"What sorcery is this?" Belial muttered inwardly as he beheld the Deathmaster's multi-form phantasm.
By all accounts, this was a psychic phenomenon, yet it felt distinct from the sorcery of a human psyker. The Warp energy being harnessed was miniscule, yet it was channeled with such surgical precision that it clouded the senses entirely—the signature craft of the Eshin Sorcerers.
Without a word of boast, the four Snikchs struck simultaneously from all cardinal directions like a swirling vortex of blades. Belial, forced into a desperate defensive posture, could only move to shield his primary vitals—his head and twin hearts. Instantly, a searing agony lanced through his back!
Yet, as the three Weeping Blades bit deep, the Grand Master of the Deathwing realized with keen transhuman clarity that no impacts had landed from the other directions. The other three figures were nothing more than hollow illusions.
Belial pivoted with all his remaining strength to cleave the true Snikch behind him, but he was a fraction of a second too late. Snikch had already vaulted backward, flicking a volley of poison-slicked shuriken toward the Grand Master's ocular lenses.
Belial raised his left vambrace to parry, but he failed to notice that the final shuriken was tethered to a length of iron wire! With a violent tug, Snikch used the wire to slingshot himself back toward his target at terminal velocity, his blades descending in a lethal arc.
"Argh!"
Blood sprayed across the cold deck as the Lion of the battlefield let out a strangled cry of pain, instantly suppressed by his iron will. The remaining Deathwing Terminators watched in horror.
Grand Master Belial, a warrior virtually undefeated in close-quarters combat, had his left arm severed at the elbow. The wound did not bleed red; it seeped with a foul, necrotic ichor.
Behind his ninja cowl, Snikch's vermillion eyes stared pitilessly at Belial, already marking the Grand Master's throat for the final stroke.
Belial refused to suffer such an indignity. He raised his remaining arm, his power sword shimmering as he tried to lung forward, but the neurotoxins coating the Weeping Blades finally overcame his physiology. His knees buckled, and he collapsed.
"Lord Belial!" the Terminators bellowed in alarm.
As Snikch leaped to deliver the coup de grâce, a hail of bolt shells tore through the air toward him. At the last possible millisecond, the Deathmaster rolled through the impact craters and vanished into the fog.
Several Terminators maintained a suppressing fire, while the others hoisted the semi-conscious Belial onto their shoulders.
"Objective neutralized! Activate teleport homers!"
Snikch realized the "man-things" were attempting to extract. He shrieked a command: "Kill-slaughter them! Leave none-none!"
The Black Thirteen surged forward, but even the most elite assassins find the frontal assault of a Terminator squad a daunting prospect, especially when those veterans have resolved to trade their lives for their brothers'.
In a flare of blinding white light, Belial and a dozen of his retainers vanished, leaving behind only the small rearguard to hold the line.
"KREEEEEE!" Snikch shrieked, his voice finally cracking with pure rage. This was the first time since his rise to power that a target had escaped the death he carried!
He spun his three blades in a clockwise whirlwind and pounced. He moved between the dense bolt-patterns with impossible grace, his twin blades carving through the space between two Terminators.
The sound of shrieking ceramite filled the chamber as two hulking veterans collapsed, their suits breached. Before the remaining two could close the gap, Snikch performed a mid-air twist, lashing his tail out. The tail-blade punched through one warrior's helm, while Snikch used the momentum to carve a triangular, glowing green scar across the chest of the last Terminator.
In less than the blink of an eye, the rearguard was annihilated.
The Black Thirteen dropped to one knee in fearful respect of the Deathmaster's prowess. Snikch ignored them; his mind was fixed on the prey that had eluded him.
He walked over and retrieved Belial's severed arm. Looking at the auspex and strange devices covered in High Gothic script he could not read, he turned toward the trembling Warlock Engineers.
"Oh-oh! Great and invincible Deathmaster, Supreme Blade of Eshin! Your might shakes Skryre to its core-core!"
"Yes-yes! You are the equal of your legendary master, the Nightlord himself!"
The Warlock-Engineers, usually the most arrogant of their kind, scrambled to flatter him. Snikch threw the severed limb at them, his voice a low, vibrating hiss. "Find out. I must know-know... who is this? Who is this man-thing? None escape the hand of Snikch!"
"Yes-yes! We shall satisfy you! Lord Ikit will want to know-know as well!"
…
When Belial's arm was brought before Ikit Claw, the Chief Warlock's initial fear transformed into manic ecstasy.
"A gift! Yes-yes! Man-things, they cannot run-hide now! This world shall become a laboratory for Skryre!"
Ikit Claw, the genius engineer who had journeyed from Zavka in the Imperium Nihilus, had plundered the technologies of a dozen races. The Adeptus Mechanicus, the Aeldari, the T'au Empire, the Squats, and even the awakened Necrons had all seen their secrets stripped and added to Ikit's patchwork laboratory.
While much of the higher xenos tech remained beyond even his reach, the technology within a suit of Terminator plate was child's play for a mind like Ikit's.
The Skryre Engineers deciphered the High Gothic ciphers and secret codes, but the true prize was the teleport homer. The coordinates embedded within solved Ikit's portal-stabilization crisis in an instant.
"Quick! Fast! I will calibrate it myself! Within one month, all the man-things above our heads will burn-crumble!!"
Dozens of Warp-portals were fine-tuned by the warlocks. Simultaneously, hundreds of Doomrockets were carefully moved into position. Fearing the initial payload might be insufficient, the overseeing engineers added "personal seasonings" to the warheads to ensure the resulting contamination was as catastrophic as possible.
…
Bard Planet, Upper Hive Sector.
Lion El'Jonson had not been idle. Rumors had reached him of "dark daemons" preying upon the populace from the shadows.
At first, the Lion dismissed these as hive-myth. But as the death toll spiraled from dozens to tens of thousands, he was forced to act.
Patrols of Dark Angels knights had slowed the killings, but the disappearances never truly stopped. Worse, several Astartes had joined the list of the fallen. Survivors spoke of "devils" that moved faster than the eye could follow.
Now, the Lion stood over the wounded, comatose Belial and the battered survivors of the Deathwing.
"Father... we did not fail you," one of the dozen surviving Terminators gasped, dropping to one knee. Nearby, Apothecaries worked feverishly on Belial; they had extensive experience with the warp-tainted wounds of Chaos, but this foul necrosis was something else entirely.
"You destroyed the xenos gates?" the Lion asked. His heart grew heavy seeing his elite Deathwing reduced to a mere handful, but if it meant averting the catastrophic prophecy, the price was necessary.
"Yes, Father. We destroyed the xenos construct. Lord Belial fell holding the line during the demolition."
"Well done. I and my Father shall not forget your sacrifice." The Lion nodded, satisfied.
He had forgotten only one detail: to tell his sons that the xenos constructs were plural, not singular.
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