On the war-torn plains of the Vigilus Star, the Demon Legion of the World Reavers clashed in brutal melee with the rampaging Ork horde. Blades carved through flesh and bone, while the churned mud and sand drank deeply of spilled blood. It was a savage and drawn-out engagement—utterly merciless for both daemon and greenskin alike.
Profane runes hovered in the war-scorched skies, pulsing with unclean warp energy that tore through the heavens. The wilderness lay shrouded beneath a veil of chaotic, primordial power.
Above, dark clouds churned like a great vortex drawn into a warp-born typhoon. The thunderous war cries of the Orks reverberated across the battlefield, their guttural roars coalescing into a storm of sound that shook the land itself.
Lightning raked the heavens, illuminating the battlefield below where the flames of war cast strange, flickering shadows of the contending legions.
The sky itself seemed to wail in agony, as a storm of yellow sand rose up from the blood-soaked earth, filling the air with choking grit and the stench of death. The very atmosphere of the Vigilus Star writhed and tore under the strain of battle.
Unclean warp energy howled across the open fields, drowning all in its vile tempest.
The catastrophic aftermath of war engulfed the entire planet. Even humanity's most fortified bastions could not escape the grasp of this apocalyptic struggle.
The daemon legion's activation of their warp-borne sorcery triggered a violent warp storm that surged across the star system.
Etheric energy flooded the world.
Within moments, the psychic shielding that protected Imperial strongholds faltered and collapsed beneath the storm's pressure.
Without the Aegis of the Immaterium, the fortress walls were left defenseless. The daemon tide—driven by base instinct and unrelenting bloodlust—crashed into them like a relentless tsunami.
Thus the war plunged deeper into madness.
In response to the sudden incursions, the battle-brother captains of the Crimson Fists and Iron Hands coordinated their forces, erecting rigorous quarantine perimeters in a desperate effort to stem the tide.
But what they found in the abandoned Litmus Harbor chilled even their hardened spirits.
Mutants—hulking, misshapen things with pig-like limbs and bloated torsos fused with rusted metal and splintered bone—staggered through the half-lit corridors. Through shattered windows, parasitic vermin swooped in, lashing out at the joints in power armor with barbed limbs and needle-like appendages.
Lumbering abominations trudged forward, belching volatile methane that ignited into hellish firestorms above their heads. When approached, they struck with rusted claws and foul, improvised weapons—inflicting grievous losses on the Astartes in mere moments.
The beasts lurked in darkness, dragging battle-brothers into the abyss one by one.
Yet the Adeptus Astartes are not so easily broken.
Trained in the crucible of a thousand wars, they made ruthless use of their arsenal. Even in close quarters, the Astartes grenade launchers barked death with unerring precision.
Hellblaster Squads swept through with cleansing flame, vaporizing the larger monstrosities in disciplined volleys.
Amidst the chaos, the disciplined thunder of the Emperor's wrath echoed. Encircling the mutant hordes, the battle-brothers fought with grim resolve, their bolters and plasma incinerators carving a path through the enemy leaders.
The Crimson Fists deployed Flame Lander Armor and unleashed Hellhounds drawn from the Vigilus Star Defense Corps. These war engines vomited sheets of flame that painted the hive's towering spires in hues of crimson and gold.
But not every front held.
Despite their tenacity, many defensive sectors fell.
Through these breaches, the diseased spawn of Nurgle flooded into the hive.
Plague Apostles—resilient, vile servants of the Lord of Decay—led the charge. Under their command, daemon forces fragmented into smaller tributaries, slithering through the sewer ducts beneath the hive.
The festering underways, choked with waste and stagnant water, proved ideal terrain for Nurgle's kin. It was inevitable: the pestilence would soon spread, and hundreds of thousands of Imperial citizens would perish in agony.
As the threat escalated, Imperial officials convened emergency war councils.
But in the dark below, another threat stirred.
The Genestealer Cults, long hidden within the underhive, could no longer abide the presence of their daemonic rivals.
Led by the Pauper Princes, they launched a ruthless purge of the Children of Nurgle.
The conflict drew out even more of the hidden predators.
The Drukhari, lurking in shadowed alcoves and forgotten voidspaces, were drawn into the fray. Their attempts at secrecy shattered, they emerged in violence.
As the Imperials rushed to finalize plans for a quarantine perimeter around the hive, the very foundations of the city trembled beneath the escalating war. The lower hive had become a crucible of death—Genestealers, daemons, and Drukhari locked in a spiraling conflict that threatened to spill into the heart of the spire.
The entire Vigilus Star reeled under the weight of madness.
Humans against daemons. Daemons against Genestealers. Genestealers against Drukhari. Drukhari against Orks. Orks against daemons.
War consumed every corner, each conflict more twisted than the last.
The inner sanctum of the hive had not yet fallen. Imperial bunkers held firm, fortified and bristling with heavy firepower. Crossfires laced the air with glowing tracer rounds. Shell casings rained down like hail. The stench of promethium and ozone clung to every breath.
An upright automatic mortar, machine spirit howling with fury, unleashed wave after wave of explosive ordnance. Each shell tore daemons and heretics to pieces in a fury of light and shrapnel.
"Upon the throne, may our enemies be annihilated!"
A preacher of the Void Order, sent from Holy Terra itself, stood upon the ramparts. Clad in Ecclesiarchal vestments, he bellowed litanies in the Emperor's name.
Yet his words fell on ears dulled by horror.
The soldiers at his side stared down at the chaos below, paralyzed by indecision. The enemies of the Imperium were locked in a bloodbath—so many, so varied, that they knew not where to strike first.
"Who is the target, Father?" the Commissar shouted over the din.
"Are you blind, Commissar? Destroy all who defy us!" the priest cried, eyes wild. He raised a scepter wrapped in barbed chains. Warp-light flickered in his aura—his soul ablaze, the magnetic field of his being dragged him ever closer to the will of the Emperor... or something far darker.
With a single hand, he hefted a massive flamethrower nearly as tall as he was.
A tongue of flame erupted from its muzzle—a roaring inferno shaped like a fire-drake. It descended on the battlefield, devouring all in its path—daemons, Genestealers, Drukhari, and cultists alike. None were spared.
"In His name or any other, let all enemies burn!" the preacher howled, voice thick with exultation.
His fervor crackled through the vox-channel.
A nearby Hellblaster, inspired by the priest's manic faith, leveled his plasma incinerator and fired.
A blinding lance of energy struck out, connecting his barrel to the base of the mortar like a blazing tether of death.
Scorching fire surged across the battlements of the inner city, sweeping over walls reinforced by centuries of faith and steel. In the charred wake, dozens of daemons and xenos left behind smoldering corpses—twisted, broken, and blackened beyond recognition.
"Charge!" the priest bellowed, his voice a roaring hymn to the God-Emperor.
A violent rain of bolter fire consumed all in its path. The battlefield—where Genestealers and daemons had moments before torn into one another with unrestrained fury—was now cleared in a thunderous blaze.
Yet still, it was not enough for the priest.
Advancing through the smoke, he snatched up his vox-link. "Air support. Coordinates uploaded. Light them up."
Minutes later, a squadron of Stormhawk Interceptors screamed overhead, their engines howling with righteous fury. With deadly precision, they released albuterol incendiary payloads that exploded into walls of flame, bathing the battlefield in white-hot light.
The shockwave rolled out like a tidal surge. Rubble and body parts flew skyward in grotesque arcs. But the Imperial Guard, ever disciplined, hunkered behind their bunkers, shields raised, unmoved by the chaos.
With air support clearing a path of fire, the priest led the charge, surging through the inferno. The enemies—fractured, leaderless—scattered in disarray.
Slinging his flamethrower over his back, the priest drew his bolt pistol. The weapon barked with holy fury as he took aim at the fleeing heretics and mutants.
"By the Throne, there is no sanctuary for you. Not in Hades. Not in the Warp. Not in Hell!"
Grenade launchers boomed behind him. Every explosion marked the fall of another traitor or abomination.
Inspired by their priest's zeal, the soldiers of the Imperium opened fire. The familiar tremor of recoil, the thunderclap of bolters—they felt the Emperor's will surge through their hands.
Their kinetic rounds struck true. Enormous Nurgle abominations burst like overripe fruit, spraying acidic pus and rotting entrails across the ground. Swollen Genestealers disintegrated into green mist, their carapaces no match for the holy wrath of the Imperium.
"Onward, warriors! For glory! For the Emperor! For the Warmaster!" The priest of the Void Order raised his sacred tome high and roared, voice echoing through vox-channels.
Meanwhile, on Holy Terra—
Far from the frontlines, in the heart of the Imperium, Dukel stood at the center of a war-room buried within the catacombs of the Imperial Palace. The flickering hololith of the Vigilus Star displayed wave after wave of enemy movement—but Dukel remained impassive.
He had seen wars.
And he knew this was but the prelude.
The current chaos on Vigilus was no true war. It was a churning sea before the tidal wave. The real storm had yet to break.
It was Doom's intelligence that shifted the tide.
Reports confirmed the potential presence of Horus and other renegade Primarchs on the planet. That alone transformed the battlefield from a desperate skirmish into a galactic flashpoint.
Dukel acted without hesitation.
Messages were dispatched to his brothers—Roboute Guilliman, Lion El'Jonson, Sanguinius, even Corvus, the long-lost shadow wandering the Immaterium.
They were all en route to Vigilus.
Horus had made his move.
And every loyal son of the Emperor hungered for the chance to confront the Wolf-Shepherd of Treachery himself.
Compared to such a meeting, the surface war on Vigilus was a mere sideshow. Desperate, bloody, and tragic—but manageable.
Although the battlefield on the surface of Vigilus appeared to be mired in chaos, it remained firmly under Dukel's control.
To him, orks were currency—expendable assets, not enemies. And as the second greatest economic force in the Imperium after the Emperor Himself, Dukel could shift the outcome of a ground war simply by loosening his coin pouch.
Even for the mighty Abaddon, who was expected to arrive on the planet shortly, Dukel had already made arrangements.
Following high-priority orders from the loyal Primarchs, several commanders were en route to Vigilus: Dante of the Blood Angels, Azrael of the Dark Angels, Marneus Calgar of the Ultramarines, and Doom of the Second Legion. Each arrived with a single Glory Company—elite forces numbering roughly a thousand Space Marines—supported by fleets and auxiliary units sufficient to wage war on an apocalyptic scale.
As expected, when Abaddon descended upon Vigilus, the so-called Despoiler found the world in tatters—bombarded, broken, and burning.
But that was all part of the plan.
What Abaddon needed was only a foothold. A single kick to ignite the true conflict.
From the ruins of Vigilus, four champions of the First Founding would rise to meet him. Whether Abaddon expected such an answer to his arrival was unknown—but it would be answered nonetheless.
In Terra's Outer Orbit—
Aboard a war barge suspended above Holy Terra, Doom was making final preparations for deployment.
The delay in his launch had not been due to hesitation, but because Dukel had commissioned an entire arsenal of newly-forged wargear for him.
Doom, as the firstborn of the Lord of Destruction, was no stranger to cutting-edge weaponry. Whether developed by the Second Legion's own research divisions or by the Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus, any new prototype was first tested by him.
Now, he stood on the landing pad of his battleship, exchanging words with a hooded and multi-armed Tech-Priest.
"Magos, I want full disclosure of any risks tied to this equipment," Doom said with narrowed eyes. "Last time, that biological stink bomb from the Great Magos of Lar detonated under high temperature. One of my brothers was blown over twenty meters. And for six months, he reeked like a plague daemon. Similar oversights have happened before. This time, no surprises."
"My lord, I assure you, there was no intent to withhold information. Great Magos Lar himself was unaware of the instability," replied the Magos, his vox-emitter crackling with static.
He wore the smug grin common to all radical tech-priests—those whose ambition exceeded the safety protocols of the Cult Mechanicus. Calculated risk was their creed, after all. If they fully understood the weapons they designed, they would not be called radicals.
In the past, their devices had occasionally backfired—sometimes injuring mortal soldiers, or in rare cases, even harming Astartes. Even the most callous Magos would feel a twinge of guilt in such scenarios.
But Doom? Doom was different.
He bore the physique of his father—the Lord of Destruction—and no accident, no matter how catastrophic, had ever done more than scratch his ceramite.
That was why the radicals adored him.
He was their perfect test subject. A living engine of war capable of wielding any experimental weapon without fear.
The Tech-Priest handed him a data slate. "The known hazards of these weapons are detailed here, my lord. As always, unforeseen variables may arise during field deployment. Combat environments are difficult to account for in full."
"But I assure you," he added quickly, voice growing fervent, "these devices contain not only the distilled wisdom of the great Magi, but also insights derived directly from your father's own designs!"
He waved a servo-arm with theatrical flair. There was even a hint of flattery in his mechanical smile—something no follower of the Omnissiah considered shameful when it served the spread of divine innovation.
Doom gave him a flat look. "…"
"Fine," he said at last, accepting the data slate. "I'll authorize limited testing. But Magos—remember this: they must prove valuable. Only then will they be deployed to the wider Legion."
His voice, while calm, carried the implicit weight of a commander who had seen too many reckless ideas turned into battlefield disasters.
"You will not be disappointed, my lord," the Magos said, restraining a tremor of excitement.
...
T.N:
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