There was nothing to do but kill them and fall back, kill them and fall back. The wide-open plaza, free of obstructions, was ideal for this, as literally every shot would hit something if it went far enough. What was important was the coordination of Sun Shots, the power of volley fire, and not wasting ammunition on inefficient replication of targets.

Dead Xenos burned, and the rest came on madly as his company fell back, again and again and again. Xenosyms popped continuously from Sun Strikes, exploding in geysers of plascrete-eating acid, and autofire laser cannons whirred continuously and reaped swathes of the enemy.

Yeah, they could do this. They just had to limit the approach vectors and stop the surround. That coliseum was going to have to do. Rote Xenos weren’t climbers, although the syms were... but the syms were still more limited in numbers.

The Xenos swept right by where the Legionnaires were hiding. Bastrid frowned, wondering what they intended, not trusting them at all, as his men pulled back with an efficiency the most experienced of armies would beg for under pressure, and were moving through the doors of the arena, blasting open any closed gates in the way, and surging through the ramps into the central area as the horde of Xenos invaders closed in on them.

Naturally the horde wasn’t going to be limited by the ramps and gates, the syms immediately beginning to climb the plascrete walls, phrenic-charged claws biting into stone easily enough as they swarmed for multiple approach vectors... but the key point was that the bigger, stronger, and much less numerous syms were the only ones that could climb. However, the converging wave of lesser xenos were sweeping around and through all the gates, aiming to envelope however they could.

Those gates naturally became the focus of concentrated fire, and were soon heaped high with burning, acidifying dead, while the syms coming over the top of the walls were also being picked off by snipers calmly and carefully, with a side effect of spraying acid all over their lesser brethren, the higher seating levels, and the seats themselves, wreaking more harm on that which passing bombs and artillery fire had failed to already level.

Their retreat point was at the far end of the field, opened up and with no higher stands above it, giving a fine view of the blasted ruin of Hendrikspire beyond, still burning with multicolored fires from the nuclear strike that had devastated the miles around it. It had been a famous artistic Spire before the city fell, the murals on its sides and the flowing aesthetics of its construction considered the most beautiful Spire on the planet.

Ah, well. When all the lovely people living there became meat hosts for cerevores or were being turned into xenosyms, no reason to keep it around.

Hym Briggs went up on the wall there, fully capable of sweeping the backside smoothly and constantly, his own shoulder-las now being slapped into position so that he could fire in two directions. The extra generator in his Masspack was coming online to supplement his Shock Gauntlets and suit feed.

All the main ramps were now under continuous volleys of dedicated fire, and in close quarters the rivers of laser fire brimming with Swarmbane were devastatingly powerful. Each shot was an explosion of acidic guts and gore that began to eat away the very ramps and make them harder to get through.

Zenthikos and Bastrid had blasted away the seats on the neighboring sections, giving them open fields of fire to the swarms now flowing slowly between and along the chairs, and exploding Xenos naturally cleared out more of them. Soon, most of the seating had been dissolved away, and the plascrete flooring was getting a little shaky from the amounts of acid bathing it.

The higher levels naturally didn’t have nearly the discouragement as the lower ones, and rapidly reached an overlooking position to his unit’s final stand position.

Glizza and Tych started dealing with those problems at the rate of twenty per second, focusing on the areas above the supports. Phrenic acid burned through the plascrete, and hit the durasteel supports. Normal acid had little hope of damaging durasteel, but this psionically charged stuff in enough quantity could do the job... and quantity there was plenty of.

Under the bathing of Xenos acids, one support, then another slowly gave away, and the decks went crashing down in succession, pushing the oversight positions back repeatedly as the coliseum decided it didn’t like them, and mashed a whole bunch of xenos flat as it came down.

Hym was sweeping the backside of the arena, while the nearest ramps to their position were abruptly covered by the crushing mass of fallen decks, cutting them out from being immediately flanked.

Different teams were layering streams of fire through all the approaches, guarding the flanks, and annihilating those streaming across the middle of the field. Still the numbers coming towards them were increasing, as even Swarmbane wouldn’t catch every one of the little things... but it would catch a lot of them, and they were being killed at unprecedented speed while coming up out of those ramps so close together.

Zenthikos was standing down there on the arena floor and almost holding the whole expanse of it himself, playing his autolas back and forth across it, frost falling from the rotating, pulsing gun incessantly, and his own shoulder-las was up to deal with threats from the flanks the shooters didn’t quite catch.

Focus, raise Nimbus, acquire, shoot, and discharge Sun Shot. Focus, raise Nimbus, acquire, shoot, and discharge Sun Shot. The Ranthas had the heights, sweeping the Xenos who got close to the edges of the higher decks, building up more acid falls and crumbling those decks repeatedly. If the xenos retreated from the decks, the girls just joined the defense against those numbers trying to come in from the sides, lasers from their Autobows pulsing twenty times a second, and the constant discharges of force bolts administering somewhat stronger hits to any syms that got into that range.

The constant flaring of Nimbuses and Sun Shots in such tight coordinated fashion was like a wall on its own, flaring against the hivemind of the Xenos, pushing at it with defiance and hostility like nothing they had ever experienced, like getting multiple flashbombs to the face, popping and delivering death every time they hit.

Still the xenos came, the flood pouring into the arena, a place for sport and bloodsport now patiently hosting genocidal war, and more and more fire had to be diverted from the entry points to the flanking zones around the defenders, especially when the xenos got tired of standing around uselessly on the upper decks and came flowing down to join the fun on the stairs.

The layered stands definitely helped them keep firing lines for everybody clear, and the Xenos were basically advancing into a killing shitstorm. Bastrid was coordinating with everyone as lines tightened up, and finally he had to tell the Shield users to light them up as the Xenos began to reach people.

With a hum, the mindshields rose up, and instead of pumping Sun Shots, psychic discharges flared on the surface of glowing mindshields and blew leaping, charging, dart-shooting xenos into sprays of flesh-eating gore atop their fellows. Above and behind them, the las-fire continued to shoot, and plunging mindclaws ripped and tore as the soldiers swore. But even if they only had a basic Vajra, it had been a #1 imperative to get Acid Resistance, and these displays weren’t harming them.

Outside, the end of the xenos horde, fully surrounding and covering the arena as they pressed down onto the constantly rippling sphere of light, swept past the Obsidian Serpents position. Only then did the Legionnaires roll out after them, and as the xenos poured into the arena, the Serpents rapidly fanned out to close in from all sides, and then opened up with heavy gyros and pulse rifles.

The Xenos were definitely surprised by the assault from the rear, especially the cerevores who were guiding the effort and making every effort not to follow those in front getting sniped off by Tremma with distressing frequency. Bastrid noted to his men that the Legionnaires were coming, but taking their own damn sweet time, their methods and tactics showing they were far more concerned about surrounding the Xenos and killing them all, instead of getting in and relieving the defenders.

The pulses of light were surging out in waves, Xenos exploding in clusters and batches, still coming in mindlessly. The syms coming up the walls behind had given up after turning the floor of the plaza outside into a steaming mass of chewed-up ground, and Hym was giving major cover fire from on high.

It was all a numbers game, and one the Xenos were actually losing.

Some Syms were making it up to and over the Shields, finding that Phrenic Bane mindclaws to the face weren’t comfortable, and the humans weren’t coming apart under their claws the way they should be. Indeed, they were even willing to rush up to and grapple them face to face... and those mindclaws hurt, hurt bad...

Happily, their misery didn’t last any longer than it took someone else to shoot the sym in the head, and the one locked in melee with it to be quickly seen to by a healer, if possible, even as they grabbed their weapon back and got into position.

Everyone was shooting, and syms were still exploding...

The Xenos seemed to be panicking as heaping swathes of them were burning vivic, trying to overwhelm the defense with numbers, building up walls to leap over the shields, and knots of personal combat were cutting the outgoing fire even as the first explosions and shots from behind were coming through the tunnels. It was slow, steady, thorough, and definitely not giving a damn how long it took to reach and relieve them. Indeed, they probably expected nobody to be left alive in here.

Bastrid was going to disappoint them.

----------

The Legionnaires coming in didn’t pick up the pace at all, even when their numbers came up and saw the writhing knot of combat taking place. They focused on removing any threat to themselves, trooper after armored trooper marching out and into place, a few jetting up to overwatch positions on higher decks and making sure none of the Xenos were up top, rapidly extending their surround and butchering of the remainder of the horde.

Bastrid could hear them talking on their encrypted channel, but there was no attempt to communicate with them, and some of their shooting got dangerously close to Bastrid’s company.

He didn’t initiate communication, either. He was, however, in communication with Anatolia and her staff, who were watching this entire process very narrowly.

The final, roiling minutes of the slaughter involved too much hand-to-hand with too many syms and panicking cerevores. Most of the company was reduced to mindclaws and hacking in close combat with unnaturally armored, fast, and lethal aliens, and just had to suck up the injuries and kill them however they could. The Ranthas were tearing through the xenos in explosions of violence, and nothing was getting close to any of the Briggs Brothers, but they couldn’t be everywhere.

Bastrid watched Markdoors wink out one by one, and the Ranthas slowly harvest those who died as their Curses pulsed.

He lifted his Hammer Taptap up from the pulverized remains of a cerevore that had come leaping out of a Sym Queen, whose head and arms had gone in all different directions under his girl Tych’s and her soulsword Stroke’s gentle ministrations.

The xenos were dead.

-Move!- he /ordered, fairly driving the exhausted troops into motion. -SAVE EVERYONE!-

Twenty-plus percent of this Hexivalla Company he had trained had died. Without the Legionnaires, that would have risen to over fifty percent without a doubt. With them, it could have been less than ten... but the Marines would have had to come of out hiding sooner, and coordinate attacks in relief of them, instead of building such a tight net and playing it so safe for themselves.

-Make no comment, make no sign, make no acknowledgement, - he /stated coolly. -They held off because they saw you all were using psionics, is my guess, and you’re just Planetary Guard... you’re both inferior, and you’re using the powers that beat them millennia ago. Focus on saving everyone, and then healing them! We can take it!-

He was matching word to action, diving after every soldier who was down but not dead, his psicrystal Heart in his fingers. Around him, designated healers were clutching their own psicrystals, and wounds were getting transferred to stop bleeding out and trauma fast, fast, fast, saving the living first, and then worrying about healing them to full later.

The surrounding Legionnaires had barely suffered any personal combat at all, and simply looked at the Guardsmen frantically digging out their own and trying to keep them alive silently. There was no call out, no plea for aid from the mere humans... and no offers from the brooding armored behemoths looking over them, although Bastrid could certainly tell they were talking and discussing their next course of action.

-Anatolia,- he /stated in no uncertain terms. -Arrange for most of these bastards to die in the Emperor’s Name, will you?-

-It would be my pleasure,- their strategist supreme /murmured back coldly, and he knew the Serpents’ fate was sealed.