Mechanicum

Roaring streams of turbo lasers and blitzing storms of explosive shells tore through skitarii and weaponised servitors as the Knights carved a path along the Typhon Causeway. Hundreds of their enemies were dying every second and their bodies were crushed underfoot as the Knights rode ever onwards. The Knights of Taranis slaughtered their way along the causeway's length, Verticorda killing with methodical precision, Caturix with furious abandon.

As sudden as the attack was, Melgator's forces rallied with commendable speed, and armoured units raced to meet the charging Knights. Heedless of their own warriors, enemy cannon opened fire on the causeway, blowing wide craters in the great road. The speed and ferocity of their charge carried the Knights clear of the bulk of the fire, but two warriors, tangled up in the debris of their carnage, were caught by the full fury of a sustained salvo of high explosives and blown to pieces.

Another Knight took a direct hit from an experimental gun recovered from the ruins of Adept Ulterimus's tomb beneath the Zephyria Tholus. Empowered with dark energies from the Vaults of Moravec, a beam of black light punched straight through the Knight's power field to wreath the machine in dark fire that instantly melted through its armour. Verticorda could hear its agonised screams over the Manifold and watched as its dying rider swept a host of enemy warriors to their doom as it plunged from the causeway and into the magma.

With every passing moment, the Knights of Taranis were fighting their way further and further from the Magma City, killing and crushing Adept Zeth's enemies with consummate skill and grace. This was no undisciplined, feral charge, but the exquisite skill of noble warriors exercising their killing art in the most sublime manner imaginable.

Already they had travelled more than two kilometres from the gate, leaving a trail of dead and dying enemies in their wake. As another four hundred metres was won, another Knight died, the machine's legs sawn off by Ulterimus's dark weapon and its carapace pounced upon by a cackling tide of mutant skitarii.

Lord Caturix turned his guns on the swarming skitarii, clearing them from the downed Knight in a series of devastating bursts of gunfire. The Knight was already dead, and, rather than allow the enemy to scavenge from its corpse, Caturix kept firing until its reactor core was breached and it vanished in a seething wall of plasma fire.

Only five Knights remained with Verticorda and Caturix, and as devastating as their charge had proven, it was slowing. More and more enemy warriors were clogging the causeway with their bodies, and entire regiments of artillery and armour were concentrating their fire on stopping the Knights.

Verticorda and Caturix, warriors of wildly different temper yet identical courage, kept pushing onwards, their ultimate goal in sight: the black pavilion of Ambassador Melgator.

Princeps Kasim in Raptoria darted through the ruins of the Arsia sub-silos to unleash a furious barrage into one of the flanking Reavers. The towering engine's shields soaked up the fire of the smaller war machine, turning its guns on the tumbled metallic ruins.

A storm of shrapnel and explosions tore through the collapsed silo, but Raptoria was already on the move, surging though the jumbled mass of collapsed towers and fallen masonry to fire again. Using every inch of cover and his natural affinity for moving through close and dirty terrain, Kasim kept Raptoria one step ahead of his enemy's fire, loping randomly from cover to deliver stinging fire on the lumbering Reaver before vanishing back into the cover of the silo.

With the Warlords and Imperator closing behind them, one of the Reavers turned into the collapsed and burning silos to flush Kasim out, unwilling to leave a snapping predator in their wake, even one as hopelessly outgunned as a Warhound.

Its vast bulk smashed through steel archways that had once seen the passage of thousands of workers, trampling through machine shops, which had produced weapons and ordnance that had pacified worlds on the other side of the galaxy. It towered over the twisted wreckage of melted machines and the charred skeletons of those who had died in the complex's collapse.

Sparks and trailing squalls of energy backwash flared from its shields as it bludgeoned its way through the factory to reach its quarry. A screaming wail of scrapcode bled from its external augmitters and its warhorn's booming howl echoed weirdly from those walls that still stood.

Kasim broke from cover, the cobalt blue of his engine stark against an ashen wall.

The Reaver caught sight of him and twisted its upper body to target his nimble engine. A torrent of weapons fire reduced the wall to pulverised dust and sparked from Raptoria's shields.