In M41.999, a cataclysm long foretold by Astropaths arrived as promised, swiftly sweeping across this scarred expanse of stars.
The Chaos Warmaster, Ezekyle Abaddon.
Led his vast fleet, composed of Chaos Legiones Astartes, Chaos Cultists, and Warp Daemons.
Out of the Eye of Terror, launching the most insane and greatest crusade of his life.
The Thirteenth Black Crusade!
Wherever Abaddon's flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, passed, planets shattered, fleets were annihilated, and countless worlds were reduced to scorched earth in the raging tide of Chaos.
The ultimate objective of this crusade was to destroy the Imperium's strategic stronghold at the Eye of Terror, the Cadian Gate.
By its end, this campaign would cause the Great Rift, which tore through space and time, to spread from the Cadia System, forcibly ripping the entire galaxy in two.
The "boundary" between light and darkness was forcibly divided, and from then on, the Imperium of Man was split into the "Sanctus," sheltered by the Emperor's radiance.
And the "dark side," eroded by Warp energy and ravaged by the forces of Chaos, as galactic order collapsed completely.
Even the Hive World of Necromunda, far out on the Imperium's fringes, could not escape the repercussions of this galactic storm.
Although it did not face a direct assault from the Chaos Fleet, it too faced a "natural disaster" of its own.
A Hive Fleet descended!
In early M41.999, the Sons of Medusa Chapter fortress in the Telos System.
Finally received the second distress signal from the Hive World of Necromunda.
By then, the Clan Magara Devastator squad led by Cassius had been wiped out on Necromunda for over a month.
During that month, Warp turbulence around Necromunda had repeatedly blocked the distress signals.
Only now had the message barely managed to reach the Chapter, and its contents were already badly fragmented.
But from the garbled fragments, the Sons of Medusa still learned the broad outline of what had happened.
Yet by the time the Sons of Medusa's command had finished decoding the signal and confirmed the identity of the missing squad.
The swarm's howls were already ringing through Necromunda's orbit.
The Hive Fleet's vanguard had already broken through the planet's fragile orbital defenses and begun dropping spore pods and Tyranid ground forces toward the Hive Cities.
This Hive World, where the Tyranids had long since taken root, had entered the final countdown to its destruction.
But to the Sons of Medusa, Necromunda's survival was irrelevant.
Whether the ten Space Marines' gene-seed could be recovered was the paramount priority above all else.
Gene-seed was the lifeblood of every Space Marine Chapter, the foundation for passing on the genes of demigods and sustaining the Chapter's existence, and every single one was beyond precious.
What concerned the Chapter even more was that, if these seeds containing the Iron Hands' genetic sequences fell into Tyranid hands.
And were analyzed and assimilated by the Tyranids, they could very likely produce a new Tyranid subspecies designed to counter the Astartes.
That could pose a threat to the entire Chapter, and even the Imperium of Man.
Without the slightest hesitation, the Sons of Medusa's three core clans.
Clan Atropos, Clan Magara, and Clan Lachesis immediately convened an emergency holographic council.
In the end, they decided to bypass all Imperial bureaucratic procedures and take action directly.
The objective was clear: recover the ten sets of gene-seed from Cassius's squad.
Necromunda's survival and the lives of mortals were not among their considerations.
The operation began, and Clan Lachesis's Strike Cruiser fleet was the first to translate into the vicinity of Necromunda.
The fleet first deployed biological psychic jammers, severing Warp communications between the planet and the Hive Ships.
Slowing the Tyranids' "biomass assimilation rate" while also preventing them from spreading to neighboring systems.
Orbital scans and marking followed, using high-precision detectors to locate two core targets.
The coordinates where the ten-man squad had fallen, and the Tyranids' main spawning nest and spore-cloud generation sites.
Orbital fire suppression began immediately afterward, delivering precision bombardments against the main spawning nest to slow the pace of the Tyranid offensive.
Under the fleet's fire support, Clan Magara and Clan Atropos would form a 120-man mixed task force to make a forced aerial landing on Necromunda.
Clan Atropos's assault detachment would penetrate the defenses at low altitude aboard Storm Eagle Gunships.
And drop directly into the Underhive, tasked with establishing a temporary defensive perimeter to provide a foothold for the reinforcements that would follow.
Next came Clan Magara's heavy weapons detachment, which landed within the temporary defensive perimeter with a large number of vehicles.
By deploying heavy lascannons, missile launchers, and other weapons, they established a network of heavy firepower to suppress the swarming Tyranids and Tyranid Behemoths surging in from every direction.
Clan Magara's clan chief personally oversaw the operation, directing the allocation of firepower.
Once the battle had stabilized, the Sons of Medusa's Apothecaries descended upon Necromunda with the final wave of troops.
In Necromunda's Underhive, they broke through obstruction after obstruction and cleared out countless Tyranids.
At last, following the trail of Cassius's squad's final signals, they made their way to the Abyssal Spawning Pool.
The spawning pool was already a scene of devastation, with charred fungal mats, shattered Power Armour, and Tyranid corpses piled together.
The mingled smells of psychic scorching and rotting flesh lingered in the air.
The reconnaissance squad's members spread out to search, examining their battle-brothers' remains one by one.
Yet they could not find a single gene-seed, and even their battle-brothers' flesh and blood had vanished.
Those precious legacies had long since been stripped from their corpses by Rena through the Tyranids' unique methods.
"Every warrior's gene-seed is missing!"
The reconnaissance squad's report reached the fleet, fully igniting the Sons of Medusa's fury.
The sacrifice of ten warriors and the loss of their precious gene-seed exhausted the last of this iron-blooded Chapter's patience.
To them, this planet had been sentenced to death from the moment the Hive Fleet arrived.
Now even its only remaining value-the gene-seed-had disappeared.
Without any hesitation, once the troops dropped onto Necromunda had returned to the fleet.
The fleet's main guns immediately began charging, and dazzling beams of energy pierced the atmosphere.
Like the Emperor's wrath, they plunged savagely into the core of the Hive World of Necromunda.
Violent explosions spread across the surface, engulfing the aristocratic palaces of the upper Hive Cities, the factories of the middle levels, and the slums of the lower levels.
Along with the rampaging Tyranids, all were reduced to ash beneath the bombardment.
The ground split open, magma erupted, and within an extremely short time, the entire planet became a lifeless expanse of scorched earth, utterly erased from the map of the stars.
And none of this had anything to do with Lynn anymore, far away in the Silis System.
At that moment, aboard the biologically modified Vagabond-class merchant ship, he was leaning against Rena's body, gazing at the stars outside the window.
The Sons of Medusa's retaliation and the Hive Fleet's arrival were already things of the past.