The Helldiver Corps is aptly named. Its soldiers drop feet first into the deadliest
theaters of war that Super Earth has to offer; frozen tundras where the bitings winds strips
flesh from bone, barren wastes where the air itself ignites in the blazing sun, and ancient
forests so dark and deep that liberty itself cannot escape its windings trails. The Helldivers have dropped into a thousand
different hells. It was inevitable that one among them would
reach out to leave the first bloody mark on the legacy of the Corps itself. And in the Severin Sector… in the first
year of the Galactic War… one world awaited its rendezvous with death and history. One world would become a battlefield of endless
jungles, where ones and zeros echoed through the tattered leaves and the horizon flashed
with deadly neon. One world, where the streams ran red with
the blood of patriots. There are a thousand different hells in the
galaxy. There is only one: Malevelon Creek. In the early days of the Galactic War, as
the Helldiver Corps spearheaded the Super Earth offensive across the galaxy, a sense
of overconfidence had permeated throughout its ranks. The opening battles against the insectoid
“Terminids” on the worlds of Heeth and Angels Venture had been extremely promising
and the Corps eagerly expected to extend the offensive across the whole of the neighboring
Umlaut Sector. Amidst the excitement of this initial campaign,
the first reports from the distant Automaton front, centered in the Severin Sector, were
almost entirely overlooked. The Helldivers mobilized there reported especially
brutal fighting on one world that acted as the gateway to the rest of the sector. The planet was known as Malevelon Creek. It was a primordial world of dense alien jungles. Twisting, slender trees and thick ferns with
spiky fronds, all blanketed under an ethereal blue-tinged mist that turned the horizon into
a haunted soup of moving shapes and shifting shadows. There was no day or night on Malevelon Creek,
only an eerie twilight that persisted on the edge of both. Tens of thousands of Helldivers had already
perished on the planet, even as their frantic reports and pleas for reinforcements were
dismissed as exaggerations and panic-induced overreactions. The Super Earth High Command, fresh off the
capture of Heeth, was reluctant to pull resources away from the advancing Terminid front, and
so the initial defenders of Malevelon Creek were forced to endure some of the most intense
fighting of the war, in almost complete isolation. Gradually however, as tales of the fighting
began to spread across the Galactic Wide Web, the extent of the emerging disaster on Malevelon
Creek became more widely known. Helldiver reinforcements flooded into the
Severin Sector, but rather than shoring up the front’s crumbling defenses, their arrival
only deepened the chaotic nature of the battle. The arrivals were all veterans of the Terminid
Campaigns, but against a fundamentally different kind of enemy, they found their tactics and
strategies hopelessly outmoded and ineffective. Veterans of a hundred drops, Helldivers who
had held the line against overwhelming waves of razer clawed-arachnids, were now effortlessly
blasted into a bloody mist by advanced weaponry, or crushed from above by dropships loaded
with strange machines. They were relentlessly, mercilessly, pressed
from all sides, hammered by mortars, tanks and brutally effective fighting socialists. The Automatons prepared defensive positions,
laid mines, and could quickly redeploy when threatened. No matter how many were cut down by small
arms or reduced to slag from orbital fire, the jungle forever glowed with red lights,
piercing through the mist. Casualties skyrocketed and morale plummeted. Many Helldivers transferred back to the Terminid
front while those that remained on Malevelon Creek struggled to counter the immense numbers
and devastating tactics of the Automatons. Under severe pressure but lacking an effective
strategy, Super Earth High Command focused on establishing a defensive posture, but this
could only delay the inevitable. The beachhead established by the Helldivers
on the planet eroded day by day, with even the most successful defense unable to shift
the momentum of the wider fighting. Yet amongst the Helldivers deployed to the
Creek, a new cadre of veterans was emerging. Many of its members had fought the Automatons
since day one while others had answered the desperate call for reinforcements and refused
to leave for easier battlefields once the nature of the fighting had presented itself. Together the Old Guard of Malevelon Creek
and these new steadfast recruits combined the lessons of both theaters, and committed
themselves to fighting the battles no one else could. Where other Helldivers merely held the line,
these warriors advanced relentlessly; sometimes by miles, sometimes just inches. They snaked their way through robot infested
swamps day after day, enduring the most terrible of hardships at even the slightest chance
to push the line forward. They rescued scientists, collected samples,
and spread democracy across the Creek in a hundred other ways. To them, defending the world was not enough,
it had to be retaken and there could be no substitute for what the fight required. They wore the shattered gears and sensors
of slain Automatons as grim trophies, their faces smeared with oil as they immersed themselves
in the silicon viscera of the enemy. They came to be known as the Creek Crawlers. Units like the Creek Crawlers and others that
made a name for themselves during the fighting turned their struggle into a great propaganda
effort. The Creek was elevated to an almost mythical
status, a place where a Helldiver could test their mettle and prove themselves. But in an ironic twist so common in war, the
symbolic value of the planet would be the primary cause of its fall. So desperate was Super Earth to liberate Malevelon
Creek, that other, equally important worlds were overlooked. When the Automatons established beachheads
on Mantes and Draupnir, they threatened to cut off access to the entire Severin Sector. In at least two instances the Creek was isolated
from further reinforcements, as neighboring worlds were lost, only to be hastily reinforced
as fierce Super-Earth counter-attacks worked to keep these planets contested. But in each case, far too many Helldivers
were committed solely to the Creek, while the worlds that made the fighting there possible,
shriveled on the vine. In orbit of the planet, the fighting was every
bit as intense, as thousands of Super Destroyers struggled to maintain the corridors into the
sector while providing support to forces on the ground. Their ability to accomplish the latter was
increasingly stymied by severe Ion Storms, turning what was already a deadly battlefield
into a slaughter. The planet was soon cut off once again. On February 25th, roughly two weeks into the
start of the Galactic War, the last Helldiver teams on Malevelon Creek were killed and Super
Earth High Command declared the planet fully lost. The fighting moved into the Xzar Sector, ending
all hope of a quick end to the Automaton War. Complexity and tragedy are inherent to warfare. It was inevitable that at some time, on some
world, Super Earth would suffer its first defeat. But at the start of the Galactic War, with
the universe seemingly ripe for the conquest, even the most pragmatic Helldiver could not
have been prepared for what lay ahead. Now the veil of ignorance has been lifted. The stage is set, and the stakes are clear. Other hells will soon dominate the headlines
of the Galactic Wide Web, new battlefields that may even eclipse the terrible fighting
in the Severin Sector. But no matter how fierce the battles or dramatic
the campaigns, the memory of Malevon Creek will endure. Its bloody mark has been left across the whole
of the Helldiver Corps, the whole of Super Earth. It has shaped the souls of those who survived
and gifted them their most sacred duty: to carry forward the legacy of those that fell
during the Massacre at Malevon Creek.
