William Wood, lord of the 12th Chapter, examined the casualty reports on his tactical interface.
After taking the planetary capital, more than twenty thousand of his Chapter's troops had pursued the defeated army and launched an assault on the Haldalan Foothills.
The battle had lasted more than one standard day, yet they still had not broken through the outer perimeter.
The spearhead pushing into the mountains had also been stopped at the eight-and-a-half-kilometer mark.
More than a hundred and thirty members of the Chapter had fallen. In the past hour alone, the 41st Company attacking position A-38 had lost twenty-seven men.
William examined the reports submitted by the companies and their records of encounters with Alpha warriors, realizing that his principal enemy had changed.
Just as my lord said, Alpha intends to trap us here.
As he considered this, he opened an ultrahigh-frequency communications channel based on Nephilim sonic technology and issued an order to the ships.
The Alpha Legion's concealed outposts had disrupted the conventional communications arrays, reducing the Chapter's communications range.
"Deploy asset one."
The Marionettist had two most important assets: the Farseer Puppet from Craftworld Marg Sisla, and the Hraf Titan he controlled through the Hraf marionette.
As a white deployment-signal rune flashed across his eyepiece, he strode out of the bloodstained governor's residence and looked up at the drop pod streaking across the sky.
Its brilliant light fell like a meteor, crashing into the ground three hundred and two meters away.
The drop pod opened like flower petals, revealing that its cargo was neither personnel nor weapon supplies, but a rectangular cabinet wrapped in crystalline chains.
William hurried over to the cabinet and tapped out a sequence of runes.
Amid spreading cold mist, one wall of the compartment rose to reveal a crystalline statue.
Her legs