodies the blasts had brought down and continued forward, the corrupted flesh offering less resistance than the ground beneath it. Flamers swept the sides of the corridor the convoy was forcing through, igniting walkers by the dozen on each pass, the fire spreading between closely packed bodies with the efficiency of something designed for exactly this.
Nolan felt the convoy's momentum begin to bleed off. The tide was too dense, too deep, and the vehicles were working against it one meter at a time.
He raised his hand.
Tony and Thor were already moving before the signal finished. Both lifted clear of the vehicle rooftops and climbed into the air above the formation, and Tony opened his arms immediately, the Ark reactor in his chest building for a half-second before the repulsor beam discharged at full width. The energy column swept across the forward mass of the walker tide in a wide horizontal arc, the walkers caught in it evaporating rather than falling, opening a lane through the press.
On Thor's ceramite shell, runes were surfacing along the plate as lightning threaded around the frame of the six-armed Terminator. Mjolnir went up. The sky above responded: dark cloud pulling together out of clear air, the wind arriving before the thunder did. The lightning that came down from it was not single bolts but a sustained rooting network of discharge, branching across the ground below and cooking everything it touched in overlapping waves. Walkers went rigid and fell. More kept coming, and more kept falling.
Professor Hulk dropped off the side of a Taurus vehicle without announcement.
He hit the ground at a run, and by the time he had taken three strides the frame that hit the walker mass was larger than the one that had left the vehicle: Savage Hulk, back to the surface, volume up, every calculation about conservation and precision replaced by something that operated on entirely different principles. The roar he produced was loud enough to feel through the vehicle hulls. He went into the tide ahead of the convoy like something accelerating rather than decelerating at contact, both palms slamming together at the apex of each swing, the shockwaves from each clap clearing in radius what no single impact could have managed alone. Bodies came apart and scattered.
The pattern between the three of them fell into something that was not quite coordinated but had the efficiency of coordination: Tony's beam ran hot, Tony pulled back to cool the reactor, the Hulk filled the gap, Thor's lightning surged into the spaces between, recovered, surged again. The convoy used every second of it to push forward.
The city edge was close when the bolts started landing.
The first detonations walked across Nolan's vibranium plate in rapid sequence, each one a concussive impact against a surface specifically built for this category of abuse. He tracked the angles and found the source: Death Guard emerging from the depth of the walker tide in groups, moving through the mass with the patience of things that had decided where they wanted to be before the fighting reached them. They had identified him as the priority and were concentrating their fire accordingly.
Nolan registered this and filed it.
He brought both arms up and released the Ten Rings from their housing. The metal bands went out in expanding arcs, trailing purple energy through their trajectories, converging on the Death Guard positions from multiple angles simultaneously. The strangle passes were not clean terminations, ceramite armor at this level required sustained pressure, but they disrupted the firing lines and forced repositioning, which was what the moment needed.
He vaulted from the moving vehicle and hit the ground running.
The Warscythe came off his back and into his hands in the same motion, extending to full configuration, and he moved through the walker mass toward the Death Guard positions with Shadow Step pushing his acceleration into a register the plague soldiers around him could not track. Walkers that were in his path registered the vibranium plate arriving and then registered nothing further. The Warscythe opened a corridor through the press, the blade carrying through multiple bodies per swing without losing momentum.
The dozen Death Guard that came out of concealment on his flanks had timed it well. They formed a partial encirclement in the seconds it took him to close distance, power scythes already raised, and the nearest of them was smiling in the way that Nurgle's servants tended to smile: patient, certain, untroubled by the prospect of the exchange they were about to have.
Nolan dropped his center of mass and accelerated through the last distance between them.
Shadow Step at contact range was a different application than at distance. He was inside their reach before any of them had completed the setup for a swing, and the Warscythe was already moving. The blade caught the first Death Guard at the waist and continued. The rotation carried through three more before the return stroke began. Upper bodies fell away from legs with the clean finality of a weapon built for exactly this density of material.
He pulled the Heart of the Furnace from his side and fired.
Plasma at this range and this cycle rate did not need accuracy. The spheres that came out of the barrel hit the Death Guard mass in overlapping saturation, and the thermal output was sufficient to deny the regeneration that might otherwise have made the previous cuts academic. The ones still standing when the plasma reached them stopped standing.
The tide was still moving around him. He took a breath.
The flies arrived as sound first.
The buzzing was not the ambient hum of a single swarm but something that registered as pressure, a moving weight of density that blocked sky and filled the air above the walker tide with a dark shifting mass advancing toward his position. He knew what that sound meant before he had consciously assembled the identification.
"A destroyer swarm." He was already backing the vibranium armor, Heart of the Furnace tracking upward. "Typhus is here."
The figure that came through the walker tide was built on a scale that communicated its own threat assessment without requiring annotation. Green Terminator plate, the abdomen distended to a degree that pushed the frame's geometry into something that should not have been functional, and taller and broader than anything in the walker tide around it, broader than the Hulk's current form. It moved with the speed that Nurgle's chosen sometimes achieved when they decided to stop performing patience.
The destroyer swarm that surrounded it moved with it, a living cloud oriented around a center of gravity.
"Suffer death."
The power scythe wrapped in orbiting plague flies came at Nolan's neck at a speed that the mass behind it did not suggest was possible.
The impact when Nolan caught it rang across the street.
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