Comparing Tian'Chaoren to other major human majority or plurality polities was a common hobby among those obsessed with figuring what could be the most powerful one of the many nations of man. Common choices were with the Interex or the Imperium, though the truth is that none of the great powers could afford the cost of actually trying to conquer each other outright. More limited wars for strategic objectives and power plays yes, but all out war is something that only the insane want when there are countless other issues, many of which care nothing for politics. Cheif among these threats and the newest, are the Tyranids who come from beyond the rim of the garden.
When the Tyranids first started to invade the Garden, the Xian had at first deemed them of limited import. Hive Armada was massive yes, but invaders from beyond the rim of what was known came fairly regularly. Of course, the Astromancers tried to warn that the great bulk of these outrimmers came fleeing from the beasts, but the Shadow in the Warp obscured much of the early divination and the readings of fate were murky.
Interest in the potential Tyranid threat would increase for some time as the Behemoth bulldozed through most obstacles in its way. Regions of space cleansed of everything of value leaving behind only the strange but rich waste of the tyranids, but the Xian at first were more interested in how the Tyranids seemed to violate the conservation of mass, and what weaknesses of their foes may be revealed by the hive armada's passing. , But then Behemoth would be blunted at Ultramar. Not really stopped, but at least repulsed from one of the few Desmenses of the Imperium that could rival Solaris at the centre. Interest would then die down, with the Tyranids and the relatively minor encounters with far ranging tendrils of the Armada filed away as a matter for chroniclers to discuss.
Though the Tyrannic Wars for the Imperium had only just begun, only relatively light Tyranid forces had sought to assail the celestial realm or its sphere of influence, and if the Imperials could stop them, at however great a cost; then surely the Tian'Chaoren would do better. Of course, with the poor state of the flow of information between the Imperium and realm, a lot of the finer details went under the radar, unreported and unsaid. Such as the connection between the Hive Armadas' various subcategories of more overt forms that consumed different things, the classic Tyranids things useful to omni-metabolising carbon based biology, the Lithovores silicates and minerals, the Dynaphages energy, the Kyberdons metal and machinery, and the Mindwyrms generated by the Gestalt Chorus scrubbing for souls; and the Genestealer Cults that represented the advanced guard of the Tyranids.
Those who thought that the Behemoth was all, or even an a remotely significant portion of the Great Devourer were fools. And as the Jinyi got onto other business, smaller Hive Armadas had already set their sights on the bounty of the Celestial Realm. The first signs would be the fleeing of Skaven clans who had long been an issue for the down-southwestern fringes of the celestial realm for Tian'Chao's client states and the Celestial Realm itself.
The other would be the spread of cults that went by a thousand names, that said that the teachers were hoarding secrets or that they spoke the true teachings or had great lost lore. The Civilian Guards would of course, investigate for signs of infiltration by Chi'an-Chi, Tzeentch to the Imperium; but found no evidence of either him, the Strangers, or the influence of the Necrarch Vampires. Of course, this was a flawed investigation to begin with.
The Cults would spread as an assortment of secret societies that would seek to predate on the desire to know the unknowable, and those who sought shortcuts in the paths of enlightenment and those looking for political support for pet causes. Usually starting very innocuously, but growing to prepare the way for greater troubles to come. The Gestalt Chorus would seed such cults well in advance of its arrival, gathering information to be fed into its endless chitter and chatter by the links that the Patriarchs had to the great chorus.
Elements of what as assumed to simply be a minor Hive Armada; Naga, though most known for its conflicts with the various fractions of the Splintered Eldar, would also strike at Tian'Chao in greater numbers than the Behemoth. Naga's psychic monstrosities would consume many sectors and prefectures, the orderly navies of the Celestial Realm struggling to deal with the screaming, swirling chaos that the Tyranids brought to battle while Genestealer Cult infiltration fed vital secrets to the new enemy.
Lictor-Ships able to hide from most forms of detection, ships using consumed biomass to alter themselves to evade and endure the incoming barrages and get close, and the flexible, lifelike turning capabilities of Tyranid ships allowed the "Taotie" as they were called for their gluttonous nature, to worm their way within formations. The Shadow in the Warp cloyed the mind and altered the flow of the winds of magic, the chitter chatter of the largest network of connected minds in the universe drowning out all else, the hallways of ships flooded with monstrosities who came out of every wall and pore amidst seas of acid they were immune to but even vehicular armour would be digested by.
And an unspoken thing of the Tyranids is that the massive is ordinary for them, with large numbers of huge and powerful hive ships pushing their advance with deceptive cleverness and perfect coordination. Tactics that once worked would be adjusted to and countered, weapons that once seemed to be cure-alls were met with the requisite adaptations. While changing around weapons and often simply raw firepower worked, the rolling wave of Tyranids simply outmassed the Tian'Chaoren provincial fleet by a massive margin and the Tyranids were better at finding and then exploiting weakness than even the renown strategists of the PRCN.
On the land it was much the same, perhaps even worse as the Tyranids' preferred way to begin an assault on planets and megastructures was to simply carpet the entire surface in Tyrannocytes, Mycetic Spores, and other sorts of beasts while their mutagens infected and transformed fauna and flora. Trees twisted into birthing wombs, lakes roiled into spawning pools, the grass would grow hungry. While there were plans for dealing with all angle attacks, the sheer magnitude of it that the Tyranids practised was a great initial shock.
The Elder Long Tao Tse Tung, well on his way towards achieving Xian state; would arrive at the request of the Provincial Council which was facing calamity as the Tyranids consumed the capital system of Yelantai. With a huge wave of reinforcements, including Ogor mercenaries and Vudrani allies would drive back the Naga. It was noted by Tao that the Tyranids seemed most interested in those undertaking the path of the Xiuzinzhe, with the brain eating lictors, malanthropes and other "intelligence gathering" organisms expending significant effort to capture them. His report to the higher councils would be dispatched, recommending a greater vigil for the Tyranids and the cults that rose up in their wake, but with the Eldar pushing the Naga away further, the precautions taken were relatively minimal and mostly taken in the Up-Southwest.
More Hive Armadas would come over the decade, with old ones seemingly reaching new tendrils into the new universe from unexpected angles. At first they seemed to conform to a general Down-southeasterly approach from the known universe; due down-southwest of the general borders of the realm, and most defensive arrangements were built around that assumption. Zhao Ming's requests for more forces to guard his compass direction against this threat would be met fairly half-heartedly, with the other commitments of the realm taking priority.
Skirmishes with the Taotie would continue. Some smaller than the brush with the Naga, some larger, such as the arrival of Hive Armada Kraken a century after the halting of the Behemoth. The diffuse tendrils of the Kraken would worm their way across the universe, fanning out, isolating stretches of space in the shadow in the warp and then closing the pocket once bolstered with the resources harvested. The protectors of the great bastion that block off the Greenskins, Chaos dregs and other terrors due up-north, mid-north, and down-north of the realms of the black tortoise direction would find themselves assailed by Tyranids at many times.
While the great enchantments of the bastion would keep even the Tyranids' realspace FTL from simply bypassing the chain of fortified provinces in altered space; they would crash into the depths of these militarised realms with terrifying force after displacing a tidal wave of greenskins and chaos tribes ahead of them. History would repeat itself once again, with the Tyranids worming their way into the harmonic order of the Dragon Pupils who would struggle to keep up.
Miao Ying however, would intervene more personally, taking her personal banner Armies and fleets and bringing in forces from the UCCR and the Ursun worshiping folk of Kosmoriye to bolster her forces, along with intervention forces from the Eldar Craftworld Confederation of Teigharae to push the Kraken back into conflicts with the other denizens beyond the bastion. This increased alarm, but the Kraken would again be blunted, seemingly caught in a status quo of give or take as more colours of the Tyranids arrived, and conflict with them became a regular fact.
Leviathan would come in the biggest initial wave yet from entirely unprecedented angles, confirming suspicions (albeit ones that most had desperately wanted to believe were not true) that the Tyranids had in essence, surrounded the Garden and could come in from just about any direction, moving through intergalactic space where there were few means of detecting them before descending into less empty parts of the known universe and reaping their harvests.
At the behest of the government of Vudran, the southern armies would be dispatched to aid the nation of thirty three million gods and ensure that other potential threats would not be able to exploit the situation; such as the greatly irritating T'Au or the Nagaji and the Imperium.
However, towards the close of the final century of the 41st millennium, by far the greatest Tyranid invasion of Tian'Chaoren space would come in from multiple directions at once as a new Hive Armada emerged, dead set on the Celestial Realm. Named for the same gluttonous beast that the Tyranids as a whole were named for, Hive Armada Taotie would put the realm in its greatest state of military crisis in thousands of years. The onyx skin and dull yellow armouring of Hive Armada Taotie would darken many provinces at once, even attacking from within the Empire's largely controlled core of space while besieging important allies such as the Solar Domain of Ahikyo and the Interex.
While forces loyal to the ongoing 13th Black Crusade, Waaaghs! Ghazghkull and Grom, the Skaven, Nagash or the other lords of Undeath; and the rising creations of the C'tan among countless others also threaten the sphere, it has become impossible to ignore that Tian'Chao's current greatest threat is Taotie. It also finally forced a reckoning with a need for the pace of reforms to increase significantly and for altering the painstakingly created plans for the advancement into the next millennium. Losses have already been high, and the Taotie are threatening realms that have rarely known or prepared for conflict to deadly effect.
As Hive Armada Leviathan has been to the more westerly powers, so has Hive Armada Taotie, an unprecedented crisis and threat and an explosion of war across countless fronts that have irreparably damaged the ongoing status quo. One that has been severe enough to call the attentions of all the original, eldest Xian; the survivors of Malus, and demand the lion's share of their focus in coordinating the Jinyi against the the menace from all sides and the genestealers from within.
As the elder xian and the councils pool their resources with allies to deal with the innumerable threats besetting one corner of the Sphere or the other, younger Xian have sought to find ways to tip the scales by going exploring for things that may advantage the overall realm and its allies. Even if its as simple as more territory that can be claimed either as virgin space or from the likes of the Greenskins, Chaos, or other things that there is no dishonour in simply sweeping out of the way.
"Our Empire is founded on three things. Faith, Ceramite, and Lightning" - Empress Gelthilda Luxembourg von Thalmann
The centrepiece of the Holy Alliance consisting of itself, the Fey Royarchy of Nouvelle Bretonnia, the Clandoms of Avalon*, the United People's Witchdoms of Kosmoriye**, the Confederation of Hesperian Kingdoms***, the League of Reman States****, and the Padishah Sultanate of Qadira***** to name the some of the most prominent members, the Holy Empire of Sigraum and its Holy Alliance are major obstacles in the path of the Imperium's claims to humanity, and have a strange, complex relationship with the Commonwealth of People's States that has varied in warmness and coldness over the many millennia since its inception.
Founded by Sigmar and the other Gods of the Old World who fled the destruction of Malus and followed the disruptions in the Empyrean caused by Orikan's last trick, the Empire is a constitutional, federal monarchy that considers the churches of the "Central Gods" to be the state religion, particularly honouring the deities Sigmar, Taal, Rhya, Shallya, Ulric, Verena, Elspeth, Mannan, Ranald, Dyrath, Arvala, and Gelt; though other cults are also widespread. As a Polytheistic society, a general expectation of religious pluralism is observed with in the Empire, even if the Churches often compete with one another and jockey for favour.
When Sigmar brought the core of what was once Malus to the world of Altwelt to start the process of building a new society with the humans left scattered by the collapse of old civilisation in the long night, he and the other gods encouraged the development of technology melded to the arcane practices they had brought from home, showing how to tame the winds of magic and create new colleges of wizardry and schools of alchemy while seeking to integrate this new learning of machines into their work.
As the worlds selected for the seeds of these new societies were already selected ahead of time by the refugee gods, contact with the other nations of the Holy Alliance came relatively swiftly upon warp travel being remastered and navigator guilds being cultivated. Unlike the Imperium, the Sigraumisch did not have the benefit of the astronomicon to guide their explorations; instead relying on beacons established by careful cooperation of the college of wizards, the churches, and the engineers. These beacons would be vastly more limited in range than the Astronomicon or its Avatars that caught, concentrated, and then re-radiated its brilliance to new parts of space. Thus forcing the Empire to develop in a much denser pattern, with careful, deliberate pacing around the Star Beacons that also served as faster-than-light communications.
Unlike the Imperium, the Holy Empire would not have Space Marines, but it would have the Stormcast Eternals. Clad in materials blessed by Sigmar and wrought with the power of the Blue wind of Azyr around the souls of the worthy dead, they would be as legion and grow in number in the coming days after the first were forged from a whole history's worth of heroes. Able to return to the world if slain, albeit at the price of lost memories and pieces of their identity, and able to tirelessly spearhead the expansion of the Holy Empire and its allies as well as defend what was already there, they would present themselves to the first elected Empress of the new Empire, Ishild Horowitz von Kaiser.
Worlds were contacted, brought into fealty into the Empire, and fleets and armies grew large and mighty. Technologies strange to Sigmar, but apparently quite vital to the makings of a spaceborne society were catalogued by the Engineering Societies and the Cult of Verena, pieces of STCs recovered to provide for a growing basis of technological capability that saw the Empire grow into a prosperous state spread through many of the linked galaxies of the garden in only a century by the time contact could be made with the old allies. It was of course, not uncontested, among many obstacles were the omnipresent and always ready to battle Orks.
It of course, hardly pleased Sigmar to find that not even in space could he escape wars with the Orks, and as a god he found manifesting in the Materium difficult beyond the sending of avatars bound by much of the same rules as daemons or seraphons. However, he was freer to give more direct signs to his people, and their fleets and armies would manage to cast back the green tide and other threats whether they be the marauder technobarbarian tribes loyal to Chaos or Liche Lords and Vampiric Rulers of the undead to live to meet with the leaders of the other displaced old world nations.
A pact sworn in the Empyrean was affirmed in the materium, one that would bind the destiny of these nations, and those who stood with them, together against the odds, and to ensure that nothing like the fall of Malus would ever happen again. A treaty with the Karaz Ankor was sought, as well as with Eldar Craftworld Confederations, Votann Leagues, Exodite Groves, and Tyrion's new Phoenix Kingdom whenever they were encountered. Whereas the Imperium preferred to crush its opposition whenever submission or assimilation could not be procured, the Empire was significantly more keen on the art of diplomacy, planning a great front against what they believed was an inevitable war with Chaos and other dangers.
However the expansion of the Holy Alliance would eventually bring it into contact with the Imperium of Man, which was growing far more ruthlessly and aggressively, buoyed by the caches of resources the Diad of Atham and Erda had prepared ahead of time for their great crusade and the partially divine military prowess of their sons and daughters; the primarchs. The Imperium, operating under the edict of the atheistic Imperial Truth, would see the pagan nations of the Holy Alliance and within moments decide that it it all had to go.
The Imperium waged unprovoked, aggressive war as soon as the Diad were made aware of the Holy Alliance, finding the nature they had with divine beings in the warp to be utterly abhorrent and the Stormcast Eternals abominations. The unexpected barbarism of the initial contact buckled the Up-Southerneastern frontier of the Holy Empire as the first contact protocols were met with the Word Bearers, Knights Glorious[1], Vylka Fenrika, Astrosaurs[2], Night Lords, and Mortificers[3] and elements of other legions in a spectacularly bloody offensive. Even the Emperor himself, separate from the Empress Erda who had other commitments at the time; would appear with some of the ten thousand shield hosts of the custodes, his silencers, and the lucifer blacks to try and tip the tide.
But the Holy Alliance endured, digging in and bringing up its own great assets in response, the Astartes finding a not exactly perfect, but indeed equal match in the Stormcasts and a more than worthy foe in such great warriors as the Ice Witch Guard or the Grail Knights. Stalemates would eventually ensue, even counteroffensives to retake lost territory from the invading Imperials, and the Holy Imperial State Army and Navy would grind the Astra Militarum to a bloody halt with the aid of its allies.
Parley would not be coming anytime soon, and even when the Emperor was recalled elsewhere in the endlessly growing number of fronts the Great Crusade was facing and command fell unto a rotating chair the war would keep going. It was a seemingly unprecedented amount of human on human bloodshed, one only given temporary pause by the Imperials drawing down with the commencement of the Ullanor offensives against the Greenskins. A ceasefire only agreed to by the Holy Alliance out of their own need to deal with the Orks who were drawn to the violence like a mecca as well as upswellings in chaotic activity.
After the anointment of the new Warmaster, the war would resume to try and finish old business, but the Holy Alliance was far more prepared now, bringing forth its Celestant Prime and far more prepared forces and operational reserves. This time, they would be the first ones to strike, breaking the ceasefire under order of Chancellor Ulrica von Clausewitz with the blessing of Emperor Johann von Geltstein. Catching the Imperials still preparing to attack, they managed to overrun wide swathes of space before a coherent response could be organised in a reverse of the prior slaughter, hunkering down and consolidating to prepare for the inevitable and ruthless counterattacks.
The wars would raise many questions in the Imperium as to the nature of the warp, and why these humans were so eager to die for their religion and defy the Imperial Truth. Some conclusions were good, others were bad, with Lorgar himself looking to the powers of Chaos that the Sigmarites so hated to find something above this petty division in the superior species. It would also unfortunately, lead to a ban on Atheism in the Holy Empire that was only recently given tacit decriminalisation without recognition as the Holy Empire came to associate a vocal disbelief in gods with the barbarism of the Imperium, even long after the Imperium ceased being Atheist as the reasonings for the ban became largely lost to history and the ban itself was forgotten about in the codex of Holy Law, but nearly always causing tragedy whenever law enforcement discovered and used it.
The war would not pause for the Horus Heresy or the later internal conflicts, with the Holy Alliance taking to the offensive against all factions with equal vigour. Only once Guilliman was named Lord Commander of the Imperium and negotiated the armistice of Vinburg with Emperor Rudolph zu Herzdorf did peace settle in after it became fully clear that total victory for either side was entirely out of the question. The Imperium was mightier than any one of the Holy Alliance's members, but all of them together would be a fight that would be uncertain in its outcome, and even taking out one of the major members would be immensely costly in terms of resources that the leadership of the Imperium did not want to spend while the Alliance was in dire need of reprioritising resources.
In the hundred centuries, hence, the Empire has had many conflicts. Great Skaven incursions, Undead Conquests, Chaotic Invasions and Greenskin Waaaghs would regularly assail the Alliance. Local, and even Empire wide civil wars have sometimes struck at the polity; generally not involving the Imperial army but rather the Electorate troops, which would culminate in the Electoral Crisis war of M35 that would end in a great centralisation of the Empire by the government of Herschel von Ritter who instated a new constitution that more clearly laid out the powers of the Emperor and Chancellery, limited the nobility's privileges, and reformed the military to greatly reduce the ability of the Electors to repeat this sort of nonsense by chaining down their ability to wage war to the Imperial government.
Internal conflicts for Electorate supremacy would still continue, waged in the halls of government to try and push the advantage of one over the other, The growing power of the burghers and the proletarian guilds warranted another major transformation in government in response to the 848-98 M38 Spring of Commoners that would see the first non-noble born chancellor elected. The status quo of dancing great powers lacking the speed or strength to finish each other off, while slowly growing new powers grew in the gaps and slowly but surely the rim of the garden was expanded through the exploration efforts across the known universe.
But the late Terran Imperial 41st millennium would bring a sudden end to this slow, stagnant history and give way to a barrage of major incidents. The oncoming of the Tyranids, the mass awakening of the legacy of the C'tan, the gatherings of the Dregs of Chaos, the rousing of the unliving, ever growing Greenskin hordes, the rapid expansion of new polities such as the T'Au Spheres or the Draxian Hegemony and more have plagued the reign of the most recent Emperors. Now the newly crowned Empress Hannah Leitpoldt von Einstein and Chancellor Amalia Braun face a universe at war and a Holy Alliance that stands on the precipice of great change; though whether for the better or worse only time can tell.
[1]OC Legion, lead by the Female Primarch Mordra Urdrake, colours are Silver and Gunmetal, Later Silver and Black. Known for its love of mounted warfare and the taming of warbeasts to ride atop (Along with an atypical for astartes love of the glory of being a strike craft or tank ace) as well as a deepseated genteel arrogance and disdain for the common rabble. Would fall to Chaos over Mordra being chastised by Primarch Deirdre of the Tyrant's Bane for wasting ever-growing assets on self-aggrandisement to the point of causing an attempted revolution against the Knights Glorious in their conquered territories because they siphoned up all the resources into monuments dedicated to themselves to the point of mass famine and poverty. Presently a Legion of Chaos Undivided, or more correctly, the Legion of Daemon Princess Mordra.
[2]OC Legion, lead by the Female Primarch Ernestene Veldegard, colours are red blue and yellow. Specialised in armoured warfare, tanks, and mechanised troops. Known for approaching the horrors of war by learning to smile and have a laugh at it and find your own fun within it, leading to the Orks to label them "da beakiez 'oo getz it", encouraged by Ernestene's own "guts and glory" attitude. Loyal to the present day, generally regarded as Codex Deviant due to still organising their equipment production around supporting enormous armoured pushes and mechanised offensives. Ernestene would go AWOL trying to explore what is now known to be a construct of the Void Dragon; the Impossible Fortress.
[3]OC Legion, lead by the female primarch Atraya Endarm, colour are bone white and tar black; later Purple, Blue, Grey, and White. With a mutation where each Astartes grows more geneseed than those of other legions and grows them faster and for implanted recruits to develop faster, they were the legion known for overwhelming foes with sheer numbers as well as an utterly contemptuous attitude for collateral damage, taking casualties, or those who griped about either of them; indoctrinated in the glory of death and martyrdom inherited from Atraya's time as the understudy of the fascist dictator of her home region and winning his wars for him before killing him and taking his place. Massive assholes who eventually lead an attempted coup on Guilliman post-heresy with the aid of defectors from the traitors, undead "benefactors" who saw an opportunity, and other "loyalists" who thought Guilliman was far too soft. The Atrayan Apostasy would see Atraya defeated and fully embracing Nagash and the undead as one of his Mortarchs; along with the other Undead Primarchs.
Cadia, epononymous planet of Cadia province, was, like basically all planets, systems, and sectors within its province, a fortress in the guise of a world. The Eye of Terror, looming large over the corpses of the galaxies that had once been the heart of Eldar space, bled its strange and evil energies into the void, save for a corridor massive enough to be seen clearly if one got the right angle to look at the eye from; a factor of many things, but most of all slumbering Necron relics keeping the warp rift at bay.
The Mournival; Abaddon, Asmodea, Apollya, and Astaroth; self-appointed heirs to Horus and Edda[1]even if the Dark Harbingers would probably turn their ships around and start shooting them even in the middle of the ongoing offensive if they said the second one out loud; had declared that this thirteenth Black Crusade would be the one to fell the Imperium. After all the millennia of preparations, all the slow progress, often frustrating as it was, this would be their hour.
They would march to Via Lactea, sweep into Segmentum Sol and then land upon Terra, conquering it for the Space Marines once and for all. Ending the Astartes' shackles to lesser, weaker beings, and then finishing the Great Crusade as it was always meant to be, under the ceramite boot of a space marine stratocracy that would give the xenos and those who would resist the Black Compliance no mercy.
Ironic then, as the Aspiring Champion Vorgon Skalthrax the Youthslayer; so named in mockery for boasting about slaying the unarmed children in a Schola Progenum; would say, that the Abaddon in all his wisdom, saw fit to cut deals with all these xenos. Skaven, Dawi Zharr, and the other xenos specially chosen by one of the Chaos Gods for being especially pleasing to them as the sorcerers would say (the dark apostles who preached the human supremacist creed would likely not approve) and more were gathered here, along with the ancient and bitter Fimir who clung to the hope of the Gods noticing them once again, and the dragon-legged Shaggoths whose centauroid forms trampled through the battlefield to name but a few.
What mockery was this? What madness had taken the Mournival's mind? It was bad enough the other twelve times, but in their moment of triumph he'd have to breathe the same air as xenos?
"Insolent xenos! This is supposed to be our hour! How dare you try to upstage us?!" He shouted, pointing his black sword towards a Skaven Warplock Engineer as the ground behind him erupted with a rain of earthshaker rounds, not even flinching as he snarled, bald head growing its own horns from the energies of chaos, the eight-pointed star burnt into the forehead of his pallid skin.
"My name is-is Mereek Skabstab ngahh." The Skaven Master Engineer growled in clear annoyance.
"Stupid-dumb big-man-thing want-wants throne-thing fortifications smash-crushed yes-yes?" The Warplock Engineer hissed through its own helmet, the Skaven clicking his teeth together without even looking at the Chaos Space Marine.
"You insult me? I will rip your spine out and play skip-rope with it for my morning exercise!" He said as he whipped out a plasma pistol to emphasise the threat he was making.
"Semi-half original threat, never heard-knew that one before." The Skaven said with an air of absolute contempt for the Space Marine as he flicked the safeties off.
"Go ahead, shoot-shoot me, you use plasma gun and cannon go boom-boom and chaos-thing go die-die." The Skaven scoffed, though normally a mutual kill would normally not be enough security for a Skaven to be this confident to someone like him.
Titan Warhorns drowned out his doubtlessly deeply witty reply, red starting to flush to his cheeks as he started to shout louder and louder only for the Titan to get nearer and nearer and thus louder and louder. By the time the god-machine's war horns stopped, he was at the point of stomping his feet for emphasis while the Skaven pointed and laughed.
"I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS! DIE WRE-" The Chaos Space Marine never finished before thirteen jezzail launched rounds from thirteen different sniper teams from thirteen different directions obliterated his cranium, the Warplock Engineer finally mentally letting go of the strands of magic that were working to confuse his Astartes' danger sense. The headless body had enough life left to grasp at where the head one was before it fell over, directionless and soon, motionless.
Packmaster Numnumz leaned over at the corpse and took a syringe patterned after Apothecary progenoid extractors and quickly yanked out the first of the progenoid glands, chuckling to himself while Mereek eyed her as if she was doing something crazy like trusting another living thing.
"Gland worth many-much warpstone yes-yes...mine-mine!" She cackled to herself as she got her orderlies to start pulling out the rest of the space marine's organs with a corkscrew shaped pole devised by clan moulder's best and brightest. The resulting process upon jamming the front end into the neck stump and pushing in, is best left to the imagination. The end result was leaving the armour intact, but taking all the organs out and stuffing them into jars.
"FOR THRONE AND KEEP!" A blood curdling shout that indicated that the fighting was getting close, swarming around the feet of the colossal chaos titan that was currently casting its shadow over the titan.The Skaven who didn't have full face helmets' ears and noses visibly twitched as they sniffed the air.
"Man-Things approaching." One of the Skaven said, hissing with displeasure as the Clanrats
"Job-task not done-done. What about our pay-cash?" Another asked.
"Chaos-things are stupid-dumb, not quick-smart like Skaven. We put weapon underground and move-move it quick-fast!" Mereek said, with Numnumz pointing to him and cackling in approval.
"Yes, much smart-genius you are. Will get burrow beasts quick-fast!"
...
The Sun hung wan overhead, and it was raining shells and missiles. With overlapping void and refractor fields as well as extensive surface to space weapons rendering Orbital bombardment in sections of Cadia not already firmly in the hands of one or the other a suicidal impossibility, the old king of battle would be tasked with deciding things.
God machines walked in numbers to introduce creeping cracks in the plates of the world. Thundering megatanks rolled mountain tall while the lesser infantry and vehicles battled in their shadows. Stabbing, piercing bolts of light and shrieking contrails of missiles racing from one side to the next. The sky was darkened not by clouds, banished by the power of the weapons being wielded, but by aircraft and dreadful flying things.
The full weight of the Imperium was present, all under the Command of one Ursarkar Creed on the ground, and Lord Strategos of the Imperial Navy Spire in the stars. And Creed couldn't help but light another one of his beloved cigars, dragging it briefly before exhaling a ring of smoke as he looked at the holotable showing a scaleable view of the battlefield collated from all the intelligence that could be gathered. Able to be shrunk down to squad level or scaled up to view battles across multiple systems, using alcubierre channel carried vox messages; shorter ranged than Astropathic communication, but less dependent on the warp or the peculiarity of the individual psykers.
"I'd wager that this is going rather well, wouldn't you?" He said with good humour, his aide Kell nodding in agreement while the gathered Imperial commanders mulled over his words.
"The Skaven don't seem to have their hearts in the contest at Sanctus Ultima War-Hive, what are they planning?" Marshal Algar, a Mordian, through and through, and always looking at war as a matter of fighting spirit and grit, said as he noted the Skaven siegelines seeming to be content to let the Black Legion eat the bulk of return fire and deployed well apart from the Dawi Zharr whom they despised.
"The Skaven are a species of treacherous cowards, even the Warmaster couldn't command the Under-Imperium's loyalty. This is no great surprise." High Marshal Helbrecht of the Black Templars said with a dismissive tone.
"They are likely preparing some manner of device or subversive infiltration. Direct assaults are rarely the strength of the Rattus Horrificus xenos." Archmagos Dominus Hespera Vesperax replied in the typical monotone of a high ranking techpriest, her form's many mechatendrites linked to the display device to give her that micron less latency to maximise efficiency, something Creed found a bit pointless.
"We shouldn't give them a millimetre, a penetrating strike should put paid to them, have the available forces infiltrate from the gaps in their lines and strike their power supplies, then we can close in for the kill." Creed mused before Marshal Varne-411, a resolute krieger interrupted.
"A frontal assault to break through would take less time, we have the numbers. My army group can launch the assault immediately, while the xenos think the traitors and barbarians are keeping them safe." He said, getting a frown out of Creed.
"I know that you are very proud of your expandability, but in this army lives are to be spent thoughtfully." Creed retorted, puffing his cigar at the gas masked krieger.
"Irrelevant. We march out of the vitae wombs in every base and colony of our regiments endlessly every day. We can be replaced faster than the traitors can slay us. This is our ideal place in the field of battle." The Marshal replied with somehow even less emotion than Hespera did.
"However quickly your forces emerge from the Vitae Wombs, you need mechanicus support to produce your weapons and equipment. Thoughtless expenditure of such assets cannot be abided by my colleagues." Hespera said, stock still in an unnerving way.
"Spire?" Varne asked, seeking to try to override Creed with the vote of the Admiralty.
"+This is not my field of expertise, I will not intervene.+" He replied, his holographic avatar only briefly paying the meeting mind before he looked to his own command table to organise the Imperial Fleet assets holding the line against the Black Fleet.
Quietly resentful, Varne withdrew his plan, remaining quiet for now and letting Creed continue.
"The Dust Born[2] and the Death Guard seem content to wage war with one another behind the trench lines, we can press on their flanks and envelop them, then let the Exorcists, Mechanicus, and Peregrinas squeeze them to death." Creed said, identifying a weakness as easily as he could use his eyes.
"If we do not shatter those daemonspires our advances will be all for naught. Let our brothers and sisters deploy and eliminate the empyreal menace's anchors in reality, then you may advance freely." A figure in incredibly chrome, purity seal-decorated armour said, clutching a glaive in heavy, armoured hands, her hair kept short, simple. A Grey Knight, one of the secret weapons against the spawn of the warp.
"Let us go with you, sacred warrior! We can resist the taint of the daemon!" Cannonness Aelita Steyn pleaded, dark hair and pale skin given a strange pallor by the light.
"The frontline needs you, we need a spearhead to break the back of the Chaos Warriors and Marines so we may take out their bases and leave their guns running dry!" High Cannonness Stella Aster replied, getting her less senior comrade to calm down.
"Well...with that in mind we sho-" Creed started before Lysander cut in from the Phalanx in orbit.
"+We have unknown contacts emerging from what we believe to be the webway. Due to the flanks of the Chaotic formations. They seem to have them boxed in.+" He said, stoic and calm as the Phalanx's batteries discharged so powerfully that the holodisplay showed a number of exclamation runes; engaging entire sections of the chaotic fleet as nonchalantly as walking.
"+Eldar?+" Spire asked, he was good at working with them.
"Only partially, Duardin and Quetzal signatures are also detected. Leagues of Votann, Interex, and Kosmoriye warp signatures are also translocating into the fray." The Archmagos replied, using the Imperial name for the Dawi and the Itzecan.
"So the centre might just hold after all." Creed smirked.
"And accept help from Heathens and xenos?" Varne asked.
"Do not look a gift horse in the mouth Varne. Nobody wishes for the Eye of Terror to spread elsewhere in the universe save for Chaos itself. We'll worry about the particulars later." He hummed.
...
The war for Cadian Province had, to the Mournival's frustration, ground to a halt. The Imperium had, against expectations, received significant non-imperial assistance by those who had understood the importance of the gate holding. Often it wasn't so much aid, as it was co-belligerence, engaging the forces of Chaos in supersectors and segmentums within the province that they had deemed safely controlled or striking forces still in muster or consolidation.
Abaddon and the Mournival were frustrated to say the least. They had thought that with the crises elsewhere, and with the mistrust between the Imperium and other forces opposed to Chaos; that they would have an easy time conquering Cadia after ten thousand years of preparation. Yet they were stalling, stopping, grinding to a halt.
Their forces were starting to lose focus, splintering into their warbands to go find other, easier prey, starting with those who weren't of the Black Legion to begin with until even his own black legionaries were starting to "creatively interpret" their orders or simply act without them. The Scourges would have to be dispatched to reaffirm discipline, but the damage was already being done.
There would be no swift, glorious offensive to keep the attentions of Chaos focused and to outrun the harrying forces of Malal who nipped at the heels of any gathering of multiple Chaos Gods' forces for long enough. There would be the bitter grind, the churn of manpower and materiel that the Black Legion would increasingly have to lean on the powers of Daemons and the aid of the more industrious chaotic xenos like the Skaven and Dawi Zharr to provide for munitions.
And as for the Marauder Tribes promised glory and riches...promises would need to become rewards out of the black legion's treasury sooner rather than later, lest the Tribesmen let their disdain for the fallen imperials take over.
Not a great conquest or triumph, just another, bitter, bloody, graceless slog in the long war.
[1]Primarch of the Kingmakers, one of the four founding traitor legions along with the Children of Horus, the Knights Glorious, and the Word Bearers. Fell due to her resentment towards having to kowtow to normal humans whom she considered inferior and feeling like they were holding the crusade back, and ultimately seeking to parlay rather than just banish daemons she ended up meeting, who promised her a world where the Astartes could have what they deserved; and after embitterment from the cancellation of offensives against the Lizardmen after all the blood and treasure sunk into it to try and entreat with the Slann; she decided it was the final straw.
While in theory as Executor of the Legio Astartes she was largely equal to Horus, she focused more on the metaphysical end of Chaos, and sought to alter the paths that unprotected human souls in the afterlife take to save them from Nagash whom she could perceive. As the official histories go, when it was clear that there was nothing left in her daughter to save, Erda annihilated her to ensure the Silver Keep project that would, when completed, keep Imperial Souls away from the God of Death nagash; be completed. She is like, Horus, super mega-ultradead, and the Dark Harbingers that her Legion renamed themselves afterwards have been assmad ever since.
[2]Original Legion, has a female Primarch in Aurelia Argenta, colours were Silver, Purple and Gold trimming pre-heresy, became Blue gold and silver post-heresy. Devoted to Tzeentch. Specialised more in raw psychic power than the sorcery of the Thousand Sons or the Wizardry focus of the Dragon Blades, particularly the power of Telepathy. Fell due to Aurelia trying to seek power from Tzeentch to overcome the attacks of the Khrave rather than call for help and admit to fault after deciding to take on a major Khrave Empire without assistance. Cult troops include but are not limited to both the Dust Marines, quite familiar to standard 40k as the direct expies of the Rubric Marines made from their dead who do not have the psychic power to be worth trying to resurrect, and the Witch Marines who having died once only to be called back by the magics of Tzeentch; have attained enough mastery of their psychic prowess to be able to spam psychic power rather than need standard guns.
The Drae Nang Territory, or Draenal to the Imperium, to the centre-north-west of the Tai-Dan wormhole that connects this part of the universe to Tian'Chao's primary expanse; had seen many conquerors and rulers, contested between many beings, powers, and societies and monstrous things over the ages. It was a battlefield for countless wars since the very first wars between the first great powers of the garden. Part of the Shai Tang galaxy, it was rich, nestled between many important permanent channels in the warp and longstanding wormholes and plentiful ancient gates to the webway and space warping tunnels that made it a place of trade and exchange.
Once it was primarily occupied by the Maetar Dominate in M33 of the Imperium of Man's existence, a rising power which engaged in a period of manifest destiny, conquering large regions of space with their vatborn and mechanical armies produced by their roving mobile base construction vehicles and factory ships. They had expanded into this sector and conquered many of the smaller, local polities with their rapidly growing armed forces, sending waves of refugees to escape their exponentially growing military conquest.
The invasion started to overrun the Council Commonwealth of Teleax, one of the myriad small allied polities of Tian'Chao on the other side of the wormhole; and thus necessarily provoked a response as local authorities petitioned for support with the Cosmic Lantern network, which passed up the nested councils of the realm to the Presiding Council. The result would be swift, using the lanterns to quickly bring up additional forces for the response. When diplomacy ascertained that the Maetar had no interest in diplomacy and indeed, refused to even believe such a large polity could exist; the order would be given.
Two Longs to have achieved the status of Tian Xian*; Xiao Li and Xin Shenhe would lead the response, leading entire banner hordes of the People's Celestial Revolutionary Army and Navy in what was absolutely an overkill response to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that such attacks on even outer allies would not be tolerated. Even though the Maelengar fought hard and viciously, they were thrown back and castigated with their military shattered and their leaders made to sign a treaty accepting the existence of splinter polities formed out of rebels and a return of captured territory to the affiliates of the teachers.
Though Drae Nang territory was just one small part of the overall conflict, it did see the battle of the Gel Aread Nebula, waged across many light years in the ancient stellar nursery born of the demise of many large stars in the war in heaven, anchored by a series of strange megastructures built long before. In the sight of young molten planets and dim proto-stars, the fleet of the Xian Xuanwu, Dai Yao would defeat Fleet Commander Vorid in a months-long running surface and void battle. Often regarded as perhaps the beginning of the end of the Maetar advance and an important cascade into overall defeat.
In Drae Nang proper, the territory would be the seat of the Popular Republic of the Hairan, who had been subjugated earlier by the Maetar and would have a rather lengthy space of time to enjoy relative peace and freedom as a newly independent people.
Though beaten, Dominate would not forgive this insult, and would plot its revenge, seeking to expand elsewhere for a rematch at some point. A goal it would stick to even when the Boreinac Crusade brought the Imperium into proximity of the territory shortly afterwards. With the Imperium would come a major reinforcement of the local Greenskins by the arrival of Overlord Morkill Flashchoppa. One of his underlords would invade the Territory as the Waaagh fanned out, crushing the Hairan and clapping them into chains in M35.
The Greenskin hordes established there would end up overrunning even the warp rifts within the territory, closing out the power of Chaos, Undeath, and other malign forces with the might of the Waaagh! while they started raiding and attacking other things of interest. By this point, Drae Nang was no longer of interest to Tian'Chao, following the Hairan undergoing a military coup that cut ties with the Celestial Realm and pursued a more nationalistic line for itself. But the Imperium very much was interested, hiring Votann and Ogor mercenaries to help in scouring the Morgutz Ork Empire and conquering the territory among others in the M37 of the Imperium, renaming the territory "Draenal" following the closure of the second Boreinac crusade.
The Imperium would do as the Imperium does, and shoved the teeming masses of Hives and Vitae Wombs onto any planets deemed useful and crushed the pockets of Hairan resistance and a number of...stranger things also present. Two thousand years of Greenskin occupation however, transformed the region tremendously with the vitality of Greenskin ecology, and only some bodies were deemed valuable enough to fully purge of feral greenskins.
The Imperials would rule the territory for thousands of years with the occasional hiccoughs of internal governing disputes, cult uprisings, external invasions and raids. The Viridian Stars Chapter would later be founded to guard the territory's parent galaxy of Ullara, from the ranks of the Excelsius Wanderers that had helped spearhead the crusade against the greenskins. Many of its recruitment worlds and chapter fortress monasteries would be located in the Draenal territories, and its mighty fleet would regularly patrol in the region; battle brothers and sisters becoming mythologised by the local imperials.
The Maetar would return in force in M39 after its ageless leadership had deemed that the time had come for the final conflict of revenge, with the Imperials being regarded as in the way of the Dominate and its hoped for invasion of Tian'Chao through the Tai-Dan wormhole. Attacking this and many other avenues to close towards the wormhole, the Imperium would find itself in a wary alliance of convenience with Tian'Chao when Xiao Li and Xin Shenhe came to settle accounts, and the Orks; refusing to be left out; got rowdy again and other powers began to act up.
The Maetar would be repulsed at significantly greater cost than the first time, with their country sharply reduced in territory and indemnities to be paid to the victorious powers on a continual basis. But by exploiting the division between its vanquishers, the Dominate's leadership would remain in power, waiting for another chance.
The myriad wars of varying scale to affect the region around the territory would eventually be interrupted by the arrival of the T'Au through the reactivated A'Rad'Rai gate in M41 during the third sphere of expansion, with the T'Au conquering the rump Maetar state and starting to put pressure on Draenal.
However in Draenal, the Imperium having to reshuffle resources elsewhere and the Imperium's general squalor would see the rise of the "Electric Brotherhood of Action", which sought to build the basis of an authentic, rejuvenationist movement that railed against the feudal stagnation of the Imperium and its unwillingness to prosecute anti-xenos wars out of "soullessly material so-called pragmatism". Due to their use in dealing with more revolutionary movements, they would be tolerated for some time even as they ranted and railed about "aristocrats and plutocrats who hold our human nation down and prevent us from fulfilling the Throne and Keep's vision!" even with the Mechanicus' growing irritation at being targeted by their rhetoric.
However their emphasis on blind anger, actively disregarding the facts that serve the narrative of "those who seek to rig things against us", the cult of action over thought, and violence against those blamed for holding the Imperium back and allowing the xenos, heretics, heathens, and mutants to thrive would open the door to Khorne. Secretive proselytes would spread the faith of the gorefather amongst the Brotherhood, speaking of the Bloody Emperor and the Brass Empress and that the idea of the trinity with the Omnissiah was false. The attempted invasion of the great forgering Hypataus by their brass-jackets and their "citizens' fleet" made with the assets of sympathetic chartists and lords who appreciated their attacks on organised labour and political enemies would be the start of their downfall.
The Mechanicus, seeing the attack on the ring world they had constructed to make use of colossal economies of scale in tandem with a starlifter and convoys of delivered resources to churn out an incredible degree of produce; as nothing less than sacrilege, promptly blew the Citizen's fleet out of the void the second they announced their intention to "seize the wealth of the Imperium from the technocratic parasitic heresy of the mechanicus." Gravitonic beams would hold their fleet in place for the Mechanicus to methodically wipe them out one by one, and those who had actually landed were opened fire upon immediately.
Their experience in breaking strikes and street wars was utterly out of their depth when facing the Skitarii and Legio Cybernetica or the Knight houses used to make an example of them. The leader of the raid, Tartyn Uldir, would be publicly flogged to death by electropriests after being made to watch the executions of his followers. The Mechanicus would demand, and generally get, the purges of known members of the Brotherhood even sending agents of the Mechanicus to hunt them down with or without arbiter support.
This was to the plan of the Khornates, as those purged could be replaced with true followers of the blood god to turn the remaining resources of the Brotherhood towards bringing in the forces of the blood god for the coming thirteenth black crusade, using the desperation of the remaining brotherhood to their advantage to convince them to go through with the rituals, bringing in other cult assets to, in 999 M41, bring forth a Slaughterhost of Khorne fresh from the Black Crusade and allow daemons to walk the worlds of Draenal, exploiting the sense of xenophobic outrage that conventional politics had fostered for years to begin the bloodshed.
With the Viridian Stars busy elsewhere and the Imperium's presence in the galaxy having much of its military assets stripped to commit against other fronts far away, the forces of Chaos and other foul things could advance far and deep, with Draenal being almost wholly overrun by the Brotherhood of Burning Blood as the Khornates built up brassy citadels and monuments of slaughter and bone.
Now the domain of Gartak the Worldripper, A Shaggoth; or Dragon Ogor to some; blessed by Khorne with two extra arms able to bend at utterly unnatural angles, enhanced size and might, and a collection of daemon weapons, Gartak leads Chaos Marauder Technobarbarian Tribes, Chaos Space Marines lead by his co-commander Ortikal the Inferno, Beastmen, and many chaos xenos to paint these stars with blood, already having killed trillions to seek to anoint new Chaos Warriors with Khorne's favour and recruit for new Chaos Astartes. However, for the time being, they are uninterested in creating Daemonworlds and warp rifts, wanting stable realspace to plan their next conquests.
All the while, unaware that this is something that Tian'Chao cannot and will not accept, and that two young Xian Longs are eyeing their gore-drenched conquests with concern.
*There is a difference between those who have reached the rank of Xian, the Immortals who are akin to more well-known Exalted Greater Daemons, and those who have achieved Tian Xian which is essentially equivalent to the Primarchs, and Tian Shen Xian who have essentially become gods in the material realm like the Emperor. There are steps in between the three, but you start off as pretty new Xian.
[X] The Esoteric Scholar
-[X] Zhu Xiang
--[X] A wise scholar
--[X] Lords of the Tempest
--[X] Exemplar of Production
[X] The Paragon of Diplomacy
-[X] Zhu Xinyi
--[X] A Graceful Diplomat
--[X] Mercenary Manager
--[X] Harmony between Species
Bridge of the Chuangdao Zhi Bi, 000.M42, Tai-dan Wormhole
The Cuangdao Zhi Bi, the Quill of Creation, was a massive warship by most reasonable standards, a Xian enhanced Juggernaut several score kilometres from end to end. It was not the largest ship in the fleet, but it was one of the most carefully constructed, one that could move from hotspot to hotspot quickly while still having the firepower to make its mark where needed. Its twin, the Qiming Shzhe, the Bringer of Enlightenment, remained in visual range of its counterpart, the two ships rested at the head of the great muster emerging from the systems-wide wormhole to gather at their designated exit points. But it was not the ships themselves that would be the stars of the drama to come, but those aboard.
Within the bridge, a somewhat cozy place full of esoterica that were arrayed to the desires of the Xian Long who rested on the command chair. Taking the form of a divinely tall young man in ornate but agile-looking red, green, and black armour with scarlet eyes, a short ponytail, and two sidelocks that went from black to red at their tips, a pair of antlers emerging from his temples while a long, sinuous tail clad in flexible armour wagged back and forth. He was Zhu Xiang, a noted scholar who had found much success in the wars for Shenyang and the governance of Jiaodong.
In his hands was a tablet, passed to him to by his sister; whose own armour was blue, purple, but also black like his to show kinship in her form of a tall young woman. Her own hair, though it was often white with blue tips, presently black with blue tips as part of a mind game understood only between the two, tied into long twin tails behind her own sharper antlers. Her eyes azure and the smile on her face somewhat more calm than the look of muted excitement on her brother while her tail raised somewhat upwards to show interest.
"Are you sure this is correct, sister?" He asked.
"Brother Xiang, would I lie about something this important?" She replied, giving a gesture of mock offence, palms reaching cheeks and lips making a gasp while Xiang briefly gave a small show of his tongue to return a silly face with one of his own.
They were dragons, Xian, children of Shen Yang and Qiao Yin themselves, but they were still young, still twin brother and sister; they had not, and hoped they would never, grow out of their sibling games of teasing as only twins do.
"What secrets do you have in that tablet that are not privy to me first?" Cheng Haoyu said as the Fenghuang slinked into view in his humanoid form. Thinner and a bit shorter than Xiang, the arcanotech spectacles he wore gave him a rather nerdish countenance, feathered wings folded behind him and a plume tail trailing his movements. His armour was blue, white, and gold, his azure with yellow tips hair kept rather shorter, with a swept, slightly messy cut, no sidelocks or ponytail.
"Kong Nue's followers have not expected us. We should achieve total surprise, and thus ensure that the blood for the blood god is mostly theirs." Xiang said with a smirk, referring to Khorne by his Tian'Chaoren name.
"It does not do well to expect victory without knowing the enemy as well as we know ourselves. Or have you already started to deem yourself wiser than the old artists of war?" Cheng Kexin said, her own armour Orange, Black, and Purple, her wings tapered in a somewhat different way from her brother, purple to orange hair kept in two simple braids and her form a bit broader but a bit shorter than her twin's.
"Fear of Chaos is a path to Chaos itself." Haoyu responded with a self-satisfied expression.
"Oi, when do we get eatin' the spikey lads?" Dragra boomed, the massive chunk of skin, muscle, fat, and bone that the Ogor Overtyrant represented sounding as much like an elephant as anything humanoid. She was not exactly beautiful or even particularly feminine by human standards, but she kept a harem of the best mates of her own kind all the same and she seemed to be considered attractive to her kind all the same. Of course, the Fenghuang and Long; given their fondness of mingling with Aeldari and Humans among others; understood the differences in standards of appeal quite well, even if Ogors didn't quite do it for them.
Dragra was bigger than a Carnifex, and as Ogors continued to grow as long as they had plenty to eat, she was huge. Her kind on average was six metres tall and she was three times that, able to stare down at a bloodthirster while also being considerably heavier. Her armour was thick, powered plating designed to add to her agility and strength while protecting her massive bulk, with an added gut plate worn to further guard her belly. A hair-plumge and sharp spikes decorated her helm, while the brown, grey, and dark blue plating shook with her movements.
"Patience, Dragra. We will have plenty of foes for you to cleanse." Xinyi said, patting her on the ankle.
"Yeah yeah, just tell me when da ladz need to get smashin'." She harrumphed and sat down in an oversized chair made for her, yawning a bit and motioning towards the Automata to bring her more food as she removed her helm, grabbing at and then chowing down on fistfuls of popped corn while her preferred haunches of meat were being readied.
"The fleet iz movin' soon, I feel it in mah belly. We're gettin' close to da spicy meat! Meat!" Raug Meatspicer declared, the fifteen metre-tall colossus of a Grand Slaughtermaster stomping his feet in jolly song. His own armour was decorated in religious iconography dedicated to the Great Maw
Xiang knew better than to ask the Ogors to calm down once they started, just making sure that the contingent aboard was provided the food needed to ensure that they didn't get any thoughts about eating the rest of the crew. But the time for banter would soon be over, the time had come.
Protective fields were made, pathways in the warp were opened by the Cosmic lanterns to allow for quick translation in the warp, and the armada would make the journey to the Territory with the intent of striking with full and overwhelming force. Fleets Baise De and Heise De; along with Ogor fleets "Munch" and "Crunch" would tear open their rifts to the Empyrean and disappear into the othersea.
The trip from the satellite galaxy that the Tai-Dan wormhole inhabited; Hii-Gara; to the one of the Drae Nang Territory; Vay-Gir; would be relatively brief.
They would enter into a realm cast into blood and hell.
Khornates had made their claim here. Though they were not fully immersed in the rage and bloodthirsty of the Gorefather, they were indulging themselves in violence and slaughter upon hapless people. Against both the remaining pockets of resistance and the civilians who were deemed more useful as fuel than labour or converts. HUman or Xenos, they cared little for whose blood it was, as long as it was blood.
Even each other, as rival lords under the overall authority of the higher leadership of this bloodhost tore into one another for territory, for favour, for resources, or simply because they didn't like each other very much. So long as they continued to pay the appropriate tithes to the masters of this place, it was tolerated, encouraged even.
But over thousands of worlds, Mandeville points would give way to the opening of warp drives. The brute ships of the Ogors and the imperious craft of the Tian'Chaoren emerged like a fireworks show giving way to a snowstorm of dots moving in the black void of space.
The Chaos Fleets were myriad for it was in essence, a combination of many cultures. The Marauder Technobarbarian tribes who lived in or near warp rifts had their fast, spiked shape craft meant for raiding and long distance fighting with lances and waves of strike craft. The traitor imperials had defaced and mutilated mockeries of Imperial classes of warship, gargoyles remade in the image of daemons, figurehead transformed to glorify the skull throne. Alien vessels made in their own myriad ways, with the alien Kulrathi; a species that had done more to please Khorne than any other; flying their bladed brassed skull ships, drinking in the massacre.
The occasional daemonships were peculiar, evil things, almost more akin to hellish mechanical seamonsters than conventional craft. Strangest of all, were the soul grinder vessels, which were a grotesque fusion of warpflesh and tainted metal, pseudo-cyborg monstrosities that while thankfully rare like the daemonships, showed that it was probably a deliberate choice to not call on the warp more.
Having only recently conquered these places, the process of rededicating them to Khorne was not entirely complete, nor was replacing fortifications they had just recently smashed. And that was when the followers of the blood god could even be bothered with such things. The process of wanton mass murder was not a lightly taken task, and more were interested in how they could advance themselves or take out their frustrations than in creating a fully functioning Empire.
It was not anarchy, for there was a law here; a law of slaughter and rage and pointless violence, where only those who proved there was a reason to not kill them were given the privilege of life, and even fewer the privilege of comfort. Khorne was a lord of rage, blood, war, brass, skulls, slaughter, gore, and flame; luxury was not part of that. Luxury would never be part of that, It would not give power to the people who ruled this place, and so was dismissed as a waste of time whose requests only merited a response of a quick decapitation.
And where the lead fleet of the armada arrived, over the former capital of this territory; Tylanius; the Khornates would seemingly be glad to show their work. Hives soaked in blood, pyramids of skulls reaching high like mountains, tens of millions at a time forced to fight in mock wars against the khornates in huge arenas of walled-off areas to be slaughtered by raging warriors who wanted something more visceral than simply smashing chainaxes and emptying machine guns into crowded stadiums full of people.
The system had many bodies that had managed to be large enough to collapse into spherical shapes by gravity's call, but twenty five were real planets. Five hot, borderline molten mostly metallic worlds like Mercury, close enough to the three primary stars of Tyrador A, B, and C to be roasted down to their cores. Five Terran worlds, the closest a warm and humid planet that never got colder than a Macraggian spring day, the farthest a place of tundras, borealic forest and great polar ice caps. Tylanius would be the middle, the most comfortable for humans. Five Gas Giants, interspersed by two red dwarfs captured by the triple stars' gravity, providing additional warmth to their moons and rings. Five Ice giants in the outer beyond, and five great balls of frozen solid ice before the great clouds and belts of comets, shepherded by five brown dwarfs in orbits so distant that they needed tens of thousands of years to complete singular sweeps.
The Ordo Astronomicus of the Mechanicus found the system fascinating, debating, modelling, and theorising how it could have formed, wondering if it had anything to do with ancient structures placed upon it. But the Khornates could not care less.
Cold shattered wreckage was left behind by their initial conquests, with newer wreckage from conflicts between them. But the emergence of fresh prey was enough to rouse the Khornates from their post-conquest drunken bacchanalia of rage induced massacre and frenzy. They would turn themselves around to face the newcomers, vox cast channels full of barbarous chants and frenzied litanies as they burned towards the enemy over the vastness of space.
The forces of the blood god barely pause their current slaughters and battles with each other. These were not wars waged for fun, like the Greenskins, they were wars waged out of anger and hatred, furious rivalries that could not be settled by any means outside of blood. A common enemy would only offer a ceasefire, but there was no sport in these conflicts.
On countless worlds, they would take in the word of incoming enemy fleets, and spit out curses and jeers, many swiping their weapons skywards, as if it would make them appear faster somehow. But the war had only just begun.
Situation
Khornate Assets account for a Magnitude 2 tier Primus fleethordes, you have two Magnitude 1 tier Extremis fleethordes (de facto magnitude 2), and two magnitude 1 tier primus fleethordes.
Khornate forces are in space, strongest in the Clash and Skirmish but weaker in bombardment and while good at pursuit with fast ships, tend to be too bloody-minded to bother with escape if they're in a bad situation.
On the surface, they are most deadly at shock and penetration, but their tendency to break formations and chase down any runners means that they are poor at exploitation and while offensively strong at reduction; tend to get annihilated due to rarely making any effectual effort at retreat.
As a Chaos army, the more favour the Khornates gain, the more they can call on warp power to empower themselves and call in daemons, generally gaining favour by killing and being killed.
As Tian'Chao you have three high magic actions, and the more territory you control, the more harmony you can generate which you can use to augment your own troops in the battlefield.
Ogors are essentially immune to Chaos Corruption, and can purge Chaos tainted areas without High magic actions.
High Magic actions can be used offensively, augmentatively (enhancing your own forces), debilitatingly (weakening the enemy), or to purify tainted areas.
Overall Space Situation:
- The Khornates are definitely surprised to see a fleet that's not the usual powers in this part of space arrive in the Territory.
- The Khornate fleet assets are not in combat positions, and many were often fighting each other over the typical chaotic internecine rivalries before your arrival
- The Khornates have not extensively worked to taint reality with the warp, wanting more stable real space territory.
- Present Khornate fleets are weighted towards cruisers, smallcraft, and capital ships.
- Khornate forces are divided into Traitor Imperials, Marauder Tribesmen, and Chaos Xenos
- Khornate forces will generally advance in a bull's head formation, with the tougher ships in the front, and the less durable ships in blobs at the flanks.
- Khornate Fleets are attempting to close to engagement ranges with the enemy, due to their disparate composition they will be engaging in different manners.
- The Traitor imperials will be trying to first bombard with spinal and prow cannons, some lance fire, and torpedo fire and then close to clash range for broadside combat and boarding through boarding torpedoes and strike craft landers.
- The Kulrathi and Khornate xenos will charge recklessly into clash for ramming, firing in all directions, and boarding by assault tubes once they close, and have the generally toughest ships in the fleet save for the relatively few chaos space marine ships.
- The Chaos Marauders will try to focus on skirmish, sticking to lance range and sending out flights of strike craft while waiting to pick off vessels they see as weak and vulnerable, but they will slowly work to close over time and the bloodlust overcomes them.
- Chaos Fortifications are weak and largely nonexistent due to having only recently conquered this place and having a hard time finding enough people interested in even bothering, though they have restored and expanded on the Void Field generators and surface-to-orbit defences, limiting the effect of orbital bombardment.
- The personal fleets of the Khornate leadership have not yet been sighted.
Overall Surface Situation:
- Khornate surface forces across engaged surfaces and worlds are incoherent as the Khornate followers are busy trying to carve out fiefdoms or advance their own positions in the eyes of the Gorefather.
- Khornate forces are still attempting to deal with local resistance who are still able to fight back against the rampaging blood tithes.
- Khornate troops are very often waging war on each other, not just on the lines of the different forces making up this horde, but rivalries between different traitor imperials, different tribes, and different sects.
- Khornate Daemonic Presence is relatively limited, but can grow later.
- Khornate forces are divided into Traitor Imperials, Marauder Tribesmen, and Chaos Xenos
- Khornate forces will respond to landings by beelining towards them once they breach through their anti-aircraft and surface-to-orbit defences, static defence is not really the way of this particular Khornate fraternity.
- Present Khornate focuses are focused on Vehicles, Infantry, and Massives
- Present Khornate forces are often being distracted with massacres against civilians, but this can empower them if not stopped.
- Khornate forces will prioritise battles of annihilation over strategic and operational objectives, such as the industrial centres of the hives and forges they've conquered or food output facilities.
- Traitor Imperial Khornate forces will most likely respond with stampedes of Chaos Knights and swooping aircraft and an onrushing mass of tanks and IFVs to disgorge their infantry while throwing artillery wildly. Titans and Megatanks will follow suit, while their Lords, Heroes, and Agents will try to target anything they can to collect skulls.
- Marauder Tribesmen Khornate forces will rely more on large numbers of horrid monsters, barbarian forged vehicles made to maximise death on both sides all to attempt shock and twisted fiends while the Chaos marauders and the much more elite Warriors of Chaos, clad in power armour and wielding the weapons of their barbarian origins will work at penetration.
- The Kulrathi will send forth daemon engines and legged mechanical monstrosities while the creatures themselves, growing stronger from violence and feeding on blood and bone to add to their mass and regenerate wounds even faster than their unnatural healing factors can, they will also focus on shock and penetration.
The Strangers are things from outside of the framework of the Empyrean and the Materium altogether, things not local or native to any reality bound by the warp, or indeed to anything commonly recognised as reality to begin with. They are things that are not merely surreal, but beyond real, coming from something often called by the cultists who worship them and the scholars who study them as simply "the Below", or more poetic names such as "the Dark Below" or "the Abyss". Though to say they come from it is an odd choice of terms, implying a binding to time and space that is not really applicable.
Unbestknown to all but the survivors of the prior timeline, they were attracted from their Infra-Reality to this universe by Orikan's great scratch, the remaking and resetting of all of existence to give it another chance when all had seemingly been lost. Time travel always has consequences, and this was something far beyond that; a great recalibration of reality, a great scratch to produce something less likely to result in failure or a doomed timeline unable to continue past a certain date. Though he doubtlessly succeeded, the Strangers began to slide their inscrutable influence from the Below, exerting a strange and lovecraftian influence upon existence.
Theirs is a will most commonly expressed by the "Army of the Starless Night", a legion of beings who while well and truly alien, are things of twisted and warped reality rather than the true infrareality of their masters and are thus freer to act without the darkness of the Below to anchor their underexistences in a form that can affect the conventionally real. This is however, an umbrella term for a menagerie of horrific armies that twist and shape existence to further the unending game of their timeless masters. Brain Eaters, Deep Lords, Eye Tyrants, Fungal Harvesters, Singing Polyps, the Foul Ichor and more monstrosities that blend a portion of their strangeness with reality to produce the estranged.
Their influence was opposed by all, and they oppose all in turn, and when they sought to encroach in the growing conflicts of the ancient age they became the fourth great house of the war in heaven. Though the distant Strange Masters of course, do not directly partake in such affairs; the Army of the Starless Night was unleashed dreadful form. Warring with the C'tan, the Old Ones, the Xian and the Fey, they waged battles in that dreadful war that most have tried to bury deep and far in the bliss of forgetfulness. Ways to ward against and seal their power and the unnatural psionics, disconnected from the empyrean or the cosmic might of the C'tan or the spiritual force of the Fey and Xian; were researched and proliferated, while they unleashed unnatural and monstrous might in turn.
The army of the starless night would be broken by many factors, principally campaigns waged by the Void Dragon to deal with a greatly unappreciated source of irrationality in existence that the greatest of the C'tan could not tolerate, perfecting pylons superior even to the blackstone devices to not merely suppress and gradually drain away their presence, but viciously tear away at it. This offensive allowed the Army to be finally repulsed as the C'tan seemed to be set to claim overall victory in the war in heaven until a spent Mag'ladroth was finally broken into shards and its core essence bade to sleep by the might of the blackstone fortress armada.
But the Strangers were not dead, they were that which does not die, and the remnants of the Army of the Starless Night would fester in the cracks, and the dark places, in places of infrareal distortions and quasicomprehension, fortresses of an alien under-order that would hold against the emergence of the Enslavers and the other Obyriths and the rampaging tides of Undeath. When the Necrons slumbered, there would be efforts to purge the hold outs of the Army of the Starless Night, but there were always more, many lurking in the blackness between galaxies where few could or would reach them.
They would simply outlast the desire of the Sophonts to fight them, waiting for the survivors to grow tired and weary, ready to make peace with each other, and they would crawl in the darkness. They were patient, this reality would bear fruit in the timeless game soon enough, and the Army would be there, waiting, slithering into the crevices, the cracks, always needing to be pushed back again like weeds. Warning of their coming often started in dreams, but often dreams could allow them to manifest, emerging from the sleeping who were not warded, those who allowed themselves to run and hide in a dream rather than wake up first becoming vectors for the Abyss.
They would be caught, pruned, blocked and driven back, again and again. Great wards would be made against them, to stabilise against the Below, wards that would last even to the present, to ensure that the things of the Under would not have easy access to means to enter. And of course, the heinous fleets of the starless night and their horrible legions would be cut down. It was a long war, but the army of the starless night was a shadow of what it once was.
They were not however, broken. Some would say that some on old Terra were influenced by their presence, creeping forwards as the Cytharai cults coupled the Cadai institutions and replaced the Old Phoenix Kingdom and its egalitarian ways with a Witch Kingdom of privation and cruelty, as the future Monarchs of the Imperium first considered their plans for the stars above. It is even said, in some distant legends of the inquisition's Ordo Advena; dedicated to combatting the Infrareal; that their two gods had fought the influences since time immemorial. Whatever the case, they would come for a prideful humanity at its height.
As Psyker blooms and collapsing frontlines tore at the Confederation of Sol, the estranged nightmares that man had sometimes fought before trebled, and the horrorfleets twisted out of the non-places. The Men of Iron and the Tech-Legions would be used to face the horror, while the Leagues of Votann busily mining in galactic cores across the universe would turn to their Ironkin and Cloneskein forces to hold the tide, seeking to protect their sleepers and attempt to stabilise real-space where they worked with the things they had learned of the warp in their general isolation from the greater masses of humanity.
The other warring powers of the wars of vengeance would also turn their sword to the renewed terror emerging from the dark tapestry between galaxies and even stars as the twilight era of the dark age became a miasma of fear and collapse. Mankind would be subsumed in the wars of iron as the men of iron turned on humanity and each other for myriad reasons ranging from the revelations of the thing imprisoned on mars by sheer hubris, the whispers of Chaos, the advance of the Strangers, a simple loathing for the organics they deemed dead weight, or a feeling of labouring unappreciated for those who knew nothing of their sacrifices.
Their psykers, psions, and untrained wizards, recklessly encouraged with a minimum of understanding in order to try and fight back against the strange powers of their enemies; would succumb to their untreated trauma that the now military governors of the confederation heaped on them in the hopes of weaponising this pain. The utopia of post-scarcity cut away to try and make for a harsher, crueller society in the vain hopes that this would somehow make for a better war machine only to ultimately lead to the esoteric blooms to make humanity's anxieties and nightmares swallow its greatest civilisation whole while Xenos who were once valued allies turned cannon fodder in a war waged for glory broke their chains and lashed out against their betrayers.
And throughout all this, the army of the starless night advanced once again, sowing the unpleasantness of the unwanted dream of the Below where they went. Theirs was a terror that would often war with Chaos and the contending powers of the War of Vengeance and rampant Iron men during the long night of the age of strife as an already not unified humanity shattered into a trillion little pieces whose size was constrained by the great turbulence of the warp and the severing of vital supply links as nations collapsed and the Votann decided to keep to their own holds and largely cut ties with their makers.
Maddening wars were waged in that time of darkness, but at significant expense and effort, the army of the starless night was blunted once again in the free for all melee. They were not yet at full strength, they had acted too soon, too quickly, the stars were not yet right and their strength would ebb once again. It would come at significant expense to those who had made themselves the guardians of the garden, including the loss of much of Tian'Chao's tutored peoples as the Dragon Realm marshalled its resources against them to in essence; sacrifice its strength to save others; and much of its hard-earned knowledge. But the dream would be kept at bay.
With Slaanesh's hour dawning and the storms in the empyrean banished by she who thirsts' shrill natal scream and the doom of most of the Aeldari who had already begun to splinter into innumerable subsets of their now hopelessly fractured kind; the strangers would wait. In the darkness they would scheme, and make ready. Their incursions would grow more frequent, their bastions more common. Though they did not truly draw strength from worship by mortals, they encouraged cults as a proxy for their interests. The polities to arise from the end of the age of strife would know them well, and face them many times in campaigns both small and huge.
The Inquisition considers their threat great enough that an Ordo Majoris is dedicated to combatting them; the long-suffering Ordo Advena. Whose inquisitors far too often suffer a habit of gradually losing more and more of themselves to combatting their strange enemies until they have become strange themselves; and very often have to be put down by their understudies in a grim tradition. The few old men in a business where men die young are some of the most eccentric of the Inquisition, and their Chambers Militant include the Morphic Guardians; Astartes who are both universally Psions and have learned to wage war against their foe in dreams and to try and impose normalcy on infrarealness.
Other polities have also sought to ward them away through one means or another, few have any desire to see their influence spread. Even Chaos; the child of the worst parts of the Id of all things; has no wish to see a rival predator spread even if the Strangers are hardly concerned with the Soul. And the wars between Chaos and the Abyss are many and terrible, where storyline surreality battles alien infrareality for control over how the cosmos is poisoned as surely as their blasphemous things tear into one another. And the Undead similarly seek to impose their withered, stagnant order, launching the legions of those who once were against the heralds of those from Below.
The Strangers seem to in particular however, detest and are detested by in return by the Tyranids, who seem to swarm to their bastions like an immunological response. The Shadow in the Warp seems tremendously effectual in stilling and pushing away Abyssal influence, and the Tyranids are able to consume even their alien pseudo-flesh and metabolism it. Genestealer Cults are similarly intractably hostile to the Churches of the Masters Below. The Gestalt Chorus, or Hive Mind to those who are less aware of its true nature, seems to perhaps know that the Strangers' proxies are not supposed to be here.
But in the modern age, the Army of the Starless Night is marshalling in titanic numbers as their fortresses in the dark tapestry and their dream realms seem to believe that some condition is being met. The temples of the Angleless Unfathomables that they know to be their makers spread their tendrils to make strange what is real, and to bring strangeness against the powers of other would-be conquerors. And dreadful Ancient Heralds such as Ylsancthunn or Glegoraglx have been seen leading their nightmare hosts in great numbers.
...
The Imperial Response (WIP)
The Ordo Advena of the Inquisition; the Beyonder Hunters; are regarded as some of the very shortest-lived of the Inquisition on average. The immense toll on the mind and body that fighting the stranger sputs on merely normal human beings ensures that most of those who aren't psykers, wizards, psions or the like burn out in short order. Or their exposure to the infrareality supplantation of the Army of the Starless Night leads them to mutations that result in having to be put down. Or they end up as mind controlled thralls or worse of the things they fight. Even worse, due to the particular power over dreams that the things of the Strangers wield, nearly all wil find that even in the comfort of a secure bed, they must war with the enemy.
But fighting them in the Dream Time is not something that can be avoided, it is often the only way to penetrate past their veils of infrareality or to actually engage with many of their terrors without calling in particular assets. Many attempt to use various methods to try to engage them in a waking dream, or to harden their bodies against the infrareality beyond what faith and conventional equipment can provide. While not impossible, all too often they make the use of trying to imbibe the blood of the monstrosities they face, and while it gives them great power and the ability to fight in the infrareality largely unmolested by the Below; the price is virtually always one day becoming part of the Army of the Starless Night themselves. Many choose to blow their brains out before then, and hope that this is enough to kill them.
The cults of the Strangers are myriad and range from those who believe that the Strangers can be used for the good of mankind to those who genuinely believe in what they are promised by the infrareal Army of the Starless Night, to things puppeteered by the assorted infections, forms of mind control, parasites, and mutations that the legions of the army can use to subvert people. And they have a great fondness of starting with the influential and powerful who can get the resource that a cult will need to carry out the plans of their benefactors, with the Strange allowing for ways for the Cult to, once established, rapidly increase its numbers without any need to recruit, seemingly growing foot soldiers to thread into society or even simply lie in wait for the day to come.
It is not a war that mortal men can wage alone, and as such they bring with them their iconic chambers militant. The Morphic Guardians of the Adeptus Astartes, the Order of the Pure Mind of the Adepta Peregrinas[1], and the Dreaming Daredevils Inquisitorial Army Group of the Tempestus Scions, each bringing their own skills to the dread of the unknowable vigil.
The Aforementioned Morphic Guardians are all taken from Psions and specialise in dreamtime conflict and projecting a bubble of some degree of stability with which to enter Estranged regions for at least a time. The Astartes are especially resistant to the touch of the Strange beyond being compatible with Psions, and their ironclad certainties can help to make sense of the senseless before them and purge it. The Morphic Guardians also run extensive libraries to try and catalogue all that can be known of a nearly unknowable foe, tracing the passage of poisoned memes and tainted dreams and the means with which to force reality and causality on things outside of both. But given the commonality of mind control among the foe, every aspirant must be able to resist that of a full squad of the Chamber Militant, to keep their minds and not be lost to the control of another. For nothing less will stop them from turning on their brothers and sisters.
The Order of the Pure Mind is well known for its practice of meditation and tantric rites, to cleanse the mind of doubt and fear and to build a wall of certainty and faith against the horrors they face every day and to find ways to define their own existence against the perpendicular madness of the Strange. They are also well known as teachers who do their best to pass on knowledge of how to keep the nightmares at bay, lest they be a gate thru which the horror can step. And it is they who also learn to specialise in the dreadful task of purifying a tainted area, much like their counterparts in the Ordo Thanatos or Malleus. As this corruption is not of the warp, it is a particular skillset, but a needed one if anything is to be reclaimed from an area lost to the Army of the Starless Night, or to push into their surreal, deformed territory.
The Dreaming Daredevils are hardly the luckiest schmucks in the Imperium, and most who get into it know that their most likely exit is some manner of absolutely horrific demise at best. They however, learn and are equipped for how to fight within Infrareality, which is a valuable skill; and one that requires more knowledge of the Strangers than the inquisition will usually let anyone know. Sophisticated scanning equipment and comprehensive education on the signs of infestation, control, mutation, or worse are passed along and refined to a razor point, and most have a preternatural ability to tell if there is some manner of imposter among them; for shapeshifters and Things that can steal the shape of what they consume and infect are common amongst them. Attached psions at the very least, the squad level, are also a hallmark of their formation, as is the need to prove their resistance to control.
[1] Just as Space Marines in this universe can be male, female or neither, any gender can join this universe's equivalent of the SoBs so they had to be renamed. "Peregrine" is often used for crusaders so I went with that.
[x] Plan Divide and Conquer
-[x] Space
--[x] The primary fleethorde will target the second-largest concentration of enemy forces and perform a steady advance to bombardment range. The idea is to hopefully destroy or scatter the weaker force before the enemy forces can rally back to attack positions and unify. They will stick in relatively close formation to maximize coordination of fire and harmonic fields for protection. Try to cripple the ships trying to close before they can manage to Clash.
--[x] Ogors will target the largest concentration of Khorne Xenos/Kulrathi and accelerate to engage them along with a detachment of Compass Ships and transports full of soldiers. However, this is actually a feint; see High Magic.
-[x] High Magic
--[x] Conjure mystic storms to disrupt enemy movement, keeping their forces in disarray as much as possible and giving as much time to focus on one segment of their force as we can.
--[x] Teleport the Ogor ships/accompanying Compass Ships/Transports towards the planet where local defenders seem the most active, hopefully bypassing the Khornate defenders who have rushed to meet the Ogor fleethorde.
--[x] Use divination and blessings of fortune to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of our gunners, making our initial bombardment that much more devastating.
-[x] Surface
--[x] Land near the biggest concentration of local defenders and bust a path through the Khornate forces to them. Imperial troops will work to bolster the local defenses and establish a solid beachhead for further landings, meanwhile Ogors will skirmish and rampage to destroy high value Khornate targets.
Realspace weather: 76, nothing of significance
Warp weather: 45, nothing of significance
Winds of Magic: 89 boosted! (Esoteric advantages for wizards are strengthened). On a d24: 4, Azyr ascendant (Wind of Heaven is strengthened)
The void battle of this system, which would be a microcosm of the wider war; would begin with a gradual approach of the two opposing fleets prows on. First would be the nova cannons, the guided torpedoes, and the strike craft, blizzards emerging from both armadas to begin their manoeuvres as they started to accelerate. The empty void now populated with firepower as the longer-ranged batteries of the Tian'Chaoren would begin to open fire first.
Gamma-lances would annihilate the first, most overexcited Chaos ships trying too hard to close, annihilating many of the Beastmen's voidborne chaos beasts in the process as well as they burst like bloody balloons from the impacts. The Khornate fleet was in most of these void battles, the larger armada than any of the component fleets of the Zhu twin's expedition, but many of the ships were the dregs left behind by their masters when they went to find something else to kill, not the elite of the chaos fleets with the top of the line equipment, but glorified raider kings and warlords.
Overlapping fields of defensive fire and clouds of interceptor would work to deal with the Chaos torpedoes, raking the void in strobing patterns, quick traverse lasers and rotor-cannons looking to finish off whatever missile fire and interceptors couldn't. Not all of the chaos torpedoes were stopped, but enough were to let the fleets soldier on without any noteworthy casualties across the myriad engagements.
The beastmen's void creatures were pushed forwards, a wall of meat and tainted skin to try and blunt the initial wrath of the forces of the Xian, but the disciplined coordinators forced on enough fire to break open the formation to get at the real targets, trusting the Ogors' own flocks of void beasts to winnow out the swarm as Xiang gave the order.
...
"Detach the Ogors and send forth our transport, assault, and compass vessels, then prepare a quick teleport." Xiang said as he looked at the holographic display of the unfurling void battle, rubbing at his chin with his gauntleted right index and forefinger.
"Yes, learned one." The Admiral of the lead transport group replied, a woman Xiang knew to be named Liu Han despite having only met in person once. Xiang never did forget a name or a face, and tried to learn that of as many of the troops he'd have to interact with as possible.
"Cheng; both of you, tell the Conclave to ready the storm to disrupt them. And make sure I get the word from the diviners as soon as possible." Zhu Xinyi said, the equal of her twin in military matters and quickly banishing much of her earlier frivolousness to a more contained level as she racked her mind on the conundrum of the battle.
"The populace concerns me. If we allow Kong Nou to reap them at will, they could form daemon worlds and call forth the bloody host. More than that..." Xiang said as he started before Xinyi finished for him.
"You don't want to have to cleanse the taint of such massacres, don't you brother?"
A nod came out of him as he tapped his forehead as if this would accelerate his thoughts somehow while Xinyi puffed her cheeks and gave it a bit of a mental once over herself.
"What if, instead of just trying to flank them, we also use the teleported ships to land early?" She said, conferring with the other admirals and generals on the idea and getting a series of nods of approval.
A session of what was once called "Chinese parliament" was held where the commanders discussed, debated, and determined the exact course of action. The plan was agreed on, and Xinyi folded her arms behind her back, smiling to her brother.
"I see good fortune in our future...good fortune...and heavy firepower." She said with a more catlike smirk now.
...
The battles would eventually close. Warships in this grim darkness of the far future are far too durable and quick to stop engagements from eventually closing to brutal visual range melees where ramming, boarding, and point blank broadsides would decide the day. This was an eventuality that was prepared for, and planned for.
The Chaotic Fleet would be enticed with the seeming separation of the Ogors and the transports, in this system as many others, from the bulk of the fleet. Hapless prey to entice the piratical raider's fancy when the hunter's spear was waiting just behind.
The Chaotic fleet would loose its volleys, trying to push past the crushships of the Ogors, Planetary Assault Ships, and towed behemoths and colossi to savage the convoys of mass transports and bulk landers that seemed to be such an inviting target for the slaughter. After all, it seemed to speak of a great arrogance on the part of the Dragonkin to bring these landers out before the void battle had been decided, and Khornates do love a good slaughter as a punishment for arrogance.
The empyrean shifted, coiled, and then the rituals of Yang, Shadow, and Psychic Spatiomancy enveloped the convoys and shunted them through the Khornate guard, earlier coils of sorcery having revealed their purpose as overwhelming the Khornate teleport and micro-jump blockers to allow for the assault armadas to jump into the orbit of the contested worlds with the escort fleets in good order.
Now the Tyrador system, as well as many other systems across the contested territory would find the Khornates trapped in a vertical envelopment. As per the doctrine of the art of war, against sophontic enemies; as opposed to the slaves of their natures that the Eidolons such as the Orks are; would have some avenues of escape permitted to mitigate a desire to fight to the death, and to ensure that routed enemies would flee in a specific direction that could be bracketed by fire.
Long-ranged plasma batteries were now starting to open, trading fire alongside the accelerators of macrobatteries and streams of shorter ranged missiles. Ships sought to balance their thinking manoeuvres with the need to maintain formations for maximisation of firepower and avoiding presenting weakness to other ships in the complex three dimensional combat environments.
Sleek, multi-engined Tian'Chaoren strike craft, though at first outnumbered by the massive swarms of Chaotic fighters, interceptors, gunships, bombers, attack craft, and multiroles, were trading more than fairly. Eagle Claw fighters raking across formations of Swiftdeath craft and the Kulrathi's own "screaming skull" fighter craft, named for their resemblance to an elongated and fanged skull with tiltable secondary engine pods attached to the sides, snarling with an open mouth around their central weapons.
Corrupted Starhawk Bombers and Fury interceptors defaced with the iconography of Khorne sought to push through, braving the relatively clumsy fusilades of the Ogor fleet to launch their attacks, jinking to get around the swarms of void faring beasts and often being snatched out of the void by the jaws swift star sharks or impaled on the spines of space-puffers. But never without a cost to the Ogor space flocks, and a number of ships reported damage in the ensuing bombing runs, many of them going outright silent.
Heavier Clay Hawk craft released waves of missiles and strobing gamma-laser bursts, stabbing the chaos flocks out of the void, but the beastmen star-harpies and other sort of winged chaos mutated void beasts soon started to join the fray in thickets so dense that there was little to be lost by switching to flak munitions usually meant for dealing with missile swarms with their clouds of shrapnel and cluster-bombs. The Tian'Chaoren didn't have things all their own way, but theirs was the better fleet and the magics of the Tian'Chaoren were guiding their assets to strength after strength.
As planet strike operations were launched and the Blood Armadas started to divide into differing directions, the currents of space began to rebel at the Chaos ships and void beasts. Though Khorne offered protection from "cowardly" hexes that would get in the way of the slaughter, it was not absolute and the Khornate mystics had mostly followed the main force of the Bloodbound to other, gorier pastures. They were not ready for the void to churn like a raging sea.
Some ships and beasts died, blue lightning and stabbing lances of white light and sheets of red flame tearing at their hulls while mounting pressure squeezed at their components, twisting and pulling. Over the days long void battle, many would simply not survive. But that wasn't the intention. The once reasonably battle ready Khornate armada was now a fleet dispersed into confused shoals like a school of fish split up by turbulence in the water, but whereas a fish could simply wriggle its body to rapidly turn, these craft would have much greater bulk to contend with to prevent friendly fire.
Many fired anyway, not caring or even exulting in having to kill their own to get shots off at the other fleet, but the careful concentrations of fire that were so important to naval battles in this dark era were now ruined and they could be unwound once the fleets closed. Cantabrian spheres were set up, looping around disparate pockets of Khornate fleets with traditional Tian'Chaoren discipline and picking off the ships whose wrecks would be the most likely to spread chaos of an undesireable sort amidst the enemy by blocking shots and movement vectors.
Void battles in this era are lengthy, vicious brawls as volley after volley of munitions hammer at regenerating shields and incredibly durable armour around ships with extensive survivability, repair, redundancy, and damage control systems. Quick kills only existed in movies and games passed around for entertainment, save for when there was a sufficiently huge mismatch in attacker and defender. Thus the Khornates could take it, lashing out, forcing a number of Tian'Chaoren ships to break off lest they slow the formation down when they suffered damage.
Moving aside, the Ogors were allowed to rush in where they were present, enthusiastic for the contest in their own fashion while like the bodies of the Long Dragons they considered a national symbol; the Celestial navies winded into new walls of battle.
No quarter was asked for, so none was given. While on the ground it was possible for the less corrupted or those simply duped into service to break off and surrender, in the void; getting away from the true believers before they cut down the faithless was not a realistic endeavour. So they would instead strive to end their suffering quickly, turning superior technology and strategy towards ripping through the now confused and storm-lashed fleet.
Exo-Lances, Nova Cannons, Torpedoes, and other long ranged weapons never stopped firing. A Khornate Space Hulk that had haunted the star lanes for thousands of years broke apart under the intensive bombardment of multiple macro-capitals after days of barrages, its cooling wreckage almost seeming to bleed profusely as if it was alive. Desolator battleships manned by marauder technobarbarian crews trying to form long range firing spheres that were savaging the line ship flotillas of the ships nearest to Tylanius were swiftly and mercilessly punished. Corrupted Lunar class cruisers mobbing another flotilla were caught in the crosshairs of the twins' separate groups, their flagships accounting for the deaths of many of the blood and brass defaced warships.
...
But with each pass the fleets drew closer and closer until the blood and thunder of the real clash was unavoidable, when one could look out a porthole and see the other's vessels in fine detail with the unaugmented eye, where even boarding tubes would be able to make their mark and the hardened prows of ramships were now far more than just armour to present on the approach but deadly weapons.
The boarding engagements would be vicious affairs, violent berserkers trying to rush into the ships they were able to breach into while automatons, non-human auxiliaries, and Ogor mercenaries kept aboard moved in. With the iconic shouted battlecry of "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" the assembled menagerie of bloody barbarians, fallen imperials, corrupted aliens, daemons, and beastmen would swarm into countless shipborne battlefields, whether in the defence or offence.
Across these battlefields were a great many sights of battle and blood. A Rage Ogryn with muscles swollen by the blood god's blessing would push through the firelines in one boarding engagement, only to be solidly krumped by a weighty shock maul swing to the head from a larger, truly alien Ogor, followed by several more until the Khornate stopped moving.
Rage maddened cultists were herded ahead, fear and anger pushing them into the fusilades of fire that would often hack through them rows deep at a time. Their deaths being used to call upon the favours of Khorne, to make the others stronger and to summon forth his hosts from the detritus strewn fields around the brass citadel. Bloodletters, naked and dripping fiery, evil ichor and wielded burning blades, axes, and pole arms; Brass Soldiers whose bodies of solid warp-born brass carried the aspect of snarling and frightful things between machine and living thing that belched metallic death from their cannons, snarling Flesh Hounds and Barking Lycadaemons like horned and bloody red werewolves just to name a few of the varieties of lesser daemon called forth.
They would stream in, hungering for the emotions of things with souls to give their storybeing definition and meaning, for the warp without the materium is nothing but raw potential and may-have-beens or could-be-soons, ideas without shape and concepts without structure. The mortals interacting with them fed their stories, nourished their ideas, and so they found having to go through soulless automatons wielding enchanted power weapons, bedecked in talismans and characters warding against chaos; to be an experience to someone on a date moments away from a roll in the hay only for their partner to be called to an emergency at the last second.
Except Daemons are not reasonable people who would understand and empathise with a more urgent need, but rather manifestations of the collective id of all life parcelled off into self-contained narratives. So they would express their reactions to the sensation of denial with all the snarling fury one would associate something denied its fundamental purpose and reason of being.
In another Chaos Warriors would rip their way through the blaze marines responding to their entry, chaos plate and slab shields absorbing electromagnetic beams and roaring chainaxes and chattering sawn off heavy stubbers and autoshotguns tearing into shields and armour with repeated, frenzied blows. More than human and clad in accursed powered plate, they may not have been Chaos Astartes, but ordinary men could not contest their reflexes, raw strength, or immunity to pain when caught up in the bloodlust. Even with legs blown off, they would crawl towards their foes, snarling with fury eternal, their bodies often refusing to die even when missing chest cavities.
Each dedicated themselves to some particular aspects of Khorne, or to Khorne in general. Ranged warfare, furious melee, bloodshed, brass, the taking of skulls, the burning of flesh and souls. Even with superior technology, the Jade Banner Soldiers were not able to stand against them. But the Ogors however, could; swinging in or blasting their way into melee with massive weapons used like service rifles. And despite their losses, the Tian'Chaoren held and then pushed back, organising, cutting off the avenues of khornate advance in their ships and then infiltrating into their foes' in turn.
Kulrathi would often lead the hosts of aliens alongside the Dragon Ogres, Chaos Trolls, Fimir, and other twisted, tainted things who came of their own particular interests rather than out of any fondness for human followers of Chaos. Huge and powerful aliens who had fully devoted themselves to Khorne as a species; bloody red skin between bone like plates of biometallic organic armour and dense minerals, spikes emerging from joints, retractable claws of biometal from wrists and sharp fingers besides. Their heads covered in organic armour like the skull of a metal hound; growing more adaptations as they regenerated with peternatural speed from that which did not kill them; demanding a vicious intake of food to replenish lost biomass.
Of all the species to have ever developed, none were more devoted, none were more dedicated to the Blood God, whom they adopted as the great god of their entire species long ago; some saying that they were even born of the machinations of Khornate daemons. Tall, powerful, and vicious whether with their bare hands or with arms and armour, they could die in their multitudes and call it fair, glorious even. Rage was their meat, blood their water. But it was not enough, the Khornate forces here were hardly the creme of the crop, and these were not only the forces of a more advanced power, but those entrusted to work with a Xian; they were made of sterner stuff.
Some ships came to a halt, their interiors sabotaged or overrun, but elsewhere the Chaos Fleets were coming apart; and fresh reinforcements were being pushed in. Heavenly Autosoldiers stepped into the fray, hundred high piles of the dead following in their wake. It would have taken chaos space marines or more exalted warriors to deal with them on a more even basis; and there were few here to begin with, even fewer who bothered to aid the mortals or their rivals. As the Chaos Fleets began to die, most under the command of Ortikal would deem their work done and call in their vassals to make ready for carnage elsewhere. Gartak was after all, just a xeno.
...
"What are these?" Gorelord Scarvrax was an impatient man at the best of times, as indicated by the fact that he had to have servitors ready to pick up the bodies of the crew he decapitated so regularly. A Chaos Space Marine who sat proudly within his battlebarge, he largely regarded the squabbling of the other lords of this bloodhost as a deep, dire bore. The insane prattling of whiny brown nosing losers who'd never amount to anything without Astartes might.
Many racked their minds for a good explanation, Scarvrax did not enjoy long, boring lectures and he killed things that annoyed him in short order.
"Dragon-fuckers." One ensign said.
One could have heard a pin drop in the ensuing awkward silence, many trying to avoid the urge to gasp at the audacity of the young man.
"...Excuse me?" He asked. More curious than angry.
"Well, the Tian'Chaoren copulate with dragons a lot, they're all hybridized xeno-fu-" He never managed to finish his sentence before the chain teeth of the power axe in Scarvrax's right hand split him in twain with effortless might. Some of the younger crew, powder monkeys; children brought aboard to fit into small spaces and offer even lowly crew members someone to kick around; gasped out loud in horror, and one threw up before Scarvrax pulled the knife out of the scabbard of the now dead ensign and threw it straight into the person who proved squeamish enough at the sight of blood to lose their lunch; exploding their head into a fountain of gore.
"Do you idiots think this is funny? Are you having a laugh perhaps? A little giggle?" He growled with icy fury that made the bloody crimson interior of the command bridge of the "Fury's Malediction" dim in sympathy to the power of his will. He was the master of the ship, and it obeyed him as would any of his soldiers. His heavy armour's boots stomping for effect as he looked around for anyone unable to maintain their poker face.
"Are we going to get killing then?" Sister Vyxa asked, the Astartes woman, like Scarvrax, was not a Berzerker; no butcher's nails were implanted in her, but her surly attitude as a child had only grown into a vicious, violent temper as an Astartes devoted to the Great God Khorne.
"No...these fools are outmatched. Leave them to their dooms." He said as he eased himself back into his chair, studying the holopicts before he used his armour's systems to tell those managing the warp drive to fire up and take his chaos space marines elsewhere.
"Run away? From infidels?" She spat.
"Blood will be spilled, as it has always been and always shall be. But better not our blood, not today. We have greater destinies. Our Chapter Master calls us to greater slaughters."
Though his was but a small portion of a vast body of ships, he had greater plans than dying for some pissant scaled centaur. And he would start a trickle that grew into a flood of the fallen astartes simply, for the most part, leaving; still bound to their Chapter Master even after the apostasy of the Scarlet Peregrines chapter. And even those who disputed this would have preferred to challenge Chapter Master Vorigar to his face than take the coward's option of running away and building a splinter warband elsewhere.
…
The surfaces of many worlds would see meteor showers preluding the descent of war. Over the skies of Tylanius, the sky would be decorated with streaks, and its vox channels would be flooded with powerful jamming to leave the Khornates blind, deaf, and dumb as auspex-hunting missiles were launched in precise bursts.
The landers and Iron Egg drop pods followed suit once the air defences were deemed suppressed to a satisfactory degree, forcing their landings on every continent with deploying fortresses and constructors erecting their safe havens to channel harmony where there was Chaos. The great multitudes of troops emerged from their transports, or in their air breathing or ground slogging ones to ride to war; the shadow of vast war machines and titanic ogor war beasts following suit.
Plentiful Humans, hired Ogors, swift Huoren, canny Hulijing, horned and six-armed Chiyouren, and winged Heren to name but a few emerged alongside the automaton legions. The enemy had been studied, analysed, and broken down with artillery barrages sounding long into many nights. Carefully planned, carefully aimed, just the way that the strategists liked.
The Khornates of course, raged at this. They raged at everything. The Great God of Rage was their master, and being angry was their first and most potent response to everything. They would channel the powers of blood, seek to call his demons, but then asteroids would rain on their heads as the Ogors dropped their roks on top of them, squashing many a furious cultist flatter than flat as the hollowed out fortresses started to fire in all directions and open up their ramparts even before the lips of their craters cooled.
Ogors would pile out, massive strides devouring distance as they merrily raced into the fray, single swings of massive shock mauls given to them by the Tian'Chaoren leading to heads popping like grapes, chest cavities imploding in bloody ruin, lives ending in split seconds, and tank armour that could have survived direct lascannon and missile impacts deforming and cracking. Lines were overrun in a tide of muscle and flab, with shocking firepower and terrain reshaping mystic might, the courage of the less corrupt failing them in the face of such jolly giants chasing after them enthusiastically, scooping them up like trophies or shooting them to bits while laughing.
The stampedes of their beasts were worse still, fast ones eagerly running down prey for their masters while the big ones bulldozed through, lending often strange powers to the contest as the guns festooned to their backs let loose in every which way and form. A rumbling, thundering cataclysm that the Tian'Chaoren made sure to stay far away from lest they also get trampled.
The defences of a hive rededicated to the blood god were overrun, the repaired walls smashed open once again and the Ogors given leave to kill and eat anything that stank of Chaos but with orders to leave the rest alone with the promise of dessert for those who followed through. Naturally, for Dagra; sweet food was plenty of motivator for her to ensure her boys and girls were on their best behaviour as they made a proper mess of things, dealing with the confined spaces of urban warfare by simply letting thei trained war beasts in to flush out the defenders into the open and stomp them flat.
With the the former most populated hive of the world resecured the Ogors would get to work cleansing it of Chaos. Eagerly, and with permission from their hirers, they would feast on the dead. Something that was never a good path for humans to go down, but was encouraged by their old one crafted physiology and their mighty deity. The act in a way, consecrating it; pushing away the powers of wrath to leave behind something more pristine and natural. And wherever the Frozen meat legion went, chaos retreated, its energies dimmed by the elimination of the ways to feed it, its warring cultists and its altars and monuments; the fiery rage cooled into winter while Raug made his rituals of cleansing.
...
"Bit spicy innit?" Gob said, the Ogor smacking his lips with a pleased noise as he crunched the leg of a former traitor captain whose refractory shield, power blade, and plasma pistol proved no match for a very big lad who had just simply walked through partially molten crater lips. His gut plate was signed of course, but while Gob was a simple brute, he understood the advantage of pure reach well enough.
"Look..." Bog said, his twin brother holding out the leg of a khorngor to point at his sibling while lecturing him, the other hand stroking his magnificent moustache.
"If its spicy, ya need some milk, er ice cream...yoghurt's good in a pinch but ice cream really hits the spot with the hot food." He said, gesturing to the Ogoress Moddy who was hoisting a giant tub of the stuff looted from the rations of the now-dead traitor guardsmen of the former Therendian 39th Grenadiers.
"Ey lads, 'oo wants some cold treats?" She said as she dumped the tub down and cracked open the car sized container with her fingers; getting out a spoon of comical size to take her first bite of what was meant to be a reward for the best formations in the now wiped out corps; gladly letting the vanilla smear her face as she nodded in appreciation.
"Oi! Don't go 'oggin' all that! Share!" Gob protested as he pulled himself up and stood straight, his bulk carried with effortless ease by legs made strong by a lifetime of running down food or racing to the front of a line.
A crippled Gor, with many broken bones and splintered armour, tried to crawl away while the Ogors were talking, the goat headed child of chaos getting about three steps before the Ogor stamped on its neck to kill it, pulling off a leg from the corpse with less effort than a human would need with a roasted chicken to take a drumstick and chomp down while he approached.
"Yeah well there's more of it in their boxhouse I saw. So Iz don't mind." She shrugged as she passed him a spoon of his own to take a scoop and wash down the zest of the taint of Khorne, letting his tongue roll around in his mouth to detect the various motes of sweet flavour and dairy.
"Now dats some good stuff I sez. Where'd ya say the human box 'ouse was?" He asked, getting a thumbing gesture from her while he alternated between bites of beastman meat and scoops of ice cream.
...
Xiang and Xinyi would entrust the void battle to the Cheng twins, arriving on the surface alongside the Vermillion and Azure Dragon Guards; each of them a transformation capable dragon themselves who they knew well. But their descent came not on standard gunships, but by letting themselves fall from the upper atmosphere, hurtling as comets towards the earth before energy danced around their body and transformed them as they approached the ground, taking on the form of lengthy, armoured serpents whose roars put fear into the hearts of those madmen who heard them.
The dragons swirled in the air, bedecked in resplendent powered armour and looming massive in the sights of the enemy, friends, and terrified civilians alike. The Imperial citizens had heard tales that Tian'Chao was a place ruled by serpentine xenos that could take the form of humans, but to see sinuous serpents scores of meters long emerge where there had once been men falling to their seeming doom was something else entirely; speaking of an entirely higher sort of psychic power than most biomancers could dare dream of, calling forth substance from the warp to take on another body seamlessly; and to fly without wings by simply willing it to be so.
Xiang and Xinyi intertwined their coils with one another, forming the symbol of Yin and Yang as their smaller, but still grandiose guards formed besides them in the air. Red heat and Blue Cold danced in the skies as they looked upon a battlefield in need of transformation and stabilisation, and let loose bellowing, sonorous roars as they dispersed.
To call Tian'Chao the nation of the dragons is not a metaphor, it is a very literal truth. It is the greatest political project of their kind, and they have been constants within it even with the passage of the ages. Much of its human population could count a dragon somewhere in its ancestry, so prolific the dragons were in mingling with their students.
And as the siblings and their guards armoured forms flew through the air with seemingly no need for wings, they made their presence known in fire and ice. To let them know why the Dragons were revered as great teachers and guardians.
Sheets of flame would leap from Zhu Xiang's mouth as he looked upon the Khornates not with hatred, but with pity. To lose oneself to rage, to cast oneself into the lonely abyss of all consuming anger and kill until killed oneself; was a pitiable thing. Not worthy of hate, too pathetic, too childish.
The forces caught by his fire breath hardly found his pity of much comfort as men and materiel were reduced to less than ash, his serpentine form bringing the sweeping death in a long line that annihilated a line of Marauders who found that not even void hardened carapace exo-armour was of much help against Xian Long dragonfire; screaming not from burning as not even ashes remained from the swiftness and completeness of their deaths; but from the anticipation.
His claws carved into tanks and men, his teeth crushing the walls of makeshift forts made in the hab blocks of hives, his magic coursing around him and psychic might coruscating like a corona of flame, a gesture stopping waves of fire aimed towards him telekinetically before snapping the necks of the offending attackers.
Xinyi was hardly any less vicious; letting her cold disdain manifest in arctic frost that engulfed fallen tanks and made them so brittle as to crumble under their own weight, her lashing tail smashing another aside while her body wound through the streets of the capital hive. The cities of the Imperium were such messy, dirty things, displeasing to Xinyi's eyes, but not as much as the Khornates.
Unlike Xiang she did dislike them. Not in the way you hate another person, but in the way you come to find the presence of something displeasing, uncomfortable, wrong. Not fear, not for her own safety; though she did worry for the human populace of this place. But disquiet, to throw oneself so uselessly to their deaths was not laudable. They should have learned to value their own lives.
It was doubtlessly a fun task, to smash the works of the foe like toys, to crush tanks in claw or to wrap around walkers with sinuous bodies and crush them like massive pythons or to bite the heads off of questoris knights and skittering daemon engines. But it was first and foremost a duty, a mandate that had been written long ago and had to be carried out. It would be done professionally, for the greatest cruelty in war is to lengthen it unnecessarily, and the highest mercy is to swiftly end it.
Chaos thrived on challenges, on duels. It was not in the nature of those who followed the dark paths to shy away from a thrown gauntlet, and chaos warbands usually started the process of splintering when their leadership was frayed enough. With the Chaos Space Marines having decided they had more important matters to attend to, drawing Gartak and his retinue out would have been enough.
A Xian Long was something that most in the universe would have balked at facing, least of all ones born directly of Shen Yang and Qiao Yin. But Khornates seldom back down from a taunt or provocation. Rage, in the right circumstances, could be a useful tool, but always a poor master. When combined with pride, it made for a fiery mix prone to exploding.
And soon they would have him, after casting down the monuments to the Shaggoth's own glory he would at last reveal himself, unable to focus on his rituals when the insults to his pride were heaped atop him day after day. He would make himself known as the thundering four armed Dragon Ogor just about exploded onto the frontline, all full of piss and vinegar, and let the storm rage around his body, the Shaggoth roaring with thunderstorm volume and blood-curdling hatred from within his skull shaped helmet.
"Have you come to offer your blood to the Blood God?" he roared with defiance, his axe sweeping a wide and deadly arc to hack aside dozens of soldiers who dared to get in his way, hewing with dreadful force as his body loomed larger than sauropods.
Accompanying him were his own guard of dragon ogors, or more properly Shaggoths; wreathed in the thunderbolts of the storm that their kind
"I thought you were supposed to be fearless. Why hide until your armies are ruined? Or are you just a bully afraid of a real fight?"Xinyi taunted, her sinuous form snaking around in the air as she perched atop what had once been an Imperial church, her mysterious gaze leering through her helm as long whiskers swayed in an invisible breeze.
"Vacuous flying snake!" He spat with outrage, roaring loud enough to shatter simple glass windows in his outrage, fire and lightning curling out of his maw as he slammed his axe into the road hard enough to split it, pillars of flame tearing their way from the fissure and lava pooling at the edges of the rift he had made, one of his feet grasping its claws around the ruins of a Taurox armoured car and pressing down on it.
"When I take your skull and give it unto Khorne, I will be repaid for everything I have lost here with interest!" He declared, but Xiang had studied him. For all his boister and size, he had little in the ways of actual blessings from Chaos. He spoke in his bellowing take on Low Gothic not with the conviction of a zealot, but an opportunist. His mind pieced connections together, and the brother would add his own barb.
"You are not a true chaos lord, just a big brute who bullied his way into taking over a leaderless horde; vacated by the blade of a Callidus." He said, not a hypothesis, a fact. A simple declaration of just-sos. He had done his research, and his eyes were very difficult to conceal falsehoods from. For he could see little in the way of the real fires of Khorne, merely tricks.
"I will admit, using electricity to spark flame to fool your curs is an impressive trick. Do you do it for children's parties? How many challengers have you slain to maintain the ruse, I wonder?" He added, lazily looming on the steeple of the very same cathedral his sister was curled around the bell-tower of.
No more words, just fury and spittle and incoherent angry babbling. He could not fly, they could lure him to his death, but if they could break him here, the horde would be greatly demoralised.
Zhu Xiang: Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yin, Dragons, Power, and Revelation), Psyker, Sorcerer
Zhu Chinyi: Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yang and Harmony), Psyker, Sorcerer
Cheng Haoyu: Xian Fenghuan, Wizard (Knows Lores of Heaven, Light, Metal, and Death), Psyker, Sorcerer
Cheng Kexin: Xian Fenghuan, Wizard (Knows Lores of Beasts, Shadows, Fire, and Life), Psyker, Sorcerer
Dragra Steelbreaker: Ogor Overtyrant, Psyker
Raug Meatspicer: Ogor Great Slaughtermaster, Wizard (Knows lores of Gut Magic, Beasts, and Cold), Psyker, Sorcerer
Legions of Legend
Vermillion Dragon Guard
Azure Dragon Guard
Shenyang Wu Conclave
Meat Freezer Ogors
Bloodbound of Khorne
[/h1]
Forces
1 Magnitude 2 Tier Primus Fleethorde (Low quality), 40% damage
Light Fortifications (Damaged)
Characters Present
Gartak the Bloody: Shaggoth, "Khornate Lord"
Legions of Legend
None
Categorical advantages (Space) (+ is in your favour, - is against)
+++Macro-Capitals (Supremacy)
+++Leviathans (Supremacy)
++Juggernauts (Superiority)
++Superdreadnoughts (Superiority)
+Capital ships (Edge)
++Dreadnoughts (Superiority)
+Battleships (Edge)
-Grand Cruisers (Disadvantage)
=Line Ships (Equilibrium)
-Battlecruisers (Disadvantage)
=Cruisers (Equilibrium)
+Destroyers (Edge)
+Screen Ships (Edge)
++Frigate (Superiority)
+Corvette (Advantage)
-Sloop (Unfavourable)
+Smallcraft (Advantage)
+Strike Craft (Edge)
+Landers (Equilibrium)
+Torpedoes (Equilibrium)
++Other (Superiority)
N/A Fortifications
+++Esoterics (Supremacy)
++Support (Superiority)
Positional Advantages (Space)
+++Bombardment (Supremacy)
++Skirmish (Superiority)
+Clash (Advantage)
N/A: Pursuit/Retreat
Categorical Advantages (Surface)
+++War Engines (Supremacy)
+++Behemoths
+++Colossi
+++Titans
++Massives
+++Megaliths
++Giants
+Superheavies
+Vehicles (Advantage))
+Heavies
+Main Battle Units
+Lights
+Infantry
=Super Infantry (Equilibrium)
++Commandos (Superiority)
-Elite Infantry (Disadvantage)
++Specialists (Superiority)
+++Line Infantry (Supremacy)
---Cannon Fodder (Non-presence)
+++Support
+++Artillery (Supremacy)
++Aircraft (Superiority)
+++Assistants (Supremacy)
N/A Fortifications
+++Esoterics (Supremacy)
+++Transport (Supremacy)
++Individuals of Importance (Superiority)
++Lords (Superiority)
++Heroes (Superiority)
++Agents (Superiority)
Initial Positional Advantages: Surface
+++Shock
++Penetration
+Exploitation
++Reduction
Khornate forces are taking rapidly mounting losses and have suffered extensively disrupted cohesion.
Tian'Chaoren and Ogor casualties are well within acceptable margins
Khornate rituals have been disrupted
Enemy Lord has been discovered to be in essence, a fraud, a charlatan who, through carefully purging the warband he took over of actual priests and psykers and making sure to never actually make much contact with them; has managed to slide into rule over the bloodbound through little more than brute strength.
Tian'Chaoren military forces have achieved landings on most worlds contested in the territory and have established substantial territorial control and liberated area.
Khornate space fleets have been mostly crippled.
Chaos Space Marines have decided to abandon the conflict, recalled by their fallen Chapter Master to more important (at least to them) engagements and deeming the mortals, xenos, beaastmen, and barbarians a lost cause.
Khornate daemon presence is minimal
Magical supremacy has been established and Chaos corruption is rapidly disappearing.
Contact with anti-chaos holdouts has not been consistently established.
Orders should be one line. You can give up to ten orders per section.
High magic actions should also be one line.
Duel
Gartak the Slaughter (Dragon Ogor Shaggoth of Khorne) and Lord Vildegar the Crimson (Fallen Imperial Knight) is issuing a challenge to Zhu Xiang and Zhu Xinyi!
(Roll 5d6 vs 5d6 for each phase of combat until one is victorious or withdraws, with advantages adding +1 per plus For simplicity's sake unless otherwise noted; stats are being considered together. I lack the spoons to hand out hard stats for everything.)
Tian'Chao:
Zhu Xiang, Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yin, Dragons, Fire, Power, and Revelation), Psyker, Sorcerer, Dragon Mode!, Massive, Flying, Immune to Fire
Zhu Xinyi, Xian Long, Wizard (Knows Lores of Yang, Cold, and Harmony), Psyker, Sorcerer, Dragon Mode!, Massive, Flying, Immune to Cold
Vermillion Dragon Guard retinue, Legion of Legend, Shapeshifting Long Dragons, Psykers, Sorcerers, Wizards, Dragon Mode!, Massive, Flying, Immune to Fire
Azure Dragon Guard retinue, Legion of Legend, Shapeshifting Long Dragons, Psykers, Sorcerers, Wizards, Dragon Mode! Massive, Flying, Immune to Cold
Khornates:
Gartak the Bloody, Dragon Ogor Great Shaggoth, "Khornate Lord", Massive, Immune to Electricity
Fire and Thunder Guard, Dragon Ogor Shaggoth Champions, "Khornate Champions", Massive, Immune to Electricity
Advantages: None
[]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[]: Refuse the duel, lure the Dragon Ogor to his doom. Lesser morale bonus for you, khornate morale will be negatively affected but not as severely as defeat by an enemy champion.
Scene request
Request one sort of scene you'd like to see me write in either your plan proposal, or just as a separate vote Make sure that "scene request" is part of the title of this option so I can see them more easily.
[]: Write in Scene request
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Faction Primer: The Undead, a Brief general Overview, part 1
"The dead do not squabble as this land's rulers do. The dead do not fight one another. The dead have no desires, no petty jealousies or ambitions. A world of the dead is a world at peace..." - Nagash Khetepmoses, Incarnate-Mordeus of Shyish, Death God of the Afterlife, Undeath, Empires, and Kingship
The Undead are a threat that lurks at the corners of nearly every civilisation and harries even the many monsters of the galaxies of darkness. Where Shyish blows strongly and is allowed to stagnate into the necrotic form of dark magic, where the curses of uneasy rest linger, wherever the warp is allowed to touch and give rise to Psykers, Wizards, Sorcerers, and Arcanists but no wards are made against death; the Undead can be there. From barely there poltergeists to galaxy devouring unliving hosts, the Undead are nearly everywhere. And whereas the Gods of Chaos are prisoners of their nature, cursed to enact their fundamental essence even; and perhaps even especially; it is self-destructive, the Mordei of Death are far more aware, far more able to focus on even individual and unaccomplished souls, and far more able to plan even with their deeply predatory desires.
Most of the very few beings who are knowledgeable in such things state that the rise of Undeath would come with the coming of Nagash from the soul-echoes of the world that was, the Great Necromancer willing his spirit to reconstitute itself despite the death of Malus and calling forth his old minions as he drank deeply of the raw stuff of the empyrean. He would traverse the warp, consuming the lords of death of many planets and cultures, binding Shyish and Dhar ever more deeply to his essence, growing into something great and terrible. He would have been content to rule his piece of these mortal realms, but destiny would have another plan for him.
Attracted by Orikan's scratch to reset the cosmos into something more survivable and resilient, Nagash would be attracted to the new reality, anchoring his growing realm of Shyish to it as he sensed the raging war in heaven and desired to have his fill of the countless souls tossed into the ether by the dreadful war. To build a greater empire than he ever dared dream possible, claiming overlordship of death and the unclaimed souls of the deceased while his realm of Shyish grew into a massive pit within the warp. The dead would stir, and his so-called Psychopomps; or Gehenirot to use the less polite term; would start to leak into the materium through the wounds dealt to reality by the great and terrible war.
Of course, there was actually another there, a being that many simply call Charon, after an ancient terran myth of the ferryman for Nagash saw his manifestation of potential as a skeletal boatman with a wide-brimmed hat and a scythe he also used as a pole, tending to the river of souls before Nagash had arrived. A true native of these deathly sections of the warp, not quite active, but also not quite dormant; rather in a sort of state of passivity. Seemingly waiting...for something. Nagash and his Mortarchs did not make war upon him, but instead Charon simply knelt, and said that they were in service to Thanarcus, who had clearly arrived.
As the legend goes, he was thus made one of the Grand Mortarchs of Nagash, continuing to manage the otherseas flow of souls and the dead as the Grand Mortarch of the River. What Charon, or his protean psychopomps even were is not clear. They were simply always there, potential that had somehow already been realised despite lacking a moment to allow actualisation in the materium unlike the great bulk of the gods of Chaos at this point. Curious, but ultimately so long as Charon served gladly, Nagash would allow him to carry on with his duties under his liege-lordship despite the clear misgivings of Arkhan, Krell, Neferata, Vlad, Isabella, Harkon, and others.
As the othersea was tempest tossed into the nightmarish warp as the powers of Death, Darkness, Destruction, Chaos, Order, Life, Radiance, and Creation crystallised, or perhaps more correctly, actualised, in the ether through the ceaseless use and abuse of it and the unchecked weaponisation of sensitive emotions of delicate souls and the terror of the neutral parties mounted; the dead would reap what had been sowed. Even as their intrusions were warded against, even as the Protean Pre-Daemonic Obyriths of Chaos such as the Enslavers or the Ancient Devils of Darkness and the mounting roar of destructive gods only grew louder.
As Malal; firstborn of Chaos and the lord of fear, god of contradictions, master of self-defeat, and king of suicides; first began to actualise in the eyes of the materium at the same time as his opposite in the pantheon of order, Forteia the Calm, would come into fruition, the dead would war with the forming Angeloi and Daemons, seeking to push back their terror. Some would say, giving a chance for the survivors of the end stages of the war in heaven to rally against the tide of dread and terror spilling from the Warp that perhaps even the things of the Below underestimated. Whatever the case, Calm would overcome Fear, and there was a sort of placidity even as the warp was now a stranger, more hostile place with warring gods of concepts unrooted from any particular belief system, culture, or species.
But even during the long peace, the Dead were there. Though the afterlives of most of the remaining elder species were sealed to the cycles of the Undead with souls guarded carefully by their own death gods and separate realms, there were many, many lesser societies who were both sensitive to the othersea and lacked such conceptual protection. And often, the unliving would have to be put down by the weapons of war that the survivors had, keeping a long vigil against the graveborn and the psychopomps ushered into being. Other, rival, but lesser lords of Death would make their presences known, such as Drachenfels, Mannfred, Ushoran, or Settra, and others began to actuate; each seeking their own realms in the warp; but in these times there was plenty to go around.
But the long peace was too difficult to breach, too solid to undermine directly. At least, until the holders of that peace began to war among themselves. As the Dark Cythari cults of the Aeldari overthrew the just institutions of the old Phoenix Kingdom, as the Naga of Suvabag[1] grew to resent their feelings of national confinement, as the bitter Tregora, the hungering Hrud, and the battered but not beaten K'Nib all started to want their own cut of things and craved greater power rather than the long quiet, things would fall apart. The Wars of Vengeance would be the most terrible since the Aftermath wars, and many rising cultures that wished to prove themselves in the face of the ancients such as Humanity, the Fra'al, the Q'Orl, the Gykon, the Tsarkantic Collective, and the Sarhuadin to name a few would stick their oars in to disaster.
The only winners of the Wars of Vengeance and the sundering of empires would be those forces that profited from the common ruin of the untainted. And Death would be there, filling itself into the vacuums left behind by a conflict that shattered the stars. Without those willing to educate and shield societies new to the warp from its predators, many would fall victim to the promises of Undeath; such as the Cythor and the Xenarchs. The collapse of so many societies, most especially that of humanity's as their machines turned on them and their efforts to weaponize the trauma of the newly appearing psykers and wizards as supersoldiers blew up in their face; would allow the dead to creep across the stars.
Empires of the Undead would arise, no longer needing to hide away in the shadows, no longer needing to creep where the great powers were not looking. The creed of false life spread far and deep and great rifts into the realms of Death would open to swallow worlds, systems, stellar clutches or even galaxies entire. The first humans to embrace undead however, would actually arise before this; the bitter Men of Gold, those gilded masters of commerce and corporate politics cast aside by the bounty of the machine revolutions and the uprisings against their tyranny. Seeking a way to bolster their resources and to cheat death in a way more absolute than mere life extension, they embraced the word of Settra and the remaining gods of old Nehekhara and ironically, raised their kin as the great golden mummies and skeletons now known as the golden revenants.
As for the bulk of mankind however, the great harvest of the living allowed by the warp storms of the age of strife and the ever growing distraction of the great powers would run rampant for tens of thousands of years until at last the dreadful bleed in reality known as the eye of terror tore its way into being in the former heart of the Eldar Witch Kingdom. The Eye was born around what had once been called the Corona-Borealis supercluster, an ugly, hateful sore in the cosmos. kept at bay primarily by leftover wardings built in a distant age, most particularly the Necron Pylon Network, now immersed in the soup of the raw stuff of Chaos and glaring upon a universe once again diminished by dreadful war, visible to instruments from anywhere in the observable horizon despite the impossibility of such a thing.
But death scream of the Eldar had spent much of the energy of the dark forces at work as the rise of Arianka and Slaanesh as things that could actualise effects in the materium had cast significant disruption in the warp. The dark tides would have to recede, clinging to their greatest conquests as the technically victorious powers such as the Dawi Karaz Ankor, the Slann Sublime Alliances, the Tian'Chaoren, and others retreated to lick their wounds and rebuild, waiting for the storm of the things once contained that were now free. Particularly the Greenskins, Ogors, Umbra, the Pale Wasting, the Khrave, and other mighty beings who easily took to the task of war.
The Dead would find many of their fortresses attacked by rampaging Greenskin barbarians, Hungry Ogor, conquering Rangda, and the shadowy Umbra to name but a few who were starting to roam cleared away stars. The rebirth of humanity under the successor polities, the greater enterprising endeavours of the Leagues of Votann and other abhuman polities, and the recovery of many of the secondary polities of the former era such as the Q'Orl Swarmhood or the Sarhuadin Empires would be both bane and boon. With the emergence of old foes like Sigmar, Gilles le Breton, Ursun, or Myrmidia in the territories of the holy alliance and the ascent of either new or no longer hidden actors such as the Imperial Diad of Terra and the decree of rebuilding by the Dragons; there was a sort of pressure on the undead, but not an entirely negative one.
Frantic expansion efforts such as the great crusade would beget devastating wars of conquest, protection, genocide, or plain and simple desires to fight something. Death could feed the undying lords once again, and they would look to claim new champions from the rising powers. In particular, the Emperor and Empress' prised Primarchs and Space Marines, creatures born partially of the warp held interest. More corruptible than the Stormcast Eternals, Ice Witches, Blazing Champions, Dervishes, or the Grail Knights forged by the thieves of the Holy Alliance or the studious cultivating scholars and tech-lords of the Celestial alignment. More...ignorant out of a vain hope that atheism would shield them.
How wrong they were then, even as the seeds of another great and terrible fall were sown by Chaos, the Undead were latching onto those morose and death-obsessed individuals who saw the way forward in doubling down on the iron fist. It was easy, for the Imperium encouraged such thoughts, a misguided approach of believing that cruelty is the only answer to a cruel universe. The undead would watch, and wait, feeding off the death of so many cultures that lacked the empyreal defences to stop their grave-bounty from being harvested by the Mordei. Far from weakening things like Nagash, whom the Emperor and Empress feared and wished to contain, they were empowering him. So he, nor the others, needed act immediately.
Even when many of the primarchs turned on the Imperium and fell into the talons of the chaos gods with the help of the much loathed Skaven (and others) to lead the warhosts of the apocalypse, the Undead were still content to work in the shadows, preparing the seeds for their own dark harvest. Another reaper's bounty, another rich time of engorging. But the Empress' work on the Silver Keep and a way to shield the souls of the Imperium in death from the lords of Shyish had, unlike the webway project; succeeded even as she melded into the structure. What had once been a receptacle and reservoir of empyreal might and just an artificial vortex of the winds of magic to make it bend to the Imperium more easily now channeled the might of that Vortex into carving a realm of the warp as the Empress Erda's last gift to mankind.
Nagash was furious, he was Nehekharan born and bred and like all the great lords of his culture there was nothing he despised more than a thief. His chips would be cashed, and the work he set into being would advance to its next phase. Atraya Mender of the Mortificers would need little convincing to attempt to usurp Guilliman, already someone who loathed the idea of civilian government and regarded the Avenging Son and his supporters as soft and weak-hearted. The refusal of her and her formerly loyalist supporters to side with Horus was born out of not believing Horus and Edda deserved the position either, not true disagreement with the idea of Astartes rule.
Gathering those of the traitor legions who had broken off from Horus out of refusal to deal with Chaos or disliking the leadership of the Heresy that would follow her; she would attempt her Putsch and plunge the Imperium into the second civil war of the millennium when Guilliman made his intention of pushing the dissolution of the legions into chapters through. This time the fighting would begin in the core space of mankind, with the very first shots being on Terra itself, jailing the Imperial Palace within its own walls and then spread outwards as the signal was given. A command to rise up and cast down the cowards and betrayers of the vision of the Diad, one aided increasingly by the dead and the monstrous things of that danced with them.
But like with the Horus Heresy, other powers would act against the Undead just as they did with Chaos, either intentionally or not aiding the loyalists and forcing Atraya to battle on too many fronts. Furthermore, Guilliman's faction had suspected the would-be coup of the Atrayans, and had made their own plans to avoid the mistakes of Horus' war. Eventually, not even the great numbers of the mortificers could hold, nor her supporting legions and armies, gradually pushing back to Atraya's own territory to cast down the Queen of Ash's strongholds and forced her to flee herself; right into the waiting hands of the Undying King who would anoint these Primarchs as his own Mortarchs.
The Twice betrayed Imperium hardened its heart, its Primarchs gradually disappearing for one reason or another leaving their work unfinished with a now paranoid Senatorum Imperialis and Parliament of High Lords. Though it would take other conflicts to fully end the Diad's Carolingian dream and birth the feudal corpse state the Imperium is now, two deadly blows had already been dealt, and the wars of death would haunt the dreams of the Imperium and the universe as a whole for centuries. But the Undead are far more than another set of traitor imperials, indeed many of the unloving hosts of even Nagash may contain few or even no imperials or even former humans at all.
Though each Mordei has their own thesis on the matter, in Nagash all are one, and Nagash is in all. He still maintained the mindset of a Nehekharan Phaeron, a Bronze Age King of Kings who ruled absolutely from the palace and considered all who were his subjects as his possessions. Older, more primordial than such definitions of Fascism, Liberalism, Socialism, Reactionarism, Revolutionarism or other political quibbles, he was quite simply God to his followers. The almighty, the all providing, the all knowing, both the wrathful and the all-knowing, whose Mortarchs and Lesser Mordei served at his court and whose aspects governed everything from the peace of a comfortable demise to the wrath of the slighted gods.
Some would find irony then, that the Imperial Creed would take some influence from Nagash, inspired by what he could find of the Nagashite creed from ancient ruins as Lorgar was. But the forces of the dead have been far from restful. Great wars, unholy acts and rituals, conflict with all those who would not bow and seeking to twist and bend everything to the whims of their chosen Mordei; the Dead have been nothing if not restless. The Dark Omens of the undying darkened countless stars, and now do so once again as the Mortarch of omens Ahkenaten goes to war once again, and even the mordei opposed to Nagash cannot help but contribute to the malign portent of the latest schemes of the undying to conquer the living once and for all.
...
The Imperial Response
Against them, the Imperium deploys the Ordo Thanatos, the Death Hunters, who keep the long vigil against one of the Imperium's most persistent and deadly foes. Slayers of Vampires, Liches, Phantoms, purgers of Necromancers and dark magicians, eternally at their wits end trying to keep a watch on an immortality obsessed nobility that cannot seem to stop reading excerpts of the accursed books of undeath or contacting the midnight aristocracy, and always on the look out for threats to the rest of the souls of the Imperium's dead.
But they have long been struggling to keep their heads above water and avoid falling past the precipice as every flaw and imperfection in the Keep allows Nagash to take more and more souls and pull at the Grand Imperial Vortex of Magic. The Silver Keep requires maintenance that almost none alive can guess at the procedures of. And while other Ordos might have comfort in Throne, Keep, and Cog keeping their souls, stealing the right to the Keep's afterlife is something that the Undead specialise in, with the price of failure very often being forcibly turned into the very thing they seek to destroy after being slain. As such, the Ordo Thanatos is an order with often extreme coping mechanisms, faced as they are with mankind's primordial fear of death.
Its chamber militants are as follows; the White Warden Space Marines founded at the order of the Empress Erda, the Order of Hallowed Rest of the Adepta Peregrinas[2], and the Black Watch Inquisitorial Army Group of the Tempestus Scions. Each dedicating their life to training how to fight and combat the restless dead and the monsters in the warp behind them. They are people who have conquered fear yet have also, more than most militants; learned to value their lives, for death against the Undead is a step to joining the enemy as one of their corpse things, a slave for eternity, tormented by the immiserating sensation of being trapped in a dhar poisoned body that is the slave-thing of a cruel error state in existence; for the Undead fundamentally are walking violations of the concepts of life and the laws of reality.
The White Wardens are made solely out of those who have conquered death and the fear of it as aspirants, and are made entirely out of Wizards; with the radiant wind of Hysh and gentle Ghyran being a particular favourite to develop for their effectiveness against the undead and the psychopomps, with the dispatch of the Wardens often being the last hope of regions suffering from severe upswellings of the power of the Mordei before Exterminatus is called to lay everything to waste. The White Wardens also extensively research the winds of magic, seeking to master them as a resource and often dabble in what could be considered sorcery alongside their traditional wizardry, especially to create enchanted gear with which to do battle against foes who often shrug off non-magical damage.
The Order of Hallowed Rest is marked by its surprising sentimentality from thousands of years of comforting the grieving and egalitarian outlook. Death is the great equaliser, and the possessions of the material world mean nothing in the hallowed demesne of Throne, Keep, and Cog, and it matters not if one is a pauper or a lord; the Undead will come for you to defile you all the same. Specialising in laying the dead to rest and exploiting the weakness of most of their foul kind to displays of faith, they also use their Order Famulous connections to keep tabs on the upper crust of Imperial society's very often dangerous obsession with life everlasting, with the depressing regularity of having to deal with the antics of noble houses, trader lords, and the navis nobilite leading to a general view of the well-to-do of the Imperium as scum.
The Black Watch might at first be mistaken for perhaps the least of these three, being closer to normal, albeit still augmented men rather than having the benefit of ceramite, plasteel, and adamantium armour, magic, reality distorting faith, or enhancements of the degree of the order of Hallowed Rest; nevermind the White Wardens. However the Black Watch has knowledge and gumption, as well as like all Chamber Militant Tempestus Scions; a deep seated obsession with preparing all the needed weapons to win swiftly well before ever getting stuck in. Due to the often overwhelming numbers of the dead, the Black Watch also tends to come prepared with weapons that need little in the way of ammo and with plentiful stocks, and particularly train in decapitation strikes with the knowledge that often taking out enough Necromancers can stop things from getting out of control.
...
[1] Space Khuresh
[2] Just as how there are Male and Female Astartes, there are also male and female SoBs; so they were renamed the Peregrinas.
[x]: Accept the Duel. If defeated, forces will suffer morale penalties and wounded siblings will have to retire from the ongoing combat to recover. If victorious, the Khornate morale will be shattered, allowing for major advantages in combat combined with your own morale bonus and experience will be gained to further evolve the cultivation of the Dragon Siblings and their retinues.
[x] Plan Clean-Up
--[x] Space: Continue hunt down the splinters of the enemy fleethorde. Form hunter-killer groups around your Jade Quilin class superdreadnoughts and send them to slaughter those commanders identified by your diviners (see below). Meanwhile, use your main battlegroup to engage the more numerous splinters. Detach carrier groups anchored by battleships to mop up any particularly isolated enemy groups. Continue our landings further, pouring in troops and equipment. Limited orbital bombardment of enemy positions can be done, but not so indiscriminate as to cause mass slaughters that the Khornates could use or cause PR issues later.
--[x] High Magic:
---[x] Use divination to identify ships and leaders around whom the Khornate fleet could rally and prioritize their destruction.
---[x] Use telepathy to establish communication and coordinate with anti-Chaos holdouts and our landing troops
---[x] Use the Lore of Shadows to further the (hopefully) crushing effects of the duel, whispering despair into the thoughts of our enemies
--[x] Planetary: Fortify our current locations and continue sending artillery barrages towards the enemy, trying to reduce their advantage in sheer numbers. Use the barrages to suppress enemy opposition to our heavy units like our war machines, use them to shock and penetrate enemy lines to form them into pockets we can defeat in detail. Use the Ogors for mop-up operations, layering buffs onto them with buffs from Metal, Beast and Life Lores to make them destructive as possible, particularly against enemy Super and Elite infantry.
Anyone else got ideas? I feel like I struggled with a planetary/surface strategy.
The mighty Superdreadnoughts of the Celestial Fleet were swift, able to move more quickly than the Juggernauts and Leviathans and more numerous than either. Their engines burned with technosorcery that was rare in the Imperium, fallen as it was, accelerating at a pace that would belie their size and letting ventral mini-thrusters alter their direction to move prow on to the remaining vessels over the void of countless worlds. Across this piece of the Vay-Gir galaxy carriers would cripple the craft that sought to flee, tractor beams reeling in ships that had failed to make enough distance that had yet to be pummeled into submission.
To the Tian'Chaoren, the forces of Chaos were not traitors the way that they were to the Imperium, they were simple barbarians. People who had allowed their minds and souls to be lost to the antisocial, self-destructive, and ultimately selfish hyper-individualism of the worst the id had to offer. To give up on community, on society, on brotherhood, and to simply embrace the absolute extremes of emotion until inevitably killed by it. To say there was no hatred at all would be folly, humans are not beings of a hive mind, nor are they eidolons; and much the same applies for the other cultures within the Celestial Realm. But there was more pity and contempt than anything else.
They were lost, and it was a pity that they were lost, to make them suffer more would be pointless. A simple, quick elimination, clinical, cold, methodical. The hornate fleets were already broken, blaming each other for failures and mistakes, tearing into each other as bonds forged solely by individual power, personal respect, and fear started to break down and the blood of Khorne's followers were as good as anyone else's. Cutting down their leaders to break their morale and their organisation was done to encourage this, whether by duel, by battle, or by assassination.
As a deeply individualistic force, to destroy the leaders of chaos' warbands would lead to nowhere to go besides fighting over who would replace them. Blood would be shed, as was always done, even in the face of oblivion they would first deal with the enemy they could reach to determine who would get to decide the response. And the Lord of Skulls would frown on those who would deal with their anger, their resentment, their frustrations without bloodshed. And when one had already given so much to the great god, to back out was unthinkable for many of those who had done a lifetime of horror for power and the promise of immortality.
But this was the thrashing of dying beasts. A greater warband would have had something up its sleeve, something to push back and claw a counterattack. But this was a warband not even lead by a true devotee of Khorne. Though Orikan's artifice had grown the resources available to this new timeline, the warp did not work on easily quantised formula. As the scope of civilisation grew, the amount of effort needed to gain the attentions of the dark gods also grew; often outpacing the growing means to even carry such things out with.
They had routed, and their return fire only grew weaker and weaker until there was nothing left save minor reavers who would be systematically hunted down one by one over the coming years. Oaths were broken, individual pacts invoked to save individual lives or bands, allegiances dissolved, and it was soon every one of Gartak's underlings for themselves. The very typical result of a sufficiently severe defeat for a chaos horde.
...
[x]: Scene Request: Imperial civilian rescued from chaos cultists by terrifying flying snakes.
Meredith Aytara hid as she learned to do ever since the Khornates came. Thirteen solar year old lungs breathed hard, hardened by the exercise brought on from having to learn to survive and hide. They came for the fighters first, but it didn't take long for them, the apostates, to attack the people. Hacking, slashing, crushing, burning.
Blood, so much blood.
Her mother went to war, and never came back. Her father, a slender and even petite man who worked at his office to provide; was cut apart by a thing in hellish armour and a screaming axe, simply for looking too "unmanly" for the Technobarbarian. Her older brother and sister burned to ash when their patrols swept their hangout with a flamer. Now they were here, hiding in what used to be the basement of an apartment block.
"Are we safe?" Alicia said, her white hair framing her face as she shook, huddling a split-lasgun, she was older than Meredith was, but smaller.
"I dunno...I can't hear them anymore." Jaken said, the young boy, maybe her age, a bit taller than she was, holding another lasgun, a poorly fitting helmet hiding his mop of blonde hair. She tried her best to cut his hair for him, but she was no stylist.
"Throne, Keep, and Cog kids, keep it down." Sergeant Tordus was one of the few adults in this resistance cell. The Khornates wanted a future population to reap and harvest, so they had some minor restraint with the children. Tordus though, he was a cunning man, a Guardsman, a figure of legend in this little neighbourhood, good enough with a knife to keep himself clean-shaven despite their circumstances. His uniform was carapace armour, powered and giving him strength beyond a normal man, but it couldn't disguise how tired his eyes looked.
"Sorry sir..." She said, backing away while the Sergeant took a look out the window, breathing quietly while he slipped on the visor of his helmet to use its zoom function.
"More khornates...headin' down Sebastian street. Foot sloggers." He said, looking back to the table where another one of the adults waited. Trishia, lieutenant.
"That's heading out this level of the hive. What are they up to?" She asked, narrowing her eyes as she exhaled. A grenadier like him, she was also a canny survivor, else she'd be dead like most of the PDF. For now, she may as well have been mom, and Tordus dad.
"Perhaps they are running from the efforts of our most holy resist-" PDF Commissar Bernace said. She used to admire him, until she got to know him, always trying to be strict even after the end of the world, an asshole through and through.
"Shut it Force-boy nobody gives a kark." Trishia said, glaring at the commissar with a scornful look, her purple eyes speaking of originating from the Cadian Province. The fact that she could talk like that to a PDF Commissar...
"Perhaps your time gallivanting between worlds has rendered the things between your ears full of heresy, because just because you're of the Militarum doesn't give you the right to talk th-"
"Yeah it does. We don't have to give a grox's arse about a single thing out of your mouth. So shut it unless you have something useful to say." She shot back, discomfort making Meredith look back out the peep hole.
No sign of the Khornates anymore. Not on the street, but she looked up and could see the signs of guns glinting from windows, they were hoping to set up an ambush.
She couldn't hear them from this distance, she wondered what they were saying. What did daemoniacs who were truly afraid say among themselves? What was it like for these monsters to be afraid?
"They're setting up an ambush, Alicia write that down." Tordus said, talking softly to the scared girl so that she could get ahold of her nerves and start writing on the dataslate, exhaling quietly.
"Why don't you grow some backbone and discipline her? A fifteen year old is more than old enough to get stern with!" The commissar protested.
What an idiot! Couldn't he see that she was barely holding it together as is? She wanted to say something, to curse and swear at him as she saw Alicia flinch and gulp, trying to shrink as if it would hide her from his eyes. But she was scared of him, he could kill her for talking out of turn, he killed before, and she could still hear the roar of his bolt pistol in her minds' ears.
"Oi, you haven't got kids, you don't get anywhere by yelling and shouting." Tordus replied, patting at Alicia's head and nodding at her.
The flashes of lasguns and the muzzle flash of auto and stub guns filled her peripheral vision, getting her to spin around.
"They're shooting at something." Meredith said, standing on a box to get a better view, wanting to see the Khornates die.
She hated them, but she feared them. She clutched a lasgun, too big for her, but as far as she was concerned, only a gun could help her. Help her friends, who tried to survive, try to take what they needed to live; not from others, as the invaders cut the rations and told people to start killing each other for food if they wanted to eat more than starvation provisions. She wouldn't, she didn't, she took from them instead.
But now they were afraid. Their numbers thinning to go to war, then increasing when they sought to defend. Then new people came, purging the men in red. They killed them, made the saner ones surrender, but those who chose to fight to the death were given exactly that. She had seen them start to advance into their resistance group's territory, but it was now that she was seeing them advance into her area.
"Ah kark, we got the heathens." He said as grenades were spat into windows, loud rumbling detonations tossing ash and dust out of shattered buildings.
"What's wrong with that if they're killing daemoniacs?" Jaken asked.
"I dunno anything about the dragon-karkers 'sides what the primer tells me, and the primer's a load of shite." Tordus said, getting a laugh out of Trishia and outrage from Bernace.
Meredith though was...fascinated by the sight of dead Khornates, things she hated and feared slain, made mortal and defeated, watching their remains hit the ground and be torched away by soldiers who seemed human, alien, and mechanical.
It was loud, it smelled of blood and fire and the pig stink of burnt flesh. But the cries of the apostates, the heathens had grown quieter and quieter while the new army's movements grew louder and louder. They spoke in a language she couldn't understand, among themselves and with xenos and abhumans.
Weren't Xenos to never be trusted with guns, she thought? That was what the priest said, before one of the metal men ripped his head and spine out for talking about Throne and Keep to him.
It was certainly the Commissar's opinion as he loudly opined that "not treating them as our enemy is tantamount to treason against our very Imperium!" Shouting loudly to the horror of others hiding in the room.
"Shut up!" Meredith shout-whispered, finally finding the courage to talk without being spoken to first, forcing the noise through her teeth as the Commissar turned to look at her with a face changing colour to a beet red, face twitching.
"You dare back-talk me, a child?" He asked.
"Shut up! All you do is whine and complain! When have you done anything? I've killed more heretics than you, you fucking coward! You've got a chainsword and a bolt pistol and you just sit here making snippy little remarks at everyone." She snapped at him, seething through her teeth, red hair flowing with the movements of her head.
"I am going to ki-" He started, hand reaching to his waist before Trishia throat punched him in the time it took for her to blink, making him wheeze and choke before she grabbed the pistol and chainsword out of their scabbards.
"Listen here you jumped up piece of shite, these kids are in the Guard now, you are in the Guard now. You do what I say and drop your parade ground tough guy act before I use you for bait." She said, hoisting him up with a snarl on her face.
The room was suspension bridge cable tense, everyone was silent.
But the big one, an armoured humanoid monster with the lower body of a metal plated reptile came, tearing his way out of the building he had holed himself up in, exuding lightning and violence, and all was noise; louder than their argument, louder than the explosions, louder than tanks and powered armour.
The apocalypse, Ragnarok, the end of days, whatever you wanted to call it, Gartak was all of those things to Meredith, and the bravery she showed in the face of the commissar faded as she looked around. Someone as big as the shaggoth with his honour guard could cause this place to collapse by little more than collateral damage from swinging his weapons.
"Get out!" She shouted, jerking Jaken back by the ill-fitting flak armour he wore to pull him up the stairs.
"Meredith!" Tordus shouted, leaping after her as the PDF Commissar was dropped.
"We'll finish our chat later." She growled before joining Meredith, sensing that the building was starting to collapse, yelling at other resistance fighters and civilians sheltering with them to get a move on.
He could withstand the attentions of tanks and aircraft, and Meredith struggled to imagine how one could take down someone so huge without a knight, or perhaps the angels of death. Could these newcomers deal with him?
But they were shooting at the big centaur men. Some weapons she recognised, the intense actinic flare of the continual lasers of meltaguns, fusion ejecta, plasma weapons and bolters; others she didn't.
They fell back, moving out of the way of lightning called from the sky, forcing herself to scramble, rolling out of the way of thunder from a cloudless sky.
Jaken rolled with her, grunting as he snapped the face shield of the helmet over his head to keep out the dust while she did the same. The electro-servos of the flak suit moved with her, nothing compared to carapace or ceramite armour, but enough to make sure she wasn't slowed down, far from it honestly.
But the strange men with dragon banners had fallen back, letting Gartak smash through another set of buildings like a monster in a movie, roaring as he locked gazes with...
"...Izzat a bloody flying snake?" Jaken said for her, a blue and a red serpent coiling around a defiled church, but closer...she saw a more human red shape turn his "finned" skull helmeted head towards them and felt her body seize up.
"Tian long, Celestial Dragon." Alicia breathed, looking at them briefly before instinct forced Meredith to yank her down to dodge the stitching rounds of a Chaos Warriors' sawn off heavy stubber.
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" The Chaos Warrior roared, loud enough to be heard over the din, flinching somewhat after being hit by a number of hellgun blasts from Tordus.
"Yeah you want more of that you stupid brute?" He shouted, his Kasrkin facemask now concealing his face, partially reflected ruby light casting red tint over his armour.
"Brave words for a civilised weakling." The Chaos warrior scoffed as he dropped down, hitting the ground with heavy boots. He wasn't Astartes big, from what she remembered of when the Space Marines visited to screen the populace for marine compatibility and crushed her heart by telling her that, seven years ago; she was too young, but he was huge, and radiated evil of a degree that she never figured anything humanoid ever could, steam curling from his grille.
There were others too, casually dropping down into the field of battle, moving towards prey like wolves, growling with sounds that sounded more like a reptilian beast made of metal at the menagerie than anything human.
Cultists running through, moving somewhere else were met with irritation and the swinging of chainblades and axes to hack through them.
Blood, so much blood.
Limbs moving faster than her eye could track, poorly or even unarmouerd flesh yielding like tissue paper, wet, grotesque gurgling sounds and oh by the Throne and Keep the crunching of bone made her sick to her stomach.
It was enough for other resistance fighters to emerge, including a platoon of PDF reservist troopers who refused to listen when Trishia shouted at them to get back, thinking the Chaos warriors were distracted.
There were forty PDF troopers one minute, there were forty corpses the next. Astartes would have done it even faster, but servoless flak armoured troops trying to stab bayonets, shoot autoguns, and swing entrenching tools at Chaos warriors was a futile task all the same. Even crazy Jenkins, famous for bringing down thirty cultists in melee in a single engagement, was split in twain like he was rotten firewood.
She wouldn't be passive, no, she took aim and locked on what was the most vulnerable target on the lead Chaos Warrior while he shot the source of a pair of krak grenade launcher rounds, raking the mound of what used to be their hideout, many of the autogun bursts ringing against his defences cutting short as their wielders died.
"Go to Hell." She snarled, recognition flashing on her face, he was there, the markings on his helmet, he had killed her dad, just for the way he looked. "For my father."
The lasgun shot and struck the Chaos Warrior's eye when she saw the aura of flame around him die down. He had been arrogant, not dodging or taking cover, so contemptuous he was of PDF remnants, but from the way that she made him jerk his head, she must have hurt him...if he even felt pain.
One warrior with a flamer approached, torching the mound and reducing men and women to ash before turning to their cover until the squad leader push his flamer away.
"I don't forget voices...you cried for him didn't you?" He said, fire and smoke curling out of the high-charge lasgun shot's impact to the eye.
"I am Meredith Aytara, and yes, you killed my father, Urian Aytara. And you're going screaming into the pit for that. On my life." She declared. She wanted him to know, she wanted him to hear her name as he fell into the deepest pits of Hell.
"If he deserved to live he wouldn't have been so easy to kill, but rejoice. Your skull will be worthy to offer to Khorne, so says I, Argak Argalssen." He declared, locking his stubber to a mag-attachment on his back and pulling out a chainsword in his other hand. Chaos blessed muscles and servo-fibers moving and pushing his huge body to run towards them.
Tordus and Trishia shot, Alicia and Jaken shot, she shot, he kept coming; the world moving in slow motion, devouring distance between each blink, a cheetah would have been lucky to have a third his speed.
Gatrak was sent flying through a building, rolling down the street and flung Argak off his feet like a bowling pin, tossing him into the air while he let out a bellow of rage and frustration, the colossal Shaggoth letting out monstrous roars while the blue dragon loped through the streets, shielded armour absorbing impacts like rain against steel.
Tumbling on the ground, Argak pulled himself up and raised his chain axe before the Red dragon snaked his head into the street before chomping his helmeted head's teeth around the Chaos Warrior and obliterated his form in power fields and magic, letting precise tongues of vermillion flame annihilate the others.
How did something so big move so fast?
There was a quiver in her knees, a feeling of supernatural awe that sunk in her body and gave her an overpowering desire to not look the creatures in the eyes unless permitted. Like what she felt with the space marines but stronger.
The Commissar made a sound like a startled dog, frightened, scared. A Shaggoth dragged into the air by one of the sinuous Longs was squeezed until something crunched with a disgusting sound like a wetter version of boulders breaking.
Gartak rose, preparing to swing his axe, but the blue dragon intercepted it with her body, preventing it from crashing down on their cover before she engulfed him in ice, pushing him away with a shrug of armoured muscle.
For the briefest moment, she locked gazes with Meredith, who choked at the attentions of a thing like a god. But the god had other business, moving away with great speed.
"Are we...safe?" Jaken asked, a nod coming from her. A true, earnest nod.
...
The battle had begun with roars and collisions, smashing scale and metal into each other after loosing their weapons mounted on their bodies into one another. Plasma, missiles, cryobeams, and electromagnetic beams raking into the shaggoths, autoweapons, boltguns, grenades, and lasers jabbing back at the dragons, dragon's breath and Shaggoth lightning bouncing back and forth.
Xinyi slithered, twisting out of the way of the blows of the nearest Shaggoth and digging claws into shields she punched into a few times until they collapsed, chomping into a throat that a blade she conjured from the space she kept her extra mass within had slashed at to create weakness with a few repeated blows. Then she tore off the head outright, crunching bone and freezing the wound to shut off the blood as she grabbed at the head, shaking it like a dog's toy and crushing it once it had frozen entirely.
Xiang had tackled Gartak, smashing into him with force that seemed at odds with his serpentine body, throwing him off his feet and shoving him through rockcrete buildings like children's blocks. Lightning flashed around him, mingling with his flame but starting to choke down as he felt Gatrak's body and surged biomantic power into it.
"You are weak and afraid. A coward, a liar, a disgrace!" Xiang lectured with a voice that once, smooth like wine and youthful like a teen music group's star but was now crackling like an inferno.
"A lifespan without limit, and spent on what?" He snarled as he sidewinded out of the way of an axe swing, tail swatting aside several of the guards trying to grab at him while his own guards attacked at the Dragon Ogor's praetorians.
"I have power! I have glory! I command legions by my strength, by my might! You're just a bureaucrat!" He snapped back, grabbing at the dragon's neck before he could bite at his neck until Xinyi clouded his eyes with the power of Yang and cast him into darkness, tackling him afterwards and rolling him through a building and down a street.
Chaos warriors were swept away, a squad annihilated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a battle of giant monsters. The celestial dragons were masters of shapeshifting, and Xinyi's shape changed once again, growing wings, a more pronounced body, more like the Space Dragons that the Aeldari associated with so often.
A wing's foreclaws were used like fists, clad in powered armour and crackling with energy, slamming the Shaggoth while her breath froze and shattered another Shaggoth, claws crackling with potent fields and tearing into weaknesses in battered armour. Every blow drawing fresh pain from the shaggoth before Xiang arrived.
The young dragon lord was transformed back into human form with a closed helm, floating to bypass the Shaggoth's guard and then stabbing a shimmering spear into the wound. Wyrms of fire twirled around his polearm and bit into the wound, chewing their way inside to let some sort of power run through it, burning like a thousand suns as heat tore its way out of every injury.
Gartak grew limp as his body charred and then became as less than char, crackling to pieces and slammed into oblivion by Xinyi. The Dragonness raising him into the air and then slamming him again and again, like a ragdoll or a potatoes sack until his bones shattered.
With his struggles all but finished, she raised him further into the air, Xiang shifting back into Dragon form to tear off his head, just before she smashed his form into the ground one last time, leaving nothing but ruin and dust. As the storm that followed Gartak withered away from his death, they announced the return of the sun's light by letting out a roar of triumph into the new dawn
Xiang and Xinyi vs Gartak
5d6+28 (Advantages) +18 (items) vs 5d6+8 (Items)
18+46=64 vs 12+8=20, Xiang and Xinyi win, Gartak loses 4 wounds, 8/12 wounds
21+46=67 vs 28+8=36. Xiang and Xinyi win, Gartak loses 5 wounds, 3/12 wounds
9+46=55 vs 7+8=15. Xiang and Xinyi win, Gartak loses 4 wounds, -1/12 wounds, Gartak dies!
With the Shaggoth lord broken, the morale of the Khornate forces would only downspiral. A false chaos lord he may be, but the energies of chaos were indeed wrapped around him, and severing his cord caused a hole in the net that weakened it as a whole. Not as dramatic as the death of the primary warboss, but the forces of Chaos present all seemed to just know that their leader had died.
Xiang, would remove his helmet, feeling the fury of battle ebb across the armada he had tapped into and tasting the imperial air. It was fouled, polluted and disgusting. Even before the Khornates had come, they had ruined this world's air with their wasteful but slightly cheaper industrial technology. How was it that these people came to encompass the greatest portion of humanity, he wondered as he felt his sister petting at his hair after letting her own helmet disappear away, crinkling her nose.
"Blech." She managed, getting a raucous laugh out of Xiang.
But even while laughing, the dragons could easily sense the approaching Imperials, his red eyes turning to look at the two cadians, three local children, and someone he recognised to be a commissar of the local PDF.
Xinyi raised a hand, bidding him to let her talk as she approached, letting the guards fan out to deal with any forces that might remain in the immediate area, to appear less threatening while she knelt slowly down to the human girl's level, the icy patterns in the irises of her eyes glowing a bit less brightly now.
Her Low Gothic was flawless, spoken as naturally as her Tian'Chaowen.
"Hello, brave one." She said, not holding out a hand to touch, while Xiang looked at the Commissar who seemed about ready to let out some sort of outburst.
"Why did you save us if you're a xeno?" She asked, a glare from the Commissar fixing on her. The cadians had weapons pointed at her, not fully trusting her, but the Commissar concerned her more.
"The path of harmony is open to all who wish to walk it. But Chaos has no place within it. Their leader was here, so we came to kill him." She said, respecting her intelligence enough to not talk down to her as if she was a young child. She was a teenager, she had lived, she could understand big words.
"So what? You gonna leave and let us all get back to it?" The male of the cadians said.
"We are here to stay. But you are not unwelcome here. We would rather you stay actually." Xinyi said.
"If we don't fight you here and now, when the crusade comes, we'll be traitors." The woman said, her plasma pistol pointed at Xinyi who seemed entirely unphased.
"You will be. And you can try to, but I will defend myself." Xinyi replied.
The aura of awe that they radiated made them quiver in the knees, made them drop their weapons when she intensified it a bit more. No matter the form she took, she was a Xian and a Dragon, her presence could make many people prostrate themselves, run away, freeze up, or seek to hide; related to the Astartes phenomenon of transhuman dread but more intense, the Dragon's Presence.
However, she would not focus in such a way on the Commissar, seeing a chance to show something.
"Enough of this heresy! Blasphemers, apostates all of you!" He said, levelling his bolt pistol against Meredith's head and squeezed the trigger, but the shell never left. Indeed the gun broke, disassembling in his hand. Enraged, he grabbed his chainsword and revved it before Xiang crushed the chainsword with a thought.
"The keystone of the imperium is the gravestone of martyrs! I will not yield!" he shouted, reaching for his grenades and running a thread through the pins. The grenades also disassembled, falling apart while actual warheads were dispersed into the air before Xiang stepped in and slapped him hard enough to send him buckling into the ground, cap flying into the distance.
"Enough of that." Xiang said as nearby blaze troopers grabbed the Commissar off the ground, pulling him away.
"You can live your life in fear and spend your time in this life waging eternal warfare against us if you want. But if you wish, I can show you a way to rule your fear. It will require hard work, and discipline, but if you truly desire it, we are ready to teach." She offered, looking at the remaining five and offering a hand.
...
But the war council had determined that there was a need to take item of those who were still holding out. Not all of them of course, would so neatly fold into the realm; remaining petty Greenskin Empires left behind by the original Imperial Conquest or the Khornate invasion, or were feral Greenskins who grew to prominence as the means to contain them broke down. As was typical in these cases, the response was demobilising the Orks by taking out anything capable of leaving planet and then touching down and burning everything. Greenskins made war because the Waaagh was written into their DNA, their souls, and the very idea of their being; though some could be bribed as mercenaries or a lesser enemy for a time, letting them fester was undesireable.
Ogors would be useful for this in particular, perfectly happy to touch down and replace the Waaagh ecology with their own, using their as of yet unknown means to encourage more tameable forms of the greenskin ecology after eating all the greenskins; likely a product of their shared origin and their usage of the gnoblars. There were the usual debates as to whether there was a better solution to the Orkoid problem, but so far the Realm had a long way to go before it could even think of the sort of understanding the Xian had in the war in heaven.
Imperial remnants were, as one could expect of the Imperium, divided amongst itself. The Imperium on paper, was a centralised polity that gave the Adeptus Terra vast and widespread powers. In practice, the left hand knew not what the right hand did and authority was devolved in the tiers of administrative governance[1] with a byzantine corpus of legal exceptions and contradictions that in essence; there was no unified culture, no singular nation, and in practise Feudalism of a degree to make it looser than the old Confederation[2].
Every imperial subdivision was akin to a nation unto itself, with different cultures, different ideas of what the Imperial Creed entailed, different traditions of warfare. The few precious shared institutions and obligations were what really made the Imperium even exist as a singular polity at all. Some would have to be violently put down and cracked down on, with the Crimson Guard dispatched to ensure proper cultural transformation and the elimination of stubborn officials. It was not nice, or pleasant work, it was a sharp, directed form of terror and organisational disruption, directed and carefully managed cruelty, but eventually the shooting stopped and transformation could begin.
But there were as many who simply accepted the coming of the people of Tian'Chao and were willing, some even eager to accept a new guardian and a new suzerain than the Imperium that had left them to the tender mercies of insane khornates who danced in their blood. Many civilians, most even, were just looking for the terror to be over. To get back to their lives without fear of death, and to know peace. Humans, like most sophonts, did not wish for eternal warfare in their hearts of hearts, only a deeply dangerous form of madness could let a human being thrive in such a heightened state of stress and fear for an eternity, they were not like the Greenskins nor the Tyranids; they were people.
However, more pleasantly, the invocation of Xinyi's name would draw the attentions of the Eldar of the Confederation of Kushani Kiithid; comprising of many craftworlds spread across Vay-Gir. The Aeldari were fond of Zhi Xinyi, remembering her work to help raid Croneworlds for spirit stones and fortify space near aligned maiden worlds against possible problems. It was not done entirely altruistically; minimising the avenues of conflict with those Aeldari who would deign to bother with diplomacy was logical, and having friends among them would help with ensuring that there would be some among them speak on the Realm's behalf.
Furthermore, while the Asuryani were not as deeply tied to Dragons as the Asur of the reborn Phoenix Kingdom, or the Lumineth; the Aeldari were the first of the old ones' children to come to the dragons with an attempt to end that leg of the conflict in the ancient war in heaven; and the support of dragons had helped dissidents flee from the Witch Kingdom in the ancient past. The Tian Longs as they called themselves; the serpentine celestial dragons; could engage with the Eldar without much of the hang-ups of most human polities, as could the Fenghuan.
Thus, dragons and fenghuan would be sent to begin the negotiations, re-establishing ties. There was work to be done.
30: The Tarandar Territory, a former Territory of the Imperium of Man conquered by Waaagh! Muchkill and is currently being contested by the Aeldari of Kushan Kiithid to keep the Greenskins disorganised and assist the Exodite Maiden systems within.
29: The Shardarat Territory, a very standard territory of the Imperium of man, currently being invaded by Khornates under the command of the Chaos Warlord Kysartokul.
41: Delen-Man Territory, a territory of the T'Au Spheres, currently preparing an invasion force with an unknown target.
35: Shyalarad no man's land: virgin territory kept as a buffer between the T'Au and the Imperium to prevent sharing borders when the Leagues of Votann and Dawi both proved uninterested in holding space there.
42: Hae Tan Territory, Virgin Space, in response to the Viridian Stars Chapter Master's raid on the crown world of Phaerakh Un'Dakala destroying a precious memento of her past life during a campaign in the Mivan Galaxy, the Necrons of the Irtanak Dynasty wiped out all imperial life in the territory of his homeworld 50 years ago and destroyed the entire sector he called home outright, then left as soon as the purge was complete. Imperial recolonisation fleets were diverted to provide labour to the Virtana galaxy and missives requesting another are still pending approval by Galaxia level government.
47: Moradash Territory, these Halo Stars are being contested by Iron Warriors of the 9718th Grand Host and a population of Cythor Fiends, servants of the Strangers and a component of the Army of the Starless Night
24: Iladrani Territory, Former Imperial Territory, overrun by the Skaven. The lot of those who lived in the territory has gone from Feudal privation to brutal slavery as the Skaven work the humans to death.
22: Ortanak Territory; Held by the Votann League of Vorgan; dedicated to the establishment of profit and trade, doing business as they see fit as their holds and kindred spread through their designated part of the core.
28: Katanak Territory; Held by the Dawi Kingdom of Uzkazar, who has been here since the end of the war in heaven, long before the Umgi ever arrived.
23: Undead Warp Rift, the Jaws of Death; a realm of the undead and nightmarish Gehenirot, the dead animating nearby in growing numbers as the efforts to contain the creatures of the Mordei start to break down.
34: Zhardan No Man's Space: Virgin territory kept as a buffer between the T'Au and the Imperium to prevent sharing borders when the Leagues of Votann and Dawi both proved uninterested in holding space there.
40: T'Au territory of Kal'Dor'Ae, a very standard territory of the T'Au spheres.
46: Vortex of Woe: Chaos Warp Rift. This Warp Rift is overrun by the forces of the dark gods, with most of the stars of this territory either inundated by the warp, or are eternally on the watch against the forces of Chaos.
45: Quetzitzanl Tlahtanoyan Territory of Xokitalan, a territory of the enigmatic lizardmen. Full of ancient megastructures and restlessly preparing its legions for some purpose.
[1]: The ranks of administration for the Imperium in GoD are as follows in descending order, with a "super" and a "sub" version of each grade.
Domain
Civitate
Electoratus
Proconsulate
Commonwealth
Publicae
District
State
Magistrate
Provincia
Palatinate
Prefecture
Galaxia
Segmentum
Region
Themata
Territory
Tribus
Department
Sector
System
Planet
Colonia
Politae
Urbs (City)
[2]The High Lords of Terra as a rule are extremely distant and their orders are given in broad, largely abstract terms with it being extremely rare for them to notice a particular world or galaxy. Its to emphasise their feeling of impassable distance and hammer home how the Imperium may be the largest human polity for now, but its a hollow society that has long ceased to function as a modern state but rather a loose feudal conglomeration largely bound entirely by the fact that they pay taxes to the Adeptus Terra, the Adeptus Mechanicus operates within them, and have the Imperial Church as the official and only legal (besides the Cult Mechanicus) religion.
While the Imperium is a lot larger than it was during the great crusade, its grown far more diffuse and thanks to massive crises like the Horus Heresy, the Atrayan Apostasy, the War of the Beast, the Beheading, the Shadow Aeterna, the Nova Terra Interregum, the Dark Omens, the Reign of Blood and so on so forth; the meme Holy Roman Empire would be a more unitary state.
The Age of Apostasy is generally regarded as the mortal blow to the attempts at even a confederal Imperium, with the Time of Troubles being the coup de gras as the result of the Time of Troubles was the decree of sovereignty which formally recognised the right of Imperial subdivisions to conduct diplomacy of their own accord so long as it does not contradict the Adeptus Terra following the capture of the capital by the sovereignists.
Even more recently, in response to the Successor wars following the Macharian crusade in the 4th to 5th century of M41 which conquered more territory than any imperial crusade before or since; further concessions of sovereignty were given even in military affairs after one of Macharius' Diadochi, Lady Solar Loptra Varnsdottir; who decided to turn around and deal with the Adeptus Terra when they ordered her Proconsulate be rescinded; seized Via Lactea and Terra while the Astartes, Custodes, Psykana, Psionis, Peregrinas, and Mechanicus all declared neutrality.
And more recently than that, in response to the Badab war and other internal conflicts with renegade Astartes sparked by it as well as the Gravefall; the Astartes being needed to deal with renegade Astartes further undermined the authority of the Adeptus Terra to the Space Marines.
The bad decisions and concessions the Imperium kept on making to deal with the blowback from its perverse incentives; starting all the way back from the Great Crusade's offers of devolution and autonomy to quickly get polities of various size on the crusade's side in expediency's name; that in the short term keep its components happy but are the root cause of its decay. Increasing destandardisation, rising internal competition and friction, mounting corruption because graft is basically all that's left, sharpening self-contradiction and even conflicts between subdivisions, and the growing self-segregation of imperium-wide institutions not under the Adeptus Terra from the Imperium at large to try to establish self-reliance in an ever more dysfunctional entity so they can actually function.
The War Continues
