Liam, cool under pressure, simply changed the angle of his weapon a little, aiming for the swarm heading their way and then let's rip on full auto again.
"THEY ARE NOT DONE YET! THERE ARE MORE OF THEM IN THE POOL! CLOSE IT!"
Liams salvo is precise and the heavy bolt shells certainly overkill for those targets, making every hit a (messy) kill.
And he scores 6 of those in his first volley, reducing the number of incoming airborne to a single ugly frakker.
Meanwhile, while loading carefully, Cecil nudges Liam in the side, leaning in to make him understand her:
"Hey Li... any idea how one 'closes' a massive pool of warp goo - asking for a friend?"
"Not good, not good, bigger things coming"
Swinging his odd shaped las wpn to the shoulder, Ikrit takes a moment to aim and shoots the cherub fly in one of its multi-faceted eyes.
Hopefully that's one of those secret dangerous lores the father might know, or the astartes.
Failing that, enough high explosives tends to be an all solving hammer to most problems."
MacGuyver knows for a fact that he has nothing that can help with the new assailants, so he continues his mission and scouts out their exit.
Ikrit blasts the last thing approaching the left walkway out of the air, while MacGyver deftly slides down the ladder leading down to the third platform and promptly vanishes in the labyrinthine conditions of toppled crates, (occasionally) twitching bodies and other detritus.
Kenneth loudly proclaims HIS power and protection, faced with an absolute hurricane of (small) (disgusting) daemon-machines flying towards him. Around him, ratlings and remaining troopers alike open up with rapid fire. 4 out of 7 heading towards Kenneth are shot down by a mix of improvised blackpowder shots and lasgun (and -pistol) fire. The first thing to hit the imperial rearguard (ignoring the two Magi currently backpedaling across the stairway connecting platform #1 and #2, shooting at the grotesque monsters now piling out of the bulkhead to your rear) is the absolutely vile stench of the flying things, which makes your sense of smell want to quite right now and never come back, your eyes to water and burn as well as every breath an act of sheer will.
But Kenneth has expected this daemonic aura and his preaching proves superior and the men (and local ratling women) around him are able to stand and fight.
Then the flapping and ... giggling (!) things are among the priest and his flock (consisting of Jeff and a not-quite-a-dozen-anymore ratlings). The three mini-daemon-machines hack and bite after several ratlings blocking their path towards Kenneth. One ratling manages to block a snapping maw with a riflestock, two others go down screaming and thrashing. The screaming part quickly turns into gurgling and then even that stops although the trashing continues for some time yet. Thankfully most of their bodies are covered by the ratlings cloaks, because what little is visible looks horrendous.
Simmins is shortly debating whether to go back along the walkway and open fire on the pool-of-daemon-spitting-goo but then thinks better of it and turn his melta down at a large concentration of enemies on the third platform and puts the Emperor's heat into them, turning a trio of mutants clustered around a NCO looking traitor guardsman into steaming chunks, opening the left flank of the platform wide and reducing the enemy presence MacGyver has to traverse.
Curse those slow moving mechanicus bastards! If you are going to replace all your flesh, how about some damn wheels or something, huh?
Having temporarily gotten rid of the pesky fliers, Liam refocuses on covering the mechanics retreat.
"Come on! Come on you bastards! Come on! No more dying! Dying is for the enemy!"
MaxGuyver proceeds to scout their exit.
Simmins packs up the melta and takes out his shotgun and uses the general chaos to try and move unnoticed after Mac.
Moving quickly whilst ushering along his fellow ratman with the recharging pack, Ikrit scuttles all the way along the walkway until he reaches the ladder. Setting up his rifle he then takes aim at the pile of goo.
Kenneth wants to spare a moment to honor the fallen but there is really no time.
"His majesty will take care of their souls and the fire will take care of their bodies. We need to keep moving."
And he does as he says - moving along the walkway while he switches out the cartridge in his flamer for a new one.
Kenneth while his hand flamer's burst was not quite enough to incinerate the daemons from reaching and killing the heroic ratlings, it was quite enough to end their unlive (in this reality at least) soon after. They crumple into organic ash and blackened pieces of corrupted machinery as well as a dissipating, low-level screaming you hear inside the head rather than with your ears. Following this assault, Kenneth is easily able to rally the locals and Jeff into action and they rush to help the group around Sgt. Seth. Lacking the incendiary response of Kenneth, they fared worse and are locked down in a nasty close quarter battle with five of the plagued creatures, with three casualties among the ratlings already.
MacGyver scouts ahead, risking much and relying on speed and the chaotic battle environment to keep him covered, which does in fact work out remarkably well. Once, nearly by the bulkhead out of this messy room, he nearly stumples into a trio of traitor guardsman after rounding a stack of shipping crates. They are however, busy hastily assembling a tripod mounted heavy tri-barelled rocket launcher but it is pretty clear to the scout that they won't finish in time to deploy it against the astartes - unless something manages to halt their unrelenting advance. He deploys his auspex and gets a clear reading for the way ahead - as far as the auspex range goes, which is only a few dozen steps beyond the bulkhead but that is something at least. He then metaphorically jumps out of his boots, together with the traitors, as something clatters off a nearby stacked crate and bounces noisily away. As he hastily checks his six, he finds Simmins rushing to his side and sliding into cover, shotgun barrel still slightly smoking from the distracting scattershot.
Liam lays down some more suppressive fire against the monsters, yes it worryingly is plural at this point, in the room. The Magi he this covers make decent progress, now reaching the second flight of stairs leading from the lower second to the raised third platform but clearly their heavily augmented frame is not ment to quickly climb stairs and they slow right back down again. The one with the ranged weapon however shoots and hits the closest monster with the powerful energy weapon, vaporising one leg and sending it tumbling and falling right over the edge of the platform to plummet down.
The monster however manages to turn mid fall and arrest i's fall by slashing one of its claws into the underside of the stairs leading from first to second platform and quickly moves out of sight along the underside!
Ikrit hastily repositions to be ready to target whatever appears next to ruin everyone's already miserable day... So he is the first to get a (debatable) good look at a massively bloated body heaving itself out of the goo-pool. The more of it surfaces the lower the level of the pool gets, as if actual laws of physics were involved for once. It is bloated beyond reason and fat and covered in pus, wounds and all kinds of skin sicknesses imaginable and then some.
What emerges clearly should not be and all of a sudden and for everyone at once, a truly, truly awful stench assaults your senses and make you gag, your vision swim and ...
A vision suddenly overcomes you, eradicating reality completely and affecting all your senses.
You find yourself drowning in the decomposing matter of the entirety of the galaxy's biomatter while an unrelenting force of DECAY is slowly, unrelentingly rips tiny bits of your being away. Some of it is being added to the swamp of decayed reality.
Some is taken up to form new life.
Monstrous, bloated, horrifying life...
You cannot bear and and violently vomit a huge, unnatural huge spray of goo the color of the pool.
There are things inside your vomit.
Slimy things that look like a disgusting mix of inner organs and bloated eel.
The things inside your vomit start to wiggle, spasm and move.
They coalesce, rapidly merging and devouring each other until 1d3 fat, little, one eyed creatures have formed and emerged from your very own vomit!
MacGuyver is assaulted full force by the warp. He has visioss of drowning in rot, then his guts nearly explode out of his midsection! He groans and curses even as he fires his weapon at the men setting up the stubber. He reports to the magi and astartes, Heavy weapon setup at my position.
But his shot is well wide of any true target.
Being in position and keyed up for new enemies, Ikrit spots the creature emerging and takes a quick aim and shot before the full horror of the creature becomes clear to him through his sights.
The sheer horror of this foul monstrosity then completely overloads Ikrit's senses and all he sees is the cycle of decay before his guts cramp horrendously spewing forth everything he contains and more. His brain filled with nothing but the scent of rot and the constant patterns of decay, Ikrit squirts an animal musk in fear as he clutches at his belly waiting, hoping and praying for the intense spasms to pass.
As he bends over and some semblance of sense comes back to him, Ikrit glances down at his own vomit and sees it beginning to move and a creature emerges from the gruesome, stinking pile of bodily fluids.
Everything becomes too much and Ikrit just scrabbles back trying to flee.
Despite ALL OF THAT and the literal vomit monsters scuttling near his feet. Somehow, MacGuyver keeps it together.
Kenneth falls down to one knee and empties his stomach just as everyone else around him. And stuff starts crawling inside it!
He is shaken for a moment but he grasps his rosarius and his heart turns towards his believe in his holy majesty - giving him the strength to shake off the fear of what just happened.
He stands back up, dousing the forming creatures before him - and possibly around him if the others aren't more steadfast than him - with flames from his newly refilled hand flamer.
Taking heart he breathes in deeply and bellows loud enough for everyone to hear:
"Stand tall! If you falter now not only will you fail his majesty but you will also forfeit your immortal soul! Take strength from him on earth in this time of need!"
It is not the MOST inspiring thing that could be said in this situation but coming from a priest with vomit stains down his front - making him the same as everyone else in that regard - standing tall nonetheless, standing in a sea of flames with burning plague creatures perishing in the flames... it does have an inspiring ring to it.
... especially if you consider that his kind is all to well known to put the fire not only to those who are very, very obviously the enemy of mankind but also those who, as far as they are concerned, have failed their fellows.
Liam, no better of physically than the others, begins to empty his guts, fortunately, since he already had before, his stomach is already empty and all he can manage is a little green bile.
Kenneth does as untold numbers if other Adeptus Ministorum priests have done before him (the truly successful ones at least): sharing the burden of their flock, enduring everything the galaxy has alongside them and yet stand upright and loudly proclaim the word of the creed: the Emperor is a God and he is divine. Immediately dousing the warp spawn in his own vomit is not only helping with the very real issue of impending attack while making for a good, very visual show it also helps removing the shameful evidence in the shortcomings of his mental defense nicely. His immediate flock of ratlings and a lone guardsman would have dissolved into pure, animalistic flight instinct at this point we're it not for him though, so there is that. His group dies face the problem of a good 30 plus wriggling warp spawn rising from various vomit pools, coalescing into larger things. Where three met, they grow to scrumball sized creatures with lolling tongues and sick teeth. In one instance, where seven meet, a roughly human sized cyclops begins to form...
MacGyver is doubling over and emptying his stomach as most of everyone in the room but gets up quickly to put a silenced round through the exposed neck and into the head of one of the enemy troopers readying the tripod-launcher. The group is actually also vomiting so it takes them a while to notice that their companion is actually dead from a gunshot. . Simmins beside him is quivering and starring down at the pool of his own vomit, then up at MacGyver with a pretty devastated expression and clearly at a loss what to do.
Liam experiences the vision but his iron physique is able to shrug off the worst of the foul power and he is ready to act on paar with the marines and Magi, both of which seem to spring back into motion nearly at the same time as Liam - although one of the Marines (their leader?) seems to have resisted the vision or whatever the warp that was just now and is busy systematically murdering the flying things that caught up with the spearhead. Then he hears a heart-wrenching sob-sigh beside him and feels Cecil falling beside him. Looking down, you see her curled up in a fetal ball inside a spreading pool of her own vomit, an odd terrified-blank expression on her face and little, writhing things slowly crawling up on her from the pool.
Ikrit doubles down, empties his stomach, sees what writhes within and legs it. Well he tries but so is his loader, although in different direction. Which is a bit of an issue if your linked by a quite durable power cable. They start running in panic and then go down in a confused-panicked rabble. While both struggle to free themselves, the rousing speech of the holy man finally manages to ring true and snap them out of it to find themselves face to face with two tiny, sick vomit monsters.
From the front part of the lefter walkway, steaming can be heart and the barking voice of Sgt. Seth echoes about:
"It's just existential threat to the entire material realm - what's there to fear when there are traitors in front of you, ready to be killed?!"
Kenneth takes a quick look at the forming nurgle daemons and the overall situation and makes a decision:
"Everyone with me, move forward past me! Let me handle the treat behind and go forward to help Sergeant Seth"
He steps aside to let everyone else on the walkway past him.
He's not idle tho he takes out his last remaining hand flamer cartridge and unscrews the fuel opening. He does not intend to reload. Instead once everyone is past him he takes a few steps away from the forming monsters and throws in the cartidge which is nicely leaking promethium - hopefully forming a line of promethium he can use as a fuse.
Then he'll either light the 'fuse' promethium line with his hand flamers nose light OR if none forms he'll just send in a cone of flame to ignite it that way.
His theory, based on his basic knowledge of war, is that the promethium contained in the cartidge will ignite and rapidly expand. Too rapidly for the cartdige to hold it. Which will
a) explode
b) spray the burning promethium, which was not used up in the explosion because of the lack of oxygen in the container, everywhere forming a sea of flames that may or may not finish off whatever "survived" the explosion
=5
MacGuyver tries to put another man down with a second shot. He then moves around his cover toward Simmins and pulls the shocked trooper forward into cover and out of the direct firing line of a heavy weapon. Well, he tries to. But Simmins is a LOT bigger and heavier than the little, scrawny scout trooper, so it takes just about everything MacGuyver has left just to get the big guy to stumble out of the Dead Zone of the triple barrel rocket launcher.
Scrag it all! Cecil, girl...
Liam's atrophied empathy flares up, but he realizes he can't afford to tend to her immediately.
One more round should allow the magos to finally make a getaway, and then he can collect Cecil and begin to retreat.
With a truly heartfelt sigh, Liam turns bakc and sends one more full auto volley at the enemies menacing the retreating magoses.
"Die you heretic bastards! DIE!!!"
"Magos! Be aware, the enemy is not down and out, it's merely clinging to the underside of the walkways!"
Still tangled in the power cable of his weapon and unable to bring it to bear, Ikrit drops his rifle to snatch the pistol from its holster at his waist. Stepping back as he does this he grips the oversized pistol in both hands and fires point-blank at the horrors that are crawling from his vomit, his natural sniper instincts, making him aim for the head despite his panic.
Kenneth remembers a cunning albeit unorthodox tactic used by some of the Imperium most notorious flamethrower wielding troops and quickly strives to implement that tactic to cover their advance (retreat) by a wall of flame.
What he did not consider, is the fact that his promethium tanks are locally supplied ones, as replacement to the spent ones from the initial battle upon landing on this planet.
And the locals use the pretty rare Gryphon IV pattern instead of the nearly universally favored Mars pattern. Which means that his intention to carefully open the valve is actually triggering emergency venting of the highly-pressured, highly-refined promethium next to an already burning pool of the same liquid...
"What are you plan-", is all one of the locals is able to squeak before a pencil thin stream of highly-pressured promethium is jetting out the tank! The many things happen in rapid succession. The ratling is hitting Kenneth's arm, which send the tank spinning away, propelled as much by the punch as by the uncontrolled venting of pressured liquid. The jet of liquid does catch on fire after the second turnabout, causing fire to rapidly expand "upstream" but as it finally reaches and detonates the tank, it has already spun off the walkway and halfway down the chasm, causing no harm to anyone you care about.
"Come-run, holy-man, yes-yes.
We leave bad-foul place now-quick."
And he grabs you under the left arm and pulls you up, as two other ratlings spray a the closing pukelings with solid sots from their single-shot slug pistols.
MacGyver hits the second loader into the unprotected arm pit, causing him to shout and writhe in agony with lots of blood pumping out at a worrying pace. The last thing MacGyver notices before dragging and vanishing with Simmins around a corner is the last enemy whirling around, catching his thrashing companion and simultaneously trying to stem the bleeding, get into cover and find the hidden shooter. You do not get the feeling he notices you.
Liam continues his fully automatic onslaught, while keeping half an eye on his catatonic loader and the rapidly dwindling length of his ammunition belt - causing his covering fire to loose some of its previous precision. At first it seems the Magi are not aware of his warning as they continue their measured pace over the second flight of (corpse covered) stairs, leading up to the third platform. But as soon as the last of the two (the melee variant, which by now certainly has less mechanical appendages than he had before) the stairs quake, ripple and then scatter for no apparent reason, sending the closing in monstrosity underneath to tumble into the bottomless pit below.
Ikrit wiggles up and out of his cumbersome weapon and places a wonderful shot from his solid slug pistol right into the left disgusting eye of the tiny writhing pukeling. It disintegrates so fast, it does not even has time to make any sound at all.
MacGuyver voxes back, <<Emplacement temporarily neutralized. One contact remaining.>> He then nods to Simmons and motions around a crate. He hand signals for flanking attack while MacGuyver covers.
He spares a glance at the vomit demon near him and tries to gauge if it will move toward him. He doesn't really want to shoot it and give away his cover.
Liam stows the heavy bolter as well as he can, then he grabs Cecil and begins to retreat.
With the stairs gone, we should have bought some time, even for the slow moving admechs...
Liam is a little surprised to find himself really CARING about Cecil's fate, but he decides to focus on their survival for now, and worry about this emotional...anomaly later.
Thinking quickly, Liam realises he needs to try and get Cecil mobile on her own, and something familiar might be enough to make her mind snap into focus just a little.
So he thrusts one of the spare ammo belts into Cecil's hands, gives her a (reluctant) slap and in his best authoritative voice gives her a simple command.
"Soldier! Snap out of it, you are needed, now take this ammo belt and make ready.
Let's go, move out!"
"I'm not letting you let go here! You WILL stand! You WILL walk! You'll do your damn DUTY! Nobody dies because you broke!"
Liam grabs Cecil by the shoulders and shakes her.
"The Emperor DEMANDS your strength! We've come this far, are you quitting on me Cecil!? I'm not letting you dammit! Open your eyes! LOOK AT ME DAMMIT! YOU! WILL! LIVE!"
With a scream like a startled child, Cecil snaps round and tries to focus Liam with bloodshot, bleary eyes.
Clearly having trouble catching up to reality, she practically fails forward into motion under the (well-imitated) shouting of some NCO or Commissar mauling you out for neglection of duty - the one thing everyone in the Guard after basic will do virtually everything to avoid.
She robotically grabs for the offered (and by now rather short) belt of heavy bolter ammo, fumbles for a moment, then grabs it properly before it can hit the ground and shoulders it.
The moment of jerking and reflexively grabbing seems to have further pulled her towards the surface of the deep well she found herself trapped in and her gaze clears somewhat.
She looks at Liam with a flicker of understanding and a quite different flavor of fear in her expression.
"L...Li? Wh...What?"
Liam offers Cecil a tired smile.
"Back with us are you? It's bad when the loader leaves the heavy in the lurch like that, ok?"
He reaches out and gives her shoulder a squeeze.
"Come on, keep it together, we're SO close to getting out of this.
You have to keep going for a while longer, right?
Are you with me, Cecil?"
Gathering confidence from destroying the first of the abominations, Ikrit fires again, placing a round in the head of the second as well.
Another successful shot leaves him stuffing his pistol away and grabbing up his 'rifle' he wiggles his way back into the contraption as he starts moving away again following the scouts. "Come, come you big lump, let's move again."
Kenneth stares at his "work" numbly for a moment longer before he lets himself get dragged away. All clever plans forgotten over that close call.
Cecil blinks rapidly and (despite her pretty sturdy build added to by the armor she wears) looks like a startled deer back on the hunting grounds of Serenus III. "Y...Yea, be with you, Li. Till the end." Her shoulders are somewhat slumbed and she does does look ... shriveled. Not actually but this is the sum of her body language you get from her.
Ikrit quickly dispatches the second pukelings as efficient as the first and gets his carry-loader up and running again, their link still humming and occasionally sparking.
Simmins blinks a couple times at MacGyver's hand signs then, with slightly trembling hands, raises his shotgun and prepares to round the corner on the count of three to finish off the last enemy...
3...
2...
*CRASH-CRUNCH*
The entire wall section the remaining traitor was sheltering behind comes down and pulps him (and also your two pukelings).
Then the weight of first one, then two, then two more fully armored (and heavily augmented) Space Marines is added on top. Seemingly, their leader decided to finish two birds with one stone by taking a shortcut through said wall, shortening their way out and getting rid of an enemy at the same time.
"Keep up, troopers.", the third in line growls mechanically as he is passing you by,
" The Calculus of Battle is reaching 80 percent of you leaving this room alive.
Orders of magnitude above the initial estimation.
One machinery of trillion pieces."
At that last sentence, his voice emitters actually manage to very-nearly convey some semblance of passion or feeling.
Then, they are past and the way out is right before you!
You notice the last Astartes grabbing onto one of the missiles which have toppled over as you put down the loader of the missiles team.
You also notice their leader having a bundle of pretty techy looking boxes attached to a very unsophisticated looking cord attached to his backpack.
The boxes do look quite a bit like the body parts of the B.U.G.S., which were used to extract the data back in the server room: your primary mission objective.
You kinda remember that Anatoly at one point had them for safekeeping. The entirety of the B.U.G.S. that is.
Wait, where actually IS Anatoly?
You do remember he was with you back in the massive, half-collapsed battleground where you met the ratlings and later on the Magi and Astartes, but since then it has been nothing but running and fighting and you do not quite remember if you have seen him recently...
Liam sends the retreating backs of the astartes a truly dirty look, but wisely keeps his words as thoughts for now.
Instead, he uses his strength and fortitude to help Cecil AND heft his big gun as they begin to move towards the exit.
"Come on, everyone, keep up! We got to go, now!"
MacGuyver radios back even as he starts to move forward again before he's left behind, <<Marines on the move, path forward is clear. Go go go!>>
But even as he moves his mind takes stock. So many loses so far, but he can't remember Anatoly being among them. <<And had anyone seen Anatoly?>> he adds.
<<Not since the big fight back in the ruins...
Emperor dammit, didn't he have the information we needed?>>
<<I thing the Astartes have it now. If we don't keep up I think we're going to be left behind!>>
"Come on, move move!"
With much exhortation Ikrit gets his gun-lugger moving as fast as their little legs will go after MacGyver, every so often stopping briefly to scan behind them and take a snapshot if needed. They aren't as slick as a well trained stormtrooper might be, their team weapon and it's power cable getting in the way, and yet they manage to move at speed in pretty good order. Despite all this rapid movement they slowly fall further behind the scouts.
Kenneth comes back to his senses while he's being dragged away from the mess he has made. He turns towards the group of Sergeant Seth and sees them fighting desperatly against their own little terrors. The people around him are already moving to help them out like he told them to but Kenneth can see that they won't make it in time at their current pace. And so there is only one thing to do - the thing he always seems to do - demand his fellow troopers to excel beyond what they should be capable of with a little divine help:
"The sergeant needs our help, the situation is dire! FASTER, his majesty commands it!"
He himself moves as fast as he can, and will direct the others to stand aside so his flamer can dose as many of the little terrors as possible
While the center, around the Astartes, Magi, MacGyver and Simmins has punched through the already crumpled resistance and is in the verge of break-through, the right (with Liam, Cecil and "Ikrit") hurries up to get off the walkway to catch up.
The left though, is in deep trouble. Sgt. Seth and company are completely bogged down by four of the flying demons and dozens of the smaller pukelings, some if which have coalesced into larger forms the size of a small yet horrifically obese and horn-sprouting child. Seth is trying to stem the tide with wide swoops of his chainsword but the numbers are too overwhelming and the ratlings he is trying to keep in cohesion too overwhelmed by the onslaught and the still lingering terror of this place that wrought so many mutations on them or their kin. Already, Sgt. Seth is bleeding from more than one fleeting scratch and a particular calm and disjointed observer may have been able to notice the green and black boils starting to appear near those scratches in the Sergeant's skin.
Lacking any other way forward, the other half of the ratlings that help Kenneth along, form up into a tight group, shooting in every direction against the squabbling things and try to push through the chaotic melee. Some get bogged down trying to push through or attempting to safe a fellow kinfolk from getting devoured body, soul and all by the neverborn. Just as it is starting to look really grim for the left flank, Kenneth's prayer ends a golden spark jutters from the burned-out roassarius dangling from the priest's back... one of the remaining plaguedrones is on the verge of diving onto his back, poisonous stinger already extended and in the next second it is gone in a blinding, golden flash of searing light erupting from the faith token. Kenneth stumbles and falls unconscious as daemons all around scream in anguish and are turned into ash and merciless nothingness. Two ratlings and Jeff the heavy gunner catch him and carry him forward. Sgt. Seth staggers along like a man stepping out of his own grave again.
The roaring laughter of the massive thing emerging from the pool of goo turns to cancerous coughing and rasping. The pursuing mutants, already milling at the second platform and seemingly wondering how to cross the destroyed staircase, squeal and shudder as if sprayed with strong acid.
Under cover of this unexpected respite, everyone still on their feet (or getting carries along) hurries out of this room of sickness, mutation and unspeakable surgery. A splashing and heaving, groaning sound if an obese man standing up from an old, half-decayed armchair can be heard from behind you.
Then, a massive detonation sends everyone without maglocked boots or considerable distance from the bulkhead sprawling to the ground. Thick clouds of rockcrete dust waver in the air and make you cough and gag as you struggle to get back up with aching limbs informing you in no uncertain terms that enough is enough by now...
MacGuyver finds himself face down on the deck having just managed to survive a massive explosion. Again. For the second time TODAY. There Emperor really does protect. He doesn't care look back as he Scrabble to his feet and tries to urge the rest onward as they catch up. Come on! Let's go! he shouts as the wings of their tactical withdrawal come into view.
Then he's off again. Running. By the ever productive and totally cool Emperor whim he loves so very much, when he gets back to barracks he's sleeping for a week.
Following the explosion, Ikrit finds himself in a tangle of limbs and weapon cable. Extricating himself from his weapon and assistant he pulls himself to his feet and shakes like a dog to dislodge the worst of the dust from his fur. His senses returning and the ringing in his ears dissipating, Ikrit remembers what was happening and starts running again. Fully aware that his legs don't carry him as quick as the others,he doesn't have time to worry about his fellow ratlings or what is behind them purely enough that he must keep running to not fall behind.
"Ungh...why me?"
Liam struggles to his feet, collects both his girls, and begins to make it towards the exit.
The end was in sight, and he wasn't willing to wait any longer to get out of this warping mission.
They had done their duty, and gone beyond, salvaging another squads duty as well.
Enough was indeed enough.
Kenneth opens his eyes and stares at some kind of ceiling. He has no idea how he got there. Last thing he remembers is rushing to help Sergeant Seth...
And with that the urgency is back. He pulls himself upwards and groans as it takes way more effort than he expected and everything hurts like hell. Still he takes a look around to see where he is, hoping however he got here he is at least still with the squad...
Everyone on the ground (that is everyone excluding the two battle-ready Magi and most of the Astartes - one looking pretty wounded has in fact fallen to one knee and is also getting back up) is groaning back up and make ready for another round of get-out-of-here-asap.
Kenneth is surrounded by what remains of the local ratling militia, Jeff and Sgt. Seth.
All of them are starring at the priest in a mix of rapture, disbelief and wonder. A few of the ratlings have tears in their little, black eyes, some are muttering words of faith under their breath and three actually sink back to their knees before him, arms spread wide in a full-body Aquilla posture.
@Ikrit is surrounded by his kin again and he listens in on a lot of low-volume chatter in the local tongue.
Everyone seems to firmly believe by now that Kenneth is the avatar of the Emperor send to lead you out of this forsaken hellhole at last.
Religious fervor is rapidly increasing beyond the already crazy high that was the only refuge left to your kin in this dark place and time.
Giving everyone a routine once over, you notice that Seth is looking really bad.
His skin is grey (even more so than everyone else's), the superficial looking gashes in his body continue to (slowly) bleed and he seems to be leaning onto is chainsword for support.
Cecil is leaning shakily against @Liam, her knuckles hard-white around a fresh belt of bolter ammo
You barely have time to get up, cough out the worst of the rockrete dust, stand (mostly) upright and without swaying, when the heavy, crunching footfall of the Astartes is picking up speed again. Quickly followed by the unrhythmic *clac-clac-clac* of the two heavy combat Magi.
Consulting his auspex and map, @MacGyver can already make out their destination: a transport tube sub-station only one level down and three hundred meters further down a diagonal running tunnel.
"We are getting close now, are we not, Trooper.", the buzzing sound of the tank-Magos-turned-Servo-Skull-with-dangly-bits snares over your shoulder.
"If the traitors have not managed to corrupt the precise departure and arrival timings, the next pod should be arriving in less than five minutes and depart in seven point three."
MacGuyver doubles over as he hacks and gasps grey mucus from his poor lungs. Maybe bring half machine wasn't so bad. When his body let's him breathe again, he consults his auspex and replies to the Magos, I've heard you lot say before, "The flesh is weak". Well today I believe it. I'm not sure all of us can make it, sir. But we'll sure try.
He then make sure Simmons is standing and tries to gather the rest, informing the squad, and their curious rat gunner, of their destination.
Tube tram is a level down and a couple hundred meters off. Last leg. Let's go.