Solar Auxilia Officer Quest. A 30k Early Great Crusade quest.

"Primevére!" You command the vox trooper. The Vox-Trooper ducks as bolts of enemy las-fire flash overhead. "Jeane and her flamer section are to go up the left flank, stop those constructs! Tell Void-Sergeants Anniet and…" You quickly bring up the section's leader in your HUD. "Richelle to go up the right flank, aid the Revenant Legion!" You put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Keep calling out orders, you're keeping us alive."

"Apothecary. Conta-" You turn to face the Revenant, only for him to be out of sight. You catch him sprinting to a nearby corpse with his Narthecium at the ready. You are about to call out.

When a corpse hits the ground ten meters from your position.

Then another.

A fat-bellied troop transport passing has been speared by a great spike launched from the surface of Proteus, its ruptured hull trailing the corpses of good soldiers. You push the Vox-Trooper out of the way, narrowly saving her from being crushed.

You refocus on the lieutenant and his man holding the center, You can see the weapons fire aimed at his location intensifying and getting closer to his command squad. You see the Tercio's standard waver, the golden Raptor and twin lightning bolt nearly falling before an unseen Trooper steadies it. The sight mollifies you. That is -your- future Vexilla.

"We'll have to do it ourselves then. Jean, with me!" You command your trusty Vexillary bearer, the emblem on his back gleaming in the light of weapons discharge. "Amélie, Philip, Follow us up the center! We will not lose the raptor!" Amélie and Philip both vox an acknowledgement, and their Sections prepare to attack.

In the distance, one of the Mountains of Proteus bulges and turns spherical, smoothing out the surface like an inflating balloon. A sheath of skin retracts, revealing a great white sphere.

You blink at the sudden reveal.

An eye the size of a mountain blinks back.

It takes every drop of willpower you have not to piss yourself on the spot as you see what you're facing.

It is a hundred metres to run down the hill and up towards the crater that Lieutenant Albert is holding.

If you are too slow, the enemy will take the lip and pour fire into you as you charge.

You are stuck in an airless rock orbiting Neptune.

The sky is white with phosphex.

The amount of anti-radiation counter treatments being pumped into your blood is turning it toxic.

Vortex munitions detonate every thirty seconds.

Massive spikes and gouts of bio-acid are launched by Proteus at ships in orbit.

You grab a handful of regolith and squeeze it tightly, feeling it between the gloves of your void armour. You refuse to die here today.

You mount the lip of the corpse barricade and wave your sword high. "Death to the Old Night!" Then you throw yourself over and charge. You will not wait for death to come to you.

You don't care. If you are going to die, then you're going to die charging.

The charge happens in a blur of adrenaline and maddened rage. Frag and phosphex shells fly overhead, landing somewhere in the rear of the Cymoeba. Your Section follows closely behind you, screaming incoherent war cries as they fit bayonets and throw up a cloud of dust as they charge up the hill.

You hear screaming from the right flank, the sound of flesh burning as Phosphex consumes men alive. On the left flank, you catch glimpses of Volkite beams slamming into harvesting constructs.

No lasfire comes your way as you reach the lip of the crater. The Cymoeba are caught utterly by surprise and are scattered in the face of Philip's bombardment. As you vault the lip, you see the scattered bodies of Lieutenant Albert and his Tercio. Each of the aliens is at least a head shorter than you, looking like sickly blue rotten eggs sealed inside cybernetic skins, their limbs composed of segmented tendrils that harden to form the limbs needed to carry the weapons they are using.

You snarl as you see a Cymoeba about to put a filthy tendril upon the Banner, and put a Volkite blast through its torso. It explodes.

You expect to be torn apart by an onslaught of lasfire from the Cymoeba. But the first volley comes from behind you. First-Section mantles the crater's lip in near-choreographed precision, opening fire on the still disorganised Cymoeba, advancing from cover to cover, using rocks and dead bodies wherever possible. They had not been expecting your assault, and they fell before you in waves.

You scream and keep firing your Volkite Serpenta, directing your soldiers to the best of your abilities, making frantic but moderated hand-signals, whistling commands, and shouting into the Vox, pushing for the northern lip of the crater. The Cymoeba make satisfying popping noises in close combat, bursting apart once the las-beams bring their internal fluids to a boil.

You pull Primevere closer to you and connect with her heavier vox set. "Lieutenant Albert is dead. Tercio Beta wiped out completely. We are holding their command post." There is static, and you receive a garbled response. "Vox-Trooper, clear up that static."

Jean Claude, ever reliable, reaches the Vexilla and grabs it before it can fall. He raises it high and waves it in the air. "The Raptor still flies! We will never fall!" He shouts over the Vox, firing his lasrifle with one hand. You join him, pushing the Cymoeba vanguard out of the crater.

"Herrand!" You hear Amélie yelling and pivot to face her. While your Section cleared out the crater, hers had manned the lip to open fire into the Imperial defenses that were lost moments before. "They are coming!"

Rushing over, you stare down and curse as you see the next force of the Xenos preparing to charge the crater. Over a hundred of the Cymoeba infantry forms, at least half of them equipped with scything limbs and buzzing blades. But less than what have already died fighting over the hill. You stare at the massive eye looking at you. Further in the distance, you can see massive walkers heading your way.

"Élan!" You shout, and the First Section joins the Second at the parapet, firing down into the advancing Cymoeba Vanguard. Grenades are thrown through the vacuum, flying through the low gravity and landing amongst the vanguard, tearing them apart in showers of blue liquid and metallic components.

A wall of lasfire returns your onslaught, scything through your troops and second section, men drop, clutching puncture wounds in their suit, too large for the self-repair functions to save them. You see two turn their pistols on themselves as they see the gaps are too large for any of their patches to mend.

"Death to the Alien!" Amélie shouts. "Death to the Old Night!". As her men fall around her. She narrowly avoids a las bolt through the skull, even as the man next to him has his head turned to a burnt stump.

"For striking Mankind in its weakness. Extinction!" You quote the Writ of Extinction signed by the Emperor, the reason you are fighting on this cursed forsaken moon. First Section alone will have to hold. But for how long?

Primevére takes a lasbolt to her torso and falls on her back. Your eye shoots to your squad monitor. It did not register a breach. You grab her by a shoulderpad and drag her into cover. The fighting begins to quiet down for a moment, and a peek out of cover confirms that the Cymoeba assault has pulled back. "Status report."

Jeanne answers over the Vox. She is almost growling, her voice intermixed with the gutter slang and insults of the lower levels of Pars. "Section combat-ineffective. Fifty percent casualties, remainder wounded. Left flank holds. Can not relocate. Continued enemy assaults."

"This is Sergeant Khorban." A familiar gruff voice mouths over the vox. "We did not ask for assistance. Your flanking force was consumed by a Phosphex cloud. " He pauses. "The intervention is recognized."

You curse loudly with your Vox receiver turned off. Phosphex clouds are liable to turn upon those who unleash them, by whatever arcane mechanism motivates their movement. "Please confirm. Veletaris and rifle section are dead?"

"Confirmed." Khorban says. "We are holding this flank. Can you hold your position?"

You peek over the parapet.

The horizon is filled with tentacles. At least two-dozen tendrils long enough to rip ships from orbit are lashing out, pulling apart ships. The ground begins to shake, the mass of Proteus in the distance seemingly preparing to detach from the moon.

Their main army of the Cymoeba is a hellish swarm of myriad bodily configurations, each seemingly more twisted and debased than the last, their sizes ranging from the small constructs you have fought, to beings the size of hab-blocks. They emerge from gaping openings in the world's surface.

"They were just cells." You mutter. "We have been fighting cells. I think those are the true Cymoeba coming for us."

Amélie gets into cover next to you, looking out into the death coming your way. She curses a string of gutter franc that makes Jeanne's prior outburst seem well-mannered. Her helmet cocks up as you stare at her in surprise. "Too bad about the suits. If we could take them off, we could die…" She trails off, her combat high slightly abating.

"I don't feel like dying tired. You?" You grin behind your faceplate. Perhaps you would not be executed if you retreated from this position. But you doubt that you could escape from what is coming your way.

Suddenly Philip throws himself into cover next to you. "Evening!" He laughs. Your head shoots around to look at his Rapier and the Servitors and troopers attending it. He's followed you all the way here. "Shitty place to die, if you ask me. But there's worse people to die with."

"Shut up, Pip." You laugh.

"Come on!" You shout, as a Cymoeba rushes ahead of the horde, easily as tall as a Space Marine, with three legs and four serrated claws. You fire your volkite into it, but the shot just disperses upon impacting its energy shield.

Just then a drop pod slams into the ground behind you, throwing up a shower of regolith. But instead of the Revenant Legion, Legionaries in black armour step out, all of them carrying mismatched weapons that share no unity of design. Their shapes are smooth and curved, instead of the boxy Imperial designs, the paint is white, purple and blue energies glow through vents or from power cells. Parts of the weapon appear to have had new sections forcibly integrated into them, which are connected to the armour of the Space Marines.

One of them takes aim at the Cymoeba and fires. A bolt of purple energy impacting it and… A feeling like ice water across the back of your head flows through you.

Why are you staring at empty air? What did the Marine just shoot? You find yourself increasingly confused as the new arrivals push towards the lip, pushing and shoving your troops aside as they open fire into the Cymoeba army.

Your armour's radiation monitoring equipment begins screaming, the gravity-accommodating pressure tubes and inflatable pads in your suit go haywire, each of them acting out of accord with the other as they adjust for different levels of gravity and toxicity.

Your chronometer rewinds an hour, jumps forward a decade, then backwards a century. Your suit registers breaches around your right hand. You look at your hand, horrified to see that your nails have grown so long they've grown through the seam from the inside. Your suit's systems crash, rebooting, all the symbols turned to incoherent gibberish, before turning into a language you have never seen before. You see a symbol flashing in the center.




Your eyes strain and you feel a nosebleed running over your upper lip as holes within the Cymoeba formation start to expand. You slap yourself in the side of the head, trying to focus.

What a weird way to march an army. You think. When one of the marines is suddenly flattened so completely he looks like a drawing made on the ground. The two-dimensional figure squirms a bit, then stops moving. You chuckle like an idiot and collapse.

The last thing you see before passing out is Sergeant Khorban barrelling one of the Marines in black aside and picking you up. You throw up blood in your helmet and close your eyes.

---

First Veteran Lasrifle Section. You are in command of this Section.
Second Lasrifle Section. Led by Void Sergeant Amélie Beaufort. Leader status unknown.
Third Lasrifle Section. Led by Void Sergeant Jeanne. Leader status unknown.
Fourth Lasrifle Section.
First Auxilia Flamer Section. Leader status unknown.
First Rapier Destroyer Support Section. Led by Sergeant Philip "Pip" Bernadotte. Leader status unknown.
First Veletaris Storm-Axe Section. Led by Anniet Chjandelmak. Leader KIA

---

The Battle of Proteus was an unexpected catastrophic failure for the Solar Reclamation, when it was revealed that Imperial analysts had grossly underestimated the enemy's capacities. Half the ships sent in the assault were destroyed by Proteus, and four of the Cohorts deployed on the surface were destroyed after the heavy Cymoeba forces made contact, making brutal use of the Solar Auxilia's shortage of heavy armoured vehicles at the time.

The three Franc Chemical Engineer Cohorts earned renown for fighting a holding action to cover the retreat to the dropships, setting Phosphex fires behind them to cover the retreat, fighting alongside the Revenant Legion while emergency deployments of First Legion Destroyers with Chrono-Obliteration weaponry blunted the enemy advance. Their efforts allowed for the successful withdrawal from Proteus of just under half the deployed forces.

A ground war on Proteus was deemed impossible, and Exterminatus was declared.

With the Emperor occupied with the final battle against the War Witches of Venus, he authorized deploying weapons from the heart of His deepest vaults. The First Legon fought into the heart of the corrupt moon, losing a thousand marines before deploying a weapon that wiped the very information that made up Proteus from the quantum foam of reality, unmaking the xenoform completely.
-The Purgation of Neptune: Submitted to the Imperial Court. 793M30

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[Spoiler
]Suit HUD translation.


Memory cache wiped.
Restarting Operating System.
No backup found.
Warning: Blood toxicity exceeding safe limits
[/spoiler]

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Welcome to the life of a human soldier in the Solar Reclamation.