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***
"Just keep an eye out," Melchoir responded.
"Yes sir."
The officer turned from his snipers and looked out over the battlefield.
He was dead tired. He could feel the fatigue pressing on his joints and grating at the back of his eyeballs. It was difficult for him to focus. Not that he necessarily had to anymore.
The fight for drop zone delta was entering into its fifth day. Casualties had been staggering, but the Imperial Guard had managed to take most of the hilltop fortifications. Only a few dozen were still in enemy hands.
But if taking fortified positions from space was all but impossibly difficult, it felt like holding what they had managed to gain was somehow even harder. The enemy was in constant counterattack mode, and every hour told news of the enemy finding and exploiting the weak spots in the Foleran's very tenuous grasp. Their ability to disrupt the momentum of their attack could only be called superb.
After nearly two days of continuous fighting, Melchoir's force had been all but wiped out. Of the 42 officers in his line, he was literally the only one that was in fighting shape enough to actually lead men in battle. As such, he had been given temporary command over the whole line. While other Guard regimental officers had a thousand men under their command, Melchoir was now responsible for fewer than 150 able soldiers.
The hundreds upon hundreds of dead and wounded men had been collected into the ruins of their conquered fort. Melchoir had carefully selected the most defensible point nearby to make his stand. Amidst endless probing actions and a few outright attacks, the guardsmen had been able to dig deep trenches and other defense works over the preceding couple of days.
They were about as prepared as they were going to get. All they had to do now was to wait.
From his position in a ruined building between two trenches, the officer and his command squad swept the hillside in front of them, looking for targets. The rest of the dug-in guardsmen did the same.
With his fortified tanks and troops, Melchoir began to feel the first tiny glimmer of security. He knew, of course, that it could never last.
In fact, it soon wouldn't. From his commanding position, he could see he enemy marshaling down the hill, just out of the range of his guns. It was more of the metallic skeleton warriors and their accursed skimming barges. They had been quickly gathering strength, and looked about to attack in force.
"Sir, the enemy is on the move," one of the sharpshooters reported in a hushed tone after a few minutes.
Melchoir drew in a deep breath. Every ounce of his body ached.
"Men!" Melchoir shouted to his troops, "The enemy is advancing. Hold your fire until they are in range, but once they get in, don't be afraid to fire. Ammunition is the one thing we're NOT in short supply of."
"You know as well as I," he continued, "how important it is that we hold this position. The lives of hundreds depend on us, and how we fight here right now."
His words washed over the battered, silent guardsmen in their trenches. The air was filled with morbid tension. Nobody dared even move.
"And so I call on you, men of Folera, fix bayonets, and prepare to give them hell."
A low grumble slid into the air as the russes started their engines. The men looked forward with grim determination.
Melchoir took out his magnoculars to get a better view of the enemy as they began to float up the hill in force from a few miles away. The horrible forms of their ghost arks glid silently towards them. Thee eerie calm betrayed the impending doom of the defenders.
The air was filled with anticipation. Filled with dread. Filled with stubborn defiance.
The mechanical skimmers continued their slow ascent, menacingly approaching. Soon they would be in range. Just a little bit closer...
A sudden explosion detonated behind them. A Leman Russ suddenly blew apart in a cataclysmic blast. Huge chunks of steel ripped through the guardsmen packed in their trenches, scything through them with deadly force. Burning fuel sprayed into the air and a plume of fire chased after the flying debris. The shockwave knocked everyone off their feet, those who still had them.
"What!?" Melchoir shouted as he turned to look down and to his left. A thick cloud of smoke forced its way up into the air as flaming hunks of the former Leman Russ collapsed back down onto the ground, peppering those nearby and falling into the massive burning crater filled with the twisted wreckage of the tank.
The officer desperately searched for the cause of the explosion. Then he spotted it. Behind the nub of a ruined building, some of the enemy had managed to sneak up in broad daylight somehow completely undetected.
"They're here!" Melchoir shouted, "On the left! Open Fire!"
Scarcely had he given the order before another pair of pale beams fired from the concealed position, lighting into the ruins just below the officer's feet. The shots slammed effortlessly into the side of the tank beneath him. The air seethed with sparks and melting steel as the incoming fire began to melt off the side armor. The tank began to fizz and pop and a wretched smell of ozone and burning metal cascaded over the guardsmen.
"I said fire!" Melchoir shouted as his entrenched forces began to regroup and find the new target.
The tanks just began to open fire when a new threat screamed out of the sky from above them.
The enemy broke from their concealed position right in front of him and began their attack ahead of the main force still implacably advancing up the hillside.
The guardsmen unloaded on the enemy approaching right in front of them. Enemy lightning arcs shot into the entrenched guardsmen while the tanks returned fire on the vehicles and the fliers. Things would be all right, a probing force along couldn't dislodge such a well-defended position by themselves.
But little did Melchoir know, this was just a diversion. With sudden speed, a pair of enemy overlords screamed forward on their airborne chariots well ahead of the main force. They bore down on the guardsmen busy defending themselves with frightening speed.
Scarcely breaking pace, one of them rammed straight into the guardsmen, smearing a couple of them to paste with the concussive force of the chariot.
The guardsmen around dove for cover as best they could. The enemy overlord wheeled around with sudden speed and prepared to hack the guardsmen around it to pieces with his powered blade.
The guardsmen desperately tried to counterattack with their meltaguns, but the shots went wide or pattered off of the quantum shielding of the vehicle.
With grim efficiency, the overlord began his slaughter.
Meanwhile, the other had made it all the way up to the command post without taking serious damage.
With cold grace, the overlord brought down his warscythe down onto the damaged Leman Russ and hit it on the front of the armor. A brilliant flash lit up the air as the tank began to crackle and charge with arcane lightning. The lord reached over and swung at the other Leman Russ next to it.
Both tanks glowed with intense power, swelling up with the unknowable energy of the overlord. Melchoir turned around to see the source of the light. The armor below him was going critical.
One after the other, both tanks exploded in massive detonations of unintelligible power. The officer tried to shield his face as his body was picked up off the ground and slammed into the side of the ruin, which broke off in chunks and flew through the air as the catastrophic shockwave burst through everyone around.
Green lightning shot up through the air as the blinding white light of the former Leman Russes seared into everything. The blast instantly vaporized the tanks, sending streams of liquefied metal splashing over everything in great, heaving globs.
Melchoir collapsed to the ground, completely stunned as lightning faded around him and the thunderclap of the vehicles' instant demise rolled over him. Everything was suddenly enshrouded by a thick cloud of smoke. The officer had no idea what had just happened.
Damaged by the blast, the alien chariot had been knocked back practically on top of a Foleran meltagunner, who involuntarily opened fire on the floating barge in front of him as he was knocked to the ground. The barge hissed and cracked as lightning filled the air behind it before it, too, suddenly erupted in a blue-green fireball and skidded off into the trenchworks.
Dozens of guardsmen were instantly killed by the blasts, and dozens more were knocked to the ground. Stunned, and in the middle of an apocalyptic scene of flaming debris and arcane fire, the guardsmen desperately attempted to collect themselves as the warlord recovered from his wreckage and advanced silently through the arcing lightning and the flames. Uncompromising. Unfeeling.
Melchoir rolled over onto his side and looked down to his left as the great, greasy pall of smoke began to sift away around him.
The enemy's advance force was now on top of his trenches.
Melchoir could see Lord Taiaphas' tank riddled with holes, and two crew members helping the shattered commander clear the wreckage of his tank. Another had moved up onto the breastworks, and was firing up at the enemy from point blank range. The sponson meltagunners unleashed their deadly cargo onto a nearby vehicle reducing it to slag before a hundred shots slammed into its front armor, slowly gauging into the lumbering behemoth's heavy frontal armor.
In the trenches everywhere were dead guardsmen. The enemy had completely compromised his position.
Melchoir staggered to his feet and looked out over the battle. The main necron force was coming up the hill. They would be in range with their guns soon.
Around him everywhere were the sounds of combat and dying guardsmen.
Melchoir closed his eyes and braced himself. What would Sanario do? In a flash of memory, he remembered his priest, angry mustache, hefting eviscerator. What should he do? He suddenly felt so lost without the priest's guidance.
The fatigue and the mild concussion and the ringing in his ears and the suffocating stench and sounds of battle closed in on his mind.
And then, from behind, the bringer of death approached.
The command squad let out a cry of alarm as the metallic enemy began to pick its way up the ruined carcass of one of the heavy tanks. Its cold gaze kept fixed on them as its arms and legs propelled it up towards the ruin.
Melchoir reached for his pistol and began to fire down on the climbing overlord. The shots bounced helplessly off of an all but invisible energy field that sheathed its metal frame. Still it advanced, looking dead into the senior officer's eyes.
"Keep firing!" Melchoir shouted to his command squad. Sniper fire poured down on it from close range, striking the enemy everywhere. It turned and looked at one of the sharpshooters.
The overlord distracted, Melchoir took his chance. With a sudden burst of energy, he leaped over the side of the ruin, landing in a pile of dead guardsmen. The sounds of massacred sharpshooters began to break out through the air as the officer struggled to his feet.
Clear of the corpses, the officer didn't even look behind him as he began to run.
To run anywhere. To run away.
***
The last of the light of dusk was slowly failing. The dark shapes of clouds blotted out the dark blue glow above. Soon, the first stars would begin to appear.
A light breeze blew over them as they marched, the road a ribbon of lighter-colored rock in the dimming light.
Just one foot in front of the other, Melchoir thought to himself as he forced his left leg forward, and then, at great energy, forced his right leg to shuffle in front of it. Just one step at a time up the gradual incline.
Behind him straggled a pair of Leman Russes and a few dozen infantrymen. All were slowly, exhaustedly making their climb up the road. Melchoir didn't have the energy to count, but he knew he'd lost at least a dozen already. Those that were just too weak to continue on. None of them had slept in days. None of them had eaten for at least twelve hours.
Ahead of them, on top of the hill was the jagged outline of a ruined set of fortifications, a black splotch against the dark blue. Already those lights which were available had been turned on, casting out a few muffled points of light.
Melchoir forced himself forward. It was only a few hundred more feet. A quarter mile at most. Then they'd be there.
"Halt!" came a voice from somewhere in front of him.
The officer stopped.
"We're friendly," Melchoir stammered.
A guardsman revealed himself from a shrub on the side of the road. He walked out in front of them, his lasgun leveled at the officer's chest.
"Who is it?" the sentry asked, averting neither his gaze nor his aim.
"I am... Commander Marshall Second Class Melchoir Theleos," he managed to reply.
"What line are you from?"
Melchoir was confused for a moment. "Me? I'm from this one," he replied, mentioning to those few left behind him.
The sentry looked at them as they came up the road.
"Are you responsible for all this?" he asked, motioning at them with his lasgun.
"What?" Melchoir asked, exhausted, "Well, I suppose I am."
***
MRRF 300pts
Adeptus Custodes: 2250pts 
4500 pts
