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Chapter 316: The Iron Warriors Are Running Out of Choices
🕑 Added 2025-11-22 09:09:15 +0000 UTCChapter 316: The Iron Warriors Are Running Out of Choices
19th Day, 11th Month, 772.M41
At the edge of the buffer zone, the situation in a certain sector shifted dramatically.
First came a massive explosion on the surface of a civilized world, followed immediately by an uncontrollable conflagration.
The first bombardment from the Chaos fleet engulfed nearly an entire continent.
Central hive-spires were reduced to dust. The ensuing firestorms and shockwaves swept across vast areas. Stone, granite, and steel were pulverized; buildings were torn apart as easily as flower petals in a storm.
And this was only the first shell. Amidst the colossal mushroom cloud, hundreds of millions of embers danced in the air.
Then came the second. And the third.
Before the glare of the first missile had faded, another smashed into the earth.
Clouds of fire bloomed one after another from ground zero. The streets of the Palatial District vanished, leaving only howling dust and rubble.
The missiles disgorged vast quantities of viscous phosphex and promethium gel, drowning the few remaining structures of the adjacent districts.
The entire continent was swallowed by a sea of fire kilometres high.
Black smoke covered a third of the planet's surface. Driven by gale-force winds, ash and debris carried the choking smog even further.
Forrix the Breaker, Warsmith of the Iron Warriors and student of Perturabo, had personally shattered the planet's surface defenses that day.
But the fighting on the front lines and in the central zones was so intense that no one immediately noticed the disaster unfolding elsewhere.
Eventually, millions of invaders swarmed in. Through the broken walls they came—human slave-soldiers and daemon engines clearing the way, while armies of thralls dragged the first wave of heavy siege engines and pneumatic bombardment cannons.
These colossal machines, designed to breach walls and collapse void shields, now rumbled forward to lay siege to the surface hives that had been converted into fortresses.
But the human armies within the fortresses resisted with stubborn ferocity. Their equipment was exceptionally fine, and they had clearly been trained to fight the forces of Chaos, adapting to offensives disrupted by scrap-code and daemonic whispers.
Furthermore, they possessed significant heavy firepower, allowing them to effectively defend every surface choke point.
The city's underground utility networks had been flooded with vast quantities of promethium, dooming any Chaos attempt at subterranean infiltration to a fiery failure.
This defensive doctrine, seemingly tailor-made to counter Iron Warriors tactics, almost made the Iron Warriors commanders mistake these mortals for their own kind.
Have there been Iron Warriors teaching them how to fight?!
It continued until around 3:00 PM, one week later.
By now, the sky was as black as night, lit only by the sporadic flashes of gunfire from the various fortresses.
These mortal troops were even launching armoured raids against the production facilities the Chaos forces had established on the surface.
"Deploy orbital bombardment. Indiscriminate fire."
The Iron Warriors commander had seemingly lost his patience.
From the fleet hanging in orbit, several escort vessels broke formation, descending into low orbit to fire upon these impregnable fortresses.
Macro-cannon shells began to fall. These projectiles caused catastrophic destruction through kinetic energy alone.
Like meteors of steel, they shattered fortress structures and ignited chemical or high-explosive stockpiles, creating unquenchable infernos.
Night fell, but for this land, it was an eternal night. Weeks passed unnoticed until the Iron Warriors' fleet had turned the entire continent into a ruin swept by a sea of fire.
They did not conquer this place. They merely leveled it.
Because there was no loot worth preserving.
"..."
Forrix, leader of the Trident and the Breaker of Cities, stood amidst the wreckage, looking down at the corpses clad in void-sealed armour.
Apart from the stubborn resistance fighters, not a single human remained in the planet's cities.
The Iron Warriors drove their slaves to excavate the ruins, dragging out broken war machines.
Even to the eyes of a Great Crusade veteran, these machines were luxurious. In the hands of the Iron Warriors, they would require only minor repairs to be combat-ready and turned against the Imperium.
The Warsmith tallied his losses. Thanks to his masterful siegecraft and the decisive use of orbital bombardment to crush the surface resistance, the forces granted to him by the Iron Lord had suffered only twenty percent casualties.
But Forrix could find no joy in it.
Just like the series of operations before this, their ferocious assault had yielded no return.
The most precious resource for a Chaos invasion had been stolen.
Forrix looked at the completely fortified ruins. Everything had been prepared for war. There were no civilians, only soldiers.
The vast masses of mortals were gone.
Without mortals as fuel, it was difficult for them to use sorcery to gain an advantage over Imperial forces, and impossible to corrupt and shift the conquered planets into the warp.
The Imperium was slow, but massive.
The fleet of the Scarus Sector remained potent. Behind Scarus, a steady stream of troops and war machines was being fed to the front, deployed by the powerful Imperial Navy to the contested zones. It was enough to give the Iron Warriors a headache.
Even with the Iron Warriors' discipline and logistical capabilities—arguably the highest among the Chaos forces—they couldn't hold their gains under these conditions.
Defend? There was no value. Factories painstakingly erected would be destroyed by Imperial naval bombardment or by ground forces deployed from who-knew-where.
Attack? They were running out of momentum.
It wasn't that the Iron Warriors lacked the military strength to conquer the Scarus Sector.
It was that if the war continued like this, conquering it would be pointless.
Lord Perturabo's strategic objective had always been the Primarchs and Cadia.
He needed to prove he was superior to his brothers, and Cadia offered strategic value as a concentration point for the main Chaos fleet within the Eye of Terror.
Perturabo knew the other loyalist Primarchs were concentrating their forces at Cadia, so he hoped to force them to split their forces with a feint against the Scarus Sector.
But who could have known the enemy wouldn't play by the rules?
Romulus had simply emptied the populations of entire planets.
Throne knows how he managed it.
"We cannot go on like this."
An Iron Warrior approached Forrix's side.
Forrix knew him.
Honsou. A genetic abomination, a fusion of Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists gene-seed.
Because of this, he was widely disliked within the Legion. Even the Iron Lord, whose temper had improved of late, looked disgusted whenever this mongrel's name was mentioned.
But as a commander, Honsou possessed the requisite qualities of an Iron Warrior.
Thus, he had been given the rank of Warsmith and command of a cannon-fodder unit composed of the sons of Dorn, designated as shock troops.
Honsou had proven himself. He had survived until now.
"I know," Forrix replied.
He knew what the Warsmiths were thinking.
Even though Lord Perturabo's personality was vastly different from the past, no one dared question his decisions.
Since entering the Scarus Sector, the series of conflicts and losses told them they couldn't continue this way.
The gap between loss and gain was too wide. Forget about forcing the Dawnbreaker Fleet to come to the rescue; just dealing with the naval forces concentrating from the fringe sectors and the endless stream of Astra Militarum from the rear of Scarus was pressure enough.
The Iron Warriors could endure, but the followers of the Four Gods, hungry for souls to sacrifice, were already deserting.
And Lord Perturabo couldn't fight a war of attrition against so many sectors in Scarus, nor could he simply switch targets.
The Iron Warriors had figured out Romulus's modus operandi. If they attacked another sector, it would just mean another sector falling under the Dawnbreakers' direct control.
Gods knew how many Astartes the enemy had involved in administration. In the sorcerers' visions, these warriors were rarely seen on the front lines, but they were never absent from the staff of every Imperial department.
The thought made Forrix feel suffocated.
So, all their fighting was just helping the enemy consolidate power?
Unfortunately, the Iron Warriors were traitors. They were fundamentally incapable of uniting these Imperial factions.
Forrix's gaze finally rested on the Dawnbreaker holy seal on the corpse of a soldier.
Their choices were running out.
