Chapter 12: He's Actually Going to Kill It?
Rosen looked at the two faces on the hull plating without any expression.
Numbers 1 through 5 tightened their grip on their Catachan Fangs a little.
Rosen smiled quietly. "The only thing I've ever been afraid of is the mushroom soup our Catachan company cook makes."
"And you two don't even come close."
Both Imps went still for a moment.
The first one let out a laugh that was sharper and more grating than before.
"You'll cry."
"All humans cry eventually. We've seen so many of them. Imperial generals, Inquisitors, even Space Marines, in the darkness of the warp they all cry. You mortals have such fragile souls. Like paper. One tear and they're gone..."
"You want to know what your biggest problem is?" Rosen said.
Both Imps tilted their heads sideways with something resembling curiosity.
"You talk too much."
Rosen exploded forward, driving the Catachan Fang into the first Imp's face on the left wall at full speed.
An Imp could push its face through a wall. That didn't mean it could pull itself back at will.
Projecting a physical presence from the warp into realspace required an anchor point. The portion of the body that had come through was temporarily fixed on the realspace side.
Pulling back required a brief de-anchoring process.
Rosen moved before that process could complete.
The point of the Catachan Fang went through the ugly face with precision.
The blade entered through the left eye socket and drove through the entire skull.
At the same moment, Rosen's left hand shot out to the other side.
In a cabin barely a metre and a half wide, his reach let him work both directions at once. His fingers locked around the neck of the one-eyed Imp on the right wall, which was still pushing itself through.
The one-eyed Imp had clearly not expected a mortal to go on the offensive against two warp entities. It had put all its attention into working on their emotions.
The instant Rosen's fingers closed around its neck, it realised in horror that it was being physically hauled out of the wall.
"Gah!"
The one-eyed Imp's full body was wrenched violently through the blurred material interface.
Its complete form was now exposed in realspace.
A grotesque little creature roughly forty centimetres tall, covered in dark purple skin like bat membrane, two vestigial wings on its back, a long tail that forked at the end, thrashing and twisting frantically in the air.
[Minor warp entity (Imp) physically eliminated.]
[Soul energy intercepted and purified.]
[Warp Energy: +1]
That was the payout from the first Imp, the one the Catachan Fang had gone through on the left wall.
Rosen's pupils contracted slightly.
Warp Energy.
A resource type he hadn't seen before.
He didn't have time to look into it right now.
Because his left hand was currently wrapped around a violently struggling Imp.
The one-eyed Imp was thrashing with everything it had. Its tail coiled around Rosen's wrist. Its small sharp teeth bit repeatedly at his fingers, though the effect was roughly equivalent to being bitten by a mosquito several times in a row.
Once the initial shock passed, the one-eyed Imp split into a wide grin full of spite.
"Hee hee hee... you idiot!"
"You think killing my companion was impressive? You think you hurt us?"
"We are children of the warp! Kill us and you just send us home! Within days we'll coalesce again, and we'll come back! We don't die, little insect! This is something you pathetic mortals will never understand. When you die, you're dead, you turn to dust, your soul gets shredded apart by the warp's storms and then there's nothing left of you! But we come back! Again and again and again!"
It broke into a manic cackle.
"So what does it matter that you're squeezing my neck? Even if you tear me apart, before long I'll be back inside another wall somewhere, watching you cry, watching you bleed, watching you die."
The one-eyed Imp's laughter cut off abruptly.
It had just noticed something.
When a daemon was killed in realspace, its physical body dissolved within seconds into a churning residue of warp energy, which flowed back into the seam between realspace and the warp, returning to the Chaos abyss where it came from.
But nothing had been left on the left wall.
Clean. Empty.
As though its companion had never existed.
The grin on the one-eyed Imp's face faded at a speed visible to the naked eye.
"It... where did it go?"
"It should be returning to the warp. It should be coalescing. I should be able to feel its presence..."
The dark-red parasitic growths in its empty eye socket writhed frantically, as though they too could sense their host's horror.
"Why can't I feel it anymore?"
It snapped its gaze to Rosen's eyes.
"What did you do to it?"
Rosen didn't answer.
Partly because he wasn't entirely sure how the system had done it.
But from the wording of the prompt, "soul energy intercepted and purified."
The Imp's essence, its soul core, the thing that was supposed to return to the warp after its physical shell was destroyed, had been seized by the system.
True elimination.
No coalescing. No coming back.
In a universe where souls were indestructible and daemons were eternal, this kind of death was more terrifying than death itself.
The one-eyed Imp was finally afraid.
"What exactly are you?"
Rosen watched it coldly. "I'm the one asking questions here, not you."
"Tell me your true name."
A daemon's true name was the symbolic expression of its fundamental existence. Knowing a daemon's true name meant holding a degree of power over it. This was something Imperial daemonhunters and Grey Knights pursued at any cost, and a secret no daemon would willingly give up even under threat of death.
The one-eyed Imp's expression shifted.
Even under the extremity of being held by the throat, with its companion truly and permanently destroyed, the Imp's nature hadn't changed.
They were born liars, deceivers, and schemers.
Deception came as naturally to them as breathing. Even facing death, their first instinct was to try and talk their way out of it.
"True name? I don't have one! We're minor things like this, the scraps of the warp, even the Chaos Gods can't be bothered to give us names..."
Rosen tightened his grip. The single eye swivelled quickly.
"Alright, alright, since you insist on knowing, my true name is..."
"Cthukkalos Errem Zandaquil."