 The imperial planning and mustering for the invasion of the traitor-held world of Rax, and for the recapture of the departmental munitorium Citadel and supply dump therein, had taken years to properly come together, requiring the cumbersome and dysfunctional wheels of the Administratum and military bureaucracies to turn, far enough, to render the imperial siege army with the arms, armaments, and human resources they required to conduct the operation. The infamous death-core of Krieg, whole battalions of fanatically indoctrinated and conditioned soldiery, had been selected for the task. And as siege and tactical officials predicted, with uninterrupted supplies of shells and bodies, it would take no fewer than eleven years standard to recapture Rax, but an imperial victory nonetheless. It would be bloody, it would be costly, but it would be victory, and that is precisely what higher-ups in the imperial chain of command demanded. Its initial unfolding went, well, almost precisely to grim merciless plan. You know then, that this is a further continuation of one's chronicle on that most horrendous of chapters in imperial history, the siege of Rax. With much pomp and circumstance, Lord Commander Zwellk established his command headquarters upon the world of Thracian Primaris, capital of the Scaras Sector. His presence on the actual field of battle would not be required. The reams of forward data projection his logist staff had provided him with had calculated the victory on Rax to the month. All Zwellk had to do was ensure the supply lines of the fortress world were be remaining open, smooth and plentiful, adopting a role less of a military commander, and more of a bureaucrat, with an especially resplendent uniform. And indeed, coming together as Zwellk's mighty war machine most absolutely was. As the Lord Commander was furnishing his office on Thracian Primaris, the first of his soldiers were finally embarking. 2,000 military servicemen of the 143rd Krieg Siege Regiment embarked upon transport ships on 790-812-M41, becoming the first in a growing armada around the Imperial war world, the grand astral muster bound for Vrax. It would not be until 199 of the same year that the first of this convoy would eventually reach the system itself, having rendezvoused with the Imperial Navy Flotilla under the command of Admiral Rassiac aboard the cruiser Lord Balerophon. The defenders had no fleet of their own, and Vrax no orbital station defences. But all precautions were taken nevertheless. The Flotilla manoeuvred into geostationary orbit above the far side of Vrax from the Citadel and its laser defense batteries, to allow for all orbital drops to be undertaken with as much safety and surety as possible. The initial landing sites had been assayed to provide the best possible beachhead. The demands of manpower and materials besieged place upon the army meant an uninterrupted flow of goods from orbit was essential. The 143rd, as first embarked, would grant the honour of being the first Kriegers to set foot upon Vrax, with orders to immediately and thoroughly fortify the beachhead they had secured. For all the care and concern the Imperial army made towards potential enemy attacks, there simply were none. The traitorous cardinal remained within his citadel, with his army making absolutely no attempts to halt or interrupt the landings. These landings would take almost a full Terran standard year to complete. This was no sudden assault, it must be understood. This was no massive planetary invasion of the Astartes dropping from drop pods to seize enemy positions with rapidity. This was a ponderously slow yet crushingly unstoppable juggernaut of the Imperium at play. The siege army was stockpiling all that it would need for a years long conflict that the tactical officials had predicted. Yes, there would be supply lines that would run out system for the entire duration of the war, but it would be a poor siege army indeed that did not plan for redundant food, ammunition, arms and armaments. All were being stockpiled in earnest, and the kilometres of regimented tent cities surrounding the Imperial prefabs were filling with the soldiers of Krieg. The departmental immunatorium additionally landed a massive labour force to supplement the guards own fortification building operations. Half a million souls from the penal world of Arfista were set to work building rail lines to link the landing beachhead to a carefully selected forward operating zone closer to the citadel as it lay over 1,500 kilometres to the north from the siege army's present encampment. The first of these depots welcomed the men of the 3rd Krieg siege regiment on 965-812-M41 born across the Saritama Plains by massive locomotive engines provided by the Adeptus Mechanicus. The remaining 100 or so kilometres would be crossed upon foot or by armoured transport and as the first regiments began their advance, the immunatorium began expanding the rail lines to branch out into newly built sub-depots. Like arteries, the lines were now beating and carrying along them the life-blood of the siege day and night as massive locomotives steamed ceaselessly across the flats. With the preparation for their advance in place, the overall plan of attack would involve offensives on two separate fronts. The front force attack, while absolutely within the character of the Imperium, would only allow the foe to mass in the defence of it. Rather, encirclement of the citadel was considered the wisest choice. Approaches towards it, of course, would be dictated by terrain. The citadel of Vrax was positioned in an unsurprisingly very naturally defensible position. To its south and east, a network of treacherous gorges and canyons, linked to Vrax's porous crust, made any land approach a functional impossibility, channeling the two-pronged Imperial attack into vectors from north and west. In the case of the former, the 1st and 30th Krieg Line Corps would form the bulk of the advance, while in the latter, this responsibility fell to the 12th and 34th Line Corpses. Circumnavigating the western line entirely, the 1st Corps were ordered to attack from the north, through not yet completed defences in order to move directly upon the 2nd Ring of Vraxian Lines. This would, however, leave them open to potential flanking attacks, nor being cut off entirely. It was not within the Doctrina of the Krieg to advance so rapidly, and without whole regiments protecting their flanks, so the potential for such a rapid engagement was shelved, in favour of the thorough erosion of the enemy's outer defences in their entirety. This would need to be done as ostensibly quickly as possible, to shrink the overall square footage of area controlled by the heretics, and allow the Krieg commanders time to probe the 2nd Defense Ring, the structure and capabilities of which were almost completely unknown. Once this line was taken from the enemy, the encirclement of the final Defense Ring would be possible, and the Citadel itself could be brought within range of the righteous artillery of the Imperium. After all of this was accomplished, the Defenders would truly be living upon borrowed time, and it would only be a question of the quantity of shells the Krieg would need to overwhelm the Citadel's voyage shields, pound its masonry into dust, and bayonet any of the survivors. Thanks to the diligence of an unnamed Administratum scribe, we have in a surprising instance of the cataloging of Imperial history an accurate timestamp for the precise moment the Siege of Wrakes began, 1-6-6-8-13-M-41, Imperial Reckoning. It began according precisely to the tactical plan laid out years before that moment, and with a typically Krieg entroitus, a barrage of every single artillery piece that had range. The Defenders of the Outer Lines had barely risen from their slumber when, from 15 kilometers distant, the sky fell in a hail of screaming munitions. Shells pulverized the trench lines and bunker pits, filling the air with flying shrapnel and choking clouds of dust. This initial reign of shells developed its own tempo, as the Krieg gunners fell into their trained rhythms, a lifetime of artillery drills functioning precisely as intended. There was no reprieve. As soon as one shell landed, another would follow suit. This would continue for an entire morning, a relentless refrain of the Emperor's high-yield explosive munitions, finally making itself known upon the Defenders' heads. The Wraxian militia scrambled to mount counter-battery fire. Rising to meet the Krieg's earth shaker and bombard artillery pieces, vassalisk cannons concealed in well-shielded pits emerged, hurling the Defenders' response back towards Imperial lines. It was, initially at least, a pitiful reply, at first falling far too short of Krieg positions, then too wide, but as the Wraxian overseers beat their charges into place, they eventually began to find their mark. The first imperial casualties of the siege was the 413th Battery, where a direct enemy hit torched off the earth shaker's ammunition reserves, killing all eight of its crew. It was considered a lucky hit, and it almost certainly was, but it was nevertheless a reminder that this was now a duel, not wholesale extermination. As the artillery crews intensified their offrains, the shells soaring over the Van Mir's lands' wastes, the arid ground felt the tread of Krieger infantry divisions. This first advance was not one made with combat in mind. The regiments were under orders to simply begin forward fortifications of the famous Krieg trench networks. The artillery duel was cover, and besides, the earth shakers and bombards would need more than a single morning to soften the enemy's defenses enough for a general attack to be mounted. And so, under the criss-crossing contrails of the shells, the Krieg set about their digging. By nightfall, the first foxholes, six feet into the dry clay, had been established. Tomorrow's work would be connecting each two-man foxhole by trenches, thus connecting each portion of the line into a single trench per squad in the space of a single day. When the days had followed, these would only spread out, a lattice of rudimentary trenches connecting into a vast front line that had sprung up in mere days. These first trenches, perhaps six feet deep and two feet wide, were merely the beginning. Once the network had been established, they were widened and deepened significantly. Sandbags were filled and lined upon the parapets. And when night fell, razor-wire teams scurried through the new no-man's land, creating vicious barriers to prevent enemy raids on forward positions. Heavier weapons, too, had emplacements carved out for maximum overlapping fields of fire. The Krieg entrenching system was as meticulous as it was rigorous. Platoons divided the work impeccably. Two squads on sentry duty, two more digging, two more resting. A rotation that ran ceaselessly, day and night. Once the forward lines were completed, communications and supply trenches began to spider their way back towards the artillery positions, and narrower lines towards spotter positions in no-man's land would allow for advance warning of enemy attacks. Attacks which, it must be noted, never once came during the entrenching phase. No infantry assaults were ever mounted, with the Vraxian defenders remaining steadfastly ensconced within their bunkers under the relentless barrage of imperial shellfire. All the Krieg lines had to contend with was the odd round of sniper fire, or sporadic harassment by mortar bombardments. Despite nominally being referred to as a front line, the bunkers of the defenders were in no way as unified as the Krieg trenches. Indeed, many were not even necessarily linked by trenches. It was less a line and more of a defensible zone. The bunkers and structures built by Zafan's militia spread out over a colossal stretch of the wastes, controlling the vectors of approach with fire zones, pillboxes, weapon emplacements, tank traps, and even rudimentary barriers cobbled together from masonry waste and barrels of promethium to torch should the necessity emerge. They were, however, far more robust than the trenches of the Krieg. Vraxian bunkers were made out of ferrocrete and rockcrete, all sank deep into the pumice rock of Vrax to protect them from shelling. Laser wire fields, too, stretched between these positions, as did one of the most dangerous aspects of the defenses, the minefields. Since the Citadel's first construction millennia prior, the Van Meers land wastes had all been mined on their major approaches, being of no value at all to Imperial elements' planet side, but considered the obvious approach for any land attack upon the fortress. Zafan's men, many being traitorous service people from the Immunitorum or Planetary Defense Forces, had known this, and had taken steps to excavate and relay as many of the minefields as they could manage, in validating all Imperial intelligence upon their locations. Where they now lay between the morass of bunkers and pillboxes and razor wire, none could say beyond what bloody experimentation could bring. The first Imperial assault upon the Outer Defenses would fall on the sector designated 4639, would be undertaken by the 149th Regiment of Foot. The sector had been designated by Imperial intelligence officers as incomplete at the time of the siege army's forward advance, providing hopeful tactical staff an opportunity to force a wedge into the Outer Lines. 149th would be covered on their flanks by the 143rd and 150th Regiments, with the 11th Assault Corps placed upon readiness at their rear, standing by to exploit any breach in the defenses that may emerge once the attack broke out. Preparations for this offensive, as it was eagerly termed by Imperial command, were extensive, as was the degree of coordination between the infantry regiments and the artillery corps that would be required. There would even be munitions coordination between the two wings of the siege army. Infantry regiments were expected to contribute to the overall bombardment with their own trench mortars. While, back in the dugouts, heavier mortars would target heavy weapon emplacements. Further back still, the Medusa cannons would target enemy bunkers and pillboxes, while the Earthshakers would focus on a rolling bombardment that would proceed the mass infantry advance. Finally, the mighty Bombards would occupy the latter role initially and then switch fire to target remaining static defenses. Four million shells had been ready to achieve this, and over half a million infantry were likewise assembled, the first wave of which went over the top at 212-813-M41, scaling the rims of their trenches to move finally upon the militia defenses. Head of them, the rain of shells was immolating and chewing through everything within sight. Razor wire, bunkers, service roads, tank traps, and the surface of No Man's Land itself was being churned into a cratered wasteland. The bombardment had been intensifying for days hence. A massive display of concentrated destruction, yet all those who were to advance obviously knew that no matter the firepower descending upon them, the resistance of the heretics would have endured. It was not long before the peace of No Man's Land gave way to a torrent of incoming fire as the overseers of the Varaxian militia bellowed their shell-shocked charges into firing positions. A lateral rain began, not of water but of munitions, and that was even before the enemy's artillery pre-sighted upon No Man's Land began to fire. Soil, wreckage, and bodies all were tossed and churned through the wastes, the incoming fire scything down the Kreeg by the hundreds then the thousands. The land became a killing ground, officers urging their platoons forward only to fall to gunfire themselves, whole squads going to ground only for artillery shells to turn them into meat and blood seconds later. Back in the trenches, squads of Kreeg moved to the firing step, awaiting their turn, only for the bodies of those who had just departed to crash back in amongst them. This was the meat grinder, all had expected, and if the eventual hurricane of death and destruction that greeted the siege army as it began its attack had made any sort of impact upon morale, it did not show upon the brainwashed psychotortured Kreeg. Some squads fell back due to losses sustained. Many, many more did not, pushing through the blizzards of fire to throw themselves uselessly at the bunkers of their foes. In sector 469-391, the 600 man strong 32nd company lost 542 of their number in the initial short advance, the remaining 58 not being considered enough strength even to constitute a full platoon. Yet, despite this, as was the insanity of the Kreeg, the second wave was similarly prepared to follow suit. To follow exactly as the first had done, even if it was now appearing to be not but certain death. Such indeed was their fate. The fate of the third wave too. At night, starlight shells illuminated a no man's land that appeared to be one monstrous organism, painted red with human viscera and literally writhing with the injured as they all attempted to crawl piteously towards imperial trenches. The slaughter of the day had been absolutely immense, but it would continue again the next day as the bombardment continued throughout the night and the third wave mounted its own insufficient attack. Gaines were nonexistent. Not a single enemy bunker or position had fallen into imperial hands and had been held successfully. Clearly the intelligence officers had aired. Nothing about the defender's response spoke to anything other than a fully completed and manned series of defences. There had been no breach forced. There had been no cracks exploited. None apparently had existed. The militia perhaps emboldened by this initial victory sought to take advantage of the devastation they had wrought upon the Kreeg with a counter-offensive, surging out of their lines in infantry waves with armored support from Chimera transport vehicles. There was no preliminary bombardment from the traitors. Clearly, their commanders intended for the surge to catch the imperial lines off-guard and unawares. But in doing so, underestimated the psycho-conditioned Kreeg they faced. All across the imperial trenches, the battered, bloody and undermanned guardsmen immediately took up firing positions, pouring gunfire into the advancing militia with orders quickly and efficiently communicating back to artillery batteries to shift fire to No Man's Land denial solutions. In trench segment R4623892, the enemy would against the odds make contact with imperial lines due to an unexplained insufficiency of artillery cover in that particular sector of No Man's Land. Descending into a vicious and messy hand-to-hand combat, the militia and remaining Kreeg fought bitterly in the mud for control over, effectively, more mud, all of which had been churned into ruin by the enemy mortar and grenade barrages. It was not until the surviving lieutenant of the sector voxed for earth shaker support that the imperium willingly and ably obliterated its own forward trench line, wiping out both the remaining 20 Kreeg and an uncountable number of Vraxian militia in the process. In the morning, the artillery took up the tempo again, the duel beginning anew. Three days had passed and the dead of both Kreeg and militia alike were spread over hundreds of kilometers. No actual ground had changed hands. Fortification was response on both sides. The Kreeg rapidly expanded their trench network, adding third and fourth lines and expanding gun nests. This was, however, conducted with no let-up in infantry engagements from the imperial side. The Vraxian defences had to be broken, of course, and the Kreeg were fighting the only way they knew how, the way the imperium had made them to be. The 149th Regiment were rotated out, with many more bodies waiting to take their place. Countless soldiers went to their deaths in the following weeks, with each attack repulsed. At hill 204, the first foothold was successfully captured by the 309th Regiment, who managed to defend the position for several weeks before the enemy eventually recaptured it. The stalemate would continue unabated for months, with both factions settling into a horrid rhythm of daily artillery duels and nighttime raids upon enemy trenches. The latter made both to shore up No Man's Land's defences and traps as well as punish the foe, often concerned themselves with the capture of enemy prisoners to interrogate, although at no point would the scant information extracted under extreme torture result in anything considered substantial. Life in the trenches, if it can be called life, was misery personified. The Kreeg lived a little better than beasts of burden upon other worlds, crammed into filthy warren barracks like rodents, consistently running the risk of drowning as Vrax's unstable climatics dumped deluges of rain into the trenches daily. Even when the water drained into the porous rock of Vrax, it mixed with the detritus of the trenches to form a thick grey mud that clung to everything and anything. There was never any time, nor indeed anywhere, for the dead to be buried. As weeks turned into months, more and more corpses simply piled up in the wastes beyond imperial lines, a carpet of putrefaction. Where possible, the grim figures of Kreeg quartermasters in their attendance moved amongst them, tallying the losses and recovering equipment that could be cleaned, repaired and stockpiled for use by another garden that would likely meet the same fate as the original owner. They were both, after all, supply lines, items upon a manifest. In some trenches, recovered skulls or bones became part of macabre votive shrines for those currently serving there, all of which perpetuated an oppressive atmosphere of grinding, inevitable death. This would go on for over a year. The first standard solar cycle of the Siege of Vrax ground on in the same bloody remorseless routine. They meet grinder in the truest of senses, as every day new Kreegers were ferried to the front lines to be torn asunder by enemy gunfire, only for their bodies to be pulverized by dueling, careless artillery pieces. This, truly, was the imperial war machine in action. Monstrous, pitiless destruction. A mathematical application of not only force, but human lives to achieve ends that were not even remotely yet in sight. Such was the degree of human remains at the front that the very air became a toxic miasma of infection and plague, held at bay only by dangerously high doses of antibiotics and the Kreeg's own stinking, cam-resistant uniforms. Something here would have to give, but if that were on the horizon, none could see it. The Siege of Vrax was now truly under way, but in a very real sense, this was only the beginning. Ave Imperator, Gloria and Excelsis Terra. Head on over to patreon.com-oculusimperia. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at oculusimperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.