Editing Life Bringers (section)

===The Infiltration of Tarrant===

The great Hive of Tarrant was the capital of Asphyxia, a petty empire ruled with an iron fist by a deranged alchemist named Hermes Geber. This once brilliant scientist was obsessed with the legendary Emerald Prophesy, stating that the one who would obtain every single chemical element in existence would gain the absolute power over the elements and the ability to transmute one into another at will. Of course, the obtention of new chemical elements was a difficult process requiring a lot of costly equipment and even more expensive raw materials, so he devised a diabolical plan to ensure a stable cash inflow to sustain his deranged experiments. First of all, he seized the power in the anarchy-ridden Hive of Tarrant with assistance from mercenaries he supplied with bullets made from radioactive metal. Once his authority was firmly established, Geber moved on to the second stage of his plan: he repurposed Tarrant's old chemical factories to pollute the air in and around the Hive to the point of toxicity. As a shroud of pernicious mist was enveloping the region around Tarrant, Geber began producing and selling oxygen to its suffocating dwellers. With his laboratories left as the only source of breathable air in the land, the people had no choice but to buy it for the steep price he demanded.

The Emperor required the ancient alchemical equipment gathered in Tarrant for his own experiments, but Geber's fortress was anything but simple to besiege. For one thing, it was permanently shrouded in an thick layer of noxious fog that even the breathing apparatuses of Space Marine power armour could have trouble filtering. To make matters worse, rumours persisted that Geber had much more in store than just poison gas for those foolhardy enough to dare intrude upon his domain. These complications rendered any kind of direct assault so valued by Hektor infeasible, leaving him with only a single viable option: an infiltration of the Hive by a team of hazardous environment specialists such as the Twelfth Squad, who would disable the chemical weapons before the rest of the Imperial forces could begin their offensive.

Meglin and his men realised perfectly well that this was their finest hour, the chance to turn their reputation around and emerge amongst the most glorious squads of the Sacred Band. Outfitted with the best filtering equipment in the armouries of the Imperium preliminary tweaked by Sachs to improve upon its efficiency even further, they used a system of ancient underground passages to enter the Hive from below. Moving swiftly and silently like the shadow of Death, they dispatched Geber's minions one after another, not giving them a chance to use their deadly polonium bullets. Alas, the Twelfth Squad were not a stealthy formation by any stretch of the term, and so they were inevitably discovered right when they began closing in on the chemical weapon depositories. Cursing the incompetence of his underlings, Geber activated Carnivorous Fog - the deadliest tool of death in his arsenal. At his command, a blasphemous alchematron began belching forth clouds of nearly invisible gas that deliberately sought out organic matter and dissolved it with a protein-degenerating reaction.

Meglin was the first one to fall to the deadly vapour. As he walked into its cloud without even noticing it, the Carnivorous Fog trivially bypassed his armour's defences like if they were nothing and started hungrily consuming his flesh. His skin, boiling with pustules spewing blood-tinted rot juices, peeled off in large rancid chunks, revealing his flesh that rapidly decomposed into a repugnant ooze. His bones cracked, letting out sticky streaks of decayed marrow, and his internal organs exploded like putrid grenades, covering everything around in malodorous slime. His best friend Hipocene Bubastus tried to drag his commander out of the toxic cloud, but instead got affected by the gas himself and died an equally horrid death before the eyes of his comrades. The members of the Twelfth Squad were deeply disturbed by the grisly scene they had just witnessed; unable to move, they stood in place and watched the gas turn their comrades into organic slime. Pneuren was the first one to shake off the shock and push his comrades back into the room where they came from before the Carnivorous Fog would reach them as well. But not all of his team members wished to retreat: well-known for his recklessness bordering on disregard for his life, Gaius Martinus Vira grabbed as many grenades as he could carry from the belts of his comrades and rushed back into the corridor. There, he used the blast waves from the explosions to dispel the toxic gas from the area, temporarily allowing him to move forward. While this move was incredibly risky, it ended up working fine in the end. Using grenades to clear his path, Vira eventually reached the chemical weapon depository and destroyed the alchematron producing the Carnivorous Fog.

All that remained to do now was to finish off Geber himself. Aflame with thirst for vengeance, the members of the Twelfth Squad found the man in his personal sanctuary. Alas, they were too late to have their revenge: faced with impending doom, the alchemist finally lost it and began ingesting the samples of all the chemical elements he managed to obtain during his tyranny, hoping that they would turn him into a demigod able to defeat the superhuman giants. The result of his delirious escapade was quite different from his expectations: his flesh simply melted off his bones from the heavy dose of radiation he received from the ingested radioactive elements.