"Since we now have to sanctify all of our gear by ourselves, it won't hurt to teach your death korps how to do so as well."
I give Galatea a nod. "Please do. Killing daemons more efficiently can never hurt."
Sanctification is an interesting subject. The exact ritual and methodology itself holds no value whatsoever, it only works because people believe it works. The sororitas sanctifying their gear, then teaching our death korp to do the same will increase the effectiveness of their ritual.
Ideas and belief hold supreme power in the empyrean, make enough psychically active individuals believe something and said something can then coalesce into existence from their collective psyche.
The sisters of battle sanctification ritual turns out to be pretty simple, if somewhat time consuming. Each sister grabs a single bolter round and then loudly sings imperial hymns like 'Purge the heretic', 'Suffer no impurity'' and 'Condemn the damned to their reward.'. Once their done they repeat the process for the next round.
Once they are done with their bolter rounds they begin sanctifying their armor. This time their hymns are more like 'Blessed are the intolerant' and 'Intolerance is a blessing'.
Joline and I can actually see as their gear becomes more and more physically active. It's watching this that makes me realise that this is what sanctic psykers actually do. Their belief is so strong that it manifests as psychic phenomena when they pray.
The kriegsmen carefully watched the whole sanctification process. There's not much to actually teach them in the traditional sense, the ritual itself is largely ceremonial. The most important part is people believing the rituals work, anything else is largely superfluous.
Since there's no need to enter the city anymore we just shell it into the ground. Galatea sighs. "I had personally sponsored and endorsed the pontifex, to think the man was a heretic…"
An interesting bit about these kinds of rituals is that people's belief in how the ritual works also affects the ritual. If everyone believes that only true believers can sanctify weapons and armor, then only true believers can sanctify weapons and armor. Dol stares thoughtfully at a sanctified bolter round that she requisitioned immediately after the sisters were done with their rituals. "Perhaps the pontifex had a crisis of faith. Self-doubt is also capable of impeding sanctification rituals."
Galatea shakes her head. "True faith is blind and justified. Those who are incapable of following the emperor's will will be unable to bless our holy arms. The pontifex and his ilk must be thoroughly investigated."
Dol blinks in confusion, before swiftly displaying a hologram of the city with a mechadendrite. "The city has already been turned to rubble thirty minutes and twenty six seconds ago, why are our troops continuing to bombard it?"
I turn to the commander of the death korp, who immediately salutes. "Emperor protects! We are ensuring that none of the heretics have hidden themselves in the rubble of the city!"
Joline snickers. "By now the only thing left alive is bacterium. Stop shelling the city, we've got more of them to raze to the ground."
There's six more cities remaining on the planet, one of them even rivals some of the lower density hive cities in population.
—
The campaign to remove the chaos worshippers from the planet goes much more smoothly than the one to recover the sisters of battle artifact. For one thing both the sisters and us now have sanctified our gear, leading to daemons dying much, much faster. Where before eight bolter rounds were needed to kill a single bloodletter, a single sanctified round does the job instead.
Joline, Dol, Flakey and I all stare at the cultist city from a nearby cliff, giving us a good visual of both our forces and the city. Dol has stopped projecting holograms of the battlefield, having opted instead to make a device that does that for her instead. I give a sigh of relief. "Looks like they didn't get alerted to the first city getting razed to the ground."
Joline takes a deep breath. "That's honestly pretty weird, you'd think that the daemons would at the very least alert their friends or something along those lines."
I shrug. "They're assholes, they don't have any friends to alert. If anything they'd keep them in the dark on purpose."
—
The next city is just as easily demolished, it's after turning it into rubble that we encounter our next complication. Galatea gives the most bloodthirsty smile towards the hologram of the planet. "The Emperor favors us today! The heretics have assembled themselves an army to combat us!"
Indeed, the population of the remaining three cities has banded together to mount an offensive. There's just one small problem with that. Dol points at the chaos cultist army. "They have no long ranged weaponry or combat vehicles."
Indeed, the heretics have decided to sally forth and face us in open combat. I shrug. "If they remain in the cities we will just shell them to death, the two other options that they have would've been to either hunker down in a single city or disperse and attempt guerilla warfare."
Of those options dispersing would be the most annoying option, forcing us to hunt them down one by one.
Galatea begins to search for an appropriate area for us to camp in. "We have the range advantage. They will be the ones forced to engage, which allows us to choose an appropriate battleground."
Their forces leaving the cities is a double edged sword for them. They can now concentrate their strength in a single army, but they've also left their cities undefended. If they take too long to fight us we could just relocate and take the cities one by one.
Galatea points at a hill on the hologram. "That hill is wide enough for us to station all of our forces and tall enough to provide us with a tactical advantage. It's not far either, any objections."
I shake my head. "None whatsoever."
Joline nods. "Same, no objections."
—
The preparations for the incoming battle are somewhat overkill.
The death korp makes the source of their canonical inspiration clear, digging trenches and fortifying the hill to hell and back. By the time that the cultist army arrives they are left to ponder how to assault a small-scale imperial fort.
They can't wait for us to starve, we've got food and supplies dropping in from the sky. They also run the risk of us deciding to cut our losses and just exterminatus the whole planet instead. In the end, the cultist army is forced to attack us by the circumstances of this war.
Their commander has clearly learned from the failures of the previous two cities, instead of sending their daemons and cultists in dense, easily bombed formations they've spread themselves out as thinly as possible. Our artillery still does some work, but now it's forced to tactically take out the stronger daemons instead of blowing them up by the thousands.
They've clearly planned the attack in detail, as they have also switched their gear to something more appropriate for this sort of assault. Their frontline is composed of plaguebearers, each carrying a thick steel shield capable of taking on a large number of bolter rounds.
Hellgun fire is another matter entirely, as that melts the whole shield and renders its ballistic defense utterly meaningless. Our kriegsmen melt their shields, allowing the bolter rounds of the sisters of battle to actually land killing blows.
By the time that they rout over three quarters of their forces have been killed, allowing the sisters of battle to charge in with their combat vehicles and eliminate the remaining quarter.
The rest of the cities are quick to shell into oblivion now that their combatants have been killed off. The whole campaign takes around three months. It's at the end of the campaign that Galatea reveals what the artifact was.
We all stare at the half burned candle. Flakey leans and whispers into Joline's ear. "This isn't a joke, right?"
Joline shakes her head. "No, it's not a joke."
Just as the sanctification rituals only work because people believe they do, this candle is special only because people believe it is. Galatea says. "This is a candle that had been lit by the founder of our order, it is of great value to us."
The presence this candle has in the warp collaborates her story. Using this candle when enacting rituals and sorcery will significantly alter the results of the ritual, either greatly improving or weakening its effects depending on the specific ritual and how the candle is used.
—
AN:
I'll need to take a break from this story to plot some stuff out, dw, it's not getting dropped, we're getting pretty close to some important plot bits and I want to get a good outline before rushing in headfirst.