The Votann Alliance was genuinely formidable. From the moment Ferrix engaged them in the Galactic Core, he could feel the resistance was real.
Even with absolute firepower superiority, unexpected situations kept arising.
The planets of the Core were, almost without exception, mining worlds — staggeringly rich in mineral output. The Iron Warriors' fleet had to think twice before reaching for Exterminatus on any of them.
These worlds were too valuable. Space naval engagements mattered. But so did the ground war.
The xenos weren't pushovers either. Nothing that had survived in the Galactic Core was soft. Every species here had earned its place through something — any that hadn't were long since extinct.
This made the Fourth Legion's progress through the Core painfully slow.
Not every enemy could simply be bombed flat and forgotten.
In previous campaigns against pocket empires and multi-system powers, the Indomitable Fleet could absorb a little attrition without concern.
But since Ferrix began the Maelstrom campaign, that comfortable invincibility had stopped being the default.
Not every xenos feared death. Not every planet they occupied was expendable. Ground assault frequency had risen dramatically compared to anything before.
Taking the Maelstrom alone had required Ferrix to divide his forces into five separate thrusts — and it had taken three full years to complete.
The Core was harder still.
The mineral wealth was simply extraordinary. Even in hostile conditions, countless xenos species had made their homes here — and that said nothing of the pirates who hid in every shadow, evading old enemies and Imperial kill-orders alike.
The Fourth Legion was still dominant. But the time and resource cost far exceeded anything before.
Sometimes absolute force was not the deciding factor in a war.
Ferrix had run into walls repeatedly — particularly with the Squats.
These stubborn creatures were almost a match for the Imperial Fists in sheer pig-headedness. And their combat capability wasn't weak.
Dámaz Kron weapons and heavy war engines fighting the Iron Warriors — who also preferred direct, head-on combat — produced battles that set entire planets ablaze. The moment fighting broke out, the sky went dark.
Leviathans and Colossi actually slowed the Titan advance. Without the absolute advantage in numbers and mass, Fourth Legion casualties would have been catastrophic.
As it was: over fifty thousand auxilia lost. Iron Warriors and Iron Guard casualties exceeded two thousand.
They hadn't taken that kind of loss fighting that absurd Ork warlord.
Over a hundred thousand Iron Warriors — the First Warband, the Legion's finest fleet and weapons — had been made to look inadequate here. Ferrix was deeply frustrated.
The accumulated strain of commanding through the Maelstrom campaign, combined with this grinding resistance, had made his temper worse with every passing week.
Ferrix's conduct toward the Core's enemies had reached a point that could only be called savage.
Heaps of corpses and rivers of blood — that barely described it. That was understating the Iron Warriors on a quiet day.
Every planet the current Iron Warriors swept through — if the Engineering Corps didn't subsequently scorch the entire surface with promethium and then sanitise it with industrial-grade cleansers, the construction work couldn't even begin.
The texture of pulped remains and shredded bodies mixed together. The dust and debris from enemies vaporised by plasma or nova electromagnetic fire. The char-heaps left by melta burns —
Even looking at it caused serious physical revulsion. The Fourth Legion's auxilia had developed severe PTSD at scale. The First Warband's consumption of stimulants and tranquilisers was approximately five times the combined total of the other four warbands.
That was a staggering and serious figure — staggering enough that Perturabo had been forced to temporarily halt the Legion's offensive and summon the warbands back.
This had drifted drastically from what Perturabo intended his sons to be.
It seemed like his own fault. Had his arrogance caused his sons to carry that same contempt into every engagement — that high-handed superiority toward mortals and xenos alike?
When the top beam is crooked, the lower beams won't be straight.
Perturabo thought of this — and was troubled that it had applied to himself.
He still didn't know whether this was a failure of his own character, or whether the Chaos Octagram had begun working on him in reverse — eroding from the inside.
Thinking of the twisted, degraded forms the four entities in the Warp had taken, Perturabo would sooner die than become anything like that. He was certain of it.
Whether it was connected to his nature in the Warp or not — his sons' thinking had become warped. And the problem appeared to be getting progressively worse.
When Perturabo began recalling warbands to Olympia — all except the First — he became more certain.
It was him. Chaos was never anything good. The Octagram had begun working back on him and his sons.
No wonder his own temper had been so violent lately. The daemon factory's KPIs had been raised again and again. The sounds of driving labour and thunder never stopped. The entire Warp had been in chaos around him.
The Iron Lord's dread presence had only grown deeper in the Warp. Even Vashtogor recently felt the pressure mounting — the entire daemon factory sensed that the Iron Lord had become steadily more terrifying.
Outside of the Emperor — that dog — the Chaos Octagram was working on him at almost every moment.
Then Perturabo thought of something genuinely alarming.
He had only been engaging with it for a few years and the situation was already this serious.
The Emperor had been in this state — unknowingly, from a time so long ago he hadn't noticed it happening — for an enormous stretch of time. A slow, quiet corruption, eating away without his awareness.
What has he become by now?
Perturabo found himself reluctant to follow that thought further. He feared where it might lead.
"Sister — I'm asking you to take care of them for now. You and Barabbas, keep an eye on them together. When I come back, I'll carry out a full restructuring of the Legion."
"Understood."
Calliphone had already sensed something was wrong the moment her brother recalled his sons.
Watching the children — growing more savage and more arrogant with each passing month — she understood, roughly, why he had called them home.
"Vulkan is working in the Webway. If something comes up that you can't resolve — and I can't get back in time — go to him. He'll help us."
"Understood. Don't worry."
Perturabo went to his private forge.
He looked at the battle plate he had not worn in a long time. For the first time in years, he put it on.
The Iron Blood led the Indomitable Fleet tearing through the Warp — crashing straight into the heart of the Galactic Core.
Ferrix drove his powered gauntlet through a Squat clan chief who had been clutching a battle-axe.
Squat warships were narrow — boarding them left Iron Warriors with no room to use their strength. The chances of successfully capturing one of these vessels intact were poor. Even getting a few Squat ships back to Olympia for study had become extremely difficult.
These Squats would rather detonate their entire ship than let the Iron Warriors take an advantage from it.
Their devotion to the Votann and their fierce unity held firm even against Iron Warrior assault.
It was making Ferrix progressively more unhinged. The intensity of the fighting had reached a severe level.
The Iron Warriors were being jointly resisted across the Core by both the xenos and the Squats. The enemy understood: if they didn't hold together, the next time they might not even know what hit them.
Some auxilia had developed psychological problems so severe that no stimulants or suppressants could manage them. The armoured spearheads were becoming recklessly aggressive — and sometimes the enemy was able to exploit that predictability to set ambushes.
Casualties remained relatively low, and the Iron Warriors were still grinding forward. But the pace was glacial.
This had spiralled into a feedback loop. The slower the progress, the more furious the Iron Warriors became. The more furious they became, the more brutally they fought. The more brutally they fought, the more tenacious the enemy's resistance. Specialist weapons designed specifically to counter Iron Warriors began to appear.
A ceasefire had become inconceivable for either side. The Iron Warriors' savagery and arrogance had unified the entire Core to a degree never seen before.
It was almost impossible to imagine — the concept of a shared enemy creating solidarity among xenos species that had been fighting each other for generations, carrying blood feuds spanning centuries.
"Commander — planetary sequences D3-56, F4-78, T2-59 secured."
The logic engine reported.
"Too slow. We've been pushing here for two months. In the same time, we would have taken four sectors in the Maelstrom."
Ferrix — whose frame had been steadily growing toward four metres — radiated a dangerous aura.
His continuous growth meant his Tyrant Terminator plate needed replacing at a rapid rate. This was his twenty-fifth set.
"Can the fleet increase the pace? I'll request additional fire support from Father."
"At this efficiency, Father won't be satisfied."
"Commander — Lord Perturabo is already en route to the Core. He will arrive here shortly."
"What? Father is coming personally?"
Ferrix's instinct was that his own progress had disappointed Perturabo enough to bring him in person.
"My lord has halted the other warbands' campaigns. They have returned to Olympia. My lord is preparing another restructuring of the Legion."
"What has happened?"
Ferrix had been consumed by the Core fighting — no news had reached him.
"Commander Dantioch requested that my lord address certain internal cultural problems within the Legion, and has proposed revisions to the organisational structure."
Ferrix didn't know what Dantioch was planning. But his trust in his brother was complete — and if even Perturabo had accepted the recommendation, it meant the Legion had real problems that needed resolving.
"When does Father arrive?"
"In two days. Lord Perturabo's fleet will conduct a direct assault on the most powerful Squat alliance — the Great Throndin Alliance — and then compel the remaining Squat alliances to consolidate."
"If they can be brought to heel, my lord will dispatch them alongside our expedition forces to conduct Exterminatus operations against the Core's xenos. If not, my lord will exterminate the Squats directly."
"The First Warband will return to Olympia for restructuring. The Olympian Expedition Army will take over our operations here."
Ferrix stood in the command room, watching the war feeds from the logic engines, calling down orbital strikes as they became available.
Whatever happened — taking more planets was never wrong.
Inside the Great Throndin Alliance, tensions had nearly broken into open internal conflict.
Not just them — across all the Squat alliances, three factions had emerged.
The hardliners wanted to stay and fight. The Core was their home. Death in battle was preferable to submission.
The pragmatists wanted to preserve their people. Better to lead some clans out of the Core — drift through the galaxy, or flee beyond its edge entirely — than to die here.
The negotiators had run out of other options. The Squats simply couldn't sustain the losses anymore.
The Ancestor Cores were struggling. Their cloning technology had developed critical failures. In just two years, the Squats had lost approximately one third of their total population — and that was with the Ironkin participating heavily in the fighting, and with other xenos consistently pushed to the front lines.
At this rate, the entire Squat civilisation would cease to exist.
When they had left Terra so long ago, none of them had imagined they would one day be driven to the brink of extinction by their own former kin — though neither side truly thought of the other as kin anymore.
Squats were fierce. Hot-tempered but shrewd. And they held grudges to a terrifying degree. But none of that mattered right now.
When the entire species was facing extinction, what was the point of clinging to those principles? Could stubborn tradition keep their people alive?
The internal arguments had reached a fever pitch.
And then Perturabo's fleet appeared at the centre of the Galactic Core.
The moment it arrived, twenty-two star-fortresses fanned out in every direction. In ten days, the Core was reduced to rubble in a purely physical sense.
The xenos were completely disoriented. What is happening? Is this real? Another fleet of this scale?
Perturabo had already appeared at the Squat negotiating table.
This time the Squats came in good faith. The alliance leaders had proactively requested to board his vessels to seek terms. They had stood down their fleet's defensive posture. They laid their technology on the table freely — everything they had to offer, short of the Ancestor Cores themselves.
Yet it was Perturabo who crossed over to their side of the table — and who had ordered Ferrix, continuing the assault up front, to route around Squat-held territory.
This behaviour gave some of the Squat extremists ideas.
But when they saw the enormity of the figure in silver-white armour — they put those ideas away.
"One sentence. You surrender. Unconditional loyalty to me. Then you join my fleet and help clear every corner of this Core — exterminate every xenos in it."
"Hand over all your technology. Including the Ancestor Cores."
Perturabo cut to it immediately. No preamble.
"Impossible. Dream on!"
"The Ancestor Cores will never be touched by outsiders. The terms we offered before were already our absolute limit. If you're still harbouring such fantasies — come and fight. Even if the Dwardin and the Ironkin fight to the very last — we will never submit to you!"
The Squat voices were loud and numerous. Some of the stronger ones had already quietly reached for weapons, ready to rush him.
Perturabo didn't argue. He raised one hand.
The sky above became transparent.
The Squats went very still.
Perturabo pointed at the moon orbiting the planet.
"You see that?"
"What are you doing?"
Perturabo didn't answer. He extended his right hand, spread his fingers — and clenched them.
Boundless psychic force erupted from him.
The moon stopped dead.
Then, as the Squat clan chiefs and alliance leaders watched with their mouths open, Perturabo crushed the moon — compressed it — until it was small enough to rest in his palm.
An entire moon. Reduced to a perfect, proportionally scaled miniature. Sitting in his hand.
Nobody spoke.
"You have to promise us — you will not harm our Ancestors. Swear it. Swear it to us."
"Otherwise we will die before we yield. Crush us. Grind us to fragments. We will never submit."
The Squats had buckled — but they held onto their last defiance.
"Take me to the Votann."
Perturabo understood what these Ancestor Cores actually were.
Technically speaking, they were not Abominable Intelligence — not in the strict sense.
They were knowledge-storage devices from the Dark Age of Technology. The reason they had developed a kind of consciousness was purely because, over millennia, the Squats had been uploading the memories of their dead into them. The accumulated memories of countless generations had given these sophisticated storage units something that resembled awareness — something that was never part of their original design.
This made the Votann strange. Perturabo had always disliked the idea of giving machines sentience. A tool, in his view, did not need its own opinions.
Grimald the Priest had no desire to let an outsider anywhere near an Ancestor Core. But there was no alternative — this enemy was beyond what they could resist.
Perturabo looked at the monolith before him and felt a genuine flicker of astonishment.
This is undeniably a Dark Age construction. The architecture alone contained principles he had never considered — and the sheer scale of it suggested unfathomable storage capacity within.
And there were other Ancestor Cores. Multiple ones.
Perturabo felt this was a substantial gain. If he could properly decrypt even a fraction of what was stored inside, the payoff in future campaigns could be immense.
The displacement technology Dantioch had recovered earlier — he had already cracked it.
It wasn't extraordinarily powerful, in the end. Essentially a short-range engine that allowed the ship to strobe between realspace and a thin boundary layer with the Warp at near-light speed. Similar in concept to what might one day evolve into the Tau's ether drive — but much faster, and with an almost negligible maximum range.
The technology was best exploited by the White Scars and Space Wolves — mobility-oriented Legions that could use rapid displacement to devastating effect. The Emperor's Children, with their obsession with elaborating every tactical possibility, would also get mileage from it.
For the Iron Warriors, it was largely a poor fit.
Iron Warriors specialised in fire coverage and defensive warfare. A short-range teleport drive simply didn't match their doctrine.
That said, it wasn't entirely useless. A star-fortress the size of a small moon, suddenly appearing point-blank from several hundred million kilometres away — the terror that produced was not insignificant.
But the Iron Warriors didn't go in for that kind of theatre. Perturabo didn't joke around with warfare.
War was a serious matter. It involved the lives of his sons, the fate of worlds, the questions of what to preserve and what to develop. None of that was material for amusement.
"What are you doing?"
Grimald the Priest had been watching Perturabo approach the Ancestor Core with a large drive module in hand, clearly intending to insert it. The last thread of his composure was about to snap.
But Perturabo held him still with a pulse of psychic force.
"No need to panic. Your Ancestors are precious. I have no interest in harming them. I'm simply extracting the technology they've stored."
He released the priest.
Then he produced several more drive modules and handed them to the Grimnyr.
"The volume of knowledge your Ancestors have stored is substantial — these probably won't be sufficient. It will take time as well. Once these drives are full, bring them to me. I'll supply fresh ones. We'll work through the other Ancestor Cores the same way."
"I'll visit them one by one eventually. You'll hand the drives to me yourselves."
The Squats didn't like any of this. But what could they do?
And — he hadn't actually desecrated the Ancestors. This was tolerable. No point overthinking it.
"I'll take my Legion out of here. I'll leave only the expedition fleet to work alongside you — take down the Core, exterminate every xenos remaining. The rest is up to you."
"If you do well — your cloning vats and bionic smelters have had some technical failures, haven't they? I'll resolve them."
"You — you're not deceiving us?"
The Great Throndin Alliance leader's voice was unsteady.
"I don't need to deceive you over something this minor."
"One more thing — stop uploading your dead kin's memories into the Ancestor Cores. At its core, that device is a Dark Age technology storage system. It is not your Ancestor."
"The only reason it developed something resembling consciousness is because of all those uploaded memories — what you're experiencing is a composite of all the dead kin you've ever put into it. It is not your Ancestor. It is not a god."
The Squats looked displeased. Perturabo chose not to push it further.
These Votann would endure for a long time yet — by the time he'd replicated all their technology, what became of the storage units was their concern. Good advice freely given. Whether they took it was their business.
The Squats' capitulation shattered the xenos coalition that had been holding together on shared hatred.
If the most powerful faction in the Core had been brought to heel — what could the rest of them, smaller and weaker, possibly do?
The efficiency of the expedition fleet combined with the Squats exceeded the First Warband's previous pace. The methods were aggressive, but not at the level of horror the First Warband had produced. Enemies were given enough fear to want to survive — which meant some of them ran rather than fighting to the death, because nobody wanted to give up access to the Core's resources.
The front lines steadily advanced. The Core's chaos was being suppressed, one sector at a time.
And Perturabo had taken Ferrix and the others back to Olympia.
Throughout the journey, Ferrix felt the atmosphere was unusually heavy. He had the persistent sense that his father wanted to say something — but didn't know where to begin.
"Father — why the sudden recall for retraining? Is there a new military restructuring?"
Ferrix broke the silence first.
"Yes. We have internal problems that need correcting. I'm planning to add a new position within the Legion — to help address certain... incorrect ways of thinking that have developed among you."
"I'm not sure what we've done wrong, Father."
Ferrix didn't understand. He hadn't noticed anything wrong. But if his father said there was a problem, there was one — at his own level, he simply hadn't been able to perceive it.
"I believe it's my fault. There are certain deficiencies in your characters that I allowed to form, Ferrix."
"My arrogance gave you all a pride — an instinctive sense of superiority in every engagement with the enemy. And over years of war, that pride has been twisting you."
"Sometimes, when overwhelming firepower fails to eliminate an enemy within the expected timeframe, you lose your tempers entirely. The methods you resort to become brutal to a degree that even our own auxilia find difficult to watch."
"Haven't you noticed, Ferrix? That accursed pride has reached the point where you look down on ordinary mortals from a height."
"That is wrong. You were mortals once. You are no different from them — and my original intention was for you to do everything in your power to protect humanity through warfare."
"Even though accidents are inevitable in the process. I care about you, Ferrix. I think perhaps my permissive attitude has caused you to default — without even thinking about it — to brutal methods when dealing with xenos, and with humans who stand against us."
This was, for Perturabo, a genuinely open conversation with his son. He had no desire to see the Legion's culture permanently distorted.
This wasn't about Chaos corruption — though that was a real concern. The arrogant contempt itself was the danger. That mentality would produce errors in judgment when his sons faced critical decisions. He didn't want his sons to become what the Dark Angels and the Emperor's Children were heading toward. And given who the Iron Warriors were, if they went wrong — the scale of what they could cause was almost unimaginable.
"I'm not condemning the methods you use against enemies in warfare. Showing mercy to enemies is cruelty to yourself."
"But I think the sheer intensity of what we've been doing has gone too far."
"Do you know, Ferrix — the Fourth Legion now inspires more dread in our enemies than the Eighth? The Night Lords deal in darkness, using cruelty to break their enemies with fear. We use the most savage methods to eradicate enemies completely."
"And they know they're going to die. They know it. Yet they are still ground apart by our iron tide — because we accept no surrender once the fighting has started. So they have nothing left to do but wait for death in despair."
Ferrix said nothing.
"Xenos have no rights. Enemies deserve no mercy. I know. But you have crossed a line."
"Can the Fourth Legion still be iron within and without? Do you remember what I said to you when your training first began?"
Perturabo lowered his head. He was thinking.
"I believe all of this comes from me. If not for my own arrogance — and the methods I used against xenos from the beginning — perhaps you would not have gone this direction. Perhaps the psychological pressure of this relentless, high-intensity warfare would not have driven you to look for these outlets."
"Father, that isn't—"
Ferrix didn't believe his father had done anything wrong. Brutal methods against enemies — what of it? At most, they had grown arrogant toward mortals lately, and that was fixable. His father should not be blaming himself for this.
But Perturabo cut him off.
"When sons go wrong, the Primarch bears responsibility. That is an undeniable truth. I think we need to set the campaign aside for a while."
"You all need to stop. In these twenty short years, our operational intensity has exceeded the combined total of every other Legion. I placed far too much weight on you — and I neglected the architecture of your minds."
"When iron is worked too hard for too long, its toughness and hardness actually decrease. That is my fault, Ferrix. I have been too harsh with you."
"This kind of problem should never have emerged inside our Legion. If Dantioch hadn't brought it to my attention, I wouldn't have seen how serious it had become."
"We all need to change, Ferrix."
Ferrix and his escort felt something shake inside them. Their instinct to obey was so deeply ingrained that their first impulse was to feel they must not allow their father to be like this.
Some time later — Perturabo addresses the assembled Legion.
"You are blades of iron. You are the beings whose names make enemies and xenos tremble — the ones who deliver the final catastrophe unto them."
"But you are also engineers. Artists. Builders and creators."
"What flows in your blood is not only the combat instinct of a beast — it should also be a hunger for creation, a love of order, a pursuit of beauty in craft."
"Not just the freedom to break things across the galaxy and then rebuild them. Iron Warriors should never be weak — but that doesn't mean you have no inner lives of your own. Iron can have warmth. Discipline can have tenderness. Strength can be turned toward creation."
As Perturabo spoke, he knelt on one knee.
The assembled Iron Warriors stared in shock.
"Father—"
Their instinct was to kneel as well. Perturabo stopped them.
"This is my fault, my sons."
"My arrogance and my severity drove you toward extremity. I forced you to become cold and merciless instruments of war — campaigning across the galaxy for my own ends."
"I neglected you. My pride blinded you. My permissiveness let you sink into your basest instincts."
"I am sorry. To all of you. My sons."
"Go. My sons — go and find the things that can carry what is violent in you without poisoning it. Go forge a suit of power armour. Carve a chess piece that is uniquely yours. Build yourself a small shelter with your own hands."
"Or none of that — find some seeds instead. Grow trees. Grow flowers. Take off your power armour. Go and stand on some of the worlds we have reclaimed and simply look at them."
"You don't need a grand purpose. You only need something that satisfies what is deepest in you — find a place where your mind can become still. Let your spirit rest."
"You are not only warriors. You are people. The iron you carry — let it face your enemies. What you offer to yourself, and to the people we protect, should be gentleness and compassion."
"Why did we pick up weapons in the first place? What was the original intention when we took to the stars? I want you to find that answer for yourselves. Do not let me, or the Emperor, become the reason you lose sight of your own will."
"Iron and life can coexist. Destruction and creation can be one."
"Rather than spending the rest of your lives thinking about how to kill the next enemy, how to build the next impregnable fortress, how to forge the next more powerful weapon—"
"I would rather you one day think: there will be no more wars. We can stay on Olympia. We can go to the worlds we have reclaimed. Plant trees. Tend flowers. Work the forge. Repair houses. Build a world."
"You were not made only to be instruments of war. My sons — when it is over, we will retire into peace."
"All people die. Perhaps we will die on the campaign road. Perhaps we will die in the last moment before the dawn comes. But there will come a day when we are victorious."
"I will stand with you on the final wall that guards humanity. And I will die there, in some quiet, unremarkable moment."
"Perhaps on that day, we will look back on this time — these years of holding the line for humanity to the very end. And we will know we did not flinch."
The Iron Warriors stood there, uncertain — not knowing how to respond to what they were hearing.
Until Dantioch came back to himself.
His right hand closed into a fist and struck his chest.
The sound of power armour rang out across the assembled Legion — and the Iron Warriors came back to themselves too.
"From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron."
"We are the Iron Warriors. We are iron — within and without."