Night fell over Gryphonne IV and the battle did not slow.
On the wide front where the Titan Legion had engaged the Tyranid bio-titans, the fighting had been continuous since the first contacts were made, and its cost was becoming visible in the wreckage now burning across the field. Reaver-class Titans whose void shields had been worn down by sustained acid-shell bombardment and the impact of biological flying units had been brought low, their reactors burning in the dark like beacons. The Titan captains inside them were dead. The loss of each engine was a loss that the Imperium of Man could not easily recover from, and the crew knew that going in.
But the bio-titan wreckage outnumbered them, and the Gryphonne Titan Legion was still standing.
Below the Titan engagement, the armored thrust had begun.
More than two thousand Leman Russ tanks, Exterminators and Vanquishers combined, moved forward in extended column formation under coordinated vox-command, tracks grinding across earth that the fighting had turned to ash and organic matter. They advanced firing, their main guns speaking continuously against the Hormagaunts and Termagants breaking toward the armored front, the sustained fire creating a rolling zone of destruction that preceded the column like a tide.
Behind the tank formations came the Skitarii Vanguard, marching in the radiation-hazard that their own bodies generated, radium carbines held at the shoulder. They used the brief gaps between armored units to push concentrated fire into any Tyranid organism that tried to press against the column's flanks. Behind the Vanguard, the Medusa Siege Guns stopped at intervals to unlimber, brought their massive ordnance to bear on the dense Tyranid concentrations deeper in the enemy mass, and fired. The detonations they produced did not distinguish between targets. They did not need to.
At the rear of the entire advance, moving with the deliberate pace that their systems required, came the Kastellan Robots.
They were the Mechanicus's final tactical reserve for this engagement, more than a thousand units coordinated through their attending Tech-Priests, moving in formation with the particular iron patience of machines that could sustain this for as long as their power cells held. Their assigned role was different from the armored formations ahead of them. They were hunting.
The wolf led them.
Dark red artificer armor, iron halo mounted at the collar, C'tan phase sword at his side and the Nemesis blade on his back. He had taken the metal helmet down from his power pack and settled it in place before the advance began, and had not removed it since. The Tech-Priests with their powered axes moved in his wake, and when he raised his hand and waved, the Kastellan formations peeled off behind him without hesitation.
The objective was not to fight the swarm. The objective was to find what was directing it.
The wolf watched the line of Warlord-class Titans cracking the night with their weapons, tracked the trajectories back toward the heaviest concentration of Tyranid resistance, and began looking for the pattern beneath the mass. The swarm moved like a fluid, but it was not mindless. There were concentrations within the surge where the movement had direction rather than simply density, where the organisms around a point were orienting rather than just advancing.
He found it deep in the press: the massive silhouette of a Hive Tyrant, surrounded by layers of Tyranid Warriors providing synapse coverage and Carnifexes anchoring the close guard, standing nearly four meters of armored chitin and biological weapons that had been killing for longer than Gryphonne IV had been a forge world.
The wolf exhaled once.
Then he came out of the trench at full run.
The C'tan phase sword was already in motion when he cleared the parapet, spinning through a continuous arc that caught the green light of its own edge and scattered it across everything it passed through. The Tyranid Warriors in the outer ring came apart. The Hormagaunts trying to mass against him came apart faster. The sword did not slow between passes.
Three Carnifexes registered the incursion and redirected simultaneously, converging from different angles, their charge shaking the ground through thirty meters of approach.
The wolf did not adjust his direction.
He drove the last few steps into a dead run and hit the closest Carnifex with a vibranium-gauntleted fist at the point of its charge.
The impact stopped the creature's forward momentum. Not gradually, not over distance, but immediately, the kinetic force distributed into the Carnifex's mass and into the earth beneath it, and the Carnifex went down into the blood-soaked mud and did not immediately get up. The wolf's arm came away covered in Tyranid-inflicted wounds from the creature's bone blades, the tissue already beginning to close.
He came up with the phase sword moving.
The two remaining Carnifexes were already on him. He gave neither of them the angle they wanted, cutting across the face of their charges rather than meeting them straight, and the phase sword opened them along lines that bypassed the chitin plating entirely, the C'tan-phased edge treating the biological armor as though it were not present. They were large and fast and they died in the way that things die when the weapon hitting them does not interact with their defenses the way they expect.
By the time they hit the ground, the Kastellan cohort had cleared the outer Tyranid Warriors and closed the perimeter. The Tech-Priests were directing fire with the efficiency of operators who had accepted what they were looking at and were managing it rather than understanding it.
The wolf straightened.
He reached back and closed his hand around the grip of the Nemesis blade, drawing it in a single pull. Psychic flame rose along the edge as the sword woke, blue-white and restless, answering the instinct that ran through the wolf's bloodline and did not have a more precise name.
He held both blades.
Ahead of him, at the center of the synapse cluster, the Hive Tyrant turned its attention from the Titan engagement to the thing that had just killed its closest guard.
The wolf let out a sound from inside the helmet that carried across the battle noise and over it, a battle cry that the Fenrisian blood made without requiring a decision:
"For Russ and the Allfather!"
"Charge with me!"
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