Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

"Got it, stop moving."

The deep crater dented into the powered suit told Lin everything he needed to know — this Astartes had taken a Deviljho body-slam square to the chest.

Lin worked with practiced efficiency, stripping the powered suit from the man, then cutting him open without anesthetic to manually shift the organs that had been jarred out of position by the impact. The immediate danger to his life was dealt with, but the raw destructive force of that body-slam still left Lin quietly impressed.

Hard to believe that in the five-hundredth year of the 32nd Millennium, Chinese martial arts were still absolutely undefeated.

Lin had the Felynes carry the treated casualty well away from the battlefield, then turned his full attention back to the fight against the Silver Rathalos.

The hunt had been planned meticulously. The World Soul pulling in outside reinforcements mid-fight — just as it had done during the Tigrex encounter — was already factored into Lin's calculations; he had been burned once, and he didn't intend to be burned again.

Beyond the thirty-odd hunters engaged with the Silver Rathalos, every remaining fighter had been assigned to Sergeant Arlo before the operation began, standing guard outside the perimeter. They had no heavy equipment to speak of, but Lin had run the numbers: sheer bodies and attrition should keep them occupied long enough for the Silver Rathalos to go down.

No matter what — the Silver Rathalos was the axis around which everything turned. Nothing outside that fight could be allowed to interfere.

With that thought fixed firmly in mind, he returned to directing the hunt. With its wings partially shredded, the Silver Rathalos was reduced to a rhythm of low hover, drop, and fight from the ground — a pattern Admir and the others had grown comfortable enough with to engage almost at their leisure.

The fighters kept to their own rhythm: scatter when it went airborne, swarm when it landed. Wave after wave of harassment was taking its toll. The Silver Rathalos was visibly fading — the surface wounds were piling up, its hang time in the air was shrinking with each cycle, and the fire it breathed came out noticeably weaker than before.

But Lin swept his gaze across the clearing and spotted a problem brewing.

Every fireball the Rathalos had spat had left scorched craters in the ground, and those dead zones were steadily eating into the space the Astartes had to maneuver. If they didn't relocate soon, the fighters would eventually be boxed in with nowhere to dodge — and the Silver Rathalos would start picking them off one by one, like dominoes falling.

Lin rubbed his chin. He was already thinking about luring the Silver Rathalos to a fresh arena and laying down a paralysis trap — when the Felynes came trundling up with another cart, depositing an Astartes Lin barely recognized at his feet.

"Another monster," the man wheezed.

The Astartes was barely breathing. His body bore the unmistakable tire-track imprint of a hit-and-run monster attack, and he'd been punched through in multiple places by something sharp enough to leave gaping craters of blood. The drag marks in the dirt made it obvious the Felynes had worked considerably hard just to dig him out of the ground.

"Covered all over in bone-like spines sticking out of the scales — and it could curl itself into a ball and just... roll around..."

"Did you try Dung Pods to drive it off?" Lin asked.

"We tried. The monster wasn't interested in leaving."

Lin wanted to swear. He held it in.

He'd grudgingly accepted the Deviljho and the Bazelgeuse crashing the party without so much as a boombox — those at least had some loose logic to them, as self-appointed monsters-of-world-order. But a Uragaan rolling in from the volcanic belt? What was that about? At what point did calling in backup require overriding the laws of nature? What kind of "natural avatar" was the World Soul exactly, some kind of cosmic joke?

"You'll be fine. Rest easy."

Lin patched the man up as best he could and waved the Felynes over to carry him off.

He turned back to check on the Silver Rathalos. Admir was still locked in the same cycle — the creature hovering, landing, and Admir punishing it on the ground. Exploiting the numerical advantage to keep whittling it down was undeniably the safest play, but the constant outside interference had made that approach untenable.

Deviljho first, now a Uragaan — what came next? Lin had no idea. But dragging this out was not an option.

Even if it cost something, he needed to end this fast.

Fortunately, the fighters currently on the field were not Lin's last card. That card still sat in reserve — and the time had come to play it, and put this whole fight to bed once and for all.

While the Silver Rathalos was still grounded, Lin moved quickly with the Felynes to lay a concealed paralysis trap. Then he called out to Admir:

"Admir — fall back toward me! Lead it this way!"

Admir didn't hesitate. He slung the tachi across his back and sprinted flat-out toward Lin's position. The Silver Rathalos, though deeply wary of these undersized, frustratingly agile, impeccably coordinated tin-cans, watched Admir disengage.

Reason told the Silver Rathalos to use this moment of disengagement to withdraw and reset. But then his eyes fell on the blade on Admir's back — the dragon longsword Red Leaf — and the madness behind his eyes returned, raw and absolute.

That was his mate. His wife. He still remembered finding her — the warmth of that moment, like being held again in his mother's arms...

This insult would be answered. He was a dragon. It had to be answered.

His face twisted into something vicious. He didn't even bother taking to the air. Burning with the energy of a creature whose mother had just been slaughtered, he dropped low into a charge — and launched a full Dragon Rush, a technique he had never once used in this entire fight.

It wasn't quite the raw speed of a Tigrex's charge, but a twenty-meter-long creature hurtling forward at full tilt was a sight that robbed the breath regardless.

With Lin's warning in his ear, the sprinting Admir made a deliberate leap over the trigger mechanism of the paralysis trap. The Silver Rathalos was thundering along just behind him — a few more meters and it would be caught.

But something in Admir's unnatural jump seemed to catch the Silver Rathalos's attention. He arrested his charge in the last possible instant before the trap would have triggered — then lunged his head forward and snapped at Admir in a massive forward bite.

Admir was still mid-air from the jump, completely unable to adjust his position. He was about to be bitten clean out of the sky.

But the Hunter Dreadnought, who had been lying in wait deep in the jungle this entire time, seized the moment and burst into the open.

"Alien!" His roar cracked like thunder. "Face me!"

Nearly five meters tall and charging at full stride, the Dreadnought hit the field with an impact force that matched the Dragon Rush blow for blow. His fully-wound Power Fist came down like a falling star and smashed directly into the Silver Rathalos's skull mid-bite — a single blow that left the creature's jaw twisted sideways and its eyes crossed.

The Silver Rathalos shook its head, dazed, trying to understand what had just happened. It growled a warning and turned its head to the side — and what greeted the freshly-turned head was the Dreadnought's other arm: a heavy twin-barreled grenade launcher, already leveled at point-blank range.

"I am the Alien's enemy! I am the fury of Mankind!"

Heavy explosive shells screamed into the Silver Rathalos's exposed throat cavity. Yes, under the World Soul's protection they had developed a remarkable resistance to conventional firearms — but that protection emphatically did not extend to having a grenade launcher shoved into one's mouth and fired repeatedly at point-blank range.

The Dreadnought had no patience for the Silver Rathalos's roaring and posturing. The moment the Silver Rathalos opened its jaws to bellow, the Dreadnought rammed the barrel straight down its throat — deep-throating the creature with a gun barrel as thick as a man's torso — and the oversized shells poured out from the muzzle, detonating with savage fury inside the Silver Rathalos's most unarmored, most unprotected flesh.

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