Final Purification

Nine ritual implements slammed into the ground at once!

It wasn't an attack.

It was the ritual's final step: its completion.

"Crack!"

The ground within a five-hundred-meter radius of the daemon split open.

These weren't cracks caused by exploding shells.

Space itself was tearing apart.

Glowing blue fissures, filled with the swirling phantom images of countless eyes and books, spread like a spiderweb!

The cracks weren't still. They writhed and branched like the tentacles of living creatures.

They greedily sucked in the Chaos energy surging up from beneath the ground!

What first poured out of the fissures were more Tzeentch Horrors. Not dozens, but hundreds!

They chattered and shrieked, swarming over everything!

Then came the higher-ranking Pink Horrors. The energy coalescing in their claws wasn't lightning, but pure flames of Chaos capable of melting armor!

There were also Blue Horrors. They didn't attack directly, but flew around the Alru forces.

Wherever they passed, soldiers' lasguns suddenly jammed, tanks' targeting systems inexplicably failed, and their communications channels filled with distorted static. They warped probability, making misfortune the norm.

But that wasn't all.

Amid the Bloodletter's roar, a blazing geyser of blood erupted from the crack beneath it!

More Bloodletters crawled out of the geyser: five, ten, twenty!

And then came things even more terrifying than the Bloodletters.

Flesh Hounds—three-headed, skinless monsters with exposed muscles, so fast they left afterimages on the retina!

Skull Cannons, mobile gun platforms made of fused living flesh and metal. Their barrels weren't loaded with ammunition, but with compressed rage and pain.

Each shot could blast a crater the size of a washbasin in a Leman Russ Tank's armor!

A daemon army.

A true, organized daemon army had descended upon this fire-scorched wasteland.

"Open fire! Open fire!!!"

The Alru forces had reacted quickly enough.

Tank cannons 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 results were completely different.

The Tzeentch Daemons were impossibly agile. Under the cover of warped probability, most attacks somehow went wide.

The Khorne Daemons didn't care about being wounded at all. The more badly injured they were, the more excited they became, and the faster they charged!

A Flesh Hound raced through the barrage in a zigzag, then suddenly leaped at a Sentinel Mech. All three of its gaping jaws clamped down on the mech's leg joints!

"Grrrriiiind!!!"

With the groan of twisting metal, the mech crashed to the ground.

A Bloodletter rushing up behind it split open the cockpit with an axe. The pilot inside didn't even have time to scream.

"Psyker squad! Disrupt them!!" Capas roared.

The remaining twenty-odd Psykers unleashed their power at once. Purple strands of psychic energy stabbed toward the fissures underground, trying to seal the energy leak.

The Lord of Change and Mystery laughed.

It raised a mirror in one of its nine arms and pointed it at the Psyker squad.

The mirror reflected the Psykers' cloth-covered faces.

And then!

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

"AAAAAHHHH!!!"

Amid their piercing screams, seven Psykers' heads burst like watermelons!

The boundless knowledge of Chaos reflected in the mirror flooded their minds and blew them apart. A brain's storage capacity was limited, but Tzeentch's knowledge was not.

The remaining Psykers broke off their spells in terror, but it was already too late.

The Lord of Change and Mystery swept its staff:

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

"Logical command override: understanding is servitude."

"Current highest-priority directive: eliminate all barriers to understanding."

The Psykers who were still alive suddenly froze.

They mechanically turned around and removed their blindfolds. Beneath them, their eyes were gone, replaced by mechanical augmetics flickering with streams of data.

In voices crackling with static and sounding inhuman, they chanted in unison, "Knowledge... must be understood."

They turned their weapons around. Their psychic attacks no longer targeted the daemons, but instead slammed into the nearest Alru infantry formation!

"The Psykers have turned on us!!!"

"They've been corrupted!!"

Panic spread like a plague.

With the daemon army charging from the front, corrupted Psykers stabbing them in the back, and Tzeentch Horrors on the flank constantly causing all manner of mishaps...

The Alru forces' formation collapsed in an instant.

"Retreat!!!"

Capas practically forced the words out through his mechanical vocal cords:

"All units! Cover each other by turns! Fall back to Arlu City!!"

"Abandon the heavy equipment! Retreat light!!"

"Move!!!"

The general's orders were decisive.

But on the battlefield, there was often only a hair's breadth between a decisive retreat and a complete rout.

And when the daemons caught up with them across that narrow gap...

It became a massacre.

"For the Blood God!!!"

The Bloodletter charged at the head of the pursuit, swinging its single arm and catching up with a Leman Russ Tank covering the retreat. Its axe sank deep into the engine compartment!

Bathed in the blazing light of the explosion and showered with red-hot metal fragments, it threw back its head and laughed.

Flesh Hounds raced through the fleeing infantry, each pounce sending a spray of blood into the air.

Forty minutes later.

When the last Alru stragglers stumbled back to Arlu City's defensive outpost, only a little over three thousand two hundred remained of the original eight thousand who had set out.

Almost all the heavy equipment had been abandoned. Of thirteen Leman Russ Tanks, only three made it back, and all were damaged.

Not one of the five Hellhound Flame Tanks returned. They were too slow, making them a prime target for the daemons.

Of twenty Sentinel Mechs, only four survived.

The Psyker squad had been wiped out. They were either dead or had turned traitor.

The Crimson Bright Wasteland industrial district had fallen completely.

It had become a forbidden zone, corrupted by Chaos energy and overrun with daemons.

On the city wall, Capas Alru stared at the distant region shrouded in eerie blue and blood-red psychic light. For the first time, the glow of his mechanical eye seemed so dim.

The right half of his mechanical face remained cold.

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

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

No.

The entire Alru Group might be finished.

And all this had started because of a group of miners who should have been working themselves to death on the assembly line, and a suppression operation that should have been a sure thing.

"Sir..."

His adjutant approached cautiously. "How should we... report this to the council?"

Capas was silent for a long time.

Then he raised his mechanical right hand and tapped the air with his metal fingers, bringing up a communications interface.

His voice regained its composure—that cold composure of a senior Chamber of Commerce official.

"Send the following report through the Simans Chamber of Commerce Security Council's highest-priority channel:

"Title: Preliminary Report on the Sudden High-Intensity Warp Contamination Incident in the Crimson Bright Wasteland and the Alru Group Defense Force's Emergency Response."

"The report reads as follows:"

"One: A large-scale Chaos contamination event has occurred in Industrial Zone Three of the Crimson Bright Wasteland. The source of the contamination is suspected to be related to the crash in District 7 eighty years ago."

"Two: The Siclaman Rebels were in fact heretical cultists. Their rebellion was intended to unseal the heresy in the underground Warp."

"Three: Under the command of Caspar Alru, the Alru Group's defense force intervened decisively at the first opportunity and successfully routed the main rebel force."

"When the rebels merged with the Warp heresy and the situation rapidly worsened, the force took decisive measures, including a heavy artillery barrage, to slow the spread of the contamination and successfully prevent it from spreading further."

"The contamination was contained within the industrial district, buying critical time for the planet's defense."

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

"Additionally..."

He paused.

"On behalf of the legitimate governing authorities of Aurelian IV, send an urgent distress signal to the Governor's Office of the Eastern Galactic Sector and the nearby Imperial Navy Patrol Fleet, requesting the deployment of specialist anti-Chaos forces."

"Recommend that the council urge the Planetary Governor to apply to the Imperium for authorization to employ all necessary purification measures, including orbital bombardment, should the situation become uncontrollable."

"Recommend that the council assess and prepare to activate the Final Purification Protocol to eradicate the threat here completely."

The adjutant sucked in a sharp breath.

"The Final Purification Protocol."

Within the framework of Imperial law, that was a euphemism for requesting extreme measures, including orbital bombardment, against Warp heresy contamination that might threaten the order of an entire planet.

Its severity was second only to a true "Exterminatus."

"Sir, this..."

"Do it."

Capas turned and walked down from the city wall.

The red light in his mechanical eye steadied again, growing even colder than before.

The losses had already been incurred.

Now was no time for regret. He had to limit the damage.

And...

Shift the blame.

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

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

"Furthermore, our forces suffered heavy losses. These were necessary and heroic sacrifices made to contain a threat capable of destroying the entire planet."

"The report should focus on discovering the threat, issuing the warning, and buying time—not on the losses themselves."

"Understood?"

"Yes..."

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

Capas didn't look back.

He walked toward the command vehicle, already planning how to spin the failed suppression operation at the upcoming four-party meeting as the great achievement of discovering and fighting the Warp heresy.

As for the soldiers who had died?

The fleeing troops slaughtered by the heretics?

The workers who had become sacrifices to the heretics?

They didn't matter.

In the Chamber of Commerce's ledgers, human lives had always been just a cost.

And now, he had to make sure that cost had been worth it.