Chapter 10(LCL)
Archon Brahust of the Tangerine Splinter Kabal was extremely alarmed to receive frantic reports saying that 8 entire slum districts in his territory were now infested with an exponentially growing number of tyranid hormagaunts.
The cursed Black Dagger had only swooped through Tangerine Splinter territory a mere 23 hours ago, throwing suspicious looking crates through random windows, far too many windows and buildings for the Tangerine Splinter Kabalite Warriors to investigate them all in time.
The Warriors had quickly discovered what was in those crates, and had been scrambling to cull the blasted hormagaunts before they bred, and had cleared out maybe half of the infested buildings.
The remaining half however were by then completely infested with thousands of fully grown hormagaunts, and those vile things could jump quite astonishing distances, leaping out of windows across perilous drops into the open windows of adjacent buildings.
They were spreading from building to building in this way with astonishing speed, killing everyone inside the buildings and laying eggs all over the bodies.
The exact number of hormagaunts was not known, but it must surely be close to a hundred thousand by now.
The Tangerine Splinter Kabal were all extremely capable warriors, they did not dilute their forces with untrained rabble, they recruited only the best of the best and only gradually to ensure that the majority of the kabal's warriors were highly experienced.
The warriors certainly had the skills to defend their most strategic territories against these hormagaunts, but they numbered less than 30 thousand Kabalite Warriors, not nearly enough to defend their vast tracts of less important territory from this exponentially growing army of hormagaunts.
The Tangerine Splinter had never been an attrition army like the Black Dagger was, it was beneath their dignity to sully themselves with the vast numbers of unsavoury riffraff needed to be that sort of army. They had too much pride for that.
Unfortunately, the hormagaunts WERE an attritional army, a seething swarm that could only be defeated by brutal meat grinder type fighting. Every hour each adult laid scores more eggs, every hour the swarm became harder to stop.
If something didn't stop them then this swarm would spread across the whole of Commorragh and wipe out the entire Dark Eldar race.
It really was not a very sensible thing Archon Arzogahn had done...
***...
32 hours later, the Tangerine Splinter was holed up in 3 strategic districts they had heavily fortified, cut off from each other in little islands of safety amid a seething ocean of tyranid infested surrounding slums.
The Tangerine Splinter had welded plate steel over every window, and had encased the entire outskirts of their 3 remaining districts with razor wire netting and sturdy mesh fences to keep the hormagaunts and rippers out.
They were cut off from supplies and simply hoped that the hormagaunts would all starve to death before the Tangerine Splinter ran out of food supplies.
The hormagaunts were now spreading into the territories of other kabals, and the situation escalating rapidly out of control.
Zasbak factory district of Gahastorest level was currently under the control of the Kabal of the Pink Javelin, just another petty slum Kabal like all the others round these parts, and the Pink Javelin was frantically installing lockable armoured steel shutters over every window and lockable heavy steel doors over every outer door and loading bay.
Fully enclosed steel sky walks covered in long spikes were being hastily built at the 50th floor level to connect the factory buildings together during the coming siege, and in the very middle of the district, fortified landing platforms were being constructed off the 50th floor to allow Pink Javelin antigravity vehicles to keep taking factory produce even at the height of the siege.
All other strategic locations were likewise being hastily fortified all across Gahastorest level as the Kabals stopped fighting each other to focus on this mutual threat.
At least, MOST of the kabals had the sense to stop fighting each other...
***...
Archon Arzogahn of the Black Dagger smiled cruelly as he took advantage of the current confusion to sack and pillage as much rival territory as possible before the tyranids infested it.
The other kabals had a far more pressing threat to deal with and did not retaliate as the huge armies of the Black Dagger looted the mostly worthless slums of absolutely everything remotely edible, including all the people.
Archon Arzogahn was attempting to create an almost 10 kilometre radius depopulated buffer zone around his fortified district, a zone with as little as possible to eat to keep the swarm from growing around the fortified district.
Parched slaves were screaming as Kabalite warriors gunned them down and dragged away their bodies onto antigravity "meat platforms" to feed the multitudes of starving slaves in the fortified district.
Absolutely nothing was wasted, and teams of Black Dagger slaves raked through every last pile of dust to find anything remotely edible to a hormagaunt.
Antigravity platforms were hovering back and forth between the slums and the fortified district, dumping all of the collected "stuff" in massive sorting piles in the heart of the fortified district, and then zipping quickly back out to the slums for yet more "stuff".
It was, to put it bluntly, a genocide, the callous slaughter of at least a million very desperate people just to use their bodies as meat and to blunt the tyranid advance.
Death world cabbages, orkoid embryos, and every other crop these wretches grew were looted to feed the hungry masses of the Black Dagger. Every last dried up old turd was harvested, NOTHING was being left behind.
As the buildings were looted, armies of slaves connected wires all the way out from the fortified district, commandeering every wind turbine in the entire radius and wiring them into the Black Dagger power grid.
The hormagaunts were unlikely to attack the wind turbines, and would have trouble reaching many of them at any rate, giving the Black Dagger some much needed power that the tyranids would then guard for them!
The methodical slaughter ground ever outwards, relentlessly stripping all biomass from the slums before the hormagaunts reached them.
In the end however, they were not fast enough to clear out the full 10 kilometres in time.
With maybe a 9 kilometre radius cleared out, the Black Dagger pulled out of the buffer zone as tens of thousands of hormagaunts poured into the remaining tenth kilometre.
The Black Dagger pulled absolutely everything inside the now heavily netted off fortified Kabalite stronghold district, and netted off all entrances with heavy razor wire meshes. Absolutely nothing was getting through these defences.
Nothing for it now but to wait until either starvation (or someone actually fighting them) killed off enough of the hormagaunts for the Black Dagger to conquer the ruins in the aftermath.
***...
Supreme lord of Commorragh Asdrubael Vect was rather pissed off when his dark city was engulfed in a colossal tyranid invasion.
He was even MORE pissed off when his own Black Heart Kabal forces and their many vassals had to spend months waging a particularly savage war to finally exterminate the creatures.
It didn't take long for Asdrubael Vect to learn who was responsible for this entire mess, and, let's just say that Archon Arzogahn there afterwards became "Haemonculi torture plaything Arzogahn"...
***...
Kaebros and the rest of the relatively few survivors of the Black Dagger Kabal had wisely decided to change the name of their Kabal to the "Ebony Stiletto", and were insisting that they had absolutely no ties, connection to, or even knowledge of the very existence of either Arzogahn or the Black Dagger Kabal.
They had also wisely relocated the fuck away from anywhere near Gahastorest level, setting up a new safe house home in an even crappier part of the nearly endless low Commorragh slums, this one about 20 thousand kilometres away from the previous location.
This might sound like a lot of distance, you might even wonder that they were even still in Low Commorragh at all, but that is just how BIG the city of Commorragh is!
Commorragh is so unbelievably BIG that if it were compared to the biggest Hive City on an Imperium planet, the human hive city would look like a rather small ant hill next to Mount Everest on 20th century Earth! In fact even Mount Everest might be too small in this comparison!
Commorragh was so mind bogglingly BIG that it was only even geographically possible because it existed inside the bizarre geometry of the galaxy spanning web way.
The population of Commorragh were the remnants of the once great Eldar empire that ruled and colonised the entire galaxy, an empire so great and numerous that only the great calamity of Slaanesh nom-nomming their souls had been able to defeat them. This remnant population had been only a small fraction of their previous numbers, but they had been just THAT fucking numerous that this small fraction was still a stupidly large number!
And for like ten thousand plus years, this stupidly large number had been using artificial vats to mass produce more than their original number worth of vat grown half born slaves every fucking year!
Ten thousand years later they were absolutely ABSURDLY over populated and could not expand Commorragh fast enough to match this eternal population growth!
Commorragh was not all one homogeneous city but was divided into rich bits and poor bits, pretty bits and ugly bits, specialist bits and generalist bits, much as other cities are.
People like Asdrubael Vect tended to be concentrated in the rich and pretty and nice bits. People like Kaebros and Bhirae tended to be concentrated in the... other sort of bits.
Low Commorragh was, very solidly, the primary "shit" part of the city of Commorragh. It was an eternal slum that would make late 20th century Calcutta look nice in comparison, a never ending squalid cess pit of absolute poverty.
It was also easily the largest section of Commorragh, the place where the VAST majority of the Dark Eldar lived. It was the wretched residential slums that housed the vast "scum" class of the city.
In the merciless libertarian meritocracy society of the Dark Eldar, most were simply left behind to languish in hellish poverty.
Even Asdrubael Vect had only a very vague knowledge of the vast bulk of his urban domain, it just grew so fast and was so unregulated that it was impossible to keep track of the daily changes.
Low Commorragh was so completely huge that relocating 20 thousand kilometres away was only a relatively small distance in the scheme of it's vastness. If Commorragh had had post codes, then Kaebros and the others would probably not even have to change their postal code.
With them, the newly founded "Ebony Stiletto" Kabal, carried every scrap of wealth they had been able to fit on their remaining antigravity vehicles. They numbered a few thousand Kabalite Warriors, and every skilled or otherwise valuable slave they could fit on the vehicles was also with them.
Asdrubael Vect's wrath had been terrible, even hundreds of thousands of Black Dagger Warriors had not been enough, and Kaebros and the others had only survived by cravenly running away while the rest of the Black Dagger fought.
They had spent many days fleeing through the web way, repainting their vehicles and uniforms as they moved. They had agreed upon a new identity, buried their potentially lethal past, and had then reemerged from the web way in a completely different bit of Low Commorragh, as a completely unknown new slum kabal that Vect would never even hear about.
Stupid Arzogahn had cost them damn near everything, but they were now safely anonymous and would survive.
***...
Bhirae was less than impressed with "Sydpug slum district of Fahammulah level". There was a very good reason why this district had been completely uncontested by any Kabal strong enough to kick their asses!
It looked suspiciously like a radioactive waste dumping ground, with all the usual symptoms of a radioactive waste dumping ground...
For one thing even the parched locals avoided this district, which only EVER happened if there was a damn good reason. It had a lack of any growing orkoids, which meant it must be toxic and or radioactive in the extreme. And, most telling of all, it had a lot of lead drums with the words "radioactive waste" written on the sides in prominent warning labels...
The radiation detector was going crazy, and Bhirae was extremely grateful that she was currently wearing a lead radiation suit!
Bhirae and a group of other slaves very carefully collected all the radioactive waste drums and took them to the perilous edge of a poorly maintained sky bridge.
They then very very carefully opened up the drums, and callously poured the lethal contents out over the edge, keeping the somewhat valuable lead drums for themselves. The radioactive waste would no doubt kill a lot of people in the lower levels, but Bhirae and the other slaves did not make the orders, merely obeyed as directed.
From the sounds of dismay that started to drift up from the lower levels, it quickly became apparent that someone was not pleased to have radioactive waste dumped on their heads, and Bhirae smiled nastily.
Bhirae was less pleased when whatever Kabal owned the lower level flew up in a raider to investigate who the fuck was tipping nuclear waste on their heads...
Bhirae wisely ran into the safety of a building as a savage war broke out between this new Kabal and the Ebony Stiletto.
A lot of bloodshed later, the Ebony Stiletto wisely decided to leave this rather... hot headed neighbourhood, and they were all on the move yet again.
Bhirae grumpily mounted a crowded antigravity vehicle, bitterly resenting Kaebros for ever removing her from Zasbak factory district 20 thousand kilometres away!
The convoy of Ebony Stiletto antigravity vehicles fled back into the web way tunnels, and resumed their search for somewhere feeble enough to claim for themselves.
For many days they searched, being constantly driven off by stronger kabals, until they came to the shores of some toxic looking acid green river with bodies floating in it. The very air was like a toxic fume, and hooligans on jet bikes and antigravity boards shot along it like a race track.
Yet even in THIS squalid place, stronger kabals soon emerged to warn them to leave, and the convoy continued on their way, leaving the strange river behind.
On and on they went until the level of poverty and disrepair became bad even by Low Commorragh standards.
Before them stretched a shot up ruin, a place without even wind turbines for energy, utterly dark, utterly worthless.
The sky bridges were so badly shot up that they had random planks across wide gaps to let pedestrians travel about, and every single person here was even more parched then Bhirae had been at the absolute worst part of the soul shortage!
These desperate wretches looked only a few hours away from completely falling to bits, and were literally naked with no possessions except for crude home made knives.
From torturing a local, the Ebony Stiletto learned where they were, the rightly infamous "Sprawls".
The absolute shittest place in all of Low Commorragh!
***...