The Expedition Begins

The expedition has begun.

Scarlet power armor strode across the ruins, acid rain mixed with hazardous substances dripping onto the smooth metal surfaces.

A tactical squad wandered through the city alleys, the muzzles of their heavy assault bolters slowly sweeping every suspicious corner. It had been three months since the war began.

For Haka, the once-prosperous streets had become dilapidated and broken. His friends and family had long since been burned to ash; all he had left was hatred for the invaders.

Before they arrived, he had possessed a perfect family. His wife, with her sturdy, long tail, had added three members to their household, but the demons that descended from the sky shattered that peace.

That day, a massive fleet arrived at the Light People's colony planet. It stayed for only a moment before enormous beams of light shattered the orbital defense network.

In the early stages of the war, air superiority over several colonies was completely stripped away. The Light People, who had broken their shackles to roam the stars, were ruthlessly struck down to the ground.

The black-armored warriors that followed breached the skies. One by one, the planetary defense systems collapsed, and cruel massacres unfolded across the land. Fewer than one in ten survived, leaving them no choice but to flee back to their homeworld to preserve the hope of their race.

"Officer, we have reached our target location."

The scarlet warriors halted. Haka made a gesture, and the soldiers began to disperse, entering the building ahead.

According to monitoring reports, an alien drop pod had crashed into this structure. Pushing through the damaged glass porch, Haka's display showed no targets other than his teammates.

"Left side clear, no targets."

"Right side clear. I've found the target in the No. 2 dining hall."

The feed was transmitted to Haka's display. A black-painted drop pod was embedded in the dining hall wall, the heat of its descent igniting surrounding debris and emitting plumes of black smoke.

The gathered soldiers tightened their defensive line, searching the nearby shadows, but they found no trace of the black-armored giants. "Where are they? Expand the sear—" Haka, about to issue the order, was startled by a sudden alert and hurriedly turned his muzzle.

A massive gun barrel extended from a gap beneath the rubble.

"Bang!" A diamond-tipped bolt was fired, flying toward the alien before him. The armor it struck could not withstand the arrival of death; the bolt exploded upon entering the body, and Haka's head was blown away. In his final moment, he knew he could finally be reunited with his family.

After taking out the first target, the Blackwatch soldier buried in the ruins sprang up from the ground, his bolter firing violently to suppress the firepower of the alien squad.

An alien attempted close-quarters combat, believing his physical strength could tear through the opponent's defenses, but the roar of a chainsword shredded the long blade in his hand and his blasphemous armor.

Green liquid splattered. Using his comrade as cover, an alien soldier raised his ion rifle—the only weapon tested to be capable of piercing the black armor.

A scorching plasma shot was fired, piercing the power armor, but a single bolt ended the opponent.

The soldiers who reacted fired wildly, pulling their triggers desperately, but this could not prevent them from being killed, even if the Blackwatch soldier opposite them was wounded. Such scenes were playing out all over the planet.

Three minutes later, a Blackwatch sergeant emerged from underground and arrived before the Blackwatch soldier leaning against a gap in the ruins. The damaged helmet was lifted, revealing the face of Ginny.

"Recruit, you failed to assess a target that posed a threat to you, resulting in your injury. Your trial is not passed. You are still 17 alien heads short of completing this trial. You have disappointed Father!"

The armor on her chest was removed as the tech-marine meticulously evaluated the recruit's performance.

Two power arms mounted behind the power pack popped out, wielding plasma cutters to slice through the melted ceramite. Thanks to excellent regenerative abilities and redundant organs, the wound had already begun to heal. "Your second heart is damaged; you need to return to the mothership for repairs."

"Understood! Officer." Ginny, having stood back up, walked with the sergeant to an open area where a transport ship waited. The cabin was filled with wounded Blackwatch recruits.

A recruit whose lower body had been melted away greeted Ginny upon her arrival. "Ginny, how many more do you need?"

Perhaps because they were in the same batch of recruits, Ginny knew his name: 'Chatterbox John,' a recruit who talked too much. "I'm still 17 heads short."

"17? Ginny, you're amazing. Father set a quota of 400 alien soldier heads for each of us. It's only the second day and you're almost done. It's a pity that if you weren't injured, you'd be the champion of this hunt again. Though, it might be Jill this time."

"Then let her have it for once." Ginny did not want to continue talking to John, who insisted on bringing up sore subjects.

The Jill Valentine mentioned by John was a recruit from the same selection batch as Ginny. As a Catachan jungle fighter, the two were the best in their group.

Thanks to Father's observation of the female Space Marine experiments, the two were treated as primary subjects and could frequently appear before Hogg. To compete for Father's favor, the two were unconvinced by each other, and Hogg was happy to watch their rivalry, even unscrupulously opening betting pools within the Legion.

Aiers was the first world of tenacious resistance Hogg had encountered in half a year of expeditions. According to records, this planet, covered in rain year-round, had lost the ability to communicate with the outside world under the ravages of warp storms.

The alien race, originally used as slaves, began to revolt. The humans on the planet were exterminated, and the lizard-like creatures that ruled Aiers absorbed the remaining human technology, developing into a force that spanned the galaxy by today.

The moment this force was discovered, the ship's lance batteries gave the space station a "photonic facial" at extreme range, after which a large number of probes were dropped onto the surface.

After bombing the important facilities on the surface, squads of Auxilia and Blackwatch began ground clearing, followed by the expeditionary fleet of the Light People. The two sides began intense exchanges of fire in space.

Steel and corpses paved the surrounding starry sky.

War in the interstellar era was not as simple as two groups of people shooting at each other with guns. With direct ultra-long-range strikes, brilliant lance arrays could melt any foreign enemy.

Unless they encountered shields too thick to breach, requiring boarding assaults, war in the starry sky was always a duel between warships.

The alien technological strength was not bad; they could even trade blows with the fleet. However, the Blackwatch simply pulled in more human troops from nearby, using numbers to pressure them into slowly shrinking their defensive line.

After more than three months, and at the cost of nearly a thousand Space Marine lives and damage to the deck of the Blacklight, the alien forces were compressed to their homeworld, Aiers.

Because the recruits lacked the baptism of fire, and the dead veterans needed to be replaced, after setting a quota of 400 for each recruit, the veterans were ordered to lead them in a recruit exercise.

This was a series of training methods Hogg had formulated based on his own experience of being trained as a soldier in his previous life, combined with the past standards of the 11th Legion.

Aiers was a planet very suitable for human survival, and it definitely contained legacy technology, so they could not perform "glassing" from orbit.

Furthermore, Exterminatus could only be used on targets that were worthless or whose benefits could not justify the cost. As long as such a good planet was cleared, large numbers of Rogue Traders would arrive immediately.

The aliens on other planets were wiped out, and a small portion were turned into specimens to expand the Primarch's genetic inventory. Through Hogg's research, he discovered that the physical strength of these creatures was extremely powerful, comparable to Ogryns. Coupled with weapons not much worse than those of Imperium, many Blackwatch and Auxilia were killed by their concentrated fire.