SethWolf

The one thing war stories always forgot was the dust. Khârn learned that early, and the lesson stayed with him through the years. Even two men kicking up sand in the gladiator pits was a distraction. Two armies of a few thousand souls on an open plain would turn the air thick enough to choke on. Scale it up again, and a few hundred thousand warriors locked in conflict would darken the sun for a day after the battle was done.

But the realities of pitched warfare rarely made it into the sagas. In all the stories he’d heard, especially those woeful diatribes from the remembrancers, battle was reduced to a handful of heroes going blade-to-blade in the sunlight, while their nameless lessers looked on in stupefied awe.

It took a great deal to make Khârn cringe, but war poetry never failed.

Two Legions fighting through a city was beyond anything else. Tank engines exhaled fumes in an oil-smelling smog. Gunships roared down on heat blurs and air washes, while those shot down fell from the sky to crash and roll across the ground as burning husks. Titans striding through the streets bled fire and smoke in equal measure – wounds that gouted pollution tenfold when one of the colossal war machines finally died.

The tens of thousands of soldiers grinding rockcrete and earth beneath their tread, and the last sighs of habitation towers bursting their dusty innards into the air as they came apart – they all added to the pall. Each spire that fell, every monument that toppled, every bunker that broke apart breathed a cloud of strangling ash in every direction.

Fighting in a ruined city was one thing, but fighting during a city’s ruination was quite another. Visibility was a myth. It simply didn’t exist.

In ages past, when bronze swords had formed the pinnacle of humanity’s capacity to wage war against itself, mounted scouts tore through a battlefield’s dust clouds to relay information and orders between officers whose regiments were blinded in the thick of it. That was another truth that rarely survived to make into the archives.

War had come a long, long way from those ancient days. Mankind’s capacity to fight blind had not. Khârn’s retinal display responded to his irritation, auto-cycling through vision filters. Thermal sight was a worthless smear of migraine colours when half the city was aflame. Tracking by echolocation auspex was unreliable with any atmospheric interference, and the dense clouds of particulate coupled with burning buildings all around most definitely counted as suboptimal conditions.

He didn’t stop running. He had no idea where he was any more, but he didn’t stop running. When in doubt, move forward. The old adage brought back his grin.

Khârn remembered the landing. The teeth-rattling descent in the Dreadclaw’s dark confines, and the burst of sunlight that followed when the pod’s doors blasted open. He remembered that first charge out into the city, pulling his weapons free, feeling the wasp-stings of lasgun fire failing to pierce his armour plating. They’d come down in a barracks district, amongst the entrenched battalions of Armaturan Academy Guard. Young warriors undergoing the process to become Ultramarines, alongside the hosts of uniformed, disciplined soldiers that were proud to serve the XIII Legion.

Damn Guilliman and his empire within an empire. Armatura, the war-world, was merely one globe in the Five Hundred Worlds. How did one man raise such vast armies? How did one Legion command such might?

He knew the answer, unwelcome as it was. Here was the gift of an unbroken primarch. Here was an unflawed genius at play, unburdened by a pain engine. While Lorgar wasted time with the mysteries of the aether and Angron tasted blood from his malfunctioning mind, Guilliman of the Ultramarines had reshaped an entire subsector into the Imperial ideal. Not even Horus had managed that.

A bolter shell had severed his irritated musing, crashing against his chestplate and throwing his stride into a ragged stagger. Khârn had roared without realising – an instinctive vocalisation of the pain drilling into the back of his head – and charged into the first platoon of Academy Guard holding the barricade at the road’s end. Their Evocatus leader fought with an energised gladius, proving himself a swordsman of consummate skill. He lasted nine seconds before he collapsed, painting the avenue’s stones red with his innards.

The city was still standing at that point. The dust hadn’t had a chance to occlude everything under the sun.