Thus Did The Imperium of Mankind Fight There

Part 4 Last of the Thunder Warriors

Arik Taranis never thought he would ever command an army again, especially not one from Terra. Sure, his creator had sent him on some classified missions known only to a handful, but even on those he'd only been accompanied by a dozen or so Custodians. Most of the time now, he remained secluded in the palace with his sole surviving son, Ghota.

Arik Taranis did not like war, only the mad and insane can truly love the hell on earth that it is. Still, when he looked back to the first battles of the Unification Wars, he remembered fondly the relationship he and his sons forged on the battlefield before the first of their number began the descent into madness and death by their own hothouse genetics. 

Even though none of them ever knew his true identity as the Emperor's bastard child.

He supposed the relative quiet of his life during the Great Crusade was the Emperor's way of granting him a cozy retirement to make up for throwing him into some of the most hellish wars Terra had ever seen and for not raising him as he'd done with his true sons.

That was not to say Arik despised the Emperor and his sons, his creator was the best hope there was for mankind in this blighted, hateful galaxy. Even if he was ostentatious and loathfully self-assured. He'd also aided the golden man in raising his 20 sons or 21 if you counted both Alpharius and Omegon. He recalled with a smile how they'd sincerely called him uncle and how that felt, for some reason, right.

However, one day Malcador summoned him, as for why, he did not know. Arik had mostly cut himself off from the outside world, so much so that the average Imperial citizen only knew about the Thunder-Warriors from the speeches of historitors, who acted more as propagandists than scholars of the past, of how they'd gloriously fallen slaying the abominable intelligences of the Ethnarchy. 

The fact that he was even still alive, while not exactly a secret, was also not widely known as he'd long since retreated from the public eye.

So, when Malcador informed him of the events that'd occurred in the past week and how he'd been selected to lead an army of mostly green rookies through the anomaly that was now being referred to as the ''Gate'' or Unknown Solid Terrestrial Terran Interplanetary Portal Construct Type A, if you wanted to get technical and have your ears talked off by the cog boys.

When he inquired as to why he'd been chosen for this task, Malcador simply retorted, ''Who else should be sent then Arik?''

To this, he simply had no response as truthfully he was indeed the only veteran general the Imperium currently had on Terra. All other generals were fighting many tens if not hundreds of thousands of light-years away. He was also the only one—apart from the other Primarchs and a select few others—who could be trusted with such a sensitive assignment.

After pondering over the matter shortly, Arik finally relented on leading the expedition. He knew when duty called, after all, he was the Imperium's very first transhuman general.

In subsequent discussions, it was decided that Arik would leave assembling and organizing the force to Malcador as he was never much of a logistician. Meanwhile, he would have the honor of naming the army and preparing plans on how to bring the world on the other side into compliance. 

To accomplish this task, he would require intelligence on what he could expect to face on the other side. Luckily for him, there were tens of thousands of prisoners with all of the knowledge he would require in the cells of the Arbites headquarters.

Adeptus Arbites holding cells

Count Formal, lord of one of the most important centers of trade in the Empire, was close to having a nervous breakdown.