User:Montonius/Sandbox - Battle for the Oteck Hivesprawl: The Genestealer Cult of the Pauper Princes, having spread their influence throughout Vigilus for generations, hadinveigled themselves into the water processing industry found in the Oteck Hivesprawl. So well hidden were they, sodeeply embedded, that only the Space Wolves had senses sharp enough to hunt them down.The Space Wolves' Task Force Icepelt, drawn from the Blackmanes Great Company and under the command of the Primaris Astartes Battle Leader Haldor Icepelt, had been amongst the first wave of the Adeptus Astartes to answer Vigilus' distress calls, making planetfall only a few solar months after the Iron Hands and their Successors. Upon reaching the planet, the Fenrisians swiftly observed that the scarcity of water on Vigilus made it a critical resource, and that any who wished to conquer the planet would attempt to gain a monopoly upon its existing sources.They sent word to the Aquilarian Council that the rest of the Blackmanes Great Company was inbound, and then made haste to the great reservoirs of Oteck Hivesprawl, known as the Hollows. There they set about rooting out the insidious foes beneath the streets, determined not to let the planet's water supply fall into enemy hands.During the fierce early battles against the uprisings in the streets -- waged alongside the 14th Vigilant Guard"Mourning Stars" artillery regiment -- the Space Wolves believed they had found their true quarry lurking beneath the cityscape around Greigan Hollow. The Mourning Stars shelled the whole region, which had been deemed infested beyond recovery, before the Space Wolves charged in.In return, the cult triggered demolition charges that toppled buildings on their foes and then sent out waves of hulking, mutated assailants. Close behind came skittering Genestealers to tear apart those who dared trespass onthe cult's domain. The Space Wolves were trapped, and many of their number were slain, but they were not yet defeated.Fighting their way through the alien hordes with blade, tooth and fist, Haldor Icepelt's hunters ventured deep underneath Greigan Hollow even as the hive city above seethed in open war. Expert trackers, their senses were so preternaturally sharp they could detect the scent of the xenos leaders amongst the subterranean reek of mould, wetrock, stale urine, hyperchlorin and rotten animal carcasses.The oddly mingled scent implied a riot of out-of-control biologies -- they were tracking the Claw of the Thirsting Wyrm, a splinter gene-sect of the Pauper Princes that boasted some of the most disturbing lifeforms on the planet.Using Fenrisian fieldcraft, the Space Wolves tracked the alien hybrids through a dank labyrinth of pipes and passageways that would have confounded even other Space Marines. They had to negotiate many traps and false trails in the under-tunnels of Greigan Hollow, and fight their way past countless broods and Neophyte Hybrid assailants.Their ferocity and firepower saw them through even when the bullets were flying thick. In the depths of the infestation's heartland, they were attacked by the gene-sect's Acolyte Iconward, Gilgas Vendella, and his swollen Abominant war leader, Bregg, but even they could not stop the Space Wolves' headlong assault.The Genestealer Cult excelled at ambush, and they knew every inch of their home territory; they had spread far beneath the hivesprawl using subterfuge and disguise, working out of sight and out of mind to ensure their lairs were as defensible as possible. As Haldor and his kinband progressed, they found themselves hard-pressed once more, gradually worn down by traps, deadfalls and ambushes.A long, gruelling hunt with a fierce battle at its conclusion is a way of life upon Fenris, and the Thirsting Wyrm soon found to their cost that the sons of Russ do not tire easily. As he fought through the main purification plant of Greigan Hollow, Haldor detoured to unite with a towering Redemptor Dreadnought -- Asger the Frozen. The cybernetic war machine's piston-driven strength let him smash a path through rockcrete walls and wrench foot-thick pipes aside whenever the strike force's path was barred.Learning of a vast amount of rigged explosives planted in caches throughout the hive city above, Haldor resolved to turn this would-be booby trap to his advantage. He sent word over the company Vox to his brothers in the Blackmanes Great Company in the wider war zone, telling them to sniff out any caches of explosives they couldfind and prime them to detonate at a set time.His plan was to trigger a simultaneous detonation above the main macro-duct and collapse a vast chunk of the city into the substrata below. He calculated that this would stop the flow of polluted water through the undergroundpipes to the other hivesprawls. Even if Oteck could not be saved, there was some hope for the other Vigilite metropolises' survival.The cultists of the Thirsting Wyrm had spread throughout the Oteck reservoirs' infrastructure, and had been spiking the waters with chemicals and foul elixirs. Some of these were brewed from their own xenos-tainted blood -- solutions that rendered the populace more susceptible to the psychic hypnosis and mental suggestion of their masters -- whilst others were corrupted by the corpses of those who had died in the cult's service.Successive generations of the gene-sect polluted the water still further until it had a faint purplish hue at times, or a wan yellow at others. Then, at the beginning of the uprising in 1.823 post VCM.M41, hundreds of pipe-worker teams and filtration crews had revealed themselves as mutant hybrid cultists. Those traitors had swiftly seized the artillery emplacements and flak batteries around each reservoir, killing those still loyal to the Emperor before taking over the water purification plants one by one. For all their cunning, however, they met their match in the Space Wolves of Ragnar Blackmane's Great Company.The cult boiled from the shadows in ever greater numbers, and still the Space Wolves refused to give up. In the ensuing battles the cult troops were cut apart by power axe, piston-driven claw and hypersteel knife, or else blasted to steaming cadavers by tight volleys of mass-reactive shells.Under the direction of Gilgas Vendella, the Thirsting Wyrm fell back in a series of deliberate retreats to lure theSpace Wolves into a killing field where the long-hidden explosives could be brought to bear -- but in doing so, they conceded the ground that Haldor sought to demolish.It was Haldor himself that set off the last in a circular chain of demolition caches that ringed the city in fire, shaking that district of the metropolis to its core. A half-mile wide section of Greigan Hollow collapsed into the under-levels below -- and in doing so blocked off the macro-duct polluting the reservoirs. The remnants of the district were reclaimed by Imperial troops soon afterwards.That saga-worthy deed was not in vain, for it stopped much of the xenos corruption in Vigilus' veins from flowing any further. A subsequent cleanse-and-purge operation launched by the Deathwatch deemed the water too polluted to recover. Two of the five Hollows of Vigilus -- Greigan and Agamemnus -- were pronounced Condemnatus, and the others were put under vigil extremis. The planet's precious water resources remained in dire peril.