-Simulation-
You drive the Cataphractii-pattern Terminator armor forward with every ounce of power the servos can generate. The suit responds to your will, acceleration building with each thunderous stride, transforming you into something resembling a maddened Grox beast on a rampage.
Repair servitors block your path. You crash through them without slowing, the Terminator armor's mass and momentum treating their industrial frames like kindling. Metal bodies fly aside, some crushed completely by direct impact, others merely knocked sprawling across the deck in broken heaps.
Bolter rounds continue hammering against your chest armor, each detonation creating showers of ceramite fragments that scatter like shrapnel. The explosions eat away at the protective shell, peeling back layers, exposing the plasteel beneath. Warning indicators flicker across your helmet's display, damage assessments scrolling past too quickly to fully process.
You ignore them all. Pain means nothing. Damage is irrelevant. Only forward momentum matters, only closing the distance to deliver death at arm's length.
The Manreaper sweeps through the air in a horizontal arc, the blade screaming as it cuts atmosphere. The sound is wrong, unnatural, carrying harmonics that suggest the weapon possesses qualities beyond simple physical sharpness.
A Death Guard raises his heavy blade to block, the Kukri coming up in a defensive posture practiced through decades of training.
The Manreaper meets the heavy blade and simply continues through it.
The superior casting technology and materials, whatever they truly are, treat the Astartes weapon like cheap metal. The blade shears apart at the point of contact, the upper half spinning away while the lower section remains gripped in suddenly nerveless fingers.
The scythe's blade continues its arc, momentum barely checked by severing the defensive weapon. It crashes into the Death Guard's helmet with catastrophic force, punching through ceramite and the reinforced skull beneath, embedding deep into the brain case.
You pull. The scythe tears free, taking half the warrior's head with it. The corpse stands upright for one impossible heartbeat before collapsing, the severed section of skull, shoulder, and power armor falling separately from the main body.
More Death Guard converge, their own power scythes sweeping through killing arcs aimed at your exposed positions. Three blades descend simultaneously toward your helmet, the warriors coordinating their assault with the practiced efficiency of brothers who have fought together for years.
Your response is immediate. The Cataphractii-pattern armor moves with you, servos translating thought into motion with minimal lag. You twist sideways, presenting your shoulder armor to the incoming strikes rather than your more vulnerable helmet and gorget.
The power scythes crash into the pauldron with tremendous force, disruption fields screaming as they meet blessed ceramite. Sparks erupt from the impact points. The armor holds, though deep gouges appear in the plating, exposing the underlayers.
But the defensive maneuver has created an opening.
Your counter-strike comes in the same fluid motion, the Manreaper sweeping forward in a wide horizontal slash. The blade catches multiple Death Guard simultaneously, cutting through their power armor's waist sections where the plates join and protection is marginally thinner.
Bodies separate at the torso. Upper halves tumble away from lower halves, both sections trailing mechanical fluids and blood. The Death Guard fall in pieces, their enhanced physiology keeping them alive and conscious for several seconds as they try futilely to comprehend what has happened.
You do not pause to ensure kills. You are already moving, already pushing past the dying warriors, already seeking new targets.
Metal fragments from shattered armor still hang in the air. Blood sprayed from severed arteries paints the deck and nearby walls in arterial patterns. The hot liquid splashes across your helmet eyepiece, reducing visibility to crimson-tinted shapes.
You push forward through the carnage, building momentum again. The Manreaper becomes a blur of motion in your hands, sweeping and slashing in patterns that defy Astartes combat doctrine. Too fast. Too aggressive. Fighting with a savagery that transcends training and enters the realm of pure killing instinct.
The weapon moves like a metal whirlwind, each rotation creating new wounds, harvesting new lives. Death Guard fall in rapid succession, their defensive stances broken, their counter-attacks arriving too slowly or aimed at positions you have already vacated.
Blood covers everything. The deck becomes treacherous with it, armor fragments creating additional obstacles. The air fills with the copper stench of spilled vitae mixed with the chemical smells of ruptured power armor systems.
Then, abruptly, you stop.
Your boots lock against the deck plating, magnetic systems engaging to anchor you in place. You stand motionless for several heartbeats, chest heaving with exertion, the Manreaper dripping in your grip.
Slowly, ponderously, you turn within the Cataphractii-pattern armor. The servos whine with the motion, strained by sustained combat beyond normal operational parameters. The armor's surface is scored with countless marks, scythe impacts, blade slashes, bolter craters. It looks like it has been dragged through a warzone, which is essentially accurate.
Your vision, still partially obscured by blood coating the eyepiece, sweeps across the arsenal's approach corridor.
Fourteen bodies. Or rather, the pieces of fourteen bodies. Death Guard warriors reduced to component parts, scattered across the deck in patterns of violence. Some are relatively intact, killed by single devastating strikes. Others exist as fragments, dismembered through sustained assault.
All dead. All defeated. The entire garrison eliminated.
You exhale slowly, the sound harsh through the helmet's external speakers. The pungent chemical air of the ship fills your lungs, filtered through rebreather systems that struggle to keep pace with your elevated respiration.
Then you feel it.
Power flooding into your body. Not from within, but from without. From somewhere else, somewhere vast and terrible. Forced blessing pouring into you whether you want it or not, reshaping your physiology to match the donor's preferences.
Khorne. The Blood God. Granting strength to a warrior who has proven himself in slaughter, binding you tighter to the Skull Throne's endless hunger.
Your physical capabilities surge upward. Strength increases beyond even Astartes norms. Speed accelerates, reaction times shorten to superhuman levels that make your previous combat performance seem sluggish by comparison. Your senses sharpen, processing combat data with crystal clarity.
The Manreaper changes in your grip.
The blade, already wickedly sharp, takes on a blood-red coloration that seems to glow with internal light. The metal itself appears to sharpen further, the edge becoming something closer to a monomolecular wire, capable of cutting molecular bonds rather than simply severing matter through force.
You recognize this transformation for what it is. Corruption. Empowerment and damnation combined. The Warp is now the playground of four malevolent gods, and you are simply an ant that happened to align with their preferences, noticed by entities that regard mortality with the same interest humans show toward insects.
A sigh escapes you, soft and fleeting, carrying resignation mixed with grim acceptance.
You drive the Cataphractii-pattern armor forward again, moving past the six hundred or so surviving repair servitors. The mechanical constructs stand motionless, awaiting direction from the Terminus machine spirit that has fallen silent since the combat began.
You reach the arsenal's entrance, a massive door constructed from reinforced adamantium plating. Your augmented strength makes opening it simple. You simply push, and mechanisms designed to resist battalion-strength assault yield to your enhanced force.
The door swings inward, revealing the arsenal's interior. Racks of weapons extend in organized rows, bolters, flamers, meltaguns, plasma weapons. Ammunition crates stacked floor to ceiling. Armor components for field repairs. Everything a Death Guard company might need for sustained operations.
But before you can signal the Terminus machine spirit, before you can issue orders to bring the navigators and their servants to this defensible position, your enhanced senses detect something wrong.
Terribly, catastrophically wrong.
A presence. Vast and malevolent, approaching with inexorable patience. The air itself seems to curdle, temperature dropping despite the ship's climate control. The smell changes, becoming fetid, rotten, suggestive of mass graves left open under summer sun.
You spin, the Terminator armor responding to sudden alarm flooding your nervous system.
Through the helmet's eyepiece, you see it manifesting.
Thick green mist, glowing with sickly luminescence, flowing across the deck like living fog. It moves with purpose, with intelligence, seeking targets. The color is wrong, a shade of green that hurts to look at directly, suggesting corruption on fundamental levels beyond simple disease.
The mist reaches a repair servitor. Flows over its mechanical frame in an instant. And in that briefest contact, the servitor transforms.
Metal corrodes. Rust blooms across surfaces that had been pristine moments before. Organic components rot, flesh liquefying and dripping from mechanical skeletons. The servitor's posture changes, becoming hunched and shambling, movements losing coordination and precision.
A plague zombie. Nurgle's gift, transforming everything it touches into vectors for endless disease.
The green mist spreads rapidly, flowing from servitor to servitor with terrible efficiency. Each one corrupted in seconds. Each one joining the growing horde of ambulatory corpses.
Even the servitor controlled by the Terminus machine spirit cannot resist. You watch as it succumbs, metal rotting, organic portions sloughing away. The machine spirit's presence vanishes abruptly, consciousness fled or destroyed, leaving only an empty shell animated by supernatural plague.
"Nurgle's Rot!" The realization hits like physical impact. "Zombie Plague!"
Your voice emerges as a dull roar from within the helmet, fury and horror combined. You recognize this from the lore you absorbed during previous simulations. One of Nurgle's most insidious weapons, a plague that defies conventional containment, that spreads through reality itself rather than following normal disease vectors.
You react immediately, boots slamming against deck plating as you retreat toward the arsenal entrance. The heavy door remains open, offering sanctuary if you can reach it before the plague claims you.
Then something else emerges from the corrupted servitor horde.
Black insects. Thousands of them. Each one the size of a human thumb, bodies gleaming like polished obsidian. They move in swarms, creating visible clouds that buzz with sound that sets teeth on edge and makes eardrums throb with sympathetic vibration.
The stench hits first. Rot and decay concentrated to unbearable intensity, the smell of every corpse that has ever decomposed compressed into olfactory assault. Even through the helmet's filtration systems, it penetrates, making bile rise in your throat.
Destroyer Plague. The insects that wear biological shells but are actually extensions of a god's malice given physical form.
The swarm bypasses the shambling zombies, flowing around and over them like water around stones. The buzzing intensifies as they accelerate, forming into a living arrow aimed directly at your position.
Your arm rises reflexively, the chemical sprayer mounted to your left wrist engaging with a hiss of pressurized release. Toxic fog erupts from the nozzle, spreading across dozens of meters in an expanding cloud.
The chemicals are devastating to unprotected life. Metal corrodes on contact. The deck plating beneath the cloud hisses and bubbles as molecular bonds break down. Walls show similar damage, surfaces eaten away by substances designed to kill anything biological.
Against mortal soldiers or even unarmored Astartes, the spray would have been catastrophically effective.
Against the Destroyer Plague, it accomplishes nothing.
The swarm flies through the toxic cloud without slowing, without showing any sign of damage or discomfort. Because they are not truly insects. They are Warp manifestations wearing insect shapes, extensions of Nurgle's will that transcend physical vulnerability.
They strike your Terminator armor like a living tsunami, black bodies covering every surface in seconds. Then they begin burrowing.
Ceramite armor. Blessed materials. Sanctified construction. None of it matters.
The insects phase through physical barriers as if they do not exist, penetrating into the flesh beneath. You feel them entering your body, feel the corruption spreading from each point of contact.
Your enhanced physiology begins breaking down. Flesh rots from within, cells dying and sloughing away. Organs fail, systems shutting down as disease consumes them. Even your soul seems under assault, the bright fire of consciousness flickering as something tries to smother it.
Pain beyond description floods every nerve. Not the clean agony of combat wounds, but the deep, nauseating suffering of systemic failure. Of corruption reaching into fundamental essence and twisting it toward decay.
Your will, that rock-hard determination forged through countless trials, feels like it is being pulled from your body like silk from a cocoon. Strand by strand. Fiber by fiber. The rage that has sustained you through combat drains away, replaced by lethargic acceptance, the whisper that surrender would end the pain.
Your consciousness begins to drift, reality becoming hazy and indistinct. Sounds fade. Vision blurs.
Whispers surround you. Kind. Gentle. Understanding. A grandfather's voice promising rest, offering peace, guaranteeing an end to struggle if you would only stop fighting and accept the gift being offered.
Your knee buckles. The Terminator armor locks its joints, preventing complete collapse, but you sink down until one leg presses against the deck. Both hands grip the Manreaper's haft, using it as support to keep from falling completely.
A roar tears from your throat. Raw. Primal. Denial given voice. Unwillingness and rage combined into sound that defies the creeping lethargy.
The kind whispers falter. Withdraw slightly, as if surprised by continued resistance.
And in that moment of respite, you hear something else.
Another voice. Cruel rather than kind. Demanding rather than offering. Violent where the first had been peaceful.
Khorne. The Blood God. Recognizing a champion being claimed by a rival power.
New blessing floods your body, but from a different source. Not Nurgle's patient corruption, but Khorne's savage empowerment.
The rotted flesh begins regenerating. Not healing cleanly, but being rebuilt through brutal force, cells multiplied at accelerated rates that border on cancerous. Destroyed organs reform. Failed systems restart.
And the reconstruction does not stop at restoration.
Your physical strength expands further, muscles growing denser, bones thickening, body mass increasing. Every enhancement pushes you closer to something beyond Astartes, toward the dangerous territory where humanity ends and daemonhood begins.
But your soul remains protected.
A powerful psychic presence, separate from both Chaos gods, wraps around your essential self like a shield. The corruption cannot penetrate that barrier, cannot reach the core of what makes you who you are.
So the Chaos blessing, denied access to your soul, redirects elsewhere.
Into your equipment. Into the weapons and armor that have become extensions of yourself.
The Manreaper writhes in your grip. The blade, already blood-red from Khorne's initial blessing, darkens to pitch black. But the edge retains its crimson coloration, creating stark contrast that hurts to look at directly.
Metal fangs erupt along the blade's length, growing from the material like teeth pushing through gums. Each one sharp and cruel, designed to catch flesh and tear rather than simply cut.
On the scythe's side, near where blade meets haft, an eye opens.
A blood-red eyeball, wet and alive, nestled into the metal as if it had always been there. The pupil fixes on you, staring with awareness that suggests the weapon has gained something approaching consciousness. The eye blinks, slow and deliberate, acknowledging your gaze.
The Cataphractii-pattern Terminator armor undergoes equally dramatic transformation.
The iron-gray metal surface shifts, color bleeding away and being replaced by scarlet. Not paint, but fundamental alteration of the material itself, as if the ceramite has been reforged in blood rather than fire.
The damage from combat, all those scythe marks and bolter craters and blade gouges, simply vanishes. The armor repairs itself, flowing like liquid to seal wounds and restore structural integrity.
Then symbols begin appearing.
Copper-colored marks, shaped like the letter X, emerge across every surface. They cover the chestplate, the pauldrons, the greaves, the gauntlets. Inside and outside, no section left unmarked. The symbols glow faintly, pulsing in rhythm with your heartbeat.
On the helmet's forehead, metal bulges outward. A horn pushes through, growing with visible speed, extending upward in a curved arc. Blood-red and gleaming with metallic luster, the horn stands as final proclamation of transformation.
The Chaos blessing completes its work and withdraws, satisfied with the corruption achieved even if total possession remains denied.
Inside the transformed helmet, your eyes snap open.
They blaze blood-red, all traces of cyan wolf-glow consumed by new coloration that matches the armor's transformed hue. The pupils are vertical slits, predatory rather than human.
A single word emerges from your throat, repeated like a mantra, like prayer, like a promise.
"Kill."
A breath, then again, louder.
"Kill."
And a third time, building toward a roar.
"KILL!"