Blood Loss [40k]
The building’s top floor was haunted with the protesting creaks and sighs of the structure’s ravaged framework as a stiff wind moaned through the remnants of its roofing and hole-riddled walls. From room to ruined room the shadow moved, its utterly silent passage mocking the disquiet of the stricken surroundings. A crackle of static and murmured tones issued from the next room beyond and the shape of shifting darkness eased up along side the doorway and peered within. A lone figure, outlined in the ashen light of a blown-out window, its form a hunched and profane representation of humanity even in silhouette. The stalking darkness waited for the noise within the room to fade, and made its move.
At the sharp sound of a creaking floorboard the sentry at the window spun around, its battered lasgun barely raised halfway before a blow to the head jerked him violently sideways. A glint of silver flashed from the side of the corrupt human’s skull, dashing blood and gore across the opposite wall before a returning slash lay the heretic’s throat open clean to the spine and sent him to the floor in a flacid heap. There was a damp sputtering like that of a ruined water hose as the man’s death rattle struggled to surface through the torrent of brackish ichor pouring from the grievous wound in his neck. The shadow stepped around the blood pooling on the worn floorboards and moved up aside the window, a curved dagger of bloodied black steel in one hand and the lasgun of its victim in the other.
Though filtered through thick cloud cover and the even thicker smoke and cordite haze of war, the mid-day sunlight made the shadow, Kuril Eugen, flinch. Daytime was not a friend of the Alukard-born trooper or any of his kin. The same native affliction which made the Alukardian’s such peerless night-fighters served to hamper them in lighter hours although, contrary to much speculation and fabricated myths, they didn’t burst into flames at a glance of sunlight. Another of the legends, however, was quite true and it was all Eugen could do to block out the thick scent of fresh blood flooding his nostrils. The taint of corruption rendered the blood of heretics sour and unfavorable but the scent of it, fresh and still pumping from a dying heart, enticed his dark hunger none the less. There would be time later for such indulgence once we free are of this bitter place, he thought, and turned his attention to the rubble-strewn street below the window.
By quick tally he made no fewer than two dozen humanoid contacts and a pair of half-tracks manning the barricade. They had been right to assume a frontal assault would have foundered. The enemy looked to be well-established and double their number in manpower with heavy weapons emplacements and, from the distinctive scent his keen nose was catching, at least one plasma weapon.
‘So, how bad?’ Quizzed the trooper even he was hard pressed to have heard sneak up beside him. Eugen eased back into a crouch against the wall, sparing a rueful smirk for his fellow. The ash, dirt and blood smeared over lean features cracking at the corners of his mouth with the expression.
‘It’s not bad at all. Two-to-one odds, a pair of half-tracks, some emplacements and a plasma in a perigot tree.’ He said casually, reaching over to clean the blood off the black metal blade of his knife on the fatigues of its former owner. Beside him, Arro Marjas chuckled lightly.
‘Is that it? Why with all the sneaking around then?’ The other trooper was grinning a grin that told he was only half joking. The soil of war did nothing but deepen the wicked lines of Marjas’ gaunt, generously-scarred features. A strip of cloth torn off as a makeshift bandana kept back longish, black hair from his face and eyes the color of heated brass carried a habitual glimmer of malice. He leaned up slightly to peer over the windowsill, muttering about a longing for perigot ale, as another unannounced presence cut in.
‘I’m betting there are more in the building across the way from us, there’s regular traffic in and out of there. Probably a staging post.’ A female voice this time, speaking as if to no one but itself. Eugen glanced over to see Maia Kilvora peering out through a narrow fissure in the exterior wall. Dingy sunlight cast a trough across her face though the young woman’s crystalline eyes seemed intent beyond caring.
‘And that means? More heretics to kill.’ Marjas grunted, sitting back from the window and checking over his las-carbine, assuring especially that the serrated bayonet was fixed securely.
‘It means one of us should probably stay here and cover it.’ Eugen replied and Kilvora nodded almost imperceptibly. Marjas, through a few choice oaths, made it clear he was not volunteering for the duty.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kilvora cut him off mid-curse, ‘I’m a better shot than you anyhow.’ Marjas smirked but wasn’t about to argue.
‘Is it time yet?’ He queried, clearly impatient.
‘Most likely.’ Eugen was tinkering with the settings on the lasrifle, drawing an arch look from Marjas. He answered it with the press of a final button, setting the weapon’s capacitors to overload, and pulled the auto pistol from his thigh holster. ‘We need a distraction.’ He said simply. The other trooper was about to retort when a single click sounded in each of their com beads.
Something arced through the air and thudded off the hood of one of the half-tracks. Shouts of question and alarm were drown out a split second later when the thrown lasrifle went critical and exploded in a brilliant ball of fire and energy discharge. The blast cooked one of the troopers standing near the vehicle as well as the gunner outright and peppered a few more with shrapnel while the shockwave caused the front end of the track to slew a few feet to the side. The ambush was on and the enemy was dying before they’d even seen who was assaulting them.
Four stories straight to the ground, Eugen landed as if it were nothing. He sprung towards the nearest emplacement, a tripod-mounted autocannon, passing bewildered enemy troopers along the main barricade. They took notice of the intruder just in time to be caught blindside by las fire as Marjas joined the fray behind him. The enemy soldiers in the emplacement had noticed him as well and he took one out with a shot to the neck as he vaulted a slab of rubble. A few more seconds and his boot was on the edge of the sandbag barrier just as the mounted autocannon was coming to bear on him. Eugen sent the gunner reeling with a brutal kick to the jaw and put a pair of shots through the side of his face as he landed. Marjas shouted a warning behind him and Eugen turned in time to see the enemy soldier he’d shot in the neck struggling to aim his weapon one-handed while he clutched the gushing wound in his throat with the other. Eugen whirled aside as the gun fired wildly and brought his knife across the bridge of the cultist’s nose, the keen edge neatly bisecting the man’s skull.
The sound of something heavy chattering sent him to the dirt just as heavy slug rounds from the gun mount of the other track started tearing into the sandbags around him. The cover was bad at this angle with the barricades not designed to protect from rearward assaults. It was all he could do to wedge himself away from the violent explosions of dirt, any one of which could take one of his limbs clean off. A glance of the dirty sky above showed flashes of red streaking from the building nearest him and the gun abruptly fell silent; Kilvora was on point as always.
Eugen holstered his pistol and grabbed for a lasrifle leaning against the sandbags; full cell. He jerked the ammo belt off one of the dead cultists and peered up over the barrier. Marjas was covering behind the nearest half-track and systematically taking down enemies along the roadblock. He could see confusion on the other side of the street which meant, so far, their plan was working well enough. It was then he saw the cultist with a launcher tube taking aim.
‘Scathing blood, Arro, move. Now!’ He shouted over the clatter of weapons and shouldered his rifle just in time to see the white plume of rocket wash streak across the street.
The detonation wasn’t right. He’d fully expected to be knocked on his back as the half-track went up beside him but instead the concussion hit him from behind, and off center. When he saw the exhaust trail pointed skyward he didn’t even need to look to know that the cultist had been aiming for. Bits of stone and wood rained down on the street from a gaping hole four stories up. The shooter had ducked back to reload. He took about for Marjas but saw the news had already registered with his fellow. The spiteful Alukardian bellowed a curse of rage and charged out of cover. An enemy attempting to sneak around the half-track was caught first, taken under the chin by his barbed bayonet and dragged to the ground before having his head blasted free in a spray of blood and scorched bone.
The sound of roaring engines announced the arrival of the rest of their force and Eugen looked to the other side of the barricade to see a pair of wheeled attack vehicles tearing down the street toward them. The LAV’s were little more than 4×4 civilian trucks with some armor plates slapped on but at least one of them mounted a heavy stubber which opened up on the men now streaming from the enemy outpost on the adjacent street corner. Most of the enemy soldiers along the roadblock were dead or soon to be but now almost double that number were advancing across the street towards them. They had plenty of cover but were going to be overrun by sheer weight of numbers at this rate.
Or not.
Eugen tossed his pilfered lasrifle aside and took hold of the grips of the autocannon mount, twisting it to bear on the enemy advance, and mashed the firing stud. Berms of piled rubble provided enough cover to the incoming troops that the heavy weapon would do little but slow them down, at least it would give them some time to regroup and form a plan. The cannon chattered away, spitting shells into the dugout and stitching burning rounds into the enemy lines. That was when he smelled it.
Plasma, the thick odor of extreme heat and singed oil.
A white hot blast streaked from the opposite side of the nearest half-track, melting through a section of barricade before raking across the side of one of the oncoming LAVs. Rubber melted, metal deformed and the vehicle pitched forward into the dirt and rockcrete of the roadway and flipped, sending the gunner flying. The other skid to a halt, its occupants struggling to scatter as another blast of blue-hot fire struck it dead on, withering the vehicle like candlewax before exploding it in a brilliant fireball as the gas tanks touched off.
The autocannon was dry and Eugen sprang for his discarded rifle, bringing it up just in time to blast open the torso of an enemy trooper edging around from the back of the track. He heard it then, the shrill whine of power coils engaging, and threw himself to the side just as another plasma blast tore through the cab of the half-track and incinerated the autocannon emplacement.
He was there, looming around the glowing, melted husk of the track. Something once human now grossly distended to greater proportions; shy of the hulking might of a traitor marine but only just. The man, if it could still be called a man, wore armor bedecked with crude, riveted plates of metal which seemed to be fastened to his inhuman frame directly rather than worn. His face, a mass of scabs and scar tissue, bore lips peeled back in a permanent scowl to expose sharpened teeth stained with decay. A line of rusted bolts were driven in along the crest of his misshapen skull in place of hair. Eugan had already recovered, his lasrifle up and he realized he had already pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He looked down and saw a glaring red malfunction rune winking up at him.
‘Oh bloody throne…’ He cursed and felt an icy chill of impending doom wash over him. Somewhere in its rotten throat, the chaos scum before him was laughing as he took aim.
The whine of power coils…
Then he heard the cadence of the heretic’s laughter hitch and gurgle to nothing; the shadow hanging over him waivered. Eugan looked up and saw a haze of light slithering around the mishapen officer, there was foul, black blood curdling from his rictus grin which now seemed to sag in distress. The haze shifted swiftly and the heretic twitched in time with it, black blood flicking from unseen cuts in thin lashes. When the blur moved away he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, bleeding out swiftly into the dirt from a myriad of precise wounds. Something both utterly lethal and strikingly beautiful unfolded from the very air itself and poised over the fallen man like a predatory animal examining its kill.
‘Such a shame… blood… so tainted.’ The voice, sweet and mellifluous remarked with an acute note of sadness. Eugen jumped slightly when the beautiful creature punched its bare fist into the fallen heretic’s back, it rooted about a moment before dragging free the thing’s cancerous heart. The organ was torn free and inspected before being cast aside with a hiss, ‘So tainted… a waste.’ With a preternatural grace, the lithe female straightened and regarded Eugen with the woeful expression of a child denied its favorite toy.
‘Thank you, Lethyis…’ He finally managed at length, realizing there was still a battle being fought. The officer’s plasma gun lay a few feet away and he moved forward to retrieve it. Hopefully it would serve a bit better than that damned lasrifle had. The woman had turned away, already distracted. She sighed gently, an acknowledgment? And began drifting towards the lines of incoming troops.
Eugen watched her go, the thing which was human and yet… not. A L’sombra, those who had given themselves (willingly or unwillingly) to the madness of Alukard’s curse and survived with their physical humanity intact. There were differences, some subtle others not so. Their limbs were a bit longer, more flexible and all were whip-cord thin. They moved with an impossible grace that, it is alleged, surpasses that even of the alien Eldar. As those of Alukardian blood enjoy longer average lifespans than typical humans, the L’Sombra are said to be all but impervious to the passage of time. For all of this, it is the eyes which are most telling. He shook off the writhing sense of unease, that stare, branded in his mind from the first time he’d lain eyes on her kind and renewed each time since. Death… no, worse than death. Empty, utterly scathing empty.
He dragged himself from the dirt and sprinted across the street join up with the rest of the platoon. Marjas was covering from behind the other half-track now and met him with a fanged grin as he approached.
‘Spared from death by death itself.’ He chuckled, clapping Eugen on the shoulder, ‘Thought that ugly bastard had your number.’
‘He did.’ Eugen grinned mirthlessly, looking about for their sergeant. ‘What’s the damage?’ He grimaced at the twin wreckages of their LAV’s on the roadway. Marjas leaned up to unload a flurry of shots over the hood of the track.
‘Not a clue. The Sarge is over there.’
