Players engaged in combat with the Genestealers suddenly felt a tremor rise from deep underground. It was not the familiar thunder of artillery fire, but something deeper—a low, vast resonance, as if the planet’s core itself had begun to groan.
A moment later, a deafening roar erupted from beneath the surface. It began as a distant rumble, then surged forward with terrifying speed. In the next instant, a blinding white pillar of light pierced the sky.
Night was torn apart.
The darkness of the battlefield was replaced in an instant by an unnatural daylight, as though the sun had been forcibly reborn. At the heart of the pillar, an orange-red mushroom cloud swelled upward, expanding at an alarming rate and swallowing the horizon in its shadow. Then came the shockwave.
An invisible force swept across the battlefield like a tidal wave.
The gale arrived first—howling, violent, carrying the acrid stench of burning chemicals. It slammed into the players and threw them off their feet as if the wind itself had turned into a living beast. In their ears was nothing but the scream of air and the metallic shriek of debris being torn loose.
Rubble, dust, and fragments of steel were dragged into the sky, forming a circular shock front that rippled outward in all directions.
When the light finally dimmed and the wind subsided, the players slowly pushed themselves back to their feet.
And then they saw it.
The Genestealers—once disciplined, coordinated, and seemingly flawless in their encirclement—were now in total collapse.
Shrieking cries echoed across the ruins, layered with something disturbingly close to fear.
Some creatures had gone feral, their bloodshot eyes wild with madness as they tore into anything nearby—ally or enemy alike. Claws ripped. Teeth tore. The battlefield dissolved into an uncontrolled massacre of their own kind.
Others abandoned all structure entirely. Weapons dropped. Limbs twisted in panic. They fled without direction, ignoring orders, instinct, or survival logic. Their formations disintegrated into pure chaos, as if the entire network of coordination had been severed at once.
For a brief moment, the battlefield resembled a boiling sea of panic.
“It looks like it worked!” one player said, climbing up from behind cover. A moment ago, such movement would have drawn immediate fire—but now, he stood unchallenged.
“They’ve lost control!” another player added, leaning out with widening eyes. “This is insane…”
“I’ve heard about this—when a Tyranid node organism is destroyed, they collapse like this too?”
“Same origin. Same system.”
As they spoke, a teammate further ahead shouted without turning back, “Stop talking and move! Finish them while they’re down!”
On another part of the battlefield, Darius sat up slowly, still recovering from resurrection. He reached down and touched his abdomen, his expression turning faintly bitter.
“My tactical nuclear bomb… is gone.”
“It was expected,” another resurrected player said, patting his shoulder. “It’s a consumable effect, not a permanent buff. Once used, it’s gone.”
“Yeah…” Darius sighed, then tilted his head thoughtfully. “Then next time, I’ll have to think carefully before stuffing tactical nukes into my body. I’ll need a way to detonate it before I die… otherwise it’s wasted.”
No one bothered pointing out the obvious flaw in that logic. Accidental detonation in friendly territory wasn’t something anyone seriously considered—the activation sequence alone required deliberate control.
A minor mistake would only trigger the outer conventional explosives, producing something closer to a grenade than a nuclear blast.
“What now?” a nearby player asked.
Darius’s eyes lit up again.
“I’m getting addicted to this gravity parachute. Since the Genestealers are in chaos now… why don’t we use them for live-fire training?”
“I’m in!”
Elsewhere, in the Mid-Hive ruins, a dozen players were locked in combat with scattered Genestealer packs.
The fight, by all tactical standards, was a mess.
Most of the players moved with little coordination—some charged headfirst, others hesitated behind cover, and their aim was wildly inconsistent. Laser fire and ballistic rounds streaked unpredictably through the ruins, carving scorched lines into walls and embedding bullets into concrete at random.
Without friend-or-foe recognition systems, they would have been more dangerous to each other than to the enemy.
The only exception was a single experienced Helldiver.
He moved through the battlefield with practiced efficiency, weaving between enemies, firing with calm precision. Each shot landed cleanly. Each target fell without hesitation.
Fortunately, the Genestealers were no longer operating under psychic coordination. With the destruction of their controlling node, their instincts had degraded sharply. Their movements were sluggish, their attacks disorganized, and some even hesitated mid-charge.
Then—something changed in the sky.
A distant roar cut through the battlefield.
A jet-like scream, growing louder.
Gravity parachutes.
The Genestealers looked up just in time to see figures descending from above, bathed in streaks of laser fire.
Half the pack was wiped out before they even understood what they were seeing.
“Are all pilots like this?!”
A grounded player shouted in frustration as another airborne trooper flipped overhead, landing smoothly beside the veteran. His weapon was still smoking.
“Bringing in new recruits?” the airborne trooper asked casually.
“Yeah,” the veteran replied, wiping sweat from his brow. “You guys are getting better with those parachutes.”
“If you flew twenty hours a day, you’d get good too,” the trooper said with a grin. Then he kicked off the ground again, rising effortlessly into the air. “Honestly… the more I fly, the more I like it.”
“I’d get bored after a few hours,” the veteran admitted.
“Different tastes,” the trooper laughed. “Anyway, I’ll leave your area to you. I’m heading out.”
He spun once mid-air and vanished into another sector of the battlefield.
“See you!” the veteran called after him.
Within minutes, the remaining Genestealers were eliminated.
After the fight, a newcomer turned to the veteran. “You know him?”
“We all know each other,” the veteran said casually, a faint nostalgia in his voice. “Back in the second beta, there were only about a hundred Helldivers. We fought together constantly. Even if we weren’t close, after a few battles, we all became familiar faces.”
He looked toward the ruins.
“Now there are almost three hundred. Funny thing is… the old names don’t show up as often anymore.”