Composition4

The Inquisition fields no army. It fields an authority. A single Inquisitor and a hand-picked retinue of Throne Agents — a psyker, an anti-psyker, an assassin, a tech-adept, a mailed Crusader — each a different instrument turned against a different heresy. Where other forces win by weight of numbers, the Inquisition wins by the exactness of its tools and by the seal its master carries: the mandate that compels the wider Imperium to fight at its side.

That mandate is Requisition, the retinue's defining power. An Inquisitor's word presses Space Marines, Battle Sisters, Guardsmen and the tempered killers of the Officio Assassinorum into service they owe no formal duty. The borrowed muscle is never truly owned — every requisitioned body takes the place of one of the Inquisitor's own, so a retinue that borrows heavily marches thinner for it.

There is no swarm here, and no miraculous save. Endurance is honest carapace plate, a bought rosarius field on the master, and a handful of resilient elites. The Inquisition is the surgeon's answer to the galaxy's rot: few hands, each holding the precise blade the wound demands, and the authority to call down heavier steel when the blade is not enough.

The Ordo Hereticus hunts the traitor within. Where the other Ordos turn their gaze outward — to the daemon, to the alien — these witch-hunters turn it on the Imperium's own: the rogue psyker, the heretic, the coven festering behind a loyal mask. A Hereticus warband is a small, elite toolbox of hyper-specialised bodies — a zealot Inquisitor, a condemnor-bearing Crusader wall, a caged Pariah whose very presence strangles the warp, a Death-Cult executioner, and a chained penitent driven before the line.

Its doctrine is suppression before slaughter. The Witch-Hunter's Authority chokes an enemy psyker's Willpower to nothing; the condemnor stake and the caged blank execute what the aura has exposed; and the purging flame drives a cult from the cover it hides in. When a heresy must be burned out root and branch, the Inquisitor alone carries the seal to summon the Adepta Sororitas, and a whole convent marches to his writ. This House fields few and chooses each with care. Against the psyker and the horde it is pitiless; against a mundane foe it leans instead on the mark of the heretic and the cleansing flame.