Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin was no stranger to Rustseekers. Forge World Huangquan VIII had a particular fondness for these biologically-augmented soldiers who could operate with such lethal stealth.

What surprised him was that a minor Forge World like Cath Maximus possessed a specialist unit of this caliber.

The Mechanicus military was typically composed of three branches: the Omnissiah's Household Guard, the Frateris Militia, and the Titan Congregation.

The Household Guard functioned much like a religious crusading army — forces assembled by individual Forge Worlds through their own influence, drawn from those who professed faith in the Omnissiah. Certain Knight Houses bound in fealty to a Forge World fell within this category.

The Titan Congregation was a transcendent power that commanded the god-machines themselves. A single Titan Congregation, fielding even a Reaver-class Titan, could tip the balance of an entire campaign on a secondary front.

The Frateris Militia, by contrast, was the standing armed force of any Forge World — composed of semi-mechanically augmented soldiers. Unlike the Household Guard and Titan Congregation, which smaller Forge Worlds might lack entirely, every Forge World without exception maintained a Frateris Militia. Even so, within that shared organizational framework, there existed a clear hierarchy of prestige and capability.

The Rustseekers, belonging to the Skitarii Sicarian branch, were a perfect illustration of the gulf between ordinary Frateris Militia and their elite counterparts.

Unlike the semi-augmented Rangers or Vanguard, a Rustseeker was rebuilt so thoroughly that almost nothing remained save a brain — a process that, in principle, edged dangerously close to the now-forbidden Mechanicus mind-slave legions. Though they still occupied a place in the Frateris Militia's order of battle, their singular nature had earned them the Sicarian designation.

All Frateris Militia belonging to the Sicarian combat series were warriors rebuilt down to nothing but a skull — fanatics who had offered up their flesh to the Omnissiah. And now, Sonic Blades raised, they were about to demonstrate the terrible power that devotion had earned them.

"Kurande, pull back!" Lin's voice cracked like a whip. "Don't let them touch you — and if they do, never take a second blow on the same spot!"

Even the Imperial Fists knew little about these rarely-seen shock troops of the Mechanicus. Kurande, expecting nothing more than a standard reinforcement like the Rangers, had already led his squad forward in an attempt to suppress the Rustseekers before they could fully enter the field.

But those iron-grey shapes were already out of the drop-pods and dissolving into the drifting smoke. Cloaked in Mechanicus crimson, they became red phantoms drifting through the haze. The abundant power fed by miniaturized reactors on their backs and the inhuman agility granted by their ball-socket joints brought them to the Imperial Fists warriors in the blink of an eye.

Warned by Lin, Kurande had already sensed something was wrong — and the speed the Rustseekers now displayed, faster even than an Astartes, shocked him to the core.

"Form a line!" Kurande drove the approaching Rustseekers back with bursts from his bolt rifle. "Alternate cover — fall back!"

The Imperial Fists moved to consolidate quickly, but the Rustseekers' uncanny agility was enough to isolate one warrior who had fallen out of formation. A Sonic Blade slashed toward the Imperial Fists warrior's chestplate in a blinding strike, and he had no choice but to bring his chainsword across his chest to block.

The chainsword turned the first blow with ease. The attacking Rustseeker, finding its strike had not connected cleanly, immediately disengaged — passing the offensive off to a second Rustseeker without pause.

Facing a fresh opponent, the Imperial Fists warrior instinctively repeated the same parry. But his chainsword shattered on contact with this second strike. The Sonic Blade punched clean through his chestplate and sank into his chest.

The red phantom drew the blade free, pulling a ribbon of crimson blood from the Astartes's chest. Watching another of his dwindling brothers fall, Kurande's eyes blazed with fury.

"What happened?! I thought all we had to do was never tank a second hit to the same spot!"

"They share a data-link between themselves," Lin said, his tone clipped and certain. "The moment a blade connects with any part of a target, every Rustseeker in the network instantly receives the analyzed resonance data for that location. That means any one of them can deliver the follow-up strike — it doesn't matter which Rustseeker swings next."

Lin assessed the situation in an instant and knew these were not opponents the current Imperial Fists could handle. "Fall back, Kurande. I'm taking over here."

Nearby, the Felynes surged forward with ferocious purpose. Carrying their stretchers, they raised psionic shields and ran through the hail of fire to reach the fallen Imperial Fists warrior. They hoisted him onto the stretcher. The Rustseekers, intent on finishing the Astartes, had no intention of letting a pack of cats carry him away right before their eyes — but as their Sonic Blades swept down, Lin's Solar-Powered Warblade intercepted them mid-stroke.

The warblade caught a Rustseeker's blade and locked it in place. Lin brought the axe through in a single arc, splitting the immobilized Rustseeker cleanly in two.

He ripped a data-cable from the Rustseeker's body and jacked it directly into himself. Hijacking the Rustseekers' local network, a torrent of dense, chaotic data erupted from him — an avalanche of junk code that flooded and disrupted the data-transmissions flowing between the Rustseekers.

Using the window of interference he had created, he swept his warblade through several more Rustseekers, then turned and spoke quietly to Kurande.

"Retreat, Kurande — fall back to the foot of the Titan and attack the infantry guard protecting it. Make it look like we're trying to seize the Titan!"

Kurande nodded and withdrew toward the Titan alongside the Felynes bearing the stretcher. Sergeant Arlo led the Second Legion's warriors up to fill the gap, forming a shield wall around Lin with their Monster Hunter weapons — an unbreakable defensive line.

From his distant vantage point, the Deputy Forge Director watched the battle with a furrowed brow. Something had shifted — he could feel it.

A group of Imperial Fists couldn't break through, so they simply swapped in a different group of Imperial Fists and that would somehow fix things? That was absurd.

The weapons these newcomers carried certainly looked strange. But to the Deputy Forge Director's trained eye, their destructive potential appeared to fall short of even an ordinary Power Sword. What possible point was there in wielding such weapons against Rustseekers?

Even granting that the Sage had disrupted the Rustseekers' data-link...

He ran the combat probability through his logic-core, calculating the odds from every angle — and no matter how he modeled it, he could not find a scenario where the Rustseekers lost. But as those strange warriors began engaging the Rustseekers in close quarters, the Deputy Forge Director realized with a creeping horror that his models were catastrophically wrong.

He watched a warrior wielding a slender, elegant blade face a Sonic Blade's cleaving arc with perfect composure — stepping back half a pace in an eerie, flowing motion, blade and body moving as one, then immediately pressing forward with a single slash that cut a Rustseeker cleanly in half. Even the blade's edge pulsed with a strange, bloody red luminance.

He watched a warrior carrying a shield and longsword stand utterly immovable against a Rustseeker's assault — blow after blow raining down on that shield, and not a single crack.

Then that same warrior folded his sword into his shield, morphing the two into a single axe. Not a trace of a Disintegration Field anywhere on the weapon — yet when it fell, it carried momentum so devastating that it tore several Rustseekers to pieces.

There was even a warrior with a one-handed sword and buckler who had been surrounded by several Rustseekers at once — his offense nowhere near as overwhelming as the first warrior's, his defense nowhere near as impenetrable as the second's. And yet, somehow, he was rolling and weaving through the encirclement with effortless ease, still finding the leisure to hurl grenades and other items to assist his comrades. His reactions were so swift that even the Rustseekers — who moved faster than Astartes — could not lay a blade on him.

Twin blades, greatswords, weapon after weapon he had never seen before — every time one of these strange-armed Astartes unveiled a new technique, the probability of the Rustseekers winning a straight fight plummeted another cliff-edge. Every swing they made was another toll of the funeral bell for the Rustseekers' defeat.

Watching a spectacle that had blown past every prediction he had made, the Deputy Forge Director nearly drove his own eyes out of his skull. He stared in disbelief, barely breathing the words:

"What in the Omnissiah's name are these things?"

Those weapons — primitive in shape, terrifying in effect — unsettled him more the longer he looked.

Especially the one that could morph into a Switch Axe configuration. He had watched Sonic Blades land over a dozen blows on it without a single sign of molecular breakdown.

That kind of resilience usually appeared on Terminator armor. Sonic Blades required time to locate the resonant frequency of a material — and the more complex the material, the longer that process took. An alloy as layered and elaborate as Terminator plate, blending multiple grades of high-tensile metal, typically needed five or six strikes before the resonance effect took hold.

But if even Terminator armor only needed five or six hits — then what in the universe was that Switch Axe that had taken over a dozen blows without any sign of structural collapse? What inconceivably complex materials had gone into forging a weapon like that, with no Disintegration Field at all, to achieve this kind of result?!

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