A wave rolled over a distant battlefield. It moved relentlessly forward, unmindful of weather or less natural obstacles. Closer inspection led to the discovery that the wave was in fact composed of smaller bits, bits that once may have once held hopes, dreams, emotions. For the present, all one could see from the long lines of Guardsmen were a glistening row of bayonets.

The most infamous of the innumerable regiments of the Imperial Guard, marched solemnly across the remains of a lovely park. The dark ranks of gas-masked men were nothing but a silent crashing wave of humanity - if human was even an appropriate word to describe them. They did not fear death - they welcomed it, if that was even possible.

If one wasn’t distracted long enough by the crash of artillery, they might notice streaks of light in the air. Simultaneously, the grey wave began to shed from itself, bits and pieces, some bright red. For all intents and purposes, however, the heretical and fanatical forces opposing it may as well have been hurling pebbles instead of firing lasguns at the oncoming force for all the good it was doing them. These weren't ordinary humans, as the enemy were discovering to their consternation.

They were the Death Korps of Krieg.

~

One Kriegsman in particular held the far right flank of the formation. On first glance, he looked no different from the thousands of other lasgun-wielding men who marched with him. One thing marked him distinctly from every other man in a ten-meter radius - he was alive from one split second to the next, as an explosion went off perfectly inside the Death Korps ranks.

Aforementioned Kriegsman was shielded from the explosion not by the bodies of his comrades - a crew-served Heavy Bolter support weapon resisted the deadly shrapnel far better than the flesh and blood of mere men. Instead, he was thrown back completely off his feet, and into a nearby shell hole. His world promptly faded into black.

~

Behind the Krieg came a sizable force of Planetary Defense Forces. If they had bothered to ponder such things, the Krieg would have been dismayed at the decidedly nonmilitant bearing of the local PDF. They were a motley bunch, to be sure, but they were all that the local Planetary Governor had at his disposal besides the recently arrived Krieg regiments, and the massive, inexplicable upheaval had to be contained. Legitimized gang members, conscripted factory workers, and Emperor knows what else, armed with a baffling array of weapons.

Few were expected to survive, and they advanced with fitting enthusiasm to their role. The crack of laspistol shots behind them from their officers kept them going hard, over the multitude of grey corpses left in the wake of the Krieg.

One hulking figure stood out among the right flank of the attack. He was in fact a Krieg Quartermaster, and the PDF looked on in awe and horror as he went to each of his fallen comrades, collecting weapons and finishing off those not quite dead. Many recalled the lessons they had received before the battle on the customs of their allies, that those who couldn't get back up (or crawl) and keep moving had paid their debt to the Emperor of Mankind in full.

They no longer needed to live.

One particular shell hole now held the unconscious Krieg and a recently-arrived PDF memeber, who crouched low in an attempt to avoid injury. As the novice looked on, the Quartermaster jumped into the hole, and looked the Krieg over. He proceeded to pull a laspistol from his belt, and lifted it to the groaning man's forehead.

"Hold on."

The Quartermaster grunted in annoyance, and turned to the PDF member who had interrupted the last rites of the dying Korpsman.

"He's just knocked out, I think."

The Korpsman stirred more forcefully, then shook his clear and stared up and the barrel of his comrade's leveled laspistol. He nodded, and reached for his lasgun . . .

. . . only to find it gone.

The Quartermaster reached into his pack and pulled out a replacement, no doubt pulled from the body of another Korpsman, and gave it to the Krieg before moving off to another dying man.

"You could say thanks." the PDF member said expectantly.

Ignoring her, the Guardsman got up, and at once rose out of the cover of the shell hole, starting for the line of Krieg in front of him. He never got there.

~

The Psyker looked over the battlefield, trying to find a proper test target. The first time she'd tried to teleport a dangerous cultist away had failed miserably, and had knocked her unconscious for her troubles. Now she thought she understood. If she wanted to cast something to another dimension, she had to try it in sync with someone similarly teleporting in that other dimension. Something like that, at least. This was technically illegal, sure, but an Imperial Inquisitor stood next to her, closely watching the sanctioned "experiment" in progress.

There. She felt it. From across reality itself came the sense of connection as she imagined warping the fanatics into another dimension, something else was warping as well.

~

Somewhere else, a oddly colored quadruped was seemingly annoyed at a green biped. "You left it." it flatly stated.

The biped looked around nervously, trying to find a way out. Finding none, a Psyker would have ascertained it decided a half-truth was the best bet.

"Uh, no?" it said rather sheepishly.

"Spike!" the quadruped groaned. "No matter." it muttered a second later, and an appendage on it's forhead glowed brightly, before the glow spread to the rest of it's body, and it promptly disappeared.

~

The Inquisitor unconsciously took a step back as the Psyker opened her eyes with a start, and raised her hand.From behind her eyes shown an incredibly bright light, and her gaze fixed upon the heretical lines.

Fate would not grant total success, however, and a cultist artillery round exploded nearby, sending a hail of dirt and debris on their position, as well as causing all present to flinch. For the majority, it was merely an automatic response to the shock wave of the explosion, something to cause the readjustment of a weapon's aim. Not even quickly forgotten, but never remembered to begin with.

Not so with the Psyker. As luck would have it, that exact moment was the one in which she released her power at a concentrated spot on the battlefield. That spot, thanks to the flinch, wasn't a heretical Heavy Bolter crew. It was instead directed at a somewhat shell hole.

The Pysker cursed as she saw the apparent failure of her attack. Her mental tirade was interrupted by the hand of the Inquisitor, however.

She turned to see him with an uncharacteristic grin on her face. "Success." he said.

"I beg you're pardon?" she asked.

"There was a Kriegsman and PDF in the shell hole." he responded simply, shifting his gaze to the battlefield.

She was starting to catch on. "And . . ?"

"They were expendable."

~

One moment in a war-torn hive, the next nowhere. A disorienting experience, to say the least. Even the stoic and fanatic Kriegsman's mind was swimming before long. A plethora of colors, shapes, concepts, and countless others flashed before him. Even the God-Emperor would have had no idea what he was seeing, a small voice in the back of his mind told him, quickly crushed.

One thing was certain, and that whatever this was, was coming to an end. They were shapeless blobs at first, but recognizably green at that. His attention turned to the one thing that he could make sense of in the void, and gradually the lines grew distinct and the shapes turned into objects. More normal colors filtered in, and the senseless ones began to appear.

Without warning, the ground rushed up to meet him, reality fully restored, no doubt. He thought he could see one personally uncommon sight before he fell the to ground. Trees.

He blacked out.

Or so it would seem. A normal human would have certainly been knocked unconscious by the shock of temporary non-existence and hitting solid ground at a considerable rate of speed, but one must remember this was not a human in the conventional sense. This was a member of the Death Korps of Krieg.

He slowly got to his feet, lasgun up, attention fixed on the inert body next to him.

.

Author's Notes:

Yeah. Warhammer 40k. Why, who knows, but it exists. In HiE fics, few use Imperial Guardsmen. Fewer still use the Death Korps of Krieg. And I haven't found one that uses those poor ignored chaps in the Planetary Defense Forces.

Time for a change.