The Lightning Struck Tower - Part 2

“What’s the plan Drystan?” asked Llarawyn, as she and Edessa hooked themselves into their custom-built exo-suits, the powered metallic skeletal structure wrapped around their high quality carapace armor. She shuddered slightly as her cybernetic implants synced up with the suit, giving her a sensation not unlike Drystan had with his Dreadnought form; not skin, not flesh, but a sensation of connection.

“We must get word to my father,” Drystan rumbled, flexing his gigantic clawed power fist, running a diagnostic on the other features of the *Sarffen*-pattern Dreadnought, notably the jump boosters on the back. Considered to be a lighter variation of the various Dreadnought patterns, the *Sarffen* lacked a lot of the defensive options, but made up for it with a surprising amount of agility. Drystan didn’t worry about the lack of defenses, he had other gifts to compensate for it. “He must know what has occurred here, if the Custodes have declared us traitors...we are already condemned.”

“What of the Chaplains? The irregulars?” asked Edessa, going through her own systems checks. “It is very likely that they are already doing purges of their own.”

“Then we stop them. Save who we can, kill those trying to kill us, and hope not too many get in my way,” Drystan growled, giving a mental command to the larger door to his chambers. It didn’t move. He felt the low burn in his chest as the rage at the betrayal started rising higher, before he shoved it back. *Later*, he told himself. *Indulge in that after you get word out*. Smoke billowed again as he reached out and ripped the two foot thick steel door off its hinges letting it hang in the air for a moment before embedding it into the wall...*Well maybe indulge a little now*, he admitted to himself. Llarawyn looked toward him, eyebrow raised, while Edessa rolled her shoulders with a smirk, the small ones looked at it with their mouths open. Drystan walked into the corridor, enlarged to accommodate his bulk, and the sole Psyker Dreadnought in The Tower lips curled into a snarl at the dark stains that had spread from other rooms into the hallway; the Custode had been busy.

Llarawyn and Edessa ducked into the various rooms as they passed, their armored forms casting long shadows from their searchlights. Edessa came out incensed, Llarawyn came out looking disgusted.

“They call us traitors without cause, and yet he murdered them in their beds, I didn’t know the Custodes allowed such craven men into their ranks,” spat Edessa.

“Some of them he lingered on,” said Llarawyn, jerking her head over her shoulder towards a room she had just come out of. “Such a petty creature, such a waste of effort and material spent creating him. Embodied more of the savage aspects of humanity than the average citizen of the Imperium. What a wa-”

“HALT, TRAITORS!”

Drystan didn’t slow, he barely cast a glance to his right at the rabble gathered behind a makeshift barricade. A group of mortals, maybe thirty persons strong leveled basic lasguns, and even some antique slug-throwers at the group. High Chaplain Omid ignored them for the most part, but most of these groups merely came here to act as informants to the chaplains, despite the disdain they received for their “service”.

“Speaking of waste,” muttered Edessa.

“I’ll take the boys with me, meet up with us after you’re finished. If they have prisoners, release them. Gather their weapons, pitiful as it sounds we may need them,” Drystan instructed, placing his bulk between the assembled group and his newfound charges.

The two women both nodded, then took off in leaps and bounds towards the barricade. Llarawyn’s face with the look of an executioner, cold and hard; Edessa’s the look of a warrior woman of old, alight and frenzied.

Drystan almost pitied those poor fools who thought they were safe behind their meager barrier, then glanced at the terrified boys who cowered in his shadow. Almost.

The Flaenors’ exoskeletal suits expanded almost in unison, Llarawyn’s suit a graceful avian inspired affair, while Edessa’s own suit was much more aggressively styled and predatory, giving their movements a more bounding, loping, gait that began eating up the nearly two hundred meters between them and the irregular militia at an alarming rate. Edessa grinned as the first las rounds began splashing against her armour, gathering both legs underneath her then leaped forward in a blinding rush, the suit’s strength more than capable of covering the remaining distance. Three choked screams sounded in the air, signalling that Llarawyn had opened with a ranged assault of some kind before entering the fray. Edessa had those options as well, but where was the fun in that? After years of being cooped up, a prisoner in all but name, watching her charge slowly lose his mind to the Dreadnought’s sleep and dreams due to apathy, she had some pent up emotions that needed letting out. Who better to indulge herself a little payback with than on those who had no right to despoil these halls in the first place? Some of these gathered before her were Avalonians, traitors to everything Artellion and his sons stood for, believing in the savagery and paranoia that came so easily to humanity. It was her job as a Flaenor to set them straight. Permanently.

It was true she didn’t have any close combat weaponry officially, which the militia obviously knew judging by their surprise as Edessa lept into their midst, but there’s a funny thing about wielding an exosuit designed to potentially lift several metric tons: everything about it is a close combat weapon to things not in Space Marine power armour or a four meter tall Ork, and Edessa demonstrated this fact with brutal relish. She spun like a dervish as she landed, one suited hand placed on the floor, her other five suited limbs outstretched as she carved an opening for the beginning of her melee. The clawed gripping talons at the end of her suit’s legs eviscerated three men, their screams of terror echoed by the dying gurgles of a woman whose chest had been crushed into a bloody pulp by the bludgeoning force of one of Edessa’s heavy lifting claws. A small cluster of irregulars lay shrieking as her arc welder did the opposite of its original purpose and simply dismembered or bisected those in its path, leaving what was a cluster of men and women a small mound of spare parts instead. Planting down her other hand as her spin lost its momentum, she did an augmented handspring over a group trying to flee, killing those at the front and she landed atop them, then gripping a man with both heavy duty claws on either side of his torso before ripping him apart in a shower of blood and gore. As the group ran back towards the dubious safety of the rapidly dwindling core of their group, Edessa glanced towards Llarawyn, made easy by the navigational HUD elemental through her helmet’s interface, and smiled openly as she watched her counterpart skewer two of the now fully panicked irregulars with her mechadendrite tendrils, before flicking an almost negligent arm at a man who thought he was well beyond her reach. He died at the business end of a heavy duty drill bored into him at the end of an extended telescoping arm. Llarawyn’s avian “wings”, which were really little more than stylized shields that could articulate to give her, and whomever she was defending cover, suddenly formed a barrier as the remnants of this pitiful band, directed a salvo of las fire at her back. She rocked slightly forward, her grunt carrying through to Edessa’s ears via the vox channel, and Edessa hissed in anger as she launched herself to her sister’s side, unstrapping her own long range weapon from its magnetic holster, a Hellgun of her own design.

“Enjoying yourself, Edessa?” asked Llarawyn, her breaths coming out in slight pants as she held their cover, although Edessa could hear the smile in her voice.

“If you’re worried about our cover disappearing, why not engage your conversion field?” replied Edessa, drilling a shot through a portion of the milita’s barricade to kill the woman behind it. The opposing fire paused for a moment, before redoubling in intensity as their opponents realized that there was no hiding from the two women who had decimated their bulwark in a matter of moments.

“I get the feeling we may need that energy for later,” said Llarawyn, shifting slightly to give Edessa a better angle to shoot from. “The sooner we’re done here the better.”

“Point,” Edessa sighed, toggling a switch on her rifle, waiting as the high pitched whine sounded even over the din of combat, before the rifle gave a loud thunk as it finished its process. She sighted down at the middle of the remaining members of the militia, a group of four peeking out from behind several steel plates, and pulled the trigger. The response of her weapon was deafening, and her helmet dimmed her visor by several increments as the resulting explosion blew apart their opponents cover, steel plating looking more like kindling as it created a shrapnel effect in a twenty meter radius around it. The two Flaenors stood, Llarawyn’s wings retracting to their resting position, while Edessa ejected the now ruined superheated core of her weapon, reached into one of her storage compartments for a replacement. They took off at a run, Edessa only pausing to swiftly dispatch the lone survivor who survived the blast, and magnetize what weapons they could easily carry to their frames, they had an angry Dreadnought to catch up to.

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