Chelast and his two Word Bearers comrades raced through the Labyrinth-like corridors, forcing their way forward.
Their heavy powered boots hammered the metal floor with thunderous echoes, painfully loud within the space station that had already become hell incarnate.
They no longer cared about stealth. Their only thought was to break through the encirclement and regroup with Lucius's main force.
More of those walking corpses kept pouring out ahead. They wore ragged uniforms, their eyes vacant, their movements stiff yet unnaturally relentless, surging forward like a tide of puppets controlled by invisible strings.
Chelast had no time to aim precisely. Like a raging bull, he fired short bursts from his Bolter at hip level to clear a path, but more often relied on the brute strength his Power Armour gave him to smash anything in his way aside—or apart!
Bang! Crack!
He rammed his shoulder plate into the chest of a puppet dressed in a mechanic's uniform. Its torso instantly shattered like rotten wood, spilling viscous, dark green "blood" and tissue resembling plant fibers onto his dark Gray Armor, where they quickly hardened into revolting scabs.
He never slowed, nor did he even bother wiping the filth from his faceplate.
Another of his comrades swung his Chainsword wildly, carving a bloody path strewn with severed limbs through the dense enemy ranks.
"Up ahead! Turn right!" Battle-Brother Dres, who was handling navigation, fired his Bolt Pistol at enemies crawling out of pipes along their flank while shouting over the noisy vox channel.
His mechanical arm kept swiping across his Dataslate as he tried to establish their position amid the confused signals.
"The corridor on the right! According to the old schematics, it should take us around this damned storage area and straight into the main power conduit passage! That should be