Nurgle's Garden.
Green smoke drifted in low banks across a landscape of swollen fungi and bloated vegetation, the air thick with the smell of things ripening past the point of ripeness into something that had crossed over entirely. Twisted flowers grew in abundance over the surfaces of putrid swamps, their colors wrong in ways that were difficult to name, their petals moving without wind. And everywhere, the steady background sound of Nurglings: their wet laughter, their infant-pitched wailing, the constant small noise of creatures entirely at home in a place that no sane thing should have found comfortable.
The flesh cysts split open one after another.
Each one was large enough to contain a Death Guard in full Terminator plate, and each one opened with the wet resistance of something that had been sealed under pressure, expelling its occupant into the fetid air of the Garden. The Death Guard who came out fell or stumbled or simply landed in the swamp and did not surface again: roughly two-thirds of them, consumed by the Garden that had briefly housed them, their corrupted forms not resilient enough to complete the transit back.
The remaining third stood or knelt where they had landed.
Typhus came out of his cyst and moved without looking at what was around him, going directly to his knees in the direction of the Garden's depths. His Terminator armor was still slick with the slime of the cyst's interior. He lowered his head.
"Only one in three from a full company has returned with enough soul-substance to resist the consumption of the crossing." His voice was measured, as close to formal as Typhus came. "My lord. We have failed."
The low sound that followed was not a voice in any precise sense. It moved through the vegetation and the green mist and the pitted skin of what lay beyond the immediate sight line, and the plants responded to it as if it were sunlight: turning, opening, sending out the prayers that Nurgle's Garden offered in place of silence. The broad back that filled the far distance of Typhus's raised field of vision was immense in a way that resisted easy scaling: a mountain range that breathed, its surface cracked and crusted with herpes that wept fluid, and across every surface of it the Nurglings moved in their constant purposeless clustering, sliding in and out of the larger cysts, climbing the ridges of infected skin, falling occasionally when something shifted, and laughing when they fell.
Typhus let the sound of approval settle around him, then spoke again.
"Our progress in establishing a presence in the new world remains well ahead of the other gods." He paused. "There is one additional matter I must report."
The Garden's sounds quieted fractionally. Not silence: the Nurglings never stopped, and the flowers never stopped, but the quality of the ambient noise shifted toward something that was listening.
"When the vessel I inhabited was destroyed in the battle, my soul-consciousness did not fully dissipate. Nor did it return here intact." Typhus's tone was careful in the way that beings who have survived long periods of proximity to gods learn to be careful. "It was held, temporarily, in a specific dimension. An unexpected factor, not one I had planned for."
He let that sit.
"A single thread of soul-consciousness is fragile. It cannot act with any direct force. But a thread placed in an unexpected location has a way of influencing the things around it. Quietly. Over time."
The laughter that came from the depths of the Garden was enormous and entirely pleased. It moved through the ground underfoot as much as through the air, and as it built the Nurglings clinging to that vast back lost their grip and fell in clusters, laughing as they dropped, wailing as they hit the swamp below, laughing again when they surfaced.
The words that came were slow and deep and carried the comfortable certainty of something that had never had cause to doubt the eventual outcome of anything it touched.
"All things corrupt. All things endure."
Typhus and the surviving Death Guard lowered their heads together without hesitation.
Their answer came back in unison.
"All things corrupt. All things endure."
Typhus's fall did not end the battle. It ended one phase of it and started the next.
The Death Guard scattered across Lucknow were not numerous in absolute terms, but they did not need to be. Each one was a fixed point around which the plague walker tide organized itself, and with Plaguebearers moving through the mass to exploit every gap in the Lamenters' formations, the second phase was grinding work that required sustained attention and offered nothing clean or quick.
The cost had already arrived before Typhus went down. Thirteen Lamenters had died by the time Nolan crushed the last of Typhus's skull beneath his boot. This was not a failure of their capability: the two companies had been holding positional warfare specifically to give Nolan and the heroes the sustained engagement time to locate and cut through to the high-value targets. That was not the Lamenters' preferred mode of fighting. They were built for fast maneuvering, for striking hard and moving before the enemy could respond. Holding ground and drawing mass fire while someone else handled the objective was a sacrifice with a specific purpose, and they had made it.
With Typhus gone and the command structure of the Death Guard broken, the pressure against the Lamenters dropped significantly. The individual Death Guard who remained were still dangerous, but dangerous in the way that isolated problems were dangerous rather than in the way that a coordinated force was dangerous. Nolan worked through them.
He moved through the walker tide like something that had decided to dispense with the concept of obstacles, the Warscythe clearing lanes, the Ten Rings operating in parallel, and any Death Guard that intercepted him lasting approximately the duration of a single exchange before the Warscythe or the rings reduced them to their components. The Hulk worked adjacent to him, the two of them covering ground at a rate that would have been difficult to maintain with fire support alone.
When the last Death Guard with a power scythe still in his hands went down, Nolan stopped.
He looked across the battlefield from behind the visor. The walker tide was still thick across most of the city, Nurgle's plague soldiers still pressing forward in their endless wave, and with the Death Guard no longer directing them the pressure was less organized but not less present. Two companies of Lamenters and a collection of individuals with exceptional capability were not, without additional fire support, sufficient to scour an entire city clean of a plague tide at this density.
He was already considering whether the moment had arrived to summon the Sky Scale, to call in that reserve and let it work across the tide at a scale that ground forces could not match.
He raised his vibranium palm to begin the focus the summoning required.
The contrails arrived first.
Streaks across the open sky above the city, moving fast from the direction of the city boundary: cyclone missiles climbing in tight grouped arcs before tipping over and descending into the thickest concentrations of the walker tide below. The detonations walked across the ground in a covering pattern, each impact cluster overlapping with the next.
Nolan lowered his hand.
Raditus's voice arrived in his ear at the volume Raditus considered appropriate for important announcements.
"Respected Primarch! The Intelligent Control Corps has reached the battlefield. I am personally present to provide direct fire support!"
The Stormtrooper Company's channel opened immediately after.
"My Lord Primarch! All companies present and ready! Large-scale bombardment of the city is commencing now! Hold your position with your battle-brothers!"
Then the Wehrmacht Guards' frequency.
"First and Second Armored Infantry Regiments of the Latverian Wehrmacht approaching the city boundary! Awaiting your attack order, Commander!"
Then the Thunderhawk channel.
"Transport formation is now overhead and in position. Requesting authorization for dive bombing runs!"
Nolan stood in the middle of what remained of the battle and heard all of it arrive in sequence. He straightened inside the vibranium plate: the full height of it, the weight of it, the frame that was still growing toward what it was supposed to be.
He pulled a long breath and held it for a moment, pressing down the things that had been accumulating since the operation started.
Then he opened the command channel.
"All units, listen for my order." His voice came out level and clear. "For humanity. Full advance, all forces, attack."
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