The 40k Lorecast - Episode 92 - The War of The Beast pt1. A new threat arises.

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

On today’s cast we begin our coverage of the War of the Beast. We open with the setting of the imperium in the middle on M32, where the imperium was actually doing kid of great (thanks Guilliman!)��Then we get into the invasion of the chromes and the appearance of the first attack moon. From there everything starts to fall apart as the Lords of Tera do Lords of Terra stuff. Thankfully their hands get forced by the Inquisition and Assassins and the imperium takes action. Only to find their great success undermined by a greater threat.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising 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 Barsati, and Bradchester. On today's cast, we're jumping into one of the greatest turning points for the Imperium, The War of the Beast, the event that completely reshaped the Imperium that existed before it. The Lord of Tera still sucked to this day. But I don't think they've ever sucked as much as they did during this time. Exactly. And we're going to spend a lot of time on that.

Before we begin, as always, the 40K lore cast is a weekly podcast, focusing the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern time. If you like the show, please like and comment on it. It helps spread us out to other audiences. It really improves their algorithm. Also, for those who want to help us expand the show into other things, we have added a Patreon to the show that gives you the show ad free for $4.99 a month. I know in Canadian, it's more than that. And in Australian, Dabloons, it's way more. of it. But it's whatever they have. It's like my favorite country, but just because they're my favorite people. Also, if you look in the show notes, you'll see links to our YouTube page, which by the time

you guys are hearing this, will have quite a few videos on it, including some live streams of us of us playing the game. How many of them, the plan is that you'll be able to see Brad and I playing, plus a lot of people playing in our event, unless the whole thing fails miserably, in which case you'll see portions of it. And luckily, as usual, we plan this to set up right before the event goes live. So we're definitely on target for our brand. I will 100% let everyone knows.

We are recording this less than one week before the event is happening. The streaming gear I purchased is arriving tomorrow. In a period of about three days, I'm going to figure out how to stream Warhammer. We should be fine. We'll be great. We'll be great. There's also another link in our show notes to our Discord. If you want to go to that, it is a wonderful place for interacting around the cast, Warhammer in general, everything.

We really do pump it because we're really, really proud of it. I love going in there every single day. All the questions that are being in there, they're being answered not by me, but by the community. All the help people are providing, especially to newer players who are interested in maybe learning how to play the game or just understanding the game better. the amount of support that sits in our Discord could not give me more joy. Big shout out to Salarzia, Snaz, Doc, Maestro, Quiri, Cthulhu, Gersback, Nugles, are two new people, Curl and Iron Magos. And as always, Steve.

I do love the fact that you're using everybody's screen name on it. Yeah, it's just easier. That way, well, because the truth, if I say they're real names and people like, yeah, I guess that's a mod. Now you know who's modding you. doxing every one of them. Of course. By the way, accidentally and not realizing it's a bad thing.

What? I figured they'd want some stuff. People, yeah. People said they wanted to send stuff to you. So I've listened to all of your personal addresses, emails, and phone numbers, because that's never gone badly for Brad. And your schedule. Let's get into M32. So before we get into the War of the Beast, we need to set the stage really well for what was going on in the galaxy at this.

moment because that's the most important element in my mind of the change that the war of the beast created. I'm not even mad. I'm just disappointed in you. You had a chance to do a Star Wars crawl across the screen. It was a time of grief. Yeah, you could have set it up with anything. Could he use the voice.

Could have came in. You had a chance. You could have been a contender. Yeah, and instead, I pulled a Star Wars episode one and just disappointed everybody. That's hurtful. It's just hurtful. It's just true. It's no Ender's game.

You know what? Fight you over this. All right. So the important thing at M32 is the galaxy is actually a fairly calm and pseudo-tranqual place. Horace heresy is over a thousand years ago at this point. And the Inquisition and the Imperium have had a lot of time to kind of craft and mold the story of the Horace heresy. Moving it away from the truth, which was the primarks turning against the emperor and embracing, evil and chaos. Instead, it's to all the citizens of the Imperium, because remember, they don't

live this long. It's a story of a selfish individual that couldn't see the golden light of the emperor and stood up and almost destroyed the Imperium, but the Emperor of Mankind sacrificed himself to defend humanity. And doing so, stopped the ver-doers and regained the Imperium on the footing. The setting is very, very important because no one has been punished for their actions. in a while. The people that are in charge right now are so distant. You're like, hey, this could have ramifications. You remember that war a thousand years ago? No, I don't. And I, and I don't know anybody that does either. So, but also, nothing's been seen. These are all fairy tales almost at this point in time. The big evil of chaos, this and everything else. No, we have the guiding

light of the emperor and worship what you want. The people in charge that are horribly corrupt have not been punished in generations for bad behavior. You know, there is no outside force that's threatening the Imperium at this point in time at all. And it hasn't been. That's the really important piece here, is that chaos at this stage has been chased completely into the eye of terror. Lehman Russ has gone in after them, so has Korax, Vulcans, who knows where.

Everyone has gone this way. Even the Space Marine Legions at this point believe they've defeated the traders for the most part because it's been a thousand years since any of the traders were cited in the galaxy. At the same time, the Xeno situation is almost non-existent. The Eldar are still reeling. I mean, you obviously have some Elder interactions, some Drukari interaction, but nothing to scale. Because the Eldar at this stage are still focusing on making infinity circuits, soul stones. They're trying not to die. Sorry. Exactly. Whoa, whoa, whoa, pull that back. They're trying not to be eternally devoured.

by the Slenesh. And they're trying to slow down what is going to be the extinction of their race. So for this reason, the Eldar are actually looking to avoid conflict, you know, because they are a mobile fleet. The Imperium bumps into an exodite world. They can basically do whatever they want,

because even if they're on a crone world, the BLTan aren't organized enough to go attack them for it yet. That is coming later. I was just going to say, they really, they have something to say about it in actually very few years on this one, but not,

exactly. They're coming, but that's my point. At this point, even the Jukari, Vect is just now taking control of Kama. So the raids that have been,

and so the Vect thing in Kamaa is important because before Vect unifies Kamaura, the Jukari raids were mostly very small. It's because you couldn't, no one had that much power

and they were always afraid of doing a raid coming back from the raid and getting counterattacked. So you're looking at very, very small raids where a couple thousand dead civilians, which in the scheme of the Imperium,

nothing. Is nothing to the point no one's even aware of it. You also have no tyrantids. You have no tau. The necrons are still asleep. The Votan are a little bit tricky and we'll have to say. We'll also wait until their codex. The new codex comes out to see what they say about that.

They either were their presence or no one knew about it. Yeah, because they either were the squats or not the squats, because if it's the squats, the squats, the squats were there. But if it's not the squats and then they're not there, that's another problem for another day for us. And this is a, so it also in the core, I guess the core worlds, you do Star Wars again on it, you know, on the core worlds of the Imperium, which is where the high lords and the most powerful of the being people in charge are, there's nothing happening. I mean, at all happening, you know, there's not even incursions of anything because they're still, because remember right now, the Marines, You know, we've got, we just did the Templar cast on this. You've got active Marines reclaiming the galaxy,

and they're pushing back anything that could be considered a threat. And they've kind of dealt with all dealt with that does not continue to this day. But everybody's felt like we're all practical purposes. We're good. Yeah, because even the other Zenos are not really a threat. You're going to hit them because, you know, you're going to have issues. Don't get me wrong with Zenos. They all tend to be centralized in a single world or a system.

And the most important Zenos, because obviously we're talking to the War of the Beast, is the orcs. And I want to get back into this. So at the conclusion of the Great Crusade, it ended with Horace himself leading the space marines in battle at the planet of Ulunor. The Ulunur Crusade, which became named later, was needed to stop this rampaging force led by a great orc named Erlach Erg. Alliteration at its best.

Exactly. Ullano, because I want to, this is all going to be very important later, is in the Ultima sector, which makes sense as the sector has always been a home to the orcs, and the human settlers had colonized the planets of the Ulanor system. The orcs sensing them arrived, wrecked the settlement, and turned the planet into their own. But what was interesting on Ulanor is the orcs also cannibalized the human technology there and created war equipment that humanity had never encountered fighting the orcs before. So when humanity showed up to fight the orcs at Ulinaur, there was a huge problem for them.

They got rebuffed. They'd never been rebuffed before. Space Marines were good at fighting orcs. They bounced the first couple times they went after them. And this is due to a couple things. First off is they were actually repurposing the weaponry and the technology of the human colony, for themselves. I think I'm about to say looted? The looters

looted? Yes. Yes. The lootas did some looting. There we go. The best part about this is they took tech, human tech, Imperium Tech, Imperial Tech, and they used their own surface air missiles, giant guns, but they made them

orky. So they made them bigger and didn't always massively bigger. Yeah. They didn't always work, but they definitely made them bigger. And they just aimed up with everything. And this is important because the experience that the Imperium had had with Orks this point was hand-to-hand combat, dangerous, range combat, hilarious.

And that's how they just like, okay, we'll just sit at distance. They bring fleets into the orbit saying, all right, we'll just bombard them. And all the fleets blew up because they got hit with a rocket that was actually larger than the ship it was shot at. Also has no business getting out of the atmosphere. But they just believe. Exactly. The next big problem that the Imperium had was the incredible number of orcs on Ulinaur.

The Ulnar Orcan infestation was massive. They'd never seen numbers like this. And because they were organized, which is the biggest problem. Because this wasn't like a, not again, when I say organized, I mean the Prussian infantry fighting the French at Marlato. But I'm talking like action, just for orcs organized. Instead of just randomly running in different directions, they kind of were near. each other.

Brutal but cunning? Cunning. No, they were cunning but brutal. And so the orcs ended up requiring an ulnar. The emperor did not take this well and said, no, we're wrecking this. And he told Horace go. And Horace went with his Luna wolves. And he went with all of his Luna wolves along with ultramarines and white scars.

This ended up becoming the kind of the pinnacle moment for Horace. in him becoming the war master. And it ends with Horace himself fighting Erlock Ugg, stabs him, then carries him to the top of the tower he was fighting in, and throws his broken body off the top of it. He gave the Achilles on that. He kind of just gave the, is there no one else? And the orcs went, yeah, that was the biggest guy.

We're out. That was kind of the biggest guy. As soon as Erlock broke, it appears to be there was a psychic connection running through the orcs. And so without him, much like we, and we know this is true because we have Gaz and what I've read the War of the Beast, as soon as the big war boss who's kind of powering the WAA dies, the WAA filters out pretty quickly, which is a rule. I'm glad GW didn't get me on the tabletop because I lose my warlord. As an orc player, I lose my warlord constantly. In fact, I threw a member.

All the time in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. It's the same as like the sergeant in my space marine squads. I forget which one is which. I genuinely don't know which war. is my warlord, half a time I'm playing the game, until someone says, hey, did your warlord die? And I go, oh, yeah, it turns out he did.

Whatever. Orks go forward. That's the rule. ABC always be charging. Exactly. That's pretty basic. But the emperor views this as proof that nothing could stand against his forces in the galaxy. This orc incursion was the largest xenophyte they'd had.

This was bigger than Ragdan. So he then organizes effectively a celebration. It's a special parade. All the prime arcs are present. He's there. Malcador, Valdor, members of the Council of Terra, sisters of silence, everyone is at this big parade. And they, of course, lined the parade with the skulls of all the orcs that they killed in it. And it was at this parade that the emperor declares Horace, the war master.

Now, the reason we're telling you this quick backstory is because, A, Ullinor is going to be coming up again in a couple casts pretty heavily. B is bigger, though. Because B, it's the mentality that this set for the Imperium that there is no Zeno's threat that we cannot destroy. And this was the biggest thing they've ever got and we handled it. Anything else is going to be even easier. They're not a threat. Yeah.

The victory effectively proved the supremacy of humanity in the gals. galaxy and the Imperium just was convinced there will be nothing greater. Now, obviously, the Horace heresy throws some of this stuff for a loop, but what ends up happening is in the period of time between Ulanor and where we are now, which is the middle of M32, the Horace heresy is not forgotten about, but it's kind of sidelined. When you're talking to the citizens of the Imperium and you're presenting the Imperium to the citizenry, the Horace heresies treated almost like a little side quest that happened. We're going from the incredible success and power that we all had during the Great Crusade into now.

And I want to talk about what happens post-heresy, which is also important. The emperor is entombed in the golden throne, obviously, and the Imperium goes in a little bit of chaos. Because by emperor's decree, the Council of Terra had to be remade into the Lords of Terror. And the original Lords of Terror was the head of the Imperial. Navy, the head of the Imperial Guard, the newly founded Admec, who are totally different and in no way related in any way to the dark mechanical. So lame. 100% no crossover. Why are you yelling about this?

If you haven't heard the cast that we did know about this, they needed at the end of the heresy, you still had about half of the admec being. And if they weren't turned, they were at least fighting on the other side. but we needed them to start producing more than they could. And they went, so anybody that wants to put on the hat that says pro-imperium right now, we're going to just look the other way and pretend you were on our side the whole time, but also hit these quotas because we need a lot more shit. Yeah, they effectively went to all of the dark Mechanicum player and said, hey, congratulations on never being Dark Mechanicum.

And the Gar-Gnege, what do you mean? I totally was, shut up. Other Lords of Terror are the heads of the Arbite, head of the Inquisition, which got formed during the Horace heresy, the head of the Chartist, which is, you know, that's the merchant fleet we talked about last time, the head of administratum, because you got to have an administrator, head of the Astro-Telepathica, the head of the navigators, and the master of the Astronomicon. So that makes up the original Lords of Terra. This actually shifts quite a bit between then and modern 40K, because obviously the Ecclesiarchy comes into play, but also some of these people lose some power and games.

some power. But this group was horrifically underprepared. Horrifically underprepared is mad that you use that to compare to the Lords of Terra. They were, they must have had a vote. And the vote was who's the crappiest person we could put at each of these posts? And they also had no idea how to do any of the things they were doing. Yes, you're going to get them up little. a pass because I'm going to give them. The emperor was in charge of half of these things and didn't tell anybody how they worked. Well, hold on. The emperor was in charge of half these things and Malcador was in charge of the other half.

I mean, that's the whole thing. These guys were literally there to stand there and not say a bad word about Malcador, the emperor. And now, well, Malcador's dead. The emperor is not speaking. They then get saved because Gilliman shows up, takes a look around at all of them and says, Yeah, nope. And makes himself in charge. Like, just nope.

But then in 121 of M31, Gilliman gets himself stad by Fulgram. So then he's out. The plus side, and we all know I love Gilliman, so deal with it, is that Gilliman, in the period of time that he ruled the Imperium, put it on the right footing. And not only just as a leader, he knows logistics. Gilman set everything up basically so the Imperium could reclaim itself, and it was doing that. So even though he's in a coma, you know, the lion is stuck under a rock.

All the other, well, Vulcan is TBD, Fist, the Dorn, we have his hand. Or he's alive. Maybe. Yeah. We'll let GW read out. All the primaries are gone. A lot of the space marines have actually retreated themselves into their own little, like, just waiting for chaos to show up so they can punch him. But it doesn't matter because Gilliman did such a good job that trade routes are being,

are still being established. Now, even after he gets stabbed, it still continues because the Imperium had invested really heavily in infrastructure while he was there and it's paying off massively. But this then, of course, creates a problem because this creates consistent success. And that creates confidence in idiots. You mean, the fact of the Lords of Terror, Brad? Morons. You basically had a squad of Joffreys from Game of Thrones in charge.

Well, Joffrey was more evil. These guys were incompetent. I mean, this was just... I think they were both. That's the thing. Yeah, well, some of them are, and we'll get to them in a bit. Yeah. So the Lords of...

Brad, no like the Lords of Terra. This is, by the way, everybody, this is the only way I get Brad do a Lords of Terra cast. I could not get him to do a real... one, so we had to do it this way. I said no. He just said no. I line-in-eye and vetoed this. Yeah. I was like, okay, so the only way we're getting Lords of Tara and Brad is if we do it as part of a story where the Lords of Terra keep getting stabbed. You know what? I'm going to talk about how much I hate them right now because I want to set this up. Because of the fact that there was so much success and there was so, there was almost no external threats, what happened was

the Lords of Terra just started backstabbing each other, putting things wildly at risk. Because anytime one of their rivals would need help, they would try to make sure that they didn't get that help to undermine that person so they could get more personal power. And they haven't had anything bad happen to them by doing this in the last few hundred years. Well, it's actually worse than that. Not only is something bad happen to them, it keeps working because they're having these like shadow wars with each other behind the scenes. And every day, the Imperium just does better and better and better. And we say better.

I don't mean like, oh, well, there was more money going in. I mean, the lives of the average imperial citizen had been improving almost daily for a thousand years. And so they're just going, I am the, they're all sitting there going, we are the greatest leaders ever, but I'm still better. than TED, so we should go undermine Ted. And it just, this was all set up for failure. And then eventually we get something. First off, we get what are called the Crohn's. And the Imperium does a cool thing.

Such a late name, by the way. Why are they called the cromes, John? Oh, because they've got a shiny exoskeleton. So stupid. Anyway. So the cool thing about, the Imperium is when it comes to Zenos. The Imperium catalog everything.

So every Zeno they encounter, they mark down what they are, where they are, how hostile they are, how to kill them, and that kind of stuff. One species... I really think it's actually worth saying in this. When we say they put down, this isn't like a couple checklist. This is a home on each race. Oh, yeah. Like every specific they do, the Inquisition is crazy. They're mainly in charge of this now, but they will go through and list everything about their lives, how to kill them.

But they go way in depth in this. We have deep, deep dives, and they send people to find this. It makes a difference because they actually try to, they want to kill them, of course, but they do a lot of capture and try to find out more about the race to find out everything that they can to kill them. and do extreme, we're real big on genocide. But only to a point. But we're big on genocide, but we're not big on wasting resources. And so the cromes are an important one. The details of the chromosomes is, as we said, they're an insectoid with an exoskeleton

and sharp claws, not to be confused with the mega rachnids of the Horace heresy. And by not to be confused by, I mean, they're identical. In fact, we can kind of do a drinking game if you guys want. every time you read a novel written by GW and there's a Zeno in it and the Zeno is an insect with pointy claws drink. It's going to come up a lot. It's kind of their go-to. Well, let's talk about what they're listed as when you're doing when you're slate. You're putting all the Zenos in particular categories. The Crohoms were listed as non-hostal Zenos race. Yeah, which means the GW, which means the Imperium was actually going to leave them alone.

as long as the Imperium didn't land on their or invade their world, the Crohn's would leave them alone. Unless they decided the world the Crohn's was of significant value to make up for the resource investment in fighting them, they just leave them somewhere because who cares. They're not a threat. This isn't like Ragdan or some of the other ones who actually expand throughout the galaxy. It's like it's a galaxy of planets. There's going to be Xenos there. Suddenly, out of nowhere, though, the Crooms begin what appears to be a crusade. on the left side of the ultimate segmentum right on the edge of the segmentum solar.

Billions of Crohn's begin descending on imperial worlds there. So the Imperium says, nope, and they deploy the imperial fists out there. Because the imperial fist, remember, at this stage, are effectively the space marine chapter that's protecting the segmentum solar. Everyone else is spread around the fists. Also, with all the fights of the fists are, they must be just, their gene seed must be like take 11 seconds because they during this time they keep losing huge amounts of people and they have so many more yeah well they run out at a certain point it's important number two the

fists are also sent now because the death watch don't exist yet yet because this conflict we're going to be getting into is where the death watch come from your story the imperial fists arrive and they study the movements of the crombs and they they decide to intercept them on a planet named adamantua and it's right on the edge of segmentum solar. This is, this planet is a six-week warp travel from Terra itself. The Fist is like, this is it. We're going there and we're going to blast them. This should have been a nothing battle for them.

The Fist should have been able to arrive and just demolish the Crohn's. Because the Crohn's had been encountered before, and each time the Imperial Forces dealt with them, they had no issue of feeding them. But this time was different. The Imperial Fists land and they find themselves immediately overwhelmed. by the Crohn's. During this, they realize why, though. The Crohn's aren't conquering new land. This is not a crusade. Their entire species is moving from one side of the galaxy to another. They're fleeing,

and they are in between the flea. This catches them so far by surprise that actually the Imperial Fists, the first Imperial Fists who go there, die. Their chapter master, Cassus Miron, gets killed by the Crohn's. And he sends a message back to Tara saying, we need reinforcements. This is a much bigger battle than we would have thought and help. Also in the past, again, we categorize them. Anytime they've taken any damage or anything, they just leave. Instead, they're continuing, running basically right past them. Yeah. So what happens now is the call goes back and I'm going to kind of foreshadow a little bit. The only people that are sent back to fight this are imperial fists and a small contingent of guard. They don't send a large

force. The imperial fists do get there, though, and they're imperial fists. They've got this. And they arrive. And what happens, though, is as soon as they land on the planet, the planet starts to fall apart around them. You get volcanic eruptions. The continents themselves start cracking. the oceans are getting a thousand foot waves, whatever you want to call it. And the Crohn's enter this even greater fury. They're just hurling themselves at the defensive lines of the Imperium, but not even trying to kill at this point, just trying to get over them to the other side so they can flee and get out of.

We'll be right back after a quick break. In my professional life, one thing I know well is how challenging, managing a global team can be. Just the act of creating one has been. an extreme challenge over the years. Because one thing you learn quickly is a difficulty of hiring global talent and how unclear those costs can be. It looks simple at first, but then the fees start to stack up with compliance worries, contractors versus employees, and a host of other regulations. Pebble brings clarity with upfront, all-in hiring costs and enables you to hire the world.

Pebble is an AI-powered human resource platform built for founders, HR leaders, and operas. who are hiring and supporting teams around the world. Pebble helps you hire, pay, and manage talent in over 185 countries with fast onboarding that could be done in minutes. Instead of juggling separate tools for contracts, payroll, benefits, and compliance, Pebble brings everything together with built-in compliance and local expertise to support you. This is especially helpful if you're managing teams internationally or planning to grow. The fastest growing companies in the world use Pebble, to stay organized and reduced risk. And founders use it to scale faster

without feeling like they need to become HR compliance experts. Bottom line, it simplifies global people operation so you can spend more time growing the business and supporting your team. Pebble's new standard discounted pricing is only $399 US dollars per month per employee. That'll help you contain costs.

Go to highpebble.aI to get a free estimate. That's high P-E-B-L-A-I for a free estimate. Let's talk about why this planet is going to shit. It is tidily wrecked volcanic action is happening. You're like, what would cause that? I don't know, maybe if like a moon just showed up outside. And this is exactly what happens, right above orbit. And by orbit, I don't mean like circling outside where you have tidal breaking,

keeping it in a nice normal orbit. I'm talking partially in the atmosphere. A giant moon made of metal appears. With guns. Don't forget the guns. With lots of guns. So many guns. Yeah.

And it's an orc death star in appearance. And we'll do, you know, let's do this now. An orc attack moon is not really, it's just, it's a shape of a moon. What it really is is a planet that's been cored out and then covered in metal. And then the exterior is covered with equipment, armor, guns, void shields, everything. And when we say hollowed out, the weird part about it is that it's not actually, well, it is hollow. But the inside is a subspace tunnel to somewhere else that allows you to have like a webway or warp gate. So you can, if you wherever, if orcs are on one side, you can just keep shoveling them through the tunnel to come out the other side.

Sometimes you got to invade the orcs versus humans. Yeah. And so that's exactly what happens. So while the imperial fists are fighting the cromes, and by fighting, they're just shooting the croms, the croms try to run past them, all of the orcs start pouring out of this attack moon onto the planet.

And within literally a couple hours, all the cron's down. The description of it's great, because what's said is a seemingly endless tide of orcs continue to pour out of this. Yes, all over the planet. Even though this is a booed, the boot is apparently a clown car

because they don't know that a gate is sending works. So this is a clown car. Just a car shows up and 7,000 people get out. You're like, that's not a real thing. Yeah. What occurs now is all the Imperial forces are killed. And when I say all the period force, I mean, all the guard, all the ships in orbit,

but more importantly, every single imperial fist. And this was, for the record, every single imperial fist in the galaxy was on this planet. They were all killed. The imperial fists are now, according to as far as the Imperium knows, an extinct chapter. So not a great moment for the Imperium. The other problem with the Orks is that there's not just one moon. Because for the Orks, when things work once, that means they kind of work forever because the Orks then believe in it. So you get more of them.

Suddenly, all across on the edge of segmentum solar and out into the ultimate segment, more of these moons start to appear. They're also wrecking the warp. Yeah, that's the thing too. You have incredible amounts of death, which always makes the work a little bit tumultuous, but more importantly, the orcs are a psychic race in their own very weird way. This many orcs moving across the galaxy, even though it's like a sub-gallaxy, travel that's not really clear how this works, it still disrupts the warp. It causes when a moon

appears in a planet to have very fun effects. One, the planet has to fall apart because of the gravity. Two, the psychic backlash of all this stuff going on actually fries the minds of astropaths and psychers. And as we talked out with blanks before, if you have blanks, people around blanks are uncomfortable. If you have enough psychic disruption, it actually affects the minds of people who aren't psychically gifted. So even the regular humans, the human colonies all over the place just start falling apart. People are trying to flee because, hey, there's a massive orcs above us. Let's try to get out of here. Trillions of people basically start trying to force themselves into any and every spaceship. Arbites and planetary governors can't do anything to stop this because, A, there's too many

people and B, they themselves are also trying to flee. Let's talk about the idiots. Come on. This is the fun one. These guys are morons. So all this things, these shit's falling apart. People are trying to flee, which is a perfect reaction. You know, it's not a perfect reaction?

Oh, this scary thing showing up that's destroyed stuff. Well, maybe they're all powerful new deity and we should worship them. And that worked out super well for them. It didn't go great. Yeah, out of nowhere, a bunch of, like, we have chaos cults later. Orc cults pop up or people begin worshipping the orcs. Fun story, when the orcs showed up, they still hit them with the stick. I don't even know if they acknowledge them.

They're just like, no. Like, you just assume an orc's just like mad that you're not fighting. Yeah, it's like, so you're not running away. Why are you bowing to me? All right, I guess I'll just cut your head off and then move on with my day. So the planetary defense forces also can't do anything to these invasions. I mean, we're talking a planetary defense force might, might be in the thousands, might be. More realistically, it's in the hundreds to maybe a thousand.

And here come a billion orcs. Didn't go well. You know what else didn't go well? Lords of Tara's idiot response. Okay, getting on my box again. So all of this is happening and they start trying to figure out what they're supposed to do about this. And none of the Lords of Terra want to lose any of their power and standing. Also, any of the Lords of Terra that have most of their base of operations close to this,

the other Lords of Terra just kind of want to wait a little bit and see if they can lose more power before they do anything. And they just start bickering. And they have no understanding of an incursion of this size. And I don't think they believed it. I think they just went, yeah, whatever. It's a lot of random Zenos. But it's still just not a big deal. These are administrators. Because again, there's no primarks, no Malkador, no emperor. There are the custodes. The irony is the custodes probably could have solved all this if they just popped out of the palace that, wait, what's going on? Those did not talk to anybody except for the emperor at this point in time in the in the L'Alar. Truthfully, the custodes could have popped out and been like, oh yeah, yeah, do this, this and

this, you guys are good and they left, but they did. This also could have just been a big battle and been done with at this time. Yes. So let's talk more about the Lords of Terra at this time and how it was. So the Lords of Terra were split into almost a pseudo-anarchistic three-way for power. One group, which is kind of like the worst of it, is the Lord High Admiral of the Navy, whose name is Lansom. He is aligned. He is aligned, yeah, he is aligned with the master of the administratum, Eckhartth.

What's interesting is that he's also aligned with the Lord Commander of the Imperium, the person who oversees both the Navy and the Guard. And his name is Udo. Udo, though, is older. And so Lansung was setting himself up to take over for Udo, and we'll get more than a second. On the other side, you have the Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial Guard, Heth, who unfortunately went to Ardementa to help fight the orcs.

So actually, Heth is dead. This new person who came in. So there's a brand new person named Abel Veralt, who has just effectively been promoted up. And he's on day one of being head of the Imperial Guard. He's also awful. Yeah. So they don't get along well.

They're also, but they are allied with the Inquisition also. Well, no, but they're not. Those two, so that's the problem is that you've got this group of like the Imperial Guard. And this is where, like, the Arbites, a couple of the randoms, the heads of the navigators, they're all in this other group that's not necessarily opposed to Lansung, but they don't always get along well with them. The actual opposition comes from two very random places. First is Van Gorich, who is going to come up a lot in all of our past. He's the grandmaster of the assassins.

Yep. Then you also have Kubik, who's the fabricator general of the Mechanicus, who kind of just disembarkers. who kind of just disappears. And then you have Weenand, who's the inquisitive, the head of the Inquisition. And Weenand bounces around a little bit. These are all kind of independence

because all of them are opposed to Lansung, but they're not necessarily aligned with each other. So that's why I say them this way. They all realize Lansung and his group are bad, but up until this point, they've never really worked together. Legitimately holding back forces and styming the response to this.

He sucks so much. He's like, let's go into, just like family-sized, 50% more family-sized suck. He sucks. So let's go into Lansing. Guys, Brad is really, this is really bothering. This guy's awful. It's so great. He's not a real person, Brad.

This is a made-up thing. Yeah. Anyway, so Lansung is the head of the Imperial Navy. And as I said before, he expected himself to become the next Lord commander of the Imperium. Lansung assumed the orc menace they were facing was something that could be easily handled, but not easily handled without casualties and cost. And so Lansung's concern was that for his own personal recognition in this war,

if he lost a large chunk of his fleet, it wouldn't reflect well on him. And so time and time again, he does everything he can to protect and preserve his fleet. In fact, when the call came to reinforce and supply Ardamanta, Lansing was the one who told the fists to, hey, you guys go. You take your whole fleet over there, telling them, you guys are more than large have to handle this. And if you need me, I'll show up. But I don't think you need me.

And it'll create confusion. So just go ahead and do it yourself. Truthfully, had he gone with the fists, his fleet could have wrecked this move. And they would because it would have been, it would have been just as it was appearing in orbit, they could have easily blown it up. But instead, every imperial fist dies. And by the way, Lansing is just. beginning to do horrible things.

Because the truth is what Lansing's real goal to what Brad was discussing earlier was to usurp the power of the other ones. Their number one concern at this point was not the invasion of the orcs, but it's who they could control. Well, it's who the control, and also who the other Lord of Terror, he wanted to weaken by this force. Hey, can I weaken my adversaries by making them take the brunt of? We're obviously going to win.

So how can I weaken my enemies by, you know, sending them out? This guy sucked. And he's got two big groups that he's afraid of. First is the assassins and the second is the Inquisition. And the assassins, you're afraid of because they could just murder you. So, spoiler alert, they might do that later. Both of them operate outside of control of the normal, basically. The things that he, the normal flow of anything, both of them.

are outside of this. And, well, it's a funny note on this is, it is not later on. At this time, the popular opinion of the Inquisition is they're here to stamp out the foes of humanity and keep everything great. And they're good peeps. And that's a really important thing here because the M32, the Inquisition are a force of good in the Imperium. They actually are.

It's not by propaganda. They actually are. And so Lansung is afraid of Vangorik, the head of the assassins, killing him. But he's more afraid of the Inquisition because in the quest for power, the Inquisition is more popular than the Imperial Navy. So he needs to figure out a way to deal with them. Fun part about that is the head of the Inquisition, Wienand. She hates him because she recognizes that Lansung is an idiot. And she's super critical.

And he's an actual. threat to the continuing prosperity of the Imperium, because this guy can wreck everything by his sheer exponentially increasing incompetence. Yeah, and she realized very quickly that Lansung was totally fine with the Imperium burning so long as he ended up ahead at the end. The other one is, of course, Van Gorich.

And Van Gorenach equally thinks Lansing is a nightmare. But the fun part about Van Gorich is because he's the head of the assassins. He's got his own little side thing that he's always working at all times. So the reason I describe them that way is because Van Gorich and Wienand both hate Lansing and everyone with him, but they don't align. They don't even talk to each of him. Yes, they just both have, they're both waging their own shadow campaigns against him. Now, Van Gorich is the first one here to begin to act. after the fall of Ardimenta.

So he uses his intense collection of spies and assassins to start manipulating the Lords of Terra behind the scenes. Vangorich then gets involved, and he begins taking a leading role because at this stage, Van Gorich is a really adamant supporter of the Imperium. He believes in the Imperium, and he wants the Imperium to succeed.

So with all that established, let's get back to the chronology of the War of the Beast. After conquering Ardimenta, the orcs actually leave it. They move off into sole segmentum. The world is now abandoned. And ADMEC, whenever this happens, whenever anything happens, actually, the ADMEX and the exploratory fleet to study the planet.

That's their number one system. Okay, we won or we lost. The more importantly, there was something there we hadn't seen before, go collect. What is it? And was there tech that we want? Yep. So the ADMEC wanted to understand how the orcs were functioning so differently from regular orcs.

And also, spoiler alert to the head, they kind of want to know how you can transport a planet around the galaxy. They hadn't figured that one out yet. With a gate inside of it? Yes. So when they get there, they find this planet completely wrecked. The topography is totally changed. It doesn't match any of their data. And they're seeing power levels of orc weaponry never foreseen.

Because, again, the orcs believe their guns are more powerful. They are. more powerful. Because you just need enough orcs to believe all of this. They also discovered, concerningly to the ad mech, this massive amount of psychic emanations all over the place. The orcs had left almost a wake of psychic energy behind them. It actually is described as that.

It's described as a psychic wake. And because it pulls other orcs forward with it, kind of you know where you're going with this wog. But it also caused physical, it's not even just harm. It was semi-harm, but like, especially if you're a psycher, you could actually be hurt, you know, because of this. Being around us, exactly. Now, they also discovered under some rubble three Imperial Fist Space Marines that had been placed in, you know, remember we talked about the stasis thing?

Although Fists don't have that, but that they were placed in stasis. They don't have the weird external thing. Yeah. The ADMEC then try to revive them. And the first two die in the process. and the ad mech tech priest goes well you know what third times the charm guys watch this and revives the imperial fist who's the second what's god i can't remember his name from secret level and still or lives second captain corland is who this is is saved making him the only imperial fist in the

entire galaxy this is my favorite corland pops up and immediately just declares to whoever the hell's around. Now the new chapter master of the imperial fist, dude, you're by yourself. You're the chapter master of Corlin. Yeah, he's also, he's also the lead cook, the lead

janitor. I mean, he's the lead munitions expert. Like, he is. You are. Congratulations, man. Yeah, the imperial fists. Yeah, the imperial fists are currently not plural anymore. You are the imperial fist of the galaxy. Nice.

He then decides, because he can, to invoke the Last Wall Protocol. Now, the Last Wall Protocol, we covered this under the Fists, is a secret code that Dorn created when he broke the fists up into, to be part of the Codex Astardis. Under the Last Wall Protocol, should Terra come under threat, which it was now, all the successor chapters in the Imperial Fists and the Imperial Fists themselves, or in this case, the Imperial Fist, have to meet on the planet called fall, P-H-A-L. Fall is an early part of Horace heresy. It's where Dorn and Petrault fought,

and Dorn actually took the day and forced Petrovo to retreat. Is this the bat signal, or is he lighting the fires of Gondor? I think it's the bat signal, because the fires of Gondor take you a different place. This is more the bat signal. Hey, everyone show up. Corland, I know how he gets there, by the way. He's just, he just is there. Again, he's by himself.

He shouldn't know anything about anything. He, this is, they kind of stretch this and went, whatever, because he just pops up and he just knows a butts of shit that he didn't know before he got killed. Yeah. And you're like, how? He was a second captain. Yeah. He knows none of this stuff exists.

He just pops up and goes, I got a good idea, guys. I know everything now. You're like, do you matrix this? What just happened? The cool thing is he does go to fall. and once there, a bunch of successors show up. The black templars, the crimson fists, the fists exemplar, and the excoriators. Of note, the sole drinkers could not be found.

No one knew where they were. And they all align, and they just decide they take the Codex of Stardes, and they light it on fire and throw it in the trash can, and they begin heading back towards Terra, which is good timing because Terra is getting really close to a serious problem. But first, we have Port Sancta. where you wanted your cruise ship to show up to. Remember last week when we talked about the merchant fleets just having just showing up

somewhere, this is one of those type scenarios. Also, the Ardimenta where you just show up and it's like, oh, hey, hey, guys, just translate it back out of the warp. What's going on? Oh. Oh, well, is anyone going to sign for this? Because I need someone to sign for it. So the orc menace is proceeding through the galaxy and the imperial forces keep kind of searching

for a head of the snake to cut off. They decide finally that this attack moon appears in the Sanctus system, and this is where Imperial forces, they kind of think this is the main attack moon. So if we go and hit this one, we can end this once and full. I have to psych up, John. I got to get my chi together because there again is one man

who sucks so much to bring about the downfall of multiple people. And who is this? Lansing. So as the invasion begins on Sanctus, and it is absolutely gigantic, there happened to be some Black Templars and a couple of successor chapters nearby who begin engaging.

And they put the call back to Terra because the fighting is terrible. There's so many orcs. Lansing, though, refuses. He doesn't just refuse. He sees that there's a giant space battle going on. Maybe the guy that has the

Imperial Navy, you know, the space fleet, could help with the space battle. You see what I'm saying here? I feel like these things are going together. So what he decides to put the car in reverse and go home. What he does is he moves

all his entire fleet to a place called the Kloskian Gulf, which is just actually outside of Segmentum Solar, by the way. And because what he wants to do is attack the orcs, from their rear while someone else comes in from the front. He wants someone else to take all, take all the injuries, and then he's going to come through and take the glory and the easy battle. A fun note, some of his ships were in Sanctus fighting with the Black Templars. This is in the books.

They just notify the Black Templars. Oh, hey, best of luck, guys. We got to go. Yeah. And Black Templars are like, we're literally fighting Orcs now. Where are you? That was some of their wrong. rides also, by the way. Not even that you're bailing on me in the middle of the fight, but also you should call somebody if you want to go somewhere else because we're taking off now. They just leave. And the Black Templars are left to fight an orc incursion basically solo with some guardsmen. The rest of the Lords of Terra, by the way, are not much better because everyone agrees the orcs had to be stopped. And everyone also agreed it was someone else's job to do the stopping. At this point, Van Gorich and Wienand take their own paths. Let's put it that way,

to achieve the same goal. Van Gorich goes first. His idea is, I'm going to unite the Lords of Terra against this. And so his thought is, we've got, there is an ecclesiarchy at this point. It's different than the later ecclesiart. This is the one that actually does worship the emperor, but not, you know, with all the psycho stuff we get later. So he, Van Gogh, shapesh, shapeshifts into a priest of the ecclesiarch. his plan is so convoluted, Scooby-Doo style, just like, hey, man, you could have been about this and not having, why is your plan so complicated?

I'm going to make it really simple here. He pretends to be a priest. He sneaks into Messring, who's the head of the ecclesiarchy, and he poisons him. And as Messering is lying there in pain, Van Gorsh tells him, you're going to die in the next three days if you don't get an antidote.

I have the antidote. All you have to do is clear a holy war against these orcs. So, of course, Messering goes, yeah, all right. They probably could have just done us a bunch of different ways, but he gets it done. Because Van Goguric knew that declaring a war of faith against the orcs would unify humanity against them. And with all of humanity aligned in one thing,

all the bickering from the Lords of Terror would stop. By the way, he knew. I've been doing a lot of air quotes, even though no one can see me. he knew that this was going to be the case. Sorry about the spoiler alert, but it didn't work out this way at all. Wait a minute. It did nothing. Yeah, it just did absolutely nothing.

It was declared and everyone just began shouting louder. Yes, someone should do something. Clearly, those guys are doing something. So now I can do even less. I also want to take a quick detour on Van Gogh at this point because he also does something else. Van Gogorik was a master planner and usurper. I mean, Malcador did a good job of putting him in charge. Van Gogurik is always scheming not just now, but also for the future. And what he knew was that this was going to be a long protracted fight for him. Then Goric was originally a Venom

assassin. The Venom or Venom assassins are the poison assassins. They're, I know, weird. As the head of the Venom assassins, he had obviously access to everybody. And there was a special Venetum, sorry, Venom assassin named Esad Wire. And ESAD was not only amazing at poison,

but also in combat. Does this make him a super assassin? It does. It makes him a super assassin. Some of the writing here, guys. Yeah, this is a little bit. I mean, he was, he was cool.

I mean, this, this guy's bad. Madass. He's like, he's like ninja James Bond. He sneaks everywhere. By the way, he keeps just walking through the front door. That's why I have no idea. I have no idea who his name. What is Tom Cruise's character in Mission Impossible? Actually, I don't have. I've seen the movie. Thank you. There he is. So he's, is Ethan Hunt? That's, I'm supposed to root for someone named Ethan Hunt. I got to be such a hater, yo. Jason Bourne was at least kind of a cool combo name. James Bond, but Ethan Hunt?

Sounds like a middle manager. Which is why no one noticed him. But, yeah. The best is in all the story, this guy just walks in, Bond style, through the front door as, because he keeps shape, chain, you know, coming in as different. He shapeshifts, he can do all this stuff. The only one that's annoying to me about him is that he's known for being really to hand-to-hand combat. Could he had, he had plast steel in his hands to make them, like, he said he could crush a skull. problem is that like I actually do kickbox so I don't need more I'm retired from

but I just kickbox it's not how hard your fists are that that break through bone it's the force you punch with like a bear doesn't bite through your arm because a bear has titanium teeth a bear has 1100 PSI strength bite force whereas a human has like 120 unless you're Ivan von deroggo that's try if he dies he dies he dies that is, again, John's side note, the dumbest montage in the history of movies. Look, man. When he's training in the snow and the cold to go fight a dude who's on Russian-level steroids, the best he would have gotten out of that is a cold.

Remember the punching power. They made it so ridiculous. He hit that thing. You're like, so he just punches. His biggest problem would be shaking the person's dead body off his fist. after he punched through them. You're like, that's not a real number, man. It's not.

I'm going to try to call it out. It's not a good movie. I'm sorry. It's not a movie. You know what? The Ghost of Apollo Creed is about to haunt you for that. And I will tell the ghost of Apollo Creed. The first Rocky was good.

The rest of them were terrible. Yeah. Rocky Bell Bo. Rocky Bell Bo is a really good movie. I'm sorry. It just was. No, it wasn't. It just was better than the ones that came before.

I mean, Rocky 5 was awful. But there we go. That's the thing. It's great on a curve. Great on a curve. Rocky about a good movie. It was a very watchable good movie. How about that? It's like Alien 4 versus Alien 3. I mean, it was better. It was better than Alien 3. That's all I'm saying. They're both. Okay, whatever. Back to the cast. So, Isadwire, who we were, is what we were talking about, had served Van Gorich for an unknown length of time. He retired, retired, which I didn't know you could do. He was a retired assassin.

Yeah, I thought they just had to serve until they die, basically. That's a. the whole thing. Well, the part that's funny is that he then retires, which is like, imagine that being your neighbor. Like, you get a new neighbor, it's like he's a retired assassin. What happens if he's a retired emissor assassin? Hey, man, you put your

bags out on the recycling day, and he just rages out because he's got all the trucks at him. Like, hey, man, we got to move again. I accidentally murdered everybody on the block because recycling vans. And I like this, although to be fair, he didn't retire and just go, you know, live in a log cabin on a hill. He became an arbitrator, which is the head of the Arbytes.

So Judge Dredd. And I will say, that's a pretty scary judge dread. Wow. Or it's like, because the normal Arbytes can fight. This is a former best assassin in all of the venom assassin. Just imagine this. It's the judge dread. You're like local criminal thinking you're going to get up on one of the judges.

And he's just like. Yeah, I killed all of you like yesterday. Actually, you don't even realize you're dead. What? Oh, no. I'll think a very quick, funny story about this reminded me of. So when I was living in California down the street for me, someone apparently was selling pot out of their house,

this was back when marijuana was not legal. And so people decided to do a home invasion robbery and steal from them. They, what they do is one person knocks on the front door and two are they will jump the neighbor's fence, then jump in the backyard. So when you open the front door, they came in the back with guns to rob them. problem is the fence they jumped, that person was home and saw two men with guns jumping a fence. So they called the police.

Where this story became funny to me is the SWAT team was practicing about a mile away. And so these guys, three or four people went to do a home invasion robbery on one person, and the entire San Jose police SWAT team arrived within like 60 seconds. The best one was like they hit one guy runs out the back and there was an easement there with a little creek behind it. He hops a fence, goes into the easement, hops the next fence to land into the yard, the yard of an off-duty police officer who saw the helicopters and was standing in his backyard with his pistol. I actually felt bad for the criminals in this way, just getting caught this badly. Things did not work out in our master plan. It did not go. Their master plan did not work.

So yeah, kind of like having Judge Dred be the former greatest living aside. Also, poisoner. Again, hence the reason they said, I killed you guys yesterday. Yeah. You just don't know until today. Yeah. Where Esad's important is not right now, but it's coming later. At the start of all this work invasion, Van Gogur went back to his formal pupil and said, hey, I need you back and recruited him back in and sent him on a list of secret missions.

That's all we're told this point in the book. It's a list of go do these things. They're all going to get revealed pretty quickly. Hey, for instance, hey, let's talk about one of the big things. Admec just not paying any attention to the thing that they should be paying a lot of attention to. And not in a, we're not, we didn't know what's happening, but more of a, let's see what happens on the flop and poker. I'm going to keep my cards to myself kind of way. Yeah, the admec got really weird.

and Van Gogorix sends actually one of his spies to Mars, because the admec just seemed to be completely non-concerned. Because remember, they're next to Terra. So it's not like the orcs can invade and not hit them, but the admec seems to be like, yeah, whatever. Back on Sanctus. Let's recap, guys. We're not winning right now.

Yeah. Oh, this is going terrible. So back on Sanctus, without reinforcements, the space Marines there are about to die. Lansing is refusing to send his troops. Inquisitor Wienand just says, nope, I'm not putting up with those grabs. What she knew, though, is kind of what everybody knows. The Imperial Navy is full of officers who are always jockeying for a position.

And nothing will help you grow within the Imperium like Glory. And she targeted specifically an admiral named Archaya, who commanded a battle fleet that was still near Terra. And she convinced Al Qaya that, look, if you go quickly, right now. You know, the orcs are engaged with a black Templar. They won't see you coming. You land in. You could take out the moon. You will save Terra. You will be humanity's greatest hero. And Archaia goes, yeah, that's awesome. This gets so much better. Because if he shows up with just his group, he would have got smoked. But in a second. But he broadcasts his, I'm going to secretly, you know, get these guys from the rear to,

everyone to talk about how awesome he is and everyone else goes, hey, wait a minute, I want to be awesome and get glory. We're going too. Yeah, it becomes hilarious. He's just like, I'm going, I'm heading to sect us to save the Imperium. And to breath point, other people said, I'm also going to sanctus to save the imperium. And this puts Lansing in a bad situation because Lansing can't order them, no stand down, because then he's seen as a coward and a traitor. And if he lets them go and they do succeed, they might actually usurp him for power. The whole imperial might say, no, put Archaia in charge.

Lansing's an idiot. So Lansing has no choice. And he comes over the radio, for lack of a better phrase here, and says, everyone stop. I'm going. You're all coming with me. And he brings the entire Imperial Navy to Sanctus. I'm going to begrudgingly give this guy one tiny prop. while he is sludge on my boot,

when you come into actual space combat, he's really good, actually. I mean, he's the greatest, he is the greatest naval mind of the time. I mean, he got to this position because he has one innumeral naval conflicts, including ones where he was grossly overmatched. I said he was good at space combat.

You can say all this other stuff. you're saying, I'm staying with good at SpaceCown. Yeah. This was, they arrive in system and begin a direct assault. All of the current ships in the system go, oh, you guys

are here, thanks, but also cool, we do need your help. And it starts off pretty okay. Lansing knows what he's doing, and so he begins picking off all the outer lying orcs to kind of start shepherding them back towards the main craft. And

the Imperial Navy does have really good guns. When they bring firepower, they're going to do it. Orc fleets really don't work like that. Orc fleets are made up of offense, not a lot of defense, because it's really just a rickety spaceship that once you put a hole in, the orcs on the ship lose confidence in the ship, and then the ship becomes what it really is, which is a giant pile of scrap that doesn't do anything.

So it's pretty, it's pretty, I know. I just, it's one of my favorites is that or spaceships aren't airtight. Yeah. It's just. And so,

well, and they're only airtight as long as all the orcs on it think it's airtight. So when the orcs then see a big enough hole, they go, oh, no, it's not airtight. And the ship's no longer airtight and breaks apart. It's freaking awesome.

It's beautiful. They begin, so at this, Lansing, they're doing well. As the fleet gets closer to the attack moon, the orcs break out their secret weapon. The jump.

It wasn't called that in the books, but that's what it was. The orcs start teleporting onto the imperial ships, despite their void shields being up. And you know it's not great for an imperial vessel? Hundreds of orc boys appearing in the middle of it. They are not ready. They're not ready for this. And the tide of battle just starts to turn the other way. Because the imperial ships have to disengage from combat because they're fighting orcs.

Again, want to point this out. These are Imperial Navy officers. Naval, like these are breaches fighting an orc. A space marine versus an orc is a bit of a fight. This is not. The orcs are slaughtering them inside the ships, and orcs are jumping into it. However, that slittle maneuver actually helps the Imperium,

because as the naval ships begin disembarking, orcs are always going to ork. And the orcs have a lot of jealousy. Orcs don't really like ranged combat. They think it's lame and boring. They like hand-to-hand. So the orcs know there's a crumpin going on inside the big ships, and they want to go be part of said crumping.

And they begin following the imperial ships that are disengaging to jump more of them onto the ship to do more fighting. Also, they talk about it in the books with that. They're also not exactly making tactical retreats. They're just going, hey, I want to fight over there and just leave. Yeah. And what this does is, as, of course, as you'd expect, the fleet then is peeling off away from the attack moon. Therefore, the Ork fleet is also following them peeling off from the attack moon. And Lansing, who's sitting back not because he's a coward because it's actually how you do command, you sit back, is with his massive battle group and notices he's got a clear shot straight at the attack moon and just decides.

And in a moment of actually pseudo-heroism here decides on what is a binary choice. binary choices, I'm going to throw everything I have at this moon. And either we're going to blow it up and we're going to win or we're all going to die. And he goes with it. And the naval guns, they get close to just open up on this thing. And they drop the void shield. From there, Lansing starts targeting the gravity generators on the moon knowing that if you can break these apart, the moon will just collapse on itself.

Yeah. But it does. He blows them up. It does not go as ways he thought it would, though, because. Well, because he didn't know what was really inside it. He assumed this was a big, like, Death Star, I'll pop a hole in it, and it'll collapse itself. He didn't realize inside of it was a portal to another part of the galaxy that also would collapse and explode. So you get, like, it goes supernova effectively and rips all, it destroys most of the Ork fleet, but then also destroys a lot of the Imperial fleet.

Lansing does survive with a small chunk of his fleet, and they're able to hunt down and kill off all. the remaining orcs. He has now achieved the greatest military victory in the Imperium since the siege of Terra. This is it. The orcs disperse. The battles around the galaxy start to lessen because it was a major attack moon. And Lansing heads back to Terra.

In heading back to Terra, there's even a massive parade that was created in his honor. I hate this. He's sending. Oh, but come on. This is this next bit. Yeah, it's amazing for that. But he has evidence that there are more moons already. There's a guy with a camcorder going,

there's literally way more guys than what you just fought. And he went, yeah, I'm going to ignore that. I'm awesome. I've won. You're like, but we have video evidence that there's more guys. And he's like, nope, killed him all. No more guys. I'm the best.

I know what you guys are talking about. Yeah. I am number one. While having this huge parade on Tara that is to celebrate the, end of the orc threat, and more importantly for Lansing, to celebrate Lansing being the greatest that has ever lived. A new attack moon arrives in orbit above Terra. Actually, specifically over the parade grounds if you read the book. Yes. Yeah. So we're going to break there. Next week, we're doing a different topic. We're talking about the pets of the Imperium,

dogs, cats, whatever crazy animals people have. Pretty cool, actually, because there's even some psionic parasites people will keep that actually take over their minds and the sinus parasite lives forever obviously i'm kidding we're going to do more war of the beast next week like like still i was like maybe john's lost his mind we're i mean i mean the pets of terra could be fun i'm sure we will get requests for it in discord now i offered it up guarantee you that's coming by the way like but next week we're going to go into battle for terra and the return of vulcan the battle for Terra is long and very convoluted. We should also point out this series of novels is 12 novels long,

and Brad will be the first one to tell you, they're not all A's. Some of them are really cool, though. Some of them are very good. So just letting you guys know, we're covering about 12 novels and what's going to probably be about four casts is my guess. But anyway.

Next one, stuff goes down. There's a lot of, the 12 books, If you condense them down, there's incredible stuff in them. So this has been John Barsati and Brad Chester. This guy. We'll see you next week.