Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Pavonis's mechanical eyes flickered with anxious light, while Lin surveyed the battlefield at his leisure, as if the raging warfare before him had nothing to do with him at all.

"Magos Lin! The daemon horde has broken through the outskirts' defense line, and the Skitarii are falling back step by step! The Fabricator General ordered you to sortie and reinforce the front line three days ago. Yet you've been sitting here doing nothing!"

Facing Pavonis's fury, Lin merely waved a hand. "The battlefield situation changes by the minute. I need more data to assess it properly."

Pavonis choked on his anger, but the situation was entirely beyond his control. As one of the Fabricator General's attack dogs, a note of despair crept into his voice.

"What exactly are you waiting for? Are you going to just watch the hive city fall?"

The Fabricator General had offered void shields as payment, and if the daemons took the hive city, Lin would gain nothing at all. Pavonis's logic circuits simply couldn't process Lin's behavior.

He had even begun to fear this inscrutable Magos.

"Since the Fabricator General told me to collect the payment myself, when I go collect it is my decision."

Lin paid no mind to the Fabricator General's urging. With a grand scheme already forming, he continued assessing the battlefield. "I need an opportunity..."

An opportunity where both the Fabricator General and the daemons wore each other down—one that would let him slip through the gap.

The ghoul horde was still hammering at the outer defenses of the hive city. But unlike the earlier clashes of expendable troops, days of slaughter had finally brought both sides' main forces into direct collision.

Beyond the Chaos Knights that had already pushed into the outskirts, Lin could see Skarbrand himself locked in combat on the outer line against Warhound-class Titans specially refitted with melee weapons.

One Warhound-class Titan provided suppressive ranged fire, while a second, specialized Wolf-pattern Warhound clashed a pair of Fallen Angel-pattern power claws against the Sadistic Terror Greater Daemon's twin great axes—sparks flew in a display of terrifying violence.

Mars knew that fighting the Sadistic Terror Greater Daemon required melee combat—but knowing how to fight in melee didn't guarantee victory.

Skarbrand seemed to be gradually gaining the upper hand over both Warhound-class Titans, while the Warlord-class Titans, tied up clearing out Bloodletters and ghouls, had no spare capacity to intervene.

Even at full strength, all they could manage was to hold the line just short of collapse against the daemons' reckless assault. But their desperate effort gave Lin—who had kept his own forces lying in wait on the flank—the opening he had been waiting for.

"Their attention is entirely on each other—it's opened a breach that lets us cross the perimeter and push into the outskirts. Kuber, get everyone ready. We need to punch into the outskirts as fast as possible."

Kuber acknowledged the order. Thanks to Evil Sun's efforts, over five hundred mass-produced Hellhound war-vehicles would serve as the vanguard of this raid, while fifty Tiantu-class Titans formed the backbone of the operation.

The remaining Exemplary Fists would ride in the transport vehicles captured earlier.

Lin appointed the veteran Thorne as joint commander of both the Exemplary Fists and the Deathless. They would follow behind the main force, and once the Deathless had been delivered to the outskirts of the hive city, they would swiftly establish a defensive line.

"Into the hive city?" Pavonis asked, startled. "Shouldn't this be a flanking strike to relieve pressure on the defense line?"

"Send a force of a few tens of thousands to strike the flank of an army millions strong? I'm not that stupid. I promised to assist Kubik, but I'm not here to serve as his cannon fodder. You need reinforcements everywhere right now anyway, so stop giving orders you have no right to give."

Thinking of the Chaos Knights rampaging through the hive city's outskirts, Pavonis found nothing to say in rebuttal, though he still harbored doubts about Lin's plan.

"These Soul Drinkers—aren't they joining the battle line?"

"They're a nifty little tool I'll be putting to use a bit later."

Pavonis wanted to press further, but Lin cut him off.

"Pavonis, you can go back and report to the Fabricator General now."

"Report what?"

"From this moment on, I'm going to set Mars ablaze!"

No one paid any more attention to Pavonis, left standing there alone.

The Hellhound war-vehicles struck first. These nimble little vehicles, racing across the sand, drew little attention at first.

Not until their mounted promethium flamers erupted in gouts of pale blue plasma fire did the Dark Mechanicum cogboys controlling the rogue Servitors finally notice.

"Where did this enemy come from?"

As the last scraps of biological tissue on the Servitors crackled and burst into fatty flame, those lacking enough flesh to sustain them, even if not reduced straight to ash, collapsed to the ground unable to move.

Servitors like these never even glimpsed the Hellhounds' exhaust trails.

Having swept clear a stretch of Servitors, the Hellhounds surged forward again, their wheels grinding over scorched earth, pressing on without pause.

The Dark Mechanicum cogboys tried to organize resistance, but Lin had deliberately chosen to strike their weakest point.

Not one of the nearly ten thousand Servitors here could withstand more than ten seconds of the flames—there was no way they could slow the Hellhounds' advance. The entire line was punched through in a flash, and the road deep into the outskirts lay open before them.

The Hellhound was genuinely effective against lightly armored units, and Lin was pleased with the result.

But the daemons weren't entirely unresponsive either. Both Vashtorr and Kubik took notice of the sudden disturbance on the battlefield.

The reinforcements' arrival brought Kubik a moment of relief, but he soon frowned again.

"What is Pavonis doing? Why aren't Lin and his forces attacking from the flank?"

Vashtorr, too, noticed Lin. This Magos from Forge World Huangquan VIII had finally, this time, left a strong enough impression on him.

"Ever since Cath Maximus, it's been this man stirring up trouble..."

Tech-priests, opportunists, fence-sitters, or whatever else—Vashtorr, a demigod of the Warp, had seen more than enough of such men.

When he'd first glimpsed Lin through the eyes of his cultists at Cath Maximus, he'd assumed this Magos—seemingly hoping to seize Cath Maximus amid the chaos—was just another one of the same breed.

At the time, his only real interest had been in the strange weapons those Astartes carried; the ambitious Magos himself had seemed entirely unremarkable, and Vashtorr naturally hadn't given him a second thought.

Afterward, as he lay hidden on Mars, carrying out his own plans with his cultists, M'Kachen had unexpectedly come calling.

This Tzeentchian Greater Daemon, whose cheek had for some reason been sliced away, told him what Lin had done at Port Sanctus, and swore up and down that the Magos would inevitably come to Mars and cause trouble for his plans.

"You're that certain?" Vashtorr hadn't believed it at the time.

"I had Kairos look into it for me!" the Lord of Change squawked insistently, trying to convince Vashtorr.

"That two-headed bird-man—are you sure he was telling the truth?"

"I'm sure, because he saw nothing at all!"

That remark piqued Vashtorr's interest a little. He found it hard to imagine a Blank becoming a Tech-Priest at all. Judging by the fear on M'Kachen's face, this Magos might be hiding an even deeper secret.

But what did that have to do with him?

He'd declined the Tzeentchian Greater Daemon's offer of cooperation, intent instead on focusing solely on his own scheme to carry off all of Mars.

That wasn't to say he'd dismissed Lin entirely, though. When Lin actually arrived on Mars, he'd signaled Augustus to arrange a plan to eliminate him—a decision that had only sparked a far greater conflict.

He was just a Magos, after all—Vashtorr's demigod pride told him killing Lin would be scarcely harder than crushing an ant.

But when Lin escaped certain death through some unexpected means of teleportation, and then began contesting production lines with Skarbrand, Vashtorr found he could no longer afford to underestimate this surprising Magos.

He realized that beak-feathered bird might, for once, have actually gotten something right.

Letting this Magos run loose really had brewed up a great many thorny problems.

Like now—Lin, whom he'd left unattended, had turned up again with his forces on the one battlefield that mattered most to him.

Vashtorr no longer had any doubts about Lin's gift for causing trouble.

He'd meant to avoid this Magos entirely and throw everything into taking the hive city. He hadn't expected the man to be like a fly—ignore him and he'd land right on your face anyway!

"Concentrate all fire," he ordered Viktor. "I want to witness this Magos's death with my own eyes!"

The order suited Viktor's own wishes perfectly. Under his command, waves of corrupted Skitarii and a handful of Bloodletters surged in from both flanks, intent on encircling Lin's forces.

Skitarii and daemons wielding ranged weapons weren't nearly as vulnerable to fire as the rogue Servitors had been, and the Hellhounds that had burned through the earlier line no longer produced the same results. Fortunately, the Tiantu-class Titans had already moved in to take their place.

Lin hadn't yet outfitted these Titans with dedicated weapons, but the Avenger bolt cannons and Lightning Guns pressed into service on short notice were more than sufficient. Gripping these weapons, the Titans returned fire on the corrupted Skitarii taking aim at them.

"Please follow the targeting guidance, Ironrider."

Kuber didn't need to lift a finger—BT had already identified and locked onto the high-threat units among the enemy on its own.

This intelligent machine-spirit distributed real-time battlefield data to every Titan under Kuber's command, guiding each one to target a different objective.

"Target locked. Firing."

Bolt cannons were suppressive weapons never meant for pinpoint accuracy, and with each Titan wielding only a single one, it was natural to worry the firepower would fall short. But BT's trajectory corrections were more than enough to overturn everyone's preconceptions.

Bolt rounds poured down like rain, precisely tearing apart the corrupted Skitarii armed with anti-armor weapons. Any unit that posed a threat was swept away in an instant.

"Firing accuracy: 98.7 percent," BT announced calmly, having just pronounced sentence on the enemy. "Ironrider, what's our next move?"

Even having grown familiar with this Titan, Kuber still found its efficiency staggering.

The sense of ease—being deep inside an encirclement yet fighting as if it were nothing more than target practice—left him faintly unsettled.

But he remembered Lin's orders. "Suppress the enemy. We need to make sure the main force gets through."

"Understood. Executing Protocol Two: hold position."

The Tiantu-class Titans' bolt cannons kept firing, pinning the surging enemy outside the breach. Now and then a Bloodletter, relying on its resistance to ranged fire, would push through into the inner ring—only to be hacked apart mercilessly by the steel hands of the Titans guarding the flanks.

This unexpected opponent stirred an unstoppable curiosity in Vashtorr even amid his fury. "Where did he get these knights from?"

Those Astartes wielding their strange weapons were nowhere to be seen now, but Lin had produced no small number of other things even he had never laid eyes on before.

The Tiantu-class Titans looked nothing like other Knights, and Vashtorr suspected they'd been built from some STC dating back to long before the Age of Technology.

If that were true, then this was exactly what he needed—technology that could elevate his very essence...

Vashtorr's thoughts raced, and he began to covet the Tiantu-class Titans Lin commanded.

But all his elite forces were already committed. Even though these Titans' firepower was weaker than that of conventional Knight suits, he had no spare unit left to send in and stop Lin from entering the outskirts.

"Breach secured. The main force can advance," Kuber reported to Lin.

"Well done, Kuber," Lin said, a note of approval in his voice.

Kuber didn't answer. He felt he'd barely done anything at all—BT had handled it all in his place.

The transport vehicles that followed carried the Deathless swiftly through the breach and into the outskirts. Vashtorr didn't know what Lin intended, but he knew exactly what he intended.

"Tell the Trix Family to crush this reckless Magos and his army. I want their Knights taken alive—I want their machine-spirits chained!"

Curiosity outweighed the fury inside Vashtorr. "Let's see just what this Magos has up his sleeve!"

The main force continued advancing along the scorched path the Hellhounds had blazed. But before long the Hellhounds came to a halt, and Neos, piloting one of them, brought word back to Lin.

"We've run into an enemy we can't handle."

Lin studied the intelligence Neos handed over, and understanding dawned at once.

It was the corrupted Knight houses.

Three hundred Chaos Knights were rampaging through the outskirts, and the Skitarii had destroyed only a handful of them.

These heavily armored units were clearly beyond what the Hellhounds could handle, but the Tiantu-class Titans that could match them were in limited supply.

"Circle around and hold them at bay. We'll go gather up the surviving Skitarii in the outskirts first."

Though they'd received Vashtorr's orders, these fallen nobles, lost in their slaughter, weren't about to make them a priority.

Reasoning that they'd wipe out the Skitarii eventually anyway and cross paths with the enemy sooner or later, they carried on with their orgy of slaughter—and that very complacency let Lin slip past the Knights unnoticed and reach the Skitarii first.

He hadn't expected the one commanding the Skitarii here to be an old acquaintance.

"Urquidex?"

The soot-streaked Tech-Priest raised his head. When he saw Lin, undisguised shock spread across his face.

"What are you doing here?"

"It's a long story. What about you?"

"Can't you tell?" Urquidex gestured at the Skitarii he'd gathered around him, his voice tinged with bitter mockery. "Organizing them to die alongside me."

"I can tell things haven't exactly been going well for you."

"Don't even get me started. I haven't had a peaceful day since the daemons started their rampage. I don't understand it—everything was heading toward Mars going to war with you lot, and then suddenly it turned into a Chaos invasion?"

"You could think of it differently—say, that it was Mars's own experiments with the teleportation device that summoned these daemons in the first place."

Urquidex's expression turned complicated, and Lin gave his shoulder a consoling pat.

"No need to worry. I'm here now."

"Here to help this disaster-causing Mars fight off Chaos and defend the hive city?"

"No need to think so small. We can give both sides a nice big surprise."

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