"What... what?"
"I said, ram it." Rovi repeated himself. "Priest Alpha fitted our front end with 'new teeth.' It's feeding time."
The Chimera Personnel Carrier at the head of the convoy suddenly accelerated.
The roar of its engine drowned out the buzzing of flies.
The Bio-Armor plates of the Wall of Gluttony seemed to sense the feast approaching.
Purple-red nodules on its surface began to pulse madly.
Several thick metal hooks sprang open like the jaws of a Venus flytrap.
The Walking Dead's dull senses had no time to react to the storm of steel before the tremendous impact smashed them into flying chunks of flesh.
Boom!
A heavy thud rang out.
The Chimera's front end crashed hard into the horde of Walking Dead.
There was no sharp clang of metal striking flesh.
Instead, there came a horrifying sound of chewing.
Rovi had a clear view.
The black pus splattered across the front armor was rapidly absorbed by the bio-metal, like water seeping into a sponge.
Several hooks pierced a bloated Walking Dead blocking the road with pinpoint accuracy, hanging it from the front end like a side of cured meat.
The Walking Dead was still struggling.
But the highly acidic digestive fluid secreted by the armor quickly enveloped it.
In a matter of seconds, the virus-ridden body shriveled up and turned into a pool of black liquid, nourishing the metal patterns on the armor plates and deepening their eerie sheen.
Inside the cabin, several new recruits were seeing something like this for the first time. Their faces turned deathly pale, and one of them couldn't help retching.
"Watch it," Rovi's voice echoed through the comms, cold and clear-headed. "This is how you survive on this planet. Either you eat people, or you get eaten. If you don't want to turn into that pool of black water, keep a firm grip on your guns."
The convoy rolled over the pile of remains, its tracks smeared with sticky biomass, and continued toward the gray horizon.
An hour later, the outline of Granary Four came into view.
It was less a granary than a vast industrial graveyard.
Dozens of spherical storage tanks, each a hundred meters tall, stood on the wasteland.
They should have been painted bright red as a warning of danger.
But now, most of the tanks were covered in gray-green mold.
Some had already ruptured.
Black promethium streamed down their sides and pooled on the ground in toxic lakes.
It was too quiet here.
There was none of the characteristic clamor of Nurgle's creatures—
No buzzing flies.
No howling Walking Dead.
Even the wind whistling through the ruins sounded hollow.
The silence made Rovi uneasy.
He instinctively touched the lead box on his chest. The Amulet Fragment inside was only slightly warm, not scorching hot as it had been when they encountered a large force of daemons.
"All units, halt and spread out into a defensive formation."
Rovi issued the order.
The convoy stopped on a rise five hundred meters from the storage tanks.
The five modified trucks quickly turned around, hiding their vulnerable tanker beds on the inside.
The two Chimeras took up positions on either side, forming the anchors of a crossfire.
"Buck, bring two squads and scout with me. Everyone else, stay here and keep watch. Priest Alpha, monitor the radar."
Rovi jumped out of the vehicle, his boots sinking into the soft humus.
He tightened his trench coat and gripped a Bolt Pistol that Priest Alpha had "blessed."
Dozens of new recruits followed behind him, trembling with fear.
They wore ill-fitting carapace armor, like skinny monkeys stuffed into shells.
Only the Lasguns in their hands offered them even a shred of security.
"Listen up," Rovi said sternly, his gaze sweeping over the rookies. "I don't expect you to hit every shot. That's a veteran's job."
"If you run into the enemy, you only need to do one thing: form a wall of light. If dozens of guns fire together, you can roast the other side even if you're just shooting blindly. Anyone who runs off, I'll stuff into the armor on the front end as fertilizer."
The new recruits swallowed and nodded earnestly.
Taking cover behind abandoned pipes, the group crept toward the nearest storage tank.
The closer they got to the core area, the more oppressive the silence became.
Traces of battle were scattered across the ground.
They had clearly been left by the garrison a few days ago.
A Sentinel Walker corroded until only its skeleton remained.
Burnt sandbags.
And Lasgun power cells scattered everywhere.
Strangely, however, there were hardly any corpses.
Neither the garrison's nor Nurgle's Walking Dead were anywhere to be seen.
"Advisor, look at this." Buck crouched in front of a valve, his voice tense.
Rovi walked over, his expression turning grave.
A head.
It belonged to a Plague Carrier of Nurgle.
These lesser daemons had astonishing vitality.
Even if a Boltgun round blew off half their bodies, the remaining rotting flesh could still attack.
But the head before them was well and truly "dead."
Its cut was impossibly smooth.
As if some kind of monomolecular blade at an incredibly high temperature had sliced through it in an instant.
So little bodily fluid had leaked from the wound that it was barely noticeable.
The cross-section was strangely charred.
This wasn't a wound from a Lasgun; Lasguns left scorched craters.
Nor was it a Boltgun wound; Boltguns blew their targets to pieces.
"Too clean," Buck murmured, fear flashing in his single eye. "Like it was cut with a scalpel."
Rovi stood and looked around.
He found traces like this everywhere.
Several deep claw marks scored the thick adamantium pipes, their cut edges glowing blue-green with metal fatigue.
A huge hole had been neatly sliced through the side armor of a wrecked Leman Russ Battle Tank.
The crew had vanished without a trace, leaving only an empty cockpit.
"Kais." Rovi opened his comm and called softly.
"I'm here, Advisor."
"Scan that unknown signal again."
"The signal source is right beneath your feet, about thirty meters down in the pipe network," the Kais Server reported. "The waveform is clearer than before. It's a biological pulse, with a very 'sharp' frequency."
A sharp biological pulse.
Several entries from the Imperium's Xenos Threat Manual flashed through Rovi's mind.
Not Chaos.
Nurgle was decay and rebirth.
Khorne was fury and bloodshed.
Tzeentch was change.
Slaanesh was the overloading of the senses.
This cold, efficient, stealthy style, the penchant for hunting in dark corners...
Genestealers!
They might also be some kind of Tyranid vanguard strain.
They lurked in the shadows of the ruins, digging and infiltrating bit by bit like patient miners, until they had devoured the entire planet.
Damn it, Rovi cursed inwardly.
This was even more troublesome than running into a nest of Nurgle's Walking Dead.
Nurgle's forces were disgusting, but they were slow and noisy, and heavy weapons could suppress them easily.
But these Genestealers were natural-born assassins, fast enough to be almost impossible to follow with the naked eye.
"Advisor, should we retreat?"
Buck seemed to sense that something was wrong, and gripped his Boltgun nervously.
"Retreat? Where to?" Rovi sneered. "If we go back empty-handed, we're dead in a couple of days anyway."
"Since they haven't attacked us right away, that means there aren't many of them yet. Or they could be busy with something else."
Rovi looked toward the enormous storage tank.
The level gauge showed that there were at least three hundred tons of promethium inside.
"Fortune favors the bold."
Rovi made his decision quickly.
"Buck, have the recruits set up a perimeter around the pumping station. Turn on every floodlight. Leave no blind spots. These things like shadows."
"Alpha, hook up the oil pumps. Forget all those complicated filtration procedures. Pump it straight out! As long as it burns, it'll do! I want all five trucks full within twenty minutes!"
"Understood."
At Rovi's command, the silent ruins instantly grew noisy.
Powerful floodlights pierced the dim fog, illuminating the area around the pumping station like broad daylight.
The recruits stood back to back in a circle, nervously watching the dark mouths of the pipes around them.
Priest Alpha worked at astonishing speed.
Several thick oil pipes were forcibly shoved into the storage tank's outlets.
As the overloaded motors hummed, black liquid gold began flowing in a steady stream into the trucks' tanks.
One minute.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
Every second seemed to stretch on.
Rovi kept his eyes on the pocket watch in his hand, while gripping the Bolt Pistol tightly with the other.
"Advisor, the first truck is full."
"Switch trucks. Move!"
Just as the second truck had connected to the oil pipe, something changed.
Clang!
A sharp metallic impact came from the left side of the perimeter.
A new recruit cried out in terror. "Who's there? Who's over there?"
All the floodlights swung toward the sound at once.
But there was nothing there.
Only a suspended pipe, still swaying slightly.
"Don't panic!" Buck roared. "Hold formation!"
"Chik."
A shadow dropped from above without warning.
It was so fast, like a flash of purple lightning.
One of the recruits on the perimeter didn't even have time to scream before the shadow pounced on him and knocked him to the ground.
Then came the sound of bones cracking.
The recruit's head exploded like a rotten watermelon, crushed in an instant by an arm with four sharp claws.
Blood sprayed across the face of the soldier beside him.
"Aaah! A monster!"
Fear spread like wildfire.
The recruits instinctively pulled their triggers.
"Zzzzt, zzzzt, zzzzt."
Dozens of red laser beams danced wildly through the darkness. Most hit empty ground; only a few grazed the monster.
In the flickering laser light, Rovi got a clear look at the creature.
An upright torso, shaped like a human's.
Its skin was a sickly pale purple, covered in a shell-like armor.
Its back was hunched, and it had four arms.
The upper pair ended in sharp, scythe-like claws.
The lower pair had hands like a human's, and were dragging the headless corpse into the shadows.
The creature had no nose. Its face bore only a pair of emotionless black compound eyes and a mouth full of sharp teeth.
A Purestrain Genestealer!
Before you continue