"Uh-huh!"
The traitors screamed and died, the flesh on their bones torn apart, and tossed into the air by the disintegration force field.
Azriel drew his weapon, shielding himself while crippling another traitor.
A scarred traitor screamed at him and lunged at him with a bayonet. The Grand Master dodged the attack and delivered a backhand slap to the face, shattering the skull and sending flying teeth into another. The face of a clumsy soldier fumbling with the activation spike of a stun hammer.
The traitor cried out in pain, dropped his weapon, and covered his tattered face.
Azrael took the man's head between his hands and squeezed hard, crushing his skull.
"Coward, repent."
He growled, throwing his twitching body into the fleeing traitors.
Five more muzzle flashes blinked at Azrael from behind the barricade, and as the gunshots of the disoriented traitors rang out, he saw the nearest of them.
The Keeper of Truth leaped over the barricade and landed on a bloody traitor, his ribs breaking under the impact and crunching into his guts.
Azrael kneed the man in the face, pinning the traitor's skull to the deck.
Once on his feet, he walked straight through the barricade, slashed his sword into the charred supply crates, then reversed the motion and eviscerated the traitor hiding behind cover.
Blood and guts spattered his helmet, and his visual sensors adjusted to allow him to see through the flesh.
To his right, a thin traitor turned and ran, Azriel throwing a dagger.
The blade pierced the traitor's back and penetrated his chest, the man leaning forward as the blade struck the floor.
Azrael turned to see Belial slamming his fist into a screaming man's chest, then putting his boot on another man's head, stomping it into dirt.
"Front."
The Dark Angel's progress was smooth. It only took them ten minutes to cross the passage and enter the former core of Attica's hive.
In order to be able to control this area, Azriel divided the team into three parts, one led by him, one led by Belial, and the last led by Sappho.
Now the core of the former hive city has become a huge maze of ruins. The goal of the Dark Angel is also very simple. Although it has undergone huge changes, the basic structure of the governorate has not changed. All roads only lead to three places. .
Governor's Office Building, Astropath's Hall, and Temple of the Machine.
As long as three places are controlled, no matter which direction the enemy comes from, they must meet the dark angels who are waiting. They are equivalent to inserting a knife into the enemy's heart.
All went well at first until Azrael received a message from Belial after taking control of the Governor's Office Building.
"A team is missing?"
Azriel bent down and looked at the corpse of the fallen angel. There was a large hole in the charred breastplate of the fallen Space Marine. The flesh and armor around the wound seemed to merge into one, and black stains rolled out from the wound. , like a net.
"Melta weapons or mixed high explosives."
The Chief Pharmacist spoke into his helmet's data recorder, recording his findings.
"The high penetration indicates a close-range explosion."
A probe then emerges from the apothecary and is inserted into the wound.
At this time, a brother of the Seventh Company, as the detector analyzed the angel's blood, lines of biometrics and biological data scrolled on the pharmacist's helmet-mounted display.
There are also traces of other human flesh on it, fused with the power armor. It is obvious that a traitor gave his life to bury his crime.
"Supreme Master, I have to recover the gene seeds now."
"Of course, brother."
The pharmacist lowered his head.
"Emperor, a loyal servant's duty has come to an end. Please grant him peace."
He had on his breastplate the symbol of the Aquila, which of all the duties the apothecary had to perform was the most important and heaviest.
Only in death does duty end, an axiom that might apply to a soldier of the Imperial Guard or a nun, but not to the son of an angel.
In death, the Space Marine has one thing left to give, and that is that the gene-seed implanted within him must return to the Chapter, ready to be received by the next generation of aspirants.
Only by harvesting the glands can the Angels continue to survive, without the precious gene-seed they will be unable to fight against the enemies of the Emperor.
The apothecary reached out with his extractor and thrust the bladed tube into the slain's neck, and as the end closed around the first gonad, a surge of energy rippled along the length of the blade with a wet hiss, The gland is sucked into the duct through the blade.
A green icon flashed in the corner of the pharmacist's helmet display, indicating that the gland had been safely recovered and frozen for shipment to the gene bank.
He then started his bone drill because the second gland would be harder to reach.
"What's going on, Beria?"
The grilled mouthpiece on Azrael's helmet did little to filter out the annoyance in his voice.
They stood amid the embers of the battlefield, the mutilated corpses of traitors scattered on the floor like the graffiti of a madman.
"A tactical team lost contact while heading to reconnoiter the D12 area. When we found them, there was only one body."
"Where are the other bodies?"
"What?"
"There are ten brothers in a team, and we only found one. Where are the others? They must be somewhere."
"This is strange, Grand Master, but we don't have time."
Sappho turned to the monitor.
"The enemy is advancing from all directions. Their vanguard will be in contact with us within eighteen minutes. We are too deep and there is no friendly cover around us."
"Then we must hurry up, we must find them, we must retrieve their gene seeds and mourn their deaths."
"What if their remains are not here? What if they, like the ashes, have been carried away from here by the violent storm?"
Azrael's tone was non-negotiable.
"Then we will mourn their loss and the loss of their genes, but first we have to check everywhere and we have to be sure."
Ezekiel, the director of the Chapter's think tank, stood next to the corpse for a while, then silently opened a holographic map. After a short sleeve, he said hoarsely:
"Here, only more than six hundred meters away from the Viceroyalty, are the ruins of the cathedral in Attica. I think they should be there."
Azrael watched for a while, then the interrogation priest said:
"A trap."
"If we leave the Viceroyalty, the enemy will choose to fight us here."
Sappho pointed to the hologram of the compound spinning in the air between him and the Librarian.
"I feel like this is a more likely target."
Azrael studied the hologram and acknowledged that the Chaplain was right, that an attack along the wide avenues of the main corridor would be suicidal if the troops were sufficient.
But if you leave this area, the situation will be different.
Could this be a trap?
"I'll take someone to take a look."
Finally, Beria said this firmly.
"If they're there, it's up to me to bring them back, alive or dead."
