The greenskins were as carefree as ever, born knowing only how to fight.
Internal squabbles gave way to external wars, and when external foes ran dry, they turned back to infighting. Wherever battle raged, their shadows lingered; wherever a formidable power arose, they swarmed forward like hyenas catching the scent of blood.
Since the dawn of the Great Crusade, the greenskins had remained a persistent cancer in the Imperium's side.
Defeating an Ork Warlord required not only vast operational resources, but also meticulous post-war environmental cleansing. Planetary surfaces had to be scoured thoroughly with defoliants and chemical agents. Fail to sanitize the soil, and by the next season, leftover spores would seed dense swarms of Ork Boyz and Grotz that evolved at alarming speed.
Much like Tyranid Genestealers, they lurked in the Imperium's darkest corners. By the time civil authorities registered the threat, the local world was already suffering a fatal blow.
The modern Imperium was vast—so massive that ongoing Tyranid incursions and Ork rampages no longer registered as top-tier existential threats.
For administrators like Guilliman and Malcador, the bulk of their focus went toward maintaining order and institutional stability across a galactic domain.
Space Marine Chapters and Navy fleets could block the Hive Fleets, while the Deathwatch and regional forces purged the greenskins. Politics, however, could not be sustained by raw military force alone.
As an interstellar power, the Imperium could not be ruled through primitive brutality. That reality rendered figures like Guilliman and Malcador indispensable.
Without high-level administrative oversight to manage the rapid expansion, the Imperium would quickly slide back into systemic civil strife.
Peacetime was rarely tranquil; true peace was merely the perception of order maintained by a functional state.
The current Imperium sat on a delicate threshold, needing time above all else to stabilize fully.
Tyranids and Orks were merely the most lethal among countless alien threats.
The real headache for Perturabo and the leadership remained the dormant, half-broken Necron dynasties.
"Are you certain these Bio-Titans present no underlying risk?"
The Emperor watched endless transport fleets depart for deep space once more, with battle barges carrying line after line of Bio-Titans toward active Ork and Tyranid fronts.
Across the Imperium, biological assembly plants had begun steady production of these massive constructs, whose visual profiles were inherently unsettling to human sensibilities.
The Emperor harbored a deep-seated revulsion toward anything profane. While he trusted Perturabo's intellect, his zero-tolerance stance on heresy triggered an instinctive rejection of such creations.
"Have I ever led the Imperium astray?" Perturabo countered smoothly. "I take war seriously. If these units trigger a critical failure, I'll step down as Warmaster on the spot."
Perturabo knew the Emperor was bound by old habits. Once bitten by the Men of Iron rebellion and the subsequent betrayal of xenos species during the Age of Strife, any veteran of the Great Crusade retained a deep prejudice.
The Imperium's hatred of the alien had deep roots. Perturabo himself had once allowed his sons to slaughter xenos without restraint, nearly warping the Iron Warriors' operational identity in the process.
Now, alien remnants trembled beneath Imperial naval fire. The Imperium no longer sought xenos labor, pursuing total xenocide upon encountering new alien species.
Having invested heavy resources into engineering these biological units, Perturabo refused to see them scrapped without testing their combat viability.
War remained a constant reality. The galaxy was vast, with daily fleet engagements across both the home galaxy and four secondary galactic domains.
The alternate timeline's galaxy where "Roboute" operated remained a high-intensity warzone, requiring six Primarchs permanently stationed on site to suppress threats, with Apocalypse-level campaigns breaking out every few months.
Although new Space Marine Chapters were founded annually, total Astartes numbers had not grown as rapidly as the Emperor originally envisioned.
By 887.M31, nearly a millennium after the Great Crusade began, total Space Marine numbers had grown by less than two million beyond the original twenty-million baseline—far short of the thirty-million target the Emperor had anticipated.
A strict emphasis on recruit quality was one factor; continuous combat attrition was another.
War never truly left the Imperium, and because Astartes numbers remained finite, replacing casualties across active fronts took time.
Within the Chaos Octed, Khorne's influence was recovering faster than the others. In truth, the containment grid established by Perturabo and the Emperor was being steadily worn down by the Imperium's own constant military activity.
Yet military force remained unavoidable to keep the massive state secure—whether confronting traitor warbands, undiscovered pocket empires, hostile xenos, or the Great Devourer, whose raw appetite rivaled Perturabo's own resource consumption.
The Imperium's underlying position was less secure than it appeared, masked largely by its rapid expansion and current industrial strength.
Should development slow before these core issues were resolved, those latent structural flaws would drag the Imperium back into chaos.
Ultimately, the Imperium's greatest rival was its own scale. It was so vast that administrators watched in frustration as daily progress moved at a crawl.
Yet it was also so powerful that even Hive Fleets sought softer targets, while Ork warbands paused to verify whether an approaching fleet was an opponent they could realistically fight.
Even "Roboute" privately acknowledged that overthrowing the current Imperium was practically impossible, continuing his opposition largely out of lingering defiance.
This was the strategic landscape inside and out. Figures like the Emperor and Guilliman could only buy time through endurance, forcing Tyranids and Chaos traitors to realize that a fully mobilized Imperium was impossible to break.
The galaxy remained in a tense deadlock: internal currents stirred beneath the surface while external threats raged. Traitors fought among themselves, Orks and Tyranids picked their battles carefully, and newly awakened Necron dynasties were suppressed as soon as they emerged.
Short of a sudden structural collapse, few could envision how such a massive empire might ever fall.
Perturabo certainly had no intention of letting that happen. No Imperial citizen would—everyone shared the dream of restoring humanity to its Golden Age.
The current era offered the ultimate stage for ambition. Though peacetime military and political avenues were fiercely competitive, genuine capability was rewarded directly.
Lineage carried little weight; meritocracy was actively enforced.
Commoners, nobles, and Astartes alike pushed themselves to the limit.
Barring exceptional circumstances, no Space Marine Chapter engaged in fewer than twenty battle campaigns per year. A single Chapter's annual ordnance consumption rivaled that of an entire Great Crusade Legion in its early days.
High operational intensity drove an relentless arms race.
Forge Worlds and Olympia worked in close coordination, benefiting from a golden age where vast technical databases were accessible via logic-engines.
Every new experimental design was rushed to the front lines, to the point where Chapters began stamping manufacture origins directly onto their power armor and weaponry to track performance.
Mechanicus Magos routinely dispatched untested, exotic weaponry directly to line Chapters and naval fleets, occasionally resulting in severe operational disputes.
More than a few Chapters had suffered from these field trials.
Examples included rocket launchers with a two-hundred-meter blast radius but a maximum range of one hundred fifty meters, or magnetic demolition charges that inflicted equal damage on user and target. Most notorious was a miniaturized black-hole charge modeled after Perturabo's prototypes; its deployment nearly wiped out an entire Chapter alongside its supporting fleet.
When the Mechanicus originally delivered the sample, the documentation had listed it as "safe, reliable, and strictly contained."
The Crimson Fists—successors of Rogal Dorn—had nearly been wiped out by the weapon. After narrowly surviving the incident, their first action was to board the responsible Forge World and assault every tech-priest in sight.
The situation was only defused when Dorn personally stepped in to negotiate terms with the local Fabricator-General.
The Imperium was experiencing an unprecedented technological boom. Thanks to Perturabo periodically releasing upgraded and innovative schematics, the overall culture remained remarkably open to technical development.
This environment explained why, despite their bizarre nature, Perturabo's Bio-Titans found ready acceptance among field commanders.
Whether a weapon was conventional mattered little so long as it eliminated the target; using bio-engineered constructs to turn xenos against one another was an outcome most commanders welcomed.
"Chapter Master, are you certain the Warmaster's new units are reliable?"
Aboard a strike cruiser, the Sons of Medusa were reviewing a fresh military supply allocation from Terra, which included two hundred Bio-Titans held in stasis.
The Iron Hands and their successor Chapters generally held little regard for biological constructs, adhering firmly to the belief that flesh was weak and mechanical ascension was the true path.
To an Iron Hands successor Chapter boasting heavy armor and Titan support that rivaled five standard Chapters, these bio-weapons looked like little more than oversized slabs of meat.
The First Company Captain voiced his doubts openly, but the Chapter Master cut him short.
"When has the Warmaster ever delivered substandard hardware? Drop a few into the warzone and let the greenskin scum test their teeth on them."
"They brag about their Gargants and Stompas being unmatched. We'll hold our own Titan Legions in reserve and observe these Bio-Titans first. If their performance falls short, we swap back to standard armor. They're disposable assets regardless."
Chapter Master Aragon was unconcerned with the underlying ethics. The operational manual was explicit: these were single-use, high-impact assets intended for maximum attrition.
If they proved effective, they would request additional shipments; if not, they would write them off.
"Understood. I'll prep the drop," the First Company Captain replied, moving to execute the drop sequences.
Their deployment zone sat near the world formerly known as Ullanor, renamed Querétaro by the Primarch, where Ork warbands had begun gathering along the perimeter.
The local Ork Warlord had proven unusually capable and elusive, keeping his command position well hidden from orbital scanners.
Decapitation strikes would require significant resource expenditure and top-tier strike squads. While Abominable Intelligences performed well in heavy combat, their profile prevented stealth insertion, limiting them to loud diversionary attacks.
The Sons of Medusa were unbothered by these constraints—as with most Chapters, saturation bombardment remained the preferred doctrine whenever logistics permitted.
Still, efficiency mattered. When the Warmaster himself introduced self-sustaining, low-maintenance war units that required no field repairs, it signaled that high-level logistics remained a priority.
First Company Captain Lusev observed the dormant Bio-Titans in the stasis bays. Each brute matched the raw scale of an Emperor-class Titan, possessing green skin reminiscent of Ork hide and dual heavy cannons grafted onto their shoulders.
A flash of grim humor struck Lusev, a slight smirk touching his lips as he imagined how the greenskins would react when these massive constructs dropped directly onto their lines.
Down on the surface, during a brief lull in the fighting, Ork Mekboyz were inspecting their weaponry, ensuring every Shoota and Choppa was loud and heavy enough to avoid being mocked by the human "Humies" and "Beakies."
Suddenly, dozens of massive drop-pods slammed into the terrain from high orbit. The Orks recognized the deployment signature, assuming the Space Marines were dropping heavy Mech-units. Confident in their own Gargants and Stompas, the greenskins prepared for a massive WAAAGH!
"WAAAAAAAGH!"
The Orks charged forward without hesitation, eager to meet the heavy armor head-on.
When they reached the drop zone, the vanguard skidded to a halt. Even the Biker Boyz froze, their crude bikes crashing into rocks and debris unnoticed.
"By Gork and Mork... why's dat big muscle-boss got dat fink on 'is chest?!"
Etched into the chest of every massive Bio-Titan was a brilliant, golden Imperial Aquila, applied directly at the manufacturing facility.
Gleaming under the local star's light, the Aquila left the Ork vanguard staring in bewildered silence. A collective, bizarre thought rippled through the mob: Was the Imperial Emperor actually bigger and stronger than Gork and Mork?
Before the Orks could resolve the theological dilemma, the heavy bio-cannons mounted on the Bio-Titans' shoulders finished charging.
BOOM!