The purestrain struck with all four arms at once.
Its upper pair of serrated claws drove into the Nob's abdominal cavity. The smaller lower pair locked onto the Nob's belt, fastening the creature to that mountain of green flesh like a parasite.
The Nob let out a roar that shook the corridor.
It grabbed the purestrain's body with both hands, trying to tear the thing off itself.
But the purestrain's claws had already pierced through the abdominal wall. The chitinous blades churned inside the Nob's gut, slicing through every blood vessel and organ they could reach.
The Nob's strength began to drain rapidly.
At last it ripped the purestrain off its body, but the price was a gaping hole in its abdomen the size of a football. A length of green intestine slid out through the opening.
With one hand, the Nob stuffed the intestine back into its stomach.
With the other, it smashed a fist into the purestrain's head.
The purestrain was hurled backward, spinning twice in midair before landing cleanly on its feet. A spiderweb crack had appeared across its skull, but all four arms spread wide again, ready to attack once more.
Lawson watched all of it in silence through Shared Awareness.
He was waiting for the moment when both sides had fought hardest, were most exhausted, and had suffered the greatest losses.
The casualties kept climbing during that stretch of fighting. Greenskin corpses and hybrid remains carpeted the floor of the corridor in a thick layer. The armor of the two Nobs was hung with strips of purple flesh, and even the chitin plates of the three purestrains were crisscrossed with green gouges from Ork blades.
Forty minutes later, the balance in the corridor finally shifted.
The greenskins had dropped from five or six hundred to fewer than two hundred.
The Genestealer force had been reduced from two or three hundred hybrids to less than eighty, and one of the three purestrains had had the two left-side arms smashed apart by a Nob's giant fist.
The bare-handed Nob finally collapsed from blood loss.
The other Nob was still fighting, though its left arm had been cut halfway off by a purestrain's claws.
Both sides were exhausted.
"Now."
Those two words cut through forty minutes of silence like a blade.
Lawson's order passed through Shared Awareness to every team involved in the operation.
For this strike, he had committed four full squads: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta.
Forty men in total.
The remaining two squads stayed behind to hold the stronghold.
Alpha and Beta attacked from the north side of the corridor, behind the greenskins.
Their target was the remains of the greenskin force.
A twenty-man volley in the narrow passage became a moving wall of fire.
Boom boom boom boom!
Boltguns and lasguns fired together.
The greenskin remnants, already mauled by their bloody struggle with the Genestealers, were taken completely by surprise and caught in the back.
The last Nob still fighting did not even have time to turn around before four bolts struck it in the back at once.
Two hit the armor and glanced off.
The other two mass-reactive rounds detonated inside the muscle tissue of its back, blowing several ribs apart from within.
The Nob staggered forward and crashed down, landing directly on top of a hybrid that had been about to lunge at it from the side.
Two creatures from different factions ended up tangled together in an absurd pose.
Number One finished it with another shot.
The bolt entered through the back of the Nob's skull and exploded inside the cranial cavity.
[Life Points +25]
The hybrid pinned beneath the Nob was still struggling.
Number Seven stepped forward and brought his chainsword down, severing its head from its neck.
The system displayed a prompt Lawson had never seen before:
[Detected xeno lifeform, Genestealer subspecies/hybrid, killed.]
[Biomass energy extraction complete.]
[Biomass +13.]
Biomass.
Another new resource type.
Lawson had no time to study it. The battle was still going on.
Gamma and Delta swept in from the flanks of the corridor, targeting the remaining Genestealer force.
These hybrids were harder to deal with than greenskins.
Even after spending huge amounts of stamina in the earlier fight, even after being reduced from two or three hundred to less than eighty, they still retained frightening tactical coordination.
When Gamma's first volley poured in, the hybrids scattered to either side at a reaction speed that bordered on the supernatural. It was as if they had predicted the bullets before they arrived.
The broodmind's psychic coordination network. If one hybrid saw the muzzle flash, then all of them saw it.
But they were tired.
Wounded.
The speed of that psychic network was already visibly slowing.
Lawson caught that instantly.
"Focus fire on the same target! Do not spread your shots!"
Gamma's ten men concentrated all fire on a single hybrid trying to dodge to the right.
Three bolts and four las-bursts slammed into its torso at once.
The hybrid's chitin plates shattered under the bolt impacts, and the las-beams burned smoking holes into its purple-gray flesh.
[Biomass +13]
"Again. Next target."
Through Shared Awareness, Lawson locked targets one after another, concentrating the fire of ten guns onto the same point in a single second.
A hybrid's psychic prediction might let it dodge one or two shots.
It could not dodge ten guns focusing on it at once.
One after another, they fell.
But the purestrains were not nearly so easy to handle.
The wounded purestrain whose two left-side arms had been destroyed by the Nob still displayed a terrifying level of combat ability, even with only the two right-side arms remaining.
It was at least three times faster than the hybrids.
When Delta fired a concentrated volley at it, the creature's body shifted two full meters sideways in an instant in a manner that seemed to defy inertia. All ten shots missed and struck the place where it had been standing a moment earlier.
Then it counterattacked.
Numbers Thirty-One and Thirty-Four of Delta were hit at the same time.
Number Thirty-One had his chest torn open by the claws, his right lung wounded.
Number Thirty-Four had his left arm severed cleanly at the elbow.
"Numbers Eleven and Fifteen, close in from both flanks! Box in the crippled purestrain!"
Crossing fire from multiple directions forced the purestrain to devote all of its remaining attention to evasion.
It was still fast.
But not fast enough anymore.
Losing two arms had severely compromised both its balance and its ability to control its body in midair.
When it tried to launch into another one of those leaping assaults, its posture in the air slipped by the slightest fraction.
That instant was enough.
Lawson burst out from flank cover, raised the plasma pistol in his right hand, and aimed at the purestrain's exposed abdomen in midair.
Hiss!
The plasma round struck the creature's abdominal cavity at high speed.
The instant it touched the chitin plates, three thousand degrees of heat vaporized them, then bored deeper into the body and turned the organs inside the abdomen into blackened cinders.
The purestrain spasmed once in midair, crashed down, twitched for two seconds, and went still.
[Biomass +30]
Lawson's brow lifted slightly.
There were still two intact purestrains on the battlefield.
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