Dukel led the Imperial expeditionary force from the northern reaches of Nurgle's blighted domain, breaching the accursed borders of the Garden. He set it ablaze with crimson flames, a harbinger of destruction amidst the rotting grandeur. Like an arsonist in a world of decay, he and his forces reduced daemonkind to ash wherever the Imperial war machine advanced.
Under normal circumstances, such a blatant defilement of the Plague God's realm would have invited his direst wrath. Nurgle, for all his joviality, did not suffer trespassers lightly.
But these were not normal times.
With his pestilent gaze turned toward the material universe, forming the virulent tide of the Scourge, it seemed as if the galaxy itself had risen in defiance against him. The Ruinous Powers, ever at odds, had turned upon one another with renewed ferocity.
To the northwest of Nurgle's dominion, Khorne's daemonic legions—led by a Great Bloodthirster—waged an unrelenting slaughter, staining the once-fertile gardens with rivers of gore. The Plague God's domain, a place of slow, festering cycles, had become a blood-drenched battlefield of ceaseless carnage.
To the northeast, Tzeentch, ever the schemer and ancient rival of Nurgle, had sent forth his minions to erect crystalline spires amidst the festering swamps. These arcane monoliths disrupted the Plague Father's sacred cycles of decay and rebirth, fracturing his authority over his domain.
Decay, death, and renewal—this was Nurgle's triumvirate of power. An eternal cycle that rendered all things immortal in their ruination, bound to his will.
Yet now, that cycle lay shattered.
Sensing opportunity, Dukel struck. Compared to the devastation wrought by Khorne's berserkers and Tzeentch's sorcerers, his own incursion was almost... merciful.
Thus, the Imperial advance was met with little resistance. Their march through the festering wilds of the Garden felt surreal, as though they had simply strolled into a corrupted paradise.
The eyes of the Imperial warriors gleamed with an intoxicating mix of awe, zeal, and madness.
To tread upon the sacred domain of a Dark God, to defile Nurgle's garden with the boots of mortal men—such an achievement was worthy of saga and song, a legacy to be told for generations.
Even in death, they would stand unbowed before the God-Emperor, proud of their deeds, their souls bound for the Throne with tales of defiance.
—"Is this what it feels like to strike down a god at his weakest? Glorious!"
Even Dukel himself was consumed by the thrill of the slaughter. The Legion's morale soared beyond limits, needing no rallying cries, no grand speeches. Their wrath alone propelled them forward.
For twenty-two days, the Second Legion had waged their burning crusade. Twenty-two days of relentless war. Twenty-two days of devastation.
The sheer number of daemons they had slain, the unholy essence they had absorbed, had transformed them. The Doom Slayers, already behemoths among men, swelled in size, their armor groaning as their forms grew stronger, bulkier. The genetic heirs of the Second Primarch now towered over their Astartes brethren, their very presence casting long shadows upon the corpse-laden fields.
Doom, their mightiest, stood nearly three meters tall, marching like an armored juggernaut in his Primarch's wake.
The daemonic tide was unending.
A sea of pestilent filth, a horde that shifted and churned with grotesque life. In this realm, anything—everything—could be corrupted into a daemon at a moment's notice.
The weakest of Nurgle's spawn, the wretched Nurglings, swarmed in droves, throwing themselves at the advancing Imperials in suicidal waves. Their bloated forms, reeking of pestilence, grinned with fanged, pus-dripping mouths. Antlers like serrated blades jutted from their heads, while every oozing pore exhaled miasmatic death.
The diminutive creatures wielded rusted, plague-ridden weapons, their distended bellies jiggling as they charged. Some barely reached the knee of a Doom Slayer; many were crushed underfoot, reduced to foul-smelling smears upon the rot-slicked ground.
The Slayers, their bodies already swollen with daemonic energy, regarded these creatures with disdain.
The 'Argent Energy Backpacks' strapped to their backs—unique to the Second Legion—began to glow ominously, overheating from the sheer volume of harvested warp essence.
A silent understanding passed among them.
Chainswords were lowered.
Shotguns were raised.
Each double-barreled weapon, modified with psychic sensors linked to their Argent packs, no longer fired mere solid slugs. Instead, they spat forth raw, searing hellfire—great torrents of burning wrath, channeled from the very essence of the daemons they had slain.
Each deafening blast of their weapons did not simply kill—it scoured.
A fan-shaped wave of balefire erupted with every pull of the trigger, vaporizing Nurglings by the hundreds. The flames merged into a raging inferno, a purging tide that swept across the battlefield in relentless waves, consuming all in its path.
The Doom Slayers did not reload.
They did not need to.
The Argent-powered shotguns roared endlessly, spewing crimson fury, an unceasing deluge of righteous annihilation.
This was not mere war.
This was extinction.
Such an overwhelming release of firepower placed immense strain on the Argent energy packs, a luxury the Doom Slayers would not normally squander. But here, in the depths of the Garden of Nurgle, it had become a standard method of attack.
Amidst the swarming waves of Nurglings, the hulking forms of the Lords of Corruption loomed. These monstrous daemons, infamous for their unnatural resilience, radiated foul energies. Their bloated, ulcer-ridden bodies teemed with writhing parasites, flesh split open with gaping sores that wept pus and filth.
Ordinarily, these fiends never set foot in the material realm, instead standing vigil at the borders of Nurgle's domain, ensuring the Grandfather's creations remained unmolested by rival powers. Now, their grotesque endurance enabled them to wade through the firestorm, pushing ever forward in their unholy advance.
Yet when they reached the front lines, their end came swiftly.
With a resounding puff!, the warriors of the Second Legion didn't bother to swap weapons. Instead, they drove the reinforced barrels of their double-barreled shotguns directly into the daemons' bloated forms. The crude, blunt instruments tore through diseased flesh with sheer brute force, nearly submerging into their pestilent mass.
Then, with a simple squeeze of the trigger—
Boom!
Like ruptured gas tanks, the Lords of Corruption detonated. Torrents of red flame erupted, consuming their wretched forms, igniting the battlefield in an inferno that reduced countless Nurglings to nothing but greasy cinders.
Through the roiling black smoke and burning flesh, the Doom Slayers marched onward, their boots crushing daemon corpses underfoot. The Garden of Nurgle, once teeming with unholy life, became their killing ground.
Plaguebearers, Lords of Decay, Pestigors, Chaos Spawn, and all manner of Nurgle's filth surged forth in an unending tide, desperately hurling themselves at the advancing Imperials. Like pus bursting from a wound, the foul legions spewed forth from every corner of the garden.
But the Doom Slayers never wavered. Their relentless slaughter continued unabated, night and day, a ceaseless whirlwind of destruction. Fatigue was an alien concept; if anything, the more they killed, the stronger they became. Their bodies swelled with stolen vitality, their strength redoubled, their spirits sharpened to a razor's edge.
Three hundred warriors advanced inexorably, an unstoppable spearhead driving deep into the rotting heart of Nurgle's domain. Though they bore the full brunt of the daemonic counterattack, not a single warrior faltered.
"Our fury burns like the Emperor's wrath,
Our duty is eternal, our mission unyielding,
We are the hammer of the Imperium,
We are the blade that severs all corruption!"
High above, the sky shook with the fury of war. The guns of the Imperial fleet roared, and the heavens themselves blazed with the light of destruction. Artillery, macrocannons, lance batteries, torpedoes, and incendiary bombardments rained down without pause.
There was no need to consider collateral damage—this was a war of total annihilation. The artillery crews, their eyes bloodshot with righteous fury, slammed the firing mechanisms again and again, howling in defiance as they unleashed ruin upon the plague-ridden landscape.
But the daemons of Nurgle were not without their own engines of war. They retaliated with grotesque artillery: pus-spewing catapults, plague-infested trebuchets, and bloated corpse-barges that hurled filth at the Imperial fleet.
Though crude in appearance, these weapons carried the raw power of the Plague God. Corruptive filth splattered against Imperial void shields, causing them to flicker and strain under the unholy assault. Green miasma exploded into the sky, tainting metal and flesh alike. Where it seeped through cracks, pustules bloomed, and daemons clawed their way free from the infected steel.
"For the Imperium! For our fallen brethren! For the Emperor!"
A thunderous battle cry rang across the battlefield as Efilar ascended into the skies, the flames of retribution trailing behind her. The once-composed Sister of Battle now burned with incandescent wrath. Her voice was raw, her fury unchained.
In her grasp, she wielded the Aquila Banner of Destiny, its twin-headed eagle gleaming with divine radiance. Infused with overwhelming psychic energy, the standard shone like a newborn sun, its light enough to illuminate an entire sector.
The eternal smog that choked the Garden of Nurgle was pierced by its brilliance. The golden radiance surged forth, anathema to all things unholy. Across the battlefield, wherever Imperial forces clashed with the daemon legions, the Emperor's light banished the creeping malaise.
The faithful of the Imperium felt their exhaustion melt away, their doubts burned to ash. Strength surged anew in their limbs, and their war cries rose to a deafening crescendo. Courage flooded their hearts like an unquenchable fire.
But to the servants of Nurgle, the light was agony.
Accustomed as they were to endless suffering, even they could not withstand its searing purity. They shrieked in torment as their rotten flesh blackened and peeled away, their festering bodies igniting like dry tinder.
And yet, in the face of their torment, the daemons did not retreat. They shambled forward, singing in ghastly voices, their dirges of decay carried on the rancid wind.
Atop a writhing mound of filth, the Vanguard of Nurgle lurched forward. A bloated, wretched thing, its flesh sloughed off in thick sheets, revealing layers of pus and wriggling maggots beneath. In its clawed grip, it clutched a horn—rusted, dripping with congealed bile, overgrown with fungal rot.
Despite its grotesque state, it grinned with rotten delight.
Three weeping eyes rolled in its skull, each oozing putrescent slime. The number three—sacred to Nurgle, a symbol of his boundless affection—marked it as blessed beyond measure.
With reverence, it reached into its throat, withdrawing its own vocal cords. With careful precision, it scraped away the filth, clearing out the buzzing flies and clotted mucus, ensuring that the sound it would produce would carry far and wide.
Then, with deliberate solemnity, it pressed the horn to its decayed lips and blew.
A sickening, gurgling note burst forth, a wave of sound that was neither music nor speech. It was a festering, putrid vibration that slithered through the air, seeping into flesh, corroding spirit. The battlefield quaked as the loathsome tone resounded, filling every living soul with a nausea that reached into the depths of their very being.
With the blaring of a colossal war-horn, decayed hands erupted from the rotting, fleshy earth of the Garden of Nurgle.
These hands, covered in oozing pustules and necrotic skin, clawed desperately at the festering ground, dragging forth faces twisted by agony and corruption.
The warriors buried beneath the Garden had once defied the Plague God. With unwavering will, they had fought against his pestilence, resisting his malignant embrace. Now, their remains nourished the writhing flora of his domain.
Thus, they became part of the eternal cycle of death, decay, and rebirth.
The moment they surfaced, they wept.
Nurgle, ever the generous god, had not granted them the release of true death. Instead, he preserved their souls and memories, allowing them to recall every wretched moment of their suffering. They remembered how their worlds drowned in filth, how their comrades fell to sickness, and how their resistance crumbled under the inevitability of entropy.
Now, they were bound to Nurgle's will, unable to die, unable to truly live, forever lingering in the abyss between existence and oblivion.
They were his unwilling servants, destined to spread his despair to all who opposed him.
"You dare trespass in the domain of the Plaguefather, mortal scum!" a booming voice bellowed.
The fetid jungle of the Garden parted as a Great Unclean One lumbered forth, drawn by the tolling of a plague bell. Upon witnessing the destruction wrought upon Nurgle's sacred realm, fury overtook the daemon's normally jovial demeanor.
Though not among the highest of the Plague God's lieutenants, the Greater Daemon exuded a presence of dread. It grasped at the festering intestines that spilled from the gaping rupture in its own stomach. Through the opening, Nurglings cackled and gorged themselves upon the daemon's putrid innards.
In one bloated fist, it hefted a massive bone club, cursing as it advanced toward the warriors of the Imperium.
With a single swing, a Primaris Space Marine was sent hurtling through the air.
The warrior, clad in the crimson of the Blood Angels, crashed into the ground, his ceramite plate shattered. His brethren rushed to evacuate him from the battlefield before the daemon could finish the job.
"Children! Do not allow these vermin to desecrate our Father's masterpiece!" the Greater Daemon bellowed.
The imperial warriors around it scattered under the daemon's relentless assault. The Plague God's spawn, creatures usually exuding grotesque mirth, now seethed with righteous fury. No servant of Nurgle could abide mortals defiling their sanctuary.
Though grotesque and ponderous, the Great Unclean One moved inexorably forward, its form swelling with unholy power. Here, in the heart of Nurgle's domain, it was nigh-unstoppable.
It brought its bone club down like a thunderbolt, obliterating an entire squad of Astra Militarum soldiers. Their bodies were crushed into a gory slurry, swiftly reabsorbed into the Garden's loathsome biomass.
Twenty-two squads perished beneath the daemon's unrelenting carnage. Blood pooled in grotesque pits, each a monument to the Plague God's dominion.
Then, from above, a shadow descended.
A figure, wreathed in flame, crashed into the battlefield, igniting the very air with raw, incandescent fury.
Dukel had arrived.
His arrival set the field ablaze with righteous wrath. At once, he beheld the horrors that had befallen his warriors, and his rage erupted like a dying star.
"Seven plagues, seven blessings, seven curses! This is the Garden of Nurgle! You who bear the taint of the False Emperor shall find no refuge here!" the Great Unclean One howled, its voice reverberating through the sickly realm.
It raised its colossal weapon, bringing it down with all the force of a cataclysm.
"Boom!"
Dukel did not flinch.
The divine power of the High Heavens surged through his form, his stature growing until he towered over even the Great Unclean One. As the club descended, Dukel met it with his fist.
The weapon shattered upon impact, fragments of rotting bone disintegrating into ash.
Dukel stepped forward, driving his heel into the daemon's bloated mass. The impact sent the creature crashing into the filth-ridden ground.
"Garden of Nurgle?" he spat, his iron-clad boot pressing down upon the daemon's corpulent flesh. "Can your rotting eyes not see the Imperial Aquila?"
With unrelenting fury, Dukel's burning rage seared through the daemon's flesh. Its hide, thick as fortress walls, split open, its corrupt flesh blackening and carbonizing as if cast into a sun's core.
The very ground beneath them cracked and dried, the moisture evaporated in an instant by the sheer intensity of his wrath.
With a final, deafening roar, Dukel drove his fist into the daemon's skull, shattering it like brittle chitin. He reached into its ruined torso, yanked free its putrid entrails, and strangled what little remained of its essence.
"This world belongs to the Imperium!" he declared. "No matter who ruled it before, once the Emperor's standard is raised, it is ours!"
He drew forth his Bloodthirsty Chainsword, its teeth still slick with the ichor of daemons, and waded into the horde of Nurgle's spawn.
With each swing, his weapon carved blazing arcs through the diseased ranks, reducing them to nothingness. Firestorms erupted at his command, twisting into towering infernos that consumed the Plague God's children with righteous vengeance.
The tide of battle turned.
Then, the ground trembled.
The Garden itself convulsed, a vast, undulating mass of flesh and filth. Pus surged forth in rivers, drowning all in its path.
From the horizon, an immense figure emerged, its antlered silhouette looming higher than the mountains. Shrouded in pestilent mist, it spoke, its voice a sonorous quake of doom.
"I am Rotigus Rainfather, second among the Plaguefather's chosen."
A god had once walked among mortals, bestowing his blessings upon the undeserving. Where he tread, the land warped and swelled, livestock birthed abominations, and the air thickened with the scent of festering life.
Now, he stood before Dukel, his corpulent form exuding the boundless generosity of Grandfather Nurgle.
Raindrops the size of boulders fell from the sky, and the stench of decay became unbearable. As the deluge intensified, Rotigus raised his arms in welcome, a booming laugh shaking the very fabric of the Garden.
"Marvel at the splendor of my lord's realm! Flesh in bloom, decay in harmony! Compared to the artistry of Nurgle, Tzeentch is but a trickster, Slaanesh a mere vagrant, and Khorne nothing more than a mindless brute. You should rejoice, little mortals, for you stand in the Garden of the Loving Father."
Dukel met the daemon's gaze, unfazed. The divine power of the Supreme Heaven continued to flow into him, his form growing ever mightier.
By the twenty-second step forward, he loomed even larger than the Rainfather himself.
Flames erupted anew, consuming all in their path. The corrupted rain evaporated before it could touch him, the seething earth withered and cracked beneath his presence.
Dukel grinned.
"Another challenger? Good."
He clenched his fist, the flames around him roaring in response.
"I hope you last longer than the last one."