The lower deck of the Gemstone was rotting.
The Rot-Rust Plague spread silently along the weld seams of the bulkheads and the joints of the conduits as if it possessed a life of its own.
The optical lenses of the surveillance array turned completely opaque, while the signals from the servo-skulls sputtered under the erosion of pestilent vapor before ultimately plunging into dead silence.
Those electronic systems originally meant to monitor every corridor and every hatchway flickered out one by one under the gnawing teeth of the Warp plague, reducing the bottom deck to complete, unseeing darkness.
Yet the expansion of the plague ground to a halt at the boundary line of the mid-deck.
That was where the core compartments of the vessel were located.
The secondary control station for the reactor, the power distribution hub for the main thrusters, the stasis chambers for the Astropaths, the attached chapels of the Ecclesiarchy...
Ever since the day the warship was laid down, these compartments had undergone day-in, day-out applications of holy oils and engravings of litanies by the Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Priests. The blessings of the Ecclesiarchy priests were sealed into the armor plating like overlapping coats of lacquer.
More importantly, these core sectors were far easier for the Machine Spirit to maintain dominance over. Having witnessed the tearing of Warp storms and the detonation of void torpedoes over millennia of voyages, as well as countless attempts at Chaos corruption, the Machine Spirit itself possessed a near-instinctive Warp resistance.
The Rot-Rust Plague slammed into an invisible wall.
The wildly growing rust churned and hissed along the boundary line like waves crashing against a breakwater, only able to creep forward at a crawl.
The lower deck was a murky yellow-green, while the mid-deck remained a frigid metallic gray; the two colors drew a sharp border across the deck plating.
Rear Admiral Dominic stood before the holographic display on the command bridge, his gaze fixed dead on that dividing line.
His knuckles cracked as he squeezed his fingers—a habitual gesture whenever he reached a firm resolve.
"Redeploy all mobile forces immediately to the mid-deck sectors where surveillance remains fully operational," his voice carried not a shred of hesitation. "Abandon all blind spots on the bottom deck—no pointless search sweeps."
"Deploy all heavy firepower positions along the boundary line. Hold only the areas uncorrupted by the plague that offer clear lines of sight; give them no opportunity to fight in the dark."
The orders were dispatched swiftly.
The security forces originally scattered across various levels began pulling back toward the mid-deck. Thirty thousand Naval Guard troops set up layered defenses along the primary corridors, while combat engineers hastily erected temporary blast-barricades and heavy weapon positions at critical tactical nodes.
Since they could not see the enemy in the dark, they would fall back into the light, forcing the opponent to step out of the shadows and face them head-on under the watchful eye of surveillance.
This was the optimal solution Dominic could devise.
On the other side of the dividing line, Phelps recognized this shift as well.
The Death Guard warrior stood inside a thoroughly corrupted maintenance passage on the lower deck. Beneath his boots was a thick, pus-like accumulation of rust fluid, while the conduits overhead continuously dripped foul liquids that struck the rot-covered shoulder plate of his power armor with dull thuds.
His perception had long surpassed the visual limits of mortals; the plague itself served as his eyes. He could "see" the advancing boundary of the pestilant vapor, and he could "feel" the heavy, almost solidified power of faith and the will of the Machine Spirit within the sector ahead.
Progress had stalled.
Not only that, but he also sensed the deployment of the mid-deck defensive line.
It consisted almost entirely of normal mortal naval soldiers—complete unit structures, dense formations, with every node along the defensive line dotted with the spiritual radiance of Ecclesiarchy priests' faith. Those warm, golden specks of light acted like red-hot irons, deterring the pestilant vapor from drawing near.
Under the priests' blessings, the soldiers formed human ramparts—high in morale, steadfast in formation.
This was a layout specifically tailored against his accustomed tactics.
A disdainful sneer pulled at the corner of Phelps' mouth, his rotting lips tearing open several disgusting cracks.
Feints, infiltration, night assaults, utilizing darkness to isolate and encircle... these had indeed been his favorite methods in the past. To strike down the many with the few, to tear apart mortal defensive lines using the tricks of Chaos, and to slowly play with his prey like a cat with a mouse.
However, he was not limited to such methods alone.
Times had changed.
He raised his head, a murky green light filtering through the eye-slits of his decayed helmet.
The narrow corridors of a warship were themselves the finest weapon; no matter how numerous the enemy was, crowding into narrow hallways meant they could never deploy their full numbers. Out of thirty thousand defenders, those capable of contributing to the forward line of fire simultaneously numbered only a few thousand at most.
And now, he held plague vehicles in his hands, possessed a structured army of walking dead, and carried the endless pestilence bestowed by Grandfather Nurgle.
Underhanded tactics? Unnecessary.
A frontal steamroll would suffice.
"Rise," Phelps spoke softly, his voice sounding like rusted machinery grinding together in operation.
His will radiated outward along the network of the plague.
Not long ago, over ten thousand naval soldiers slaughtered by him and his warriors had fallen across various compartments and passages in the lower deck. The Rot-Rust Plague had already seeped into every inch of their tissue, corrupting their bones and muscles, converting their corpses into walking dead that answered to the command of pestilence.
Over eight thousand corpses pulled themselves up simultaneously.
It was a spine-chilling spectacle.
Shattered bones reattached with sickening cracks, exposed internal organs were scooped back into abdominal cavities by rotting fascia, and a murky yellow-green glow flickered within hollow eye sockets. They swayed to their feet, their hands still clutching the lasguns and bayonets they held in life, their movements stiff yet driven by an unyielding sense of direction.
Then, they all marched toward the mid-deck defensive line.
At the same time, the dozens of vehicles infected by the Rot-Rust Plague completed their transformation. Rust crawled over their metallic hulls, viscous pus flowed through their hydraulic lines instead of engine oil, servo-arms twisted into bizarre claws, and the emissions spewed by their starting engines were not exhaust fumes, but yellow-green clouds of plague mist. They let out low, raspy mechanical roars like tubercular behemoths.
Eight thousand walking dead and dozens of plague vehicles formed an army radiating the stench of death and decay.
Directly opposing them was the meticulously prepped first line of defense aboard the Gemstone.
Thirty thousand Naval Guard defenders, heavy weapon positions, blast-barricades, and reconnaissance mines scattered all around the perimeter of the defense line. Those mines had been covertly planted by combat engineers inside maintenance ducts, ventilation shafts, and equipment sub-floors surrounding the position, covering virtually every blind spot where infiltration could occur.
Every single mine was equipped with hyper-sensitive vibration and acoustic sensors; the moment any object approached within trigger range, it would detonate within 0.1 nanoseconds, emitting an ear-splitting directional acoustic shockwave that served as both an early warning and a lethal attack.
It was an airtight perimeter network.
Phelps knew the enemy was on high alert.
The perception of the plague told him that the metal sub-floors around the defense line were packed with tiny devices, every single one exhibiting the signatures of dangerous explosives.
Yet he did not care.
"Forward."
The order was given.
The army of walking dead advanced toward the first line of defense along the main corridor with rigid strides. The plague vehicles traveled along both sides and the front of the formation, their rusted tracks grinding against the deck plating and producing an ear-splitting metallic screech. The entire passage echoed with chaotic footsteps, the roar of engines, and a rapidly intensifying stench of decay.
Two hundred meters, one hundred eighty meters, one hundred fifty meters...
At the defensive positions, the commanding officer gripped the vox-communicator in his hand, cold sweat beading on his forehead.
Something was wrong.
It was far too quiet.
According to the plan, as long as the raiding force approached within fifty meters, the perimeter's reconnaissance mines should have been triggered, or at least a few explosions should have echoed out. Yet now the enemy had advanced to nearly two hundred meters, while the surrounding maintenance ducts and ventilation shafts remained dead silent—not a single mine had detonated.
Were the sensors broken? Or had the Plague Marines simply avoided those routes altogether?
The commanding officer grit his teeth, just about to order a squad to check the condition of the mines along the flanks.
Right at that moment, a gap suddenly opened within the formation of the zombie horde.
Twenty-two silhouettes burst out from the ranks of the walking dead.
Or rather, calling them twenty-two humanoid tanks would be far more accurate.
The Death Guard's power armor glinted with a rusted, dull yellow-green under the corridor lights, every single one significantly bulkier and more swollen than that of an ordinary Space Marine. Those were the blessings of Nurgle—the fusion of rotting, bloated flesh with heavy war-plate.
They took massive strides, the joint actuators of their power armor emitting dull roars as their speed instantly spiked to its absolute limit.
Forty meters per second.
That was the charging speed of a Space Marine.
A distance of two hundred meters took them a mere five seconds.
The Naval soldiers on the line didn't even have time to execute a full response. The riflemen in the front rank had barely swung their muzzles around, the reticles of their lasguns having just caught those rapidly closing figures.
Five seconds was simply too short—so short that most men only had time to squeeze off a single shot.
The Plague Marines had already crashed straight into the defensive line.
BOOM!
The foremost blast-barricade deformed and caved in like papier-mâché before the entire wall, along with several soldiers behind it, was sent flying backward. Rusted power armor propelled by thousands of pounds of force meant mortal flesh and blood lacked even the right to slow down such an impact.
Laser beams struck their war-plate, managing only to scorch shallow burn marks into the surface, unable to penetrate even the outer layer of decayed flesh.
However, Dominic had prepared for this beforehand.
"Spear formation!"
A fierce roar echoed from deep within the position.
Dozens of figures stood up simultaneously from behind cover on both flanks, clad in gleaming, master-crafted power armor.
These were the Ventrian Elites—private troops raised by Dominic's house at astronomical expense. Every single one was a warrior selected from tens of thousands, equipped with the finest gear available. In their hands, they held taser spears over four meters long, the spearheads crackling with the blue light of high-voltage arcs.
This was a killer technique prepared specifically to deal with powerful, singular targets.
Dozens of electric spears thrust out in unison, their tips precisely aiming at relatively vulnerable spots on the lead Plague Marines—joint gaps, optical viewports, power conduits, and similar weak points.
The Ventrian Elites had trained in spear tactics countless times; their greatest specialty was using alternating long and short spear arrays to pin down and slaughter single, powerful foes. Even if the enemy were a Space Marine, they could rely on their formation and the numbing effects of the electric spears to drag them into a relentless battle of attrition.
The grating screech of clashing metal filled the air.
Eleven Plague Marines found themselves ensnared by the spear array.
The high-voltage arcs of the taser spears crackled against the power armor; while hard-pressed to pierce the thick, rusted war-plate, they could interfere with neural fluidity, causing the enemies' movements to stutter and delay.
The Ventrian Elites advanced and retreated in precise order, their spearheads rising and falling like a tightening net, trapping the eleven Death Guard within their formation.
However, Phelps had never intended to tangle with these elites in the first place.
His target from the very beginning had been crystal clear: those priests.
The core of the defensive line was faith. As long as the priests remained, the soldiers enjoyed the protection of the Emperor's Light; their morale would not break, and the Rot-Rust Plague would find it difficult to spread through the crowd. Severing the priests was equivalent to ripping out the spine of the entire defense line.
"You stay and pin them down," Phelps' voice sounded over the vox-channel, turbid and calm. "The Grandfather's blessing is with you. These mortals cannot kill you."
The eleven Plague Marines uttered low grunts of affirmation.
Indeed, they had no need to fear death; Nurgle's blessing granted them a vitality so tenacious it was appalling. Severed limbs could regenerate, and they could continue fighting even with their viscera torn out; as long as their heads and core corrupted organs were not utterly obliterated, they could fight on indefinitely. A mere few dozen mortal elites, no matter how well equipped, would cost them nothing more than a bit of time.
As for Phelps himself, he led the remaining ten Death Guard and bypassed the flanks of the spear formation entirely.
Their trajectory locked directly onto the choir of priests behind the defensive line.
Around the command node where the priests were located, twelve Battle Sisters stood guard with bolt rifles and power swords, forming a tight defensive perimeter.
They were the Daughters of the Emperor, the Order Militant of the Ecclesiarchy. Every one of them had undergone grueling training and the baptism of devout faith; their physical capabilities far exceeded normal soldiers, and their power armor had been thoroughly sanctified.
Seeing eleven Plague Marines flank around toward them, the Sisters did not retreat a single step.
"For the Emperor!"
The Sister Superior barked aloud as their boltguns opened fire in unison. Heavy caliber bolts detonated along the corridor, the flashes illuminating their resolute faces.
Yet the disparity between mortals and these "Fallen Angels" was simply far too vast.
The Death Guard's power armor absorbed the vast majority of the bolt impacts, the explosions only blasting away chunks of rusted plating without inflicting lethal damage. Conversely, every swing of the Plague Marines' rusted battleaxes and plague claws was enough to cleave a Sister in half, power armor and all.
Worse still, Phelps raised his hand and lobbed a grenade.
It was not a Warp plague.
If it were the power of pestilence, the holy prayers of the priests could still cleanse and resist it.
This was an honest-to-goodness chemical gas grenade.
With a dull thud, a grayish-white toxic mist instantly billowed through the corridor. This was military-grade nerve gas; requiring no Warp energy, pure chemical toxicity could paralyze a human's respiratory system and neural responses in seconds.
The priests' prayers failed. The Emperor's blessing could banish demonic plagues, but it could not erase real-world chemical toxins out of thin air.
The twelve Battle Sisters bore the brunt of it.
Although their power armor possessed filtration systems, hastily deployed defenses struggled to fully filter out high concentrations of nerve gas. While the gene-worked bodies of the Sisters far surpassed normal humans—allowing them to endure part of the toxicity—their movements inevitably slowed, their breathing turned heavy, and their hands holding their weapons began to tremble slightly.
Meanwhile, the Death Guard were walking toxic canisters themselves. To them, nerve gas was no different from ordinary air.
The clash devolved into a one-sided slaughter.
The slowed Sisters stood no chance against the Plague Marines charging at full tilt. Rusted battleaxes fell, shearing through power armor like tin cans as blood and bone fragments splattered against the corridor walls. One Sister lunged toward Phelps with her power sword raised, only for him to catch her by the neck; his rusted fingers effortlessly crushed her power armor's neckguard, snapping the cervical spine beneath it.
All twelve Battle Sisters were slain in less than five minutes.
The obstacles were gone.
Phelps led his ten warriors and charged straight into the compartment housing the priests.
The priests were still praying.
Over a dozen Ecclesiarchy priests stood in a circle, holding holy relics and scriptures high. Golden light of faith radiated from their bodies, attempting to hold off the incoming pestilent vapor.
They saw the Death Guard bursting inside; they saw the floor carpeted with the Sisters' corpses. Some turned pale. Others chanted their scriptures even louder, attempting to drive back these minions of Chaos with the sheer power of their faith.
It was useless.
Phelps did not even bother to exchange a single word with them.
The slaughter began.