Herald of Misery part 4

Chapter 1:

Warsmith Czagra was aware of the loyalist marine boarding action on his Ark. He believed them to be the vanguard of a much larger assault. He was focused on directing the planetside invasion and left the loyalists' destruction to the forces left on the Ark and the Ark's horrors. However, when the movements of the loyalist force became less random and more directed to the point that they became a straight line, Czagra realized that the loyalist force was not a vanguard force. The loyalists were after something, a certain objective.  Were they assassins? Were they aware of Abaddon's plans and sought to foil them? Did they carry an apocalyptic weapon to the heart of the Ark? Czagara does not tolerate the unknown. Czagra sent thirteen hunting parties of the Bronzewrought, the elite of his own warband of Iron Warriors. They were led by the Iron Warrior champion Vurnok the Grey. The combined forces of these hunting forces held enough might to lay waste to armies and perhaps entire worlds.

The loyalists fought nonstop aboard Ark for sixteen hours, cutting a path to the heart of Ark through the lesser champion warbands and horrors of the Ark. Vurnok could not help but acknowledge the loyalists' cunning and tenacity to have made it this far, even as his hunting parties encircled and harrassed the loyalists toward the ambush kill box.

As Vurnok made his way to the target site, he saw a group of Iron Warriors retreating. Furious that one of his blocking parties was put to rout, he was about to order the fleeing marines to stand their ground when they were wiped out by melta fire. Their killers came into view—a squad of Blood Angels wielding heavy meltas. Vurnok and his terminators opened fire on the loyalists. One of the loyalists was struck by the bolter fire. His helmet was burst apart, and his chest was cratered. The rest of the Blood Angel squad withdrew to join the rest of their force in a fighting retreat.


The hunting parties blocked the loyalists' attempts at breaking left or right, and the path forward was blocked by a force field raised by Warpsmiths and techno-sorcerors. They were forced into a defensive stand. Even though the loyalists were bloodied, they refused to surrender, which pleased Vurnok.

Vurnok saw a techmarine furiously working on a console. Whatever the techmarine was doing, Vurnok knew he had to stop it. He opened fire at the techmarine, but his shots were blocked by one of the servitors shielding him. Before Vurnok could fire again, he was charged by bladeguard led by a Sanguinary priest. Vurnok's terminators moved to aid their commander. The traitor elite clashed against the loyalist elite.

Vurnok's daemon sword locked with the Priest's chainsword. Vurnok used his strength to throw the Priest off balance and open him up for fire from his combi-bolter. A bladeguard blocked the shots with his shield, saving the Priest. Vurnok responded by slicing open the bladeguard's faceplate with his sword. As the loyalist reeled, one of the Iron Warrior terminators tore his shield away and ran him through with a power talon. This enraged the Priest, who responded by smashing his chainsword into a rent in the terminator's armor. An eruption of gore burst from the rent, and the Terminator collapsed dead.

It was Vurnok's turn to be enraged at the loss of a comrade. He stabbed his daemon sword into the Priest's side and pulled it out to deliver a decapitating backswing. But the killing blow was blocked by a blackguard. Thwarted from killing the Priest again, Vurnok cursed and delivered a headbutt into the faceplate of the bladeguard. The press of the battle pushed Vurnok away from his opponent, allowing the bladeguard to carry the wounded Sanguinary priest to safety.

Vurnok glanced in the direction of the techmarine. The servitors were all destroyed, but now he was protected by squads of Blood Angels and Tome Keepers. They were preventing the Iron Warriors from getting to him. The Master of Executions' path to the techmarine was blocked by the swords of a Blood Angel lieutenant and Librarian.

As Vurnok charged with haste toward the Techmarine, another Librarian blocked his path and made a strange sigil gesture with his hand in Vurnok's direction. Vurnok found himself frozen in his place, trapped in his own mind. The blinding paralysis disappeared as soon as it manifested. Vurnok noticed that his surroundings changed. Checking his helm chrono, he realized, though it lasted mere moments in his mind, the loyalist psyker had frozen him for three minutes. It was akin to eternity in an ongoing battle.

The force field was shut down, and the loyalists escaped the trap. Vurnok men kept to his side as he was frozen. The rest of the hunting parties continued their pursuit of the loyalists. Examining the routes taken by the loyalists, Vurnok deduced that they split their forces into two paths to avoid being trapped again. He also deduced their objective. The loyalists were heading toward the Warp portal.

Vurnok told his men there would be consequences for this failure; if they wanted to avoid them, they must make haste after the loyalists. He ordered them to report to Czagra that the loyalists' target was the Warp portal and that they had powerful psykers with them.

Vurnok could not imagine any way that the loyalists could disrupt the Warp Portal, but if they somehow managed it, the energies of the portal might destroy the Ark. Vurnok's sense of uneasiness tempted him to say a prayer to the Dark Gods in spite of Czagra's disdain for god worship.

Vurnok stomped his boot into the chest of a dying loyalist scout and vowed to himself that he would make the loyalists bleed and thwart whatever they sought on the Ark.


Chapter 2:

Czagra's Balefleet crushed Lume IV's orbital defenses, allowing his forces to make planetfall in greater numbers. Moreover, The Herald of Misery was free to rain down destruction on whatever hive sprawl Czgara wished. Though, he held back from unleashing the Ark's full destructive power on the world for fear of endangering Abaddon's prize.

Yet despite the menace of the Herald of Misery, it was still a single vessel. It could not be everywhere.  Initially, a few of the sprawls felt its wrath. This allowed some hive sprawls to coordinate a mutual defense against Czagra's hordes. However, as the war ground on and intensified, an increasing number of sprawls found themselves isolated and their battlelines shrinking into their cores.

Czagra's armies were accompanied by the slave psykers. They sniffed for the psychic spoor of the key fragment amidst the ruin and butchery of the regions conquered by Czagra's hordes. Eventually, they detected that the spore was strongest in the northern regions.

The sprawl of Lindengrave was ravaged before any of Czagra's armies reached it. Half of an orbital defense platform fell from the heavens and impacted the sprawl's outskirts. The apocalyptic impact enveloped the sprawl in a firestorm and buried its remnants in a mountain of rock and metal. Miraculously, less than half of the teeming population of the sprawl survived the devastation. Led by the Sisters of Battle, the Imperial Guard and militias of the faithful used the tunnel networks beneath the sprawl to burst out of the flaming rubble and debris to take the fight to the Iron Warriors. Roaring preachers led the charge in daring counterattacks and guerilla raids. A stalemate formed with the battleline shifting back and forth, both sides unable to bring enough numbers to seize victory. The Imperial defiance did not last long. A Lord Discordant discovered the entrance of the tunnel networks. He drove his Daemon Engines inside the tunnels as a huntsman does with his hounds. Lindengrave's trapped defenders were slowly and methodically ground to extinction.

East of Lindengrave was the forge sprawl of Ko'goh-xo Quantarch. Larger numbers of Skitarii cohorts, alongside Imperial Guard battalions, defended it against an overwhelming armored assault by the Iron Warriors. The Tech Priest Dominus directed her forces to funnel the armored companies into hidden traps and kill boxes where they could concentrate their heavy firepower on the enemy for a maximum kill ratio.

The massed companies of Iron Warrior tanks and artillery, supported by sorcerers, titans, and Chaos Knights, blasted apart the forward elements of the Admech forces. Swift Chaos Predator squadrons tore into the flanks of the Imperial lines and encircled them. The Dominus' traps were crushed under the tread of the Iron Warriors, and the Imperial efforts to stall the armored advance of the traitors failed.

In desperation, the Dominus activated a forbidden explosive device. It was a hydorgyric atomizer that unleashes the legendary Sanguic Scourge- an irradiating wave flux that would liquefy the enemy.  Dominus reasoned that the devastating impact of the wave of her own forces and that of her allies would be acceptable as long as the traitors met their doom.

When the flux wave reached the Iron Warriors, it slammed into a Warp shield conjured by their sorcerers. Fueled by the Iron Warriors hatred, the shield protected them from the worst effects of the wave. In contrast, most of the Imperial Guard died in seconds. The Skitarii fared better, but their flesh melted off their metal frames. The weakened Imperial forces could not stop the final push of the traitors from smashing through them and ending their resistance.

The slave psykers pinpointed the likely location of the key fragment. It was Uranic Lumensprawl- A major stronghold of the Admech on the world. From their strategium, fortified to the extent that it would withstand orbital lance fire and sanctified against scrapcode attacks, the leaders of the Admech forces used every strategy in their arsenal to defend their forge sprawl. Waves of servitors clashed with hordes of cultists. Pteraxii and Serbrys harrassed Iron Warrior formations baiting some of them out of position. As the fighting continued, the Skittarii line slowly moved backward to minimize their casualties and draw in the Iron Warrior forces into the range of more of the Admech firepower. The mortal element of the Iron Warrior forces was wiped out, and the Iron Warriors' efforts to breach the sprawl were either blunted or misdirected into kill zones where packs of cyborg assassins waited for them.

Reluctantly, Czagra's leading champions reported their lack of progress to Czagra. It was something he already knew. He was monitoring the battle with mounting impatience. He decided to direct the battle himself. He ordered a portion of the reserves aboard the Herald of Misery to deploy around the sprawl, and he recalled warbands from other warzones on the world to aid the assault. Then he let them loose to attack the sprawl from separate directions. Even the spires of the sprawl came under assault from Heldrakes and packs of Iron Warrior Raptors. While this happened, Czagra kept his own Iron Warrior warband, the Effacers Medrengard, a safe distance from the fighting. Czagra grudgingly acknowledged the Admech leaders' ability to hold back so many different attack vectors simultaneously.

Eventually, the multidirectional attack exhausted the Admech reserves opening them up for Czagra to launch the final push. A large force of the Effacers Medrengard, which included several squads of Bronzewrought terminators, launched an overwhelming attack into the sprawl. Under the weight of so much combat data and panic, the Admech strategium collapsed. Czagra took grim satisfaction when his techno-sorcerers detected that moment of horror radiating from the strategium. Afterward, the defense of the forge sprawl did not last another hour.

As the Slave Psykers and their handlers searched for the key fragment amidst the carnage and ruin of the sprawl, Czagra mused how he could freely obliterate the world. During this musing, he received a report of the failure of hunting parties aboard the Herald of Misery and that loyalists were making their way to the Warp portal.  There would be consequences for this failure, but first, he has to address this threat. He would not have the means of delivering Abaddon's prize threatened.

Czagra sent orders to warbands on the world's surface and aboard the Ark and then put his machine-like intellect to invent a dozen ways to thwart the loyalists and humble them. When the loyalists reach the Warp portal, they will find Czagra there to welcome them.