Chapter Text
Recovered fragment. Source identity unverified.
Attribution: Attached operative within the retinue of a Nordafrik warlord, name redacted.
Intended recipient: “The One Who Keeps the Western Routes.”
Transmission method: Dead drop / encoded courier.
Status: Incomplete but internally consistent.
You asked for truth, not reassurance.
I will give you what I saw, and what I was able to confirm before the lines broke and the city burned itself hollow.
Ursh is gone.
Not conquered in the way we understand conquest. Not absorbed, not negotiated into weakness, not betrayed from within. It was broken, methodically, by something that does not belong to the old wars of Terra.
I do not know who commands these forces. I do not know their banners, because they did not carry them. I do not know their name for themselves. I only know what the soldiers of Ursh screamed while dying, and what the survivors refuse to speak of now.
They call them the thunder men.
I. First Contact
Ursh did not fall from within.
That must be understood.
There were no uprisings, no defections of the high clans, no collapse of the manufactoria districts. The city-state was unified, prepared, and blooded by centuries of siege-craft. Its war engines were active. Its gene-troops stood ready. Its walls had repelled worse than the nomad hordes of the south and the raiders from the poisoned steppes.
The first sign of disaster was not an attack.
It was silence.
The forward listening posts along the northern ridges stopped reporting within the same hour. No alarms. No distress calls. Just absence. Patrols sent to investigate did not return. Auspex sweeps showed nothing moving—then, moments later, showed too much, overlapping returns that made no tactical sense.
Ursh command assumed electronic warfare. Jamming. Spoofing.
They were wrong.
The enemy did not hide.
They simply moved faster than interpretation.
II. The Thunder Warriors
I observed them at a distance of approximately four thousand meters during the second breach.
That distance did not feel safe.
They are giants.
Not simply large men, but overbuilt, grotesquely so. Their armor is not ceremonial. It is functional, brutally thick, layered in slabs and cables that look less forged than grown. Impact detonations that would pulp armored vehicles barely slowed them.
They advanced at a run.
Not a charge—no shouting, no ritual. Just forward momentum, relentless, coordinated without visible signals. Their formations were loose, adaptive, designed for environments that collapse under pressure.
And Ursh collapsed.
Their weapons defy clean classification. Heavy kinetic launchers that tear through reinforced plascrete as if it were meat. Bladed implements the size of industrial tools, swung with enough force to bisect augmented soldiers in a single stroke. Shock mauls that discharge energy on impact—not enough to cauterize, but enough to rupture organs through armor.
I watched one of them take a direct hit from a macro-accelerator emplacement. The shell detonated against his chestplate. When the smoke cleared, he was missing part of his armor—and laughed.
Then he tore the gun crew apart with his hands.
They are not disciplined in the way trained armies are disciplined.
They are disciplined like natural disasters.
III. Close Combat Observations
Ursh prides itself on close-range brutality. Its warriors are bred for it. Their gene-cults exist solely to perfect the moment where distance closes and blood decides.
The thunder men outmatched them utterly.
In the inner districts, where narrow streets should have favored defenders, the thunder men did not slow. They smashed through walls rather than navigate alleys. They used the city itself as a weapon—collapsing structures onto defenders, sealing choke points with rubble and bodies.
They do not retreat.
They do not pause to secure ground.
They move forward until resistance ceases, then pivot outward like an expanding wound.
I saw one of them impaled through the abdomen by a powered lance, pinned briefly to a bulkhead. He ripped himself free, advanced three steps, and beat the lancer to death with his own severed arm.
They take wounds that should put down even gene-coded warriors of the Sibirian clans. T
They barely react, and even then only to the kinetic shock.
They fight as if they are already dead.
IV. Command and Control
This is the most unsettling part.
They are not berserkers.
They do not lose cohesion.
They receive orders—somehow. I never observed signal flares, vox traffic, or command vehicles. Yet entire formations adjusted simultaneously, redirecting pressure at moments when Ursh counterattacks might have succeeded.
This implies a centralized command capable of real-time battlefield awareness across urban environments under extreme interference.
Whoever commands them understands war.
Better than Ursh did.
Better than we do.
V. Psychological Effect
The warriors of Ursh broke.
Not immediately. Not all at once.
But they broke unevenly, which is worse.
Some units fought to extinction. Others fled at the first sight of the thunder men. Entire gene-companies refused to deploy after witnessing the aftermath of the second breach.
The thunder men do not take prisoners.
Not because they enjoy killing—though some of them clearly do—but because prisoners slow them down.
Civilians were not targeted systematically.
That, I must state clearly.
They were simply ignored.
Those who fled survived. Those who stood between the thunder men and their objectives died without ceremony. Entire hab-blocks were crushed because they lay between two points of resistance.
This was not extermination.
It was prioritization taken to its most brutal extreme.
VI. The Fall of Ursh
Ursh command collapsed on the fourth day.
Not because leadership was killed—though many were—but because there was no longer a coherent concept of defense. The thunder men did not respond to counterstrategy in predictable ways. They did not secure supply lines because they did not appear to require them. They did not hold territory because they did not intend to stay.
They were a weapon used for opening.
Once the central manufactoria districts fell, the rest of the city-state followed within hours. There were no negotiations. No terms offered. No declarations.
The thunder men withdrew as abruptly as they had arrived.
Ursh was left burning.
Its surviving population scattered.
Its armies annihilated.
Its name reduced to a warning.
VII. Assessment
This was not conquest as practiced by the old powers of Terra.
This was demonstration.
Someone has unleashed a force designed not to rule, but to remove obstacles.
If these thunder men are only the first wave—if they are a prelude to something more stable, more enduring—then the balance of power on Terra has already ended.
I advise immediate reassessment of all defensive postures.
I advise caution in all future engagements.
And I advise, with all the emphasis I can muster:
Do not attempt to fight these forces head-on.
Ursh tried.
Ursh no longer exists.
Report ends here. Subsequent pages corrupted or deliberately erased.