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The Chaos army did not fight alone.
When traitor boots touched Cadian soil, they brought ancient savagery with them.
Tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners were dragged into open ground and used as living sacrifices. Skinned. Deboned. Bled out. The rites spread across the battlefield like a plague, nauseating in their scale and precision.
The blood ran in channels, deliberately dug, deliberately placed, tracing an Eight-Pointed Star across the scorched earth, vast enough to be seen from orbit.
The slaughter of flesh was not rely war. It was worship.
The aurora above Cadia changed color.
The veil between realspace and the Sea of Souls thinned.
Sulfur haze thickened in the air, choking and acrid, laced with shrieks that drove straight through the eardrums. Physical laws buckled. The material world began to co apart at the seams.
Daemons poured through the cracks. Bloodletters on reverse-jointed legs. Pink Horrors vomiting fire in colors that had no na. Nurglings trailing clouds of plague-flies. They hit the Astra Militarum lines in waves, tearing into Cadia's defenses alongside the Chaos ground forces.
And that was before accounting for the Chaos Astartes who had already slipped behind the lines days earlier, hunting officers, severing the chain of command one targeted kill at a ti.
The Imperial command structure took a devastating blow. Positions fell. The defensive periter kept shrinking.
The outer bastions went down one by one under the tide of assaults, reduced to rubble and broken walls.
On the surface of Cadia, only one intact fortress remained.
Kraf's Bastion.
Inside the command center, the exhaust fans ran at full overload and still couldn't clear the tension from the air.
Creed had a cigar clamped between his teeth, eyes fixed on the holographic sand table, tracking the shifting lines of blue and red.
Adjutant Kell ca up the tal steps with a field summary docunt in hand.
Everything in it was bad news.
"Lord Castellan." Kell's voice had gone rough, his vocal cords shredded from hours of shouting. "The Convent Sanctorum district on the outer periter has been destroyed by daemon engines. The Sisters are withdrawing. Before they pulled back, they fought to the last and took down one Skull Lord, crippled another — but the line didn't hold."
Creed tapped the control panel. The local projection expanded.
"The Krarak Plains are worse." Kell turned to the next page. "The Space Wolves' Emperor's Angels are holding against the traitor armored columns. Losses are severe. The heretics airdropped Titan Legions into the engagent. The Wolf Lord has ordered withdrawal. The Dark Angels are pulling back with them."
Report after report. All defeats.
On the holographic display, the blue markers retreated steadily, squeezed from every direction by the advancing red tide.
"Nearly every frontline defense is contracting, my lord." Kell lowered his arm.
Creed exhaled a long breath of smoke. The ember lit his jaw, the stubble thick and grey.
"Inevitable strategic contraction." He said it slowly, each word deliberate. "We are holding the full weight of the Eye of Terror with a finite force. But look carefully — so positions are still holding. They are drawing the enemy's fury. They are buying us ti."
He pointed at the sand table. Kell followed the line of that rough finger to 2 salients, one east, one west.
The eastern blue dot was driven into the line like a nail that refused to co loose.
The Wall of Martyrs. High Marshal Amalrich's Black Templars, sons of Dorn, holding with flesh and blood and sheer stubborn will against everything the traitors threw at them.
Kell's gaze moved west. His eye twitched.
The Phoenix Infantry Regint?
A second-line unit. Cobbled together from fresh recruits. Holding a stable defensive position in the middle of a at grinder, and not one step back.
"How is that possible?" Kell pulled up the ground-level reports for the sector.
He read through the encrypted log. Swallowed.
"The 7th Company Commissar was killed in the first enemy airdrop," Creed said. "Crushed."
"Since then, a Captain Kaelen has taken over the Commissar's role. He's running with his two Ogryn retainers as a sector fire brigade — moving between companies, shoring up morale, and personally racking up a kill count that shouldn't be possible for a mortal."
"The number of Chaos Astartes they've put down is absurd. It's drawn the enemy commanders' attention and fury directly onto them, which has pulled pressure off the other lines."
Creed flicked ash from his cigar. Sothing like appreciation settled in his eyes.
"By the God-Emperor." Kell let out a slow breath. "Those two Ogryn can bloody well fight."
The uplift lasted 3 seconds. Then it faded, and the weight ca back.
Bright spots didn't change the strategic picture.
"But the main army is still retreating." Kell looked at Creed. "When the Astra Militarum sees that even the Emperor's Angels and the Sisters are pulling back, they will start to feel..."
He stopped.
"Fear." Creed said it for him.
No anger. No frustration. Just the word, flat and honest.
"I know, my friend." Creed ground the stub of his cigar out against the steel console. "We are mortal. Faced with sothing that defies every natural law, fear is not weakness, it is instinct. That soldiers who picked up a lasgun last month are standing their ground against daemons without breaking is already a miracle."
He crossed to the coat rack. Settled the wide-brimd officer's cap onto his head. Pulled on the greatcoat and squared his shoulders.
"Which is exactly why we have to stand with them. Give them sothing to stand behind."
Creed drew his bolt pistol, racked the slide, and chambered a round.
"Co with to the front."
"Where exactly, my lord?"
"Into the mud." He was already moving toward the door. "To tell every last one of them: Cadia stands!"
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Across the battlefield, on the Phoenix Infantry Regint's lines.
"Cadia stands!"
"Comrades! Look at what's across from us!"
"Freaks twisted by the Chaos Gods, not human, not anything! But we are standing here. We are still human. We still have our dignity!"
"He upon the Golden Throne sees our resistance, and He is proud! What we are doing is the most righteous thing in this universe! We defend the legacy of the Master of Mankind, we are His most loyal warriors!"
"Scorn the hardships the traitors bring. The road to victory is never clean. It is thorns and blood and grinding forward. That is what this is. When your soul returns to the Throne, you will be able to look the Emperor of Mankind in the eye and say: I was at Cadia. And He will look back at you and say: there is a warrior."
Kaelen's voice rolled across the Phoenix Infantry Regint's lines, loud enough to reach nearly every company.
After the Commissar died, he had stepped into the gap without thinking about it. He and Horus and Cullen had been running from line to line, plugging holes, and sowhere along the way he had looked at the faces of the defenders and seen the morale draining out of them. So he had picked up the banner.
He'd traded System points for a high-amplification loudspeaker. He used it constantly, roaring, rallying, refusing to let the silence settle.
Even Horus and Cullen, who had spent the battle quietly tearing Chaos Astartes apart with their hands, had to admit it: the kid had a gift. Born for this. A natural Commissar if one ever existed.
Crude. Blunt. No poetry to it. But it hit like a stimm injection straight to the bloodstream.
Under the combined weight of Kaelen's voice and the three-man fire brigade cutting through every crisis on the line, the Phoenix Infantry Regint held. Chaos Astartes, cultists, daemon hordes, wave after wave broke against them, and they did not move.
They had even counter-charged once. The whole regint surging forward behind Kaelen and his 2 Ogryn, fearless and screaming, driving straight into an enemy Chaos Astartes warband and tearing the head off it. They pushed the Chaos line back 10 kiloters before the montum finally spent itself.
Now, in the drifting smoke, every soldier in the Phoenix Infantry Regint had their eyes fixed on the sa 2 figures at the front.
Two Ogryn. Towering. Unhurried. Unstoppable.
Looking at them did sothing to a man. Put iron in the spine where there had been water.
As if, as long as you followed them forward, victory was not just possible.
It was close enough to touch.
➤ Next: The Hounds of Abaddon
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