Chapter 403 - Far Future Ch. 113 – Swords and Hammers against Xenos (1/2)

The carapaces of even the base Xenos were remarkably resistant to laser fire, both reflecting and ablating much the most common weapon of the human Planetary Guards that were their most dangerous opponents.

Sun Shots empowering hot plasma, heavy neutrons, slugs, lightning charges, force lances, and sonic waves, not so much.

While there were suborned PG regiments, they'd been identified and were the first things eliminated. The Mech and Cavalry units had managed to remain fairly clean, as had most of the air cover. The skies were still dangerous places to be with the immense amount of air defenses unrolled from fallen bloks and the enemy heavy units that had breached the Shield Wall... and citizens were not excited to find out that the curious creatures from outside the Walls that made for fantastic documentaries and fight shows were not at all friendly in person, either.

Estimates were that at least a hundred million citizens had been virus-pslaved, and were united and under fairly centralized control. Suborned citizens had gotten in everywhere, and sabotage was ongoing and devastating.

Naturally, there were dozens of unwanted factions taking advantage of the chaos to pull shit, from nobles administering comeuppance to thieves and looters stealing everything not nailed died... to dozens of Warp cultists here to greet the end times and spectacularly make everything go as wrong as possible. Ambushes or explosions in the middle of a successful defense turning it into a disaster happened more than once, and the first few days of the city were horrible. More than a few bloks that had been sealed against the invasion and incursion were betrayed from within, opened from within, or those within simply slain like offerings. A day later, new xenosyms were boiling out of such bloks in massive numbers to add to the fighting.

In certain areas, the hellacious fighting and psychic discharges had attracted Warp energies, and uncontrolled rifts blew open. The shrieking hordes of the Warp came howling out for the blood of anything and everything. Happily, they killed the xenos as readily as anything else, but their taste for civilians was every bit as rabid as the aliens. Slaughter was on the menu, and they were determined to make it a buffet.

Hundred of square miles of Janus Prime were buried in blood and gore, all of which was happily sucked up by harvesting xenos to turn into more syms...

At the same time, there were pockets of fighting that were establishing solid defenses and only getting stronger.

Of the hundreds of Spires that dotted the city, only three had completely fallen, while combat was raging in about four dozen others, and the rest were simply defying the pressure from below with multiple layered defenses, Sealed against anyone and anything from outside. The fact that the Xenos couldn't mobilize any aerial attack force that could really threaten the Spires had a lot to do with it, along with the presence of Mentats who weren't murdered in time to prevent them from being useful.

The Pstatic Towers screeching their telepathic interference into the ether also hampered the enemy. Going from a functional hivemind to needing relays to work together, and that interference only getting worse if an active psion was contributing to it, turned an instantly responsive and agile attacking force into a slowed, lagging army, not much better than their human opponents.

The human forces in Janus Prime seemed to organize who was trustworthy and who was not remarkably quickly, and recognize areas lost and safe with astonishing speed. These areas quickly became bastions for the Planetary Guard to land in and operate from.

The xenos were not expecting the sheer level of violent resistance that came from Underspire, an area that they were sure would be theirs with their numbers and natural advantages. The Skraelings and Themis led a screaming resistance of the Undermobs that often involved collapsing huge areas downspire, burying the xenos and the dead they wanted to salvage, flooding areas with acids, poison gas, and flames, and if cost them thousands of civilians to win, then those civilians died. As long as they weren't recycled, it was a win.

The Soylent processing centers, in the face of so much death, underwent massive necroic events, and hundreds of thousands of animated cyber-zombies clambered up to join in the fun. The Steiners vacated the areas as the xenos streamed in to harvest the biomass, and found themselvar tangling with the undead who didn't care exactly what kind of the living they got to kill. Massively poisoned tanks and feeds greeted all attempts by the xenos to get at the biomass, and tens of thousands of vatted Family members were alternately spawned early and thrown into the fight, or killed and turned into toxic sludge that couldn't be harvested as the heavily assaulted vat areas were blown apart with lethal enthusiasm.

The xenos and cerevores very specifically did not expect assaults to be coming down from the surface into their supply centers and bases of operation.

Glowing swords, huge men in armor, death from shadows, and flashing Cloaks. These things flickered across the collective racial memory of the Xenos, and what might pass for dread slowly began to trickle through the collective. In dark and narrow places where unlimited numbers counted for very little, untiring lights rose and charged forwards, ignoring psychic powers, rivers of acidic blood, and screaming black-carapaced horrors as they reduced existential nightmares from before humanity rose from reptiles to a single thing.

Karma.

Watching a wave of cloaked, howling Coronal Guards going over a barricade into the teeth of tens of thousands of pslaves and rivers of xenos, waving glowing Swords and Hammers like shining waves of destruction, mindclaws ripping, Shields humming and taking those charges like exploding walls, did impossible wonders for morale. The fighting power of the Coronal Guards and the units attached to them was so murderous the whole invasion force started to pivot to try to compensate for them... exactly as intended, drawing attention away from more vulnerable areas.

Then there was the Green and Gold pushing back against them, the Rantha Corporate Zone turning into one of the central deployment areas for the Planetary Guard to deploy from.

Just as there were sections of the city completely lost to the invasion, others were hardly touched, and became bases for hastily-raised defenses and sources of manpower for the Juris-led militia, gangs who suddenly found many, many ex-gangers coming out of the woodwork to organize a resistance, and tens of thousands of Planetary Guard moving into attack.

Down in the dark spaces, Umbral Striker teams were slagging key tunnels and transit points, squeezing the movement options of the Xenos swarm tighter and tighter, making their infiltrations of new areas of the city more and more difficult. This continued deeper and deeper in relentless fashion, and the tentacles that had been extended all over the Undercity began to cut off one by one in methodical, coordinated, and lethal fashion, glowing claws and shadows the last things thousands of syms saw before they died.

The Mentat resistance was all focused on the Spires, preventing the swarms from getting to the most skilled, valuable, and richest members of the city. They swept ruthlessly for Pslaved and cerevore infiltrators, and swept climbers from the glittering walls with mass attacks, teams contesting against any concentrations of 'vores with psychotechnic displays of unleashed psionic power.

The bombings began in earnest, scores of acres of city streets drowning under each fuel-air bomb, and if the Pslaves couldn't get off the streets, they were blown to ash, while the reinforced bloks weathered the blasts with fair impunity.