Sanguinius summoned his scions and boarded the Gloriana-class flagship, the Red Tear. Leading the Legion fleet, they departed immediately for the epicenter of the breaking war.
Lion El'Jonson borrowed a swift vessel from Blazkowicz, racing toward Terra at maximum speed to take command of the First Legion. His heart was filled with anticipation, envisioning the scene of his reunion with his sons and making silent preparations for the encounter.
As the two Primarchs entered the Warp and confirmed their headings, they both, as if by unspoken agreement, retreated to the private sanctums of their ships to read the books gifted to them by their brother. Upon encountering the forbidden lore of Chaos, both were profoundly shaken.
There were gods in this world!
Not as a title of respect or a high-level description of a great lifeform, but true deities—and their existence was utterly malevolent. This knowledge, which violated the Imperial Truth, struck their minds like a lightning bolt shattering the firmament, stirring tempests in their thoughts.
The Chaos Gods, daemons, a glimpse into the truth of the Warp.
They learned the source of psychic power, the thirst of the foul Warp-entities for the creatures of the material universe, and the horrific darkness hidden within the very conduits mankind relied upon for survival. The Master of Mankind had enforced the Imperial Truth, hiding the reality from mortals and his sons alike, specifically to weaken the Chaos Gods within the realm of conceptual cognition.
Despite being thousands of light-years apart, upon finishing the forbidden knowledge, they both performed the same silent ritual: closing the pages and casting the books into the plasma engines to be incinerated, ensuring the secrets would never leak. If such a book were to appear within the Imperium, it would be enough to subvert the Imperial Truth and destroy the life's work of the Master of Mankind.
Finally, they understood why their Father had deleted those memories. The knowledge of Chaos was too heavy; to shoulder it was an immense burden. Ignorance was, in fact, a form of protection.
With heavy sighs, the two Primarchs continued their journeys toward their respective destinations.
On the distant fringes of the Imperium, the Forge World of Shana was engulfed in the flames of war. Every street was a battlefield; life was as cheap as grass. The munitions produced by the Forge World were consumed on the spot, supplied to the V and XIX Legions as they resisted the onslaught of the Rangdan, defending the core sectors of the world.
The V Legion conducted high-speed raids, engaging in guerrilla warfare across the crimson wastes piled with iron oxide, utilizing their speed to harass and strike the Rangdan. The XIX Legion emerged from the shadows, conducting street-to-street ambushes to buy every precious second.
The defensive war was deteriorating. The Rangdan had not deployed auxiliary slave forces but had directly released their elite warriors. The xenos race intended to seize Shana immediately, utilizing its industrial capacity to resupply their expeditionary fleets and using the world as a springboard into the heart of human territory.
In high orbit, over a hundred xenos warships loomed. There were pure mechanical vessels, semi-mechanical-semi-biological hybrids, and pure biological ships—a vast variety from which lance beams and drop pods frequently fell.
Void shields rippled as the dense anti-air batteries of the Forge World spat tongues of fire, intercepting the troops and supplies dropped by the xenos. Orbital defense platforms fired relentlessly, driving away ships in near-orbit to prevent a mass landing of Rangdan warriors.
In the street battles, tens of thousands of lives vanished every second. Astartes and Rangdan elites, covered by lower-tier soldiers, engaged in brutal slaughter for control of every single alleyway.
In the crisscrossing steel streets, the shields of Rangdan elite warriors overloaded under the bombardment of bolters. A second later, bolt shells found the gaps, shattering biological armor and destroying primary brains. The elite warriors retaliated even more fiercely, their plasma carbines melting ceramite and vaporizing the superhuman organs of the Astartes, slaying the Emperor's warriors.
The battle had raged for half a Terran month. The Rangdan had committed 200,000 elite warriors and hundreds of millions of thralls, slowly compressing the Imperial defenses. The day the city would fall seemed imminent.
After half a month of ceaseless combat, the superhuman bodies of the Astartes shrieked with exhaustion. Their muscles were sour, and their internal organs felt as if they were tearing. Magos of the Mechanicus dragged their massive, augmented frames through the Skitarii trenches, chanting binary prayers to bestow the Omnissiah's blessing upon weapons and equipment. The once-aloof Sages looked haggard, their red robes stained with oil, their mechanical joints creaking.
Whether Rangdan or Human, both sides slaughtered one another, pushing their physiological limits to the breaking point. Under the high intensity of war, mechanical bodies that lacked timely maintenance suffered from irreversible fatigue.
The Forge World of Shana was so perfect that the Cult Mechanicus was willing to pay any price to protect its purity. As a Forge World on the Imperial frontier, its value was immeasurable. The local Mechanicus of Shana was highly independent, its relationship with Mars mirroring that of the Imperium itself, having signed treaties of equality with the Martian priesthood. To hold their home world, the Mechanicus had spared no expense, unleashing massive waves of Cybernetica automata alongside the Skitarii.
The battlefield was choked with scorching smog. The excessive use of high-energy ray weapons caused the temperature to skyrocket, making the environment uncomfortably hot for biological life. Streets were piled with wreckage and draped with organic remains; shattered power armor bore witness to the war's brutality.
Multiple Forge Temples were under xenos siege. The Rangdan sought to capture the plasma reactors to disable the world's planetary shields and flood the battlefield with more troops. The trenches outside the temples had become grinding gears of mutual slaughter, where both sides were locked in a stalemate, constantly funneling in reinforcements to suppress the other.
In the nearby industrial cities, Titan Legions trampled over rubble. The God-Machines walked the earth, unleashing the wrath of the Omnissiah against the sacrilegious constructs of the Rangdan. No part of the Forge World was at peace.
Looking down from high orbit at the iron-red planet, flashes of artillery erupted everywhere. It looked like a boiling stone in a sea of magma, covered in scalding bubbles of fire.
"Hold the line!"
The commander of the XIX Legion roared into the vox-channel. He had lost count of how many times he had said it, ordering the mortal Imperial Auxilia to hold against the Rangdan charge. By now, the will of the mortal soldiers had been repeatedly crushed; their morale hovered on the brink of collapse. They continued to fire their lasguns not out of courage—those inspiring emotions had long since been ground away—but because Space Marines stood behind them. The dark muzzles of bolters reminded the mortals: any retreat meant instant execution.
If a mortal showed any sign of cowardice, the Legion warriors would fire without hesitation. The Auxilia, faces ashen, pulled their triggers with mechanical stiffness, firing at xenos shields to create openings for the superhuman warriors behind them. The soldiers saw no hope. In this desperate situation, the only thing they did not lack was the endless supply of ammunition provided by the Forge World—and the Servitors bringing the supplies.
Those augmented Servitors had been their brothers in the same trench just hours ago. After being sent to rear-line hospitals for treatment, they returned as mindless automatons. The battlefield crushed life and trampled humanity. The Auxilia gritted their teeth and persisted; they had one more reason not to give up: they did not want to become human hardware for a machine.
While humanity struggled to hold on, the Rangdan were also suffering. 200,000 elite warriors could face an Astartes Legion head-on, yet they could not break the mortal Auxilia lines. Those lowly human soldiers would rally whenever the lines were about to break, screaming "For the Emperor," and retaking their positions despite horrific casualties. In the tug-of-war for the trenches, the advantage of elite warriors over common soldiers was infinitely diluted.
The moment a warrior charged from cover, a tide of crimson human las-fire would flood their defensive shields, eventually melting their biological armor. What was meant to be a swift assault had turned into a grueling war of attrition.
The Rangdan Warmaster was equally anxious. If the stalemate could not be broken, this human Forge World would bog down the entire campaign. The homeworld's plan was clear: first swallow a hundred systems on the Imperial fringe, using them as a base to spread the fires of war deeper into human space. They intended to use their initiative to strike industrial worlds and cripple humanity's war potential.
Now, the first step of the strategic plan was stuck. A gap had appeared in the hundred-system plan; a single Forge World was resisting stubbornly and was about to attract more attention. The strategists of the Imperium had noticed this place.
It required little guesswork to reach a conclusion: the Legions of the Imperium were on their way. If the enemy sent reinforcements, the Rangdan would have to do the same. The worst-case scenario was predictable—both sides jumping into a whirlpool of war, with massive armies fighting to the death in a narrow sector.
"Commander." In the command room of a Rangdan Battle Moon, a cold, mechanical AI voice delivered the worst news: "A human fleet has appeared in the Warp. A massive target is approaching rapidly."
What they feared most had happened. The reinforcements of the Imperium had arrived.
The Rangdan Warmaster's biological armor shifted, letting out a strangely human-like sigh. The simulated voice was somewhat stiff: "Contact the allied fleets. We need support."
The worst had come to pass. Shana had turned into a black hole of war, drawing the armies of both sides. The true war was about to begin. The Astartes Legions of the Imperium, led by their Primarchs, were crossing the sea of stars to answer the invasion with a posture of absolute defiance.
This war would have no upper limit in scale. It had transcended local friction; it was a total war between one empire and another. Both sides shared old grudges and could never share the stars. Only through total destruction would they pay the final respect to a worthy foe.