The steel rain kept falling for a full three minutes. For anyone caught in that targeted zone of Heralius Hive City, those three minutes lasted an eternity.
This wasn't ordinary shelling. This was a complete reshaping of the landscape. Tens of thousands of heavy artillery shells, earthshaker rounds, and possibly even super-heavy strikes from orbital defense platforms hammered down in preset, overlapping patterns. They blanketed the entire kill zone, a circle a mile wide, without discrimination.
Explosion after explosion merged into a sea of fire. Shockwaves tore through the earth again and again, crushing the reinforced hive structures like crackers, tossing them into the air, then slamming them back down.
Smoke, dust, vaporized metal, and the reek of burning flesh mixed into a choking cloud. It hung there like a monument to total destruction.
When the last echo of distant guns faded among the twisted wreckage, the mid-levels of the hive had been transformed. What had been a battlefield was now a smoking, fire-lit hellscape, utterly silent.
The corridors, halls, and fortifications were gone. In their place were jagged craters, mountains of twisted metal, and ground turned to glass by the heat. You couldn't tell where the Imperial lines had been or where Chaos had stood.
Everything had received the Emperor's purification equally.
Behind Chaos lines, on top of a blasphemous resurrection altar built from crude stone and reeking bio-organic tissue soaked in blood and sulfur, dark red light twisted and writhed. Scorchwind's form stumbled out.
He shook his head, trying to shake off the lingering disorientation and the searing pain of being instantly vaporized by high-intensity explosives. His berserker body was already healing fast, but his mind was reeling.
"What... what the hell just happened?"
He stared toward Heralius Hive City, now shrouded in towering columns of black smoke and fading red energy. All he could see was a blurred, distorted outline.
On the tactical map, nearly every marker in that area had vanished. Only massive gray-black zones marked "severe damage" remained, along with real-time troop counts that had plummeted almost to zero.
"Orbital strike? No... this kind of coverage..."
He pulled up the battle log, freezing on the final frame where blinding white light and an unstoppable shockwave consumed him. The system notification was brutally simple:
[You have been destroyed by 'Basilisk Artillery Cluster Strike' area damage.]
"Artillery cluster... area strike..."
Scorchwind repeated the words as an absurd, ice-cold sensation crept up his spine.
He opened the zone channel. Nothing but dead silence and scattered static, like voices from miles away.
He switched to the Chaos-wide battle status.
In those few minutes, friendly forces in the Heralius sector had been reduced by over 85%. That included his entire Chaos Space Marine squad, worth 5,000 points. All marked KIA.
"Are they insane?!"
Scorchwind couldn't stop himself from snarling, his face twisted between shock, rage, and complete disbelief.
"What about their own troops? Those Krieg lunatics were in that zone too! They just blew their own people to pieces along with everyone else?!"
He couldn't wrap his head around it.
As a player who chased power and conquest, who loved slaughter and victory, even as Khorne's chosen, his core logic had always been "destroy the enemy, survive yourself."
This cold-blooded willingness to drag both sides into mutual annihilation was beyond his understanding.
To him, this was pure madness. The desperate, inglorious thrashing of the losing side.
"They'll sacrifice their own without a second thought if it means winning..."
He stared at the smoke-shrouded ruins, and for the first time, something like caution flickered in his crimson eyes. Not aimed at the enemy, but at this philosophy itself, and at the vague sense of unease it stirred in him.
Khorne valued blood and skulls, maybe even appreciated raw destruction. But the Empire's cold, calculated annihilation, the kind that measured sacrifice down to the last digit, sent a very different kind of chill through him.
Not far away, at another resurrection node carved with twisted runes and glowing faintly with blue psychic light, See You Tomorrow's figure quietly took shape.
Unlike Scorchwind's furious confusion, his expression barely shifted. He still wore that same detached look, as if everything was going according to plan.
He quickly checked his status and resource losses. Psychic reserves restored during resurrection. Equipment intact. Point loss acceptable.
More importantly, before his death, through psychic theft and scavenging, he'd accumulated a solid number of soul fragments.
He didn't even glance at Scorchwind or the other cursing Chaos players around him. His form shimmered faintly with psychic light as he activated some kind of short-range teleport or cloaking spell.
He vanished into the shadows of the hive's maze-like lower corridors. For him, pointless venting and small talk with allies mattered far less than making the most of his time to gather resources and plan his next move.
Deep in the hive ruins, thoroughly baptized by artillery fire.
This was a graveyard of steel and stone. The air still rippled with heat. Beneath your feet was scorching ash and slag.
A massive set of deep-red power armor lay half-buried under collapsed alloy beams.
The armor was cracked in multiple places, exposing charred bio-muscle and broken tubing inside. Most of the blasphemous decorations had melted or been torn away.
This was a Black Legion Chaos Space Marine, part of the summoned squad. Somehow, in that devastating bombardment, he hadn't been vaporized instantly. He'd survived the crushing impact and shrapnel, though now he was barely clinging to life.
Heavy breathing rattled through the damaged helmet filters, mixed with the wet sounds of blood foam and shredded organs. His life was slipping away fast. Even the blessings of the Warp couldn't undo damage this severe.
Then, light footsteps, almost unnaturally quiet, came from behind a pile of smoldering debris.
The Chaos Space Marine's remaining bloodshot eye turned with difficulty. He saw a thin, mortal-looking young man in psychic robes walking steadily toward him.
It was See You Tomorrow.
"Cough... mortal..."
The Chaos veteran forced out hoarse, pain-soaked but still arrogant words from his throat.
"Come... finish me... This is... the honor... I grant you! Ten thousand years... of war... I want... rest... Send my soul... back to the gods..."
He wanted a warrior's death. Even death at the hands of some lowly mortal was better than slowly rotting away in these ruins, his soul fading into nothing.
But See You Tomorrow just looked down at him quietly. Those eyes, hidden in the shadow of his hood, held no mercy. No fear. And no intention of granting him an honorable end.
That gaze was more like a researcher examining rare experimental material about to be put to use.
"No."
See You Tomorrow said the single word, his voice calm and flat.
Under the Chaos veteran's suddenly furious stare, See You Tomorrow raised both hands. Faint blue psychic light flowed from his fingertips.
It wasn't healing. Wasn't attacking. Instead, it quickly sketched out a complex, precise, self-replicating geometric pattern on the scorched earth mixed with ash and blood.
A makeshift sacrificial altar, filled with the cunning and forbidden knowledge of Tzeentch.
"You... what are you doing?! You fool! Blasphemous mortal! Do you know what you're... defiling?! You're insulting a Chaos Space Marine's final rest!"
The Chaos warrior used the last of his strength to roar, trying to lift his one functional arm with its deformed claws. But he couldn't even summon a thread of Chaos energy.
See You Tomorrow ignored the bellowing. He was completely absorbed in the ritual. The altar's glow grew brighter, synchronized with the rapidly dropping count of soul fragments in his interface.
A full 500 pure soul fragments collected from battlefield deaths, plus 300 points, were offered as sacrifice. The altar's core living sacrifice was, of course, the dying Chaos Astartes body on the ground.
On his personal panel, a special option lit up by Tzeentch's blessing appeared:
[Chaos Battlefield Support: Helbrute Summoning]
[Requirements: Soul Fragments x500, Points x300, Grievously Wounded or Dying Chaos Space Marine Body x1 (as core vessel)]
[Effect: Through sacrificial ritual, invoke the more savage Chaos essence deep within the Warp, transforming, expanding, and twisting the designated Chaos Space Marine body into a Helbrute born purely for destruction. This process is irreversible, and the summoned unit is uncontrollable and extremely dangerous.]
The corner of See You Tomorrow's mouth twitched upward ever so slightly, a rare expression from him.
"Kill you? What a waste."
He murmured, as if explaining, or just stating a fact.
Final confirmation.
The altar blazed with light, instantly swallowing the Chaos Space Marine's broken body.
Agonized screams erupted from the sphere of light. Horrific sounds, bones shattering, metal twisting, flesh multiplying, rang out in a dense chorus.
The light faded.
The shattered power armor was gone. In its place stood a monstrosity nearly four meters tall, made entirely of twisted, overgrown flesh, constantly shifting metal, exposed jagged bone, and burning with warp-flame.
It looked like some kind of giant beast, but it had multiple asymmetrical limbs covered in thick chitin and claws. Its head held several wildly rotating sensors and a gaping maw bristling with fangs, dripping acidic saliva.
Its back bulged outward, sprouting cannon-like biomass vents and writhing energy tentacles.
It released an ear-splitting roar, a mix of pain, fury, and pure hunger for destruction. Just standing there, the Chaos corruption and oppressive aura it radiated made the surrounding ruins shake.
A Helbrute had been born.
See You Tomorrow calmly observed the monster he'd personally created, his eyes gleaming with calculation and satisfaction. He made no attempt to control it.
Instead, he immediately pulled back to avoid drawing the Helbrute's firepower and rage onto himself.
The Helbrute let out a ground-shaking roar and charged off in some random direction with heavy, violent strides. Wherever it passed, even the scorched earth was re-corrupted, leaving burning footprints and spreading Chaos energy in its wake.
See You Tomorrow melted into the shadows, like a chess player setting a deadly piece in motion. He coldly watched to see what new, unpredictable chaos and terror this piece would bring to this freshly silenced killing ground.
The ruins of Heralius were far from finding peace.