Warhammer: Hail to the Void Lords!.

Chapter 840, 08.839: 'Close-up Meat Grinder'

Subspace transfer has, in reality, torn open a brief crack in non-Euclidean geometry.

What followed was not a sound, but a silent pressure that caused everyone on the bridge, along with the alien's dental fillings, to feel a dull ache, and their eyeballs to bulge outwards due to the sudden change in intracranial pressure.

A psychic shriek, purely of malice, pierced their minds—a silent scream as the veil of reality was torn apart.

One of the Ducali aliens immediately sensed the energy disturbance around it.

The muscles beneath his segmented, gleaming, dark purple carapace tensed suddenly, allowing him to leap backward with superhuman agility, attempting to create distance.

Although the Dark Eldar have used technology to shield themselves from psionic magic from the High Heavens, their ancient and acute senses still react violently to warp fluctuations that are right next to them.

Immediately afterwards, a group of warriors clad in matte black power armor swarmed out from the rift that shimmered with an ominous light.

As soon as they appeared, they rushed toward the tactical stronghold of the bridge like a steel torrent.

The first soldier to charge out immediately became the target of concentrated fire, and a poison crystal bullet whistled through the air.

The sharp monomolecular edge of the crystal grazed the warrior's smooth shoulder armor with a piercing metallic scraping sound before being deflected by the heavy ceramic armor, leaving only a deep and narrow dent on the surface.

Through the crack, one could clearly see the bulging, veiny muscle tissue below, and the synthetic muscle fiber bundles shimmering with a faint light deeper inside, twitching violently from the sudden impact.

Sergeant Valina from Catachan took the lead, her gloved thumb clicking open the safety of the Hellfire with a practiced ease, pointing the muzzle directly at Dukali who was firing.

The next second, before Dukali could even rejoice at the success of his attack or make any dodging maneuvers, he was firmly locked onto by the blood-red target lock frame that lit up in Valina's helmet visor.

Jiong!
With a muffled bang, a powerful focused beam of energy erupted from the Hellfire Gun's barrel, transforming into a blazing red ray that struck the Ducali's breastplate directly.

The high temperature of tens of thousands of degrees instantly melted and vaporized the originally very sturdy blackish-purple carapace, leaving a charred hole on the alien's body with black smoke still rising from the edges and the bone visible.

A fierce close-quarters battle erupted in the confined space of the bridge.

The two sides clashed and fought at close range, the glint of guns and blades intertwining beneath the golden glazed ceiling.

Within seconds, several twisted corpses lay on the cold deck, the air thick with the pungent stench of ozone, burning flesh, and alien chemicals.

However, this was only the beginning of this sudden and intense conflict.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the bridge, several surviving Ducalli aliens were viciously operating the tactical display console.

They were not organizing a defense, but rather carrying out a far more sinister plan: to issue orders in the name of the captain to the engine room located in the heart of the ship, demanding that the plasma engines be overloaded and the self-destruct sequence initiated.

Beneath this magnificent 2.2-kilometer-long warship, tens of thousands of crew members and sailors remained completely unaware.

They were busy at their posts, managing damage to various parts of the ship's hull amidst deafening alarms.

The wailing of the fire alarm drowned out everything, including the faint sounds of gunfire coming from the top bridge.

The crew had no idea that a group of raiders from the Dark City had invaded and taken control of their central nervous system.

Inside the engine room, a technical priest dressed in a crimson robe received instructions from the bridge.

His prosthetic eye gleamed with logical light, scanning the source code of the command. After confirming that the transmission command indeed originated from the captain's command throne, he had no further doubts.

For believers in the Mechanic Church, verified instructions are divine decrees that must be carried out.

He turned around and issued a series of commands to his machine servants and mechanical acolytes in emotionless binary language, beginning to systematically activate the overload program.

The self-destruct procedure is not rushed. The protocol must be transmitted to the end and verified by the physical key on the captain's ID card before the self-destruct procedure is finally activated. This process takes about 5 minutes.

He faithfully performed his duties, unaware that he was personally guiding the giant ship toward destruction, just as the enemy had planned.

"Operation Hellsent Outpost Objective: Deactivate the aliens' unauthorized intrusion into the bridge and interrupt the self-destruct protocol transmission process!"

The voice of the operations commander, Archie, came through clearly through the sound array built into his helmet.

Archie was currently sitting on a rocking shark assault boat, speeding towards the target warship.

As the flagship lord captain, he was granted temporary command authority by Horatio, which allowed him to view the ship status reports automatically transmitted by the Thinker array every 3 minutes from friendly ships, and to control the closed-circuit television inside friendly ships.

On the holographic screen in front of him, he could clearly see a fierce and bloody close-quarters battle erupting on the bridge of the target ship.

The crimson beam of the Hellfire Gun intertwined with the eerie green light emanating from the Ducati weapon, flickering repeatedly on the closed-circuit television screen.

The intense heat released by the high-energy rays can even overload the image sensor, causing the image to become blurry and distorted from time to time.

Ducalli, relying on their superhuman agility and faster killing weapons, are engaged in a desperate struggle with the Hellsoldier.

Despite the power feedback armor that empowers the Hellsoldier, their mortal bodies are ultimately no match for these fallen distant relatives of the once-dominant Aedarin race, who have lived for thousands of years.

In close-quarters combat, the casualty ratio between the Empire and the Xenomorphs reached a gruesome 3:1. It took the sacrifice of three Hellslingers to take down one cunning Ducali.

But the sacrifice of his comrades did not shake the naval special operations force that Horatio had painstakingly built up over four years.

Undeterred by casualties, they surged forth from all sides of the bridge via subspace teleportation, compensating for individual skill gaps with a precise network of fire.

No matter how agile a Ducalli is, it is impossible for him to deal with attacks from the front, side, and back at the same time.

Often, after he gracefully dodged several beams of light from the front and used his ghostly movements to take the life of a scout, he would be pierced through his slender body by another Hell Soldier who had just completed teleportation from the side and rear with a Hell Gun.

This brutal meat grinder was spread throughout every corner of the command bridge.

Captain Patron, hiding behind the communications control console which served as cover, was utterly astonished by the shrewdness of this action force that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

At first, he even thought that the Astartes had come to his rescue.

It wasn't until the Imperial Navy's winged ship's wheel insignia came into view that he was certain these were his own people.

"Assault team! Eliminate the alien on the command throne!" Sergeant Valina ordered over the communications channel.

(End of this chapter)