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The Last Loyalist – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Last Loyalist

David Guymer

He was sick of the killing. After twenty-six brutal days and a billion lives, he was numb to it, a child who had gorged himself at his first sitting and now felt nothing but loathing for every further bite he was forced to take. He was a revenant who knew only pain. The ash of a cremated world had turned his face into that of a ghost. The blood speckling his parched lips brought him no joy. With every dull crump and distant whine, the Butcher’s Nails flogged at overstimulated nerve endings; simply passing his thumb over his chainaxe’s activation rune was an agony he could hardly bear.

A month ago, this would have been unthinkable, but he was no longer sure what that word meant.

The unthinkable had been the first casualty of Isstvan III.

The World Eaters advanced in an undisciplined line, firing from the hip as they picked their way through the rubble. The thud of their powered tread and the staccato bursts of bolter fire caused bits of the commercia roof to come crumbling in. Grit pattered off their bone-white pauldrons. The air was smoke. Helmet lenses glowed like hot coals in the murk. A hundred metres ahead of them, Space Marines in the weathered heraldries of the III, XIV, and XVI Legions laid down sporadic volleys of return fire as they withdrew deeper into the ruined commercia.

Zhukel Dror watched through dead lenses as the loyalists’ retreat drew the World Eaters in. His pale armour was well camouflaged under a layer of grit and surrounded by rubble, the pale blue of his knee plates and pauldrons eroded to almost nothing by dust and ash and too much blood. If any of his former brothers were to look his way, then they would see nothing but another corpse in wrecked plate, and there were enough of those on Isstvan III for one more to pass unnoticed. But not one of them did, too intent on the enemy in front of them, as Dror had known they would be.

With his armour’s reactor running on minimal power, his view of the firefight was devoid of its usual tactical overlay, but in this instance he did not need it. He had been compelled to face his brothers many times in the great gladiatorum pits aboard the Conqueror, and had reluctantly shed VI and XII Legion blood over the ruins of Ghenna. He knew all too well what a Space Marine could do. He knew where on their armour a bolt-round would penetrate and where it would glance off hardened ceramite plates.

Looking back over Angron’s brutal reign now, it was almost as if Dror and his brothers were being prepared specifically for this war.

A neural spasm from the Butcher’s Nails caused his finger to tweak against his bolt pistol’s trigger. He clenched his teeth and resisted the need to fire. His right eyelid convulsed furiously.

Not yet, he thought to himself. Not yet.

A warrior bedecked in scuffed Imperial purple, with a plumed helmet and a golden aquila still glorious across his plastron, leant out from behind a heap of masonry and unloaded his bolter into the advancing legionaries. His name was Pyramus. Screaming at the top of his lungs in language unfit for his patrician airs, he raked his fire back and forth, mass-reactive explosions blasting great chunks out of the remaining stalls and showering the commercia concourse with rockcrete shards. Any human or xenos foe would have been driven to ground under such a concerted burst, but the World Eaters ignored it, emptying their bolters even as they charged through the III legionary’s fire.

Not yet.

Not yet.

They passed so near to Dror’s place of concealment that his armour rattled.

They thundered on.

Now!

His reactor pack shuddered as the mental impulse goaded it back to full power. Systems whirred and clicked on. The red lights in his helmet lenses flickered to life, the displays filling up with heat and radiation warnings and rapidly propagating targeting runes. His armour growled like a revving tank, rubble sliding off him as he rose from hiding. His bolt pistol tracked the passing World Eaters. He hesitated only a moment, grimacing as the Nails rewarded his indecision with pain, and then immediately gave the trigger a short squeeze, punching two rounds into an unsuspecting legionary’s back. Point-blank, the bolts cratered the ceramite backplate with ease, a single bolt detonating inside each of the legionary’s primary and secondary hearts. Death was messy, and immediate. Dror gasped as the Nails force-fed his brain with a short-lived dose of stimulants and anaesthetics.

He was pain-free and lucid just long enough to experience the full harrowing detail of murdering one more brother.

Rage spluttered up from between Dror’s cracked lips, rasping from the dented augmitter grille of his helmet. ‘Why?’ he demanded of the universe, as the dead legionary toppled over, his head dramatically swollen with the blood displaced from his ruptured hearts.

Targeting icons scattered over Dror’s faceplate display like birds startled by his gaze. A few of the charging World Eaters slowed down in confusion, turning to face him, but the majority ran on, either too thoroughly committed to the attack now or simply oblivious to the danger behind them.

Their fate was sealed either way, gunned down by XIV and XVI legionaries who suddenly had no interest in retreating.

Dror’s voice cracked with emotion as he charged their rear, ceramite boots pulverising rockcrete slabs, bolt pistol held out at arm’s length and spraying rocket-propelled shells. He thumbed his chainaxe’s activation rune, howling in pain even before the whirring axe head sawed another World Eater’s forearm from his elbow. The legionary roared in agony. Dror’s shout rose higher still, his rage greater than his former brother’s pain, climbing in pitch to match the shriek of adamantine teeth chewing through transhuman bone.

They had made him do this.

Why had they made him do this?

Another World Eater swung to face him, the front of his helmet and a huge chunk of his face exploding over Dror’s pauldron as a XIV Legion sniper named Glaum closed the loyalists’ trap from the opposite flank.

That still left the better part of half a squad for Dror to deal with.

Too many.

Never enough.

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