Abaddon's defeat and the Imperium's triumph in the Battle of Vigilus Prime are now indisputable facts. But while the void war has ended, the surface of the planet remains a charnel house. Thousands of daemon legions—abandoned by the Despoiler—continue to fight tooth and claw across the scorched battlefields of Vigilus.
The wilderness has become a wasteland of fire and ruin. Nearly every inch beyond the hive cities is overrun by the green tide. Ork Boyz, swarming like a plague, battle the lingering daemons of the Warp with relentless fury—more out of joy than duty.
The greenskins have taken heavy casualties over the course of the long campaign.
But to the Orks, that doesn't matter.
What does matter is that it's fun.
A desert drowned in blood.
"AAAHHHH..."
Warlord Kroolkrumpa sat hunched over a monstrous harp of soul-stuff and polished bone. The grotesque instrument, built entirely from the twisted remains of Slaanesh cultists, towered over two meters tall and sang a song of torment.
And the ork loved it.
Thick, gnarled fingers of deep green plucked at the harp's twitching, sinew-bound strings. Each tug tore into the trapped souls, making them emit wails that bent the air itself. Agony radiated from every note. It was, to the warboss, music of the highest order.
With a feral grin splitting his tusked jaw, Kroolkrumpa bellowed, "I like dis one!" and dragged his whole hand across the cords like a Nob sharpening his claws on a grot.
The harp screamed.
It was a sound beyond mortal reckoning—pure, exquisite suffering, flavored with the twisted joy of Slaanesh's perverse creations. Somewhere beneath the shrieks, there was even a hint of ecstasy.
Kroolkrumpa didn't care about that part.
Pain was what he heard, and that was good enough.
"I love dis fing!" he cackled, stomping his feet with excitement, already wondering who made the thing and how many more he could loot.
Despite the sheer volume of his racket, no one paid the warboss much attention. The battlefield was already a chaos of noise and violence.
Nearby, red-eyed Ork Boyz screeched in glee, unloading dakka from massive, rattling shootas. Bolts of crude but deadly fire tore into the ranks of Slaaneshi daemons, ripping apart warp-spawned flesh and scattering ichor across the burning sands.
One explosion flung a mass of wet, throbbing organs through the air—splattering across Kroolkrumpa's face.
He wiped the mess off with a grunt. The smell? Rich, metallic, intoxicating. Like good fungus beer at the end of a long war. It made him more excited.
"WAAAAAGH!!!" he bellowed, voice booming over the hills.
His cry rippled through the green tide like a psychic thunderclap. Orks all across the scorched wastes howled in return, and the earth seemed to tremble beneath the weight of their shared bloodlust.
They weren't just fighting—this was the best kind of fight.
And as their minds united in purpose, a subtle yet powerful field of psychic energy enveloped them. A pressureless, invisible barrier—born of pure Waaagh! energy—formed around the Boyz.
Warp corruption, strong enough to doom entire cities, melted away under this crude but unshakable psychic resistance.
This is why Orks are so rarely corrupted by Chaos. Their own belief in da fight is too strong to twist.
The few known exceptions were usually orks who saw Nurgle, decided he looked green enough to be "one of da Boyz," and corrupted themselves by sheer misunderstanding.
Kroolkrumpa, now bored of his tortured harp, flung it aside. It landed with a squelch, still shrieking. He crushed it underfoot, silencing its song forever in a final spasm of pain and joy.
Then he swung onto his ride.
As a boss, Kroolkrumpa's warbike was no ordinary machine. The vehicle roared with rage, deep red and bristling with jagged steel. Two daemonettes of Slaanesh were impaled on the bike's forward spikes—twisting in endless agony as the vehicle's vibrations tore at their warped bodies.
They screamed. And they laughed. And they screamed louder.
The louder they cried, the harder Kroolkrumpa laughed.
He was, after all, the reigning champ of the Ork Racing League. His bike skills were as legendary as his brutality. He was revving up for some new tricks when—
He saw them.
Falling from the sky like a meteor storm, the shattered hulks of daemon warships rained down from the heavens. A spectacular ruin.
Kroolkrumpa squinted and recognized the wreckage. Those were daemon ships. Ghost-boat gitz.
The warboss spat in annoyance.
Even the harp's tortured song couldn't bring back his joy now.
Because he understood what the falling wrecks meant.
The humies—the shrimps—had won in orbit. And that meant the war was ending.
Kroolkrumpa didn't want the war to end.
At least, not until he crushed all da enemies.
But fate doesn't answer to orks.
As he predicted, the sky suddenly split with the screech of a massive warhorn. A colossal Imperial warship breached the veil above Vigilus. Its golden prow punched through the clouds, ramming horn first, like the Emperor Himself had headbutted the atmosphere.
A thunderous roar followed—a cosmic drumbeat that shook the heavens.
A great Aquila—Imperial and divine—spread its wings across the sky. Its golden radiance poured over the ruined world like a tidal wave of light.
The smoke-shrouded battlefield lit up like midday.
Kroolkrumpa glanced down.
His perfect green skin was now coated in shimmering gold. Even the blood-red glyphs of his warband—Du'Gor's overlappin' wheels—blended with the light like holy markings.
He knew what this was.
The arrival of the Xi'rus battlegroup. The warriors of the Golden Throne.
"Bah," he grunted. "Wot's so great about dat?"
Then, with a glob of contempt, he spat a thick wad of phlegm onto the burning ground.
"Hurmph. Bleedin' shiny gitz."
"Boss, wot now?!" an Ork Boy yelled, skidding up beside Kroolkrumpa's warbike, his voice nearly lost in the thunderous roar of engines and gunfire. The war chariot had just pulled off a bloody power-drift, kicking up a storm of dust, gore, and burnt promethium across the cratered battlefield.
"Zog off!" Kroolkrumpa barked, clearly not in the mood.
Every proper Warboss knew that Xi'rus was one of Dukel's favored allies. Starting a scrap with Xi'rus was the same as pickin' a fight with Dukel himself—and no one wanted that.
Even if the Boyz didn't know better, Kroolkrumpa did. There were rules to this.
"Boss! Big bir—uhh, sumfink's comin'!" the same Boy yelled again, squinting through a battered pair of looted magnoculars from the back of the buggy.
Kroolkrumpa glanced upward, eyes narrowing. No birds. What the git was actually seeing were Imperial fighter squadrons and landing craft, screaming down from orbit like a flock of golden-armored raptors.
The burnished ceramite of their hulls caught the sun, turning the descending Thunderhawks and Stormravens into glimmering harbingers of doom.
"Skrap! Dey'z gonna steal all me fun!" Kroolkrumpa growled, tusks grinding.
"Boss! Commander Xi'rus is sendin' a vox," another Boy shouted from the comms-rig.
"Nope!" Kroolkrumpa snapped, yanking the throttle. "We'z leavin'. I don't like shrimp faces showin' up at da end fer da glory!"
With a violent roar and an ear-splitting series of metallic clangs, the Ork vehicles sprang to life.
The green tide wheeled about mid-fight and thundered away, engines belching smoke, oil, and fire in a joyous retreat. Their sudden withdrawal left behind only dust and a thick haze of exhaust, blanketing the confused Slaaneshi daemons in a choking fog.
The daemonettes stood frozen, blinking through the oily air, clearly baffled. They had no idea why their brutal green tormentors had simply left mid-massacre.
Their confusion didn't last long.
A sudden BOOM shattered the air, a sonic shockwave racing across the field.
From above, massive Imperial transport craft began landing in neat formation. Their landing struts crushed stone and corpses alike as their ramps hissed open.
Out strode towering warriors clad in heavy Mark X Gravis armor—black and dark green, their chapter colors unmistakable: the Doom Slayers. Each of them carried a twin-barreled shotgun the size of a regular human.
Behind them came mortal auxilia, squads of mechanized infantry and tech-priests, wheeling out rune-etched containment cells and null-cages designed to imprison warp entities.
The daemons barely had time to react.
No war cries. No speeches. Just fire.
The Doom Slayers opened up in perfect sync, their disciplined fusillades unleashing a storm of scatter-shot and anti-daemonic rounds.
Every trigger pull turned a wide cone into a death zone. Rounds peppered the battlefield like steel rain. There were no blind spots—only slaughter.
The Slaaneshi horde, already worn down from the Orks' gleeful brutality, had no real defenses left.
They were swept from the field in minutes.
But the Doom Slayers didn't kill them all.
Instead, they captured.
One by one, the daemons were shoved into rune-cages like livestock. Those that resisted were subdued with ruthless efficiency. They weren't here to win glory—they were here to collect specimens.
One Doom Slayer marched alone through a ruined trench line, his sensors pinging on something hidden beneath scorched debris. He spotted a claw—elegant and deadly—half-buried in ash.
He didn't hesitate. The warrior stomped over, reached down, and wrenched the daemon out with one hand.
"No—wait!" the daemoness shrieked, her form shimmering, shifting into that of a delicate, trembling young woman. Her claws melted away. In their place, a soft, pitiful figure clung to his gauntlet.
"I recognize you... children of the Lord of Destruction... such powerful, noble heroes…" she purred, voice like velvet, eyes brimming with faux admiration and tears.
If this were any other world, any other story, it might have become some tragic tale—a warrior moved by compassion, falling for the monster's illusion.
But this was not that world.
And the Doom Slayer was not that man.
Without a word, his gauntleted hand clamped down on her arm.
CRACK.
The entire limb came off clean.
He tossed it aside like trash.
"AAARGHHH!" the daemon shrieked in raw agony.
There was no twisted pleasure in this pain—no ecstasy born from torment. Only pure, bone-deep suffering as the Doom Slayer's armored gauntlet crushed flesh and soul alike.
She writhed on the ground, hurling venomous curses through bloodied lips, calling the warrior a brute, a thug, a monster without mercy.
He stood over her in silence, watching. Waiting.
Only then did her glamour falter.
The veil shattered.
What lay before him now was a creature of Slaanesh—violet-skinned, serpentine grace wrapped in a form almost human. Almost beautiful. Her lithe frame twisted unnaturally, four slender arms ending in clawed digits. Her face, deceptively pretty, was marred by a long, barbed tongue that coiled from her mouth like a predator's lure.
The Doom Slayer tilted his head slightly.
"Daemonette. Low-grade variant," he muttered.
Then, with swift, mechanical precision, he went to work.
Four arms—dislocated.
Legs—snapped at the knees.
Horns—torn from the skull.
It took him mere seconds to render the creature harmless. Every movement efficient, devoid of emotion. He'd done this before. Many times.
"Tactical to support. Cage Three," he barked into his vox.
A nearby mortal guardsman—his carapace armor stamped with the sigil of the Inquisition—stepped forward.
"Yes, my lord," the soldier answered crisply, dragging the mutilated daemon toward the rune-etched containment cell.
The Doom Slayer was already moving on.
Another artillery pit lay ahead, mostly buried beneath rubble and ash. But he noticed something—the faint outlines of six evenly spaced depressions in the dust. Too symmetrical. Too deliberate.
He drew his bolt pistol and advanced.
On this battlefield of madness and broken physics, the Doom Slayers moved like hunters along the shore of an ocean made of nightmares—calm, unhurried, precise.
Elsewhere...
Kroolkrumpa and his mob of Boyz had bypassed the Imperial-held strongholds and instead barrelled straight into the daemon-infested city-states beyond.
They were ready for a real fight.
But just as the WAAAGH! was about to erupt in full force...
Vigilus shifted again.
A vision bloomed—alien and divine.
From deep within the ruined mountains, ancient xenos stonework cracked open, and a prism of iridescent light burst forth like a flower blooming in reverse.
The light consumed the summit in a haze of fractured reality. It shimmered like oil on water, impossible to focus on, impossible to comprehend.
For many, it was like gazing at something both familiar and entirely unknown—what the eyes saw didn't match what the soul perceived. It was the sense of waking from one dream into another, deeper one.
And the sound—by the Throne, the sound.
A wave of auditory corruption swept across the valley. Ears bled. Minds cracked.
No two victims heard the same thing.
One heard nails dragged across ironwood.
Another heard a choir of machine-spirits in frenzied ecstasy.
Another swore it was forbidden knowledge, whispered biology amplified to infinity.
But all who heard it wept.
Every time they tried to describe it, they sobbed uncontrollably, as if their soul had been reopened and left raw.
It was a wound. A spiritual scar.
And its source stood at the heart of the storm.