During the Great Crusade, every Legion had its own distinctive traits. But by and large, they served as the spearhead, weaving through enemy lines to gnaw at the hardest targets. The backbone of the Great Crusade would always be the so-called Imperial Guard.
This inevitably led to one awkward problem: the dispersal of military forces.
When they encountered a weak Xenos race or a rebellious planet, the Space Marines, serving as the spearhead, could easily reclaim the lost colony or world. But if they ran into a tough target with technology on par with the Imperium's, their casualties would soar to an extremely high figure.
After two years of recovery, Blackwatch had grown to more than 17,000 Space Marines. Nearly 400,000 shipboard auxiliaries were equipped with T1 Individual Power Armor, and they had a full Knight Mech regiment and a Titan detachment for ground support. But compared with other Legions that fielded tens of thousands more warriors, their numbers still looked a little inadequate.
Whenever they discovered a world that needed to be reclaimed, Blacklight would draw enemy fire from the front while the other regiments surged toward the target from multiple angles like a pack of wolves, encircling it with the sheer weight of a massive army.
They used long-range Lance strikes in the early stages, an armored assault in the middle, and infantry to breach and sweep the battlefield in the final stage. They never split their forces to attack several worlds at once. Even if it slowed the expedition and displeased the Emperor, Hogg refused to divide his forces.
During the Great Crusade, humanity had no shortage of Primarchs capable of conquering fortified cities and capturing enemy strongholds. Under Hogg's plan, after reclaiming each region in its entirety, they would rest there, consolidate control of the conquered colonies, and wait for the Imperial Administratum to arrive and establish the basic order of the Imperium.
The Imperium's methods were every bit as vile as those of the baldies from his previous life, if not worse. But compared to the cesspit of the Warp, the Imperium was nothing short of paradise. In later times, the Space Marines who turned traitor in the Warp would fight each other like dogs over a single mouthful of clean water.
In Hogg's eyes, the Emperor's Great Crusade was far too hasty. Perhaps it was all for the Webway Project, but it also left behind hidden dangers that would fuel rebellions across the galaxy. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush.
Over the course of six months, Blackwatch reclaimed seven human colonies in the star system that had rebelled, along with every world except the Laer Lizardmen's homeworld.
With the Alicia system as its rear base, the Blackwatch Legion employed a great many Rogue Traders. The enormous quantities of supplies looted from the conquered worlds were also used to support development in the systems around Alicia.
This was, in truth, deeply immoral, and the Administratum was extremely displeased. But no one could do anything about Hogg. A noble child of the Emperor was, wherever he went, as good as the Emperor himself being present.
Hogg acted this way because, in the near future, a planet would be teleported close to Alicia. Its name was Ullanor, known in later ages as Armageddon.
A brutal Greenskin war would erupt there in the future. If Alicia couldn't be turned into a fully developed fortress world during this period, countless Greenskins would flood the neighboring sectors and form a vast Ork Empire.
Aiers was the last world in the system that had yet to be reclaimed. Hogg decided to go there in person and show them what a Primarch could do.
Beost, king of the Laer, knew the history of his people.
Long ago, the Laer had been slaves, but they overthrew their human rulers and took up the technology the humans left behind. After a thousand years of development, they had grown into what they were now. But the former slave masters had returned.
A massive, deep-blue shield covered the Laer capital, which occupied half a continent. Even the enormous Lance fired from Blacklight in orbit couldn't pierce it.
That left both sides with no choice but to wage a war of attrition. The heavy weaponry on the outer perimeter had largely been cleared, making it suitable for green recruits to train by sweeping up the remnants. But the fighting at the front was so intense that even a moment's carelessness could cost a veteran of Blackwatch his life. The Xenos also had war machines comparable to Titans, and the Titan pilots on both sides began trading devastating barrages.
Amid the thunder of artillery on the battlefield, Hogg immediately recognized that the seemingly impenetrable shield before him was a relic of the Dark Age of Technology. It might even be powered by the Warp. The only way to bring it down was to cut off its power source, but Blackwatch had no way to block the Warp passages across an entire planet.
After much deliberation, Hogg decided to use the most classic method of attack: digging a tunnel.
An orbital mining tunnel-boring machine was dropped onto the battlefield by the air force. As if they had sensed Hogg's intentions, the Xenos unleashed even more ferocious bombardments and desperate assaults. Plasma fire blotted out the sky and rained down on the battlefield. The Titan Group charged, plasma and lasers melting the earth and carving trails of death across it.
Auxilia casualties began to soar, and Knight Mechs were scrapped in batches. Rossmanderson, captain of the First Company, ordered the captured Lizardmen to be brought up as human shields to fill the trenches. Human soldiers forced the alien old, weak, and sick to advance toward the front lines.
The Xenos warriors who charged out couldn't believe humans would resort to such a despicable tactic. Some of the Xenos soldiers broke down and tried to flee the battlefield, only to be shot by the commissars behind them.
Using the Xenos prisoners to distract the enemy and cover for the even more intense bombardment, the Primarch led his bodyguard, all clad in Terminator Armor, to start up the drilling machine in a secluded spot.
The Plasma Reactor inside the drilling machine began to roar. Its enormous, superheated drill crushed soil and rock as countless engineers reinforced the tunnel behind it.
Under the unrelenting bombardment, countless rounds of every kind were expended, and some gun barrels even warped. At last, Hogg and his boarding party reached the foot of the royal city, where an unknown thickness of metal lay beneath the ground.
The drill finally wore out. With no time to replace it, Hogg leapt out of the cabin and touched the metal with both hands. Emerald lightning, thicker than ever before, surged as the metal's structure warped.
"Open up!!!" he roared. A breach tore through the nearly hundred-meter-thick underground defenses. The horrified faces of the Xenos appeared before them.
"Kill them! Crush them!"
The drilling machine's deafening roar had made it impossible to conceal their approach.
As the ground broke open, the Lizardmen, who had already established a defensive line, unleashed a furious barrage. The Blackwatch troops who had just fought their way through the underground facility were blasted by every kind of plasma weapon. A Leman Russ melted on the spot.
But in that instant, Hogg, clad in Raider Power Armor, soared out of the tunnel. The weapons platform loaded with missiles, Melta weapons, and Grav-cannons began to overheat, and its ammunition was expended in three seconds. A breach tore open in the defensive line ahead, while Hogg in the air drew all the fire in the area. Heavy plasma cannons began to focus on him.
Lyla Lynn couldn't reach the Primarch in time to protect him. She snatched the Chainsword from her waist and led thirty veterans in Terminator Armor in an indiscriminate teleport straight into the battlefield. They roared:
"Protect the Primarch! Kill those Xenos!"
Chainswords sawed through armor, Power Swords tore through flesh, and roaring Bolters smashed one Xenos after another. Green scales and scarlet blood splattered across the battlefield.
After a plasma blast melted one of Hogg's arms, he began slaughtering the enemy with his other, still-intact Power Klaw. Tree-root-like tendrils sprouted from the stump of his severed limb, burrowing into the Xenos and devouring their energy.
Watching his people butchered by the monster in their midst as more human troops emerged from underground, Beost let out a pained wail. The future of the Laer was gone.
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