Editing Nobledark Imperium Drafts (section)

=== The War of the Beast ===

==== Raid of Cthonia ====

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The Raid of Cthonia was not a strategically important battle in the War of the Beast, but it has long stood as an eerie portent in the annals of imperial history, and may be remembered with hate in the clash of some future war. During the Great Crusade the system spanning ruin had been garrisoned by detachments of both the Imperial navy and army, as well as a contingent of Mechanicus intent on the study of the ancient hub system, and a special Custodes unit nominally present to ensure the safety of the treasures of human heritage. At the time of the Dark Eldar engagement, Cthonia was far from the main theaters of battle, and much of its naval and infantry guard had been ordered into the defense of Old Earth. The raid is notable as the largest single incursion the Dark Eldar have ever made into realspace, and the only time the great tyrant Asdrubael Vect is known to have walked an imperial world. As the siege of Old Earth reached its terrible climax the Cthonian system was set upon by a force of corsairs and Kabalites, first seeming a particularly fierce attack of opportunity, but with the appearance of Crone and Upper Commorragh command ships, then Vect’s own, it became apparent the scale of the assault.

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While significant fortifications had been established on one of the system's rocky inner planets and the foundations and initial foundries of a new forge laid on another in hopes of staging exploration through the system the forces that remained to man them were few. Navy and Mechanicus ships scrambled to secure their orbits against the tide of corsairs. The imperial officers could do little but watch through their telescopes as the Crone and Commoraghi command ships maneuvered to the crest of the golden circlet and made to secure the broken ring set around the Cthonian star. 

Of the Imperial forces present the techpriests were the best armed and in the greatest number, but they received the greater part of the Dark Eldar's attention. The guns of explorator ships and newly scavenged archaeotech illuminated the space around Cthonia III, but even as the darting corsair ships burned in orbit they made for the surface. The orbit of Cthonia rapidly became a dynamic hell of boarding actions and lance fire as incubi and skitarii ripped into each other in fierce engagements that were soon mirrored on the planet's surface. The Commoraghi forces on Cthonia made to plunder the forge of its magos and higher acolytes, while those around Chthonia IV tried to cripple the Imperial military force. The predominantly Voidborn battlegroup successfully held against corsair opening salvos, the remaining imperial army forces on Cthonia IV supported their meagre naval force with surface based lance and torpedo installations and polar weapons platforms. As the third day of fighting on and around Cthonia III dragged to a close the remaining Mechanicus forces retreated first to their ships in orbit, then to their sister world. As they broke from the fray the attacking Dark Eldar made for the crest and their command ships.

The dark battleships of the attacking force's Crone sorcerers and mighty archaeons were moored among the gleaming discharge towers and control domes of the crest facility, the forces of the haemonculus and balesingers they brought with them engrossed in the wonders they were dissecting. Assets drawn from Vect's own fleets and forces manned the shredding guns set up in the installation's spires and the cutters ready to intercept any counterattack meant to dislodge his expedition. In the years that followed Inquisitorial investigators and their illuminate superiors judged that his forces had access to facilities that were integral to the creation and engineering of souls, facilities that housed the stacks of Dark Age Abominable Intelligence that trawled the deep warp, and others that prepared blank bodies for life. The extent of his Haemonculi and sorcerers gained from this endeavor could not be known, and the Magos of Cthonia III was never found. 

As the bloodied forces of the Mechanicus and Imperium regrouped at Cthonia IV under the protection of its surface armaments they made to contact the wider imperium and the Custodes garrison. Attempts to call for aid brought dismay, the latest news was that Sanguinius was dead and the Eternity Gate breached, and no reinforcements could be spared. In spite of this blow it was found that the Custodes still held the focal complex and central repository, and hoped to hold it longer still even as their barricades breached. It took two more days to prepare a meaningful attack force to challenge the Dark Eldar assembled at the crest, and for that time the focal complex and its golden defenders held by power glaive and sword even as they fell back from lab to lab, and dove back into lost chambers to face down witches and horrors that strove to pry forth their lord's very fundament.

The defending Custodes were all but overrun, but enough stood to continue to disrupt the invading Dark Eldar. In later stories of the battle it is said that Vect entered the complex guarded by mandrakes and his personal retainers, intent on ensuring the successful looting and study of this piece of imperial history, and was engaged at some distance by a Custodian wielding a rocket launcher. The remains of the Custodes unit was forced to its final fallback position in the central operating chambers, as well as a handful of holdouts fighting on across the massive complex. Vect was still in the complex when the remaining Imperial and Mechanicus ships entered combat with the corsairs and set course to charge the moored command ships. While some of the Imperial vessels were intercepted, others picked off by the corsairs before they could get the commanding crone ships in range, much of the counterattacking force got in among the enemy fleet, some ramming and others firing their guns until they no longer could.

The great tyrant's personal hasty retreat spared him and his ship. The corsairs fled soon after the first Imperial ships detonated their drives, their Mechanicus crews devoted to the sanctity of the Omnissiah and hatred for such things as haemonculi. The crone ships burned among the emission spires, their blasted wrecks were pinned to command domes by the broken prows of imperial ships. The ships that remained after the initial charge ran down the fleeing pirates until they slipped into the webway, or else entered the crest and threw themselves into the destruction of the straggling Dark Eldar. Even as the remaining Voidborn and Imperial army forces relieved the Custodes unit from their charred and melted fortification there was little celebration. To their best knowledge the Imperium had fallen, whatever their victory was worth, and they braced for the worst. It took another day to establish contact with the Imperial navy, which confirmed the opposite.

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==== Battle of Mount Afonso ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Forces of Chaos#Drach'nyen|Drach'nyen]]

==== Battle of Necromunda ====

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The Battle of Necromunda was a major conflict during the War of the Beast, where the Imperial Fist fought to control both the planet and space around the hive-world itself. As a technologically advanced Survivor civilization, Necromunda was a major munition manufactorum that directly supplied munitions to the front lines and Terra itself. As the Beast made a beeline for Terra to recapture Isha and kill the Steward, in order to make the upcoming Battle of Terra easier other Orks and Crone Eldar worked together to cut off the entire Sol-Sector from the rest of the Imperium. When a blockade couldn't be establish the Chaos forces switched from cutting supply lines to outright attacking the production of supplies itself. The ever opportunistic Dark Eldar joined along for the ride with the Chaos forces to make the Imperial shipping lanes a living hell to operate within Segmentum Solar. 

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The sights of a big WAAAGH! had the poor planet of Necromunda as the next prey after already destroying several Imperial worlds when they bypassed Terra. Still rich in mineral and other resources the hive-clusters on the surface would be devastated in the fighting in the orbit as debris from Imperial Navy wrecks, Ork Rokks, and twisted Crone corpses rained down upon the planet. Due to people living in such tightly packed conditions, tens of thousands of civilians died just in the first week of fighting over the planet. The Imperial Fist sent a detachment of 40,000 Space Marines under First Captain Sigismund to defend the planet at all cost, but an unknown amount of ships got lost in transit due to Warp interference that was probably conjured by the Crone Eldar. When Sigismund arrived over the planet, the Imperial Navy was in a stalemate with Chaos ships where neither side could attack without being destroyed in a single battle. Unfortunately, the Ork ships orbiting Necromunda had mostly crashed onto the surface to begin invading the planet. Sigismund would report that Imperial Fist ships are arriving over the planet at random times yet there were enough Battle Barge to kill the Chaos fleet. The Battle Barges combined with the Imperial Cruisers attacked to finally crush the remaining Chaos fleet, ending the battle in orbit. 

However, the damage was already done for Necromunda as the majority of the invading Orks had already crash-landed into or near the hive-clusters. Sigismund ordered all available Imperial Fists to land and defend the manufactorums at all cost. The hive cities were turned to fortresses (more than usual), in that the Orks paid five Boyz for every one Space Marine. However, even this was not enough when the Orks outnumbered the Imperial Fist ten to one. What was more frightening was that the invaders were making fast progress as well. Thousands of Imperial Fist were lost within the first few days of fighting in the hives. Sigismund was not shocked with the losses but rather had expected them knowing how the battles in the War of the Beast worked. What he did feel was worried by the fact that as this battle of attrition continued, the Imperial Fist will lose the world being bleed dry. 

The streets were filled with trenches, the spires were kill-zones, and rooms were bunkers. Hallways were blocked off with the bodies of fallen Imperial Fists with armor still on them. Hive gangers had resorted to cannibalism while the rest of the civilians fled away from the hives. The desperate and pure hopelessness of fighting in the hives led to many, including Sigismund, to fall under the sway of the Plague Father. The wishes of eternal life and reviving fallen brothers to help the defense of Necromunda were granted under a demonic pact with the First Captain's blood. The words "I offer all those presently under my command" had damned all 40,000 (living and dead) Imperial Fist, along with the mortal crew of the Battle Barges, to serve Nurgle.

The fallen Imperial Fist were brought back, along with some being granted immunity to pain and being able to fight while still missing all limbs but one arm. Now the Orks had to kill every Space Marine twice and each Marine could take twice as many wounds. The blessed Imperial Fist shot the Orks in the front as the revived brothers shot from behind, the Orks had walked into a trap of their own making. In the ending stages of hunting down the last Orks, an unknown Space Marine clearly blessed with illnesses shouted "For the Imperium!" before slicing an Ork with his Lighting Claws. 

The Battle of Necromunda was won but neither for the Imperials nor the Beast. The real victors were the Chaos Space Marines. True the Imperium still held the planet and the Ork WAAHG! was crushed, but this was done for the price of almost 40,000 Imperial Fists turning to Chaos and forever being lost to the Imperium. Those on the planet that sought the Dark Gods’ help did so when they were forced to either flee and lose the planet or have a heroic last stand and then lose the planet. Well, one must remember that Sigismund was told to "Hold Necromunda at all cost" even at the price of any lives and damnation.

The traitor Imperial Fist would quickly and quietly depart from the sub-sector on their Battle Barges before the news broke out, then announcing to their mortal crew that they would now fight the Imperium. The traitors would rename themselves the "Rotten Fist" as a joke about how the Imperium would be rotting in the future. Their motto is still "For the Imperium" as some odd form of love for the Imperium or a reference to how they fell to Chaos due to defending the Imperium.

Rotten Fist marines during the War of the Beast were sighted fighting Orks and Imperial forces but not the Crone Eldar. After the Battle of Terra, the Rotten Fist along with other Chaos Space Marines were hunted down by Loyalist Space Marines. The Rotten Fist would flee to The Maelstrom, escaping into the Warp.

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==== Be'lakor and the Alpha Legion ====

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Every legion at a role to play in the War of the Beast, even if that role wasn’t immediately obvious. Such was the case with the Alpha Legion. When war broke out, the Hydra continued its work in the shadows, though they weren’t too happy about it. It was not the job of the Alpha Legion to fight on the front lines. It was their job to find the source of the threat, the man behind the man, and stop the problem at its root. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Urlakk_Urg|Urlakk Urg]] was the obvious threat to the Imperium, but there was clearly more going on. One did not just go from being a former warboss with no empire to his name to head of a galaxy-spanning WAAAGH! in less than six standard years. Chaos was clearly a factor, but beyond the four Ruinous Powers there were other players behind the scenes vying for power, ones the Imperium did not even know about yet.

The Alpha Legion was first put onto the scent of one of these players after the end of the Nurthene Campaign, which had ended in disaster when the natives, who considered autoguns and tanks to be the cutting edge of warfare, had unexpectedly gotten their hands on Chaotic Exterminatus-class weaponry and the means to fleshcraft nightmarish golems in the image of their animalistic gods. Despite stymying assets of the Imperial Army, Astartes, and even a Titan legion, the Nurthene insurgents known as the Echvehnurth could only slow, not stop, the Imperial advance, and in a grand act of salting the earth the Echvehnurth activated a Chaotic weapon known as a Black Cube. The Black Cube stripped Nurth of all life and left it an uninhabitable, primordial wasteland, killing all upon it but at the same time denying it to the Imperium and inflicting heavy casualties.

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The Alpha Legion were perplexed by this turn of events. Never before had their intelligence apparatus failed them so. It is possible they would have continued to be perplexed had they not heard from their contact with the Cabal, John Grammaticus. Alpharius and Omegon had heard from Grammaticus and the Cabal several times before, the two organizations having shared useful intel, but this time all Grammaticus had was a single cryptic line courtesy of the mysterious Gahet.

“Go to Eolith. The answers you seek will be there.”


As fellow espionists themselves, the primarchs of the Alpha Legion were at first unsure of whether or not to believe Grammaticus, but ultimately decide to investigate it for themselves. They didn’t fully trust the Cabal, but the Cabal’s goals were straightforward and their information had been reliable in the past. Additionally, even if the Cabal’s weren’t telling the whole truth, that didn’t mean what they said was incorrect. An expeditionary force was dispatched to investigate the Cabal’s claims, consisting of several cells of Alpha Legionnaires as well as reinforcement by the Geno Five-Two Chilliad. The Chilliad’s knack for pinpoint coordination and tactical adaptability had impressed the Legion’s twin primarchs, and meshed well with their own combat sensibilities. What’s more, the Chilliad knew how to keep a secret. The Chilliad and Alpha Legion had worked together several times in the past, and when the Alpha Legion was in need of more traditional military assistance the Chiliad was normally who they thought of. However, Uxor Honen Mu was not at the head of this expedition, having stepped down following her loss of cept many years ago at the beginning of the Great Crusade. Instead, the Imperial army detachment was commanded by Teng Namantjira, the commander who had overseen the Nurthene disaster. Namantjira’s record had been spotless until Nurth, and the commander was eager to discover whether some external force had caused his offensive to fail.

Their destination was a world which the Imperium had cataloged and ignored during a routine survey as 42 Hydra Tertius, but the source knew as Eolith. Eolith was a strange world. At first glance it seemed utterly out of the ordinary, but closer inspection revealed otherwise. Surveys of the planet found plateaus with perfectly sheer faces and straight lines buried in silt under the ocean’s continental shelf, resembling starship landing pads. Nature does not build in straight lines. The rest of the planet was also more abnormal than it appeared, basins were exposed hundreds of meters below sea level, while the planet’s core suggested a lack of rotation that made it hard to imagine how the planet could sustain a breathable atmosphere or magnetosphere. Indeed, in other respects the planet was almost too ordinary, having an atmosphere that was almost identical to Earth’s, albeit with more neon and oxygen and less argon and nitrogen in the atmosphere, and a gravity 1.5 times that of Earth, despite its diameter suggesting it should have had a gravity twice that. At the north pole of the planet found an unusual energy signature, suggestive of a continuously open portal into the eldar Webway, but the records the Imperium had gained on the labyrinthine dimension from the eldar never indicated that any such portal existed here.

Given such an anomaly, the first place to look seemed obvious. Taking half of the forces of the Chilliad with them, the Alpha Legion descended upon the basin at the planet’s northern pole. There, sitting in a basin that was supposed to be three hundred meters below sea level, was what looked like an open Webway gate, albeit one that didn’t look like it was made from wraithbone, but instead an eerie black stone that resembled obsidian, but seemed to reflect no light. The members of the Chiliad were commanded to secure the margins of the basin, while the Alpha Legionaires would act as the tip of the spear and enter the portal first. Nobody wanted an enemy force potentially attacking them from behind, and if there was something nasty on the other side better the Astartes go first.


Upon entering the portal the Alpha Legion found themselves in a shrine dedicated to a being older than recorded history and an evil older than man. The reliquary was lined with numerous paraphernalia and artifacts atop singular pedestals, fossilized statues of a horned and winged being carved out of fossilized bone, five thousand year old scrolls from the Age of Strife made from tanned human skin and written in blood, horn fragments that seemed to be both material and immaterial at the same time, all illuminated in an eerie half-light that seemed to come from spotlights that did not exist. More recent items were also present, grisly trophies from the Massacre of Teuthowald, the Battle of Pydinia and the Nurthene Campaign, all Imperial defeats or losses that had seemed to have no real culprit, at least until now. The halls were lined with cyclopean blocks of stone, inscribed with writing and hieroglyphs that no one had ever seen before.

At the very back was the centerpiece of the shrine, a massive mural several stories high. One of the Alpha Legion, a Katholian, immediately made the holy symbol of Quolious for protection upon seeing it. It depicted a single entity surrounded by flames, vaguely reptilian in countenance, with forward curved horns and three eyes, shrouded by a pair of leathery wings. One of the Alpha Legionnaires remarked that it vaguely resembled depictions of the devil in their home planet’s religion. The face of the being was hard to read due to the lighting in the room, but the shadows gave the impression of a vengeful god with power over life and death. Strange beings were on their knees surrounding the creature, supplicating it for mercy but seemingly receiving none. The beings were abstract and almost devoid of detail, akin to ancient Grecian black pottery, but the Alpha Legion recognized some that looked disturbingly similar to simplified humans or eldar.

The Alpha Legion may not have been able to read the stone carvings, but the text on the scrolls was decipherable, resembling an extinct dialect spoken on a world the Word Bearers had reluctantly purged for being violently insane and too extensively tainted by Chaos. It spoke extensively of the writer’s lord, a being it referred to as “Be’lakor” and called “The First Prince of Chaos”. To the Alpha Legion, it seemed clear the writings spoke of a Daemon Prince, but one on a scale in which the Imperium had never seen before, and which the Imperium knew nothing about. Having seen the scale of the den of iniquity they had found themselves in, the Alpha Legionaires turned to each other and grimly nodded to one another. The Steward had to know about this. The Alpha Legion set about meticulously documenting the scene, taking vid-picts of every artifact and helmet cam footage of the entire sordid shrine. Even if they didn’t know the meaning of every symbol, that did not mean someone else might.

Then, the Alpha Legionnaire Mathias Herzog made a fatal mistake.

He reached out and touched the stone mural. 


At once the shrine reacted to the Alpha Legionnaires presence, much like an immune system suddenly recognizing the presence of an invader. The chamber began to shudder and contract, wretched artifacts rattling and falling off of their pedestals. The Alpha Legion made for the exit at once. But where their trip into the portal had been uneventful, now all the sudden the space within the pocket dimension was like quicksand, actively fighting their attempts to try and escape, the short space to the exit seeming to telescope endlessly. The Alpha Legionnaires could see what was going on outside the portal but were helpless to do anything about it. All they could do was watch what happened next.

It was not just the dark shrine that had reacted to the Alpha Legion’s presence. As the Alpha Legion struggled to escape, the planet itself seemed to break apart, whatever force was holding it together seemingly relinquishing its ownership. The planet’s atmosphere vented itself into space as if realizing it wasn’t supposed to be there, whereas whatever artificial force was holding the oceans the way they were suddenly dissipated leaving the oceans to slosh around the planet as intended by the laws of gravity once more. Including into the basin below sea level where the portal had been.

The Alpha Legion tried to make it through the portal to warn the Chilliad of the oncoming flood, having been aware of the planet’s self-destruction before they were, but were unable to escape from their own predicament in time. Nor could the ships in orbit provide any assistance. As rescue craft descended towards the planet, space-time seemed to ooze around them, slowing their descent to a crawl as they pushed their engines to the limit trying to reach the surface before the planet fell apart. They didn’t make it in time to save the Chilliad forces on the ground. The lucky ones died when the ocean reclaimed the basin. The unlucky ones asphyxiated when the atmosphere dissipated. When the Alpha Legion emerged from the portal, protected from the changed planet by their power armor, they did so at the bottom of the ocean and surrounded by the bodies of their dead comrades.


It wasn’t until the return trip from Eolith that the Alpha Legion noticed something else was amiss. At first it was relatively minor. Shadows out of the corner of one’s eye, strange flickering of the lights when people occasionally entered a room, nothing unusual to see on an old void ship. Then people started to get the feeling they were being watched, and some claimed to see the silhouette of a humanoid figure standing in the doorway in their peripheral vision that disappeared when they turned to look. Then people started having “accidents”. Then they just started to disappear.

The Alpha Legion quickly noticed that the people who were dying were not random, but were all people who had entered the portal on Eolith. At the same time, the shadowy phantoms became bolder, no longer disappearing when people turned their gaze and bearing a striking resemblance to the statue the Alpha Legion had seen on Eolith. When Mathias Herzog turned up dead, not vanished like all the others but his flayed body simply appearing in the middle of the mess hall between a brief flicker of the lights, it seemed clear what was happening. Be’lakor, the being referenced in the shrine on Eolith, had discovered their trespassing and was now following them.

As the days went on more people continued to die, first the last of the Alpha Legionnaires who had survived the portal on Eolith and then all who they had told what they saw. Be'lakor seemed to know exactly who had learned the secret on Eolith and who had not. People started to survive just long enough to describe what was happening to them. Be’lakor was no longer content to hover over people’s shoulder menacingly, but was now coming after his victims with a slow, predatory walk. Victims would burst into rooms, begging for help from phantoms only they could see, only for their would be rescuers to die in turn. But the Alpha Legion was determined. They had to get the information out there, no matter the cost.

And so began the ultimate game of cat and mouse. No matter how far they ran, and how fast, it always seemed like Be’lakor was just two steps behind them. Nothing the Alpha Legion could do seemed to stop it. Be’lakor was implacable, unstoppable, more like a villain from a slasher movie than anything else. All the Alpha Legionnaires could do was keep the intel alive, passing the information on to as many operatives as possible in the form of encryptions and secret codes hopefully below the daemon's notice, and then buy as much time as they could before inevitably dying. Then their comrades would pick up the information, and the hunt would begin anew.

When Be’lakor did catch them, he either killed them on the spot or took what information he needed out of them to continue his hunt, relying on torture techniques honed over millions of years of cruelty. However, Be’lakor’s strategy was starting to exhibit a major flaw. He had spent so much time toying with the Alpha Legionnaires, punishing them for daring to trespass on the hallowed ground of the Old Ones, that the Alpha Legion were getting further and further ahead. First by minutes, then by hours, then by days. A told secret tends to spread exponentially, and before long the Alpha Legion were reporting their findings to the highest levels of the Imperial military. The secret was out, and the truth had become so widely disseminated there was no way Be’lakor could ever cover it back up again. Be’lakor was informed of this fact by one Alpha Legionnaire, who cheekily called himself "Alpharius", though he almost certainly was not. Be’lakor had started to become worried after he noticed that cleaning up this little operation was taking longer than expected, but after hearing those fears confirmed, Be’lakor’s rage was explosive and immediate. The Alpha Legion could not say to have won the battle, having lost too many men over the course of the operation to claim the most pyrrhic of victories, but then neither had Be’lakor. The Imperium still does not know the whole story, believing Be’lakor to be an impossibly ancient Daemon Prince rather than his true nature, but they know he exists. And that is enough.

The loss of fully half the Chilliad and the Alpha Legion’s helplessness to do anything to stop the death of their long-term allies is thought to have been another contributing factor to the Alpha Legion helping the Chilliad disappear after the War of the Beast. The Alpha Legion and its primarchs had [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The_Hydra_Uncoils|done their share of horrible things throughout the years]], [[grimdark|often to people who did not deserve it]]. But that does not mean they were incapable of caring about others. After all, if they did not care, how could they call themselves human?
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==== Second Battle over Elysia ====

The 2nd Battle over Elysia took place when the Chaos fleets tried to keep the blockade of Segmentum Solar after the Battle of Phaeton started. Battlefleet Solar was effectively crippled in a few days as fighting on Phaeton started, the fleet was killed over the skies of Terra. The Chaos fleets stationed themselves around Terra in different sub-sectors to block the supply lines. Battlefleet Pacificus launched a series of small offensives including diversionary attacks in the galactic west, drawing away concentrated defenders from weaker sub-sectors to allow the real attacks to clear supply lines. Battlefleet Ultima along with what's left of Battlefleet Solar gathered to the galactic east of Segmentum Solar's bordering sub-sectors to prepare for war. The Imperial ships in the meantime were conducting hit-and-run attacks all along the bordering sub-sectors. Cronefleet L'Oquis assembled every CE and Ork ships it could get together to hunt down and snuff out the raiding ships coming in from Ultima Segmentum.

The raiding ships fled to the randevu point over Catachan and brought with them news of the chasing Cronefleet. The acting admiral of Battlefleet Solar ordered all ships at the point or heading towards Catachan to divert to Elysia. All of Battlefleet Solar and some of Ultima rushed to meet over Elysia while the bulk of Battlefleet Ultima was moving back to the galactic west. CEs had already teleported inside some of the raider ships to plant tracking beacons on them before leaving unseen. The ships over Elysia rushed to resupply themselves with whatever they can get their hands on until they were unexpectedly attacked by Cronefleet O'Oquis. The battle started with Imperial ships keeping distance while Ork ships tried to close in. CE ships did enter their firing range to launch voidcraft before the Orks could and the Imperials couldn't retreat by then. Many of the human cruisers slugged it out with the CE before the Orks could get a chance to board their ships. The Orks tried ramming the Imperials many times to mostly miss or worst, damage CE ships by mistake. Eldar ships had chased off the rearguard of the Cronefleet while everybody else was fighting in the main battle. Some CE ships from the rear advancing into the main battle were fired upon by other CE ships due to misidentification and were thought to be Craftworlder ships. When the human ships had taken considerable losses Cronefleet L'Oquis tried to withdraw but was blocked by Eldar ships in their rear. 

Several days have passed when the Cronefleet first engaged the Imperial fleet over Elysia. The Imperial forces had clearly taken more losses than the Cronefleet near the ending stages of the battle. When the rest of Battlefleet Ultima arrived over Elysia, the Imperial fleet was much smaller while the Cronefleet had bloodied their noses. The admiral of Battlefleet Ultima assumed command of all ships over Elysia then ordered Battlefleet Solar to retreat. As Battlefleet Solar was disengaging, the rest of Battlefleet Ultima rushed to reach firing range. The Cronefleet was almost destroyed when giving chase to the retreating Imperial ships as Battlefleet Ultima shot them to pieces. 
The 2nd Battle over Elysia reached a mythical status. The destruction of so many Crone ships in that one battle and ineffectiveness of the blockade in the galactic west caused a change in strategy for the Chaos navy in the WotB. Chaos fleets were now to fulfill a supporting role in the invasion of supply producing Imperial worlds rather than block Imperial supply lines. What was left of Cronefleet L'Oquis supported a WAAAHG! that already burned 2 worlds then supported the destruction of another world. Only 3 or 4 cruisers of Cronefleet L'Oquis survived the war to return home after almost all of the fleet was burned by Imperial Fist Battle Barges over Necromunda.

==== Appearance of Attack Planet Ullanor, the Sacrifice of Ollanius Pius, and the Appearance of the Ork Diplomats ====

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|Ork Diplomacy]]

==== The Siege of Terra ====

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|Arik Taranis]], [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|Sanguinius]], and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Eldrad|Eldrad]]

==== Reclamation of Old Earth and the Formation of the Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Xenos#Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork|Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork]]