While the battle in the Hecate Gap raged with the Imperium getting the upper hand, battles in the Rifts of Hecate proper reignited. If the Imperium did secure the Gap, it would become all the more important for the other factions to secure bases in the Rifts to avoid being steam-rollered by the Imperial Crusade. At the same time the factions of heretics and xenos sought to undermine the positions already held in the region by imperial garrisons.
The first of the renewed conflicts in the Rifts of Hecate flared up on Helos Majoris, the main imperial base in the Rifts themselves. With most of general Maximus' armies now engaged on Ergura's Fall and Haven, the Drukhari thought they would opportunistically raid the world, sending a force to obtain slaves and equipment while also damaging as much imperial infrastructure as they could.
Unfortunately for the Dark Eldar, a company of the Unnumbered Sons, not seen before in the sector, had quietly arrived in the area and responded quickly to the imperial garrison's distress calls. The astartes caught the xenos raiding force by surprise and quickly annihilated them, freeing the slaves and minimising the damage to imperial infrastructure.
On Pyrrho Zeta the Night Lords were pursuing their own aims for their dark gods, which mostly included raiding necron tombs for artefacts and supplies. Not realising the necrons were not in fact in suspended animation the Night Lords blundered into one such tomb and quickly found themselves in a violent firefight. The guns of the necron force overwhelmed the traitor astartes and this particular mission had to be aborted.
On Calthingum the chaos held bases found themselves assaulted by ork forces in early 03.023M42, as the continued violence in the area brought more and more greenskins flocking to the fight. This particular band of Bloodfang orks may have been part of a wider strategic operation by the greenskins, were destined for Haven and got lost, or had decided to make a detour to fight some chaos forces. In any event the brutal xenos race landed in force, and the chaos garrison on Calthingum resorted to summoning a horde of Khorne daemons to oppose the invader.
The appearance of greater daemons seemed to energise the orks however, and a violent and disorganised melee erupted around a major chaos held installation. Despite killing the ork Warboss, the appearance of another - or the same ork Stompa as the one seen elsewhere (the random spatial-temporal nature of ork tellyporta technology not precluding the possibility of the Stompa effectively being in two places at once) turned the tide for the greenskins as it bludgeoned a blood thirster from existence. Seeing this the ork boyz rallied once more and overwhelmed the rest of the chaos army, securing more than a foothold on the chaos held world.
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