The banquet hall was a scene of utter chaos; the expensive furniture and exquisite decorations had been reduced to rubble by Huron’s power sword.
Only then did he manage to regain his composure.
Looking at the Watt family servants, paralyzed with fear and unable to resist, he established contact with the Chapter and issued orders to the Chapter’s high command, who were on high alert: “According to the contingency plan, control traffic to the Hive and wipe out all noble strongholds.
Also, activate all available warships and blockade orbital space.”
“All enemies, those who resist will be killed without mercy, those who surrender will be imprisoned and put on trial.”
“Understood.” The entire Chapter immediately acted according to plan.
The Captain of the First Company led over 800 Astartes aboard Thunderhawk gunships in a high-altitude assault on the spire, while the Second Company, in coordination with the Chapter’s other four reserve companies, began blockading and wiping out all noble forces from the Upper Hive.
Odinson assumed command of all regular troops, ordering the armed police to blockade the main roads of the upper, middle, and lower hives, while the special forces divisions prepared for assault missions.
The first to suffer were the PDF soldiers of Paratos Hive.
Thanks to the nobles’ cleverness, most of them were outsiders recruited from other hives.
Not only did they lack local ties, but they also had no relatives or friends in the hive, allowing them to carry out various suppression orders without any psychological burden.
Therefore, Odinson ordered several Astartes, along with special forces divisions and armed police, to quickly surround the various PDF barracks and demand immediate surrender.
Most of the PDF soldiers who were chatting and playing cards immediately surrendered.
Their training level was already poor; reaching even Level 1 in the system’s evaluation was a struggle, so naturally they had no will to fight to the death.
Not to mention the presence of the Emperor’s Angels, and the soldiers on the other side were all in exoskeletons, even having Chimera fire support vehicles right in their faces.
Anyone who hesitated even a moment longer to surrender would likely be shot.
They didn’t even understand what was happening.
As an army barely better than a gang, how could they be expected to fight the Emperor’s Angels for the sake of the nobles?
The surrendered PDF were disarmed by armed police, who took all their weapons and locked them inside the camp — a form of de facto imprisonment.
As for the few who resisted, and some PDF soldiers who had developed a bond with the nobles from doing their dirty work, they were swiftly wiped out by special forces divisions and Astartes.
Tens of thousands of bolters fired simultaneously, combined with the heavy weapons on the Chimera support vehicles and the plasma weapons provided by the Astartes.
The PDF camp’s defenses were practically paper-thin.
Except for a few fortifications built along the main structure of the hive, the rest — rockcrete — was reduced to rubble.
Astartes led the special forces division through the breach into the camp, preparing for close-quarters combat.
Upon witnessing this, the PDF soldiers’ morale immediately collapsed.
Although Badab Primaris was not the Astral Claws’ homeworld, the Chapter chose its space station as their Chapter Monastery.
For centuries, the inhabitants of Badab Primaris had grown up listening to stories of the God-Emperor and his Angels.
Now, discovering they were the ones being punished by the God-Emperor’s Angels, they naturally offered no resistance.
The Astartes bypassed the kneeling mortals and stormed into the command centre of the PDF barracks, slaughtering all the high-ranking officers who attempted to resist.
Having dealt with the PDF army, which was weak in combat but numerous, everyone immediately returned to their posts: the Astartes went to wipe out the noble forces in the Upper Hive, while special forces and armed police went to wipe out and contain the noble forces in the Middle and Lower Hives.
In reality, there were practically no noble forces left in the Lower Hive.
The Astral Claws’ infrastructure projects had absorbed 6 billion people, and almost every family in the Lower Hive had benefited from it.
The few who didn’t understand were quickly taught a lesson by their neighbours.
However, to prevent the remnants of the nobility from escaping to the Lower Hive and even the Underhive, causing trouble for subsequent operations, it was still necessary to block the passages to the Middle and Lower Hives.
This task was assigned to Old John, who had transitioned from instructor to high-ranking officer.
He now commands 20 armed police divisions, each with 50,000 personnel, and a special operations division of 10,000.
Frankly, he never dreamed he’d risen from a lowly hiver to the commander of an army group in less than a year.
In fact, it wasn’t just him; everyone in the command headquarters was originally from the Lower Hive, and no one could have imagined they’d reach this point.
Old John patted his cheeks, gathering his scattered thoughts, and walked to the command centre’s hololith to check for any omissions in the troop deployment.
As the largest and most populous Hive City on the planet Badab, Paratos’s Lower Hive covers six million square kilometres, almost half the size of the United States in his previous life.
Unlike the United States, which has vast tracts of undeveloped land, almost every inch of Paratos’s Lower Hive shows signs of habitation.
Combined with the uniquely complex environment of a Hive City, completely sealing off the area between the middle and lower hives with just over a million people is utterly a pipe dream.
However, he couldn’t simply blow up the passages between the lower and middle hives; the subsequent repair trouble would likely be greater than that caused by the remnants of the nobility.
So Old John chose a compromise.
He ordered the armed police to use the information obtained from interrogating various gang leaders to mark all the hidden private passages of the noble families.
Then, they directly moved high-density rockcrete blocks to seal the exits.
This way, even if the nobles used the passages to reach the Lower Hive, they would be trapped inside the rockcrete blocks.
After hundreds, even thousands of years of development, the nobles of Paratos had countless such secret passages.
A million men were simply not enough to cover them all.
Not to mention, a significant number of men would have to be diverted to maintain curfew control in the Lower Hive, further exacerbating the already limited manpower.
Old John had previously wondered why the Chapter Master hadn’t dealt with the gangs and nobles sooner; now he understood that manpower shortages were a major reason.
However, he now had another question: things were going well before, so how did a full-scale conflict with the nobles suddenly erupt?
If there had been more time to prepare, to demobilize some administrators, and to build more armed police divisions, things wouldn’t be so strained and leaky as they are now.
However, complaining is useless; when problems arise, solutions must be found.
Old John’s solution was to utilize the tens of millions of administrators and mobilize the two hundred million labourers who had been working there for the past six months to block the passages in place of the armed police divisions.
This work required little technical skill, and the labourers, who had been working in civil engineering for the past six months, were already adept at it.
Furthermore, everyone had witnessed the Astral Claws’ actions over the past six months, so the labourers responded enthusiastically.
Although they didn’t know what was happening, for their own benefit, they naturally voted with their feet.
After all, they didn’t know what would happen if the Astral Claws won, but if they lost, they would definitely suffer.
Even simply returning to their previous lives was unbearable for them.
So what are we waiting for?
Let’s do it, brothers!