The Expedition Begins

Chapter 13: The Expedition Begins

Scarlet Power Armour strode through the ruins as acid rain laced with toxic substances dripped onto its smooth metal surface.

A Tactical Squad prowled the city's alleys, slowly sweeping the muzzles of their heavy assault rifles across every suspicious spot. It was the third month since the war began.

To Haka, the once-prosperous streets had become a wreck. His friends and family had long since been burned to ashes, and all he had left was his hatred for the invaders.

Before they arrived, he had had a perfect family. His wife, with her strong, long tail, had added three children to their household. But the demons who fell from the sky shattered their peace.

That day, a vast fleet arrived at a Laer colony world. It lingered only briefly before enormous beams shattered the colony's orbital defense network.

Early in the war, several colonies had already lost control of their skies. The Laer, who had broken their shackles and ventured among the stars, were brutally driven back down to the ground.

Then came the black-armored warriors, descending from the sky. One planet's defense systems after another began to collapse, and brutal massacres unfolded everywhere. Fewer than one in ten people survived. The only choice was to flee back to their homeworld and preserve the hope of their species.

"Sir, we've reached the mission site."

The scarlet-armored warriors stopped. Haka gave a hand signal, and the soldiers fanned out, entering the building ahead.

According to the monitoring report, an alien Drop Pod had crashed into this building. Haka pushed open the shattered glass doors. His display showed his teammates' positions, but no other targets.

"Left side clear. No targets."

"Right side clear. I've found the target in Dining Room 2."

The image was transmitted to Haka's display. A black-painted Drop Pod was embedded in the dining room wall. The intense heat of its fall had set the clutter around it ablaze, sending up billows of black smoke.

The soldiers regrouped and tightened their perimeter, searching the nearby shadows, but found no sign of the black-armored giant. "Where the hell is it? Expand the search—" Haka was about to give the order when a sudden alert sounded. He hurriedly swung his gun around.

A massive gun barrel poked out from a gap beneath the rubble.

"Bang!" A diamond-tipped bolt round fired, streaking toward the Xenos before him. The armor couldn't save its wearer from death. The round punched into its body and exploded, blasting Haka's head away. In his final moment, he knew he would finally be reunited with his family.

After taking out the first target, Blackwatch warriors hidden beneath the rubble leapt to their feet. Their Bolters roared, suppressing the fire of the Xenos squad before them.

One Xenos tried to engage them in close combat, confident that its physical strength could tear through their defenses. But the Chainsword's roar shredded the blade in its hands and its blasphemous armor.

Green fluid sprayed everywhere. Using its comrade as cover, a Xenos soldier raised an ion rifle—the only weapon that had proven capable of piercing the black-armored warriors.

A searing blast of plasma shot out, punching through the Power Armour. But a bolt round ended the shooter's life.

The soldiers reacted and opened fire, holding down their triggers, but they couldn't stop themselves from being killed. Even a wounded Blackwatch warrior could slaughter them. Scenes like this were playing out all over the planet.

Three minutes later, a Blackwatch Sergeant climbed out from underground and approached the Blackwatch warrior leaning against a gap in the rubble. Her damaged helmet was lifted, revealing Ginny's face.

"New recruit, you failed to identify a threat to yourself, and as a result, you were wounded. You have not passed your trial. You still need seventeen more Xenos heads to complete it. You've disappointed your father!"

A Techmarine removed the armor from her chest and examined her injuries, assessing the recruit's performance with meticulous care.

Two servo-arms extended from the power pack on his back, each holding a plasma cutter. They sliced through the melted Plasteel. Thanks to her excellent regenerative abilities and blood-clotting organs, the wound had already begun to heal. "Your Secondary Heart is damaged. You'll need to return to the mothership for repairs."

"Understood, sir." Ginny stood back up and followed the Sergeant into an open area, where a transport waited. The cabin was full of wounded Blackwatch recruits.

A recruit whose lower body had been melted away saw Ginny arrive and greeted her. "Ginny, how many heads do you still need?"

Perhaps because they were from the same batch of recruits, Ginny knew his name: "Talkative John," a recruit who never stopped talking. "I still need seventeen."

"Seventeen? Ginny, you're amazing! Father set each of us a quota of four hundred Xenos heads. It's only the second day, and you're nearly done. Too bad you got wounded—otherwise, you'd have won the hunt again. Though Jill might take the prize this time."

"Then I'll let her have it." Ginny didn't want to keep talking to John, who always brought up the wrong thing.

The Jill Valentine John had mentioned was a recruit selected in the same batch as Ginny. A Catachan jungle fighter, she was one of the two best in their batch.

Thanks to Father's experiments and observations of female Space Marines, the two were his main subjects and often got to appear before Hogg. Both wanted to win their father's favor and refused to yield to the other. Hogg, for his part, was happy to watch them compete, and even set up a betting pool in the Legion.

Aiers was the first world Hogg had encountered on his expedition where the inhabitants had put up stubborn resistance. Records showed that this planet, perpetually drenched in rain, had lost contact with the outside world amid the ravages of a Warp Storm.

The Xenos species that had once been used as slaves began to rebel. The humans on the planet were wiped out, and the reptilian beings who ruled Aiers absorbed the remnants of human technology. Now, they had even developed an interstellar power.

As soon as the fleet discovered this power, its Lances gave the space station a photon resurfacing at maximum range. Then a large number of probes were sent down to the planet.

Only after the important surface facilities had been bombarded did squads of Auxilia and Blackwatch begin sweeping the ground. Then the Laer expeditionary fleet arrived, and the two sides began a fierce exchange of fire in space.

Steel and corpses filled the surrounding void.

Warfare in the Space Age wasn't as simple as two groups of people shooting at each other. It began with direct, long-range strikes. The dazzling Lance Batteries could melt any intruder.

Unless they encountered shields too strong to penetrate and had to launch a boarding assault, battles in space were always fought ship to ship.

The Xenos were technologically advanced, and could even hold their own against the fleet. But Blackwatch brought in more human forces from nearby, using their numerical superiority to gradually force the enemy to contract its lines.

After more than three months, and the loss of nearly a thousand Space Marines and damage to the deck of the Blacklight, the Xenos forces had been driven back to their homeworld, Aiers.

The recruits lacked the baptism of fire, and the gaps left by fallen veterans had to be filled. So, after assigning each recruit a quota of four hundred, the veterans took them out for a training exercise.

Hogg had based a series of training methods on his own military training in his previous life, combining it with the 11th Legion's past standards.

The planet Aiers was highly suitable for human life, and it undoubtedly held traces of lost technology, so they couldn't glass it from orbit.

Besides, Exterminatus could only be used against targets with no value, or whose returns wouldn't justify the cost. Such a fine planet would soon attract hordes of Rogue Traders once it had been cleared.

The Xenos on the other planets had been wiped out. Some were made into specimens to expand the Primarch's gene stock. Hogg's research had revealed that these creatures were immensely strong, nearly as powerful as Ogryns. Their weapons were also not far behind the Imperium's, and many Blackwatch warriors and Auxilia had been killed when the Xenos concentrated their fire on them.