Final Purification (Seeking Follow-up Reads)

Nine ritual artifacts slammed into the ground simultaneously!

It was not an attack.

It was the final, completing act of the ritual.

"Crack!"

Centered on the demon, the ground for five hundred meters in every direction split open.

It was not the kind of fissure caused by an artillery shell.

It was a tearing of space itself.

Deep blue rifts, their interiors churning with countless phantom eyes and books, spread out like a spiderweb!

These cracks were not static; they wound and branched like the tentacles of a living creature.

They greedily sucked up the chaotic energy erupting from beneath the earth!

From the rifts, more Tzeentch Horrors poured out first—not dozens, but hundreds!

Chirping and chattering, they blotted out the sky!

Then came the higher-tier Pink Horrors; the energy gathered in their claws was not lightning, but pure chaotic fire capable of melting armor!

There were also Blue Horrors, which did not attack directly but instead swarmed around the troops of Alru.

Wherever they passed, the soldiers' lasguns suddenly jammed, the tanks' targeting systems inexplicably failed, and communication channels filled with distorted static; they were warping probability, making misfortune the norm.

But it was not over yet.

Amidst the roars of the Bloodletters, the fissure beneath them erupted with scorching fountains of blood!

Climbing out of the blood fountains were more Bloodletters—five, ten, twenty!

And things even more terrifying than Bloodletters.

Flesh Hounds—three-headed, skinless monsters with exposed muscle—moved with such speed they left afterimages on the retina!

Skull Cannons, mobile artillery pieces fused from living flesh and metal, were loaded not with ammunition, but with compressed rage and agony.

Each shot could blast a basin-sized crater into the armor of a Leman Russ Tank!

A demonic legion.

A true, organized demonic legion had descended upon this scorched earth baptized by artillery fire.

"Fire! Fire!!!"

The reaction of Alru's troops was fast enough.

Tank main guns roared, the lascannons of the Sentinel Mechs flashed, and the infantry pulled their triggers, instantly blanketing the area in a web of fire.

But this time, the effect was drastically different.

The Tzeentch demons were impossibly agile; under the cover of warped probability, most of the attacks missed for no reason.

The Khorne demons, meanwhile, did not care about injuries at all; the more heavily they were wounded, the more excited they became, and the faster they charged!

A Flesh Hound sprinted through the barrage in a zigzag pattern, leaped violently, and pounced on a Sentinel Mech, its three blood-drenched maws biting down on the mech's leg joints simultaneously!

"Crunch!!!"

Amidst the groaning of twisting metal, the mech crashed to the ground.

The cockpit was cleaved open by a Bloodletter that arrived moments later, and the pilot inside did not even have time to scream.

"Psyker squad! Interfere!!" Capas roared.

The remaining twenty-plus Psykers exerted their power simultaneously, purple threads of psychic energy stabbing into the ground rifts in an attempt to plug the energy leak.

The Lord of Change and Mystery laughed.

It raised a mirror held in one of its nine arms, aiming it at the Psyker squad.

The mirror's surface reflected the blindfolded faces of those Psykers.

Then!

Beneath the blindfolds, those modified brains, implanted with computational arrays, suddenly overloaded all at once.

"Aaaaaah!!!"

Amidst shrill screams, the heads of seven Psykers exploded like watermelons!

Their minds were instantly overwhelmed by the infinite, chaotic knowledge reflected in the mirror; the storage capacity of a brain had a limit, but the knowledge of Tzeentch did not.

The remaining Psykers interrupted their casting in terror, but it was too late.

The Lord of Change and Mystery waved its staff:

"I grant you... eternal pursuit of knowledge."

"Logic override, to understand is to serve."

"Current highest priority directive: eliminate the barrier of understanding."

The bodies of the surviving Psykers suddenly went rigid.

They turned mechanically, removing their blindfolds to reveal that their eyes were gone, replaced by mechanical ocular implants flickering with rotating data streams.

With a hiss of static and inhuman voices, they spoke in unison: "Knowledge... must be understood."

They pivoted, their psionic powers no longer directed at the demons, but unleashed upon the nearest phalanx of Alru Infantry!

"The psykers have mutinied!!!"

"They've been corrupted!!"

Panic spread like a plague.

With a demonic legion charging from the front, corrupted psykers stabbing them in the back, and Tzeentch Horrors constantly manufacturing accidents on their flanks...

The formation of the Alru forces collapsed in an instant.

"Retreat!!!"

Capas squeezed these words out from his mechanical vocal cords:

"All units! Provide covering fire! Fall back to Arlu City!!"

"Abandon heavy equipment! Retreat light!!"

"Move!!!"

The general's order was decisive.

But on the battlefield, the line between a decisive retreat and a total rout is often razor-thin.

And when that line is overtaken by demons!

It becomes a slaughter.

"For the Blood God!!!"

A Bloodletter took the lead, swinging its great axe with one arm to catch up to a rearguard Leman Russ Tank, the blade cleaving deep into the engine compartment!

Amidst the fiery explosion, it bathed in scorching metal shrapnel, laughing wildly toward the sky.

Flesh Hounds wove through the fleeing infantry, each pounce bringing forth a rain of blood.

Forty minutes later.

When the last of the Alru remnants stumbled back to the defensive outposts of Arlu City, only three thousand two hundred men remained of the eight-thousand-strong army that had set out.

Heavy equipment was almost entirely lost: of thirteen Leman Russ Tanks, only three returned, all of them damaged.

Five Hellhound Flame Tanks—none returned; that equipment was too slow and became a primary target for the demons.

Of twenty Sentinel Mechs, four survived.

The psyker squad was wiped out, either dead or turned.

The Crimson Bright Wasteland industrial zone had completely fallen.

It had become a forbidden zone, eroded by Warp energy and infested with demons.

On the city wall, Capas Alru looked toward the region shrouded in eerie blue and blood-red psionic light, the red glow of his mechanical eye appearing dim for the first time.

The right half of his mechanical face remained cold.

But on the left half, his flesh-and-blood face, the muscles twitched involuntarily.

He knew that after today, his standing within the Chamber of Commerce was finished.

No.

Perhaps the entire Alru Group was finished.

And the cause of all this was, of all things, a group of miners who should have been working obediently on the assembly line until they died, and a suppression operation that should have been a guaranteed success.

"Sir..."

The adjutant approached cautiously, "How... how shall we report this to the Council?"

Capas was silent for a long time.

Then, he raised his mechanical right hand, his metal fingers tapping in the void to pull up the communication interface.

His voice returned to a state of calm—the cold, detached calm of a high-ranking Chamber official:

"Send the following report to the Simans Chamber of Commerce Security Council via the highest priority channel:

"Subject: Preliminary report on the sudden high-intensity Warp contamination event in the Crimson Bright Wasteland and the emergency response by Alru Group defense forces."

"Report content as follows:"

"One, a large-scale Chaos contamination event occurred in Industrial Zone 3 of the Crimson Bright Wasteland; the source of contamination is suspected to be related to the District 7 crash event eighty years ago."

"Two, the Siclaman rebels are in fact heretical cultists, and their rebellion was intended to unseal underground Warp heretics."

"Three, the Alru Group defense forces, under the command of Caspar Alru, intervened decisively at the first moment of the incident and successfully routed the main rebel force."

"And, as the situation deteriorated rapidly due to the fusion of rebels and Warp heretics, they took resolute measures, including heavy artillery saturation, to delay the spread of contamination and successfully prevented the further expansion of Chaos corruption."

"The contamination was contained within the industrial zone, buying critical time for planetary defense."

"Four, it is recommended that the Council immediately initiate the highest emergency response, contact the Adons Knight Family, the Khomo Psionic Family, and the Cult of the Machine Thought to convene an emergency four-party meeting, and immediately activate the Aurelian Crisis Joint Defense Agreement."

"At the same time..."

He paused:

"In the name of the United Legitimate Governors of Aurelian IV, transmit an emergency distress signal to the Governor's Office of the Eastern Galactic Sector and the nearby Imperial Navy Patrol Fleet, requesting the intervention of specialized anti-Chaos forces."

"I advise the Council to urge the Planetary Governor to petition the Empire for authorization to take all necessary purification measures, including orbital bombardment, should the situation spiral out of control."

"I suggest we evaluate and prepare to initiate the Final Purification Protocol to thoroughly eradicate the threat here."

The adjutant gasped.

"The Final Purification Protocol."

Within the framework of Imperial law, that was the euphemism for requesting extreme measures, including orbital bombardment, against Warp-tainted heresy that threatened the order of an entire planet.

Its severity was second only to an actual Exterminatus.

"My lord, this..."

"Do it."

Capas turned and walked down from the ramparts.

The red light in his mechanical eye stabilized once more, appearing even colder than before.

The losses had already been sustained.

What needed to be done now was not to wallow in regret, but to mitigate the damage.

And...

To shift the blame.

"Additionally, double the quota of experimental volunteers for the families of those useless fools in the intelligence department."

"Tell them they died heroically in the line of duty, and that this is the Chamber of Commerce's... compensation for their families."

"Also, state that our forces suffered heavy losses as a necessary and heroic price paid to contain a threat capable of destroying the entire planet."

"The focus of the report must be on the early warning and the time bought, not the losses themselves."

"Do you understand?"

"Yes..."

The adjutant's hand trembled slightly as he recorded the orders.

Capas did not look back.

He walked toward the command vehicle, his mind already beginning to conceive how to package the failure to suppress the rebellion as a primary achievement in discovering and resisting Warp heresy during the upcoming four-party conference.

As for those dead soldiers?

Those routed troops slaughtered by heretics?

Those workers who had already become offerings for the heresy?

It did not matter.

On the Chamber of Commerce's ledgers, human lives had always been nothing more than a cost.

And now, what he had to do was ensure that this cost was well spent.