Warhammer 40K in a box

Chapter 629 The Trap is Ready
Medusa's surface war has lasted for nearly six standard months, and the steel planet is undergoing a slow and painful torture.

Every inch of land was soaked in viscous engine oil, congealed blood, and indescribable chaotic filth, as if the entire planet itself was silently decaying.

The once vast outskirts of the Orbital Forging City have now been reduced to a nightmarish ruin. Mountains of terracotta and adamantite remains are piled up, and metal melted by high-energy rays cascades down like black waterfalls, instantly solidifying into grotesque and twisted shapes, like sculptures from the abyss, recording the madness of destruction.

The air was perpetually filled with the acrid smells of ozone, gunpowder, and burnt flesh. Above all, there was a cloyingly sweet whisper of Slaanesh energy, like invisible fingers constantly teasing the nerve endings of every living thing, trying to seep into the cracks of will and transform reason into a frenzied tremor.

The war had long since entered its most brutal phase of attrition. The attacks of the Emperor's Sons were like a venomous tide, one wave after another. They pursued the ultimate sensory stimulation and the "art" of destruction, regarding slaughter as a sacrilegious performance.

Each of their ferocious offensives was blocked and crushed by the Iron Hand Legion with silent resilience and a tight network of fire. The soldiers relied on the broken walls and ruins of the workshop, the towering furnaces, and the deep underground tunnel network to carry out a bloody struggle for every street and every house, leaving no inch of land unto themselves.

With almost cold-blooded rationality, they calculated the exchange ratio of each firefight, using space and time to wear down the invaders' madness inch by inch. To them, this was not war, but a grand engineering deconstruction—removing faults and erasing mistakes.

For many new recruits, these six months were nothing short of a re-forging in a furnace of blood and fire. They learned to maintain shooting accuracy amidst deafening noise weapons, to discern real threats from distorted psionic illusions, and even to mechanically reload, aim, and fire after witnessing their comrades reduced to ashes by terrifying weapons.

Their fear did not disappear, but was suppressed and forged by a deeper, steely will called "duty" and "protection," which eventually became part of their power armor and the rhythm of every beat of their mechanical heart.

Beneath this bloody stalemate, a highly classified operation is quietly underway within the deepest isolation layer of the Karada Fortress. After six months of tireless research, the great sage Belisarius Caul has finally completed the analysis and reverse replication of the space necromantic stasis field device, and secretly arrived at Medusa with the final solution.

What he brought was not blueprints or raw materials, but a core component of a static force field system that had already been completed and was so complex and precise as to be beyond imagination. This was a miraculous crystallization that was finally completed in the secret chamber at the bottom of his mobile mechanical ark, the "Forge of Wisdom," after consuming countless rare resources, ancient STC fragment data, and almost infinite computing power. It was the embodiment of knowledge and will.

His task focused on deployment and activation. This system was far more than a simple force field generator; its multiple node units had to be precisely deployed in the bases of key underground and surrounding structures on the selected battlefield.

The energy conduits, like sleeping silver blood vessels, are buried deep beneath rocks and steel, and are triggered in an extremely dangerous docking with the raging energy network of Medusa's core.

Beneath Caul's crimson robes, countless intricate mechanical appendages simultaneously operated dozens of incessantly humming analytical instruments. His ancient brain and advanced logic engine were running at full speed, processing massive amounts of geological data, subspace background radiation models, energy flow predictions, and chaotic interference parameters to ensure the deployment was flawless. Countless tech priests, who had signed an absolute silence agreement and were directly under his command, busied themselves like worker bees, laying, connecting, and performing micron-level calibrations under the double protection of an anti-spiritual energy field and physical isolation.

Within the temporarily designated deployment area, there was an atmosphere of overheated metal, ionized air, and a near-frozen tension that could only be broken by binary prayer. Every interface test and every tiny energy fluctuation calibration was crucial to the success or failure of the final trap, allowing no room for error.

Kaul himself, like the core of this sophisticated instrument, stands silently in the center of the torrent of data, with only the ever-shimmering blue light deep within his optical lens hinting at the complex calculations taking place beneath.

When the war reached its sixth month of stalemate, Kaul sent a brief pulse signal via a highly encrypted, independent data chain to his few confidants—Ferrus Manus, Chen Xi, and the frontline command node—with the code: “Device ready.” It was accompanied by more detailed energy readings and an index of the activation protocol.

This system consists of multiple generator nodes. When it is started, it needs to instantly extract a huge amount of energy from the Medusa core furnace and perform extremely dangerous directional interference on the local spacetime structure. Its fault tolerance is so low that it is close to the theoretical value. Any tiny mistake may trigger a catastrophic energy backlash, or even tear apart the structure of reality.

Meanwhile, Kaul's mechanical ark also brought crucial reinforcements to this decisive battle—four psionic knight mechs belonging to the Nearl family. These majestic war machines stood like mobile gothic fortresses, their specially treated pale armor engraved with layers of ancient runes to resist warp erosion, and their joints and weapon bases flowing with a ghostly blue psionic glow, as if they themselves were beacons against the void.

Piloted by noble knights of the purest bloodline of the Nearl family, whose wills have been tempered through countless trials, their souls are deeply bound to the machine spirits within the mechs, burning together in silence, silently awaiting the moment to purify evil. They are living icons, a refusal to walk the mortal world.

In addition, there was a full-strength Ash Knights reinforcement, whose warships joined the orbital defense sequence like silent undertakers, while the warriors, as the most elite strategic reserve, stood ready deep within the fortress. Beneath their black and white paint scheme lay a long-suppressed determination to purify everything. Their very existence was like a sword of judgment yet to be drawn, its cold light concealed, waiting to strike.

These forces, along with the Rostov Stormtroopers task force under Hathor's command, equipped with the latest thermomelting and plasma weapons, and the Neo-Gorgon SS Company composed of Ferrus's most trusted Iron Hand warriors, were all incorporated into a highly secretive final plan.

It has no name, only code names and coordinates. Their goal is clear and singular: to work together to create an absolutely deadly stage, lure that eternal nemesis into it, and then launch a thunderous attack to drag it into a stagnant, eternal cage.

(End of this chapter)