"Apologies for the interruption, my lord. Have you concluded your discourse with the gladiator? He is scheduled for redeployment in the arena."
The cybernetically enhanced guide stepped through the chamber hatch with the practiced caution of someone used to handling dangerous patrons.
Her ocular implants glowed as they swept over Grot, then over Heavy Hammer, then over the blood-stained maintenance restraints and discarded surgical tools around them. Her servo-jointed limbs moved almost silently, disturbed only by the faint hiss of worn hydraulics and the soft internal whir of compensators fighting age, cheap replacement parts, and too many years of arena service.
She had barely finished speaking when Grot raised his gauntleted hand.
A pinpoint blast of scatter-laser fire erupted from his wrist.
The crimson lance punched through the center of her torso before she could even flinch.
For half a second, she remained standing. Then the hole in her body widened as flesh, augmetic ribwork, synth-muscle, and subdermal plating collapsed inward around the superheated wound. The smell hit first: scorched meat, burned polymer, vaporized lubricant. Her mouth opened, but only a wet mechanical click escaped. Then she fell in a twitching heap, her limbs spasming against the floor until the last damaged servos died.
Grot did not look down at her.
Without a word, he reached back and unseated his grav-hammer. The weapon came free with a heavy magnetic clunk. With a casual, almost dismissive flick, he hurled it toward Heavy Hammer.
Heavy Hammer caught it in his servo-clamped pincer with an audible metallic clank. The pincer tightened around the haft hard enough to make the weapon's casing groan. For a moment, the ruined gladiator simply stared at it, as if judging whether the hammer belonged in his hands or was merely another chain disguised as a gift.
Grot stepped forward, his power armor humming with restrained violence.
Behind him, Heavy Hammer followed, broad shoulders hunched, optics burning, every motion carrying the ugly promise of years of pain finally given a direction.
Outside, the ferrocrete walls shuddered with the sound of approaching boots.
The arena enforcers had registered the weapon discharge. The chamber alarms had not even finished cycling before they arrived.
Dozens of enforcers stood in formation, las-carbines raised and primed to fire.
Their armor bore the sigils of the Coliseum Watch: polished enough for noble spectators, thick enough to intimidate pit-scum, and nowhere near strong enough for what had just stepped out of the gladiator cells. Red targeting runes flickered across their visors as they locked onto Grot's warplate. A few sights shifted toward Heavy Hammer, then hesitated as their systems struggled to classify the mutilated giant behind him.
A commanding voice broke the tension like glass.
"OPEN FIRE!"
The hallway detonated in a maelstrom of las-bolts and muzzle flashes.
Beams of concentrated light slashed through the corridor, scorching the walls black and filling the air with ozone, hot dust, and vaporized paint. Lasfire struck Grot's armor in flashing bursts, blooming against his gravitic shield in brief ripples before sliding aside or dispersing into harmless heat. The impacts would have cut a normal man apart. To Thunderborn warplate, they were irritation.
But Grot did not slow down.
He advanced with deliberate, mechanical calm, shoulder cannon rotating into position. The weapon's charging coils burned white-hot. The enforcers saw the glow and understood, too late, that their volley had changed nothing.
With a roar of discharge, the cannon opened fire.
The narrow corridor became a slaughterhouse.
The first line of enforcers vanished in a storm of burning energy. Armor ruptured. Bodies folded, burst, or came apart where they stood. Men who had spent their careers beating starving underhivers and dragging gladiators to the pits were erased before they could retreat. Their flak plates offered no more protection than paper held before a furnace.
Some screamed. Most did not have time.
Blood boiled across the ferrocrete. Weapon casings melted in twitching hands. The corridor filled with smoke, sparks, and the metallic stink of scorched human remains.
A new wave of enforcers surged forth from an adjacent corridor.
Only for Heavy Hammer to charge forward, roaring.
"FOR THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD!"
The words did not sound like a battle cry anymore. They sounded like a reflex carved into him by pain, victory, and worship.
His servo-driven pincer spun the grav-hammer into a brutal arc.
The first wave didn't stand a chance.
The hammer struck the lead enforcer and the gravitic pulse turned the man's torso into red ruin inside his armor. The shockwave hurled the bodies behind him backward. Helmets cracked against walls. Ribs folded. Arms spun away still clutching weapons.
Heavy Hammer pressed forward before the dead had finished falling. He swung again and again, each blow crude but terrifyingly committed. Where Grot killed like an execution system, Heavy Hammer killed like a man trying to fill a hole inside himself with bodies.
Grot lifted his armored gauntlet toward his brother.
"You want to use this?" he asked, angling the modular weapon mount so Heavy Hammer could see the compact scatter-laser assembly locked into his forearm.
Heavy Hammer scoffed, shaking his head. "I do not need weapons for the weak."
With a contemptuous grunt, he threw the grav-hammer back toward Grot.
Grot caught it one-handed, mag-locks in his gauntlet clamping around the haft. He gave his brother a flat look, then slung the weapon across his back again.
Heavy Hammer turned to the corpses instead. His pincer dragged through the ruined pile, shoving aside broken carbines, severed limbs, and shattered helmets until he found something that suited his mood better.
Finally, he found it.
A massive, two-handed war axe, its steel edge dented and rusted from years of slaughter.
It was not a noble weapon. It had no machine-spirit worthy of hymn or incense. It was a pit-fighter's tool, heavy enough to split bone, simple enough to survive neglect, and ugly enough to look honest in his hands.
He hefted it, rolling his shoulders as he tested the weight.
Then he grinned, feral and mad, teeth flashing beneath a face smeared with blood.
"Perfect."
More guards arrived, but this time, one of them towered over the rest.
A slab of gene-bulked muscle, over 2.3 meters tall, with shoulders like riot shields and fists the size of servo-skulls.
An Ogryn.
The brute's armor had been patched with arena plating and industrial scrap. A shock-collar circled his thick neck, its control runes blinking red as handlers behind him shouted commands he barely understood. His brow was heavy, his skull scar-pocked, his small eyes wet with confusion and eagerness.
Ogryns were abhuman descendants of mankind, shaped across generations by crushing gravity, brutal conditions, and worlds where survival favored muscle over subtlety. Their bones were dense, their skin thick, their bodies powerful enough to tear armored men apart with their hands. Their minds were simpler, but simple did not mean harmless. Simple meant direct.
The Ogryn scratched his oversized skull, lips twitching as primitive neurons struggled to form words.
"Ogryn... gonna... gonna... SMASH!"
And he charged.
The colossal brute barreled forward, gargantuan fists raised.
The corridor shook beneath him. Broken weapons jumped on the floor. Even the remaining enforcers scrambled backward, suddenly aware that releasing the arena Ogryn inside a confined passage had solved one problem by creating another.
Even Grot, clad in Thunderborn power armor, felt a rare instinctive unease.
But Heavy Hammer did not yield.
He bellowed his own war cry, lifted his axe, and sprinted forward.
They collided like siege engines.
The impact was not elegant. Flesh, metal, augmetics, and armor slammed together with a crack that ran through the walls. Heavy Hammer's feet left the ground. The Ogryn's sheer mass drove him backward and smashed him into a steel support column hard enough to dent it.
His newly installed augmetic arm was torn clean from its socket, sparks and dark arterial blood spraying in all directions.
But Heavy Hammer only laughed.
His face twisted into an ecstatic snarl.
"FOR THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD!"
Grot raised his cannon, lining up a killing shot.
But his brother rushed back into the fight, blocking the firing angle.
"Damn it!" Grot cursed, then charged in himself.
The Ogryn swung, his fist like a wrecking ball, crashing into Heavy Hammer's metal-plated skull.
Bone cracked. Armor dented.
And yet, Heavy Hammer grinned as he took the blow head-on.
He answered with the axe, burying the blade deep into the Ogryn's forearm. The weapon caught in dense bone. Heavy Hammer twisted it with both remaining strength and machine-assisted leverage until the wound widened into a ragged trench.
The Ogryn howled, but retaliated.
A second punch connected.
Another rib shattered.
Still, Heavy Hammer kept swinging.
The gladiator's movements grew less coordinated with every blow he took. His balance was wrong. His missing arm bled. His newly damaged socket sparked. Any sane fighter would have fallen back, let Grot take the shot, and survived.
Heavy Hammer was not sane.
Blow after blow landed.
Until the Ogryn made a fatal mistake.
He raised both fists, preparing to bring them down like a sledgehammer.
At that moment, Grot struck.
He stepped in low, ripped the grav-hammer from his back, and drove it into the Ogryn's knee.
The gravitic core flared. The joint did not merely break; it collapsed inward, bone and cartilage compressed under a focused wave of force. The Ogryn's roar turned into a confused bellow as his leg folded beneath him.
The Ogryn stumbled.
And Heavy Hammer seized the opportunity.
He leapt high, raising his axe.
And buried it in the Ogryn's skull.
The blade split the brute's head from crown to jaw. For a heartbeat, the Ogryn remained upright, mouth still open, as if his body had not yet received the news. Then Heavy Hammer wrenched the axe free and struck again.
The second blow finished the work.
The Ogryn's massive corpse crumpled.
Its head separated from its body, rolling across the blood-slicked floor.
Heavy Hammer lifted it high, his face streaked with crimson, roaring:
"GLORY TO THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD!"
The remaining enforcers hesitated, their nerve breaking.
Then they broke ranks and ran.
That saved some of them for three seconds. No more.
Heavy Hammer sprinted after them, his metallic limbs clanking.
Though he was slower than the fleeing enforcers, his rage never waned.
Some shoved their comrades down, hoping to slow their own deaths.
Heavy Hammer gladly obliged.
Every fallen body was hacked apart before he resumed pursuit.
Grot followed several paces behind, not out of weakness, but because he was watching his brother now. Not the guards. Not the exits. Heavy Hammer. Every shout, every laugh, every unnecessary strike made the unease under Grot's ribs grow heavier.
The chase led them out of the tunnels, straight into the open coliseum.
The guards scattered.
But Heavy Hammer no longer cared.
Instead, he turned toward the center of the arena, where two gladiators fought.
They had been locked in a fierce duel, one armed with chain-blades, the other with a shock-spear, both circling through the blood-dark sand beneath the screaming crowd. Neither understood that their match had already ended.
Heavy Hammer charged into them, his war axe flashing.
They barely had time to react before their heads were severed in a single brutal swing.
The audience fell silent.
The silence spread in layers. First the pit-gangers at the lower bars stopped cheering. Then the merchants and flesh-brokers in the middle tiers leaned forward, mouths half-open. Finally, even the nobles behind the tinted viewing glass ceased their laughter and their wagers. Thousands of people who had paid to watch murder suddenly realized the murder had stopped obeying the rules.
Hundreds of wealthy nobles, gang lords, and corrupt officials sat in stunned horror.
Then Heavy Hammer raised his axe, drenched in fresh blood, and shouted.
〈"PRAISE BE TO THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD!"〉
His voice carried strangely. The vox-horns did not amplify it, yet it rolled through the arena all the same, raw and hungry, pressing against the skulls of those who heard it. As he lifted the gore-drenched weapon high, something small slipped from his belt.
It tumbled through the blood-slicked air and landed upright in the widening crimson pool at his feet.
A tiny brass effigy of the Champion of Blood himself.
The idol should have been nothing. A cheap charm. A pit-born token hammered together by desperate hands. But the moment it touched the blood, the arena seemed to draw a single breath.
The assembled crowd, men and women who had gorged themselves on excess, who had thought themselves untouchable, stared, transfixed by the unholy idol.
A few gasped, clutching at their pendants of the Imperial Creed or whispering hurried prayers to the God-Emperor.
The brass figure's crude face caught the arena lights. To some, its mouth appeared to curl into a grin. To others, the fresh blood around it seemed to thicken and creep toward its feet, drawn by an appetite no sane mind wanted to name.
Grot saw it too. His hand tightened around the grav-hammer.
"No," he muttered.
Seconds later, a shriek split the silence.
The spell was broken.
Panic spread like wildfire. Nobles shoved past each other, trampling the weak.
A woman in an embroidered dress of gold and lapis screamed as she was thrown to the ground, her silken garb torn and soiled beneath the trampling mob.
A merchant-lord, bloated with years of excess, was crushed under the weight of panicked bodies, his pleas lost in the chaos.
Gang lords drew pistols. Bodyguards fired into the crowd without knowing what they were shooting at. Servitors continued offering trays of drinks until fleeing patrons knocked them over. Above the arena, emergency shutters began to descend, too slowly to matter.
And in the eye of this chaos, Heavy Hammer grinned.
His massive frame heaved with exhilaration. He turned his gaze toward the stands, toward the fleeing cattle, his mind consumed with but a single thought: more blood.
He lunged forward, eager to continue his bloody worship.
But before he could ascend the steps, a new line of enforcers poured into the arena.
They came through the service gates in disciplined ranks, shock-mauls raised, suppression shields locked together, heavy las-weapons setting into brace positions behind them. These were not corridor guards. These were the coliseum's last internal response force, the men kept for slave riots, escaped beasts, and noble scandals too loud to bury.
"Enough." Grot stepped forward, trying to stop the madness. "Let me handle this."
He did not say it for the enforcers. He said it for his brother.
For Antara. For the man who had once been more than the thing now standing ankle-deep in blood before a brass idol.
But Heavy Hammer no longer listened. He rammed into Grot, forcing him back.
The impact drove Grot's armored boots through the arena sand and into the iron decking beneath. The grav-hammer shifted in his grip. For one instant, Grot did not strike back.
Heavy Hammer's eyes burned with madness.
His axe gleamed in the crimson light.
And with a feral snarl, he declared his intent:
"IN THE NAME OF THE CHAMPION OF BLOOD, I PROCLAIM YOUR DEATH!"