The world shivered beneath a sky torn open. Heat and fire raked the clouds in jagged lines, sending shivering echoes down into the massed ranks of the Imperium below. From the maw of the Tyranid biocannon, a single projectile uncoiled into existence: a spindle of wet chitin, slick with primordial enzymes, thrumming with the hive's insistence.
It did not think. Not yet. But it sensed. Pressure against the air, the resonance of the barrel, the snapping of the launch… all pressed into its core like a waking heartbeat. It felt itself expelled, propelled, spiraling, twisting, and already aware of every micro-currents of wind that threatened its trajectory.
The hive-mind's distant roar—abstract, yet immediate—curled along its neural filaments. It was a whispering tide of command: Consume. Adapt. Survive. Reach the biomass. It was not alone, yet utterly singular in its experience, a living missile of bone, sinew, and instinct.
Through the chaos of descent, it recognized other presences. Thermal glimmers scattered below: rigid shapes armored in metal, human-shaped, crawling across the craters and spires of the imperium's fortress-world. They moved with predictable hesitation, their patterns readable in the wave of synaptic echoes it could sense.
It flexed its spiny limbs midair. The bio-cannon had gifted it more than momentum: reflexive aim. Tiny shifts in its chitin could twist its trajectory, let it arc toward denser clusters of prey, higher concentrations of nutrient, or away from the shrieking firestorms above. It was a dart of living death, adjusting mid-flight with the grace of a hunting organism that had never yet existed outside the hive.
The world beneath it expanded and contracted in pulses. Scorched earth, broken towers, fires spitting black plumes into the sky. Smells reached it—not through nostrils, not through lungs, but as vibrations along neural membranes: charred protein, heated metal, fear. Everything screamed for consumption.
A shadow flickered across its sensors—a heavy las-cannon bolt streaking toward the fall of its descent. Not a threat; the projectile dodged instinctively, spiraling slightly left, right, weaving with the elegance of a seed in the wind. It understood trajectories, arc, impact vectors, though it had no words for them. All it knew was survival and the magnetic pull of potential biomass.
The world below loomed closer. It flexed the soft, foldable claws at its tip, each lined with microbarbs and enzymatic sacs capable of piercing and digesting matter. It was small, almost insignificant, a mere fragment of a greater swarm—but even so, it had potential. It could consume, adapt, mutate, survive. And it would.
Lightning forked across the sky, illuminating the horizon in brief, cold blue-white flashes. For a heartbeat, the tiny projectile understood the scale of its descent, the chaos it would enter, and the first laws of existence it must obey: contact, consumption, evolution.
And then, gravity pulled harder, air roared past its carapace, and the first touch of the world beneath it waited.