The Battle of Paramar V

Paramar V was not a fortress but a warehouse of empire, a whole world given over to the stacked munitions, armour and promethium reserves that fed the Great Crusade's insatiable hunger. The Battle of Paramar V was fought to seize this treasure whole, and the Alpha Legion approached the prize with their customary contempt for the honest clash of arms, weaving infiltration and misdirection into the very fabric of the assault.

By the time the loyalist garrison understood that the war had begun, it was already half-lost. Sabotaged defence-grids, subverted Mechanicum cohorts, and warriors who wore no colours until the killing started unravelled the world's protection from within. What might have been a siege of years collapsed into a rout of days, the vast depot-cities falling one after another to an enemy that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once.

The materiel of Paramar V flowed into the traitor war-machine, arming the rebellion with the Imperium's own bounty. For the Alpha Legion it was a masterwork of their peculiar art, a strategic wound inflicted with minimal loss and maximal cunning. The loyalist cause learned, too late, that Alpharius's sons would win their battles in the shadows and the supply-lines long before the first true shot was ever fired.