The battlefield roared; the Immaterium trembled.
The concept of war expanded infinitely—strife, bloodshed, hatred. Every surging emotion flowed directly toward the Brass Throne, prompting Khorne to let out a roar of absolute gratification.
On Planet Five, nestled within the inner rim of the J-11 system, the fires of conflict ignited along the edges of the theater. The very first drop of blood from this war spilled here!
Roars blended seamlessly with the thundering artillery, composing a symphony of slaughter. Those brave, unyielding heartbeats and the torrents of boiling blood were music to the ears of the Blood God. He laughed, he howled, bestowing the blessings of the Warp upon every single soul fighting to remain unbowed.
Deep within the trenches, the soldiers felt their blood surge and accelerate. A crimson tint slowly bled into their vision, and their conviction in ultimate victory became absolute.
Hiss— Hiss— Hiss—
Twenty kilometers outside the Rangdan basin defense line, well within the advanced human trenches, the soldiers pulled their triggers as if guided by divine intervention. Electromagnetic flechette rifles tore the xenos forms to shreds.
Beneath the swirling canopy of fire and choking dust, the combatants pressed on. Shells detonated against the upper layers of the shield barriers, their explosions blotting out the bright white sky. The sheer volume of projected ordnance was immeasurable; had they been stripped of shield protection, the tens of millions of human soldiers holding the frontline trenches would have been obliterated in an instant.
Even with the external audio dampeners of their power armor dialed to the absolute maximum, the Auxilia found it impossible to completely shut out the deafening roar of the bombardment. The soldiers' heartbeats fell into a violent, hollow synchronization with the artillery, vibrating through their chests, up their throats, and rattling their back teeth.
The sheer scale of the conflict was terrifying. It felt as though the very planet shuddered under the weight of the shelling. The shockwaves radiating from the detonations of those colossal macro-cannons were more than an ordinary soldier could endure. Without full-body power armor providing complete life support and structural stabilization, a mortal soldier would be unable to keep their footing—or would simply be vibrated to death by the acoustic trauma alone.
Yet, beneath the umbrella of these multi-layered shields, the war was forced to proceed in an incredibly "primitive" fashion.
Planetary-grade shields easily deflected fleet-level firepower, rendering orbital bombardments ineffective. Continent-class shields completely suppressed intra-planetary ultra-long-range strikes, rendering nuclear warheads, long-range missiles, and over-the-horizon weapons of mass destruction entirely useless. Furthermore, mobile fortress shields neutralized mid-range heavy fire.
Because the "shield" was entirely unyielding, the "spear" had no choice but to adapt.
Consequently, this starfaring conflict devolved back into an archaic state. Conventional firearms became the primary tools for eliminating the enemy's living forces, and at ultra-close quarters, cold steel and blades were required to finish the job.
An apocalyptic-grade planetary theater such as this saw tens of millions of troops actively engaged at the point of contact, with hundreds of millions more held in reserve, waiting for the order to cycle in. The battlefield was a meat grinder, its opposing gears spinning relentlessly to tear flesh and bone apart, ruthlessly crushing the lives of the soldiers.
"For Humanity! For the Nur Stars! For the King of Novik!"
Mortal soldiers roared, utterly indifferent to death. Amidst the deafening artillery that blotted out the sky, they squeezed out defiled battle cries from raw, hoarse throats. Yet these shouts, emerging through the briefest cracks in the bombardment, were instantly swallowed by the vast, raging tides of smoke.
High within the Empyrean, Khorne laughed heartily. He watched the most steadfast of warriors scream for victory, laying down their lives to cement it.
Thus, He bestowed even greater blessings.
The fighting spirit of the human forces stemmed entirely from their racial allegiance—pure, scorching, and tempered in the forge of fury. Conversely, the God of War utterly despised the Rangdan slave-auxiliaries. This hybridized host appeared fanatical and loyal on the surface, but they were nothing more than thralls stripped of their free will. They had long since succumbed to the control of neural fluids; their rage was hollow and cold, their blood turbid and defiled.
Every passing second saw countless combatants perish. When a true warrior's physical body died, Khorne would normally claim their soul, guiding them into the Blood God's domain.
But today, that convergence met an anomaly.
Souls glowing with the radiant spark of true warriors gravitated toward a golden sun instead. Traversing a golden bridge, they returned to the material universe. In the blink of an eye, the landscape shifted; these points of light settled into the moss of the Planet of Peace, merging seamlessly into the World Spirit.
Humanity's most selfless, brilliantly shining souls finally had a sanctuary—they were no longer destined to be delicacies on a daemon's table.
Khorne detected this shift immediately. Letting out a earth-shattering roar from atop the Brass Throne, He smashed a fist down, shattering his skull-carved armrest!
Those souls rightfully belonged to Him! They should have entered the Blood God's domain, manifesting as yet more ferocious daemons to join Khorne's legions and wage war against the other gods. They had no business resting like cowards!
Though Pandora's failure had given the gods some forewarning, the Blood God still found the reality intolerable when it manifested before His eyes. He burned with the urge to launch a Blood Crusade to completely shatter that world of cowardice. The Blood God's heart burned with spite, as if dripping blood—
Yet in the very next instant, an exceptionally brilliant counter-attack on the battlefield caught His eye once more, prompting the Blood God to burst into uproarious laughter.
On Planet Five, live tactical feeds of the war were broadcast across the various primary command chambers. The Primarchs watched in grim silence. The sheer intensity of the conflict continually redefined their thresholds for what a war could be.
The elite nature of the Nur Auxilia exceeded all expectations. Encased in mortal power armor, their survivability skyrocketed. The potency of their electromagnetic flechette rifles far outclassed standard lasguns, and the combination of the two yielded an formidable display of combat effectiveness. Furthermore, single-person mechs provided close-range fire support, achieving a seamless, lightweight iteration of infantry-tank coordination.
The absolute fearlessness of the Rangdan slave-auxiliaries was a sight to behold; witnessing it firsthand was far more striking than any cold data entry in an archive.
[Analyze the visual data. Adjust deployments swiftly.]
The Command Headquarters' orders arrived promptly. The Primarchs nodded solemnly, relaying the footage to all tiers of officers to elevate the perceived threat level of the Rangdan auxiliaries. The sheer tenacity of these xenos thralls—who charged human positions with rudimentary armor and weapons even while dragging broken, mangled bodies—demanded serious respect.
The battlefield of Planet Five had become the focal point of the galaxy.
Gods of the Warp watched intently; the Master of Mankind and the Grand Overlord cast their gazes downward; and brother Legions extracted vital operational experience.
Blazkowicz stood atop the high wall, overlooking the sprawling theater. The concussive gales of detonating shells mixed with the howling winds, sending his cloak snapping violently behind him.
The engineering excavations had ceased. The automated machinery had successfully pushed the network of trenches and bunkers directly in front of the Rangdan defensive perimeter. The vanguard was currently consolidating their defensive fortifications, while the mid and rear sectors expanded supply corridors.
The Horanion Corps had been rotated out to rest and reorganize, replaced by units specialized in protracted attrition to maintain the meat grinder against the slave host.
By this stage, the opening objectives of the war had been achieved.
Regardless of how smoothly the advance had gone, the frontline had to halt right there.
The second phase of the operational plan was to engage the Rangdan in a war of pure attrition—to throw the lives of soldiers into an endless abyss in a seemingly "stagnant" and rigid manner. Had it not been for overarching strategic demands, the Nur Auxilia could have broken through the Rangdan line, or at least found an opening to seize the position entirely.
But they had to stop.
This colossal war could not proceed with an unstoppable momentum. It required a measured, calculated drain of resources, designed to drag the Rangdan into a strategic quagmire and drown them in it. If the advance was too rapid or the offensive too overwhelming, the Rangdan might simply cut their losses on J-11—shedding the planet like a lizard shedding its tail—and withdraw their forces to abandon this critical transit route. They would then lure the Imperium deeper into their territory, utilizing strategic depth to systematically eliminate the invaders.
Should that happen, the Imperium would fall right into their trap, getting bogged down in a war of attrition on enemy terms, severely draining the Imperium's overall strength.
To prevent such an outcome, Ferrus had formulated a strategy that demanded a heavy price.
The Imperium would systematically shave off pieces of the enemy's flesh, forcing the Rangdan to continuously funnel reinforcements into J-11. As massive amounts of military assets were poured into the sector, the strategic weight of the star system would inevitably skyrocket, ultimately turning it into a festering wound the Rangdan could not afford to abandon.
Within this single star system, the Imperium and the Rangdan resembled two apex predators, locked in a brutal embrace, tearing at each other with tooth and claw. In the early stages, withdrawal remained an option. But as the wounds deepened and the lifeblood flowed, the sheer scale of the investment and the casualties sustained made abandonment an impossibility. Whichever side blinked first would lose the entire board.
As the front lines stabilized, Blazkowicz let out a long sigh and stepped down from the high wall. The fighting on Planet Five was about to enter a period of grim equilibrium. Both factions would numbly commit forces, reducing human lives to cold, calculated statistics.
The only variable in this period of "stability" lay within the minds of the opposing commanders. They were the ones continuously tossing kindling into the furnace of war, stoking the fires with the authority in their hands, calculating how to use the least amount of wood to sustain the blaze for the longest possible duration.
Blazkowicz cast one final look back at the battlefield. Raising his arm, he inputted a directive into his tactical terminal:
[Request reinforcements from the War Council. Authorize the Imperium to conscript eligible citizens from upstanding households and transfer them to Planet Five for training.]
[Nur will provide the training and materiel to offset frontline attrition, facilitating unit rotations throughout this war of endurance.]
The directive was cold-blooded, but Blazkowicz had no choice.
An army of one billion Nur elites simply could not withstand a pure war of attrition. Their conviction was unyielding, and their political and military acumen was exceptionally high; placed within the wider Imperial military, any one of them could easily serve as a mid-to-high-tier officer.
According to Ferrus's projections, the war of attrition in J-11 would drag on for at least ten Terran years, with an indefinite upper limit.
From the very first casualty to the present moment, a mere half-hour had elapsed, yet twenty thousand men had already fallen. And this was with extensive protective measures in place, alongside the sacrifice of millions of automated automata.
Though they had wiped out nearly five million slave-auxiliaries, the ratio of resource expenditure to tangible tactical gains remained heavily disproportionate. Furthermore, as time dragged on and both sides grew accustomed to each other's doctrines, the casualty rates would only climb higher.
They had to preserve their core strength, lest the army's overall combat effectiveness plummet drastically when the time finally came to launch a decisive counter-offensive.
The only viable path forward now was to draw recruits from across the wider Imperium, train them within the fortress bases, and elevate the combat capability of these conscripted forces through superior equipment.