Chapter 382: Mop-Up
Throne Mountain was a colossal fortress-complex standing five thousand meters tall, and at its summit sat a colonization ship over twenty kilometers long.
Most super-massive vessels were constructed entirely in orbital shipyards, never built to enter an atmosphere at all. A ship that size, if it ever descended into gravity, would be captured by the planet's pull permanently, losing any real chance of returning to the void.
Glory's original settlers had built their entire royal seat around exactly that ship. Over tens of thousands of years, the interior of that five-thousand-meter mountain had been hollowed out completely, not so different from a hive city in the end.
Since the world's Chaos corruption had first erupted from Throne Mountain itself, the entire mountain functioned as the corruption's anchor point, its ritual nexus.
Inquisitor Trasolh wasn't a daemon specialist by trade, just an internal-affairs Inquisitor. But within the Ordos, everyone picked up bits of anti-daemon knowledge from colleagues over the years, if only through shop talk.
The moment Kian had reported that ranged weapons and communications had failed across the entire world, Trasolh knew immediately how deep the corruption ran.
Deep as it was, though, no actual daemon had physically manifested on the planet yet. There was still a chance to save it.
Destroy the anchor point, the site where the corruption had first broken through, and there was a real chance of breaking the god's hold on the world entirely.
So the fleet unleashed an absolutely merciless bombardment on Throne Mountain. Lance beams, macro-cannon shells, falling like rain without any regard for cost.
Hundred-tonne macro-cannon shells punched hundreds of meters underground before detonating, throwing thousands of tonnes of earth and stone into the air.
High-energy lances vaporized soil and rock outright, turning it into toxic gas that spread out through the surrounding atmosphere.
Everyone still on the mountain, and everyone in the tunnels beneath it, was caught in a bombardment of near-apocalyptic scale.
The bombardment continued for a full day, and the five-thousand-meter peak visibly, measurably flattened before it was over.
With no void shields to stop them, warship weaponry held absolute supremacy over anything on the ground.
Eventually, one particular macro-cannon shell struck home, obliterating some unknown ritual circle buried deep underground, and the corruption's hidden anchor point was destroyed. The entire planet was freed from Khorne's grip in that instant.
On the bridge, Trasolh watched the Chaos corruption readout on his display drop from 888,888 straight down to a three-digit figure.
A three-digit corruption reading was well within normal range, the kind of thing standard Astra Militarum forces, even a decently strong PDF, could handle on their own. The curse that had disabled ranged weapons had lifted entirely.
Trasolh gathered his staff.
"The planet's Chaos corruption has dropped to a three-digit figure. Ranged weapons are functional again. But I've been informed there are still multiple Chaos-corrupted mortal warbands active across the surface. We need to eliminate them.
I've decided to remain at Glory for one month. I'll be deploying a full million troops from the fleet down to the surface, working alongside the loyalist forces here to wipe out every remaining Chaos traitor.
Return to your commands and lead your forces in the cleanup effort. Within one month, I want this world's corruption level brought below double digits."
With the assignment given, Trasolh dismissed the room.
Across the fleet, hundreds of shuttlecraft, large and small, began ferrying troops down to the planet's surface.
The Inquisitor's forces linked up with the local loyalist nobility and began sweeping the remaining Chaos strongholds immediately.
With Throne Mountain's anchor point destroyed, communications, electronics, and ranged weapons across the entire world came back online, and the fallen had nowhere left to hide.
Locator systems, auspex scanners, portable corruption-detection equipment, all of it came back to life at once, and the cultists who'd been running wild days earlier suddenly found themselves being hunted down and ticked off a list, one by one.
The Chaos warlords found the whole world had changed under them overnight. Mass together in groups tens or hundreds of thousands strong, and they'd get bombed from low orbit within minutes. Scatter into small bands of a few hundred or a few thousand, and they had no chance against the loyalist ground forces sweeping in.
Loyalist troops hunted cultists across the entire planet. Armoured vehicles, tanks, and gun-laden Knight suits tore down every road, and wherever they went, piles of dead cultists followed.
Kian didn't take part in the cleanup campaign. He went off freelancing instead.
He took a Devourer-class transport, loaded with engineering vehicles, down to the surface, hoping to salvage a few Knight suits while he was at it.
He set the transport down near Throne Mountain, where several wrecked Knight suits still lay from the earlier fighting.
Throne Mountain itself had become a crater nearly a hundred meters deep now, flooded with water, possibly from a ruptured underground aquifer.
Anyone wandering the area needed a respirator. The rock vaporized by the lance strikes had left behind highly toxic residue that hadn't dispersed yet, settling thick around the ruined mountain.
The massive Devourer transport, like a flying fortress, touched down in the middle of the golden wheat fields.
Kian's men drove down in engineering vehicles, ready to haul away the wrecked Knight suits.
Plenty of wreckage remained on the field, nine large Knights and over twenty smaller squire-suits, all still lying exactly where they'd fallen.
No one had touched them. No cultists lingered nearby, no loyalist troops either, given Throne Mountain had been the primary bombardment target, nobody wanted to be caught anywhere near it.
But as Kian stepped off the transport, he caught sight of something that struck him.
Beside every loyalist Knight wreck, though not the corrupted ones, sat between ten and a hundred robed Mechanicus attendants.
These tech-priests were working with whatever tools they had left, doing everything they could to tend to the wrecked machines.
It was a genuinely pitiful sight. The Knights were wrecked beyond any real repair, and with no heavy equipment to work with, all these attendants could do was scrape the dirt and grime off the plating, like morticians preparing a body.
These attendants' entire lives were bound to their assigned Knight. Wherever the Knight went, they went. And if the Knight died for good, tradition demanded they take their own lives in turn.
Kian made his way toward Luca's wreck, still frozen in the exact position it had fallen, locked in that final clash with the Preceptor.
Over a hundred of Luca's attendants surrounded the Cerastus's remains, some kneeling in prayer, others carefully wiping the accumulated dust from the plating.
All of them had modified respirators fitted, letting them work undisturbed in the toxic haze.
Kian spotted a familiar face among them, someone he'd seen a few times traveling with Luca before. The chief maintenance tech for the Cerastus.
He walked over and asked.
"Any word on whether Luca left behind an heir?"
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