On the northwestern plains of Kasr Kraf, the Cadian 2nd Army had laid an intricate ambush before the mouth of a massive canyon. Countless foxholes densely carpeted the frozen earth, where over a thousand Kasrkin—the elite of the elite—waited in absolute, disciplined silence.
Helsk huddled in his foxhole, checking the power cell of his hellgun while awaiting the order to engage. They were Kasrkin; they were the steel in Cadia's spine, born and bred for the most suicidal missions the Imperium could devise. The plan was simple: once the enemy's heavy armor passed over their buried positions, the Kasrkin would rise, coordinating with the fortress's heavy artillery in the canyon behind them to catch the traitor host in a crossfire of utter annihilation.
However, the expected surge of heretics did not come. No Vostroyan tanks rumbled over their heads. Suddenly, a cry of pure shock crackled through the vox-channel in Helsk's helmet: "By the Throne! What am I looking at?!"
As the sergeant's voice broke into an incredulous shout, the ground began to shudder with a rhythmic, tectonic violence. Then, the fortress commander's voice overrode the local channel: "All frontline units! Abandon concealment and engage! I repeat, all units, initiate an immediate pursuit of the enemy!!"
Helsk was bewildered—this was a deviation from every protocol he knew—but he instinctively vaulted from his foxhole. When he crested the ridge and saw the carnage unfolding before him, he could only murmur, "By the Emperor..."
He finally understood why the traitors of Vostroyan descent had not reached their lines.
Bathed in the dying glow of a blood-red sun, an army of heavy mechanized vehicles—beasts of steel capable of crushing anything in their path—was relentlessly shredding the Vostroyan traitors and mutants. Above them, the sky was eclipsed by the shadows of thousands of air-support craft, their engines a deafening choir of judgment.
Only then did Helsk realize the source of the ground tremors: it was the collective fury of thousands of artillery shells and heavy ordnance saturating the enemy positions until the horizon was obscured by fire and smoke. He instinctively took a step forward, raising his hellgun to fire at the scattering heretics.
But the traitors ignored the Kasrkin completely; they were screaming in terror, fruitlessly firing their lasguns at the massive, unfamiliar war machines. The Leman Russ tanks and Chimeras of the Vostroyan rebels were being reduced to molten slag under a deluge of concentrated fire.
The heavy tanks of the reinforcements did not stop to mop up survivors. They simply kept advancing—an unstoppable tide of tracks and turret-fire that crushed bodies into the mud and incinerated the fallen.
Following in the wake of the armor were the mechs. Some stood over ten meters tall, striding through the chaos with a cold, mechanical indifference. The small-arms fire of the traitors did nothing but scorch the paint on their thick plating. Even heavy antitank rounds failed to halt their stride. They acted as steel wedges, driving into the heart of the enemy lines and widening the breaches until the traitor army was nothing but isolated pockets of dying men.
Helsk slowly lowered his weapon and released the trigger. There were no enemies left within his range. He looked around, his confusion mirrored by his sergeant, who stood a few meters away, equally stunned. Helsk understood the feeling—their elite Kasrkin squad, the pride of the Cadian Gate, had played no part in this slaughter. They were spectators to a new kind of war.
He shouldered his hellgun and walked toward a higher vantage point. When he reached the summit of a nearby hill and looked across the valley, the air left his lungs.
Endless columns of mechanized units drove past him, and swarms of fighter jets shrieked overhead. Below the hills, the plains were choked with thousands of airdrop bays and heavy transports. Every soldier emerging from those crafts was encased in powered armor that appeared far superior to the Kasrkin's own carapace plating. They filled his entire field of vision—a sea of silver and steel.
"By the Emperor... we... we aren't just holding," Helsk whispered. "We're saved."
On the Alpha Curtain to the north of Kasr Kraf, the Cadian defenders watched with bated breath as the aerial battle raged in the upper atmosphere.
Thousands of fighter jets were locked in a lethal dance with blasphemous Heldrakes and screaming daemonic engines. Explosions blossomed in the darkening sky like a macabre firework display.
As the guardsmen prayed for their allies, a new cluster of black dots appeared, plummeting through the clouds. "Incoming! Dreadclaws! Incoming!" the curtain wall defense commander roared over the vox.
The quad-autocannons and anti-air laser batteries on the ramparts opened fire, tracking the Dreadclaws as they breached the Void Shield. Despite the wall of flak, several of the spiked pods slammed into the curtain wall with the force of meteors.
The heavy hatches were blown open by explosive bolts, sending several white-helmeted Cadian defenders flying. Amidst the swirling smoke and muzzle flashes, the deadliest nightmare of the Long War emerged. "Heretic Astartes! Chaos Raptors! Brace for—" The Cadian Captain's order was cut short as a Raptor ignited its jump pack, leaping across the gap to tear the officer's torso from his legs with a jagged chainsword.
The struggle on the curtain wall became a slaughter. Even the elite Cadian shock troops were overmatched by the sheer speed and ferocity of a Chaos Raptor swarm in close quarters. Mortal flesh was simply no match for the corrupted demi-gods of the Warp.
A section of the wall began to give way. A Raptor crouched over the body of a fallen guardsman, its claws dripping with gore. As it prepared to launch into the air again, a heavy armor-piercing round from an unseen source punched through its jump-pack turbine. The heretic plummeted, crashing into the stone as a desecrated heap. Before it could rise, two more rounds struck the same point on its helm, shattering the ceramite and liquefying the skull within.
Kydel lowered his heavy sniper rifle. He had fired three times in less than a second—a feat of impossible precision. "Focus on their mobility," Kydel commanded the Ghost Squad over their private link. "Avoid melee at all costs. Target them while they are airborne and vulnerable. Hit the jump packs and disrupt their momentum."
Kydel glanced at the distant Astartes reinforcements. They were holding their own, but the wall was massive, and the enemy was legion.
"You are telling me they are all equipped with master-crafted power armor?!" Creed demanded, staring at the messenger. "Hundreds of thousands of them? With thousands of armored vehicles and atmospheric craft?!"
After the messenger confirmed the report for the third time, Creed leaned back into his command chair. His hands were trembling—not from fear, but from a massive surge of adrenaline.
This force was currently grinding the rebel armies into the dirt outside the canyon, waiting for permission to enter the interior. Beside him, Supreme Commissar Jago Sevaran looked grim. "Creed, we cannot simply open the gates. If this is a Trojan horse—a grand deception by the Archenemy—this fortress will fall from the inside in an hour."
The Lord Castellan tapped his fingers rhythmically on the table. "I know the risks, Jago... but they just annihilated an entire Vostroyan rebel army that we've been struggling against for weeks." Doubt gnawed at him. Was it a ruse? Would the Despoiler sacrifice an entire traitor legion just to get a foot in the door?
The door hissed open. "Sir! The Southern Martyrs' Fortress has held! Lord Mordred reports they have received direct support from an entire Astartes Chapter and substantial air assets!"
Creed's eyes widened. A full Chapter. Before he could speak, another runner arrived, breathless. "Lord Castellan! The Alpha Curtain was breached by Chaos Raptors, but reinforcements have intervened! The wall is secure for now!"
Creed stopped tapping. He looked at Sevaran, then at the tactical maps. His eyes snapped open with a cold, hard light. "Let them in."
"Creed! Think of the consequences!" Sevaran hissed.
"No, you listen to me." Creed stood up, looming over the table. "I'm taking the gamble. The Emperor wouldn't send a Chapter of His Angels just to play a trick on us. If we don't open those gates, we're dead anyway when the Black Fleet returns."
He looked at the dazed messenger and barked the order that would change the fate of the war: "Open the canyon gates! Let the reinforcements through! Guide every one of them into the interior!"
"At once, My Lord!"