User:Montonius/Sandbox - Battle of Megaborealis: The mid-western fringe of the hivesprawl "continent" of Megaborealis came under siege within solar hours of the Bastion force fields going down through the Pauper Princes' treachery. Its westernmost point, known as the Seeping Delta due to the rivers of industrial runoff that had burned across its reaches, became a killing ground.There were few built-up areas here, for the ground itself had been poisoned. Though the hyper-acidic soil was of little consequence to the metal-legged Skitarii and tough-skinned Orks that fought over it, the quagmiresand sudden subsidence meant that vehicles could swiftly get bogged down or vanish without trace. The death tollspiralled into the millions as both forces poured ever more infantry into the fight.With the pragmatism of one who has long forgotten notions such as honour, Fabricator Vosch of Megaborealis ordered the Seeping Delta set alight. Just as the Orks mustered an overwhelming force against the city’s defenders, six hundred Flamer-armed Kataphron Breachers trundled into place and set the entire Delta aflame.The Fabricator had ordered refined promethium to be funnelled into the area, so the entire landmass was consumed in liquid flame as if a match had been dropped into a petrochemical spill. The Orks were consumed by the fire, turning into flailing, living torches in their tens of thousands.The Skitarii burned with them -- all save the Ruststalkers equipped with anti-incendiary ablative armour for the subsequent clean-up operation. These specialised, stilt-legged killers were tasked with running down any Orks that survived and preventing their leaders from escaping into the city. It was a victory for the Imperium, but it was won at an insanely high cost.The hivesprawl of Megaborealis, largely ruled by the Adeptus Mechanicus sect of Stygies VIII, was unlike any other on Vigilus. Punctured, wounded, torn up and left as a landscape of chasms, pits and sink-holes, its tumbled hive cities provided a million places to hide.Though the entire continent of Megaborealis felt the sting of war at times, during the early stages of the conflict the fighting was thickest around Bore-hive Scelerus. Situated to the south of that ravaged sprawl, the hive city provided over half of the energy that kept Megaborealis' countless manufactoria running, for it had been built atop a massive thermal stack that yielded endless geothermic power. In many ways it was the key to power --both literal and figurative -- in the sprawl.When the Orks first attacked Vigilus the lord of Hive Scelerus, the Tech-priest Dominus Ipluvius XIV, spent over eighty solar nights with his internal Cogitators running hot as he attempted to categorise the war in the wastelands. During this time he also gazed in awe at the giant cosmic aberration that was appearing in the night sky, doing his level best to rationalise what was happening to his planet.Content that his holdings were well-defended by the force field network on the ground, Ipluvius XIV coordinated a flak net of Onager Dunecrawlers to destroy the Ork aircraft that sought to hurtle over the defences. Though the fringes of the false continent were being bombarded -- and in places, demolished -- by the artillery of the Ork strongholds in the wastes, he contented himself that Megaborealis' key installations were safe. He went back to his studies of the Great Rift.When the backlash of the Warp cataclysm bathed Vigilus in its strange energies, the disruption to the Bastion-class force field networks was quickly discovered by the roving Ork Kommandos probing the frontier for weak points. A terrible storm of dust and pollution was raised by the esoteric forces roiling across Megaborealis, and the Orks were quick to capitalise.The Speed Freeks in the wastes scrambled from their camps and hurtled towards Megaborealis without a second thought, their headlong charge obscured by the tempest of pollution and dust that rolled across its borders.With speed and recklessness as their prime weapons, the Orks made exceptional progress through the hivesprawl, for its defenders could not bring their big guns to bear in time. Bursting through the outskirts came smoke-belchingswarms of Ork vehicles, so ramshackle and careless in their construction it sickened the faithful of the Machine God just to look upon them. Across the refineries of Kraxxon, the slag fields and the south reaches of Grisport, they proved nigh impossible to stop.Upon realising the full extent of their predicament, Ipluvius XIV froze, caught in a mental feedback loop that robbed his Skitarii and Cult Mechanicus troops of any directions other than squad-level leadership. Perhaps his Cogitator mechanisms had been damaged by the Great Rift, perhaps he had been a victim of some midnight hypnosis at the hands of an agent of the Pauper Princes, perhaps he was simply paralyzed by fear.Whatever the reason, his forces found themselves without orders and unsupported by the Imperial Knights that stood ready to defend the hive city, and the god-machines of the Legio Ferroxus that languished dormant in Scelerus' war hangars.The hivesprawl's defenders fought the sudden Ork assault as best they could, but in a hundred places andmore they were overwhelmed. When the Genestealer Cultists of Megaborealis rose up, their day of ascension triggered prematurely by the Ork invasion, Hive Scelerus' defences swiftly came apart. All the perfectly calculated kill zones and flak solutions put in place against invasion from without were rendered obsolete by the attack from within.The gene-sect of the Writhing Wyrm -- a sub-faction of the Pauper Princes under the command of Slygaxx the Prophet-- aimed to immediately orchestrate the most devastating assault they could. They had captured a [[VortexMissile]] at great cost in lives from the Mechanicus, and now took that terrible payload deep into the hivesprawl's heart, using stolen access codes and the torn-out eyeballs and severed fingers of slain authority figures to confound each hangar's biomantic checkpoints.The Vortex Missile was detonated beneath the slumbering Warlord-class Titan Dominus Rex. The megatonnage of its explosion was so potent it set off a string of detonations that destroyed not only the Rex but also triggered a chain reaction that spread to all the Titans alongside it. At a stroke, the most powerful Mechanicus assets in the entire hivesprawl were destroyed.Only when Archmagos Dominus Nesium Caldrike seized the malfunctioning Ipluvius XIV, had him placed in cryostorage and took his place, did the Adeptus Mechanicus manage to put together something approaching a coordinated war effort. Caldrike proved a canny and decisive war leader. Uniting his efforts with Clan Company Kaargul of the Iron Hands, recently despatched by Kardan Stronos to reinforce Megaborealis, he stopped the insurgencies of the Genestealer Cultists from attaining critical momentum, forcing the war into a grinding stalemate where every city district and manufactorum was the site of bitter fighting.The growth of the Ork Scrap Cities in the wastelands soon prompted a major Imperial counterattack. Many Imperial commanders of Vigilus saw the Ork junk forts blighting the horizon as a call to arms. They mustered their mechanised regiments and artillery, sending them out into the wastes with the express intention of hammering the Orks into the sand before they could consolidate their positions.After the Orks had made planetfall, Astra Militarum armoured columns rolled out of city gates across the planet to the blare of fanfare klaxons and the cheers of the citizenry. Into the wastes they went, so numerous that the dust kicked up by their passage could be seen from low orbit. Valkyries and Vendetta gunships hurtled overhead, their holds packed with veteran soldiers and elite Tempestus Scions eager to take the fight to the foe.Some of the armoured convoys, sent on missions of reconnoitre or resupply, made it to their destination with minimal damage. The Padrillus Pan'te fuel column allowed the Storvhal hivesprawl near Megaborealis to reinforce Fort Kaphinus with vital war materiel mere solar hours before it was assailed by Ork Kommandos.The Valkyrie squadron known as the Winged Grail carried several demolition squads through a network of Ork flakka-dakka wagons, braving intense fire to land near the Killa-Kan factory of Runthive -- and before dawn that site was reduced to smoking scrap.The Aquario Column reached Dontoria Hivesprawl virtually intact, its water tankers holed by Ork bullets but plugged up once more with the fingers of the many conscripts sent to guard it, until the steel of each cylinder could hardly be seen for human bodies. A great many of their fellow convoys, however, did not return.Already the Ork speedsters were scouring the wastes, driving pell-mell in search of things to kill. Here and there an Ambull colony or sandrat nest was riddled with bullets for target practice, but the nascent WAAAGH! was yet to get truly stuck in. Beady red eyes scanned the horizon for signs of life, barked commands directed outriders ever further, and green, pointed ears pricked up for the tell-tale crump and boom of distant battle.At the sight of the blocky silhouettes of Chimeras and Leman Russ battle tanks on the horizon, a great whooping shout went up from each Speed Freek mob, and the Orks closed in from all sides. The resultant desert warfare was typified by the shriek of heavy lasfire, the ping of bullets ricocheting from reinforced armour, and the thunder of detonating Battle Cannon shells.Huge losses mounted on both sides. At first the convoys of the Imperial Guard reaped a heavy toll, blasting dozens of Ork contraptions into scrap with each passing solar minute, for in long-range engagements their artillery and ordnance gave them a definite edge over the ramshackle vehicles of the Orks.But the Imperial forces could not kill them all, and in announcing their presence in so spectacular a fashion, they had sealed their fate. Attracted by the signs of actual battle from kilometres around, the Ork Speed Freeks swarmed ever thicker.At first a few isolated warbikers and buggies got through the cordon of gunfire with cunning and reckless abandon, only to be cut down by volleys of lasfire and sheets of flame. But every time a squadron was occupied in killing one target, another got closer, and at breakneck pace. Before too long the Orks had reached close quarters, where their heedless fury could truly make its mark -- and once that tipping point had been reached, there was no coming back for the beleaguered humans.Elsewhere, a singular incident remembered as the Battle of Mourning Gorge typified much of the conflict of this period in the war. On the southern outskirts of Megaborealis, the 121st Goliath Armoured Battle Group was destroyed by the actions of a single maniacal Ork.Fragbad Squigbiter intended to watch the SPEEDWAAAGH! race through the kilometres-deep Mourning Gorge from a commanding vantage point. He and his mob scaled the cliff edge ahead of time, only to see an Astra Militarum blockade move to the end of the canyon and a Vigilite artillery company take position on the precipice.As the SPEEDWAAAGH! drove headlong into the trap, Squigbiter hurled so many Stikkbombs at the nearest Imperial artillery piece -- a Deathstrike Missile Launcher -- that the cliff itself gave way, toppling the giant warhead into the valley below.The resultant explosion annihilated the Imperial blockade and much of the SPEEDWAAAGH! warband before the rest bullied its way through the flames, completing the Greenskins' encirclement of the nearby Storvhal hivesprawl and cutting off a vital supply route for the forces of the Imperium.