The 40k Lorecast - Episode 153 - The Tanith First and Only pt 4 - The siege of Verunhive

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

On Today’s cast we conclude our coverage of the Tanith first and only with a heavy dive into the events of the siege of Verghast. From the opening attack of Verunhive that exposed kind of all the failings of the leadership there. Through the constant meddling and politicking of the numerous lords and local commissars. Through the great victory brought about by Gaunt, his Tanith. And of course the ending of the book that made one of the host groan a the cheesiness of it all.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallBrad ChannelOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl and use my code hipebl.ai for a great deal: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Quince and use my code quince.com/40KLORE for a great deal: https://www.quince.com* Check out Shopify and use my code shopify.com/lore for a great deal: https://www.shopify.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K lore cast. With me, John Barcati and Bradchester. This guy. Today, we're continuing our coverage of the 10th first and only. Actually, you're probably going to conclude it, guys, spoiler alert. It is a funny conversation we had, everybody. John calls me up when we're talking about what we're doing.

He's like, hey, man, like, we're in our third cast and we're not done with the third. Yeah, I'm sorry, fourth cast. Fourth cast and we're not done with the third book. What do you want to do? And I was like, we should probably do something else. Yeah. So today. It's not going to be the, it's not going to be the, or we could just be the Gantz ghost podcast for the next year.

So, yeah, today we're going to finish up the story of Vergas and give you guys a bit more of a taste of what comes next for the ghost, but really spent a lot of time on this conflict. Because this conflict is huge for this story, but also is a really good story about the Imperium in general. So I love it a lot, and we're going to cover that today. And then, yes, spoiler, move on something else afterwards. But as always, 40K Lourcast, weekly show, focusing in the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern, please follow and comment because, yay, it's helpful. Also, links in the show notes to really cool things, like a YouTube channel that we will do a Q&A for maybe this month. I say this month, and we're just going to go with depending on when you listen to it.

A link to Brad's channel where he's covering the competitive side of the game. A link to our history of 40K, where we're talking about the history of the game in the tabletop and mostly just messing around. Link to my show Retro Recall. We're on messing around old video games. And of course, if you want to support us, a link to our merchandise and our Patreon. We have stickers. We do. Brad also has a mute button that he's never figured out yet.

But it's fine. Anyway, just I think we are, this is like the 50th time. I've had him sneeze into a microphone. There we go. Look, I'm fine now. It'll all work better. And I just, well,

I figured at some point, I would tell you there was a mute button. You could just press this on this one. Fine. Instead of swinging the microphone, wildly far away from myself. Yeah. I mean,

it's fine. This is what I like. All right. But as always, our Patreon. Our Patreon is $4.99 cents a month. it gets you this show and the history of 40K ad-free or 4,556.67 Chilean pesos. Because today we're going to Santiago, Chile.

Because last week's cast, I decided to look up with the coldest country in the southern hemisphere is. And apparently it's Chile, but it's kind of bullshit because it's just the part where Patagonia is. Turns out, Brad, yeah, the northern hemisphere is a lot colder than the southern hemisphere. And I'm just not cool with this. Like, it's like, because it's not just us. We also have listeners in Sweden and whatnot. There's no Sweden in the Southern Hemisphere. Oh, South Africa gets cold.

No, it doesn't. I have friends from South Africa. No. They own sweaters. They don't own Carhart. So, but anyway, I mentioned Santiago, Chile, and we're doing Santiago Chile. Santiago, it's the largest city and it's the capital in all of Chile. And it's a lovely place.

It's an hour and a half from the coast. It's a really, really nice coastline, by the way. Lovely seafood. So you get cooling brew. breezes, great little spot. But you don't get the nightmare if anyone's ever lived coastal. You get a lot of saltwater coming and wrecking your house. You also get a lot more drizzle and BS.

So kind of being that far off the coast is nice. Founded in 1541, Santiago is this really vibrant city, large green spaces, historical areas, but also a lot of skyscrapers and modern amenities. And all of that with a cool view of the Andes Mountains, because they're right there. cuisine really great. As you guys know, I like food, and they lean heavily into kind of a few different things. One, fresh fruit. There's watermelon everywhere. They've also got this weird concoctions, this thing called Monte Conjozzo, which is a summer drink, which is wheat and dried peaches, which sounds gross, but it's actually quite delicious. They're also full of bread for some weird reason. I don't know why they eat. They're the second most, consume what is how it says they consume the second most bread on the world next to the germans i didn't

realize it was the germans who eat the most bread either so there you go brad don't go there i've been there yeah how's that gluten allergy going for you super good loving it really super super super fun the fact that i got developed allergies late in life that didn't even know that was a thing yeah awesome go team uh uh Things are going perfect. Chileans are also, and I'm assuming this is a German influence, they like mayonnaise a lot and put it on everything, including hot dogs. But they also put avocado on the hot dogs, and I've had these hot dogs, and they're really good.

It's really good. Hot dogs are kind of weird anyway. So whatever. I do kind of like avocado on everything, though. Avocado is always a win. They've also got soapapias. They've got pastel de choclo. They've got really great food.

And if you go there, there's a ton of stuff to do. If you want something wild, go up the Atacampa, the thing. I've actually been there. The Atacampa deserts are one of the most desolate places on Earth. I don't think it's rained there for millions of years, something like that. They've got beautiful beach and coastline. You can hike. You can paracale.

Paraglide. I'm afraid of height. So none of those are going to happen. But you can go nuts. And it's got one of the best economies in all of South America. And it's one of the safest places to visit. So really great place to go. Enjoy.

Have fun. And, of course, I always finish up with our Discord. Hop into the Discord. Ask us questions. We will answer them. Ask other people questions. They will answer them because that's what Discord's for. And you know how much you're going to cost you to join our Discord?

Zero dollars because that's what discords are supposed to be. Come on in. Learn more about lore. Ask terribly dumb questions and have no one get flame you for it because it's not your fault. You're new to the game and don't know something instead of Reddit, which is seriously a nightmare. I've had to spend a lot more time in Reddit recently because of 11th edition. It is not fun. Just not fun.

But all right, back to the cast. Quick recap of where we were. Last week, the Tannath had been deployed to Varenhive, along with the Vulpene Blue Bloods and a few others. Varenhive is under attack from another hive called the Farozoikens, which are actually full-blown chaos force. On the plus side... And a big thing on this, not just chaos.

It's full-blown chaos. And I know that sounds like you said the same thing, Brad. usually there's the tops that you get the loyal or you get the under hive kind of getting to chaos. No, this is a whole hive period into chaos, which has not been seen at this point in the writing. This is a big deal on this. We haven't seen a huge uprising like this where everything takes over. So the positives are, the Varon Hive is secure, the void shields up and the walls are intact. Unlike others that did not put their void shield up.

Yeah, one of the other hives that took nuclear weapons at the dome. That one doesn't exist anymore. The negative is there are at least three million cultists on the other side of the wall that are being led by chaos magister Heritor Asphidal, who's a master of arcane technology, and no one inside the walls know this. So they just think it's a rag-tag chaos force outside the wall. Which, but they shouldn't because he has demon engines outside. Well, they haven't hit the wall yet.

That's what I'm saying. The demon engines haven't hit the wall. wall yet. They figure this out. They don't figure out it's him till later, but they figure out that's a problem pretty quick. Now, what makes it even more complicated is there's way too many cooks in the kitchen. So we have Colonel Commissar Ebram Gant. We've got General Nash of the Roan Deepers, General Grismond of the Narminian Armored, General Sturm of the Royan Volpone, and that's just the guard. Then you have the PDF. Then you have all of the idiots inside. Yeah. Lord Cass.

Sondar, pious. Everybody inside the walls that's not a guard character is a moron and commissar should have shot. With the exception and we're going to touch on him a lot later, the guy who leaves the militia. He is cool. That's the only

one. He's the only one in the inside who's not a complete piece of garbage. It's just so much political nonsense going on while people are, I refuse to let you save my life unless you give me a sticker that says I'm awesome. They legitimately just give a lot of these people a pat on the back to do this.

It's like, it infuriates me. And that's why the biggest problem of this is, so technically the highest ranking officer here is General Stern. He should be able to take full control. By the way the Imperium is written, he is a commanding general in the Imperial Guard. He has been deployed there. The way it is written is the local PDF and militia automatically report to him. He should take full control of the city. But the thing in Sturm, to his credit, is not an idiot.

What he knows is they're on the ass end of nowhere. They also came down with a small force. But it doesn't matter. The thing is, but just because the rules say that doesn't mean the rules will get followed. Yes, but coming down with the small force means a little bit because he knows that if he just starts shooting people in the head, big mutiny could happen and they have a small force. So pretty tired of you shooting people. Let's just kill the guy that's shooting people.

Yeah. And what ends up making it a lot worse is everyone's kind of got different goals outside of not die. Although they're not even necessarily ranked where not die is the top one. You've got Commissar Pius. Who sucks. Yeah. He just wants this whole thing to make him so glorious that he gets to rejoin the crusade as like a general. He was doing character.

and he put max points into douche and moron. Yeah. Then you've got Highmaster Sondar, who just wants to the hive preserved and ties keep getting paid. Sondar is a weird character. It's almost like he expects to win. And his whole thing is like,

I just want to go back to the way things were when this is over. I was basically kind of running the planet. And he sucks for a different way because it's almost apathy for Sondar. He just, he doesn't think, any of this, all of this is an inconvenience. You guys are all drama queens. Stop. Exactly. Do basically do whatever you do, but like he keeps popping in because he goes,

well, don't do this because it'll make it harder when I get back fully can control. Basically, hey, don't wreck the, don't ruin the grass in the lawn because it's going to be awesome later. You're like, dude, they're going to burn down the house, man. Stop worrying about the lawn. And then you have General Sturm, who's looking to have a really decisive victory over a chaos force, because he's been struggling as of late to live up the expectations place. He just had a huge loss. Oh, that's right. Yeah. He did have a huge loss.

And the other problem for him, don't forget, is he's also been sent here with the expectation of an easy win and got here to find three million cultists. He's grossly outnumbered. And then you have gaunt. Now, let's call a spade of spade here. The novels are about Gaunt and the Tannis. The main characters actually know what's going on. Yeah. So they're the ones.

Sorry, the only people that know what's going on. Yeah. So Gaunt and the Taneth are obviously the ones who seem to figure out all the stuff that's going on throughout it and blah, blah, blah. But the first kind of big issue, the conflict that comes up is Gaunt, Grismund of an Armenian armored, and Nash of their own deeper. they believe that the best defense is a good offense. The Narminian armored being there, because this is a very, very, very good armored division. They say, look, we've got an opportunity.

The Farozoicans are still advancing on the city. They haven't dug in yet, and so they can't really bring their big guns to bear. This is when you do a mobile counterattack. Grisman could exit the city, flank the enemy, and just start wrecking shop, bring it. And then they really want to take to go back into them. Yeah, well, you also take the cities has giant gun emplacements.

They could just bombing them. In that city, we could take the fight to them. Let's weaken their forces. Even if this doesn't completely defeat them, we can cut them in half. We can do a ton to them. But Sturm and the civic leaders all stand in opposition to this. They don't, their viewpoints, we don't want to reduce our defenses at all. They want to stand.

Basically, they just want to sit there and let the waves crash against the beach. that's their view point. God has one of my favorite lines of this because he tries to be, he's actually respectful of it because he's trying to be part of this meeting, which goes to shit in just a minute. But he points out, hey, man,

if they do breach, everyone dies. Yeah, we have nowhere to retreat to. We're at the wall. There's nowhere further back. Maybe put some space between us and the enemy, but anyway, gone accepts this to Brad's point, and he deploys his Tanneth all over the place to kind of aid not just the defenses but also the citizens.

Because the Farozoicans are not there, you know, have a campfire and make s'mores outside the city walls. They're there to kill. And the Tanneth immediately find a city that's just grossly unprepared for what's coming. And this is a lot of Sanders fought on this because they still have not mobilized people. People don't even know what's going on. They have no idea. The regular populace is just like, hey, what's going on? I'm just going to go make some sandwiches.

You should do some stuff. You might want to shelter. Exactly. And none of this is happening. Well, and the irony of the whole thing is that the way that the hive is built to function is when an attacker comes, the walls go up, and then we go and we attack. Exactly what Gaunt was calling to go do is how all of these hives are meant to do war. They're actually not meant to take abuse against the wall.

Because quick side note about a void shield, you can walk through a void shield. You just can't shoot through it. So the city's not built to be a defender. It's built to do short-term defense. So the Tanneth find themselves embedded with a civilian population that is starting to starve, by the way, and they're starting to break. Well, this is a bigger thing. I'm going to go back just a little bit on this because of the fact that Sanders doing a bad job of running this place because he's behind us off. There's no reason that they should

already be having supply issues in the first place. This is a mismanagement. This is why I can't Stanley's people. They start to run out of stuff instantaneously when there's absolutely no reason that it should be this way. And of course, because it's a story about the Tanneth and Gond, the Tanneth coming from a forest world, they're newer to this. Their viewpoint, they have a lot more sorrow for the people in the hive. The other regiments are just like, yeah, hives suck. What? Like people are starving.

Next problem. The tanneth are the ones that were like, well, we should help them, shouldn't we? You know, it's like, where everyone's like, no, it's a hive city, don't care. And they do. They actually do make efforts to try and make life better. The defense force is a trash fire too. And it's a trash fire because no one's gotten them ready for stuff. These guys are ready to break before the fight starts, not.

during or anything they're well yeah and i do like this scene a lot because what happens is the pharazoicans start shelling the city so for 24 days it's the void shield for 24 days the void shield just takes a bombardment and anyone who studied world war one knows this process they shell it and then the shelling stops and the shelling stops that means the attack is coming and so it's but it didn't come and a day passes there's no attack and another day passes and no attack. The third day passes and no attack. And as this is going to Brad's point, the defenders start losing it. They start running away. And so they start having to execute a lot of the defenders because they start running away because they're just sitting on a wall, staring out from a

wall, waiting for the attack to come that does not come. And it's happening. Let's clear on the shields, though. So they have big walls, like regular physical walls. void shields are to stop munitions from showing up. They're stopped kinetic and laser, everything else. But you can just walk through them. You can get inside of them. They don't stop you moving slow, basically, when you go in. So they're just going to walk past the shields,

then deal with the actual physical walls of the run hive. And, well, that does happen on day five. Yeah. On day five, they show up. and what they show up with is terrifying. Now, all of the else, the first time I read this, I thought it was defilers they showed up with. They're described as crab walkers.

Also, screw you on this. It just is. I'm sorry. I know that Reddit says you're wrong. The description is a freaking defiler. I, okay, go. When I read it,

I'm like, go to defiler, and then I go on Reddit. Crap walkers with a cannon on their chest. Screw off, dude. It's a defilers. So they show, yeah,

right, fine. They show up with the filers. and no one's seen a defile us were wrong, but like, this is just a defiler, man. Yeah. So they show up with these Crabwalker defilers and start, but they're all over this. They attack four main areas. Vavergate, Crowgate, Hieronomo Sondar Gate, and the committled the spoil. I would go on this again.

Because they didn't do anything, they didn't do any countercharge, they didn't do any bombardment, they didn't focus on the forces that are attacking are able to. to effectively surround the city and do whatever the hell they want. And they also, they're dug in. Their siege engines and stuff are just dug in with absolutely no issues. And they're coming in at full force. So they're hitting all four spots the same time. And this is obviously a probing assault, but it's still a full assault.

And the defenders are not prepared for this. So these crab walkers, by the way, are very well armored. And they're just shrugging munitions. that are coming into them and firing back into them. And the defenders are terrible. They're missing with all of their shots, everything, it's going to crap. And in the case of Vavor Gate, the enemy actually breaches the gate with one of the defilers.

The defenders end up destroying it, but they end up having to repair the gate sort of. It's actually jammed open. Yeah, because the defiler jammed in the inside of it. But he are able to repel. this is a nightmare. The command of PDF of the Defense Force, the planetary defense force,

is horrific because they talk a lot about the communications and everything and people are just screaming into comms. Ah, that's about it. Like no information whatsoever. They are poorly trained. Well, the guns, while

everybody in the, the Tanneth First is pretty cool. They're helping the citizens, stuff like that. These guys are pretty angry with these guys. guys, the defense force, and they make no tough it. There's multiple times in the book where they're just kind of like, hey man, get your shit together, basically.

What they actually do is, it's not just the Tanneth, but also I believe the Volpeen did this too. They actually made a side communication channel. Yes. Of their own. They cut them off. Because they couldn't use the open box channel. Because he got so corrupted.

They noticed in the first assault. So we fast forward a little bit. Six days later. a massive artillery barrage kicks off again. And this time, it's not targeting the void shield, though. They'd actually move their artillery further up, and they were targeting the towers on top of the gates. Because if you put enough munitions through,

and you kind of angle them down, they will penetrate a void shield. And they start ripping apart, and they're only targeting Vever Gate, the one that had been jammed open. Also, again, if they would have done an assault, but whatever. Let's go ahead. Yeah.

So the defenders in the plus side can return fire into said artillery, which they did, but the number just weren't in their favor. This artillery starts pulling down all of the stuff around Vever Gate. And then immediately the ground force. There's no five-day pause now. The ground forces come rushing in. Siege engines come through. And this is a air quotes here, repaired gate.

Vaver Gate is very quickly getting overrun. At the same time, forces are hitting other parts of the city, but it's just more to create confusion. The main thrust is Vaver Gate, but they're hitting other spots, and this does cause incredible confusion. The defenders need to get all of their stuff down to Vaver Gate, but they discover an issue. Well, they discover, same issue as before. As this whole attack's taking place and they're trying to move stuff around, it just turns into a giant traffic jam, a horrifying traffic jam. And the way that the rules are, it's up to the PDF to coordinate the movement around.

And this Vox channel is just completely out of control. It's everyone just yelling, screaming. And there's a man named Colonel Modil, who was overseeing all of this. and he's in the command center and everyone's yelling and screaming. And he decides that the best solution to this is just to do the line from airplane. Jump don't want no help. Jump don't get to help. And turns off the Vox.

Now, luckily for the defenders, the Tanneth, like we said before, saw this coming. And the ones holding VerveerGate had made their own Vox communication. So they actually were still keeping up communication during this. So despite the fact that the Vox Channel had just been a. effectively turned off. And it, when it was almost was anarchy, the tannots were able to move around and keep the fences going. At the same time, Gaunt is not going to let this stuff happen.

As Gaunt discovers this stuff's, the gentleman been turned off, he rushes into the command center and confronts Colonel Modil. And by confront him, I mean, he shoots him in the head. Yep. I'm not going to lie. I was waiting for my chance to jump all over this. because I was like, a confront feels very soft. He walked in there and said,

pardon me, sir. You do it on a great Poupon commercial? Yeah. And then shot him in the head and immediately took control, turn the box channel on, and took control of the situation. Now, I will should mention, this was a little bit late in the process.

There are Farozoican troops who penetrated the walls. The defenders, The Channis have already had their own secret channel, period. Yeah, but they've had this. But what happens is the Farozoicans do get in. This is the first time anyone gets to see what the Farozoicans are. And so we talked about this when we did the Vraxcast. Usually chaos troops get a little bit, just go jacked up.

They look a little bit wonky. And these ones very much so were. They take the mask off. It's one of those sci-fi reveals. They take the mask off. And these people have implantations all over their heads. It's men, women, adolescent. children, and it's mind control implantation.

They're digital mind slaves. There's not, yeah, but it's technology. It's again, they're basically using admec versions, again, someone that wasn't from, and they've got mind control. They've chipped everybody, and it's pretty gruesome all they do it, too. These are, they effectively just bolted in stuff into people's heads. Like, that seems not great, because they talk about big slabs of metal being drilled into their domes.

but they are able to eventually repel this second attack and chaos retreats. But now the brat irritation will begin because now we've got drama, big drama. Gaunt just executed one of the main leaders of Varenhive for cowardice. And because he made out basically the leaders of Varenhive to be unable to handle a situation. Which is 100% right. They've proven it. Yes. Also, this gate falls.

If God's ghost isn't here, I know them the main characters, but like, if they're not there at this gate, the city falls from this. Oh, 100%. 100%. And, but this is something Stern was trying to avoid because he also knew something. He knew that the soldiers and the leaders of Varanive were not capable of defending themselves. and the Imperial Guard were there to save them. But the people there thought the opposite.

He knows that the people who are leading Verenheim believe that the guard are there basically is like an accoutrement to their forces. Like, we're, oh, yeah, we've got this. Those guys are just there to fill in some gaps here and there. That's all in shambles now. And the leaders of Verenheim blow up and demand, air quotes here, accountability.

And they want a trial of Gaunt. Problem is that Gaunt was completely correct in his absence. And he had the authority to do it. Gaunt, however, doesn't really rock the diplomacy on this one because he goes, effectively, he's like, I'd shoot him again right now if he was here, like to all of those guys in the thing. Because he goes, we want accountability. He's like, I'd shoot him again right this second.

But the problem is that when they ask him why he shot him, Gaunt says, well, he acted outside of the command structure. He didn't follow the rules and therefore unfit for leadership, which is exactly what Strom or Stern did not want him to say because Gaunt didn't know something. As the Farozoican forces were breaching the gate and all hell broke loose. The city was totally clogged up. No one could move. And then rush hour traffic.

And so Brad, rush hour traffic is this thing when people live somewhere that people want to live, it occurs. So you can't get from one place to the other because there's lots of people there. It's just a thing. Don't worry about. Toledo, you guys doesn't come up. You know what? I'm telling everybody a side story. And this one of my friends stayed in my house. And he's driving back to New York. And he goes, Brad, you know, I'm going to work. And he's like, well, I'm like, hey, stay whenever you want, leave whenever you want. And he's like, well, when should I leave to make sure that I'm not in rush hour traffic? And I go, today at any time, whatever you want to leave, It's not going to come up.

You will be fine no matter what time you leave. I mean, to be fair, I live in Michigan. It's not much better. My friend of mine, my best friend visited me from California where I lived for 20 years. I picked him up at the airport at 4.30 p.m. And he laughed the entire drive from the airport to my house going, this is rush hour traffic. And we both just had a great giggle at it. Yeah.

I will be right back after a quick break. Anyway, during this whole process, when Modil gave up on everything, everything's congested. General Grisman and his Armenian armored needed, the point was traffic is stupid. We're not doing this. So they just made their own alternative route and drove around the traffic. Kind of driving through the hive. I had 100% drove through the hive. They drove through houses, basically.

Yeah, it was helpful. But the problem is that he got arrested for this. And this put, because he did the thing that Gaunt just killed Modial 4. He disobeyed direct orders. He was told to take Route A, and he went with Route Go F yourself. I'm going this way because I've got a tank. Sturham's in a difficult position now. It's obvious to him that the leaders of Varenhive would rather die than be embarrassed.

And they're making it pretty clear to him that their forces will not fight. at all unless they are told that they are pretty, pretty princesses. This is insane. By the way, this is a long time in this. There's a lot. This is a long, which is, it is moronic. Yeah, it's infuriating on this. Yeah.

So Sturm has to leave General Grisman, who's the head of one of the most important parts of their defenses, their armored division imprisoned for a trial that he's going to lose and be executed for. All right. So let's move forward a little bit further. So the second siege that was broken, but the pharozoican forces are now very close to the wall, so close to the wall that their Vox communications can be heard. Or more importantly, their Vox broadcast can be heard. Because they don't think that they weren't listening in on it. Because they were prior, because it's chanting. They're just chanting. Asphodel's name.

They're saying Asphodel, Osphodel. Osvidel, Osphodel. And we talked about Oswaldel last cast, so I'm not going to jump into him a lot here, but I just wanted, what needs to matter about him is, the Imperium knew who he was. This is not an unknown lieutenant

who's risen up post the death of Nazebert. This was someone who is an imperial target. They were actually been hunting him down. So, fun side note, they do send communication out saying, hey, Asphodel's here. this shifts the narrative a little bit. For Sondar and the leaders of the hive, they don't really care.

They're just like, all right, some chaos lords here. What of it? Sturm, though, starts to freak out. Sturm has been questioning himself an escape building for a while. He was deployed to this planet, you know, expecting a win. He gets the planet. He's deployed to this planet expecting an easy win, a cake. Exactly.

Basically, I'm coming off a big L. now I'm going to come and I'm going to kick this tomato game. Put down a stupid civil war. Yeah. And knocked out. He comes down. He's grossly outnumbered. It's chaos.

And now he's got one of Nazi bears best lieutenants up against him. Also, and he knows this. Yeah, tech genius. He started in behind the scenes, he's starting to break mentally. Then things get really fun. I get enfuegoed so hard at this. Imminent doom is outside. They're legitimately bombing the city.

They're crushing the void shields. And then we go to the trial of Jenner Grismund. You're like, come on. Gaunt finds out of us. Gone is literally trying to figure out, hey, what's going on? We're under attack. We need to move the armor. Where is Grismund?

And someone tells him, oh, his trial just started. to which Gaunt says, A, what do you mean? And then B, well, who's representing him? Don't worry. Commissar pious cowl. God, I guess a moron. A guy who's light, you're selfish and not particularly intelligent, but more importantly, he is singular in purpose in kind of his regimented behavior.

If he's your defense attorney, you're going to die. Like, he's not even going to defend you. So Gaunt rushes off to go kind of take command of the situation. As he's rushing, the Eastern Gate collapses, explodes. Pick your phrase. All right. So basically they halted all Promethean mining operations. So they didn't use their Promethean piping to blow up things.

I don't know, like the Eastern Gate, everybody shut it down except for one of these pieces of crap who legitimately came up with the excellent idea that once all this nonsense was over, this minor inconvenience, he'd be the only one that immediately originally had a steady stream of premedium. He would jack up the prices and make it rain money, baby. Yeah. Basically, the hive has prometheus mining and the way you mine prometheus it goes through obviously tubes, two in front places. There's, you know, Prometheum going underneath the city. Prometheum is highly explosive.

And someone said, hey, let's not have the explosive stuff moving around the walls. A plus plan. And everyone said, yeah, except to Brad's point, one guy. And that one guy kept it going, didn't tell anybody. Screw you, Ted. The Farozoicans had sappers, because that's what you do when someone has walls. You do sapping. We've had sappings been around since, I don't think the Romans did it, but basically since the invention of a gunpowder.

Yeah. She could blow stuff up. Yes. Yeah. They had sapping. They go under a wall and they set off an explosion. The sappers didn't know that above their explosion was a whole bunch of prometium. It blows the entire eastern wall up.

It just ceases to exist. And the chaos forces go, well, that one worked and start charging into this giant hole in a wall. And to make things even more fun, since Asphidal had come down to the surface, apparently this is on the other side, he brought with him, I guess, the guns from his ship and had converted. I don't know. This is so funny because he effectively MacGyvers it and puts battleship guns on whatever. He's just duct-taping them to stuff. Yeah. To basically, to treads.

And so the other side of the hive starts taking orbital cannons to the dome. And this is it. We're kind of at the end now. The hive is falling. The wall, eastern gate is gone. The western and southern gates are getting just wrecked by these things. And back in the command center, Stern is done. He breaks.

And he goes to order a full retreat from the city. Luckily, he's not alone there. So we mentioned earlier how everyone in the hive sucks. One person doesn't. Yeah. Edric Crow. Edric Crow was the head of the Varenhive Militia, and he's this great character throughout the whole novel because he's kind of sitting there as this passenger who's very angry.

He's the head of the militia. And so as such, he knows he's the lowest ranking officer there. He's also making random snarky comments during the book. Yeah, he is. Because the whole time he said they're going, like, I realize I'm not in charge, but you guys are effing morons. And he's driving him insane. And he just sits there, but he's this extremely capable leader. The militia loves him. He's this great guy. And as Sturm goes to order the full retreat, he turns to him and says, very simply, if you order that retreat order, I'm going to

kill you myself. He gives the whole stop. Ain't going out like that. Yes. No, absolutely. I will kill you myself. We are not retreating. We are fighting. He also gives him the bonus. You're releasing Grisman right now. We're threw off. And to his credit, Stern does regain a little bit of himself and goes, oh, yeah, fair point. So at this point, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, sometimes if someone puts a gun to your face, you're like, you know what? You are right in this argument. But he does. Stern grabs his Volpeen, like, basically someone's like, is like honor guard and rushes off to the trial to go release Grisman. at the same time, Crow heads off to go basically lead from the front, the defenses of the wall. He's not, we're not done with him yet. Gaunt, meanwhile, arrives at the prison to break Grismond out at the same time.

So Gaunt and Stern both arrive at the same time, and they have to do a little bit of fighting. They basically, they literally do break Grismund out. There's a whole thing. They actually break up in the process running to Commissar Pius Cowell, who, and Cowan, by the way, gives them a whole speech. The city is under attack and falling. And Cowell decides at this moment, you guys are weak, you guys are this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Gant puts him under arrest. He does no. It's, oh, wait for it, strips him in his capasar title, telling him, it's funny because he gives him the, it gives me the whole end of unforgiven kind of thing with little Bill,

talks of shit, and, well, you go, and Clint Eastman's like, yeah, good to hear, man. I've killed men with children, cool. I don't give a shit, which is what Gaunt does. He's like, good speech, you're done. Yeah, rips his actually rips his commissar ranking office thing and then place him an arrest, sort of kind of. I'll tell you more about that in a second. Then he frees Grisman, who

does this almost like Dragon Ball Z thing, where Grisman then basically runs out of the prison, jumps over to his regiment, and then leads one of the most successful tank attacks in the history of the Imperium. Yeah. Like, they

they actually, he goes to the Eastern Gate, I think they lose two tanks and take out the entire attacking force. It's this whole wild part of the book. It's really funny. Yeah. He also Tokyo drifts a bunch of tanks. Yeah. He does everything but you yell, Kamiamiha as he's freaking doing it.

Like, it is the weirdest part of the whole book. I'm like, wait, why wasn't he just doing this the whole time? Why is this war still happening if he can do that? But side note for a different day. As he's doing this, though, the fun part is the void shield. turns off. Why? Because Sondar, the leader of Varenhive, has been getting psychically attacked the whole time. And the chaos forces are just telling him all these things. And eventually he goes, yeah, okay, fair enough. And decides to give into the promises of chaos to save himself.

Which is crazy. Although in the book, they talk about this a little bit, but like, they don't even like offer him much. They just say that he won't die. Well, no, they did. They're offered him, he could still lead the hive when they were done with it. Sure. Yeah, we know that one's going to go. Yeah, monkey paw. As this happens, Crow, who we just mentioned the head of the militia, knows what's going on. He knows exactly what's going on. But Crow can't leave. So he basically radios over to Gaunt and all them and says, this is where he is. This is how you do this. Go fix it. I'll be, I'm going to hold the wall. You guys go get the void shield back up. And Gaunt, Sturm and they have to grab pious cow who's basically right there next to him and the Volpone

or Volpeen rush up to go deal with Sondar. I just like they brought Cowell with them. I know. It's just this is like all of the different action series where you're like, yeah, we're just going to bring the unbelievably untrustworthy guy with us. Nothing bad should happen if we do that, right? Right. So they break in there and immediately front into a problem.

Sondar explains to them, no, it's okay, guys. These guys promised me that if I do all this, I get to not die. And they're all like, yeah, but what about the entire hive? And Sondar goes, yeah, don't care. And then they discover that Sondar has these, they call them flesh slaves, their servitors. I mean, they're basically, they're Dukali grotesques. I was just saying they're rats. They're 100 of a hundred bit Jukai grotesques.

That's the best way to describe me. Except they have acid blood, which we're going to talk about that in a second because there some narrative holes here. These flesh slaves start ripping apart the Volpeing Stormtroopers, who I guess had just finished ironing their red shirts, how badly. They get wrecked in this one.

It gets ugly. Because as they go to kill them, they discover the acid blood. This is such a freaking alien rip-off, but the acid blood starts shooting on them, and they don't know how to kill them until Commissar Pious Cowell decides to have his redeeming moment. And there's a final flesh slave,

and he rushes over with a pack of grenade, and shoves it down its throat just as the flesh type turns around it and literally pulls his arms off of his body. Yeah, he gets beat to death with his own arms, which is a shooting death. Yeah, so the beast then dies. And I have some questions about this because, oh, page before, they're shooting these things and the acid blood is spraying on people and they're dying. And then this dude shoves a bunch of grenades inside of it.

It explodes and no acid problem, even on the guy right in front of it. Look, man, they just got behind their plot armor and they didn't get hit by acid. All right? Move on. Cowell is literally like a foot from the thing when it explodes. Anyway, all right. But they then are able to take control. They move Sondar.

There's another noble there who's able to use his like noble key. And they turn the voyage shield back on. Sorry, but hold on. I like the way Pius dies. I know you don't like this. I like the way Pius dies. I find this funny. That was why Pius is then lying there in a pool of blood because he has no arms.

Also, he should be, had no anything because he did just take grenades to the face and acid blood to the face. Whatever. He's doing great. And Gaunt walks over at him with this like, hey, you're a hero now. And he looks up at Gant and just starts bad mouthing gone. explained to Gaunt that thanks to Gaunt, he, Pius, is going to die. The greatest hero of the Imperium. Yes.

Gaunt, you have now robbed the Imperium of one of its greatest military minds. And this is a wound the Imperium will struggle to recover from his death. And Gaunt, to his credit, just goes, yeah, here's your pinback. Yeah. Like, you get to die a commissar. I would have to peeve on that guy. Screw him. He's awful.

Yeah. Like, really, man? man, really? Yeah. But the work's not done. The city is still under heavy duty assault. The void shields back up, great, but there's still enemies in the city. A lot of enemies.

Yeah, artillery's everywhere. There's physical attack going on. And defenders need to rally. And courting those forces is a challenge. Here's the issue. Sandar's dead, which is, you know, obviously. Crow died defending the wall against chaos. Kamas are pile, dead.

General Sturm disappears randomly in this thing. No one knows where he is. Grismund is out doing his like weird Tokyo drift tank thing. So Gaunt is the highest ranking officer available. And so he has to take command. But remember, Gaunt to this point has never commanded anything larger than the Taneth, which is like 2,000 soldiers. He's now taking over, it started half a million,

we're probably down to a quarter million. But he's about to take over a quarter million. million and leading it. But of course, plot armor being plot armor, he does a great job. And they, you know, save the city for now. This is a, two books in a row, we've talked about how much of a tactical mind he has. This is not a stretch. Come on.

I just say it's a pretty solid, like, first game out, you know, that's the thing. But as the chaos forces end up retreating back through the walls for now. And for this, Gaunt is presented with something called the Hieronym Osandar, which is a sword. And it was actually Marshall Crow's. It was his sword, which is a cool thing he did. But Crow knew he was going to die. He ran out to the wall going, this is not going to go well for me. He turned to his second and gave his second his sword.

This sword is always held by the head of the militia. And he said, whoever takes over after me, make sure they have this sword because it's a symbol of the leadership of the hive. And so obviously, Gaunt is the next one. so he gets it, and this sword is all foreshadow. So, aftermath of the battle, Gaunt is faced with another fun challenge. General Sturm is bought to him, and General Sturm had been caught by local police force trying to flee the planet because he decided that this was, he wasn't about this anymore, he wanted to run away, which is now we have a general, who's a member of the Imperial Guard,

tried to run away from a battlefield, and now he's standing in front of a commissar. Think we know how this one has to go. So obviously he's to die. Sturm asked Gaunt for the right to kill himself, not to be killed by Gaunt. They called a soldier's death, although that's not a soldier's death,

but that's a sign of a different day. And Gaunt says, sure, but does it after evil style? 100% Dr. Evil goes, here's your gun. You'll definitely do this. And then, Turns around and walks away. Yeah.

At which point, Sturm pulls the gun up to shoot Gant in the back of the head. And a little boy yells, look out. Gant and Gant spins around and cuts Sturm's handoff that's holding the pistol before it can shoot him. There wasn't actually a little boy yelling that, but that's basically the scene I've seen in a thousand shit films. This was so poorly written. I was so mad at this. I don't mind that Sturm tried to shoot him with the gun. I mind the whole cutting his hand off with the sword thing.

We don't need that. No one needed that. It's just dumb. It's a trope. And so Sturm is then taken away and I guess not handcuffs. Get it? But Gaunt is screwed. But we have to have a happy ending to this.

And I don't love the ending of this. So we're going to get there. Let's go through. Current situation. Verenheim is surrounded by a force at least six times larger than it. Chaos infused, armed with the teeth with arcane weaponry. Verenhive is taking a battering, by the way. One gate is gone.

We've got holes in the walls. The militia and regimental forces. Everybody that doesn't live inside the walls, dead. Either food is running out, supplies are running out. This siege is basically over. The Farisorgan is just hang out outside. It's over. all the pharazoicans have to do is not i don't know shove their achilles heel right in front

the verron of the wall of veren hive and they win just don't take your only achilles heel and jam it i don't know inside the city so what happens next gaunt gets lucky with the daughter of one of the dead nobles that's actually what happens and she tells him that her dad had a special weapon and they explain what it is, but it's a super EMP. It's a device that when activated, shuts down all the systems of an entire city. And I could explain it a lot more than that, but I've seen Oceans 11.

So we're going to go with that. And she then just gives it to Gaunt. So you tell John Cheathel to go do his thing? Yeah. Yeah. It just gives the Gaunt. So Gaunt now has this thing. Now, next morning, because remember, night fights a thing.

couldn't have attacked at night. Don't forget, Brad, no fighting at night. Night fight is a rule. There's no fighting at night. Poison and night fight. My two fights. Yeah. So we had no way. So now we next, the next day we get the assault on Gondor. It's how I'd explain it. Gaunt knows that there'll be a big push. But what Gond also knows that Asphodel will likely want to join in on this victory because he'll want to bask in the glory in person. Yeah. And that's when Gaunt will strike with his secret weapon. But how? Well, fun thing about chaos lords is they're not subtle.

So Gaunt just has to wait and figure out where Asphodel is. And as the giant hordes of chaos just descend on Berenhive, a large construct is observed in the distance. And this mobile fortress is called The Spike, because it's tall and pointy. Hold on, I got to get my chi together for just a second. I love this book. This part's so silly because the spike is the transmitter that's controlling all of the cultists because it's my controlling it.

And they bring it four feet away. Because apparently it's running on a... Straight up. It's running on a CB. It doesn't have a lot of range. It is terrible. So this thing's coming up. Oh, they also did have Starship plasma guns on it.

So it's just like moving up and firing. It is kind of funny. It's almost like a stompah in some ways, which is the good thing. I 100 thought it was a stomp on this. Because it's just got two big guns, and it's lumbering up. Yeah, just shooting things. So what God realizes all we have to do is get onto the spike, disable the spike, and then all the Farozochans will become disoriented,

and the Varanai forces a win. So what do we have to do? Simple. We go through a few hundred thousand Farozoican chaos cultists, board the spike, fight our way to the top of it, plant the EMP device, and then... Make the DREAT. Yeah, nobody deal. We got this.

Plan is simple. Spike itself is moving. It's literally in the city at this point. It's like grinding. That's why I brought it both out of stompah because it just felt like a stompah. It is grinding the city. He's just walking through the city, basically. Yeah.

So God grabs 30 Tanneth and some of the royal vulpane, because he's, Red shirts are necessary and to go through it. And they're guided there by a Veron Hive miner who turned militia named Goal Kolea. And Goal was a lifelong ore minor. But when his home was under attack, he saved a bunch of miners. And then minors let children, people within the mind. I don't know. I'm just going to make it clear.

And then join the militia. And so he knows I can get us there because we can go underground. They can sneak us under. I don't want to know how much this thing. ways, but I feel like you don't want to be right underneath it. It feels like it might just collapse on top of you. But apparently that's not the case because they actually were in basically like the sewer system under a thing that weighs.

Let's go with 10,000 tons. I don't care. The period is very good at doing a couple of things. One is building wildly too big and two crowded cities. They're good at us. Come on. Fine. We're the best.

Anyway, this story is going to get a lot worse. All right. They get, they do this. They're successful. They get to the bottom of the mobile fortress, apparently no one sees them. And they start climbing it. And the story, they, oh, God, this is so bad.

One guy does fall off and they thought he dies. He gets, he's fine later with some augmentation. But eventually, after climbing for a while, they burst into the bridge and they have a conundrum. I guess the EMP device doesn't really an EMP, by the way, because it's a, it's a, this is a scrapbook, they have to plug it in. And I don't like this. because, you know, it doesn't make sense to me.

Why do you have to plug it in? Because what if it was the USBC? And then you get there, it's all USB3s. Now you've got to go get a converter, you go to store. That's a whole process. It just doesn't make sense to me that we'd have to plug it in. You're saying, we don't have universal ports now. There's no chance.

All right. But it is the right connection and it works. The whole spike shuts down. All the guns stop firing. The transmission cease. All of the chaos cult has stopped firing. And the force field around the, command throne goes down because Asphodel is right there and he's not super thrilled about all this.

He has he has something to say. All right. And I need to gather myself because what happens next almost ruined the book. Screw you, man. They get to do a sick duel. No. The duel's fine. The duel's fine.

The end is bad. Okay. Gone to Asphidel have a whole fight. Blah, blah, blah. One guy's winning, one guy's losing. Other guys are winning, other guy starts losing, blah, blah, blah. In the end, Gaunt lunges forward with his special sword and rams Asphodel through with it. At the same time, Massel brings up his pistol and shoots Gaunt in the heart.

However, Gaunt doesn't die because Gaunt had been given a steel rose by a now deceased Lord Cass that he pinned to his chest. over his heart. And that stopped the bullet. I love everything about this. Boo. Boo. I read this over a decade ago. Don't you up over my happiness.

It's been over a decade since I read this. And I'm still. Boo! That ending. It's just stupid. It's just done. Dule's just, it's cool. But that part right there is stupid, stupid, stupid.

stupid, stupid that. Why do you not love sunshine, puppies and cookies? It's a, no, no, that's a phoned in ending. All right, but let's get to the rest of it. So after the death of Asphodel and the destruction of the spike, the battle just turns. Mind-thralled, Therozoicans. They're just useless now if there's no one in the direction. They couldn't go over this, though.

This is one thing you have had about that little ending piece. I didn't like that they didn't touch on what's going on with them. citizens because they didn't they said they were useless they were kind of wandering about but they didn't say if they were like why am i here i was baking a cake they don't touch on this really well because they i think the truth is i don't think the verenheim ask i think they just start shooting this burn down yeah because in my that was kind of a lot of confused citizens looking around going there might have been followed by gunfire a lot of bull that's that's that's that's that was how i interpreted they just shot all of them Like, yeah, problem to solve.

Like, none of them are ducking. Cool. Yeah. Because they're all looking around going, again, there was 25 minutes left on the apple pie. Like, where am I? Fast forward a few months later, Macroff arrives late, but he's there. And Macroft had heard Asfidel was there.

So he showed up with a full force to come kill Asphodel. Only discover Gaunt already did it, like literally personally. I do. I love everything about this because it's so Imperium style. You're like, hey, we've broken the mind control. We've killed Asphidal. We got all this stuff going on. And MacArthur goes, yeah, let's not risk that. They just blow up. The pharozoica hive gets destroyed from orbit. That thing's gone. And then they didn't just blow it up. They level it. Yeah. And then along with Macaroff, Brad's buddy showed up the Imperial Fists. And the Imperial Fists, which I do love they did this, going grab Asphodel's body, shove it in the spike, and they personally incinerate the entire spike, which is smart. Because if the ad mech had gotten there, they would 100% start pulling that thing upon. These parts are still good, though, right? They were to try to reverse engineer this. 100%. No. Yeah, all bad. All bad. So they destroy that. But now

Macroff has a bigger problem. Well, not a bigger problem than the Civil War, but also a problem. Vergas was a hive planet. I don't know, less than a year ago, had five hives on it. Vergas, Yannik, Farozoika, and then what's called the Northern Collective, which is a group of other hives. But those are like a collection of small urban hubs. They're less manufacturer. They kind of made up the other couple hives were up there. Now there's the Northern Collective and like 30% percent of Verenheim. So Macroft doesn't have the resources to rebuild this planet. It'll take generations and the cost will be incredible. And to make matters worth, it's in the middle of a war zone. So he can't really transport the supplies in to build it back up. So what do you do?

If you leave it to its own devices, it'll just turn chaos because this place sucks to live in. So he offers the citizens this cool thing called an act of consolidation. basically join a guard regimen or get blown up. Well, join a guard regiment or stay here, but if you stay here, we're not coming back. And so that, but I do like this one because this is, this is kind of cool. Well, we get the, we finally get reinforcements for the ghosts. I mean, this is the first time they're going to get juiced. Yeah.

But I like this act of consolidation because act of consolidation is cool. It's not a press gang and it's not a new regiment. What they do is they say to the citizens, you guys can go anywhere you want. It's actually, it is almost a piece of honor because instead of saying to them, you have to go form a regiment right now, which is kind of, you know, rough or a press gang. Basically, you're part of a draft now. They get to choose. But to Brad's point, all the people there looked around and were like, well, there was this one

regiment that was here who were super cool to us. All of us. And also helped us, helped the citizens, basically gave us food, medicine, water, defended us when no one else was. So when they were given the choice, they went, I'm going to go to those guys. Those guys seem a lot cooler. So they do. They go and they join the Taneth. And the Taneth go from less than 2,000 soldiers to over 4,500.

They become a full-blown regiment. Also, the Taneth first and only become less Taneth than anything else. Yeah, they're mostly not Taneth. They also get female soldiers, which is going to be a big thing for a lot of their later novels. Obviously, the Imperial Guard has female soldiers. even though they don't model them very often, but they do have them, obviously, because why would you not use 50% of population? The TANTH just had never had them before. It's a key part of the later novels.

It also does allow them to replicate. That helps. It also means, to Brad's point, half the TANTH weren't from TANF, which does create some cultural divides in later novels. But more importantly, this is a major turning point for the Tanneth, because now they're big enough to be significant in battle zones. Up until this point, they were an ancillary force. They were being deployed alongside the full-blown regiments. Now they are a full-blown regiment today. They can actually go and do stuff on their own.

At the same time, Gaunt is a big deal. Macaroth just showed up on Veronheim with this massive fighting force to overtake this chaos lower to only discover Gaunt killed him. So... Also, not just Gaunt killed him. Gaunt personally dueled him and killed him. Yes. It's kind of a legendary thing here.

Yes. And Gunn also took command of entire. He's done all these things. So the writer is from here on out. Start one-upping this a little bit. But as we said, the start of the cast, this is where we're going to pause on the Gaunt coverage. There's 15 books to get through,

and I didn't want to do four to six months of Gaunt Ghost coverage. So we'll come back to them in the future and cover more of the Subat World Crusades and more Gaunt Ghost books. mostly because this cast series here had two goals. First, for those who don't know anything about the Gonsk Ghosts, we wanted to give you a bit of a coverage, so you kind of know when people are talking about what they're talking about. But also, I wanted to motivate some of you to read more of the books.

You can actually read, you can go read Necropolis. We left the putting stuff out with stuff. I slammed into a bunch of stuff. Intentionally. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I get in my rants. I do stuff. I get excited.

I don't know if you guys have ever noticed that in the cast. I get pretty pumped up about things. But one of the biggest things is there's so much going on. So this is actually the first book that was written as a full book narrative. The rest are like short stories, basically. I mean, Ghostbaker was full short story. So I like NERC. This is my favorite book in the entire series is Nercopolis.

This is a great book. And the hope I have is that for a lot of you guys who want to know more, there are 12 other books you can go read. So go read some more Gons. books. It'll be a while before we come back to them for a while. So we have a chance to read some more Gaunt's Ghost books. But next week, new topic. And there's a glaring one that allows me to check a bunch of boxes. First, we haven't done Zenos in a while. And so I want to do some Zenos. I also do it, we love doing these large battle coverages. And I'm playing orcs again right now.

So Armageddon. We're going to go do the second war of Armageddon. Gas go, baby. Yeah. We're going to the introduction of Gaz into the lore technically. And, yeah. This is going to be super fun. It also sets up because now we're on Armageddon 4 right now, so we've got a lot of catching up to do. But we're going to do Armageddon 2 talking about how this one came about and how well the Imperium dealt with. Rock.

Big rock land on planet. Ork jump out bad. And also lets me talk about the greatest commander of all time. Well, hold on. Let me see you you're talking about. It's behind him. Yeah. Yeah. I do have quite a few of them. I have. That's right. You're right. He is, I have a picture on my wall and I have three models. I think have three models of him too at this point. All right. But with that, John Barsati, Bradchester. This guy. See you guys next week.