Commanding a tide of warp-spawn, the twisted scions of the Emperor's Children launched an all-out assault upon Commorragh from several converging Webway arteries. Daemonic Overlords brandished reality-warping blades, reaping a bloody harvest through the Drukhari ranks.
Warriors of the Kabal of the Black Heart met the onslaught with relentless counter-attacks. Behind them, Wyches unleashed agonizing hexes, attempting to repel the Chaos Space Marines embedded within the daemonic host. Yet, psychic maledictions capable of flaying a soul were naught but a sweet reward to these traitors, who viewed agony as a divine gift. Their mutated flesh let out shrieks of ecstatic joy as strangely-wrought power swords and jagged chain-weapons tore through the Drukhari defenders.
Within the Dark City, Asdrubael Vect sensed the shifting tides. Compared to the mindless, disorganized slaughter of typical warp-breaches, a daemonic army directed by the strategic malice of the Legiones Astartes posed a catastrophic threat. On Vect's command, the Haemonculi and the elite champions of the arenas were unleashed to surgically excise the Chaos commanders.
It was a calculated move. The arena elites coated their blades in the most virulent toxins brewed by the Covens. These Emperor's Children, boasting vast expanses of exposed, prideful flesh due to their compromised power armor, would soon pay a steep price for their vanity. The concoctions of the Drukhari's mad flesh-sculptors were masterpieces of biological horror, biotechnology so depraved it would elicit a nod of approval from Nurgle himself.
At the vanguard, Tervantias the Archmachinator watched with grim satisfaction as one of his alchemical abominations, a grotesque fusion of meat and machine, barreled into the daemonic tide. It flattened scores of lesser warp-spawn before pinning a bellowing Daemon Prince to the deck.
While the daemons, traitors, and Commorrite defenders bled one another white, the expedition led by Aurelia Malys was encountering an anomaly that defied their comprehension.
Though the Void Sword was equipped with sophisticated inertial dampeners and gravity-stabilizers, the sheer magnitude of its mass generated an inescapable gravitational wake. Even in the Webway, gravity remains a fundamental law, and as the giant vessel tore through the dimension, its pull intensified.
Malys's force was currently speeding across the "ceiling" of a Webway artery, their velocity spiraling out of control under the ship's tether. As they cleared a narrow transit-gate, the crushing gravity of the massive construct suddenly seized them, dragging the entire host into the open void toward the ship.
Every Aeldari present felt the terrifying sensation of being caught in a planetary gravity well, as if they were plummeting toward the surface of a world from hundreds of kilometers up. As they fell, they looked toward the source of the pull, and a collective, horrified silence fell over the ranks.
Malys had seen the Craftworlds of her kin, but never had she beheld a fabrication of this scale within the Webway. She knew with absolute certainty that no Webway gate in this sector was large enough to accommodate a planetary-sized vessel, nor should such an artificial colossus even exist. For a fleeting second, she wondered if she had finally succumbed to madness.
But as she opened her psychic senses, the feedback was undeniable: this was a physical entity of terrifying proportions. Pinpricks of light flickered across its hull, and the silver-white metal of the superstructure filled their vision with a sense of crushing oppression.
The gravity well dominated the local space. Anything emerging from the smaller, peripheral Webway tubes was ensnared by the vessel's mass, yanked from their footings, and pulled toward the Void Sword.
Malys and her survivors faced an immediate, lethal crisis: they had to arrest their terminal velocity before they struck the metallic hull. Failure meant becoming nothing more than a red smear upon the silver plating.
The Drukhari pilots fought their controls, pushing the anti-gravity generators of their Reaver jetbikes and Venom skiffs to their breaking points. Normally, these craft were designed only to hover meters above a planetary surface; here, they were kilometers away from their "ground," accelerating toward it like falling meteors.
The Talos Pain Engines and Cronos Parasites were in even direr straits. Given their mass and lack of high-altitude thrusters, their only destination was total structural disintegration upon impact.
As for the warriors of the Kabal of the Black Heart...
Floating in the zero-gravity transition, Malys gave a sharp, subtle hand signal. Her loyalists from the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue understood instantly. Mid-plunge, these warriors unsheathed their blades and opened fire upon the forces loyal to Vect.
Thousands of Aeldari descended into a chaotic skirmish while in terminal freefall. Shuriken fire and purple splinter-rounds crisscrossed the sky, erupting in clouds of gore. Wyches used their whips to lash onto debris or enemy vehicles, swinging their bodies with predatory grace to deliver killing blows with their daggers. The Haemonculi unleashed volleys of toxic darts and esoteric injection-rigs; those unfortunate enough to be struck by the needles underwent instantaneous, agonizing mutations, transforming into thrashing monsters before they even hit the hull.
Malys knew that regardless of the mission's outcome, Vect never intended for her to return to Commorragh and challenge his rule. She had been prepared for his "escort" to turn on her. Now, she simply struck first.
The battle was swift and brutal, fought without cover or quarter. At the cost of nearly a thousand of her own, fifteen hundred warriors of the Black Heart were slaughtered. Even as a successful ambush, the price of the civil war was steep.
This brief spark of fratricide did not go unnoticed by Axion.
The Void Sword was so massive that it acted as a colossal magnetic lure, pulling everything in the surrounding Webway toward its hull. Daemons were typically vaporized by the ship's localized psychic shielding, while luckless Aeldari and assorted debris were smashed into pulp against the outer armor. Nanite swarms would then emerge to scrub the "biological contaminants" from the hull.
However, this was the first time Axion had witnessed a group of targets engaging in a civil war during their descent. Through the vessel's high-resolution sensors, the Sapient Machine studied the Aeldari. While they differed from the Craftworld variants in his databanks, they were clearly Aeldari, specifically identified as Drukhari by Imperial records.
Axion understood that the Drukhari were more sadistic than their kin, but the sheer irrationality of this internal conflict was something the Iron Man found difficult to compute. They seemed driven by a deep-seated hatred that even the immediate prospect of death could not extinguish.
The Void Sword currently had no active point-defense weaponry available, so Axion simply waited, watching the spectacle with cold detachment while mobilizing a massive mechanical contingent to the relevant sector.
Once the survivors landed on the outer hull, these forces would be deployed from the internal hangars to "sanitize" the deck, provided, of course, the Drukhari didn't turn into a layer of red mist upon impact.
Malys did not yet know what awaited her, but she took cold comfort in the fact that she had won her right to survive the descent.