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Cogboy's Crusade: A Warhammer 40k Story

Hollowborn
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Synopsis
This is the story of a simple Cogboy. He never became a mighty Space Marine, but this lowly tech-adept has a message for you: So long as we have the machine cult and the grunts in the trenches, the Imperium retains 99% of its strength. Humanity will never fall! In the name of the holy binary, sing praise to the Omnissiah! Glory to the Machine God! Praise the Omnissiah! Praise the Machine, Praise the Iron! You are the Forge-Lord of Creation, the Apocalypse that Unmakes All. Vaporize! Incinerate! Fabricate! Iron is Eternal, the Machine Immortal. The Way of Iron is the only truth. For the Machine is Truth! More is Good! Bigger is Better! A billion gun barrels are Your glory! The roar of a million engines is Your sermon! ------ Author's Note: I'm not a very serious person, so this isn't a grim-dark, serious story. ------ P.S. Let's be honest, some of the official Games Workshop lore is a bit wild. To make the plot flow better and feel more consistent, I've taken the liberty of making some changes. This is fanfiction, after all! ~~~~~ Genre: Sci-Fi, Action, Military, Fanfiction Tags: #Warhammer40k, #AdeptusMechanicus, #ImperialGuard, #Transmigration, #Isekai, #Action, #SciFi, #Military
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Chapter 1 - Chapter 1: My Magos is... Unorthodox

Chapter 1: My Magos is... Unorthodox

Some people are born extraordinary. Or so the transmigrator thought.

His innate rationality allowed him to grasp the situation within thirteen seconds of waking. He knew, and accepted, the reality of his transmigration. Or more accurately, his rebirth.

47 seconds until birth!

Yes, even before being born, his intellect was phenomenal! He could simultaneously calculate the remaining time while sensing the potent strength in this unborn body, a strength far beyond that of a normal human infant. The inherited knowledge, blurry and churning within his mind, felt sacred and vast, even before he had begun to process and organize it.

13 seconds left! In this life, I will lead humanity to its zenith! I would die a hundred deaths for it! I will bring ruin to the enemies of the Imperium of Man!

9 seconds left! Knowledge is so wondrous! So divine! I must acquire more of it in this life! I must witness all the universe has to offer!

8 seconds left! Strength! Justice requires strength! Thought and action both require strength! Power is the foundation of everything! To ignore the innate power of this body would be my greatest mistake!

7 seconds left! Immortality! Time is the greatest enemy! Longevity and health are the true pursuits!

6 seconds left! I've been transmigrated! What's the point if I don't build a harem? Give me one woman, and I can create a dynasty! Give me a hundred women, and I can create a nation! Give me a hundred xenos, and I can create a new species!

5 seconds left! Haha, calm down. Don't overthink it. There will be plenty of time for that later. Adjust my mindset. I'm about to be born from the vitae-womb...

4 seconds left! Vitae-womb? Ah! AHH! AHHHH!

3 seconds left! The Imperium of Man?! AH! XENOS?! AHH!

2 seconds left! Wait! Pause! STOP! Σ(っ°Д°;)っ Hold on! TIME OUT!

1 second left! Screw the countdown! What else can you do besides count down?! PAUSE! Can't you hear me?! Don't force me to make my first act in this world kicking your ass! Bro, just stop for a second, I'll get on my knees and beg!

This proved that when a person's brain is working overtime, they can, in fact, get into a fight with themselves and beg for mercy.

With a wet squelch, the transmigrator was expelled from the vitae-womb. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw several red-robed, half-machine figures prostrating themselves before a control panel, chanting in binary, "01101101..."

Fortunately, he understood them. Unfortunately, he understood them.

"Praise the Omnissiah!"

"...Waaah," the transmigrator let out his first cry of new life.

Years later, during a joint secret investigation by Inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus and Ordo Xenos into a certain Magos suspected of heresy, the earliest record of the subject was uncovered on the Forge World of Teydeon. It read as follows:

Production Record: Vat-born Batch #139876 (Experimental Accelerated Gestation Batch)

Product Physiological Age: 6 Terran Standard Years (Standard Gestation: 18)

Purpose: Tech-Priest Aspirant; Advanced Wetware;

Quantity: 10,000

Product Requirements: Knowledge Instantiation (Complete); Genetic Screening (Complete); Personality Imprinting (Complete);

Success Rate: 13% (Far below standard parameters. Further experimentation of this nature is contraindicated.)

Anomaly Record: Product Designate 139876-9527-Omega, upon decanting, was observed crying in a manner reminiscent of a lesser greenskin organism. A secondary genetic scan was performed. No mutation was detected. Product meets designated parameters.

This record has since been interred in the Inquisitorial Archives for permanent storage.

The transmigrator—no, Designate 139876-9527-Omega—was blissfully unaware that his embarrassing origin story would one day be inscribed on vellum stamped with Purity Seals, using ink mixed with the ashes of the faithful, to be preserved by the Imperium forever.

Right now, all he wanted was to be chosen quickly and leave the grand and holy Grand Manufactorum of Teydeon. Every extra second he spent here felt like he might die from the Omnissiah's "blessing" (read: hard radiation).

This was no longer a matter of health risks. The radiation was practically visible, forming scintillating, coruscating patterns in the coolant vapor that filled the Manufactorum.

Omega had no choice in the matter. He could only be chosen. Chosen by a Magos from one of the innumerable Mechanicus temples, located in the districts of the workshops, under the industrial zones, subordinate to the great macro-clades that branched out from the Grand Manufactorum to cover the entire planet.

To better pursue the knowledge of the Machine God and to better serve the Omnissiah, every Mechanicus temple was required to cultivate and discover more faithful humans to become the Omnissiah's most excellent cogs (Tech-Priests). The Machine God would not refuse any pure human who believed in Him and pursued knowledge.

You say the Omnissiah's blessing in your manufactorum is so potent that your workers don't live past thirty, and any naturally born children are either stillborn or grotesquely mutated, leaving no candidates for apprenticeship?

You say that because a Magos... ahem, improved... no, repaired a fragmented STC template, your factory floor is now staffed entirely by servitors, so there are no humans to become apprentices? Don't worry, I have people for you. Wait, where are you going? We've known each other for years, you know me! Hey! Don't leave!

You say your workers either dropped dead or rebelled after drinking waste water blessed by the Omnissiah, and the Skitarii legions had to put them down, so your factory is still under repair and has no apprentices? The damn heretics!

You say you've scanned every person in your district and not a single one meets the minimum intelligence quotient?

For these reasons and countless others, the Forge World thoughtfully prepared an easy-to-use, artificially-created workforce for the temples that failed to produce enough Tech-Priests to maintain production: the vat-born.

What can you do? The very soil and water of a Forge World are not meant for nurturing the living.

Gestated from the improved genetic material of the most brilliant Magi of generations past, their growth is accelerated in vitae-wombs, reaching adulthood in mere years. While developing, they are fed a constant stream of knowledge required to become a Tech-Priest. Upon decanting, they are qualified machine-tenders—ahem, Tech-Priests—who can be deployed after minimal training to become excellent cogs for the Omnissiah.

Of course, Omega's batch was clearly not a standard production run. The reason was simple.

Several years ago, Archmagos Veyl of the Grand Manufactorum on Teydeon was reviewing the endless lists of orders: orders from the Departmento Munitorum; from Planetary Governors; from Rogue Trader dynasties great and small; from various Adeptus Astartes Chapters; and countless others from every corner of the Imperium.

He then looked at the production capacity charts, which had been expanded again and again. Even so, the order backlog was already one hundred and sixty years long.

Praise the Omnissiah! All glory to the Machine God!

What little flesh remained on Archmagos Veyl could still feel a genuine sense of pleasure. At the same time, another report's data made him sigh, "The flesh is weak!"

This month alone, one hundred and thirty Enginseers (low-ranking Tech-Priests) had perished. Some, out of fatigue, had taken a nosedive into a smelter, becoming a puff of smoke. Others, in a moment of distraction, fell onto the tracks of a Titan-hauler and were ground into a fine paste. Still others were found dead from exhaustion while performing rites of blessing before the Omnissiah's sacred creations.

Instances of nervous breakdowns, catastrophic spinal failure, and assassination attempts on senior Magi were too numerous to count.

Meanwhile, the rate at which indentured flesh-and-blood laborers were "voluntarily" applying for servitor-conversion had increased by twenty percent over the previous month! Fools! Do you not realize there are tasks a mindless servitor cannot perform?! Does becoming a servitor absolve you of your tithe to the Emperor?! This is betrayal! This is blasphemy! This is heresy! Denied! All of them, denied!

Two more districts had erupted in riots! It made Archmagos Veyl fondly recall the Genestealer Cultists who used to work here before they were discovered. They were always so diligent and always exceeded their production quotas. You are pure and noble humans! How can you lose to those detestable xenos!

Silently repenting to the Omnissiah for the sin of fondly remembering detestable xenos, the Archmagos's mind, a fusion of organic and inorganic matter, began calculating a solution to his problem.

The solution was simple: cut costs or increase revenue. In this case, "cut costs" meant reducing production, which was impossible. "Increase revenue" meant increasing the workforce. Indentured laborers were easy enough to acquire; the Imperium never lacked for worlds that couldn't pay their tithe. The problem was the number of Tech-Priests, the lynchpins of the entire operation. Off-worlders couldn't be trusted; it was better to cultivate their own here on Teydeon.

But a projection based on the number of priests trained by the various macro-clades, the output of the vitae-wombs, and the annual rate at which Tech-Priests went to meet the Omnissiah, showed that the priest shortage would only worsen year by year.

A decision had to be made now, while there was still some slack in the system. The standards for selecting priests could not be lowered—that would be a blasphemy against the Omnissiah. But they could increase the number of aspirants from cooperative industrial worlds, Knight worlds, and allied noble houses. This would solve the recruitment problem and earn them considerable political favor. A win-win.

Why don't people on Forge Worlds just have more children? the Archmagos wondered, a problem he could never solve. The number of naturally born, healthy infants was far below the Imperial average.

They needed more vitae-wombs, but their construction and blessing alone would take decades, consuming time and manpower that were already scarce.

He could just work everyone harder, a short period of intense pain for long-term gain. But then he remembered his recent factory inspections, where some young Cogboy had actually taken a potshot at him, their supervising Archmagos, with a laspistol! When questioned, the reason was that they'd rather die a quick death than be worked to death. The youth of today are so impolite! And their logic is utterly preposterous!

Which Archmagos hadn't waded through mountains of corpses and seas of blood to get to their position? I've fought skirmishes with xenos, gone blade-to-blade with the forces of Chaos, competed for biomass with the Tyranids, and ambushed the Imperi—... can't talk about that one. You pick up a standard-issue flashlight off the assembly line and you dare shoot at ME?

After much deliberation, Archmagos Veyl abandoned the plan to build more vitae-wombs. After all, keeping his personal refractor shield active all the time was a nuisance, and even his relic-grade generator needed its machine spirit soothed periodically.

But abandoning the plan didn't mean he wouldn't experiment. So, Archmagos Veyl decided to take the newly gestating Batch #139876 and cut their planned incubation time by two-thirds to see what would happen.

As a side note, to demonstrate his benevolence and in accordance with the principle of not wasting valuable manpower, the Archmagos decided that the few Cogboys who shot at him would be welded to the assembly line without undergoing lobotomization, sentenced to one hundred years of service.

Clearly, the Magi were not pleased with Omega's batch. They thought they were receiving fully-qualified, ready-to-use assets, only to find they were defective goods that couldn't be used immediately and still needed to be raised. Of course, they would complain.

In the end, it was Archmagos Veyl himself who appeared, his refractor shield shimmering, to settle the matter with a single declaration: "He's just small. All the necessary components are present. Take him back; he's perfectly usable."

And so, 139876-9527-Omega was led out of the Grand Manufactorum by Magos Laust. The newly-minted, half-step Tech-Priest Omega was deeply worried about his future. From the moment he stepped out of the Manufactorum, the silent, marching Magos Laust in front of him had been muttering nonstop under his breath, "I'll kill that old bastard Veyl one day."

A year later, Omega wouldn't be worried anymore, because he'd be muttering the same thing himself: "I'll kill that old bastard Veyl one day!"

But that was all in the future. Right now, Omega had no mental capacity to spare. He was on the verge of death, tormented by the standard-issue "Tech-Priest Starter Kit" and the "Forge World Survival Package."

Tech-Priest Starter Kit:

Mars-Pattern Red Robe: (Had to be tied around his waist due to his height.)

Back-Mounted Mechadendrite Harness: (Connected to the spinal-neural port, capable of micron-level manipulation, modular all-metal design with multiple upgrade paths. Weight: 15kg.)

Power Axe—The Omnissiah's Wrath: (All-metal construction with multiple upgrade paths, a symbol of the Machine God's authority and a Tech-Priest's status. Weight: 9kg.)

Forge World Survival Package:

Telescopic, Fully-Enclosed Environmental Suit: (Partial metal construction, weight: 3kg. The Omnissiah-blessed ground is not for just any human to tread upon.)

Integrated Air Purification and Filtration Unit: (Includes mask, air hoses, and a self-powered purifier. Weight: 5kg. The Omnissiah-blessed air is not for just any human to breathe!)

Geiger Counter: (The Omnissiah's sacred blessing is not for just any human to encounter!)

After a forced march of one kilometer, carrying 1.5 times his own body weight, Omega finally couldn't take it anymore. He had to speak up.

"Magos! Magos Laust!"

"Hmm? 139876-9527-Omega, what is it?" Magos Laust turned, his brow furrowed in annoyance.

Though he didn't want to get on the bad side of his new master and immediate superior, even Omega's genetically enhanced body was screaming in exhaustion.

"Magos, I can no longer walk. Based on my calculations, if I continue at this pace, I will collapse from physical exhaustion in approximately one more kilometer."

Omega said this using all the emotional intelligence from his past life and all the rationality of his current one, tilting his boyish face up and staring at Magos Laust with wide, innocent eyes.

He had been composing this single sentence ever since they left the grand gates of the Manufactorum. Considering the attitude of the Magi towards his batch, he had to project the "rationality and cold, precise calculation" prized by the Adeptus Mechanicus to salvage his image.

Furthermore, based on his observation of Magos Laust's appearance—apart from his arms and lower legs, which were clearly bionic, the rest of his body showed no signs of modification. His forehead, face, and neck were as human as any other—Omega deduced that Laust belonged to the faction of the Mechanicus that revered the human form.

The hallmark of this "humanity-purist" faction was that as humans, they should act like humans. Even their cybernetics were primarily for performance, not radical transformation. Therefore, among the crowd of bizarre monstrosities back in the Manufactorum, Laust was one of the few who looked like a person. His humanity should be the most intact.

"Oh..." Magos Laust was clearly taken aback by Omega's words, eyeing the cute-acting boy with an unreadable expression.

Feeling a bit unnerved by the scrutiny, Omega had to press on. "Yes, Magos. I do not know the distance to your temple, but if I were to collapse, it would surely cause unnecessary trouble for you."

"Hmm, correct. However, according to my observations and calculations, you have retained at least two-thirds of your stamina. Am I wrong? Or are you lying?"

Dammit! What do you do when your boss is deliberately looking for trouble?

"Haha, of course the Magos would not be wrong. It must be my own calculations that are in error. After all... after all..."

Omega stammered an explanation, desperately trying to project sincerity through the transparent visor of his mask, hoping Laust would let him off the hook.

But Magos Laust clearly had no intention of doing so. "After all, what?"

"..."

"Are you trying to think of an excuse?! Lying to and trying to deceive your Magos within the first thirteen minutes and thirteen seconds of meeting him!"

"No! Not at all! Magos, you misunderstand! The calculation error is my fault, but after all... after all, I'm just a child!"

So shameful! How could a grown man say something like that! Wait! In this life, I'm only six. Nothing wrong with that!

"...Hiss..."

The tall and the short, the big and the small, stared at each other. After a moment of silence, Magos Laust's multi-threaded brain still couldn't find a good excuse to continue teasing his new apprentice.

So, he unfastened his cloak and the robes beneath it. To Omega's utter astonishment, with a cacophony of grinding gears and hissing pistons, the Magos's body from the waist down transformed into half a motorcycle—a Moto-Centaur!

"Get on."

"..."

Is it too late to run back to the Manufactorum and ask for a different Magos? After confirming I had transmigrated to a Warhammer Forge World, I had prepared myself to meet tech-zealots. I had prepared for religious fanatics, for mindless servitors, for soulless AI, and even for Genestealers! But I had never, ever, prepared myself for a complete psycho!

Emperor! Omnissiah! Machine God! Motive Force! Somebody come down here and take this monster away!

What kind of Tech-Priest modifies himself into a motorcycle?!

"Hurry up! What are you thinking about? Don't be shy. You're not the first person to mount this holy vessel, this condensation of the Omnissiah's divine wisdom."

Magos Laust looked quite pleased with his shocked apprentice. He twisted his torso and patted the passenger seat behind him, urging Omega to hurry up. It had been a while since he had last felt the "speed and passion." All thanks to that damn Archmagos Veyl!

Oh, what blasphemy! He even installed a passenger seat! Purge the heretic! PURGE THE HERETIC!

"...Yes, Magos."