---o---
"The Hive. Defiled again."
The cold voice fell like a bucket of ice water poured directly over the center of whatever was animating Sola Altera's presence. In that instant, the entity became aware of itself.
A bloated and distorted body. Limbs beyond counting. Features that defied categorization.
"AAAH!"
A piercing shriek tore through the hall.
At the same moment, eight crystal towers blazed with blood-red radiance.
Zhou Ye had felt sufficiently nauseated, on reflection, to contribute two additional towers to the original six. He had done this on general principle, specifically the principle of making Slaanesh's situation as unpleasant as possible.
Eight crystal towers now stood in the chamber.
Khorne's sacred number.
In the Warp, a roar shook the Immaterium from one end to the other. An incomplete and corrupted ritual, contaminated at a critical moment with the number of the Blood God, had just caught Khorne's personal attention.
Khorne looked. Khorne saw Slaanesh.
Khorne has always despised Slaanesh and everything associated with what he regards as weak and degenerate excess. No additional prompting was required.
The Blood God's howl rang through all nine layers of the Warp simultaneously. Slaanesh's daemon legions, who had been marshaled just outside realspace and waiting for the ritual to open the way, ran directly into the full weight of Khorne's answering host.
And because the ritual itself was fundamentally Slaaneshi in nature, even with Zhou Ye's modifications, the underlying structure of the summoning altar prevented Khorne from crossing into the material realm directly. From Khorne's perspective, someone had apparently stolen his people's altar and given it to Slaanesh. He was not going to do nothing about that.
In any case, Khorne's reasons for hitting Slaanesh were always essentially the same regardless of provocation.
The Warp battle ignited in a single instant.
As for Zhou Ye himself, he had become considerably more nauseated than before.
In the moment when his gaze locked with the entity on stage, something unexpected had happened. His perception had pierced straight through those three eyes and through the veil between realities, carrying him momentarily into the Warp directly behind them.
What he saw there is not something that can be described with any precision. He had watched a considerable quantity of extreme cinema in his previous life. Creature features. Body horror. Things with too many limbs and the wrong number of faces. He had believed, until this moment, that he had seen most of what that genre could produce.
He had been wrong.
His original intention had been simply to destroy the altar in realspace. The extra two towers had been the result of wanting to make things maximally unpleasant for those responsible. The Warp grand brawl that followed was, he felt, an acceptable bonus to that goal.
He also noticed, in the Warp behind the entity's eyes, something that might have been a large pink manta-ray shape, and next to it, something serpentine that moved in a distinctly familiar way.
"Fulgrim. With Slaanesh?"
He muttered it before he could stop himself, and then the moment of Warp-sight ended abruptly.
"AAAH!"
The mass of flesh on the stage trembled. The entity on the platform was staring at him now, that enormous and wrongly-shaped body visibly shaking. All the organs on its surface that should not have been there caught the light at nauseating angles. The veil between what it appeared to be and what it was had torn.
She was the only one who could see clearly. Everyone else in the hall continued embracing each other and spinning in their ecstatic dance.
On the stage, the Inquisitor in the robes covered in desecrated symbols reached for his bolt pistol with unsteady hands.
Slowly, he raised it to his own head.
"For the God-Emperor. For His Majesty. Come with me to hell."
BANG.
The Inquisitor's head came apart.
The Keeper of Secrets attached to him produced a screaming detonation of its own. The soul it had been planning to enjoy at its leisure had just exploded. Now without a body, it could not simply retreat to the Warp in the usual way. In the material realm, it was in a state of extreme vulnerability.
Which was when it felt a very large hand close around what it was.
Then.
Burp.
Another Greater Daemon on the menu. Only a weakened spirit, but still a Greater Daemon.
Zhou Ye was genuinely pleased by the unexpected bonus.
---o---
In the Warp, within a certain palace.
The youngest of the divine entities associated with the Aeldari race was in the middle of her usual reverie when she felt something.
A gaze. Black, cold, with the quality of a singularity, pressing through her follower's eyes and reaching directly into her palace.
From that gaze she felt contempt. Disgust. The particular expression of a sovereign regarding something too insignificant to name.
And then what she felt from the soul behind those eyes hit her.
It was brilliant in the way that a soul-stone is brilliant. It was vast in the way that only the oldest and most extraordinary things are vast. She had existed since before the fall of her people's civilization and she had never seen a soul shine like this. For one disorienting moment she had the sensation of being looked at directly by the Emperor of Mankind Himself.
She let out a long, shuddering cry of absolute delight.
The sound reverberated through every corridor of her palace. Every celebration in every chamber paused for a fraction of a second. Even her most prized dancer stopped moving and looked at her mistress with genuine confusion. She could not imagine what had caused her master to react this way, or what connection the soul her master had been watching could possibly have to this.
The serpentine figure standing nearby also registered confusion, and turned to look behind him.
Because in the moment just before, he had felt the sensation of something looking at him. The kind of feeling that raises the back of the neck.
Then the veil collapsed around the dancer. She saw her own true reflection and produced a screaming cry of her own. No one in the palace noticed.
The Dark Prince reached through the dancer's eyes to find the source of that gaze. There was nothing. The line of sight pulled away and showed only blood-red light.
"KHORNE."
In the opulent palace, the Dark Prince produced a sound that was considerably less dignified than usual.
Shalaxi Helbane, the Monarch of the Hunt, stepped forward from the court and departed the palace at the head of sixty-six Slaanesh legions. The objective: destroy whatever forces of Khorne had dared to reach for what was Slaanesh's to covet.
At the same time, sensing the movement of Slaanesh's forces, Khorne did not know or care what had prompted it.
You want war? We give you war.
An'ggrath the Unbound moved at the head of eighty-eight Bloodthirsters and advanced toward the engagement.
An even larger war erupted in the Warp in the same instant.
Only in the Warp.
---o---
In the material realm, the entity who had lost her veil and seen her own true shape fell from the ornate platform her six carriers had been bearing aloft. She crawled toward the owner of those black eyes on her hands and remaining limbs, every movement an act of desperate supplication.
She was begging. Begging for someone to give her a peaceful and permanent end.
A golden flash lit the space around her.
An enormous armored foot came down.
The mutated head came apart under it.
Cannon fire and boltgun reports rolled through the hall in waves that echoed off every surface.
Thirteen Centurion squads, each accompanied by a Terminator unit, fired without discrimination into every living presence in the hall except Zhou Ye.
The magnificent chamber became a river.
Zhou Ye walked through it at a measured pace and approached the twitching mass of corrupted flesh. Worse than Nurgle's offerings, if he was being honest with himself about it. The head had been crushed but the entity had not died from that alone. He looked at it for a tenth of a second, pinched his nose, and fed it into the conversion device.
A pulse of concentrated energy entered his reserves.
The Quintus excursion had been reasonably productive overall.
And as the Bolter fire swept through the hall in continuous overlapping waves, the ritual collapsed at its foundation. The assembled souls, instead of forming the concentrated energy that would have torn a breach between realspace and the Warp, dissolved into nothing under the fire. The breach would not open.
"I said my plan was perfect."
Zhou Ye observed the landscape of the hall and the steady pace of his warriors collecting anything valuable and sending it through to the Thousand-Person Theater.
He said it with genuine satisfaction.
No need to call the Grey Knights. He had handled it himself.
The only thing he was annoyed about was his own momentary expectation. There was absolutely no reason to have expected anything from a Slaanesh situation. He had just ruined his own eyes. At least Nurgle's things were visibly, obviously inhuman from the beginning. You knew what you were looking at. Slaanesh operated near enough to human aesthetics that the horror of what lay underneath had a very particular texture to it. The uncanny valley, fully occupied.
From this point forward: any Slaanesh manifestation encountered gets eliminated immediately. No curiosity. No observation.
"I am not a god. Just a person. These things genuinely disgust me. Clear the entire palace. Leave nothing."
He stepped sideways and left through the nearest exit, the hall cleaning itself behind him.
His plan had been perfect tonight. He was not going to say otherwise.
The Slaanesh elements had been an unexpected bonus, not the main objective. A useful discovery, efficiently disposed of. The actual plan, the plan to acquire a Rogue Trader Dynasty Warrant, remained on track. Sokk Oliveira was already en route to assemble his fleet.
As for the palace itself and everyone who had been in it: heretic cultists conducting a large-scale sacrifice did not invite their guests. They gathered them. Every person inside that building had been part of the ritual whether they understood it or not. The corruption was already done. There had been no other choice.
He stepped out of the palace and his vox-caster chimed.
"How was the banquet?"
Sokk's voice. The man had sensed something wrong and left early, which meant he had avoided corruption.
"I am not sure. It was very noisy. I stepped out for some air and when I came back the doors had sealed. I could not get back in, so I returned to the hotel."
He glanced back at the corridor behind him, its gates locked and defensive barriers now active, and shrugged with complete innocence.
"Pity. In any case. Would you be interested in signing a long-term trade agreement? Meet me at my hotel tomorrow."
"We can discuss it..."
"Good."
He ended the vox-link and walked on.
The Altera family's palace, in the wake of the Terminator and Centurion fire, contained nothing alive. The squads switched to incinerators after confirming the kills, burning everything thoroughly. Corrupted blood typically carried its own residual corruption effect, and eliminating that required fire rather than Bolter rounds. When they were done, the space was an open and silent ruin.
The Terminators teleported back to the Hyperion to resupply. The operation had encountered no resistance they could not handle. The family's entire core membership, without exception, had been eliminated.
Not cruelty. Calculation. Zhou Ye did not have the right to decide the fate of thousands. But he had even less right to leave hundreds of billions of people exposed to what those thousands would have spread.
---o---
The following morning, the patrol sentinels assigned to the district found the Altera family's palace conspicuously dark for the first time anyone could remember.
They forced the doors eventually, and immediately stopped moving.
The entire grand hall was covered in impact craters. The pattern and size of those craters was consistent with Astartes-pattern weapons. Everything and everyone inside the Altera family's possession had been reduced to charred remains, the floor scorched throughout by the residual heat of sustained heavy weapons fire.
The Lord Sector was informed within the hour. He attempted to contact the local Inquisitor. The Inquisitor was not reachable.
At roughly the same time, a Black Ship cleared the Mandeville Point and began its approach.
"Report from local authorities: suspected Astartes-level assault on a major noble family, palace interior extensively burned, requesting Inquisitorial investigation."
Chris read the incoming message with the expression of a man who has just realized he was late to a problem he has not yet identified.
He went directly to the planetary authority, Victrix Guard veterans at his side, and was taken immediately to the palace.
Looking at the impact craters lining every surface, every person in the group took a slow breath in.
The craters were Terminator-pattern. One squad at minimum, possibly several, had operated here with complete freedom of movement and encountered nothing capable of slowing them down.
Then his investigation continued deeper into the palace.
His expression deteriorated steadily as he progressed.
Because throughout the entire building, Slaanesh's marks were everywhere. The corruption itself had been comprehensively eliminated. But the Slaaneshi ritual symbols had not been erased. Someone had destroyed everything capable of acting on the corruption and left the markers in place, apparently deliberately.
Chris called the Lord Sector and every noble of significant standing in the hive together within the hour, and transmitted a formal request for Inquisitorial reinforcement to the wider sector. What followed would be a full purge of the Quintus Hive. The process would take decades.
---o---
In Slaanesh's palace, the atmosphere was difficult to characterize.
An inexplicable brawl with Khorne had erupted without warning and concluded without resolution. Slaanesh could not account for any of the causal chain that had produced it.
Fulgrim was similarly at a loss.
The two of them were currently consumed by the same question: who had looked at them from that direction.
"I can sense a family bound to me by a blood covenant," the Dark Prince said, turning toward Fulgrim. "They are making their way toward us."
---o---