A Senju in the Stars, Chapter 12

With Batu at the helm and twelve thousand wooden warriors beneath his command, the tide of battle shifted like a blade drawn from its sheath. The Bodhisattva Legion marched without rest or fear or need, and Hashirama, ever behind and beside them, filled the world with his will. His Wood Clones moved like smoke through ruin, splitting and reforming, spreading across the ash-drenched sprawl of the Hive City. From their hands poured fire and root, stone and leaf, binding and sealing and breaking with equal ease. Jutsu cut through the enemy like wind through long grass.

And it was not long before the upper levels of the Hive were reclaimed.

They took it inch by inch, corridor by corridor. Enemy Astartes—clad in armor like bone gilded with filth, screaming laughter through vox-filters choked with incense and blood—fell beneath bludgeons and spears. Their mortal kin, those madmen who served their debased banners, broke like rotted wood when struck. The war machines roared but were silenced by rising root and clutching vine. The daemons shrieked and twisted and laughed, but they too died, unraveled by the fusion of spiritual and physical energy that only Hashirama and his Wood Clones could conjure. Some screamed curses, some sang hymns. A few moaned in ecstasy and delight. All were erased.

The battle had changed. It was no longer a clash of warriors, not even a siege. It had become a cleansing. A purging.

Cut off from the sky, the enemy fractured. Their support had come in the form of shrieking machines and wings of fire. Jets, bombers, gunships—metal birds and dragons that spat death from on high. But when the forest grew tall and the skies were sealed with leaves and branches thick as iron, when the upper reaches were wrapped in bark and shade, the enemy below found themselves blind. And once blind, they found themselves vulnerable.

Hashirama watched it unfold. From a high vantage on a ruined spire, he saw the pattern repeat again and again. Wherever his trees rose, the enemy floundered. Wherever his clones sowed confusion, the enemy fell. The Emperor’s Children, for all their grotesque refinement and speed, faltered when denied their symphony of destruction. It became clear, then, how reliant they were on their war machines. On their logistics. On the weapons that roared for them from far away.

Their strength lay not only in their bodies, but in the arms of the beasts they commanded.

Hashirama took note.

Despite their armor, despite their weapons, despite their cybernetics and enhancements, they needed what every other army needed. They needed supply lines. They needed communication. They needed support. They were not omnipotent. They were not invincible. They could be beaten. Not easily, and never without cost, but they could be undone.

And so he pressed harder.

The clones doubled their efforts. The Bodhisattvas widened their sweep. Batu pushed forward, never halting, cleaving a path through the remnants of the corrupted host. The Hive shook beneath their feet. Once a city, now a graveyard.

Beneath the twisted shadows of charred buildings, children were found. Beneath walls blackened with soot, mothers and fathers buried themselves to protect their kin. Some dead. Some still breathing. Hashirama sealed them away one by one, pulling them from ruin like weeds from broken stone. Their hearts beat on inside scrolls of chakra, stored until they could be freed once more. Safe, if only for a time.

The sky did not clear. The air remained thick with ash and grief. But the ground—the ground belonged to them now.

And Hashirama understood something deeper then. This world, strange as it was, played by the same rules as his own. Power without balance was weakness. Might without support was noise. And every force, no matter how terrible, had a point at which it could be broken.

He turned from the battlefield and began walking again. Roots parted before him. The trees bent in quiet reverence. The war was not over. Not yet. The Hive had many levels, and the depths below still roared with the sound of fighting.

But for now, they had the surface.

Hashirama drew a slow breath and knelt on the broken stones. His eyes fell closed, and his palms pressed flat against the cracked ground. From deep within, he felt the pull of the air around him, thick with the grime and ash of a thousand fires. His senses reached beyond flesh, drawing the tainted natural energy, pulling it into himself. Like dirty water filtered through cloth, he strained the corruption from it, cleansing it until pure. He fed it into his chakra, careful and measured, forming the steady current of Senjutsu needed to sustain himself and the twelve thousand wooden soldiers he had crafted from bark and breath.

Their bodies needed the flow of that energy to endure. Without it, their forms would crumble into splinters, and what had been gained would be lost again. Each pulse of Senjutsu, carefully measured and balanced, kept their limbs whole and their strength endless. The ground around him shivered slightly, as if aware of the quiet power passing through it.

Batu stepped slowly across the ruin toward Hashirama. His armored boots crushed blackened stone into ash beneath their weight. He halted near the shinobi, his posture straight and grim as he gazed down into the smoke-choked abyss below. Distant sounds echoed upward through the winding chambers and tunnels that led downward into the belly of the Hive. Gunfire. Screams. The dull echo of explosions that shook loose more dust and rubble from above.

“Surface secured,” Batu said in his rough, accented voice. “Lower levels still fighting. But most of enemy defeated. We go down?”

Hashirama opened his eyes, dark and calm, and rose slowly to his feet. His robes stirred gently around him, touched by a wind that did not reach the ground. He gazed around at the devastation wrought upon this place, at shattered towers and broken bridges and walls burned black by fire and bolt and daemoncraft. He knew, deep in his bones, that each city they retook would look the same, scarred and torn and blackened, filled with the dead and dying, but this knowledge did not sway him. He nodded once, his expression unyielding.

“We don’t stop until the city is free,” he said quietly. He raised his gaze toward the horizon, where dark clouds churned like ink spilled into water. “After this one, we save every single one that’s between here and this Imperial Palace you mentioned before.”

Batu’s armored frame shifted slightly, the joints of his warplate grinding gently as he inclined his head. He hefted the long, curved blade at his side, its edge already notched from battle. 

“Agreement,” he said. “We save as many as we can.”

Together, the two moved downward, deeper into the Hive’s lower chambers. They descended beneath ruined arches and through caverns carved from metal and rock and bone. The darkness closed around them as the wooden legion marched behind, a river of unyielding timber and bark and chakra-driven strength. Their footsteps drummed out a steady rhythm, a pulse of inevitability that echoed against steel walls, reverberating in the dark.

Without the threat of enemy fliers raining death from above, their progress became steadier, quicker, but never easy. The fighting below was brutal and close, hallways clogged with rubble and corpses and pockets of the enemy that still lingered, unwilling to yield. Daemons, enemy Astartes, mortal cultists—each fought with desperate savagery, backed into the corners of broken rooms and tunnels choked with smoke.

Hashirama’s clones spread through the halls and chambers like shadows made of wood and will. Where they found pockets of resistance, they met them with wood and wire, blade and root. They crushed armored foes beneath coiling branches. They drew daemons into themselves, flooding them with physical energy until they unraveled, screaming, into nothing. At times, they escaped as in-betweeners, Daemons turned corporeal, but they were slain all the same. The air filled with smoke and splinters and echoes of fading howls.

Survivors they found huddled in the dark, trembling against cold metal walls. Men and women holding children close, their eyes wide and bloodshot from terror and exhaustion. Some wept quietly, others stared blankly, unable to see beyond the nightmare. When they beheld the towering wooden legionnaires, many screamed, raising makeshift weapons and attacking in blind, confused panic. Clubs, pipes, bits of broken furniture—all swung against the towering, silent statues, only to rebound harmlessly from bark like iron.

Hashirama shook his head and moved quickly among them, calm and careful, with gestures gentle but swift. He placed a hand against their heads and sealed them away within scrolls inked in chakra—safe from the ruin, from the violence, from the terror of war. He conjured more paper as needed, pressing fingertips wet with his own blood to its surface, tracing symbols and lines of ink that glowed briefly with power before fading. These scrolls were tucked away into folds of cloth, heavy with lives preserved and futures kept from ruin.

Soon the lower chambers fell silent. Batu stood at the end of a long hallway, his sword wet with fresh gore, his armor streaked with black and red. Behind him, the legionnaires waited, silent and unwavering. He turned toward Hashirama, nodding once. There was still some fighting down below, but he sensed no more of the enemy Astartes. Their mortal servants were all that remained and they would soon be overrun and defeated. It was practically over. 

“This hive,” Batu said slowly, his words worn by weariness yet firm as steel and bearing just the tiniest bit of something that might’ve been happiness or hope. “Taken. Finally.”

Hashirama nodded. He raised his face and closed his eyes briefly, feeling the vibrations of life and death and ruin and hope. Batu turned to him and fell to a knee. “Thank you. Hive fallen would’ve without you. Fallen brothers and I thank you.” 

He let out a slow breath, calm and steady, before stepping towards Batu and laying a hand on his shoulder. “I did what anyone would’ve done if they had what I have. Nothing to be thankful for. Stand up. We have more work to do.”

Batu nodded and stood. “Yes. More hives to save.”  

One hive down.

An untold number left to save. 

______________

Lord Commander Cyrius crushed the messenger’s head with one mailed fist. Bone cracked beneath ceramite. Blood spattered the floor like spilled ink. The corpse folded at his feet in silence, its limbs twitching once, then going still. No one moved to drag it away. No one dared speak.

He stood in the middle of a command chamber that pulsed with low music, a tremble of strings and screaming. The walls were paneled in flayed skin, still fresh, stretched taut over brass struts that moaned faintly when the air vents shifted. Incense smoldered in golden braziers, thick and perfumed, masking the stench of blood. The ground beneath his boots was slick with wine, or something like it, and the light was tinted rose.

A screen flickered to his left, showing grainy augur-readings, distorted by atmospheric interference and something else—something they had not yet named. Across the Hive known as Red Hope, great spires of biomass had sprouted, thicker than towers, older than stone. Trees, the tech-priests whispered. But not trees in any natural sense. Their branches reached miles into the sky. Their roots had split the foundations of the Hive open. And the leaves—damned things—interfered with every deep scan they attempted. A living shroud. A wall of silence and shade.

Cyrius turned from the corpse. His armor groaned as he moved. Gold plate chased in violet trim, lacquered in filth and polished with ash. A halo of blades circled his helm, spinning slow. His gauntlets bore the sigils of Fulgrim. His right pauldron was marked with teeth not his own.

The silence in the chamber pressed in.

“Five thousand Astartes,” he said. The words echoed low, quiet. Not a question. A sentence. “Gone.”

No one answered.

“And the tanks. The armored companies. The mortals. The slave-bands. All gone.”

He stepped closer to the nearest terminal. A servitor’s face blinked and shifted in response, trying to interpret the shifting data streams. Cyrius reached out and touched the screen with one finger. The image of the Hive pulsed. In place of structure and spire and ruin, only green now. Not the green of fields or gardens. The green of forest primeval. Of old things. Alien. Wrong.

He had fought on hundreds of worlds. He had watched suns fall and moons break. But he had never seen trees do this.

“Bombardment failed,” another officer muttered. His voice filtered through a twisted vox-mask shaped like a screaming cherub. “The canopy absorbs impact. Regenerates within hours.”

Cyrius tilted his head. “How.”

“The biomass… unknown. Resistant to heat. Resistant to kinetic force. We’ve seen this before. In part. But never like this.”

He looked down at the screen again. Rubbed a smear of blood across its surface. 

“Then it grows,” he said, “and it learns.”

He turned back to the gathered officers. Sorcerers and warriors alike. Each draped in finery. Chains and silks and armor carved from bone and pleasure. They stood in a semi-circle. Not one met his eyes.

He took another step toward them. The floor shifted underfoot. The music grew louder.

“Someone,” he said, “has made a mockery of us.”

He paused. Looked toward the far end of the room, where the open viewport displayed the Hive in the distance—now a thing of branches and canopy and thorn. The city’s highest towers were no longer steel and glass. They were bark. They were leaves. The sky above was thick with mist and falling ash. A faint light shimmered within the foliage like dying stars caught in a web.

Cyrius smiled without humor.

“The children of Fulgrim,” he said. “The chosen of the Prince of Perfection. Humiliated by trees.”

A soft chuckle came from one of the officers. It died instantly when Cyrius turned.

His fingers flexed. He reached up and removed his helm. Set it down on the altar beside him. His face was smooth and flawless. Skin stretched too tight over the skull. Eyes sharp and colorless. He looked younger than he was. Eternally so. And entirely without mercy.

“I will descend,” he said. “I will enter that city of bark and rot. I will burn it from the roots.”