//------------------------------//
// Massacre 
// Story: Of Xenos and War 
// by Snake Staff 
//------------------------------//


++Hive Tersius, Denton III++
++3.631.879.M39++


Death. The universal constant. It is the fate of all that live to someday perish, whether they believe themselves immortal or not. Eventually, even the stars go out. It comes in many forms – blade and bullet, disease and age, toxin and asphyxiation. For billions on the Imperil Hive World of Denton III, death came in the form of the Necrontyr.
The first most knew of it was when the ghostly fleet had appeared from nowhere near the system’s primary star. For hours, a quartet of Necron starships lead twice that number of Imperial warships on a merry dance around the system, disgorging dozens of smaller craft as they did so. Finally, the xenos fleet powered up engines and vanished as suddenly as it appeared, but the fighting had only just begun. The swarm of crescent-shaped, fighter-sized craft penetrated the remaining orbital defenses with ease, and then the killing had begun. Hive Quaries had been the first target, swarmed by the deadly craft. They scoured sections of the exterior of life before swooping low to complete their primary. More Necrons appeared from them in rapidly-increasing ranks. First soldiers, then vehicles, then floating pyramids and more disgorged themselves into the hive. The entire PDF force stationed there and over ten million civilians perished in the first hour. Almost a billion, the hive’s entire population, were to die before the day was over.
Since that first strike, the forces of the Necrons and Imperium had waged a vicious, bloody war over the six hives that remained. The xenos were impossibly outnumbered, facing not only the world’s PDF, bloated beyond belief by a hasty conscription by the panicked nobility, but regiments from the Imperial Guard, and even the Emperor’s Angels of Death, Adaptus Astartes from the Thunder Serpents chapter. But where a lesser foe would have withered and perished, blockaded from space and subjected to punishing bombardments at every turn, the Necrontyr endured. Thousands of lives were extinguished with each attack by the mechanical terrors, and their overlords had not yet deigned to end the world’s suffering. So the battle continued.



Serisa Quintus Jedia Mae, or simply Serisa, stood vigil over a nondescript doorway. It was not much to look at, simply another ordinary rusted scrap of metal in the lower parts of the ancient superstructure that made up the hive. The lighting down this low was astonishingly unreliable, and sunlight nonexistent. A handful of old glow strips flickered feebly at intermittent variables, where they had not been scavenged or looted by the hive gangs or lone stragglers. The bulky goggles covering her eyes provided the vision she needed, even if they turned the world red in the process.
Serisa was dressed in patchwork clothing typical of this level. Thick hive leathers molded into a vest protected her upper body, while patched breeches and rubbery boots covered her legs and feet. At her belt was a prominently displayed autopistol, large enough to deter most of the scum who saw it. Standing on the other side of the door was Garvel, her partner. Together, they looked like little more than the typical underhive gang scum. They had been, once. But that was before the Prophet came along.
The Prophet had revealed the truth of this conflict to them. The rotten forces of the False Emperor, those that had despoiled this world and mercilessly tyrannized its people, would be swept away by the forces of the Masters. Those alien beings, so feared by those in power, had to cleanse this planet of the filth infesting it and start again. Only those that were loyal, now, would join them in coming age of immortality. Those that resisted or bowed and scraped to the False Emperor would perish with all his minions. He had shown Serisa all these things and more with his Sacred Orb, a green and silver gift from the Masters. Now she stood vigil over entrance to the Believers’ Temple, where the rest of the faithful gathered to plan their next actions.
Serisa looked out around the streets again. They were deserted, as one might expect at this time of night, on this miserable rust pile. Her goggled eyes swept over old rockrete and the flickering glow strips. She paused and whipped her head around when movement showed in the corner of her vision. Her hand went to her autopistol. She drew the gun and held it in front of herself.
“Wha’s goin’ on?” asked Garvel, his hands gripping his own weapon, a massive stub-automatic. “What you see?”
“I thought I saw…” Serisa’s voice trailed off. A few dozen meters down the way was an old, rusted, half-smashed crate. It had been there the whole time, and was long since empty of anything but filth. But when she looked at it now…
Garvel was the first to voice the feeling. “I want it.”
Serisa nodded dumbly, lowering her pistol. “I need it.”
Serisa started walking. Slowly, at first, but then faster. The burning desire, the absolute need for that old crate was exploding inside her, eclipsing everything else. She wondered, as she burst into a sprint, how she had ever lived her life without it.
Then a lasbolt speared through her brain, and she never wondered about anything again.



“Nice shot,” said Twilight Sparkle, as she watched a streak of red pierce the woman’s skull, followed by two through the man’s chest. The two crumpled without a sound. “Very nice. But did you need to use two on the big guy?”
“Didn’t have a clear shot at his head from up here,” came the reply through her comm-bead. 
“We’re going for the door. Cover us.”
“Roger that, TS.”
“Don’t let any get out from there, no matter what happens.”
“Acknowledged.”
“Good. TS out.”
“Mallia out.”
The purple xenos raised a grey-armored hoof and pointed. “Orl, Titus, Jakes, go.”
The three armored men dashed out of the cover they’d been in and across the now-deserted alleyway. They passed the softly-smoking corpses and reached the rusted door they’d been guarding. One of them knelt to examine it.
“Primitive lock. Bolt-style. I can get it in fifteen, thirty if you want it quiet.” Orl voxed back over.
“Quiet please. We don’t want them alerted.”
“Roger.” He whipped out a tool from his belt and began dissembling the door’s lock from the outside. Twilight waited patiently with the remainder of the Inquisitorial team, keeping an eye out for any passers-by. Fortunately, there were none.
At last, the pieces of the rusted thing littered the ground, and Orl pulled on the door experimentally. It slid softly, without the squeaking one would expect of such apparently ill-maintained equipment.
“We’re in.” he voxed.
“Acknowledged. Coming to join you.” Twilight voxed back. She gestured to the man and woman with her, Lupus and Narcia, respectively, and then made her own dash across the alley. The soft padding on the hooves of her armor muffled her steps as she approached the three men by the door. She nodded approvingly as the group formed up to go in. “Remember, we want this Prophet and his Orb. I’ll deal with him. Eliminate the others.”
The men around her nodded their acknowledgment.
“Go.”
The door slid open. The squad rushed in.
The hall they entered was nothing like the worn exterior. The floors were scrupulously cleaned and polished free of rust. The lighting was a bright, consistent white. Symbols of the Necrons, meticulously rendered in green paint that seemed to have a slight glow of its own, decorated the walls. The place had sterile, almost pure feel to it.
A man with a lasgun leaned against one of the walls, looking bored. He barely had a chance to jump before a hellgun shot burned through his chest, and he collapsed limply to the floor. A look of shock was permanently frozen onto his face.
The Imperial team didn’t even slow their charge down the hallway. They could hear their target, not far now, expositing on the supposed glories of the age to come under the Masters’ benevolent gaze. They rounded a corner and burst into the chapel.
Once, it had been warehouse. Used to store manufactured products from the hive, then abandoned by the authorities and taken over by one of the many hive gangs on Denton III, and most recently converted to the service of the heretical cult now listening to its leader preach. Crude pews, mostly benches stolen from broken machine workshops and some assorted junk, filled the wide area in a mockery of one of the God Emperor’s sacred chapels. Some three or four dozen men and women from the underhive had gathered to hear their Prophet speak. 
A few turned in shock at noise behind them. The most perceptive had already started to rise. It didn’t help.
Five small ovoid objects flew out of the intruding group and into the midst of the crowded rows. The most intelligent of the cultists kicked or batted at them as they landed, trying to put distance between themselves and the weaponry. Two seconds later, the five frag grenades exploded throughout the chapel, flinging dozens of pieces of lethal shrapnel throughout the crowd. The luckiest cultists were killed instantly. The less fortunate were left to bleed out on the floor. A handful had been shielded from the blasts by their fellows, or had simply been lightly wounded. They went for what weapons they had or fled as the Imperials followed up with hellgun blasts to anyone moving.
Twilight Sparkle was not paying attention to that. She had vanished in a purple flash before the grenades went off, reappearing behind the makeshift podium where the Prophet stood. He wasn’t much to look at – a skeletal old man with a small amount of grey hair and what looked to be a bad skin condition. In his left hand was clutched an untitled, tattered black book, one of a billion such things in this sector. In his right was the other target of the night: a glowing green orb encased by what looked like a pair of twin silvery spiders. He barely had time to flinch away from the grenades before Twilight was on him.
The alicorn’s horn glowed as her telekinetic aura seized the man’s legs. He toppled over onto his face with a yelp of surprise. An armored hoof knocked the orb from his hand before he could recover, purple telekinesis grabbing hold of it as well. As he rolled onto his back, clutching an obviously broken nose, a floating bolt pistol leveled itself at his head.
“Surrender,” Twilight said calmly. “You’re done.”
The Prophet shook his head, a look of fury taking hold. “No… No… The Masters will prevail. You will die here! Throw down your arms and you may be allowed to live!”
“You’re delusional. Your “Masters” care nothing for you. And your little cult is just about through.” Twilight gestured to the scene around them. One of the cultists had managed to injure Jakes with a stubber shot through a weak spot in his carapace armor, but that was their only causality. Every single cultist, by contrast, was bleeding out on the floor or dead, and the Imperials were walking among them and turning the former into the latter with practiced efficiency.
The Prophet looked out onto the carnage with a shocked expression, which rapidly morphed into fury. “You’ll pay for this!”
“I think not. Surrender.”
“Never! I- AAARRRGGGHHH!!!” The Prophet’s features contorted with a sudden agony. He clutched his face with both hands and screamed.
Twilight backed off a step or two as the man flailed, unsure of what was going on and unwilling to shoot her prize just yet. She failed to notice the brightening glow of the orb.
The Prophet sat bolt upright with a sudden twitch. And then his face exploded.
Human blood, bone, and brain matter splattered Twilight and the floor around her as something burst out of the old man’s face in a spray of gore. Her bolt pistol barked, more by instinct than conscious thought. The silvery thing was blown backwards and to pieces by the powerful ammunition of the Imperial weapon. One of the pieces bounced off Twilight’s armor and clattered to the floor in front of her. It looked like half of some kind of metallic insect leg…
“Mindshackle scarab!” Twilight’s well-honed mind reacted instantly. She glanced up at the orb, now glowing far brighter than mere moments before. It took less than a second to piece it together. “Ambush!” she cried over the vox. Too late.
The orb in her telekinetic grip flashed once. Suddenly, the room previously occupied by Imperials and corpses played host to a dozen Necron Warriors. The alicorn lost her grip on her pistol and the orb as her mind reeled. 
“Retreat!” Twilight screamed, even as she vanished and reappeared across the chapel in a flash of magic.
Jakes was injured and slow to react. Two gauss beams caught him in the chest and arm, disintegrating both instantly.
“Emperor’s holy balls!” Narcia, who had been supporting him, screamed, immediately before taking a shot to the head.
Across the chapel, the orb, now free of Twilight’s grip, had clattered to the ground. It flashed again, and the number of Necrons in the room doubled.
“Run! Run for your damn lives!” Twilight yelled again as she rushed back into the hallway they had come through. The remaining three humans had little problem with doing exactly that, bolting into the hall behind the alicorn as fast as their legs could take them. Orl had the profound misfortune of being the last in, and he took a gauss shot to his left leg. He screamed as it disintegrated, writhing on the floor for the half second it took for three more shots to finish him off.
Twilight grabbed her second bolt pistol with her magic, pointed it at the Necron nearest the door, and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. The mechanical abomination’s head and chest exploded under the impact and it fell. Lupus and Titus, the two humans left, rushed past her as she did. Twilight vanished from the spot just in time to avoid the retaliatory fire focused on her. She reappeared just behind her fellows, and they ran.
The first Necron to stride unhurriedly into the hallway took a pair of hellgun shots and a bolt from Twilight’s pistol, its large profile and the short distance compensating for the difficulties of shooting whist running. Virtually sawed in half, it too hit the floor. 
Twilight’s horn glowed as she concentrated hard on her spell. She, Lupus, and Titus vanished in a flash of magic, and then appeared two levels up, where Mallia was stationed. 
Or, rather, where Mallia had been stationed. Instead of their sniper and her trusty long-las, an enormous insectile machine with a wormlike tail waited to greet the Inquisition’s representatives. Twilight’s head was wracked by a splitting pain from the effort of the spell even as the Canpotek Wraith pounced. Its clawed legs jammed themselves into Lupus’ torso, spilling his blood everywhere. 
Titus backed away and screamed, firing blindly on full auto. Several of his shots simply passed through the creature without harm, burning large holes into the wall and ceiling of the balcony they were on. But one struck at just the right moment, melting the connecting joint of one of the mechanical horror’s legs. It fizzled and sparked uselessly. Another pierced its chest, exposing the alien interior of the wraith.
Twilight telekinetically pulled the trigger of her bolt pistol and didn’t let go until there was no more ammunition in the magazine. Bolts flew through the monstrosity's head and torso, tearing open more holes. The wraith let out some kind of mechanical shriek as it collapsed onto the floor. Titus leveled his hellgun at the thing’s head and fired three more times, melting it to so much slag.
Human and alicorn slumped back against the walls for a moment, breathing heavily.
“Thank the Emperor,” Titus panted. “Oh, thank the Emperor.”
“They knew we were coming. Not the human pawns, the Necrons,” Twilight managed between wheezes as she clutched her head. “We need to get out of here. We need to warn command. Where’s our long-range vox?”
“Jakes had it, remember?”
Twilight rubbed her head again. “Then we need to get moving. Now.”