Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

== Boaz Kryptman ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Last Tyranid '''''

''“The Tyranids are undoubtedly one of the greatest threats the Imperium has ever faced, all-consuming in its hunger and insidious in its method of infiltration. I do not care. This Hive Fleet will burn like the rest.”''<br>
- Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Kryptman
 
Once upon a time there was a world. A complete nowhere world, located on the very fringes of the galaxy. An Ocean World, which despite having some nice beaches saw little tourism due to its remote location, some mines, and a small bit of aqua- and agriculture on and around the few volcanic islands that poked their heads above the planet’s seas. It’s only real contacts with the Imperium a semi-retired Arbiter and a small Adeptus Mechanicus research outpost, its contributions to the Imperium minimal but of no bother.
 
The only thing of note the world ever produced was a child. A child, named Boaz Kryptman, who saw his home planet of Tyran devoured.
 
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When the Hive Fleet Behemoth first made galaxyfall in M37, the inhabitants of Tyran were lucky enough to see it coming. An Explorator scouting ship headed by Magos Varnak had been lucky enough to spot a cloud of what at first glance had seemed to be unusual debris heading from what was once a verdant uninhabited world towards Tyran. The Explorator ship was damaged by what appeared to be biological artillery weapons, but managed to limp its way back to Tyran.
 
The people of Tyran, who lived so far out they were actually considered east of the Segmentum Ultima, knew there was no way they could contact the Imperium for assistance. An astropathic distress signal had been sent as per standard protocol, but the Explorator vessel had encountered the unknown force less than a lightyear away from Tyran and by the time any Imperial fleet could actually reach Tyran via Warp travel it would be too late. All that could be done was load up as many people as possible onto the single, small Warp-capable merchant ship that had docked in the Tyran system and get them out of the system to somewhere safe. Among those on the ships was the son of the planet’s semi-retired Arbitrator, Boaz Kryptman.
 
The rest of Tyran’s population barricaded themselves inside the Mechanicus’ research facilities located deep within several extinct volcanoes. These facilities weren’t Fortress Worlds, but they were natural bunkers and chokepoints surrounded by defensive weapons and surface to orbit weaponry common to worlds on the edge of known space. The people of Tyran assumed they could at the very least survive whatever was coming. However, it was not enough. The xenos overran the volcanic strongholds, slaughtering every inhabitant within, leaving only inorganic metal and apocalyptic logs in its wake. Even the planet’s ecosystem was not spared, the great menagerie of cephalopods that dominated Tyran’s oceans little more than calamari for the swarm’s hunger.
 
The ship containing Tyran’s few evacuees had made it as far as the edges of the Tyran system and was preparing to made the jump into Warp Space when the Warp Drive simply refused to start. Similarly, when the ship attempted to relay the situation to Tyran, all means of astropathic communication failed. It was as if, to quote the ship’s astropath, as if the shadow of a giant being had fallen across realspace, blotting out the Warp the like a cloud blocking the sun. When the Great Devourer fell upon Tyran, the only thing the ship could do was power down all systems and hope that they were too inconsequential to be of any notice. Boaz Kryptman and the other refugees got a first-hand look at their world’s destruction.
 
When the Imperial Navy finally arrived in response to the distress call sometime later, they searched the system but could find no trace of the force that had caused this destruction beyond the few terrified witnesses in the ships and whatever they could salvage from the volcanic mountain fortresses. And so, despite the nature of the catastrophe, the Imperium generally forgot about the destruction of Tyran over the next several years. The galaxy was a big place, and there were far stranger things out there than a planet being stripped of life.
 
There were less than 200 survivors, virtually all of them children, from a world of more than 15 million. The survivors were placed in the Schola Progenium, as they were nearly all orphans and there was nowhere else to put them. Over the years, the various survivors of the horror of Tyran gradually drifted apart from one another and went on with their lives. However, Kryptman would remain fixated, some would say obsessed, with the entity that destroyed his home.
 
Then, twenty years later, the Great Devourer resurfaced. Having fully assimilated the biomass of all the fringe worlds they had devoured, the Hive Fleet had recovered the reserves it had lost in the great journey between galaxies, and was ready to resume its mission of devouring all life in the galaxy once more. When the Great Devourer made its “official” appearance on the galactic stage in M37, almost no one had any idea how to deal with them. The Imperium was able to connect the tyranids to the genestealers fought in the Genestealer Wars nearly over half a millennium prior, but this did little good as the tyranids had a completely different modus operandi than the genestealers.
 
About the only half-decent idea of how to deal with the tyranids came from Boaz Kryptman, who was at this point a junior Inquisitor in the Ordo Xenos, in a plan which would later become known as the Kryptman Line. Planets that were predicted to be in the direct path of the tyranid Hive Fleet were evacuated with all haste, and the systems were left empty save for a single manned starship. When the hive ships moved in to eat the unguarded planets and the tyranids were finally committed, the ships would Exterminatus each of the planets in the solar system. Not only would the tyranids be unable to claim any biomass from the planet, but they would lose any biomass and energy they had expended while trying to feed, an overall loss for the Hive Mind.
 
The downside is that it meant that it meant leaving some poor souls alone, in a dead solar system with the tyranids, with no way to escape due to the Shadow in the Warp.
 
Although at first the plan proved successful, before long the tyranids learned to break the blockade by merely jumping two or three planets past the nearest life-bearing world and continue eating. Nevertheless, Behemoth expended enough biomass in its initial effort that its back was broken in a later engagement.
 
However, the costs of the Kryptman Line were high. It involved the utter destruction of numerous life-bearing worlds, a precious resource for the Imperium, and even with the most advanced terraforming methods available to it would take millennia before the Imperium could reclaim those worlds, if they could reclaim them at all. To this day there is an unnatural line of dead stars burned in the Segmentum Ultima by this plan. And even though tyranid-related casualties were (relatively) low due to mass evacuations, the Kryptman Line created a massive refugee crisis and the death of millions due to the ensuing famines and plagues.
 
Some hailed Kryptman as a hero for the Kryptman Line. Yes, the consequences of the Kryptman Line were horrific, they said, but it was the lesser of two evils, for if no one had come up with the Kryptman Line nothing would have stopped the Hive Fleet from simply snowballing and Behemoth would have been all but unstoppable. It is said that this praise broke Kryptman a little inside. He had condemned dozens of worlds to die, and here these people were calling him a hero? He considered himself eternally damned for having ever come up with the Kryptman Line, no better than the monsters that ate his world.
 
Kryptman’s other notable accomplishment, and the one that got him actually excommunicated, was Kryptman’s Gambit. When Leviathan, the last of the three great scouting fleets, appeared in the galactic South, the Hive Fleet’s erratic behavior was enough to make Kryptman take drastic action and use several captured genestealers as breadcrumbs to steer a significant portion of into the Ork empire of Octarius. The idea was to let the two groups fight it out and then Exterminatus the survivors before they could build a functioning space fleet. Things did not go to plan. Kryptman’s Gambit did have some measure of success in absorbing a significant portion of a Hive Fleet, but it also created a whole slew of new problems, including the “Bug Boyz” of Octarius.
 
To most, this was the point where Kryptman had gone too far. The Kryptman Line was controversial, but it had been the least horrible option available at the time and Kryptman had done it with the Imperium’s blessing and legions of grim statisticians on his side. This time, Kryptman had acted unilaterally and without warning or approval. Kryptman, to his credit, surrendered quietly and without issue when the Arbiters turned up with the handcuffs and a warrant with an Imperial seal on it.
 
Kryptman’s actions and excommunication presented an issue for the Imperium. On the one hand, it was clear that Kryptman could not be allowed to operate as a free action. However, he was simply too useful at killing tyranids to simply be gotten rid of. The solution the Imperium came up with was to put him in the jurisdiction of the Kryptman Institute, the Ordo Xenos group formed specifically to try and figure out how to take down the tyranids in the wake of the three scouting fleets. There, Kryptman could continue to research new ways to hunt and kill tyranids, but he would no longer have clearance to access any kind of Exterminatus weaponry, nor use it without the express approval of an Inqusitor of sound mind. The purpose of the Kryptman Institute is as much to keep Kryptman under control and as it is to fight the tyranids.
 
Kryptman isn't hugely clever, he isn't hugely charismatic, he isn't even a hugely dangerous combatant. But he is driven. He is driven like Konrad Curze was driven. He will make the Hive pay for what it took from him.
 
Under his commission poisons, diseases and strange alchemy have been concocted and although the Hive always adapts the toll before it does so is immense. No other mere mortal has hurt the Great Devourer quite as much as he has.
 
Kryptman has been taking every longevity treatment known to man and freezing himself between hive fleets. The Hive Mind is his white whale and he will chase it across the universe to the end of time and space. He is awoken when needed and preserved when not. As of 999.M41 he is very, very active. He is the spear tip slamming into the neck of the great beast. His dying day is close and he knows it, but he will make his passing be felt.
 
He is also insane. Simply put, he is bug-fuck, batshit insane.
 
He wears a helmet made of lictor skull, his robes and body armour are made of tyranid skin and chitin, his las-rifle and power sword handle inlaid with polished scrimshawed tyranid bone. He has tattoos depicting every splinter fleet he's responsible for killing. The ink is made in part from their blood. He also eats tyranid. With enough processing and preparation it is possible to destroy the spores and purge the biotoxins to make tyranid flesh safe to eat. He eats tyranid meat with the same ferocity that the Hive Mind devours worlds.
 
He thinks the Hive Mind is taunting him, once he realized the true nature of what the Swarmlord is. He claims the Swarmlord has started to recognize him, going so far as to claim that in one case it was laughing at him. These claims of anthropomorphism are more than likely all in his head do not help the case of Kryptman’s sanity.
 
Kryptman’s official kill count contains very little in terms of Orks, Dark Eldar, Rak’gol, or any other Xenos Horribilis, except when members of those species are fool enough to get in his way. Just lots and lots and lots of tyranids and their degenerate genestealer spawn. Kryptman is the bane of genestealer cults across half the galaxy. Genestealers are just human enough to feel fear, even if it is dampened by their connection to the Hive Mind. They fear Kryptman. If the Hive Mind had any sense of higher consciousness, it too would have reason to fear Kryptman.
 
Other people also fear Kryptman.
 
The Kryptman Institute as much a means to keep Kryptman under some measure of control as it is to fuck up the tyranids. His retinue are the only thing close to friends he has. To Kryptman, at least by this point in his life, the greatest virtue someone may possess is their ability to fuck up tyranids. He has hired and fought alongside allies as diverse as Hau-Yuan Exterminators, the Zoats, Shas’O “Shadosun” Shaserra, and Nemesor Zahndrekh. He considers his retinue friends because they do what they are told and they fuck up tyranids with him. They have other virtues and characteristics but those are all secondary unless they relate to making them better bug hunters.
 
But he does consider them friends, even if they only tolerate him. As he leap frogs through time all his friends are stolen from him by the Time Thief. They endure years that he does not and he is forced to outlive them. It is not a thing that makes him happy, but it must be done.
 
He blames their death on the Hive Mind too.
 
Kryptman has lived long enough to see the tyranid main fleet make galaxyfall, and see his previous efforts amount to spraying bugspray on an infestation. This has only encouraged him to fight harder, and if that does not succeed he will take as many tyranids as he can down with him, stabbing them until his last breath.

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=== The Heartseeker ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Bane of the Swarm '''''

In the late 40th Millenium, when the Tyranid Hivefleets again scoured through the Eastern Fringe, one of the first star systems hit was Felusa, a tropical jungle world settled by mostly humans but still contained a sizable population of Kinebranches. The world was deemed to be indefensible, the Hivefleet at that point still far too coordinated and numerous to be intercepted, and thus a convoy fleet was sent to pick up the civillians and deny the Tyranids a star system.

Unfortunately, due to a freak warp storm the rescue convoy failed to arrive. Fortunately, the SOS signal was caught by none other than Lord Inquisitor Boaz Kryptmann.

Hearing their desperate pleas for aid, something relived within the old Inquisitor's mind. His memories of the day he lost his world and his family, and he ordered his ship to full spead ahead to Felusa, on his mouth a constant chanting of a mantra consisting off 'Tyran', 'Nids' and 'Never Again!'.

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When they arrived, it was almost too late: the paltry PDF was swatted aside by the sheer bulk of the Hivefleet, the survivors retreated to one last city, the swarm of chitinous flesh and blood tightening up the noose further and futher by every seconds. Even through his crazed, raging haze Kryptmann knew he was outnumbered, yet he was not one to give up so easily. Pulling an extremely risky manuever, he managed to land his ship right above the bunker, his crews and retinue frantically loaded and crammed up as many people as he could before high-tailing it to the outskirt of the system and activate their warp drive (but not before leaving behind a lot of nasty gifts for the tyranids.)

Out of the 20 thousands that they managed to save, there was a young Kinebranch by the name of Wu-Ko-Gu, son and apprentice to Forge Master Wu-Ko-Ga. As the old Forge Master laid dying in his son's arms, he taught him his last and greatest lesson: to forge a Kinebranch Cursed Blade.

As the ship fled for the star system's border, the Hivefleet hot their tail, Wu-Ko-Gu began forging. The fire of his anger became the forge's flame, fueled by the searing memories of his burning homeworld heating up the fragments of his father's adamantite anvil. Guided by the words of his dying father, his fists turned into adamantite, hammering down his fury and grief, molding the molten metal into a blade with mono-molecular precision. As the final strike came down, and the old Master breathed his last breath, but the blade was still unfinished. With his fingers he etched on the name of the blade -and his Grudge- in the traditional Kinebranch runic letters that glows red with fury and blue with grief for all to see - Heartseeker, the blade that shall be plunged into the Heart and Mind and the very Soul of the Swarm.

The sword was finished. The Apprentice, now the Master Smith, looked up and met the eyes of the Old Inquisitor, finding a kindred spirit. Both had lost everything dear to them, both harboured an insatiable grudge to the swarm. Ever since that day, the Smith found his destiny - to forge the blades that will hurt the Hivemind. He will make them feel what he felt; he will make them pay. And Kryptmann will lead him.

As of 999.M41 Wu-Ko-Gu is very old now. A Kinebranch usually live long but not this long. He had lived for more than 1000 years, his body is old and tired and his hands weary and shaky, yet from his forge still came out both the famed Kinebranch Cursed blades, and the Apprentices that will continue to carry on his Grudge far on into the Long Night. Until the day when the Swarm is finally laid low, he shall not rest and nor will his blades or those who wield them.

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'''See Also:''' [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Diary_of_a_Madman|Diary of a Madman]]