Day thirty.
The outer walls of Vienna Hive City were already unrecognizable.
The once towering, sheer facades of alloy and concrete were now riddled with enormous breaches, their edges torn outward in radiating patterns—the handiwork of direct hits from heavy artillery and melta bombs.
Countless shell craters, scorch marks, and blackened blast scars covered the walls like a malignant skin disease.
At the foot of the walls, corpses and wrecked equipment had piled up almost level with the lower firing platforms, taking on a horrifying dark brown hue under oxidation and bloodstains.
The air was perpetually thick with the stench of death, a foul mixture of rot, gunsmoke, ozone, and molten metal.
The defenders' positions had been compressed to the breaking point, forcing them back into the walls' central sections and the few enormous passageways connecting them to the hive city proper.
Their numbers had dwindled, ammunition was scarce, and days of bloody attrition had left even the toughest Colchis Warrior visibly exhausted, though their eyes remained sharp as tempered blades.
The traitors' attacks had noticeably intensified over the past few days, as though they had scented the last breath of strength leaving their prey.
Saladin's Legion warriors began appearing on the assault's front lines more frequently. Their sand-yellow power armour stood out amid the ruins, and every appearance brought violent upheaval to the defensive lines and devastating casualties.
Hope was like the faint starlight behind the pollution clouds that hung over the hive city year-round, so dim it was almost invisible.
A heavy weight pressed on everyone's heart—would reinforcements still come?
Or had they already been forgotten here in the heart of the Imperium, doomed to perish in the same catastrophic explosion as this steel tomb?
Then everything changed.
The first to notice anything amiss was the traitors' Combined