Though the tech-visitation upon the Forge World of Lucius had not yet drawn to an absolute close, Axion was already allocating new processing threads.
From the mechanical fleets dispatching across the Imperium Sanctus under Guilliman's direct decree, tasked with reinforcing Imperial elements and bolstering the defenses of both the Nachmund Gauntlet and the perimeter of the Eye of Terror, a Heavy Assault Cruiser and a Machine Weaver industrial vessel detached. Forming a two-ship task element, they broke away from their parent fleet and charted a return course toward Holy Terra.
Simultaneously, a separate theater of war had arrested Axion's processing focus.
On the outermost reaches of the Eastern Fringe, hard against the terminal edges of the Great Rift, the fires of unnumbered macro-cannons were shattering the silence of the entire Aberrus System.
The Aberrus System lay embedded within the Eastern Fringe, cast into the Dark Imperium at the very lip of the Warp-rent scar, suspended between the Grendl Stars and the Hadex Anomaly, a notorious and weeping localized rupture in reality.
Though the green tide of the Orks had been snuffed out by the Iron Men with a terrifying, unthinkable swiftness, the structural scars inflicted upon the defensive cordons of the Eastern Fringe could not be so easily erased. Hundreds of Imperial worlds had suffered varying degrees of devastation, with more than a dozen critical systems left spiraling into absolute paralysis.
Once the horrific green tide had been forcibly broken, the vast majority of the Iron Men fleets scattered across the galaxy once more, acting as a kinetic fire brigade to suppress outbreaks across the stars. Yet, constrained by total troop numbers, the Heart of the Forge, which Axion had left behind, led a small task force through the local sectors, scouring the void for any signs of the Tyranid vectors Guilliman had previously warned of.
Imperial communications, however, remained notoriously, agonizingly sluggish.
Because the Heart of the Forge and its subordinate vessels had previously encountered Tyranid bio-detritus near the Ghoul Stars, the fleet had spent months pushing steadily northward along the line of the Eastern Fringe's defensive perimeter. Only after a vast expenditure of chronological time did Axion finally pinpoint the Tyranid organisms mentioned by the Lord Regent, guided by telemetry fed back from a Guardian-class scout vessel.
This specific Tyranid host was no newly cataloged threat; it was an old and bitter acquaintance of the Imperium, a splinter tendril of Hive Fleet Kraken.
Though the Imperium had broken Hive Fleet Kraken once before, these xenos abominations possessed a chilling, instinctual genius for locating fractures in the Imperial bulwark, plunging their vanguard organisms deep into the domains of mankind without warning.
Utilizing the sensory arrays of the Guardian-class vessel, Axion executed a rapid strategic assessment of the invading bio-mass. Seizing a brief window when the Heart of the Forge emerged into realspace to recalibrate its bearings on its northward trek, the fleet initiated a comprehensive quantum data synchronization.
The fleet pivoted instantly, altering its trajectory to run hard and fast to the south.
This was not merely Axion executing his pre-established strategic protocols; more pragmatically, he required the mineral-rich bio-matter of the Tyranid organisms.
The Heart of the Forge and its accompanying vessels had previously launched multiple short-range sorties from the Imperial border into the intergalactic void. However, the migratory bio-forms they encountered there were severely limited in volume, and the xenos organisms had a frustrating tendency to scatter into deep space the moment they registered the approaching mechanical signatures of the fleet. More often than not, the raw materials harvested from those void-skirmishes failed to offset the logistical cost of fabricating two new assault ships, a deficit that had ultimately forced Axion to abandon that vector of acquisition.
Now, the Aberrus System was plunged into absolute, roaring chaos.
Tens of millions of Tyranid organisms, sustained by a massive biological fleet and the driving intent of the hive tendril, had crashed violently into the Grendl Stars.
This sector of space fell under the eternal vigil of the Iron Lords, a Successor Chapter of the Iron Hands.
The Iron Lords were a standard, Codex-compliant Chapter. For three millennia, they had shouldered the grim burden of monitoring and containing a localized xenos species known as the Barghesi. These creatures were immensely savage and horrifyingly prolific; for centuries, the Iron Lords had waited for the Imperium to marshal an expeditionary crusade of sufficient magnitude to scour them from existence.
Throughout that long, grinding war of containment, the Iron Lords had been pushed to the absolute brink.
These sons of Ferrus Manus had once been forced to execute their own battle-brothers when a strike force became infected by a bizarre, incurable contagion native to the local mutants. Later, in the dark twilight of M41.997, they suffered the catastrophic loss of their battle barge during the defense of Valedor. They had bled in the wars against the expansionist T'au Empire, and had broken themselves in countless unrecorded purges against the Barghesi.
Yet despite their sacrifices, the Imperium's broader military investment in the region remained tragically sparse.
The Tyranids, however, viewed this sector with far greater strategic appreciation than the Adeptus Terra.
According to urgent dispatches from the Chapter's Hedhan Scry-station in the Aberrus System, should this splinter tendril of Kraken successfully digest and assimilate the volatile genetic code of the Barghesi xenos, it would trigger a localized evolutionary leap. The resulting bio-forms would unleash an unparalleled catastrophe upon the Imperium, potentially dooming the entire Eastern Fringe.
Recognizing the Aberrus System as the lynchpin holding the Grendl Stars together, the Iron Lords hesitated for not a second, deploying three full companies to reinforce the Astra Militarum regiments dug in across the local war zones.
This vital system held several Imperial worlds, upon which stood a diverse coalition of the Emperor's hammers: the Catachan Jungle Fighters, the Valhallan Ice Warriors, the Vostroyan Firstborn, the Truskan Snowhounds, and vast, desperate hosts of local Planetary Defence Forces. Supporting them were the Battle Sisters of the Order of the Crimson Chalice and two storied Knightly houses, House Curtana and House Borgius.
Yet even with this concentrated array of steel and faith, the Iron Lords were forced to broadcast a general distress signal.
Long before the main body of the Tyranid host descended, the Space Marines had fought dozens of grueling, claustrophobic engagements against xenos vanguard organisms. Unlike the monolithic, battering-ram tactics of Hive Fleet Leviathan, the splinters of Kraken adapted and mutated with terrifying, hyper-accelerated fluidity.
Perhaps drawing upon genetic data harvested during the wars of the Segmentum Pacificus, the Tyranids tailored their biological adaptations with surgical precision to counter the specialized warfare of the Iron Lords.
The battle-brothers found themselves trapped in a worsening spiral of attrition, locked in desperate, close-quarters combat against increasingly monstrous strains of bio-titans and bio-engineered shock beasts. The Iron Lords began to discern a chilling pattern: the Tyranids seemed to treat them as low-tier approximations of the Iron Men, utilizing the Chapter as a living crucible to stress-test new tactical doctrines, continually intensifying the corrosive lethality of their hyper-acids and biological munitions.
Acknowledging the cold reality that they could not stem this tide alone, the Iron Lords cast their voice into the astropathic void, calling upon their Adeptus Astartes kin.
Following the transmission of their psychic plea, an answer came with unexpected swiftness from nearby fleets. Three loyalist Chapters responded in rapid succession, turning their prows toward the Aberrus System.
To the surprise of the Iron Lords, the first to answer the call were the Lamenters. Close behind them came the Knights of the Raven, followed by the Scythes of the Emperor, a Chapter recently brought back from the precipice of extinction by infusions of Primaris gene-seed.
These forces had originally entered the sector to counter the greenskin invasions, but their sub-light transit speeds were painfully archaic compared to the reality-bending drives of the Iron Men. By the time their strike cruisers arrived at the coordinates, the Ork war had already been systematically brought to an end.
Yet as they sat at anchor, plotting their next strategic deployments before departing the sector, the astropathic distress call from the Iron Lords reached their Librarians.
The Lamenters had once been utterly shattered and systematically hunted by Hive Fleet Kraken during the horrors of the Second Tyrannic War. The Scythes of the Emperor had suffered an even darker fate; their homeworld of Sotha had been completely consumed, reduced to a barren, lifeless husk by the xenos. At one point, the entire Chapter had been reduced to a single, hollowed-out company of traumatized survivors.
Though those veteran survivors had since given their lives in final, defiant acts of martyrdom, Archmagos Belisarius Cawl had utilized Sotha as a primary testing ground for his planetary restoration technologies, attempting to reverse the absolute biosphere death inflicted by Tyranid feeding cycles. Concurrently, with the arrival of the Primaris Marines, the Scythes of the Emperor had been fully and gloriously rebuilt.
As for the Knights of the Raven, they remained a Chapter thoroughly shrouded in shadow and operational secrecy. The Iron Lords possessed little data on them beyond their suspected lineage as a Successor of the Raven Guard. Though they had been witnessed slipping through the dark like wraiths, they fought with an unsettling, deeply superstitious zeal and a fierce, fanatical devotion that bordered on the manic.
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