No route wide enough for the Titans existed through the sub-hives, but Princeps Camulos had no need for one. The guns of his Titans could easily blast a path, or simply crush a way through with the weight of his engines. Mortis cared nothing for the millions that dwelled within the sub-hives, only that the Magma City was brought to ruin and Adept Zeth humbled before the new masters of Mars.
Thousands of workers fled before the advancing Titans, ants before a herd of charging bull grox, but like the containers around them, the Mortis engines ignored them, safe in the knowledge that the forces following behind them would mop up any lingering threats.
Flowing like a black-armoured tide of spiked nightmares made real, the warped cohorts of skitarii and horrifically altered battle-servitors poured into the container port, their lustful war-shouts echoing weirdly from the metal skins of the stacked containers.
Explosions dotted the landing fields as fuel lines were crushed under the colossal feet of the Titans and flames followed in their wake. Black smoke boiled upwards like dark scratches etched on the sky.
Artillery pieces fired from redoubts and fortifications around the base of the sub-hives, and the ground before the Titans erupted in corrosive flames and deadly clouds of whickering shrapnel. Hundreds of enemy soldiers were cut down in the first instant, but it was nothing compared to the host pressing at their backs.
Voids flared and shimmered under the bombardment, but without the concentration of fire necessary to overload an engine's shields, the defensive fire was largely wasted. The four Warhounds bounded forward, low to the ground, weaving between the incoming fire as they opened up with their mega bolters.
One Warhound staggered as a particularly well-aimed salvo caught it full on and it shed its voids in a coruscating detonation. The explosion blew off one of its legs and it smashed, nose-first, into the ground, ploughing a thirty-metre furrow before finally coming to a halt. A cheer of elation erupted from the defenders, but observers further back in the Magma City knew the loss of a single Warhound would not slow the attackers.
The remaining Warhounds increased their speed, using their agility to better evade, and each engine's princeps displayed a healthy respect for the accuracy of the Magma City's gunners.
Blizzards of weapons fire strafed the defenders, a furious storm of high explosive shells that tore through all but the heaviest fortifications, wreaking unimaginable havoc within the packed knots of Zeth's Protectors, skitarii and tech-guard. Artillery pieces exploded and ammo parks detonated explosively as the Warhounds' fire tore through them.
The elation that had gripped the defenders upon seeing a Warhound brought down evaporated instantly in the face of the destruction unleashed by its brothers. Terrified, insensate survivors staggered away from the shrieking, smoking, flaming hell of explosions, some clutching severed limbs, others holding in spilling intestines or dragging the shredded carcasses of their comrades away from the firestorm.
As a flood of panicked men and women fled the fortification lines, the adamantium blast doors of a hardened bunker slid aside and an Ordinatus machine rolled forwards on heavy gauge rails. A gargantuan artillery piece so large it needed a strengthened chassis, a crew of hundreds and specialised generators just to power its enormous gun, the Ordinatus was a weapon of such power that an adept counted himself lucky if he had even one such weapon in his arsenal.
Its crew locked in the targeting auspex, working on a firing solution on one of the larger war engines, an impetuous Reaver that had broken from the pack of marauding Titans.
A searing beam of blinding, unwavering energy erupted from the Ordinatus and struck the careless Reaver square in the face. Instantly its shields screamed and blew out in a froth of sparks and whipping arcs of discharged energies that vaporised hundreds of mutant skitarii advancing in its shadow. The Ordinatus beam continued to play over the Reaver's body, obliterating armour plates and body shielding in a flurry of actinic explosions.
Flames bloomed from inside the enemy machine and as the reactor core was breached, the Reaver vanished as a newborn sun flared into life. Voids scraped and howled as the Reaver's accomplices felt the violence of its death, but none were damaged beyond shrapnel scars.
Its work done, the Ordinatus machine began to roll back into its protective bunker to recharge its main gun. It never got the chance.
The towering, dreadful form of Aquila Ignis opened fire with its monstrous annihilator cannon and the giant Ordinatus vanished in an expanding mushroom cloud of nuclear plasma.
Shock at the death of such a magnificent machine rendered the defenders immobile for a heartbeat, but that was all the Mortis engines needed. As the Ordinatus was consumed in a sea of roiling plasma, the opportunistic Warhounds darted forward and smashed through the crumbled remains of the defensive line.
Amongst the defenders, the Warhounds barked their triumph from carapace-mounted augmitters and began the killing. Mega bolters blitzed and chewed up exposed soldiers in a furious storm of explosive rounds through which nothing could survive. Turbo lasers incinerated flesh and melted armoured units as the cackling beasts crashed the tiny figures that stood before them.
Drank with slaughter, the Warhounds raced onwards, crashing the few pitifully burned or shredded survivors as their slower pack members stomped over the walls between the worker habs and outerworks of Adept Zeth's mighty forge, as easily as a child might step over a fallen branch.
In the close-packed confines of the sub-hives, the Warhounds snapped and killed like hunting raptors, guns rippling with fire and their horns screaming with the elation of the kill.
One engine worked in solitude, methodically reducing block after block of habs and forge temples to rain with its weapons and bulk. Walls broke apart, smelteries collapsed and great coolant towers were brought down in tumbling cascades of rockcrete and steel.
Two others worked as a pair, one demolishing buildings with concentrated blasts of fire, while the other raked the rabble to slay any survivors. Together, they left a wake of destruction such as had never been seen in the Magma City's history.
Dust billowed in vast clouds and the sound of collapsing structures overpowered even the cackling glee of the Warhounds as they cleared a path for the larger engines.
The solitary Warhound was the first to die.
Its crew never saw its killer, but its sensori felt the auspex lock a fraction of a second before its voids were blown out in a devastating volley of las-fire and it was obliterated in a rippling series of missile impacts.
The other two Warhounds felt its demise and furiously surged into the rains in search of its destroyer. Darting forwards in a series of loping bounds, they came upon its smouldering carcass and swept the area with aggressive bursts of their targeting auspex.
The lead engine caught a return from behind a shattered steelworks and opened fire without waiting for a lock, hoping to drive its quarry into the open where its twin could finish it off.
The ironworks dissolved into a mist of pulverised rock fragments and shattered steel, but instead of forcing the engine behind it to ran, it had the opposite effect.
Lunging though the fiery debris, a towering monster in cobalt blue armour came at the Warhounds, its fists blazing and a heroic challenge issuing from its warhorn.
Deus Tempestus crashed into the astonished Warhound, smashing it to the ground and stamping down hard with one enormous foot. The smaller engine was crashed like a tin can beneath the mighty Warlord, the First God Machine of Legio Tempestus.