Clad in shinobi-shozo forged from advanced super-materials, the Eshin Assassins moved like living ink. The matte-black fabric of their cowls and cloaks was designed to baffle the most sensitive psychic auguries and mechanical sensors, granting these scions of Clan Eshin entry into the most forbidden sanctums.
For these "shadow-blades" of the Under-Empire, survival was a relentless pursuit of KPIs. From the lowly Slave Rat upward, every member of Clan Eshin lived under the shadow of brutal, Darwinian culling. This ceaseless pressure drove the assassins to undertake ever-more suicidal missions, all to solidify their standing within the clan's treacherous hierarchy.
The current cell, led by a veteran Eshin Assassin, consisted of a team of Deathrunners. These were the premier killers of the clan, second only to the Master Assassins themselves, yet the gulf between their current rank and true mastery was an abyss few ever crossed.
"Go! Scent-seek the intelligence… sow the terror of Eshin-Eshin!" the Assassin hissed, his voice a rasping command.
"Yes-yes!" the Deathrunners chirped in unison before vanishing into the gloom.
Watching the aspirants depart, the veteran curled his lip in a sneer of cold disdain. To infiltrate a Necron tomb and extract secrets from an ancient Dynasty was a task with a near-certain mortality rate. But such was the way of the clan; every master had survived by stepping over the corpses of the weak.
As the Assassin prowled the shadows, the Necron necro-matrices below suddenly flared with a violent emerald radiance. He froze, thinking his presence had been compromised, but soon realized he was not the target. From the teleportation matrices, ranks of Necron Warriors and Immortals emerged, their mechanical gait rhythmic and inexorable as they marched toward a distant engagement.
Suddenly, a hail of shuriken whistled through the air. An Aeldari Jetbike tore into the chamber like a bolt of lightning, its rider clad in a form-fitting mesh-suit and crowned with the terrifying visage of a Howling Banshee mask.
These Aspect Warriors vaulted from their moving transports, activating their power armor and leaping into the fray. Their Chainswords and Power Swords hummed with lethal energy, shearing through the living metal of the newly-reawakened Necron Warriors with surgical ease.
"Quickly! We must sabotage the matrices before they encircle us!" an Asuryani Warlock shouted, leaping from his bike to join the assault.
The hyper-technology of the Necrons was a nightmare of stasis fields and techno-sorcery that defied conventional reason. Even the Aeldari, masters of their own esoteric arts, trod carefully, lest they be cast into some lightless temporal oubliette by the tomb's defensive mechanisms.
"Oh-ho-ho-ho!" The Kabalite Warriors of the Drukhari were far less cautious. Many among them were veteran tomb-raiders who saw this not as a war, but as a golden opportunity for plunder.
Splinter Rifles and Shuriken Catapults spat death, shattering Necron constructs before they could fully calibrate. Yet, the Necrons did not remain idle. Their Gauss Flayers erupted in beams of molecular deconstruction.
An Aeldari warrior caught in the beam let out a soul-piercing shriek as his body was unmade atom by atom, his essence pulled toward the gauss muzzle in a process as agonizing as being flayed by a thousand invisible blades.
The Warlock rushed toward a glowing, pulsating device, his hands moving in a blur as he attempted to bypass its arcane security. Suddenly, time itself seemed to recoil. The half-deciphered device reverted to its pristine state, and the fallen Necron Warriors rose back to their feet without the need for a resurrection orb.
"What?!" the Warlock gasped.
"You... pathetic Aeldari. Still clinging to your delusions of grandeur," a voice crackled, heavily synthesized, yet dripping with vivid, ancient mockery.
From a sarcophagus-shaped matrix, a Chronomancer drifted forward. Its upper torso retained a skeletal, humanoid form, but its lower half was a writhing mass of metallic tentacles. In its grip, it held a staff topped with an orb of shifting chronons.
"Have you grown tired of hiding in your dying worlds? Have you come here to find your end?" the Chronomancer mocked, his tentacles hoisting him high above the interlopers.
"By Isha's grace, you phantoms of the Necrontyr have no future. But for us, the tide is turning," the Warlock countered, raising his witchblade to meet the Chronomancer's challenge.
"Foolish!" Stung by the truth, the Chronomancer's fury flared. He leveled his Staff of Tomorrow at the Aeldari thieves, unleashing a stasis field saturated with temporal charges.
Those Aeldari unable to evade the shimmering wave were instantly encased, frozen in a perpetual, unchanging second of time. Simultaneously, the Necron legionaries raised their weapons as one, unleashing a coordinated volley of green fire.
Hidden in the rafters, the Eshin Assassin cared nothing for the battle. His amber eyes were fixed solely on the Chronomancer.
"Target... found-located... YES-YES!" The assassin checked a tattered mission scroll. He was certain that this tentacled iron-thing carried exactly what he needed: a Staff of Tomorrow, a Chronometron, and a Timesplinter Cloak.
The assassin gripped his pair of Weeping Blades. His long, powerful tail, trained since birth to be as dextrous as a third limb, tightened its hold on a Warpstone Shuriken.
The Necron's "magic-science" was indeed perverse. Even the Warlock, a master of blade and psyche, could find no opening against the Chronomancer's artifacts. The Chronometron allowed the Necron to exist slightly out of phase with time, glimpsing the future and adjusting his movements before an attack could even land, while the Timesplinter Cloak wove disparate timelines together into an impenetrable shroud.
But the Eshin Assassin merely watched, cold and patient. He possessed total confidence. His Weeping Blades were a gift from the Great Horned Rat, forged to slay any foe of the Under-Empire. He only needed one opening for a killing blow.
Distantly, the teleportation matrices began to flicker and shut down, perhaps a Deathrunner had been discovered and had triggered a failsafe. The Chronomancer paused, receiving a frantic data-tether report.
"Impossible... an intruder?" the Chronomancer muttered to himself. He found it inconceivable; the Dynasty's vital systems were protected by stasis-locked corridors. Conventional weapons should have simply phased through the temporal displacement.
The Eshin Assassin saw his moment. He lunged from the darkness!
"What was that?!" a Howling Banshee cried, catching only a flash of green-sickly light. The speed of the movement was enough to unnerve even an Aeldari.
"Childish!" the Chronomancer hissed. Through his Chronometron, he glimpsed the flickering micro-second of the future and maxed the power to his Timesplinter Cloak.
Yet, the pinnacle of Necron science, the mastery over the temporal flow, was forcibly buckled by the raw, chaotic influence of the Warp. The Weeping Blades, dripping with the mutagenic essence of the Chaos, ignored the displacement.
The Assassin's first blade punched through the Timesplinter Cloak's defenses, burying itself in the Chronomancer's mechanical chest. With a fluid twist, his second blade drove upward through the metallic jaw.
"YES-YES! Target secured! Mission complete!" As the mechanical body began to lose cohesion, preparing to phase-out to a repair bay, the Assassin struck twice more, severing the metal hands clutching the Staff of Tomorrow and the Chronometron.
The entropic power of the Warp had twisted the Necron's technology against itself. After all, they served the God of Distortion.
"What?! Skaven!"
The Aeldari cried out in shock, but the Eshin Assassin had no interest in them. He slammed a Warp-smoke bomb onto the floor and vanished into the roiling green haze.
The "iron-things" of Clan Resilience had offered a high price for these artifacts, and the more impossible the mark, the higher the Assassin would rise.
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