bdsm-fiction Chapter 21 Siege Guards
Chapter 21 Siege Guards
As soon as Qianzi and the Steel Warriors entered the mine tunnel, a cold wind carrying the smells of sulfur and dust rushed towards them.
The group had walked less than 500 meters when dozens of cultists and translucent, luminous figures, never before seen, rushed out from the shadows on both sides of the mine tunnel.
Li Weiling, one of the thousand members of the group, could recognize them. After a moment of contemplation, he concluded that these luminous figures were remnants of human souls corrupted by subspace.
It was also described in the intelligence Magnus had previously received: mysterious light and shadow.
Faced with danger, the Iron Warriors reacted swiftly, firing their explosive guns in unison and instantly turning the enemy at the forefront into a bloody mist, clearing out the ambush in less than a minute.
However, the explosive bombs had little effect on those glowing figures, but the concentrated firepower still successfully eliminated those psionic remnants, albeit for a slightly longer time.
The team then quickly advanced to a huge natural cave hall.
Li Wei, who was guiding the entire mixed team forward, looked at the crisscrossing mine entrances before him, which were as intricate as a spider web.
He slowly closed his eyes, and his psychic perception spread like a tide, instantly revealing the structure of the mine tunnels several kilometers ahead.
The winding path resembles a maze, with traps set by cultists hidden at every fork in the road, and countless glowing figures lurking in the corners.
Withdrawing his psionic senses, Li Wei pointed to the deep mine tunnel on the left and said:
"Take the third fork on the left, bypass the collapsed area and the traps in the middle, and you will reach the location with obvious subspace fluctuations. It will take three kilometers longer, but it is safer."
Perturabo didn't speak, but simply raised his hand to bring up the tactical terminal, which displayed the geological structure map that the Iron Warriors had just scanned.
He glanced at it, then looked up in the direction Li Wei was pointing, his brows furrowing even more.
"A detour?" Peturabo scoffed, tapping the thick rock wall in front of him with his sledgehammer. "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Siege Guards, prepare to dig."
"Wait!" Li Wei hurriedly stopped him. "There's a solid rock layer ahead, over forty meters thick, and it contains a high concentration of methane gas! Digging through would take at least half a day, and it could easily trigger an explosion!"
"Half a day?" Peturabo looked at him like he was an idiot. "My siege guards can dig through this rock in less than ten minutes. As for the gas explosion, it won't damage the power armor."
He paused, his tone carrying the certainty characteristic of an engineer:
"Those side roads you mentioned, each one could be ambush site. Taking a three-kilometer detour, given the density of ambushes there, would take at least half an hour. Digging straight through, zero casualties, at most ten minutes. Which is more cost-effective? Do you even need to calculate it?"
Before Li Wei could object further, Peturab had already given the order into the communicator: "Siege guards, advance and mark the tunneling route!"
From among the steel warriors emerged a group of siege guards, clad in thickened MK3 armor covered with blast-proof ceramic steel.
They were equipped with multi-functional robotic arms on their left arms and their waists were full of explosives, exuding an aura of industrial violence. Then they picked up shoulder-mounted thermobaric cannons and aimed them at the rock face to adjust the angle.
At Peturabo's command, twenty blazing orange beams of light shot simultaneously at the rock wall, instantly melting the hard rock into lava that flowed down the wall.
Immediately afterwards, the siege guards pushed small tunneling machines forward, and the roaring drill bits easily gnawed at the remaining rock layers.
Li Wei stood there, his mouth twitching, dumbfounded.
He knew that the siege guards were Peturab's elite engineering troops.
Since Olympia, the home planet of the Iron Warriors, they have followed Peturabo in battles across the land and are extremely skilled at assaulting cities and civil engineering, but I never thought they could be used for this kind of rough work of digging tunnels.
As time passed, a straight passage was carved out of the more than forty-meter-thick solid rock layer.
And they were lucky enough not to encounter any gas.
The rock face was smooth and flat from being heated by the hot melt cannon, without even a loose rock.
"What are you standing there for? Let's go." Perturabo glanced at Levi sideways before stepping into the passage first. "This is the power of steel and engineering, much more reliable than your mystical psionic abilities."
Li Wei snapped out of his daze and led his thousand warriors to follow.
As soon as they stepped out of the passage, a huge natural cave appeared before them.
Glowing crystals hung from the cave ceiling, illuminating the entire space.
In the very center of the void, a colossal, silver-white ship, stretching as far as the eye could see, lay silently moored.
The ship's hull has thick, regular lines and is covered with shiny alloy armor without any rust.
The portholes were pitch black, like empty eyes.
A faint, chilling resentment emanated from deep within the ship's hull.
"There really is something here." Perturabo's eyes lit up. He strode over to the ship and touched the cold alloy hull. "Board the ship immediately and check the propulsion system and navigation capabilities."
Peturabo quickly reviewed all the ship knowledge maps in his mind since birth, but could not find any matching models.
He felt the cold touch of the ship's alloy, which brought him a strange sense of excitement.
A glint of fanaticism flashed in his eyes; this was undoubtedly a creation of the lost golden age.
This will greatly bolster the strength of the Iron Warriors' fleet.
Just as Li Wei was about to warn of the psionic anomaly on the ship, he saw Peturabo's excited and eager expression and gave up the idea of persuading him.
He didn't want to engage in pointless arguments with this capricious Primarch, so he turned to his warriors and gave them orders:
"Be extra careful and pay attention to any unusual psionic fluctuations in your surroundings."
Under Peturabo's command, the thirty steel warriors immediately formed a commando team, blew open the side hatch of the ship, and rushed in first.
Li Wei only led Apophis, the company commander of the Fifth Academy, into the cabin, fearing that the other Thousand Sons warriors were not strong enough and that it would be too dangerous to venture deep into enemy territory.
A strong smell of dust mixed with the rotten metallic odor, along with a faint, chilling, fishy smell, instantly enveloped us.
Countless skeletons were scattered in the rooms on both sides of the corridor.
Judging from the remaining clothing and ornaments, these people were colonists from the Golden Age.
Li Wei gently brushed his hand over a skeleton, his brows furrowing even more. These bones still contained faint psionic energy fluctuations, which could be clearly sensed even through his power armor gauntlets.
Moreover, Li Wei also discovered that these skeletons were covered with marks from being hacked and chiseled, indicating that they had been cruelly tortured and murdered.
"This is a slaughterhouse for psionicists." Levi's face darkened. "They treat psionicists like criminals and slaughter them."
He quickly deduced that it was most likely a large-scale awakening of psionicists in the late Golden Age, which led to ordinary people, filled with fear, persecuting those psionicists as monsters.
There are so many psionic corpses here; this will definitely cause warp contamination.
He already suspected that the true form of the Storm Lord was most likely an aggregate formed from the resentment of these psionicists.
A chill ran up his spine.
A piercing scream suddenly came from the end of the ship's corridor.
Countless black vengeful spirits emerged from the walls. They had no physical form, only a twisted and pained face, and roared as they pounced on the steel warrior.