Welcome to the Null Forge Cohort(WH40K FanFic)

The Imperium did not send the Null Forge Cohort first.

Many things went before them.

Arbites detachments. Ecclesiarchy missionaries. Adeptus Mechanicus surveyors. Eventually a strike element of Space Marines whose presence only deepened the problem. Each group arrived with discipline and purpose. Each group slowly became absorbed into the strange equilibrium of Bestatter Prime.

No war erupted. No daemonic host manifested. The world simply changed the people who touched it.

The Inquisition concluded that conventional force had failed because the phenomenon worked through persuasion, atmosphere, and suggestion. The  Daemon Lord Boognish did not dominate minds—it altered priorities. Perfection became absurd. Efficiency seemed unnecessary. People stopped fighting and started finishing things that did not quite make sense.

So the Imperium chose a different tool.

It sent something that could not be persuaded.

The Null Forge Cohort — Legio Cybernetica Expeditionary Force arrived without ceremony.

They were an austere war congregation of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a sect that had already reduced its humanity to the minimum required for technical authority. Their command core contained perhaps twenty pounds of organic tissue between them—brain fragments sealed in brass housings, nerve clusters wired into logic engines.

Emotion was considered computational noise.

Their war machines followed.

Columns of Kastelan Robots disembarked from the landers in geometric formation. Their armor was coated in ultra-matte black that devoured light rather than reflecting it. Brass pistons and joint rings moved with measured inevitability. Each unit’s red optical clusters burned like small furnace doors in the dusk.

They advanced across the brown fields without sound beyond the deliberate articulation of machinery.

With them strode a reclaimed Armiger Warglaive—a scarred relic, stripped of former corruption but never restored to parade condition. Under certain angles of sunlight the faint scratching of an old symbol—three flies set evenly apart—could still be seen in the armor plates.

It had no pilot.

That fact disturbed the human troops far more than the priests.

The Cohort’s only organic infantry were the Penitent Breachers—condemned criminals sealed into boarding armor and forced to march ahead of the machines. By the time the Bestatter expedition launched, those units had already been replaced repeatedly. None of the previous contingents had returned from the agriworld.

The replacements understood the pattern.

Forty previous squads had disappeared into the strange quiet of that planet.

The Breachers prayed during descent, but not for survival. They prayed for the kind of death that happened quickly and left no questions.

They expected madness, mutation, or slaughter.

Instead the landers opened onto wheat plains.

Brown wheat.

Fields stretching to the horizon, moving gently under a steady wind. Farmhouses dotted the landscape. Smoke rose from cooking fires. Agricultural servitors moved slowly between crop rows.

No fortifications. No resistance.

Only people.

Some wore the black Mk. VI armor of Iron Hands, though the warriors themselves behaved in ways that confounded Imperial expectations. Their armor bore the clan sigils of their chapter, yet they carried tools instead of weapons. One group was rebuilding a grain mill with elaborate decorative supports that served no mechanical function.

Another Marine stood on a roof shaping a weather vane into an ornate spiral.

None of them attacked.

They simply acknowledged the arriving army and returned to their work.

Elsewhere, other Imperial agencies had settled into similar routines. Administratum clerks maintained record halls that cataloged harvest yields in calligraphy that grew increasingly elaborate. Adeptus Mechanicus tech-adepts constructed sculptures from obsolete machinery. Entire communities gathered in the evenings to produce slow, drifting music that echoed across the fields.

Nothing about it resembled rebellion.

Everything about it undermined Imperial order.

The Penitent Breachers stared at the settlements in disbelief. They had been prepared for horror. Instead they found a world that had chosen to stop trying so hard.

The Null Forge Cohort did not hesitate.

The priests evaluated the phenomenon with mechanical clarity. Their cognition was too stripped of emotional response for the Boognish’s influence to find purchase. Where previous forces had paused to question what they were seeing, the Cohort simply identified deviations from acceptable system parameters.

Deviation: memetic corruption.
Solution: remove corrupted components.

The Breachers were ordered forward.

They advanced reluctantly through the fields while the robot phalanxes followed behind them like moving fortresses. Against the evening sky the Kastelans formed a line of black monoliths whose optics glowed steadily across the plains.

The Warglaive moved alongside them with slow, deliberate strides. Its silhouette against the wheat looked less like a knight and more like an enormous execution instrument walking patiently toward a task already calculated.

For the inhabitants of Bestatter Prime, the arrival of the Cohort felt like the arrival of gravity.

The Boognish had altered their sense of value and proportion. It had slowed their urgency, twisted their priorities, allowed them to accept unfinished beauty over sterile perfection.

But the machines of the Null Forge did not value beauty.

They valued function.

What followed was not the frenzied violence of Chaos warbands or the roaring assault of berserk armies.

It was a process.

The Breachers entered settlements first, forcing evacuations and detaining inhabitants. When they faltered or hesitated, the robots advanced past them and completed the work.

Breachers died often.

Each time a squad collapsed under the strain—psychologically or physically—another penal unit arrived from orbit to replace them. The Imperium treated the casualties as acceptable losses within a logistical equation.

Forty-one rotations of Breachers were consumed before the phenomenon was considered contained.

The Iron Hands who had chosen to remain on Bestatter Prime did not resist in any conventional sense. Many attempted to continue their work even as the machines dismantled the structures around them.

The Null Forge removed them with the same efficiency applied to any other corrupted component.

Months later the fields of Bestatter Prime still grew brown wheat.

The music had stopped.

The strange architecture had been demolished.

The hill where the gatherings once occurred had been flattened and sealed beneath a Mechanicus monitoring station.

Only the machines remained there now.

At sunset the red optics of the Kastelan robots could be seen standing watch across the grain plains while the pilotless Warglaive moved along the horizon like an enormous, patient predator.

No one on the planet dreamed of horned smiles anymore.

The Imperium recorded the incident as resolved.

But among the penal troops who survived the campaign, a quiet belief persisted that the Boognish had not truly lost.

It had simply learned something new about the kinds of minds it could never reach.

*****

The transport shakes when it breaks atmosphere.

I’m in the forward rack with the rest of the Breachers, bolted into the drop frame like spare parts. The suit seals around my shoulders. The visor shows landing data in dull green glyphs I barely understand. I don’t bother reading most of it anymore.

Six tours.

I am the only one left from my original squad. The others were replaced one by one until no one remembers who started with me. The armor numbers changed. The faces changed. The prayers changed.

The machines never change.

Through the small port in the lander’s hull I can see them standing in the cargo bay behind us: a formation of Kastelan Robots. Twelve of them in matte black that eats the light. The brass joints catch the faint glow of the warning lamps, slow pistons breathing like a forge.

They do not move.

They never fidget.

They simply wait for gravity to change.

Behind them stand the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus—if that word still means anything. Brass torsos, cables where throats should be, red optics flickering with internal calculations. They face forward like terminals in a machine hall.

No one speaks.

The Cohort does not require speech.

The last thing I register before the drop clamps release is the distant shift of the Warglaive in its restraints. Slow hydraulic precision. The chain-cleaver turning just enough to remind you it exists.

I’ve seen what it does to things that were once people.

If I were a better man I would fear the enemy.

But every Breacher learns the truth eventually.

We fear the thing behind us.

The world below is already sick.

It belonged to an agri consortium once. The orbital picts showed irrigation canals and grain seas. Now the fields look swollen and wet from orbit. Brown-green patches spreading through the soil like bruises.

A Nurgle incursion, the officers told us before loading.

Plague cults. Rot. The usual.

I have fought worse.

The lander opens with a scream of venting air. The smell hits first.

Sweet. Wet. Wrong.

The Breachers step out because the suits force us forward when the ramp drops. Nine of us this time. Penal replacements. One man vomiting inside his helmet already.

Behind us the machines disembark.

The Kastelans walk down the ramp in perfect spacing, black slabs of armor crossing infected soil without hesitation. The ground squelches beneath their weight but they never slow. Their red optics sweep the horizon.

They look like statues of some iron god that decided to start walking.

The priests follow. Their robes drag through the mud and leave neat geometric tracks.

Still no one speaks.

Orders arrive in our helmet displays.

ADVANCE.

We move through the fields.

The wheat here has swollen into thick fungal stalks that pulse with trapped gas. The Breachers keep their shields high. I have learned to watch the robots instead of the horizon. When they stop, something important is happening.

The first infected come out of the irrigation ditch.

They were farmers once.

Now they move in soft clusters of swollen flesh, skin split and leaking grey fluid. Some carry rusted tools. One drags a sack that twitches as if something inside it is breathing.

They do not run at us.

They wander forward like people looking for something they misplaced.

The new Breachers panic. Shotguns fire. Bodies burst into wet clouds.

The Kastelans walk past us.

Two raise their phosphor cannons and the ditch becomes a sheet of white fire. Fungal stalks vaporize. Infected bodies collapse into steaming ash.

One robot stops beside me. Its red optics look down for half a second, calculating something about my position.

Then it steps around me and keeps walking.

I try not to imagine what would happen if the calculation had gone differently.

We reach the farm complex at dusk.

The buildings have swollen like the fields. Barn walls bulge outward under layers of fleshy growth. A bell tower leans sideways as if the metal softened in heat.

The ground vibrates.

Something large is moving beneath the soil.

The priests stop.

The robots reconfigure their formation instantly, a black semicircle facing the barn.

That is how I know the real enemy has arrived.

The earth splits open.

The daemon rises slowly, like a blister breaking through skin. A mound of swollen flesh and rusted machinery fused together. Pipes protrude from its back, dripping black fluid. A face grows somewhere near the top, smiling with rotten teeth.

The air fills with flies.

A lesser manifestation of Nurgle’s garden. Not large enough to threaten a fleet.

But more than enough to end nine Breachers.

The new men fire wildly. One runs.

The Warglaive arrives.

It strides past us with the steady rhythm of an execution engine. No heraldry, no voice, no pilot inside the hull. Just motion.

The thermal spear burns through the daemon’s chest like sunlight through fog. The chain-cleaver follows, tearing away slabs of infected flesh the size of cargo crates.

The Kastelans close in.

Their fists hammer the creature apart with mechanical patience. No fury. No triumph.

Just function.

The fight lasts less than three minutes.

When it ends the daemon is a heap of cooling sludge and broken metal.

Seven Breachers are dead.

The man who ran does not get far. A robot intercepts him on the edge of the field. The impact throws him twenty meters.

The priests do not look at the body.

They have already begun scanning the remains of the barn.

Night falls over the fields.

I am the only Breacher left standing.

Six tours now.

Six squads gone.

The robots take their watch positions across the farm complex. Against the horizon they look like enormous black monuments planted in the soil. Their optics glow quietly in the darkness.

The Warglaive stands near the barn ruins, a tall silhouette against the stars.

I sit on the step of the lander with my shield across my knees and watch it.

No one congratulates it.

No one praises it.

It does not need praise.

Tomorrow another Breacher squad will arrive to replace the ones lost today. They will stand where I stood. They will learn what the machines are like.

And the Null Forge Cohort will keep walking across the infected world until every corrupted field and swollen barn has been corrected.

The robots never tire.

The priests never hesitate.

The Warglaive never stops moving.

The enemy fears it.

But the truth is simpler.

So do we.

*****

The interrogation chamber had once been a grain silo. Now it was a cathedral of metal.

The floor had been stripped to bare ferrocrete and webbed in long cables that ran outward like roots from a central node. Red lumen strips hung from the high curved walls where wheat conveyors had once rattled. The air smelled faintly of oil and burned circuitry.

In the center of the chamber knelt the prisoner: a wounded Chaos Space Marines warrior, armor cracked and partially removed. Shackles bound his wrists to a thick ring set into the floor. Black blood had dried along the edges of the restraints.

Around him stood the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus—six Tech-Priests and three **Cybernetica Datasmith. None of them looked particularly interested in violence. They studied him the way engineers studied a defective machine.

The Chaos Marine spat blood onto the floor.

“You fools,” he rasped. “You worship a corpse.”

One Tech-Priest leaned slightly closer. Brass cables shifted where his neck should have been. His voice came through a vox-grille, calm and metallic.

“Clarification requested.”

The prisoner grinned through broken teeth.

“The Emperor,” he said. “Your precious god. He’s nothing but a dead human nailed to a chair. The throne is the thing keeping him alive.”

Silence filled the silo.

The priests did not react with anger.

They reacted with curiosity.

A mechanical arm extended from a priest’s back, tapping a rune on a data-slate. Another turned his skull-mask slowly.

“How… unfortunate,” he said.

The Chaos Marine laughed hoarsely. “Your god is a corpse.”

“That would be… unpleasant,” the first priest replied.

Another spoke, tone thoughtful. “The Golden Throne is a machine of extraordinary sophistication.”

“Yes,” another agreed. “An artifact worthy of the Omnissiah.”

The Chaos Marine blinked.

The priests continued calmly, the way men might discuss a malfunctioning reactor.

“If the Throne sustains the organism,” one said, “then the Throne must be the locus of divine function.”

“Agreed.”

“Flesh is notoriously inefficient.”

“Indeed.”

The Chaos Marine’s smile faltered.

A Datasmith stepped forward.

“The statement implies the Omnissiah may be obscured by biological obstruction.”

“A regrettable configuration,” a priest said.

“Correction may be required,” another added.

The Chaos Marine stared at them. “Wait.”

The priests kept going.

“If the Throne is the divine machine,” one murmured, “then the flesh upon it may represent a maintenance oversight.”

“Or a relic component.”

“Or an obstruction.”

The first priest folded his mechadendrites neatly behind his back.

“If the statement is accurate,” he said calmly, “removal of unnecessary organic matter would improve system purity.”

The Chaos Marine’s eyes widened.

“That’s not what I meant.”

Across the chamber, twelve enormous silhouettes stood motionless in the shadows: towering Kastelan Robot, matte-black armor swallowing the light, red optics glowing faintly with the patience of industrial machines awaiting a command.

Beside them stood the Cohort’s reclaimed Armiger Warglaive. Its chain-cleaver rested against the floor like a saw waiting for timber.

No pilot. Just the machine.

At a small metal table near the wall sat three men in black coats: the **Inquisition. None of them spoke. One wiped sweat from his forehead. Another stared fixedly at the priests discussing the hypothetical removal of the Emperor’s flesh from the Throne. The third slowly set down a cup of recaf as though it had become heavier.

Along the wall stood dozens of penal Breachers. Pale. Hollow-eyed. Helmets resting at their sides, cleaning rags and scrap hooks still in hand. Their skin had the sickly sheen of men kept alive on mixtures never meant for people. The supply manifests called it “nutritional suspension,” but the Inquisitors knew the smell.

Ancient machine lubricants. Holy synthetic oils. Corpse starch stretched thin and made thinner still.

A man could live on it.

Technically.

The prisoners did not complain. Complaints had a way of ending in phosphor flashes.

Back in the center of the room, the Chaos Marine watched the conversation drift into places it had never intended to go.

“You people are insane,” he whispered.

The first priest tilted his head again.

“Incorrect.”

He tapped a rune on his data-slate.

“We are engineers.”

The Chaos Marine sagged against the restraints. A priest leaned closer.

“Further clarification required,” it said calmly.

“If the Throne is the Omnissiah…”

“…let us talk of its maintenance schedule.”

Four hours passed like that.

The priests did not tire. They simply migrated from hypothesis to hypothesis, debating how one might test divine machinery without destabilizing the Imperium. The Chaos Marine stopped interrupting around the third hour, as though he had learned there were worse things than pain.

The Breachers, meanwhile, began to relax in tiny increments. A shift of weight. A shoulder roll. A man leaning against the wall for half a heartbeat. The robots did not react. The silence remained intact.

Then the veteran Breacher—the one everyone subconsciously made room for—looked at the Inquisitors’ table and spoke as if they were all trapped in the same cellblock.

“I had no idea those things could talk,” he said quietly, nodding toward the priests. “Are they even human?”

The youngest Inquisitor went rigid. The senior one raised a hand, stopping him.

“How long,” the senior Inquisitor asked, voice low, “have you been with them?”

The Breacher scratched the back of his neck.

“Me? Five years.”

The Inquisitors stared.

“Everyone else,” the Breacher added, glancing down the line, “three months. Most die.”

“From combat?” the younger Inquisitor asked.

“Sometimes.” The Breacher nodded toward the machines. “Mostly from trying to escape. Getting stepped on. Or that.”

He jerked his thumb toward the Warglaive.

“That thing’s the worst.”

The Warglaive’s chain-cleaver teeth rotated with slow, patient indifference.

“That thing is a walking heresy,” the Breacher said, as if describing bad plumbing. “No pilot. Joined us after it killed its pilot and quit a Nurgle warband.”

The Inquisitors looked at the knight.

Then at the robots.

Then back at the prisoner, who didn’t seem to understand he was confessing to treason in normal company.

“I got no idea if the Disintegrators we haul around even have people in them,” he went on. “Probably not.”

He tapped his canteen.

“Rest of the prisoners die from food before anything else. Grease made from saints mixed with corpse starch. Washed down with rainwater mixed with coolant and whatever that blue cleaner is. Don’t drink the green. You only last a week.”

He leaned in a little, speaking to the Inquisitors like old acquaintances.

“You got real food?” he asked. “Or water? I got relics off Chaos Marines I can trade.”

The senior Inquisitor stared at the Breacher’s pale face and cracked lips and thought, not for the first time, that there were types of heresy the Ordo did not have categories for.

Across the chamber, a Tech-Priest paused mid-sentence.

Its optics brightened.

Another priest turned.

Then another.

The conversation among the priests faltered as though a machine had detected unexpected input on the wrong channel.

A long silence followed.

“Observation,” one priest said slowly. “Vocal transmission detected.”

“Confirmed,” another replied.

“Biological ears present,” a third added, as if the concept were newly discovered.

The priest’s skull-mask turned toward the Breachers. Then toward the Inquisitors. Then toward the Chaos Marine.

“Information contamination may have occurred,” it said.

The priests began arguing.

Not whether action was required—action was always required—but how best to resolve the new problem with minimal disruption.

One priest suggested eliminating witnesses.

Another suggested repurposing them.

A Datasmith listened for exactly seven seconds and then spoke.

“Solution: personnel reassignment.”

All the optics turned toward it.

“Clarify,” a Tech-Priest said.

The Datasmith gestured toward the Inquisitors.

“Observers become labor.”

Then it gestured toward the Breachers.

“Labor becomes observers.”

The chamber went very still.

A priest processed this and nodded.

“Efficient.”

“Approved.”

The Inquisitors rose at once.

One started to speak.

A Kastelan’s optics shifted a fraction in the dark.

The Inquisitor’s mouth closed again.

Two robots moved forward—not quickly, not violently—just with the indifferent confidence of machines moving components into the correct bins.

The Inquisitors’ coats were removed.

Rosettes collected.

Hats taken.

Three Breachers—newest, palest, most bewildered—were pushed forward and dressed in the Inquisitors’ black.

One of them stared at the rosette like it might explode.

A priest pointed to the table.

“Sit.”

The Breacher sat.

Another priest adjusted his hat slightly, as if calibrating an instrument.

“Observe.”

The three Breachers nodded solemnly, suddenly very concerned with appearing authoritative.

Meanwhile the three Inquisitors were handed penal armor.

Heavy, dented, still smelling faintly of sacred oil.

One stared at it with a kind of spiritual horror.

The veteran Breacher stepped forward, calm as a man greeting new bunkmates.

He clapped the nearest former Inquisitor on the shoulder.

“Welcome,” he said.

The man looked at him, speechless.

The Breacher nodded toward the canteen in the Inquisitor’s hand.

“Don’t drink the green, it used to be blue”

Then, as if remembering something important, he glanced toward the center of the chamber where the Chaos Marine still knelt in chains.

The priests had turned back to the prisoner and reached a new conclusion.

“Subject requested release,” one priest said.

The Chaos Marine’s grin returned instantly. “Yes.”

“Granted.”

The shackles released with a click. The Chaos Marine stood slowly, rolling his shoulders.

“Now what?” he asked.

A priest turned its skull-mask toward the large silo doors.

“Exit available.”

The Chaos Marine walked out into the open air of the dead fields.

He made it five steps.

A deep mechanical growl rolled across the grain plain.

Behind him, the Warglaive unfolded from stillness. Chain-cleaver spinning up, slow at first, then steadier, like a machine deciding it had been waiting long enough.

The Chaos Marine turned.

“Oh.”

Inside the silo, the priests resumed their debate about the Throne’s hypothetical maintenance regimen as if nothing at all had happened.

At the observation table, three Breachers in black coats sat up straighter and tried to look like they belonged there.

At the wall, three former Inquisitors stood among the penal ranks, learning to breathe through a helmet that smelled like oil.

And the veteran Breacher, now with fresh “colleagues,” gave the only ceremony the Cohort ever offered.

He looked at them, expression unreadable, and said quietly:

“Welcome to the Null Forge Cohort.”