He was already moving when it exploded. He charged blind, his autosenses whited out by the detonation and the secondary explosions of cybernetic power units. Fragments of tech thrall banged from his armour. Something more substantial than a las-bolt slammed into his greave, denting the metal. He swung blindly into the mass of tech thralls. His vision returned to normal as he cut a thrall through the shoulder, his chainsword's teeth kicking out a black spray of mixed blood and oil. He continued the cut down, carving out of the side of the dead cyborg, and brought the weapon around at waist height, bisecting another across the chest. A further one died to his gun, a single bolt emptying his ribcage of its contents. Bror's brothers were shouting and howling, boltguns barking deafeningly in the confined space. The tech thralls' close-quarter protocols kicked in, proximity to their fellows preventing them from firing their built-in weapons. They had no words, but the organs of speech were intact in many, and they mumbled idiot moans at Bror as they grabbed for him with their gloved left hands. He shot them, he cut them down, he kicked and punched and headbutted. Twisted wreckage snagged at his ankles. Oil-tainted vitae slipped under the treads of his boots.

His last bolt was spent. He threw the weapon hard into a tech thrall's face, staving in its domed bronze helm and shattering its glass eyes.

A moment later, his second weapon failed.

Black smoke poured from the chainsword's motive unit. The teeth jammed with flesh and swarf. He smashed it hard against the wall to jar the muck free, at the same time grabbing a thrall's throat and crushing it in his bare hand. The teeth spun through a single revolution, and jammed again hard, breaking the links and unravelling the track from its mount. Bror dropped the sword, and grappled with the thralls barehanded.

They pressed in on him. He tore them bodily apart, but there were dozens, and they pounded upon his armour with metal fists as they dragged him down under their combined weight.

A shot buzzed past his shoulder, blasting the upper half of a thrall into metal-laced gore. He tried to focus on his helmplate to see how his brothers were faring. He saw mortis runes, but his vision shook with the hammering of the thralls on his armour and he could not tell which of his pack lived.

His field of view was crowded with cybernetic faces and scrabbling hands. Decaying flesh left greasy smears over his eye-lenses. They were tugging at his power feeds, metal fingers prying under his battleplate. Finally, one seemed to process that their weapons could be freely used again.

With a metallic chink, a laslock pressed against his forehead.

Bror screamed defiance into the mouth of Morkai.

'Fenrys hjolda!'