For a moment.
A few seconds during which Koorland knew, but could not see, that he had reached his target. He knew what he was about to encounter, but the knowledge had no true weight. There was no visceral understanding. There could not be. He was still on one side of the barrier that separates belief in a legend from its experience.
He fired into the orks separating him from the legend. He and his brothers charged into the mass.
Koorland began to cross the barrier.
The moments passed. Belief met reality, and the shockwave killed dozens of orks.
Something struck a battlewagon. Koorland could see the upper portions of the hull from his position. There was
the sound of a single blow and the vehicle stopped dead. The rear jerked upwards, as if the forward section had been driven into the ground. A concussion wave radiated outwards from the tank’s position. The battlewagon exploded. Orks flew through the air. Koorland staggered as the wave hit him, a sudden hurricane. The blow scythed the enemy before him.
The space ahead of the Last Wall was clear. Surrounded by bodies, lit by the flames of the burning tank, the legend was there.
Time stuttered. Koorland’s senses grappled with awe. His existence before his transformation into a Space Marine was a blank. The history of that earlier being was lost. So now, for the first time in his memory, he experienced what an unenhanced mortal felt at the sight of the Adeptus Astartes.
Vulkan was a colossus, more pillar than man. He was an icon carved of granite and night, immovable as a mountain, ferocious as lava. The deep green of his armour’s scales made him a reptile sprung from the dreams and fears of humanity’s past. The forged flames of its design made him the fire of a planet’s core. The skull of one beast adorned his shoulder guard. His cloak was the hide of another. He was a slayer of myth, and he was myth incarnate. His massive hammer pulsed and crackled with energy. Koorland could not imagine lifting it, never mind wielding it. He found it even more impossible to picture anything, be it ork, voidship or world, that could survive its strike.
It was all Koorland could do not to fall to his knees. He was not alone. He was surrounded by the stunned immobility of his battle-brothers.
They did not forget their training and leave themselves vulnerable to the enemy. They were frozen for the space of a single intake of breath, and the orks in their vicinity that still lived were incapacitated for much longer. But oh, the time of that breath stretched to infinity. Though Koorland had witnessed a moon open its jaws and roar, it was only now that he felt the true touch of the sublime. A breath, and his life was in a point of culmination. His existence was already divided into two irreconcilable halves by the destruction of the Imperial Fists. Now it broke in two again. This time, the far side of the crevasse was filled with the fiery light of glory.
The breath, and then war.
No words passed between Vulkan and the Last Wall. They would come later. Now there was the necessity of battle. Koorland looked up at the drake-helm and the infernal red of its lenses. Vulkan inclined his head in a nod. Then destruction came to the foothills of Caldera once more.
The orks closed in. They fought against a storm. The Last Wall formed a circle. They became a fist, a mailed gauntlet. The horde broke itself upon its spikes. Bolter shells punched through armour and flesh. Streams from flamers incinerated brutes who tried to close within melee distance. Monsters in piston-driven armour burned in their metal shells. They died standing, and became obstacles in the path of their kin.
Vulkan swung his hammer. Each blow was a meteor impact. The night flashed with the weapon’s wrath. The earth trembled before its power. Braced now, Koorland kept his footing. The orks struggled forwards but were swept back again and again, and each time their ranks thinned. The terrain itself began to change. The battle shattered hard ridges to dust. Rivers of blood poured over arid stone. The softer lines of broken bodies covered the jagged shapes of rock. The stench of death, burned and wet, reached through Koorland’s grille. His frame vibrated with the pounding beat of the hammer. His blood rejoiced, caught by the rhythm of righteous annihilation.
‘More!’ Vulkan bellowed at the orks. ‘Send more! Still more! Will you never be enough?’
The strength of twenty Space Marines and a single primarch shattered the orks’ assault. The force that had remained to fight Vulkan had contained him, but no more. The orks had been unable to achieve victory. Now they could not avoid defeat. As the infantry numbers diminished, the greenskins tried to conquer through swiftness. The vehicles had more room to move. They could pick up speed, or as much as the rough terrain would allow.
They died all the more quickly.
Squads of bikers roared by in strafing runs. Koorland and the Last Wall lowered their aim, stitching the sides of the bikes with shells. They blasted through wheels, exploded fuel tanks. They turned the bikes into somersaulting death traps. Rolling balls of steel and fire collided with other drivers. It was destruction built on destruction. Vulkan swung his hammer sideways. The blow went through a bike and its rider without stopping. The ork machine might have been made of air.
To Koorland’s astonishment, mortals joined in the fight. They were a small group, no more than a score. They wore ragged mining clothes and wielded lasrifles. They used the folds in the earth as cover, ducking down each time the hammer came down. They clutched the ground, weathering the wind and the shockwave, then popped up again to shoot at the orks. The few greenskins they brought down had no impact on the struggle. Their presence and their survival was a miracle. They fought for their planet when the only hope of victory lay in the hands of others.
They were a wonder.
Koorland looked at them with a kind of joy.
Four battlewagons circled the fight. Then they converged, riding over the ridges at such speed they almost overturned. Their turrets blazed at Vulkan. They were in each other’s line of fire, and stray shells fountained earth before them. Two of them were burning as they closed in. Koorland pulled a krak grenade from his belt. He turned his attention from the slaughtered infantry to assist, but the tanks were already there.
Vulkan disappeared in the nexus of shell bursts. The glare faded, revealing his massive form leaping at the nearest battlewagon. A mountain sailed through the air. He landed on the front of the tank and his boots drove through its armour. The vehicle veered to the left. Vulkan raised his hammer over his head with both hands and brought it down, crushing the upper turret. The shockwave made Koorland’s head ring. Metal cried in agony, and Vulkan was already charging at the next tank as the first exploded.
Koorland fought. He brought the enemy down. He was not distracted by Vulkan’s actions. Yet he bore witness. And afterwards, when he thought of the battle, he could barely remember his own role. There was room in his memories only for the sight of a primarch’s wrath.
Vulkan ran into a battlewagon at full speed. The impact halted the tank and its forward hull crumpled. The giant of myth took the vehicle apart with two blows, and their thunder was so huge, the ammunition blasts that followed were mere echoes.
The orks did not retreat. The last two battlewagons hurled themselves at the legend, and to oblivion. The legend was indestructible. The legend was bedrock and magma. He was tectonic strength and tectonic fury. Koorland had a vision of this world having given birth to its champion, of Caldera itself striking back at the orks in retaliation for the wounds it had suffered at their hands.