It was a fairly bad situation.

They were vastly outnumbered to begin with. Half the Planetary Guard in the city was compromised and pslaved straight off. The Brain Ward was taken offline, the Mentat presence in the city was hit with multiple terrorist attacks, and the Juris were shooting one another and unable to tell friend from foe. The Xenos were murdering millions every day and making more of themselves, and atomic weapons were being deployed to stop the process with ruinous results for everyone and everything, while the screaming people in the undercity were fighting for their lives and losing.

That being said, the Xenos were definitely not enjoying the detachment of the Janus Prime Guards that had been sent to give some fighting assistance. How training against Warp incursions suddenly became incredible effectiveness against the millions-strong hordes of Xenos slavering to the surface shocked the hell out of everyone, but the two thousand members of the Janus Prime Guard knew there wasn’t going to be much in the way of help coming, they were only going to get out of this themselves, and were as united in purpose and cause as any human force could possibly be.

Their officers and sergeants had administered a lethal cleansing operation throughout every single nearby native Guard unit here in Hexival, the fourth largest mega-city on Janus III and one of the most compromised. 1.3 billion humans inhabited the city, although that number had dropped precipitously, and was probably under 300 million and falling by the second. That action had managed to save them most of an artillery battalion and their supplies, one Kasr and its mechs, and an airfield. They had slaughtered thousands of suborned troops and cerevore infiltrators, and when the Xenos came at them in reaction, their defense was brutal and lethal.

In very little time, they became the core of the human defense, and if the generals didn’t like it, they were either shot by surviving Umbran Agents, or taken aside by the three living Coronal Squires present and told that if they didn’t like it, they could lead the next defense against the Xenos personally, right alongside the Coronals.

They shut up and fought for their lives like everyone else was.

The days spent in the Warp Zone and outside the city, especially killing the ant swarms, came in very, very handy now. Swarmbane Clasps were monstrously effective against the carpet-wave attacks of the incoming basic Xenos, turning standard laser single-shots into mini-AoE’s. Bane/Phrenics meant the power of a basic laser rifle was doubled straight off, and when backed with the power of a Sun Shot, repeatedly, the level of fire the company could put out was incredible.

They had been recruiting new units, Marking them, training them up, and now those units were getting a baptism by fire. Beacon Psions were making Baneskulls and Swarmbane Clasps continuously, hundreds more of them hitting the firing line every day, and when they did, their killing power was blossoming.

Most telling of all, a constant Song was coming through those Marked, getting their blood pumping, letting them know that they weren’t alone, that there were others out there, in their millions, fighting just like them. The buffs from that song let newbs fight like veterans, veterans like elites, and elites like heroes. Combined with Sun Shots, banefire, and Swarmbane, the fighting power of a unit of the Janus Prime soldiers or the units they had been training was easily ten times that what their numbers might indicate.

Seemingly unlimited wave attacks broke time and time again against a wall of lasfire supported by some of the most precise artillery fire the veterans present had ever seen. Localized Brainwards went up to interfere with nearby hivemind maneuvers, and the flak guns blew hosts of winged Xenos out of the air in clusters, Swarmbane turning the death of one into two, three, or four in efficient clusters, and the powerful ammunition easily ripped through dozens at a time, every death magnified and reflected multiple times over.

Vivic fire was burning on mountains of corpses, denying the Xenos biomatter to recycle. Active psi-using Pslaves, thralls, mutates, or syms found themselves engaging with screaming Ranthas and Briggs Brothers who had no respect for their psychic might. The air force was striking at the biomechs and fleshcrawlers coming out of the Spiked Plains before they could enter the city through the opened gates, hitting them repeatedly and constantly as artillery moved into position to help, and what satellite support could be spared helped out as well.

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Bastrid Briggs and Tych Rantha were commanding a company in the warzone, Brevet Captains by Coronal fiat, a nice promotion from Sergeants. Anatolia and her Strategos circle were coordinating city tactics. It was a race against time, punctuated by nuclear explosions, with Bloks cracked open like eggs to get at the screaming biomass inside, and hordes of millions of xenos swarming up one Spire after another despite all the maddened defenses of those within, to deliver the same fate as those below had received.

Three days ago, word had come in that help had arrived from out-system. Companies of Imperial Legionnaires had arrived to support their efforts, and would be deploying into the city in support.

While fully appreciative of any help they could get at this point, and seeing other Imperial Army units were also deploying down where they could, or preparing to wipe cities entirely, there was some trepidation by the instantly skeptical Hagbloods when the Obsidian Serpents declared they would be deploying into the fight.

Instant Coronal and Umbral confirmation of the reputation of those units gave the Janus Prime commanders of this theater remarkably little confidence. When the Obsidian Serpents merely asked for a link to the tactical database and went off to do their own thing without pre-planning or coordination, the bad feeling rose higher.

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Bastrid and Tych were trapped in a cul-de-sac of the Hexbella troops they’d recruited, driven back and back and back by waves of Xenos assaults into this sprawl of shattered walls and cratered ground. Bastrid’s shoulder cannon, wrist pulsars, and horn were basically firing the instant they were off cool-down, which for the shoulder-las meant constantly. His fusion reactor had been refilled twice over the course of this fight, and the constant firestream meant he had been inheriting all the long-range firepower that their enemy could muster among their troops... which wasn’t a lot, and the snipers were quickly taking them out as he waded through the barrages time and again, roaring defiance at them and praising his damn Healing Matrix that was keeping him alive despite it all.

The plaza in front of them was filling up with Xenos swarming around syms, the pig-sized pure Xenos outnumbering the bigger syms born from implanted eggs by dozens to one, and still the syms formed a huge number of far more dangerous attackers coming their way.

The aliens could only meet the devastating firepower they were running into with more numbers and layered fire of their own, although their organic projectiles did not have the range of the energy weapons of the humans opposing them. Their most well-armed pslaves were fighting in other zones, as the ones near here had all been slaughtered by Janus Guards.

The syms were coming in straight at them, not bothering to infiltrate the buildings and get in around and behind them, which was a blessing at this point. If they stopped moving and tried to hold a position, getting assaulted from all sides was definitely on the menu, and they didn’t feel like that was happening.

-Bastrid, the Obsidian Serpents marker is near your position. They seem to be in a flanking position... have they engaged yet?- came Anatolia’s cool /voice.

He looked in the direction indicated. The Legionnaires had to be in the wreckage of that fallen factory over there, bombed out and not much of interest to be found there. If they attacked it would be a classic enfilade, but the numbers of Xenos meant they’d weather it and storm the Serpents’ position regardless, simply opening a new front and venting more bodies on it.

-Negative, they are laying low.- He expected nothing from them, given their reputation. They treated normal human fighting units with callous disregard, by all reports, and were one of the most ruthlessly efficient and pragmatic Legions. Their loyalty was unquestionable, and they worked decently with other Legionnaires... but normal humans were just cannon fodder in their eyes.

It was proving true now. They weren’t going to risk themselves for some native Planetary Guard troops, and were simply looking on as Bastrid kept rolling his men back in waves, each new line covering the one before, and streams of hard, hot light burning with Banefire scything out, punctuated by vivic fires erupting everywhere as Tych’s autolas, limned in white and transparent flames, both killed and ignited corpse-eating flames everywhere as she sprayed down the enemy in twentieth of a second flashes of light.

The power cell for her autobow would have been depleted long ago, but she was running it through the Shock Gauntlet Tats on her hands, feeding it an unlimited stream of soul-powered Vajra amperage that was keeping it firing just as steadily as his own cannon.

Two Briggs sergeants, Hym and Zenthikos, were helping the defense from near the front, holding heavy auto-lasers like toys as they sprayed them across the incoming hordes, their hands also crackling with power and feeding the weapons juice, while frost fell from the barrels and made sure the things didn’t overheat. In the face of that level of constant firepower, any conventional force would have been slowing down and seeking cover, especially when the two kept weathering whatever was thrown at them, but the Xenos never even slowed down.

There were two other Ranthas present: Glizza, who was focusing on picking off the syms in front of her with Sword Shards and the autolas on her autobow, and Tremma, who was in full autobow mode and picking off Syms constantly from further back, while the healers fixed up damage done to the men and transferred it to her to heal away. Out of range of most of the incoming fire, and constantly gliding back, she was the one most suited for taking on injuries, and so her team of healers was the busiest fixing the lads up and getting them back into the fight.

It was the constant empathic healing that had kept them in the fight, or wounded men would have died over and over again, instead of withdrawing to be healed physically, getting some Soak back as a buffer by fighting in the rear, and covering their fellows as the process repeated.

And they were tough. The amount of punishment the men they had trained could take would have shocked anyone below Seven. Layered Psychic- and Soul-Fortified Bodies had made them able to take hits that would have killed normal men, grit their way through them, and get Healed by the roving medics who were making sure that Tremma’s healing Matrix was constantly at work. If there was a particularly urgent need, the other officers could be brought online, too, and the amount of healing delivered spike incredibly in a short period of time.

-Anatolia, we’re going to hit a dead end. There’s a colosseum at the end of this plaza we’ll have to make a stand at. Is there any support incoming?-

-No artillery has the arc to reach you, and the psychic static won’t allow any missiles,- she /told him grimly. -The assault is too broad, and there’s no infantry or mechanized that can reach you in short order.-

-Mmm.- His firing didn’t stop as he considered his options and kept /sending out orders to the troops. Morale was high, even with the constant retreating, as the deaths had been few and the result of monstrous bad luck or people who didn’t get off the line fast enough, and they had killed hundreds, even thousands, of the enemy each. It hadn’t stopped the Xenos, but it was still damn impressive.

He took a firing line and popped three syms with one wrist-pulsar, as well as a mess of the little ones in between, a bright line of hot plasma with banefire and swarmbane accents popping a swathe a good fifteen feet wide through the mass.

-Acknowledged. Can you tell me how far this mass extends?- He received an immediate mental relay of the ground he had traversed over completely covered by carapaced bodies for almost two miles, taken by a drone spotter high in the sky.

Two million of them, he reckoned. He and the others would have to kill another thousand apiece...