Chapter 359: Taking the Gate
Once Kian was up on the wall, he turned his attention to the elite cultists blocking the gatehouse.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, shields raised half their own height, wrapped in heavy iron plate, dark visored helmets on, standing like rows of solid iron wall.
Kian could feel the thick Warp taint radiating off them. They'd already received Khorne's blessing, their bodies reinforced with Warp energy. Limited reinforcement, though, still mortal-tier.
Despite Kian's sudden leap onto the wall, these men didn't move, still holding their line across the gatehouse.
Their job was defense, not offense. Killing Kian was somebody else's job, the rest of the garrison's.
Kian had no interest in wasting time on the rank-and-file behind him. He charged straight at the shield wall in front.
His greatsword, disruption field active, came down in one massive, gravity-laden arc.
"Cleave through!" Kian roared.
A blade a meter and a half long, swung with everything behind it, covered an enormous arc.
The disruption-wrapped edge struck shields and the armoured men behind them at once, sparks erupting in a bright line.
There was a crash, and four men went down together, shields shattered on the ground, severed hands, broken weapons, and halved bodies all crumpling in a heap.
One swing, and four men dead.
Kian kept going, three strikes a second, and everything the blade touched, metal or flesh, came apart in two.
The elite shield-bearers cried out in agony. The unbreakable wall of iron came apart in moments, the "hammer squad" simply erased.
Luca's forces surged forward in the same moment, pouring up the ladders in numbers, covering Kian's flank and engaging the rest of the defenders along the wall.
With his back secure, Kian could focus entirely on cutting through the elite line ahead.
His melee proficiency was climbing fast, from just over 100 all the way up to 150 in a matter of minutes.
These elites weren't pushovers, though. Even as their comrades dropped by the handful, they didn't panic, they got more excited.
They pressed in around Kian, swinging their mauls to crack his skull open.
Kian cut fast, and the bodies piled up around him. But their sheer numbers meant a few mauls still connected.
The blows landed hard, ringing off his armour with heavy metallic clangs.
Fortunately, his ceramite plating wasn't something mortal strength could dent. Each hit just gave him a slight push, nothing that could interrupt his motion.
Less than ten minutes into the fight, all two or three hundred elites lay dead, and Kian had already burned through a third of his armour's built-in stimulant reserves.
Fragile as they were individually, the sheer weight of numbers had still been genuinely dangerous.
He'd had to keep his swing rate at a punishing pace just to avoid getting swarmed under and pinned by sheer bodies, and it had taken a real toll on his stamina, enough that he'd needed the stims to keep going.
Fortunately, with the elites wiped out, Luca's main force had surged up and secured the wall.
Kian made his way to the gatehouse itself, where a small iron door blocked the way in.
Two strikes with his power sword and the door was in pieces. He stepped inside.
The gatehouse held an elaborate winch mechanism, built to raise the two-meter-thick ceramite gate.
He stared at the cluttered array of controls, having no idea how to operate any of it.
Just as he was struggling with it, a few Enginseers rushed in behind him, breathless.
Kian breathed a sigh of relief and handed the whole thing over to them. They didn't disappoint, working the control panel with practiced efficiency.
Grrrrrind... grind... grind...!!
The winch engaged, massive gears turning slowly, and the two-meter ceramite gate began to rise.
The drawbridge began to lower in tandem. Once it was fully down, the Knight suits would be able to cross the long, deep anti-cavalry trench.
But watching the gate creak upward and the bridge inch down at this glacial pace, Kian felt his patience fraying. At this rate, they'd be here forever.
"This is way too slow. Can't you speed it up?"
Kian pressed, and outside, waves of battle-cries were already rising, the cultist forces inside the city massing to retake the gatehouse.
"My apologies, my lord, the gate and bridge together weigh over a thousand tonnes. Fully raising and lowering them will take at least an hour."
"Oh, for hell's sake, we have to hold this position for a whole hour?!"
Kian had no good response to that. Nothing to do but head back out onto the wall himself.
By now, the stretch of wall near the gatehouse was firmly held by Luca's men, close to five hundred heavy infantry packed together, shields raised in a defensive knot.
On the far side of the gatehouse, a huge wave of red-cloaked cultists surged forward, trying to retake the position. The battle was already turning into a back-and-forth grind.
To bring Luca, this Freeblade, fully into his fold, Kian had no choice but to throw himself right into the front line, cutting down enemy after enemy with wild swings of his greatsword.
Meanwhile, deep in the center of the Baron's city stood a smaller inner wall, ringing the keep where the Baron himself had once lived.
That inner sanctum had since been seized entirely by the Chaos warlord and converted into his personal ritual den.
After breaking the city, the warlord had slaughtered every living soul inside it, collecting eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight heads and stacking them into eight great mounds of skulls.
Dark blood seeping from those eight grim monuments flowed through pre-dug channels toward a ritual circle at the very center.
Once the offering had steeped for eight full days, the circle would activate, and Khorne would bestow his blessing, in whatever form it took.
Right now, the warlord stood atop the inner wall, gazing out at his eight towers of skulls and the ritual circle slowly maturing at the heart of it all.
"Two more days. Just two more days, and my circle will be complete!"
The warlord grinned, a cruel, satisfied smile, muttering under his breath.
Blessed by his patron god, he stood 2.1 meters tall, every inch of him corded with muscle, the sort of physique that looked like it had been raised on nothing but combat stims for years.
His armour was thick and heavy, and across his back, arranged like the ceremonial banners of a Chinese opera performer, he'd mounted a rack of spears.
Every spear bore a severed head, trophies from his conquest, and mounted proudly among them was the head of the Baron himself, the man who'd once ruled this city.
This warlord had fought through hundreds of battles, large and small, to become what he was now.
He'd started out as an ordinary farmer, once robbed by bandits, who'd fought back with everything he had and killed every last one of them.
From that moment on, something in him changed. His body grew powerful, and something inside him developed an insatiable hunger for violence and bloodshed.
He'd raised a bandit company soon after, roaming and pillaging.
Where other men feared the armoured nobles on their tall warhorses sent to hunt down bandits like him, he'd come to relish exactly that kind of enemy.
Because killing a strong opponent made him stronger still.
Driven by that belief, the warlord had spent his life raising his blade against the strongest enemies he could find.
Victory after victory, battle after battle, and it had won him the favor of his dark god.
He'd grown stronger, and stronger, and stronger.
But now, he'd hit a wall.
No matter how much more he killed, how many more battles he won, none of it seemed to please his god anymore. His growth had gone quiet, stalled.
Then, just when he needed it most, breakthrough had come fast. A voice had spoken to him from somewhere unseen, telling him that if he offered eighty thousand souls to his god, the god would grant him the blessing he most desired.
Overjoyed, he'd launched this massacre without hesitation.
Standing atop the inner wall now, gazing at his eight towers of skulls, the warlord felt something burning in his chest, restless and impatient.
Why did these last two days feel like an entire century?
Just as the thought crossed his mind, a cultist soldier rushed up to him, shouting.
"General, bad news! The enemy's taken the gatehouse! The gate and the bridge are lowering, it won't be long before their war engines are inside the city!!"
"WHAT?!"
The warlord's crimson eyes snapped toward the distant wall in shock.
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