A Monster in Hell: A 40K Story

Chapter-27

Several ships disappeared into the Rifts of the Warp, the turbulent currents of torturous color tormenting our senses as they disappeared. More were being loaded, with huge ships taking Clone Troopers, Skitarii, Noctis (Dark) Troopers, Space Marines, Guardsmen, Titans, Tanks, Sisters of Battle and Silence, Naval Officers, and Custodians. Rows upon rows, columns upon columns, all in an unending tide of style that seemed to look glorious from the perspective of the Imperium and ominous from a hostile point of view. Ship after ship took off from Mars, ready to end the devastation the Warlords of Chaos were working. 

Huron Blackheart's Red Crusade had widened its scope, taking victories one at a time, slowly. Dividing our forces, making sure no united effort could be made. Plundering and pillaging to gain what he needed, before razing entire star systems to the ground. Leaving various traps even in systems that had been razed: corrupted stars sending out horrifying radiation, black holes aimed towards us, Warp Storms, some sort of sorcery-oriented explosives that opened Warp Rifts with Daemons, powerful Daemon Engines, ships, things called Goliath Engines which were literally Warp Death Stars with Greater Daemons chained to its core, genetically tinkered monsters, hordes of zombies, shape-shifting corrupted Assassins, Abominatus-Class Titans, and more.

As his Crusade had shown more and more success, devastating portions of entire Sectors in the Maelstrom. Eidolon openly joined the Red Crusade, Kharn needed something to kill, and Typhus begrudgingly lent support. Various Chaos Warlords, Champions and Greater Daemons joined in... and literally anything short of the Primarchs, Be'lakor and some of the most powerful Greater Daemons were in on the Crusade. Huron lost countless troops and sacrificed thousands to the meat-grinder, but gave as much as he got, and unlike the infinite nature of the Entropic Empyrean, we had finite resources around the galaxy. He specifically seeded Chaos Cults similar to how the Tyranids planted Genestealer Cults, to cause Chaos incursions on a huge scale.

As the Red Crusade wore on, in six weeks (that I took to recover and get my bearings) the scale of the war was like a black hole, and only by our united effort combined by devoting resources to the areas under war, did we keep him on the backfoot. He needed to be stalled so that Diamat and the surrounding worlds could be cleared of anything important, and I could personally get there to lay the trap. The death and devastation had taken a toll that surpassed the Age of Apostasy and the War of the Hydra, making it the third conflict after the Hera Heresy and the War of the Beast that had threatened the Imperium directly. Huron had sprung his plan well, using advantages, resources and the power vacuum to steadily put himself on a footing greater than anything Abaddon had managed to do. 

After the amount of devastating news, my Battlefleet, called the Battlefleet Summum Imperator, was the most powerful and expansive fleet to exist. It consisted of a powerful flagship constructed as a secret project started by the Mechanicus before the Hera Heresy, and my power and the circumstances forced them to give it to me. It was the Imperial Pride, a powerful warship larger than even the Abyss-Class Battleship, the size of a star system. Annihilator Prime had used backdoors to get UR-025 to work some additional Dark Age Tech, along with the technology already added by the Tech-Priests. Basically it was a ship that was supposed to be a getaway in case Mars ever fell, and my almost-immortality and the threat to the Imperium itself was a devastating motivation for them to give the ship to me. Matthias, Belisarius Cawl, and my own lobby within the Tech-Priests allowed me to also appropriate three Ark Mechanicus ships for myself: the Sanguine Ferrum, the Supreme Cross and the Nova Bellum. Combined with the largest fleet of Emperor-Class and Gloriana-Class ever given to a single person, my fleet was set, and I had a more powerful fleet than a Primarch, close to the fleet power, perhaps more, than even the Empress herself.