Clearing mine field

This was not Stronos’ first time through a minefield. His right leg above the knee was a grey slab of stiff, bifurcating scar tissue. Beneath it was a rugged cybernetic, solid enough to break an ork’s chest or withstand the blast equivalent of the plasma pulse device that had claimed the original flesh. With shrapnel protruding from the crumpled plate of his legs and their hard-wearing hydraulics hissing with every step, he drew his right boot out of Locis Primus’ newest crater and advanced relentlessly towards the next, wherever it might form. Nearby, another buried charge drove a geyser of shrapnel and debris high into the air. The overhanging cable lines were shredded, but Brother Burr strode through the maelstrom scorched but uncompromised.

They were anti-personnel devices, small explosive charges packing just force enough to turn the very ground they waded through into a primed frag grenade. The skitarii defenders had rightly reasoned that an armour assault through such uncompromising terrain would have been near impossible, but what was a power-armoured Iron Hand but a walking tank?

Withering las-fire from an inclined vector punched into his battleplate and tore indiscriminately into the surrounding metal. He walked through it for a few metres until the sheer energy of the impacts forced him to turn away from it. He tried to pinpoint the source of the incoming fire, but could not.
The thin air had swiftly been transformed into a pseudo-plasma of ash, fragmentation shards and splitting energy beams, the world’s low gravity coupled with the sheltered environs of Loci Primus’ surface precincts keeping the after-effects of the ongoing battle aloft.

Still advancing, but at a tangent now that bled the incoming las-bolts of some of their energy, he performed an unconscious mental triangulation using his prior and present position and fired his bolter into the murk. A muted crump and the shredding of metal were his calculation’s rewards. A fixed sentry gun.

As his advance slowed, others pushed theirs at the same unwavering pace. Periodic bangs of bolter-fire and buried explosions illuminated their forward positions, clearing the field of enemy ordnance by the simple expedient of walking through it. Their very tenacity drew enemy fire, predominantly automated or servitor-mounted, betraying their own positions to the infinite patience of the Iron Hands’ guns.

No other force could have had the durability to conceive of such a direct assault, even less the cool discipline under fire to carry it through.

Eye of Medusa