hsntnovel Chapter 1039: Spicy! Titan is coming!
Chapter 1039: Spicy! Titan is coming!
Calvin was awakened by the groans that came one after another.
The pungent smell of disinfectant mixed with the smell of rotten meat penetrated his nostrils. When he opened his eyes, countless hanging infusion bags were swaying slightly above his head, like dying dragonflies under the eaves of his hometown during the rainy season.
The fifty-meter-long medical cabin was filled with three layers of bed frames. The bandages of amputated soldiers hung down onto the faces of the wounded on the lower layers. A soldier disfigured by acid was using a mechanical prosthetic eye to play a holographic image of his hometown. The emerald green wheat fields were projected onto the charred ceiling and were shattered into spots of light by the skulls of the shuttling medical servos.
There were baskets of severed limbs piled up in the corner, on top of which was an arm still wearing a wedding ring. The words "Until Death" were engraved on the inside of the ring, glowing coldly under the operating light.
Change dressing number 1." A mechanical voice came from the end of the corridor.
Calvin tried to prop himself up, but felt a foreign object protruding from the sutures in his chest. It was a fragment of Roy's burnt love letter, which Irene had sewed into his wound.
The skin under the gauze felt itchy. He turned his head to see the old soldier in the next bed carving the correct character on the bed frame with a dagger. The metal fragments scraped off by the blade fell into the open abdomen of the wounded below, like silver pepper sprinkled on rotten flesh.
The lavender petals suddenly brushed against my cheek.
“They say lavender can mask the stench of a corpse.”
Irene's voice was accompanied by the hum of a breathing mask. She was wearing a yellowed medical uniform, but the bouquet of dried flowers in her arms was carefully wrapped with the flag of the Astra Militarum, and the withered petals were still entangled with amber condensed from the candle wax of the church.
The old soldiers at the end of the bed began to bang on the bed frame with their metal prosthetic limbs, and a soldier who had lost his lower jaw squeezed out a distorted whistle from his throat.
Calvin's bandaged fingers groped and touched the fragments of his wife's wedding dress inside the protective suit.
A map of the medical area was sewn onto the fabric, marking all the blind spots that could avoid surveillance.
"Your lavender sachet..."
His voice was as hoarse as sandpaper on metal. "It bloomed on Tommy's body, brighter than the stained glass windows in the church."
Erin's goggles fogged up.
She suddenly grabbed Calvin's uninjured arm, her movements as rough as if she was moving a corpse: "Third-class disabled people need sunbathing, this is the doctor's order." Amid the laughter of the veterans, someone threw a half bottle of moonshine, and the liquid spilled onto the metal floor and ignited a blue flame.
"We won't report it like that! Go!"
The "Healing Garden" outside the medical area is a cemetery of shell craters nested within shell craters.
Fluorescent mushrooms grew among the broken tombstones. The bone blades of the Genestealers were stuck in the soil like gardening tools, and the brain matter left on the blades became the best fertilizer.
As Irene helped Calvin walk past a new grave, he caught a glimpse of Walker's name engraved on the tombstone. On the grave was a twisted mechanical prosthetic leg with half an orc's fang stuck to the end, like some kind of absurd burial object.
Two medical servitors were digging pits to bury new corpses. Their shovels were welded from trench shovels and Tyranid shells, and every swing scattered dirt mixed with blood.
"Joseph has carved your name all over three walls."
Erin kicked the skull that was blocking her way. On it was Danny's soldier card. "He said he would record 10,000 charges for you."
Her tone of voice, which was pretended to be relaxed, was distorted by the gas mask, but her fingers were tightly clasped around Calvin's arm, as if if she let go he would fall back into the sea of blood and corpses.
In the distance, soldiers were burning corpses in bomb craters; the crackling sound of burning fat mixed with a recording of "Hymn to the Emperor" sounded like a rehearsal of a choir from hell.
They sat down on the wreckage of a destroyed Baneblade tank.
The tank's gun barrel was bent into a strange arc, and the crack pointing to the sky looked like the remains of a limb questioning a god.
Erin lifted her mask and bit open the bottle of moonshine, letting the liquid run across her scabbed lips. “The priest married us before the bombing. He carved the scripture on the shell casings.”
She took out a half-burnt wedding candle, with a blood-stained ring sealed in the wax. "Now it is a sterilization lamp in the medical area, and it is lit next to the amputation operating table every night."
Calvin rubbed the bullet holes in the tank's armor.
The penetrating wounds formed twisted heart shapes, and a soldier wrote with chalk next to them, "To my eternal bride - armor-piercing bullet."
Just as he was about to speak, Irene suddenly grabbed his hand and pressed it against her chest. Under the wedding dress fabric inside the protective suit, her heartbeat was trembling in the same rhythm as the artillery fire in the distance.
The battle line three hundred kilometers away was bearing a new round of impact, and the continuous explosions sounded like a giant beating on the eardrum of the planet.
"Once Terra sends reinforcements, we can leave..." Her words were interrupted by a loud noise tearing through the sky.
At first the sound was like a whimper from deep within the earth's core, and then it became the roar of a thousand church bells collapsing at the same time.
The clouds were torn into cotton-like debris by invisible giant hands, the atmosphere was burning, and Calvin's mechanical prosthetic eyes automatically dimmed their brightness, but he was still burned by the light pollution above the sky and shed tears.
On the horizon seventy kilometers away, a giant metal object with a diameter of one kilometer penetrated the clouds, and plasma flames wrapped around it like a meteorite in the creation myth.
That was the Emperor-class Titan "Iron Creed". The identity tags of the fallen soldiers welded on its foot armor plates turned red and melted in the high temperature, falling like countless weeping stars.
The ground began to convulse. Calvin grabbed the steel plate of the wreckage of the tank and watched the swamp boiling five kilometers away. It was not the bombardment, but the secondary earthquake caused by the footsteps of the Titan.
When the thirty-meter-long mechanical giant foot was lifted up, it brought up tens of thousands of tons of mud, and when it fell down, the shock wave razed the entire Genestealer Forest to the ground.
The vortex turrets on the Titan's shoulders slowly rotated, and with every degree of rotation, tons of prayers poured out from the loudspeakers, drowning out all the sounds of fighting on the battlefield.
"God Emperor above..."
Irene's breath condensed into white frost in her mask. More airdrops pierced through the clouds like divine swords of punishment, and the dust clouds stirred up by the Warhound-class Titans crashing into the battlefield were as high as a kilometer.
The ion shield of a Titan swept across the eastern mountain range, and the entire mountain fell apart in blue light, with the rubble forming a diamond rain in the air that lasted for three minutes.
The wreckage of the Orcs' junk ship was swept by the aftermath of the Titan's main gun, and the burning metal parts flew like wedding ribbons. Half of the bridge steel plate with "WAAAGH!!!" written on it was stuck outside the medical area, becoming a new pillar of shame.
Calvin's eardrums were bleeding in pain, but he refused to cover his ears. This would be the only chance in their lifetime for mortals to hear the roar of the Mechanical God.
Every step the Titan took created a new canyon in the ground. The orcs' fungal tanks exploded like beetles crushed by children. For the first time, the greenskins' WAAAGH war cry was tinged with a tremor of fear.
Twelve kilometers away, the vanguard of the Tyranids tried to corrode the Titan's feet with acid, but was turned into a column of biomass smoke rising into the sky under the counterattack of the melta incinerator.