Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

=== The Beast ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' He Who Will Bring His People Much Slaughter: '''''

Urlakk Urgg. The Beast. The big one. The lord who will bring his people much slaughter. The single greatest mortal threat ever faced by the Imperium, and the yardstick to which all other Ork warbosses are measured.

Urlakk Urg was originally the warboss of Ullanor, the center of an Ork empire that laid claim to a number of star systems. It is thought that the Imperium was lucky to have encountered Ullanor when they did, as Ullanor and similar Ork empires such as Gorro seemed to be reaching a critical mass beyond which Brain Boyz would start being produced. Already the Orks of Ullanor and Gorro were developing technology and organization beyond what orks were capable of for most of Imperial History (like proto-Attack Moons and sedentary settlements), and orks like Urlakk Urg seemed to be much smarter and of a different caste from the usual ork, though not fully Brain Boyz.

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The Ullanor Crusade was a bloody slog, made more difficult by the fact that the usual strategy of “shoot the warboss first” was untenable as Urg was smart enough to not to reveal his face in the open until his Boyz were in the thick of the fighting. The conflict only turned in the Imperium’s favor when Horus provoked Urlakk Urg into revealing himself, taunting Urlakk Urg from his flagship until Urg gave Horus the coordinates to his location, demanding that the coward face him in single combat. Horus responded by slagging Urg’s palace from orbit and decapitating most of the WAAAGH!’s leadership in one blow. Normally this sort of practice worked wonders, and indeed it did win the day in the Ullanor Crusade, but slagging the palace from orbit meant that Urg’s body was unaccounted for, which allowed him to escape unnoticed and swear bloody vengeance on the Imperium from the barren rock he ended up on. This led him to an encounter with [[Chaos Gods|four other individuals]] who also had a very vested interest in deposing the Imperium.


The Chaos Gods assisted in the Beast’s phoenix-like return to power, giving him access to Warp portals that allowed him to rapidly assert dominance over WAAAGH!s that were otherwise a galaxy apart, and giving him blessings to exploit the loophole in Ork logic of “bigger equals boss”. The Beast’s assault was basically a massive blitzkrieg that came screaming across the northern border of the Imperium, backed up by daemons, Crone Eldar, and Dark Eldar raiding in their wake like pilot fish following a big shark. Daemonic incursions and smaller WAAAGH!s erupted in other parts of the galaxy such that the Imperium was besieged on all fronts and had trouble creating a unified front against the main push of the WAAAGH! to the north. Although many smaller WAAAGH!’s split off from the Beast’s main force, the Beast’s plan was to head straight for Ullanor, convert the planet into an attack planet, and then make a beeline for Old Earth to kill the Steward and claim Isha for Chaos (Isha wasn’t on Earth at the time since this was before the alliance was formed, but that was a secondary concern). There was some stopping for lootin’ an’ pillagin’, but by Ork standards it was extremely fast. Most early battles in the War of the Beast, especially on the main front, tended to be [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|pyrrhic victories]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia_Krole|heroic last stands]] for the Imperium at best, the defenders swept away by the sheer force of the green tide.

It wasn’t until the Beast’s forces entered the core territories of the Segmentum Solar, despite being harried by Horus, Kurze, and Guilliman, that his momentum began to slow. His first plan upon entering the Sol System was to ram Ullanor into Earth, sterilizing everything on the surface. Some say it’s because hitting one planet with another like billiard balls is ded orky. Some say the Beast was so obsessed with revenge he didn’t care how orky it was. Maybe it was both, and the Beast was mixing business with pleasure. However, that plan was foiled by the actions Ollanius Pius, which forced the Beast to try and take the planet using ground troops. We all know how that ended up. The death of the Beast marked the turning point of the war, as the warbosses could no longer effectively cooperate and were picked off one by one, with the most successful carving out their own petty kingdoms.


The Beast’s status and accomplishments are legendary among the orks. The most dangerous warbosses throughout history have taken up the title of Beast (specifically, Mag Uruk Thraka) in the hopes of achieving a similar level of infamy to Urlakk Urg. These Beast WAAAGH!s are some of the greatest threats to the Imperium, comparable to a major tyranids Hive Fleet (e.g., Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan) or one of Malys’ Black Crusades. However, until [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Ghazghull|recently]], none of the successors to the title had the potential to measure up to the original.

Importantly, unlike most of his successors, who either consider Chaos an ally of convenience or just pay lip service to its ideals at best, and Ghazghull, who hates Chaos, the Beast was the only major warboss to actively embrace Chaos and reject the Gorkamorka to pledge his devotion to, quote, “gods who actually do something for their worshippers”. As a result, he got a shitload of blessing including marks from all four Chaos Gods and the mark of Chaos Ascendant, which turned him into an absolute nightmare the size of a hab-block that tore through a number of the Imperium’s greatest heroes and took the Steward and Eldrad (with some softening up from Sanguinius) to finally bring him down.

Ironically, the Beast’s greatest flaw was wrath of all things. Orks love fighting. They love fighting and winning even more. The Beast wasn’t angry that the Imperium declared war on him. He was angry that they took his empire from him. Not only that, but they did so in one of the most underhanded methods possible, by tricking him and then nuking him from orbit rather than defeating him in face-to-face combat. The danger of this flaw could already be seen in Ullanor Crusade, Urg was a kunnin’ ork and knew Horus was trying to trick him but eventually his anger got the better of him. Anger can be a powerful motivator, as well a deadly flaw. The Beast’s anger gave him the motivation to unite most of the Ork race within a few years, but it also led him to making a lot of short-sighted, kneejerk decisions without thinking of the consequences like allying with the Chaos gods and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|tactical errors due to trying to make a statement rather than just krumpin’ da gitz]]. Ironically, this would have probably gotten him killed by his followers once the rush of battle wore off and the orks started looking to their long-term future, but the Beast’s lust for revenge did the job for him and accidentally [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Brain_Boyz|set the Orks back millennia]].

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