With a sharp motion of his hand, Manus signaled his intent. No spoken command was necessary; a dozen Librarians of the Legion of the Damned unleashed their power in unison. A searing torrent of psychic energy illuminated the sector, their empyrean sparks flaring to expose the mercurial shadows lurking in the gloom.
"Squeak-squeak-squeak!"
The rat-creatures, stripped of their shroud like uprooted weeds, transformed into streaks of darkness and lunged toward the Astartes with frantic speed. Manus glanced toward a Librarian who, in life, had served as a Chief Librarian of the loyalist Emperor's Children. The warrior spoke in a voice of flinty resolve: "Fear not. No daemon can evade the Emperor's Light."
Manus nodded, raising his warhammer, Forgebreaker. He brought the weapon down in a thunderous strike, the shockwave wrenching a dozen Eshin Vermin Herders from the warp-mists. With a devastating backswing, he reduced the rat-daemons to a gory pulp.
Bolters roared in a synchronized volley, the heavy thrum of explosive rounds shaking the chamber. Yet, only a fraction of the shadows were extinguished; the majority drifted with unnatural fluidity, weaving through the hail of fire at impossible speeds.
Fixing their transhuman sight upon the shifting glooms, the Astartes revved their chainswords, the adamantium teeth snarling. Just as the shadows reached a distance of mere meters, they leaped.
Lean, agile forms sprang into the light. These daemons were clad in soot-grey fur; though they possessed the lithe, elongated proportions of the Aeldari, their presence invoked a visceral loathing in the Astartes. Each bore a long, twitching tail coiled around a weeping green blade, recurved legs ending in filth-encrusted talons, and the narrow, twitching snout of a vermin.
Chainswords rose in a frantic parry. Clang-clang! The Eshin daemons, their initial strike thwarted, immediately doubled over, transitioning from a thrust to a wicked disemboweling slash aimed at the warriors' vulnerable midsections.
The Astartes swung downward to decapitate their foes, but the Eshin daemons were as slick as oil, evading death by a hair's breadth before unleashing a blur of counter-strikes.
Though the Astartes held the advantage in a frontal assault, the Vermin Herders fought with terrifying finesse. Their physical prowess matched the Space Marines, and their panoply of esoteric wargear was as varied as it was lethal.
Ferrus Manus moved to join the fray, but was suddenly halted by a crushing weight of oppressive shadow.
Before him stood a towering rat-beast, its head crowned by an indeterminate number of gnarled, curling horns. Standing taller than the Primarch himself, the creature brandished a Weeping Blade and a triangular throwing weapon the size of a man's torso. It had manifested without a sound.
"Interesting hairless-thing... you are worthy of my focus-sincerity." Sneek rolled his corded neck and shoulders, dismissing the Astartes he had previously slaughtered as mere warm-ups.
Lightning crackled across the head of Forgebreaker. The mechanical augmentations of Manus's power armor whirred, making his silhouette appear even more imposing.
"I have no words for daemons. You shall be extinguished before the presence of my Master!"
"Hahaha! All the world-realms shall fall beneath the Great Horned Rat's claw!"
Sneek's paws blurred into a series of ritualistic mudras, reminiscent of some ancient, forbidden shinobi art. In an instant, a dozen perfect duplicates of the Nightlord coalesced, surrounding Manus from all sides.
The real Sneek crouched low, vanishing into the storm of his own illusions as he lunged forward.
Sneek truly earned his title as the Nightlord; his movements were surgical and treacherous, his speed so extreme that even a Primarch's senses struggled to track him. To Manus, the poisoned green blades had become a shimmering fan of lethality. In less than a thousandth of a microsecond, Forgebreaker parried hundreds of strikes, yet hundreds more bit into his ceramite plate.
With a roar of fury, Manus unleashed a kinetic pulse that threw Sneek back. From his backpack assembly, several servo-arms emerged like a conjurer's trick, brandishing storm bolters and lascannons.
A relentless curtain of fire shattered Sneek's clones, but the Nightlord's true form wove another sign, channeling a surge of dark sorcery. A gale of obsidian psychic energy swept through the area. Dreadnoughts and Terminators alike were lifted from the deck, tossed about like dry leaves in a black hurricane.
When the psychic storm dissipated, the Eshin daemons had vanished.
Manus knew this was no victory. The battlefield had simply regressed into a state of chaotic uncertainty. Deep within the shadows, Sneek hissed a low, menacing mumble: "In the sun-light, the Eshin blade is no blade at all. This is not the Way of Eshin. Now, let the hairless-things feel the fear-dread."
No voice answered, but the Eshin Vermin Herders dissolved back into the darkness.
Meanwhile, as the Legion of the Damned operated without explicit tactical directives from their silent God, Manus dealt with the Craven governors of Bard's World. The "negotiations" were brief; the nobles were reduced to a slurry of gore. Manus seized total command of the Astra Militarum and Planetary Defense Forces, ordering them to purge the remaining Drukhari and seize control of the ships to repel the Ork invasion.
"Those who abandon the God-Emperor's sacred domain are beyond forgiveness! Your only path to redemption is to reclaim your home and die in His service!"
The towering, wreathed-in-fire silhouette of Ferrus Manus was a vision of absolute terror. None dared defy the Emperor's Angel.
Reorganized into disciplined squads, the guardsmen advanced with lasguns leveled, supported by Leman Russ battle tanks, pushing toward the bridge of the Aeldari vessels. Yet, they encountered no Drukhari resistance. Instead, they found only the corpses of the xenos, pinned to the bulkheads in grim, triangular patterns.
A chill ran down the guardsmen's spines.
"Get the Tech-priests to the consoles, move!" the Captain barked, looking around warily.
He failed to notice that every time his men passed a shadow, a throat was silently slit, and a body was dragged into the gloom. By the time they reached the alien control hubs, the Captain turned to find that his force of thousands had withered to a few hundred.
"What is this madness?"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Bolter fire signaled the arrival of the Astartes. Chainswords tore through several Eshin Vermin Herders. From beneath a burning helm, a voice of cold, toneless authority addressed the mortals: "Watch your every flank—up, down, left, and right—if you wish to keep your lives."
As the Legion of the Damned began a systematic purge of the shadows, Lucius looked up at the Emperor across the celestial game board. "Cheating? You are whispering the locations of my agents to them?"
The Emperor remained stoic, averting His gaze. Behind Him, a hooded old man nodded with grim satisfaction.
"Well played, Emperor."
"Indeed. And you as well, Malcador."
The Four Gods of Chaos erupted in a cacophony of laughter. It was not out of spite for the Emperor nor mockery for the Great Horned Rat, but rather the shared, dark amusement of seeing another soul frustrated by the "Anathema's" penchant for bending the rules. It was the laughter of those who had all, at one time or another, been the victim of the Corpse-God's deceptions.
"Don't think I can't play that game too," Lucius hissed, his clawed finger tracing a line across the star-chart.
In realspace, the Dark Mechanicum fleets once loyal to Vashtorr, now corrupted by the skaven blight into the verminous "Red-Robed Rat-Priests", abruptly changed course, pivoting toward Bard's World.
"Let us see what strength you have left to spare, unless you intend to forfeit the Nachmund Gauntlet and Vigilus entirely!" Lucius leaned over the table, his smile a jagged wound of shadow directed at the Emperor.
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