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Forge Sector 4.
Since the supposed death of the Archmagos of the Forge World Agripinaa, enemy forces had poured into the heart of the Engine Foundry, overrunning its once-impervious defenses and nearby manufactorum zones, eventually seizing control of Forge District 4 and its neighboring sectors.
Many of the local citizens perished in the initial stages of the war, and even more died during the raids, purges, and retaliatory massacres that followed.
Entire hab-blocks vanished beneath orbital bombardments. Manufactoria that had operated continuously for centuries burned for weeks without interruption. Conveyor systems carried corpses alongside unfinished machine parts. Everywhere the defenders gave ground, the invaders left grisly examples behind.
The surviving few scattered like vermin throughout the manufactoria, either hiding in what they believed were undiscoverable recesses or taking up arms in desperate acts of resistance.
Some barricaded forgotten maintenance tunnels and ration vaults. Others converted machine workshops into improvised strongholds, arming themselves with mining lasers, industrial cutters, and salvaged weapons stripped from the dead. Most knew they could not win. Their goal had become simple survival. Every day they remained alive was another day denied to the enemy.
Of all the forge districts, District 4 resisted the hardest. The district's defenders possessed no unified command structure anymore. Tech-Priests, PDF officers, labor overseers, and civilian volunteers often fought independently.
Yet somehow that fragmentation made them difficult to eradicate. Every time the traitors believed the district pacified, another sabotage attack crippled a supply convoy, another ammunition stockpile exploded, or another patrol disappeared into the maze of manufactoria without a trace.
In response, three Heretic Astartes of the Foresworn Warband and a war-priest of Khorne known as Vigious Khovain, a Dark Apostle, were pulled back from the front lines.
They led a host of over one hundred thousand corrupted mortals to enact an extermination crusade and purge the defenders of the sector.
However, when the corrupted warband marched into the manufactorum under Khovain's command, prepared for a bloodbath, they found only silent ruins: charred machine halls, blackened cogitator nodes, and shattered assembly lines oozing molten slag like open wounds.
Ash hung in the air like a funeral shroud, coating every surface in the color of sorrow. The rhythmic thrum of the forges had fallen silent, replaced by an uncanny, almost reverent stillness. Even the distant rumble of war seemed muted here, swallowed by the dead manufactorum's vast emptiness.
Neither the Chaos Space Marines nor their mutant human auxiliaries believed anyone could still be alive in this sector. Oddly enough, the air here was even cleaner than in other forge zones, which was a bad omen in itself. On a Forge World, clean air usually meant the machinery had stopped.
But Khovain, Dark Apostle of Kossolax the Foresworn, one of "The Four," knew better.
As a preacher of the Dark Gods, a conduit for the infernal will of Chaos, Khovain was attuned to malevolent revelations, unholy whispers that guided him toward the next slaughter.
At the manufactorum gate, Khovain raised a barbed Crozius Arcanum adorned with the sigil of Khorne, the Blood God, and commanded the nearby Traitor Marine:
"Bring the prisoner to me."
The Chaos Space Marine visibly disdained taking orders from the apostle, even one touched by Khorne.
But one glance at the blood-marked Crozius, its surface etched with screaming faces trapped mid-wail, writhing beneath brass lacquer, stayed the Astartes' tongue, and he begrudgingly obeyed.
Among the Traitor Legions, Dark Apostles walked a narrow line between prophet and parasite. They were not warriors by birth, nor champions by challenge, but the Dark Gods granted them power in exchange for utter and blasphemous devotion.
The Chaos Space Marine returned moments later, dragging a prisoner as ordered.
Khovain stepped forward and examined the captive.
The man's head was clamped in the massive, gauntleted grip of an Astartes. His legs, clearly replaced with crude cybernetics, dangled lifelessly. Mechadendrites, an iron lung, a rebreather where a nose should be, and servo-claws meant for forge labor were grafted across his body.
The quality of the augmentations was so poor that even Khovain, no artisan of the Dark Mechanicum, felt a pang of revulsion.
Rust flaked from exposed cabling. His limbs sparked at the joints. He reeked of burnt oil and desperation. His single human eye, bloodshot and rimmed with oil-stained tears, met Khovain's with defiance.
"Look at the wretched state of you," Khovain sneered, his voice low and cold. "I thought the lackeys of the False Emperor were pitiful. But you cog-freaks of the Omnissiah? Slaves. Worse than slaves."
The prisoner's voice rasped, but it held conviction.
"And you are different? I've watched your followers. The weak serve the strong. The strong kill the weak. You preach freedom, but all I see are new masters wearing different colors."
He glanced toward the mutant cultists standing nearby. During his days in captivity, he'd observed how these wretches, favored among the traitors, lived. The weak among them were flayed and hung on brazen iron pikes, screaming until the wind tore their vocal cords.
He had also noticed something else.
The traitors feared one another almost as much as they hated the Imperium. Strength was the only law among them. Mercy was treated as weakness. Loyalty lasted only until betrayal became profitable.
Several cultists glared at him for speaking. One reached for a knife before another grabbed his arm. Even now, discipline within the warband existed only because stronger monsters stood nearby.
Khovain chuckled darkly, his eyes gleaming like coals beneath a funeral pyre.
"Perhaps. But at least we do not lie about what we are. You know what you should do?" he said with mock kindness. "Join us. Serve the Blood God. Burn those Tech-Priests who beat you down. Slaughter the Ecclesiarchy. Wouldn't that be glorious?"
A few nearby cultists nodded eagerly. Some had done exactly that.
The prisoner answered by spitting a wad of phosphorescent lubricant into Khovain's face.
It sizzled as it struck Khovain's eye, the bio-lubricant clearly designed to aid mechanical respiration but now burning like acid.
"Give me a clean death, coward," the prisoner hissed. "For the Omnissiah! For the Machine God!"
Khovain wiped the glowing spit from his face, grumbling in annoyance.
"I really didn't want to waste my strength on a ritual here… If you'd shown even a flicker of sense, I'd have granted you the mercy of a quick death."
The prisoner grew nervous as Khovain began chanting, his voice rising in guttural syllables older than mankind, waving his Crozius in slow, ceremonial arcs, each movement leaving afterimages of blood-red light.
Khovain's rituals weren't sorcery, not as the deluded psykers of Tzeentch knew it. His power came not from trickery or scheming, but from sacrifice. Real blood. Real screams. Khorne didn't deal in illusions.
The air grew heavier. Nearby cultists instinctively lowered their heads. Even the Traitor Marines watched in silence.
Within moments, the prisoner lifted off the ground, suspended by unseen forces.
His skin began to bubble and slough off like melting wax, as blood gushed from every pore, levitating around his body in a spiraling halo.
The agony was beyond expression. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound escaped. Instead, visions of madness and nightmares surged through his mind, horrors gifted by the Warp, shredding his sanity.
The blood pooled around him, then unraveled into thin threads, stretching outward in every direction like a spider's web, embedding themselves into the substructure of Forge Sector 4.
The warriors of the Foresworn Warband understood without needing orders. They split into squads, each following the blood-trails deeper into the manufactorum.
The first squad to reach the trail's end found a movable steel floor tile, concealing a tunnel.
Others discovered interlinked subterranean tunnels between facilities, slagducts once used for transporting molten metal and waste vapors beneath the manufactorum's superstructure.
Several tunnels had been disguised with surprising skill. Fresh weld lines had been concealed beneath centuries of grime. Ventilation routes had been rerouted. Heat signatures had been deliberately masked.
To Khovain, these discoveries weren't surprising. Such architecture was commonplace on Forge Worlds; countless pipes, tunnels, and substructures linking every industrial sector. What mattered was not their presence, but their destination.
The blood threads continued to grow, pulsing like veins, guiding the warband forward.
Khovain commanded everyone to follow.
The tunnels were a twisted labyrinth. Some wide enough for tanks, others so narrow they had to crawl, even shedding their armor's sigils and spikes just to squeeze through. Tension mounted with every step.
But it wasn't in vain.
Khovain's group finally emerged into a vast underground chamber, a vaulted cavern hidden beneath the forge, its walls blackened with soot and engraved with faded cog-runes.
Creaking industrial cranes hung overhead like dead birds, and static lamps flickered, casting long, nervous shadows across the cavern floor.
Inside, hundreds of survivors were training with makeshift weapons or resting. Some were PDF soldiers, but most were unarmed forge workers.
Khovain smiled and raised his crozius.
"Kill the PDF and those too augmented. The rest, take them alive."
Chaos Space Marines and corrupted mortals launched their assault before the defenders could react. The skirmish was brief.
The PDF soldiers, along with their cyber-thralls, were swiftly slaughtered. A few civilians with light augments were also caught in the crossfire, but they were of no consequence.
"Pile the heads," Khovain ordered again.
His mortal followers obeyed, gathering severed heads into a grotesque monument of bone and blood.
This was not some mindless display of brutality. The skull pile had purpose, ritualistic requirements that demanded quantity, shape, and symmetry. If the structure was flawed, more sacrifices would be pulled from the surviving civilians to make it "complete."
Eventually, the skulls rose into a small mountain that thrummed with malevolent intent, radiating raw dread and unquenchable bloodlust. The traitor forces gazed at it, their battle lust ignited.
For those not aligned to Khorne, the sight either drove them into a suicidal frenzy, charging unarmed at the Chaos Marines, or left them frozen in abject terror, too afraid to even breathe.
The frenzied ones were promptly butchered.
Khovain turned to the trembling civilians who had collapsed to their knees around the skull pile.
"Do not move. Wait for our return."
Their minds were broken. These were once resistance fighters, but now they were little more than slaves, nodding with empty eyes, unable to even think of defiance.
Khovain nodded, satisfied.
"Onward," he commanded, and turned to lead his warband deeper into the dark beneath the forge.
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