The doors of the headquarters stood wide open.
Ten Cadian Soldiers marched with synchronized steps, disappearing into the twilight outside, which was shrouded in smoke and the color of blood.
Their retreating figures were like a red-hot branding iron, seared deeply into the retinas of every Dominion soldier in the headquarters.
Colonel Griffith still held his pistol raised, but his arm was trembling slightly.
He wasn't afraid.
He was confused.
He was being struck by something unprecedented, something that transcended all the knowledge he had gathered over his thirty-year military career.
"Colonel... we..." an adjutant spoke with difficulty, wanting to ask what they should do.
Whether they should rush out to fight those monsters to the death, or listen to that madman and hunker down here.
"Watch."
Griffith slowly lowered his pistol, his gaze fixed intensely on the holographic sand table.
On the sand table, the ten blue dots representing Sergeant Baston's squad formed a tiny arrow, actively moving to meet the red tide representing the army of Horned Beasts.
Like a drop of water cast into a sea of fire.
Everyone held their breath.
They wanted to see how these ten mysterious soldiers, who claimed to be "For the Emperor," would be instantly swallowed by that red wave.
...
At the breach in the western city wall.
This place had turned into a slaughterhouse.
Countless Horned Beasts, like a bursting dam, poured in through the massive breach where the wall had been toppled.
These monsters were comparable in size to Earth's rhinoceroses, their bodies covered in rough, dark green skin, with thick limbs and two massive, bone-like horns on their heads that resembled battering rams.
They possessed no intelligence, only the most primal hunger for flesh and an instinct for destruction.
The Dominion Soldiers defending this position had already collapsed.
The red beams fired from their blaster rifles only managed to cause small charred patches on the monsters' bodies, failing completely to penetrate their thick hides.
The shockwaves from grenade explosions only made them stumble slightly.
A soldier had just emptied his magazine and hadn't had time to change it before being gored and thrown by a charging Horned Beast. His body traced a parabola through the air, slamming heavily against a broken wall and turning into a blur of mangled flesh.
Panic was spreading.
The front line was being torn apart and devoured bit by bit.
Just then.
Ten figures appeared at the end of the street.
They marched forward in two columns, neither rushed nor slow, treading with a fixed rhythm.
Their footsteps weren't loud, yet they clearly pierced through all the clamor of the battlefield, like the drumbeats of the Grim Reaper.
The hundreds of Horned Beasts charging at the front noticed these few tiny humans.
Cruel and bloodthirsty glints appeared in their compound eyes.
They let out excited roars and changed direction, charging toward Sergeant Baston's squad like a moving wall of flesh.
The earth trembled.
The surviving Dominion Soldiers closed their eyes in despair.
They couldn't bear to watch those ten mysterious "reinforcements" get crushed into meat paste in an instant.
Sergeant Baston stopped in his tracks.
The nine soldiers behind him stopped simultaneously, their movements so synchronized they seemed like a single person.
"First rank, ready!"
Baston's voice rang out calmly through their internal communication channel.
The five soldiers in the front rank knelt on one knee, steadily bracing their lasguns against their shoulders.
"Second rank, ready!"
The five soldiers in the rear rank stood behind the kneeling ones, their barrels protruding through the gaps between their comrades' shoulders, forming a two-tiered field of fire.
A perfect, textbook double-rank firing formation.
Watching the approaching beast tide kicking up clouds of dust, a cold arc curled at the corner of Baston's mouth beneath his helmet.
"For the Emperor!"
"Fire!"
The moment the command was given.
Ten slender, bright red beams erupted from their barrels.
There was no thunderous roar.
Only a "buzzing" sound, like cloth being torn.
The head of the foremost Horned Beast was instantly pierced as if by an invisible red-hot iron.
A finger-sized hole, its edges scorched into a glass-like state by the high temperature, appeared between its eyes.
Its charge stopped dead; its massive body crashed to the ground, sliding for over ten meters and knocking over several of its kin.
And this was only the beginning.
"Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz—"
The dense, ear-grating tearing sounds merged into one.
Ten lasguns spit out beams of death alternately at a terrifying rate of fire.
They constructed a visible net of fire composed of pure energy.
An unstoppable barrier of death.
Any Horned Beast that charged into this net of fire met only one end.
Being pierced through.
Some had their skulls perforated, their massive heads exploding like watermelons.
Some had their limbs shot off, tumbling to the ground only to be trampled to death by their following kin.
Some were cut clean in half at the waist, their upper bodies still crawling forward while their entrails and green blood spilled everywhere.
Not a single shot was wasted.
Every beam accurately struck a monster.
This was no longer a battle.
This was an efficient, cold, and industrialized slaughter.
The surviving Dominion Soldiers were completely dumbfounded.
Their mouths hung open, forgetting to fire, forgetting their fear, as they stared blankly at this miraculous scene.
That green wave that had once driven them to despair and seemed invincible.
At this moment, it was like crashing into an invisible dam forged of steel and fire.
Countless Horned Beasts charged frantically, only to pile up a mountain of corpses ever higher before the dam in futility.
They couldn't even get within fifty meters of those ten soldiers.
"What... what kind of weapons are those?" a Dominion soldier murmured. "Why... is the power so great?"
"No... it's not a matter of the weapons," his companion said tremblingly. "It's them... it's those people... Look at their movements, look at their eyes..."
Yes, it was those people.
From beginning to end, the expressions on the faces of those ten soldiers never changed.
They were like ten precision killing machines.
Reload, aim, fire.
Their movements were fluid and precise, without a single unnecessary motion.
In their eyes, there was no fear or tension, only a deep-seated hatred for the xenos and a near-fanatical flame called "Loyalty."
"Purge the xenos!"
"For Cadia!"
"Glory to the Emperor!"
They shouted slogans that were unintelligible to their language, yet the killing in their hands never ceased for a moment.
A mutant among the Horned Beasts, twice the size of its kin, braved the barrage of laser beams and forced its way to the front of the line.
It roared, raising its forepaws like giant hammers, intending to crush these tiny humans into pulp.
A soldier in the rear rank calmly stowed his lasgun and drew a rugged-looking single-shot weapon from his back.
A grenade launcher.
He didn't even seem to aim.
He pulled the trigger at the giant beast's gaping maw.
"Boom!"
The high-explosive fragmentation grenade detonated inside the monster's mouth.
Its massive head was blown apart from the inside. The headless corpse lurched forward a few more steps due to momentum before crashing down.
This bloody scene finally seemed to instill fear in these unintelligent monsters.
For the first time, the momentum of the charge faltered.
Sergeant Baston keenly captured this moment.
"Burner squad, purify!"
He issued a new command.
Two soldiers in the squad immediately stepped forward. They lowered their lasguns and took a large metal tank from their backs, along with a nozzle connected to it.
flamethrowers.
"For the glory of the Emperor!"
Accompanied by fanatical shouts, two thick dragons of fire roared from the nozzles.
Scorching, viscous napalm was projected over a hundred meters, covering the largest cluster of Horned Beasts ahead like a rain of lava.
"Aieee—!!!"
Wails so shrill they didn't sound biological echoed across the entire battlefield.
Hundreds of Horned Beasts were instantly ignited into giant torches.
They struggled and rolled frantically, spreading the fire to even more of their kin.
The air became filled with the nauseating smell of burnt protein.
The green beast tide completely collapsed.
They began to turn, pushing and trampling over the corpses of their kin, desperate to escape this fiery hell.
But Baston's squad would not give them the chance.
"Pursue! Leave none alive!"
The ten soldiers marched with steady steps, crossing the defensive line composed of corpses and ash to take the initiative in the pursuit.
Laser beams, fire, and grenades.
They wove together into a symphony of death.
...
A deathly silence filled the headquarters.
On the massive holographic sand table, the red dots representing the Horned Beasts were rapidly melting away and dispersing at a visible rate.
Meanwhile, those ten insignificant blue dots were like a red-hot branding iron, plowing trails of destruction through the red expanse.
Colonel Griffith and all his subordinates stood as if petrified, motionless.
They all shared the same expression.
Shock.
Disbelief.
And an awe toward some transcendent power that came from the depths of their souls.
"The... the casualty ratio..."
A communications officer looked at his data terminal and recited a string of numbers in a voice like someone talking in their sleep.
"Enemy kills confirmed... three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven... three thousand three hundred and fifty-four... still rising..."
"Our side... our side..."
His voice trembled violently with excitement and fear.
"Our side... zero casualties!"
Zero casualties!
These two words were like a heavy hammer striking everyone's heart.
Colonel Griffith's body swayed violently; he nearly lost his footing and had to grab the edge of the sand table.
He thought of General Armitage.
He thought of those high-and-mighty generals who decided their fates.
Did they know?
Did they know exactly what kind of army this "consultant" they sent had brought?
No.
They didn't.
He had a strong premonition.
From this day forward, the war history of the Terran Dominion, and even the entire Galaxy, would be completely rewritten.
The battle ended completely half an hour later.
When Baston's squad stopped their pursuit, not a single Horned Beast could be seen standing in the entire western district.
Mangled corpses and burning ash were everywhere.
But these Cadian Soldiers did not celebrate.
They didn't even rest for a moment.
They skillfully began to clear the battlefield.
Some were responsible for collecting the Horned Beasts' massive bone horns and teeth, perhaps as some kind of valuable war trophy.
Others used flamethrowers to incinerate every xeno corpse into charcoal.
They called it "purification."
Thoroughly, without leaving a trace, they wiped everything that indicated the xenos had existed from this world.
Reinhardt had walked out of the headquarters at some unknown point.
He stood in the middle of the street, watching it all.
Behind him were Colonel Griffith and a group of Dominion Soldiers with complex expressions.
Sergeant Baston walked quickly to Reinhardt and once again performed a standard chest-thump salute.
"My Master, the xenos in this area have been completely purged."
He handed over a post-battle data report.
It recorded the exact number of kills, ammunition consumption, and an assessment of the enemy's unit composition.
Reinhardt didn't look at the report.
He just nodded.
"Very good."
He turned around and looked toward the distant starry sky where General Armitage was.
He knew.
At this very moment, that heavily guarded meeting room must be just like this place.
Filled with a deathly silence.
...
Planet "Iron Wall", Central Command.
Around the massive circular conference table sat the generals of the Dominion.
But no one spoke.
Everyone's eyes were fixed on the central holographic projection, showing the battle footage of less than thirty minutes that had just been transmitted back from Viridian.
The footage had already been played on a loop three times.
They saw how those ten soldiers had stood like boulders, blocking enemies thousands of times their number.
They saw how that laser weapon they had never seen before easily tore through the Horned Beasts' solid defenses.
They saw that extremely cold post-battle procedure called "purification."
General Armitage sat in the primary seat, motionless.
His red cybernetic eye flickered at a high frequency, frantically analyzing every detail in the footage.
His intact human hand was clenched tightly.
He had lost.
His defensive theory, built on reality and compromise, seemed so pale and laughable in the face of the pure, overwhelming aesthetic of violence displayed in this footage.
Reinhardt wasn't a madman.
He wasn't talking big.
The "Mandate," "Crusade," and "Purification" he spoke of...
Behind it all stood a terrifying force capable of dragging the entire Galaxy into the fires of war.
"General..." a young major general spoke with difficulty, his voice a bit raspy from shock. "What... what should we do?"
What to do?
Armitage didn't answer.
He knew that from now on, the choice was no longer in their hands.
With a victory that could be called a miracle, Reinhardt had won the most important capital for himself at this table.
This mysterious "purifier" and the grand yet dangerous blueprint he represented.
The Dominion high command would have to re-evaluate.
And he, Armitage, would have to be the first to face this true "field consultant" who was about to return in triumph.