Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Shell after shell detonated against the Silver Rathalos's throat, wringing muffled, agonized shrieks from the creature. The rounds buried themselves in flesh and exploded from the inside, shredding the neck cavity into ruin. Some shells didn't even detonate — they punched clean through the back of his neck and kept going.

The Hunter Dreadnought saw this and locked the trigger down harder, fully committed to sawing the Silver Rathalos's head clean off with sheer volume of fire.

But raw survival instinct drove the Silver Rathalos to fight back. He forced his jaws shut and bit down on the gun barrel shoved into his mouth, snapping it off.

The Dreadnought wound up to give him another thundering backhand — but the Silver Rathalos threw his head back and denied him the opening.

That, however, was not the end of the Silver Rathalos's nightmare. In the moment he reared his head back to avoid the Dreadnought, he found that Lin had already ridden his jet engine up into the air directly above him — and the Plasma Pistol charging in Lin's hand blazed like a death-star.

Ever since recognizing the World Soul's presence, Lin had deliberately avoided deploying high-yield weapons like the Plasma Pistol — not wanting to openly provoke a direct confrontation. He had theorized, based on how long the Astartes had managed to survive on this planet, that the World Soul might tolerate firearms as long as they weren't excessively destructive. That theory had just been comprehensively disproven by a World Soul that was now calling in backup from every direction.

If the other side was no longer holding back, neither was Lin.

The outside interference had pushed the overall situation to the edge of collapse — but Lin had now played every card he held. Take down the Silver Rathalos fast enough, and every other problem would unravel on its own.

So what was the World Soul planning now? What trick did it still have left? In a situation that had shifted this violently in under a minute, what could a planet's self-awareness actually do?

Lin asked himself those questions — and kept moving without missing a beat. He raised his arm, trained the barrel on the spot the Dreadnought had already savaged, and released the trigger.

A brilliant azure flash erupted from the muzzle. That plasma-stained death-star blazed directly above the Silver Rathalos's skull.

The searing charged plasma punched through the Silver Rathalos's fangs and drove down into the throat cavity — already torn into swiss cheese by the grenade barrage. The Silver Rathalos let out a howl of agony that produced no sound at all. All he could do was wrench his neck skyward and throw his wings wide, thrashing like a man possessed, trying to shake off the pain through sheer violent motion.

Lin descended to the ground and set down the Plasma Pistol — it was close to overloading — and watched the Silver Rathalos with cold, measured eyes. He waited quietly for the convulsing to run its course.

He calculated it out: the moment the Silver Rathalos's strength finally gave and it collapsed onto the paralysis trap below — that would be the moment of its true death.

In the end, there didn't seem to be anything all that special about it. The World Soul had evolved a Rathalos into a Silver Rathalos and called in outside reinforcements. But Lin's side was nothing like the eight-man operation that had taken down the Tigrex.

If this not-yet-fully-evolved Silver Rathalos had the combat power of a small Titan, then Admir's fully-armed spearhead and the rest of Lin's force amounted to a more agile anti-Titan platform — something like the Emperor's Spiteblade. Committing every available fighter and still having special weapons in reserve, their victory here was only natural.

And above all, the Hunter Dreadnought — a veteran who had seized the moment the Silver Rathalos opened his jaws and nearly blasted the throat clean through — had made victory arrive even more easily than Lin had antici—

Lin moved to complete that thought. The battlefield did not cooperate.

The Silver Rathalos's thrashing had stopped. But it had not fallen.

Lin noticed immediately that something was wrong.

He watched carefully. The Silver Rathalos had stopped fighting entirely — and the neck wound that had been blasted through was, impossibly, slowly closing. Worse: deep inside the chest cavity, a blinding white-hot radiance had begun to build.

That was the tell. It was about to breathe.

But why? How?

No matter how strong the Silver Rathalos's regeneration, the heavy explosive shells and plasma that had been fired directly into its throat were real. That damage was real.

The World Soul. It had to be the World Soul. Damn the World Soul.

Lin had poor aerial maneuverability and wasted no time dropping back to the ground. On the ground, the Hunter Dreadnought and Admir had both registered that something had gone badly wrong.

"Last stand surge?" Admir called out.

"More like it's been powered up — pull back now!" Lin shouted without looking back. "Move it, double-time!"

The two fighters and the war machine broke for the edge of the battlefield. The other Astartes who had been closing in received the same order and scattered. But this Silver Rathalos was wilder than anything they had faced before — more brutal, more savage, more unstoppable.

When the fury building in his chest reached its absolute limit, the head that had been thrown high suddenly snapped downward — and the Silver Rathalos vomited a vast torrent of blue-white fire crackling with plasma arcs directly onto the three figures below.

The fire-tide surged and churned, chasing them, greedily consuming every trace of life in its path. Lin and Admir ran flat-out and barely cleared the edge of the fan-shaped kill zone. The Hunter Dreadnought was not so fortunate. Far less mobile than a standard powered suit, he was overtaken — and the white-hot flames melted his locomotion assembly down to the ground.

When the fire-tide died, Lin and Admir picked their way back across scorched, smoldering earth to reach the Dreadnought's side. Both legs had been melted and re-solidified into the ground, fusing him to the spot like a monument.

His upper body was undamaged. It didn't matter. In that condition, immobility and death were the same thing.

"Think of something, Lin! We are not letting the Hunter die here!" Admir bellowed. The Silver Rathalos — its fighting strength restored — was bearing down on them, and they had almost nothing left to stop it.

"That plasma round I fired into it didn't wound it," Lin said, running his hands over the Dreadnought's chassis. "It expelled the plasma back out as part of the breath. The plasma supercharged the flame, the supercharged flame melted the Dreadnought's locomotion assembly."

"I can't repair the locomotion, but I can unlock the Dreadnought's piloting interface and eject the sarcophagus separately — but we're running out of time…"

"Then forget about me and do what needs doing!" The Dreadnought's voice rang out like a struck bell. "Remember — you are the true Hunter now!"

The true Hunter. What needs doing.

Admir set his jaw. He took a few steps back and called out: "Deputy Aibo — assist Chaplain Lin! Everyone else — on me!"

He raised the dragon sword Red Leaf high and sprinted to the side. The Silver Rathalos's hatred for Admir vastly outweighed any interest in an immobilized iron coffin — it gave chase without hesitation. Deputy Aibo, banner in hand, moved to Lin's side to assist in freeing the Dreadnought.

"Why has it come to this?" the Hunter Dreadnought said. "That dragon was nearly dead just moments ago. This defies reason!"

"No," Lin said. "It is entirely reasonable."

Anywhere else, it would have been unreasonable.

But this was the Warhammer universe. Here, even numerology qualified as a science.

Lin worked the sarcophagus release as he turned it over in his mind. "We were deceived by the World Soul. Those monsters that crashed the fight from outside were all feints — misdirection. The real killing blow was always this Silver Rathalos. The creature already possessed extraordinary self-regeneration — it burns its own throat every time it breathes fire. The damage we dealt that nearly killed it didn't destroy it. Instead, with the World Soul's intervention, that brush with death became the crucible for a metamorphosis."

Providing raw energy alone could never trigger a true evolution in a dragon. Only a brush with death could. And by racing to kill the Silver Rathalos as fast as possible, Lin's side had played the role of crisis-provider perfectly.

"You sound very calm," Deputy Aibo said, working alongside him. "Was this outcome within your predictions?"

Lin shook his head as the sarcophagus came free. "Being unclam wouldn't accomplish anything. Deputy Aibo — take the Dreadnought's sarcophagus clear of the battlefield with the Felynes. I need to assess the Silver Rathalos's current state."

Deputy Aibo and a squad of Felynes who had rushed to assist hauled the sarcophagus away. Lin turned his full attention to the Silver Rathalos.

He noticed immediately that the Silver Rathalos's chest was now continuously suffused with a blazing white radiance, like rivers of molten metal flowing beneath the scales. The Silver Rathalos had clearly entered a sustained state of heightened fury — what hunters called the Hellfire State — from the moment of the transformation.

For a Silver Rathalos in ordinary conditions, this state could only be maintained briefly, and only during the most intense phase of combat, granting a dramatic increase in flame temperature and agility. But the Silver Rathalos before him had been locked in this state continuously — which flatly contradicted the principle of "brief maintenance."

Not only was it showing no signs of exhaustion — it was growing more ferocious with every exchange. The flames it breathed no longer simply erupted and dissipated. They lingered on its body, weaving through every movement, flowing with its strikes and turns as though the Silver Rathalos were conducting them — a maestro commanding fire.

To command fire was to command a natural force.

The power to bend the natural world to one's will.

In the Warhammer universe, that kind of power — the kind that twisted physical reality — had a name.

Psionics.

Lin understood in an instant.

An Elder Dragon.

This Silver Rathalos — now wielding psionic power — was undergoing a fundamental transformation of its very life-essence. It was crossing the threshold into the Elder Dragons.

In the world of Monster Hunter, Elder Dragons were the collective name for creatures possessing unparalleled vitality, lifespan, and a vast diversity of abilities — beings that stood apart from all other life. The Hunter's Guild, built by humanity, had repeatedly stressed one truth: the very existence of an Elder Dragon is an exception to the rules.

The ecology and physical form of every Elder Dragon defied biological classification. But they shared one common trait: power that matched natural disasters. Some were not merely disaster-level — some were disaster itself. Some were nature itself.

And that was the dividing line. The ability to command a natural force was the defining threshold between Elder Dragon and everything else. Certain creatures possessed combat power that rivaled Elder Dragons — but without mastery of a natural force, they could never cross that threshold and become one.

Throughout all of recorded history, no one had ever known how an Elder Dragon achieved that mastery — how a creature came to transcend the food chain entirely. And yet here, now, Lin was witnessing it with his own eyes: a Rathalos that had seized psionic power, crossing the threshold into the Elder Dragons in real time.

But the price of knowing the truth was always steep. If he couldn't find an answer, everyone present would become the sacrifice offered on the altar of this Silver Rathalos's ascension.

The heightened fury state had made the Silver Rathalos indifferent to the small-caliber ranged fire harassing it from the perimeter. Admir's close-range squad was still holding — barely. The Silver Rathalos's assaults were growing more relentless with each passing moment, and the squad was beginning to show the strain. When a tail-sweep came out of nowhere as the Silver Rathalos feigned a bite — catching one Astartes who couldn't dodge in time and launching him into the air — the scales tipped decisively.

Once the line began to break, it could not be stopped.

The Astartes were warriors who fought to the last breath — but every soldier that fell meant one less fighter tying up the Silver Rathalos's attention, which meant more of its fury concentrated on the survivors. Bite attacks, Dragon Rushes, climbing to low altitude to carpet the ground with explosive fireballs and cut off escape routes, then diving with claw strikes on Astartes with nowhere to run…

The Felynes continued to pull endangered Astartes from the brink, but the number of fighters still capable of combat was plummeting. And at precisely this moment, a messenger arrived from Sergeant Arlo:

"A third dragon-kind has joined the fighting on the outer perimeter! Sergeant Arlo's forces are almost out of time!"

The Silver Rathalos — a threat they could not defeat — pressing from within. Three dragon-kind closing in from without. Was this truly the end?

Lin swept his gaze across the Astartes the Felynes had pulled to safety. Those who weren't grievously wounded couldn't simply withdraw — if they chose to abandon the hunt now, they would inevitably be abandoned in turn.

Lin did not accept that outcome.

He still had one last card to play. A card that didn't quite feel like a card at all.

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