Chapter 64: Widow Mines and Siege Tanks

Chapter 64: Widow Mines and Siege Tanks

"By the God-Emperor, please, don't kill me! Let us go!" A mother held her child tightly behind her. The dilapidated door to her home had been smashed open.

Her husband already lay by the door, his body half-severed by a chainsword.

Several Chaos cultists, their bodies already beginning to mutate, had broken into her home.

Looking at the mother and daughter before them, these Chaos cultists swallowed with desire.

But no matter how much she begged, she couldn't change her fate. Her resistance was like a pre-dinner appetizer to this group of Chaos cultists, even making them more excited.

In the eyes of these traitors, there was no longer any distinction between man and woman, old or young. Their desperate situation had made them even more insane.

Before long, several more corpses were added to the room.

"Take all the bodies with you, for food!" a leading traitor commanded.

The uphive was short on food, and so was the underhive.

Previously, when the heretics still occupied a large number of industrial facilities, they still had plenty of starch blocks to eat. But as time went on, their living space was continuously compressed. Having lost their processing equipment, they lost their production capacity. Now, they couldn't even eat starch blocks anymore. However, for this group of madmen, this wasn't a particularly big problem.

The gradual deepening of Chaos corruption, coupled with starvation, made them completely abandon their last vestiges of humanity and turn their sights on their own kind.

Since they couldn't process them into starch blocks, they might as well eat them directly.

A massacre was taking place in this residential area of the underhive workers.

The workers' resistance was completely futile.

One by one, corpses were dragged out of their homes. But just as this group of Chaos cultists was about to leave with their spoils, the sound of a Gauss Rifle shot rang out. A spike round, as if smashing a watermelon, blew the head of a Chaos cultist apart.

And at the same time, the engine sound of a Banshee was heard from above.

"God-Emperor preserve us! Enemy sighted! This bunch has killed everyone in this residential area, not even sparing the children! Banshee 7 requests permission to engage!"

"Request to engage approved! Purify every last one of these bastards! Provide firing coordinates for the Siege Tanks!"

Receiving the order, the Banshee pilot, as if venting her fury, fired her ordnance at every traitor in sight.

Plasteel missiles instantly detonated in the densest part of the Chaos cultist group. Then, the Banshee immediately cloaked and ascended, moving away from the battlefield. The underhive, unlike the open sky, had limited height and space.

The Banshee's mission was reconnaissance; if it took concentrated fire, it also risked being shot down.

The traitors fired wildly at the empty sky above, trying to shoot down their unseen enemy, but the Banshee was long gone.

"It's that cloaking aircraft! The False Emperor's soldiers are here!"

The sound of Gauss Rifles and Banshee engines had been like a nightmare haunting the ears of these traitors for days.

They had been chased and driven all the way here.

The shoddy weapons in their hands couldn't even get through the enemy's combat suits. Even if they managed to temporarily penetrate someone's armor, that person would be back in the fight, completely unharmed, not long after.

A 20-man Marine squad, under the cover of a Siege Tank, advanced into this residential area.

They calmly picked off the enemies before them, not even seeking cover. The heavy, massive blast shields in their hands were enough to block most of the incoming fire. The Medics in the squad constantly monitored the status of their comrades.

The Siege Tank began to switch to siege mode. Hydraulic stabilizers extended from beneath its treads, anchoring the tank.

Its cannon barrel began to elevate. The powerful Shock Cannon, guided by the coordinates provided by the Banshee, began to roar.

The surviving traitors began to hide in houses to return fire.

But in the next second, the houses, along with the traitors inside, were blown to smithereens. The resulting shockwave was even powerful enough to rupture the internal organs of these traitors.

And any traitors who rushed out of the houses to attack were torn apart by shells descending from the sky the moment they entered the Siege Tank's range!

"How many of them are there!"

"There are only about 20 of them, and one tank!"

"A tank? That's no Leman Russ! I've never seen that model before!"

The traitor couldn't understand why, after living on Agathos for so many years, that Rogue Trader would have so many things he'd never seen before the moment he returned.

A traitor peeked his head out to look outside.

"Twenty men?! Damn it, only twenty men?! Get them! Circle around from the side! We have a full five or six hundred men, can't we take down 20 men and one broken tank?!"

The leading traitor had been blinded by rage.

He directed his remaining men to begin flanking the Raiders' side. The complex residential area provided temporary cover for these traitors.

Some of the flanking traitors even had large amounts of explosives strapped to their waists. "If guns can't get you, then I'll take you with me!" The traitors didn't believe that even if the enemy could block bomb fragments, they could also block the high heat of melta and the force of an explosion!

The traitors who successfully reached the flank howled as they charged out of the houses. There were only 20 opponents; as long as one person could reach that squad of the False Emperor's soldiers, they would be finished!

But just as they charged out, they realized something was wrong.

Even if the enemy was overconfident, they wouldn't just completely ignore suppressive fire, would they? Seeing a group of madmen charging towards them, even on pure instinct, they should have fired a couple of shots in their direction, right?

But these traitors saw that the soldiers on their flank only turned to glance at them once before no longer paying them any attention, continuing to focus on the battle before them.

Unreasonable… this was too unreasonable.

Closer, they were getting closer. Just as they thought they were about to succeed, they heard a faint beeping sound from in front of them. Then, a small missile launched from seemingly empty space on the flank of that Dynasty squad and, as if with automatic tracking, flew towards them. And at the location where the missile appeared, a mechanical device buried deep in the ground revealed its form.

It was a Widow Mine!

The heretics, charging at full speed, had no time to dodge.

The Sentinel Missile exploded, and the explosives they carried on their bodies only accelerated their deaths.

The explosion of the Sentinel missile, combined with the sympathetic detonation of the explosives on their bodies, destroyed everything around them. Their physical bodies were directly vaporized under this power, not even fragments could be found.

The threat on the flank was resolved just like that. Nearly a hundred traitors died under the attack of a single Widow Mine.

"This thing called a Widow Mine is really useful. Now we don't have to worry about our flanks being attacked."

"Don't get distracted! The battle isn't over yet!" the squad's officer reminded everyone.

Even before the battle began, Widow Mines had already been deployed to bury themselves on the squad's flanks.

Their four metal claws could break through even metal-plated ground.

And the towering pillar of fire from the explosion left the leader of this traitor contingent completely dumbfounded.

Where did this heavy firepower come from?!

After dealing with the trouble on the flank, the squad's offensive pace began to quicken.

When it came to close-quarters combat, the combat suits still held an overwhelming advantage. Even if the enemy was mutated by the influence of the Warp and had increased physical strength, it was far from the enhancement provided by the combat suits.

When the last heretic was killed, the reconquest of this area was complete.

"By the God-Emperor… they must have suffered a lot before they died."

Looking at the corpses of the brutally massacred underhive laborers, a Marine said with pity.

"Hurry up and search for survivors! Medics, see if there's anyone who can be saved! In teams of two, don't miss a single house. Who knows if any of these traitors are hiding in one of them."

Twenty men, with zero casualties, had eliminated a remnant force of over 500 Chaos cultists.

Numerous such small squads were currently operating throughout the underhive.

Widow Mines excellently compensated for the lack of manpower. Most squads were not equipped with a Siege Tank as standard, but each would be assigned a Widow Mine.

And besides these accompanying Widow Mines, the main thoroughfares connecting the various areas of the underhive, as well as numerous unguarded secret passages, were also mined with them. The Widow Mine's IFF system would not attack passing friendly forces, but if any unlucky individuals tried to sneak through or launch a surprise attack while there were no soldiers on guard, they would immediately be greeted by a Sentinel Missile, and the sound of the explosion would also alert nearby soldiers.

(End of Chapter)