The roar of twin-engine aircraft tore through the air as Imperial transport landers, bearing the twin-headed Aquila, touched down in the grand plaza outside the cathedral.
Ragged survivors rushed to board under the direction of Cadian troopers, and the moment they hit capacity, the transports lifted off, bound straight for the spaceport.
These Cadian soldiers and aircraft had arrived while Vane and the others were debating whether or not to rescue Governor Flax.
Their original orders were strictly to locate General Dhrost and bring him safely back to the spaceport.
Dhrost had assured them he was under the protection of their Forefather and in no danger whatsoever, ordering the extraction unit to evacuate the civilians first to lift a massive weight off their shoulders.
Seeing the last of the refugees off, Vane immediately called the shot: they were going after Governor Flax.
You simply don’t pass up the chance to watch a messy, brother-killing family blood-tragedy live and in person.
The convoy changed course, rumbling straight toward the palatial estate of the Flax dynasty.
Along the way, they tangled in a couple of minor skirmishes with Tyranid vanguard units, but Vane batted them aside effortlessly.
The once-glorious complex of sprawling palaces was now a shattered ruin.
Rapidly growing living alien architecture choked the courtyards, while hordes of swarming rippers methodically carved up corpses and dragged them into bubbling digestion pools to recycle the biomass for the Hive Mind.
The approach of Vane’s convoy scared off the smaller bio-forms scavenging nearby.
As they pushed through the pulverized halls, they stumbled upon a servitor pinned beneath a collapsed stone lintel.
Though heavily battered, its internal systems were still faintly blinking.
A staff officer in the entourage promptly marched over, plugged a data-cable straight into the port at the base of the servitor’s skull, and keyed in an activation sequence.
The servitor’s augmented body convulsed violently.
A stream of bloody, corrupted code spilled from its lips before its vocal synthesizer clicked over into an empty, mechanical drone.
[Warning: Unit requires immediate debriefing with Governor Flax.
Warning: Plaza defense perimeter breached.
Warning: Security Hub J-7 overrun.
Warning: Leadership Hall overrun…] The mechanical warnings made Dhrost and his officers wince.
It was basically a verbal post-mortem spitting on their military defeat.
Using advanced tech-priest override privileges and decryption sub-routines, the tech-adept forced his way into the servitor’s memory banks.
He discovered that right before the stone column crushed it, the servitor had been heading directly to file a report with Governor Flax.
“The servitor’s memory banks hold the exact layout and coordinates of the subterranean bunker,” the tech-adept reported, his face lighting up.
“The bunker is directly beneath the palace, but the primary access route is heavily concealed.” “Lead the way,” Vane ordered.
“Let’s make this quick.” The squad followed the coordinates extracted from the servitor’s remnants, picking their way through the ruined palace until they uncovered the hidden subterranean access hatch.
Throughout the trek, an oppressive sensation prickled at the back of everyone’s necks—the distinct feeling that a pair of hateful, predatory eyes was tracking them from the shadows.
Yet, their auspex scanners registered zero biological signatures, clearly indicating some form of advanced Tyranid stealth adaptation capable of evading Imperial sensors.
Once they descended the tunnel into the subterranean complex, however, the probing eyes vanished, and the march proceeded without interference.
It seemed whatever was lurking in the dark actively wanted them to reach Governor Flax, willingly letting them roam the dim corridors unmolested.
After navigating the cold, gloomy service tunnels, Vane’s group halted before a massive, vacuum-sealed blast door.
Its heavy, interlocking gear-shaped blast panels bore the embossed crest of the Flax dynasty.
“This portal is keyed to the genetic signature and biometric passcodes of the Flax bloodline,” a staff officer declared grimly after sweeping the locking mechanism.
“We either need to find someone carrying Flax DNA and codes, or transmit a direct vox-ping to the Governor and have him pop the seal from the inside.” “Why bother wasting time like that?
Just smash it open,” Vane muttered.
He didn’t want to wait around and gave Steve the green light to mine.
Steve, completely invisible, casually whipped out an enchanted netherite pickaxe and started hacking away at the blast door.
With every strike, fine spiderweb cracks spidered across the reinforced steel.
Moments later, the entire door shattered into a neat bundle of pixelated item drops that Steve casually vacuumed straight into his inventory.
Dhrost and his men couldn’t see Steve, of course.
All they saw was a dense web of fractures instantly bloom across the solid, high-yield explosive blast door before it vanished into thin air.
The edges of the exposed doorframe were cut with terrifying precision, completely smooth with zero electrical arcing or plasma burns, as if some fundamental law of reality had simply decided the door no longer existed in that specific spot.
“Move out.” Dhrost didn’t waste brain cells trying to figure out how Vane pulled it off.
Over the course of a single day, they had witnessed an entire lifetime’s worth of impossible miracles: a walking cathedral, an army of iron golems, hand-crafting tanks and transports from thin air, drawing down the Emperor’s divine blessings, and summoning the Legion of the Damned.
At this point, their brains had hardwired a single absolute truth into their psyches: the Forefather was fundamentally omnipotent.
Any absurdity he pulled out of his hat was automatically rationalized as business as usual.
After tearing through a few more heavy blast doors with the same invisible pickaxe method, the group finally breached the inner sanctum of the bunker.
The interior design was breathtakingly lavish, dripping with opulence and styled like an imperial court.
It was nearly impossible to wrap one’s head around the fact that an absolute wasteland of a war zone sat just meters above this hedonistic paradise.
At the very heart of the complex lay a sprawling, artificially lit indoor garden where the elite aristocracy of the system were throwing a raging bacchanal.
The air was thick with a heavy, narcotic musk.
Floating servo-skulls drifted lazily overhead, constantly venting a psychoactive fog designed to flood the senses with euphoric, dream-like hallucinations while aggressively burning out their users’ capacity for chemical dependency.
The nobles were completely losing their minds, their faces locked in crazed, manic grins as they indulged in every depraved excess imaginable.
“These people are completely beyond saving,” Vane muttered, surveying the naked, writhing mass of bodies in the subterranean pleasure den.
Everyone knew the Imperial nobility was structurally rotten to the core.
Only a tiny fraction of aristocrats were ever willing to lay down their lives for the Emperor and humanity; the vast majority were violently myopic, selfish, cowardly cowards wrapped in silk.
Even so, the sheer scale of the depravity before him proved Vane had still somehow overestimated the absolute floor of aristocratic baseline morality.
At a time of absolute planetary extinction, these parasites were still throwing orgies and indulging in grotesque hedonism.
“Barachiel, round every single one of these pieces of trash up.
Once they sober up, strap every last one of them into a Penitent Engine.” “Their cowardice and incompetence have caused the suffering of millions.
It’s time to settle the bill.” Vane handed down a perfectly balanced verdict.
If you’re going to reap the rewards of absolute power while categorically refusing to shoulder its obligations, any pathetic excuse you try to offer later is utterly worthless.
“As you command, Forefather,” Bishop Barachiel replied with icy reverence.
He immediately motioned for his zealots and armed guards to round up the aristocracy.
The vast majority of the nobles were so thoroughly fried on psycho-active narcotics that they were practically boneless, completely incapable of putting up any resistance.
A tiny fraction who had managed to stay sober enough to register reality went white as sheets the second they stared down the barrels of the Imperial weapons, instantly collapsing into whimpering surrender.
As for the lowborn servants cowering in the corners, they dropped to their knees the second the doors breached, frantically begging for mercy and forgiveness.
“Dhrost?
What the hell are you doing here?!” A raspy, aged voice cut through the chaos.
Dhrost whipped his head toward the source of the sound, spotting an old man half-reclining on an opulent floating barge piled high with silk cushions and velvet bolsters.
It was none other than their primary target: Planetary Governor Flax.
“Didn’t you transmit the distress beacon telling us to come rescue you?” Dhrost’s face twisted into an expression of profound disgust.
“The fact that you can still spit out a question that stupid implies those narcotics have completely rotted what little brain you had left.” Hearing Dhrost’s words, Governor Flax’s bloodshot eyes suddenly bulged out of his skull, sheer, unadulterated terror flooding his features.
“No…
that’s impossible!
How in the hell could that monster figure out how to be this cunning and smart?!” “What on earth are you talking about?” Dhrost marched right up to the floating barge, convinced the old man had lost his mind.
“You’re the one who sent the distress signal.” “I didn’t send any vox-ping!” Flax gasped, looking utterly exhausted and hollowed out.
“You’ve all been tricked.
That monster lured you right into a death trap.” “What are you talking about?
The transmission carried the exact biometric DNA signature of the Flax bloodline.
If you didn’t send it, who else could have?” Bishop Barachiel felt his stomach drop down into his boots, a sudden, cold sweat breaking out across his neck as he felt the sky threatening to collapse on him a second time.
He was the one who had brought up the distress signal to begin with.
If the Forefather—who had literally received the direct blessing of the Emperor—ended up dead in a trap because of bad intel, Barachiel’s fate was sealed.
Dying meant infamy for eternity; surviving meant being dragged to the pyre by the Inquisition and then achieving infamy for eternity.
“I have a younger brother,” Flax’s wrinkled, aged face twisted into a mask of pure, hopeless despair.
“Or rather…
a monster born from a twisted union of Tyranid genetic sludge and Flax dynasty blood.
The distress signal you received?
That thing sent it.” “There is zero doubt about it.
This is a trap.
You guys blew the blast doors off the subterranean bunker and found me…
and that thing has probably been tailing you the entire time, waiting to tear every single one of you to ribbons.”