>>5479019Roboute is next, then Magnus. There will be three phases of the battle. The first will probably not involve us directly but we will hear about it from the 1st Legion (canon records of the war actually were recovered from Xana) and it will be a terrible shock.
By that time, the Imperium will have finished up and introduced the Gloriana Battleships. Spoilers but:
The Dark Angels will be the first to wage war on them, bringing in 3 battleships and a host of 50,000 marines and 100,000 men. Without going into too much detail, the Imperium saw the vast host of the Rangda and thought it had to be their capital. The Rangda had legions of enslaved human soldiers with neural collars, horrific soldiers on par or maybe better than space marines, and commanders able to match the skill of the veteran xeno hunting chapter master of the Dark Angels. Their fleet matched the Imperials in weight and size (even with battleships), and was made even worse by the presence of a battle-moon that itself alone could match the fleet. In the end the Dark Angels lost 1/10th of the space marines they brought, huge numbers of humans, and 1 out of the 3 flagships they brought which was practically irrecoverable after ramming into the battlemoon.
And then it turns out, this was only a 'small outpost' on the fringe of their territoryThe 2nd one will be even worse for us, because:
that one is going to be a true galactic scale invasion of massive proportions, and a massive force of them will penetrate deep into Imperial territory and attack Xana itself.For these reasons and more, I pray that we will have made some really spectacular industrial and military reforms and upgrades. The introduction of Adsecularii Covenants (Tech Thralls) legions, and the conversion of Penal Brigades to act as our proper guardsmen so the Skitarii aren't the ones thrown into the meat grinder. We're terraforming planets, so I hope at least a number of those are Heavy Worlds the better to raise abhuman Ogryn regiments.
The Dark Angels ground themselves to a shadow of their former self, because while they started older and bigger than everyone else (including us I bet), they had no empire to speak of. Just destruction. We won't succumb to that fate.
Also Horus and Roboute did the shrewd thing of being 'busy' in the western front with their legions while the 1st was getting beat to a pulp by the rangda coming in from the east. Clever bastards. All the more ironic given if the 1st didn't hold back the Rangda tide, it would be Guilliman's empire they would go for next. And, well, us.
Right now, though, we absolutely, positively, MUST get Rogal Dorn's aid in organizing the macro and strategic defenses of our Federal Realm.
