Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Urquidex's presence saved Lin a great deal of trouble. This Priest, who had always leaned toward the Imperium anyway, handed over command of the Skitarii under him to Lin without hesitation.

Lin had expected he'd need somewhat cruder methods to seize control of the Skitarii, but it seemed that wouldn't be necessary now.

Guided by Urquidex and Thorne, the Exemplary Fists and Deathless disembarked from their transports and deployed rapidly.

The hive city's life-support systems, barely limping back into operation, gave them room to fight without relying on the protection of their transports. Carrying more than enough heavy weaponry, they took over the Skitarii's defenses.

Lin planned to use them to hold the key routes leading into the hive city, keeping the Chaos Knights barred outside.

But they alone couldn't handle Knight mechs — only Knights could fight Knights.

The true protagonists of this battle would be the Ironriders, reorganized from the ranks of the former Iron Hands.

The crumbling ruins of shattered buildings made for excellent cover for the Titans. Kuber, most of his systems powered down, lay buried silently in the rubble alongside his Titan, waiting for the enemy to arrive.

BT provided outstanding battlefield analysis. Even with the Titan in silent running, it could deduce the Chaos Knights' movements from the communications traffic of other Skitarii on the field, and present the results to Kuber.

The situation stood at fifty against three hundred.

Though most of those three hundred were just Armiger-class Knights padding out the numbers, Kuber understood he still had to fight with utmost care.

Any mistake could plunge him into an inescapable abyss.

Fortunately, his enemies were reckless enough to make up for it. Those pitiful Knights, corrupted by Chaos, were no longer masters of their steel — they were its prisoners.

They sat within their Knights' cockpits, yet it was the corrupted, bloodthirsty machine-spirits that now controlled them, driving them into senseless slaughter across the battlefield.

Too busy hoisting corpses high before hacking off their heads, they paid no mind to the Tiantu-class Titan blended into the surrounding ruins. Utterly unguarded, they walked right up to Kuber.

"Target within firing range," BT advised.

It judged this to be the optimal moment to strike, but Kuber didn't act at once.

"I am an Ironrider."

He murmured the reminder to himself, fingers resting lightly on the control stick, waiting for the moment he judged truly best.

Only when the enemy Knight exposed its back did Kuber move the Titan, raising the bolt cannon in its hand.

"Now!"

Unlike the elaborate ritual required to wake a machine-spirit, the Tiantu-class Titan could self-activate from zero to full systems in mere seconds. Kuber squeezed the trigger. A dense volley of bolt rounds hammered into the power system on the Knight's back, tearing several gashes into its outer armor.

But the bolt cannon's firepower was still too weak against a Knight. Only a few rounds lodged in the power system, causing minor malfunctions.

Sheltered under Chaos's blessing, the Knight all but ignored the damage. It spun around swiftly, an enraged roar blaring from its vox-array.

"Which fool doesn't know when to die, daring to disturb me?!"

Autom was the pilot of the berserk Knight.

His Knight Errant had gone mad long ago, corrupted by years upon years of Chaos's touch. Now the entire machine, Autom included, had become a bloodthirsty beast.

They no longer upheld the nobility and grace of Knighthood, choosing instead to bathe themselves in the glory of slaughter with Reaper Chainsword and Thunderstrike Gauntlet.

Only this way could he draw closer to Sadistic Terror!

To anyone who dared insult his glory, there was only one thing he would do: sever their head and offer it up to the almighty Blood God!

He charged, driving straight for the Tiantu-class Titan that had struck at him from behind.

Reacting with lightning speed, Kuber dodged nimbly aside. The Titan's vector thrusters flared blue flame forward, quickly opening distance from the Knight. With room to fire again, Kuber opened up once more, but his shots were entirely swallowed by a pale blue field of light that enveloped the whole Knight.

"A lost Ion Shield…"

As a former Iron Hand, Kuber of course knew what that was. Realizing ranged attacks would be futile, he had no choice but to adjust his tactics.

He drew the massive chainsword at the Titan's waist and chose close combat instead.

The choice excited Autom, who roared, eager for a head-on duel. But when he charged in, Kuber refused to meet him directly.

Kuber's chainsword served only to parry. The rest of the time he relied on the Titan's vector thrusters to reposition, using brief bursts of speed in close-quarters combat to pull off incredible feints and dodges.

Autom's fury began to boil over. His opponent hadn't landed a single wound on him yet, but the frustration of never being able to touch him gnawed at him, driving him into ever greater rage.

"Face me, coward! Let's have an honest duel!"

Autom needed only a single blow — one strike to shatter those joints that looked agile but were in truth fragile, turning his foe into a dog with a broken spine.

But he couldn't so much as graze him!

The enemy machine's handling and the pilot's reaction speed both surpassed anything he'd imagined. He badly wanted to see just who was piloting such a machine.

He figured he'd find out the moment he cut off their head.

Autom stepped back, deliberately giving ground. Kuber didn't understand why, but BT updated him on the battlefield situation in time.

"Range: one hundred meters. Targets confirmed: Armiger-class Knights, quantity two."

The Armigers assigned to support Autom had finally reached the battlefield. They swept in from both flanks, trying to help pin down the Tiantu-class Titan's movements.

Small as Armiger-class Knights were, their Thermal Spears could still threaten a Titan's vital components at close range.

The fight had turned into exactly the numbers disadvantage Kuber had feared. He knew he had to eliminate these two threats first.

The vector thruster nozzles blazed with intense light. Kuber pushed his speed to the absolute limit in an instant and shot toward one of the Armigers.

His chainsword came down on its head before the enemy could even react. Too slow to dodge, the Armiger was cleaved clean apart.

The other Armiger barely managed to react and raised its weapon to fire, but the Titan's hand dexterity let Kuber snatch up the half-destroyed Armiger's wreck and use it as a shield.

He blocked the shot with it, then hurled the half-wreck at the firing Armiger. The bolt rounds that followed crushed the enemy along with the debris, punching through the cockpit and turning the pilot inside to mist.

Dealing with the two Armigers had been like sweeping away dry leaves, but that was exactly the outcome Autom — utterly indifferent to his subordinates' lives — had wanted.

Though startled by the Titan's speed, he used the opening created by Kuber's need to deal with the Armigers first to catch him.

"Got you, you damned flea!"

The massive chain blade, aimed at the cockpit, carved a lethal arc through the air. With his vector thrusters needing to cool down, Kuber had no choice but to raise an arm and block.

The chain blade tore at the Titan's frame but couldn't take Kuber's head off outright — yet Autom knew it was only a matter of time.

Leveraging his weight advantage, he bore the blade down, and sure enough, the edge crept closer to the cockpit.

The enemy's agility had cost it firepower and mass — and as a veteran Knight, Autom scorned that trade.

In the end, a Knight's battle is decided by heavy armor and overwhelming firepower!

The Tiantu-class Titan's cockpit blared a shrill alarm. Its display, flushed red, warned Kuber that the hydraulic arm was bearing a load far beyond its rated limit.

His mind raced for a countermeasure, but BT ejected a data-knife from the control console.

"What's this?"

Kuber remembered it was something Lin had made specially for them, but he still had no idea what it actually did.

"Remember this, Ironrider. A Knight's strength isn't decided by its machine's performance."

"Is that something you wanted to tell me, BT?"

"It's what my creator asked me to pass along."

Kuber could feel a stream of icy-cold data uploaded to him from BT through the Furnace Chain, ultimately lodging itself in his own iron hands.

Following BT's cue, he gripped the data-knife in his hand. Fitted snugly into his palm, it linked to the mechanical arm and activated the program within.

Only then did Kuber realize the program was a cyber-virus BT had just meticulously written. Once injected into the enemy's machine through the data-knife, it would wreak devastating interference on the Knight.

For an Ironrider, the real fight was only just beginning.

Understanding what he had to do, Kuber took a deep breath.

BT popped open the Tiantu-class Titan's cockpit, and Kuber leapt out on his own. The astonishing strength granted by his nineteen augmentation surgeries let him cling to the Chaos Knight's arm, and he finally worked his way up above its cockpit.

Autom finally laid eyes on the enemy he'd been so desperate to see.

"An Astartes?!"

His eyes nearly bulged out of his head, and for a moment he even forgot his grand ambition of severing the enemy's skull as an offering to Sadistic Terror. He tried to break free, but the enemy Titan hadn't gone slack after its pilot abandoned it — instead, it kept grappling with him.

Autom couldn't spare a single hand to deal with the Astartes clinging outside his cockpit. All he could do was watch helplessly as Kuber pried loose the cables connecting to the cockpit and drove the data-knife in.

"The battle between Knights — is decided by the pilot!"

The cyber-virus spread rapidly through the Knight's neural system. The once-berserk machine-spirit began to spiral out of control under its corrosion.

Autom felt he could hear the machine-spirit's screams, a flood of error messages pouring into his mind through the mechanical throne.

But before that cold current could destroy his brain along the neural link, it scoured away the whispers of Chaos and the bloodlust festering in his mind.

Freed from the bloodthirsty machine-spirit's grip, Autom felt, for one brief moment, lucid.

It felt as though he'd jolted awake from a long nightmare, his voice faint as a mumble in a dream.

"Decided... by the pilot..."

The thought stirred, for the first time in a long while, the pride of Knighthood in his heart.

Straining to hold together his fast-melting mind, he resolved to make one last stand with a Knight's glory intact.

But BT gave him no such chance. Under BT's control, the Titan reached out and seized the Knight's cockpit — shaped like a head atop its body.

Amid sparks from snapping cables, it tore the Knight's "head" clean off!

BT yanked Autom out of the cockpit. With just a bit more force, his skull burst apart like a melon. As the pilot's brain died, the Chaos Knight's frame ground to a complete halt.

It began to topple, threatening to drag the still-clinging Kuber down with it. But BT moved first, catching Kuber in its arms.

"A fine fight, Ironrider."

"So were you, BT."

No longer suppressing his emotions, he grinned and gave BT a thumbs-up.

BT didn't quite grasp the gesture at first. It looked at Kuber, then at its own hand, and finally mimicked him, trying its own thumbs-up in return.

Kuber let go of every doubt he'd held about BT. He felt the bond between them — no weaker than that shared with a battle-brother — and understood deeply that they were one, bound together by a shared fate.

This battle became a microcosm of every engagement across the city's outskirts.

If Autom, an elite Knight, couldn't match his foe, the rest stood even less of a chance.

Using the Skitarii and Deathless to hem in and lure the rampaging Knights across the city district, Thorne and Urquidex pinned down the Armiger-class Knights while funneling the larger ones, one by one, into the streets where the Ironriders and their Titans lay in ambush.

In open terrain, the Knight houses' superior armor and firepower might well have carried the day. But amid the rubble-strewn city, the Titans' agility came fully into its own.

Their mobility opened up far more tactical options, and their combined mech-and-pilot maneuvers — techniques beyond anything an ordinary Knight understood — shattered the Chaos Knights' worldview entirely.

Never having imagined a battle could unfold this way, they found themselves led around by the nose by the Ironriders. In just a few hours, their numbers dropped by more than half.

The Knight commander, having pulled back from the battlefield, tallied their losses. Discovering that half his Knights had gone silent, he was struck with shock: "Just what kind of battle are we even fighting?!"

No one could answer his question.

The Knight commander understood clearly that they couldn't keep fighting this way. Their losses had already far outstripped whatever benefits Vashtorr had promised them.

He was hardly in a position to bargain with a demigod, of course — but he could still choose to leave.

"Fall back! We're pulling out!"

Save for a few Knights too blood-mad to stop, most of the Chaos Knights began disengaging from the battlefield. Vashtorr furiously called them back, but the Knights no longer heeded him.

Vashtorr couldn't stop them — as one of the rare daemons who actually kept his word, he'd promised earlier that the Knights would be guaranteed safe withdrawal through the teleportation device, and he wouldn't break a pact he himself had struck.

That didn't stop him from raging, though, nor did it stop his greed from stirring.

"Those new-model Knights actually have combat power like that?"

The Chaos Knights' assault hadn't been without gains, either — twenty Titans had been destroyed or knocked out of the fight in the recent clash.

Vashtorr understood well that such an exchange ratio owed itself to these new-model Knights fully exploiting their agility and mobility amid the complex ruins of the city.

That only sharpened his interest in Lin and his creations.

With the Knight houses already withdrawn, they clearly couldn't bring Vashtorr the wreckage he wanted. Vashtorr had no choice but to send Viktor in with a portion of his ghouls, hoping to seize Lin's creations.

But Lin, having taken control of the Skitarii, had by now re-established his defensive lines, and the entire city outskirts had fallen under his control.

With only a portion of rogue Servitors at his disposal, Viktor found it difficult to break back into the outskirts. His divided forces also eased, if only slightly, the pressure on Kubik along the main front.

Kubik, finally catching his breath from the crisis, at last had a moment to consider other matters.

"He said he wants to set Mars ablaze?"

He asked Pavonis, who'd returned to report, for confirmation. All Pavonis could do was nod.

Kubik felt his logic circuits gaining one more knot he couldn't untangle.

"What is he even trying to say?"

[Author's Note 1: How is a pilot personally wading into melee combat not a case of performance being decided by the pilot?]

[Author's Note 2: Yesterday, before the bonus chapter, I owed 24,000; today, before the bonus chapter, I still owe 24,000. Let's hope it isn't still 24,000 tomorrow…]

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