Do You Have the Resolve to Dedicate Yourself After Death?

949.M30.

Segmentum Obscurus, Onswold.

Sasebo Tezuka, adjutant of the 10th Battalion's 36th Company, set foot on the surface of the Eternal Night World with three squads.

The dead star cast not a single ray of light upon this planet.

Tresoldi looked around at the enormous black boulders everywhere.

"What a desolate world. It's hard to imagine there could be life here."

"Report from the Auger Matrix Master: scans have found no life signs, but Father told us this world has millions of Ratlings," Sasebo Tezuka warned.

"Have the Ratlings here learned to turn invisible?" Ordonez hugged his Bedrock-pattern Bolter tight. "Those abhumans may be small, but with millions of them, there's no way they'd leave no trace at all."

Sasebo Tezuka was just about to speak when a series of whooshing sounds suddenly rang beside his ears.

"Enemy attack!"

Beams of light hammered down from every direction onto the Shadow of Order warriors' Mark III Power Armor, sending wisps of black smoke curling from their black plate.

The smooth armor plates were scorched pitch-black.

Sasebo Tezuka turned toward the hillside. Inside his eyepiece, the Divination Box raised a haze of blurry red Runes, as if they had grown indistinct in the darkness.

He shouted, "Vision Assist!"

The Shadow of Order warriors could not rely on the Divination Box to catch the enemy as they had in the past. They turned sideways and fired, steadily pouring out a barrage.

They raised their bolters, using enhanced visual assistance to shoot like the Solar Auxilia.

Boom, boom, boom...

A dense barrage shot toward the hillside, roaring as it blasted the vague, short silhouettes to pieces.

The Ratlings of Onswold did not scream in terror like their kin on other worlds. They crouched silently and changed their ammunition in silence.

A Ratling whose whites