The Retaking of Macragge
Mikael and his squad of Blood Troopers crept quietly through the silent and ruined halls of Bunker #184, the walls of which were scarred by bullet holes and scorch marks, all overgrown by lichen and vines. A great battle had taken place here, on Macragge, during the onslaught of Hive Fleet Behemoth. The entire First Company of Ultramarines had given their lives to defend it to the last, but in the process it had become a blasted wasteland, nearly completely uninhabited. The only reason Mikael and the Dreadlords Legion of Chaos was here was that a small force of Ultramarines had been detected landing and investigating this bunker. Anything that the Ultramarines wanted, the Dreadlords would be happy to capture for themselves.
Mikael suddenly motioned his squad to a halt, a small scratching sound tickling at his Slaanesh-enhanced senses. He looked back the way they had come, but nothing was there but the large entrance chamber with the wreckage of an ancient Ultramarine cruiser crashed through it. Ahead was a long hallway with two entrances on the right wall, and farther down, one on the left. All was still.
The scratching sound came again, closer this time, and as one they all whipped around to face the section of wall that it had emanated from. Again, nothing there. Mikael motioned one of his men to investigate the wall, and he obliged his sergeant, stepping cautiously and noiselessly towards it, weapon uplifted, armored boots making no noise upon the floor. He reached it, cautiously ran his hands over it, pressed his ear to it, and finally turned back, shaking his head in confusion.
Then blood fountained out of the wound in his neck that suddenly appeared, and the Lictor clinging to the ceiling let its camouflage dissipate back into its normal red and blue coloring. As it dragged the Blood Trooper towards the ceiling screaming and writhing, Mikael and his squad opened fire with their heavily modified hellguns, but all the purple laser blasts either went awry or bounced off it's hardened chitin. Then it was gone, jumping through a hole in the ceiling. The Blood Trooper on the floor writhed and gurgled in his own blood until Mikael silenced him with a hellpistol shot to the forehead.
Their weapons, like themselves, were once weak and generally ineffective against heavily armored opponents, but when they stopped being Kasrkins and began their career as Blood Troopers of Chaos, they had received enchantments and modifications to their weapons, making them more effective than even a bolter. The versatile hellguns now fired laser blasts entwined with sorcerous energies, which generally cut through armor rather well, and they could manage a rate of fire that a bolter never could.
None of that would help them, however, if they were picked off one by one by the damn Lictor. He motioned his squad to follow him back to the entry hall, where the rest of their force was setting up a base of operations. As they turned to go back, however, they heard scratchings, similar to before, but multiplied by many more.
Mikael turned, and his eyes widened in shock as what seemed a tidal wave of Termagants poured out of a side passageway, fleshborer weapon symbiotes firing wildly with no semblance of accuracy. They came on and on, and Mikael led his Blood Troopers in a frantic run at full tilt away from them, dropping several grenades behind him as he did so. The explosions came seconds later, accompanied by the inhuman shrieks of injured Termagants, but he knew they were in no way slowed down.
Finally, they broke into the entry hall, and were heartened by the sight of two full squads of allies, one the mutated Possessed, the others the Noise Marines of Slaanesh. They had just finished setting up their heavy weapons, and as Mikael and his squad ran up, their leader turned to face them.
His name was Levistus, and it was he who had led them down the Path to Ruin, he who had tempted them from the Emperor's light with the promise of power. And he had delivered. He was dressed in ancient power armor and strangely mottled robes, and at his side hung his Daemon sword Adrammalech. But his most striking feature was his great, daemonic wings, like those of a giant red bat, which were currently folded about him like a cape.
"Report." His voice was like ice floating down a river of freezing blood.
"Down that hallway, my Lord, the Tyranid are com-"
His report was cut off by the sudden arrival of the Termagant swarm, all of them shrieking like devils as they charged full-tilt into the chamber. The Noise Marines reacted first, sonic weaponry cutting bloody swathes through them as waves of disruptive noise literally melted flesh and shattered bone. Deep lacerations appeared as sonic blasters let out high-pitched shrieking waves of noise, while the throbbing, ongoing bass note of the mighty blastmaster just shook the Termagants apart at an atomic level. Yet still they came onward, their numbers seemingly limitless.
The Blood Troopers opened fire as well, pouring beams of sorcerous energy into the enemy, slicing many completely in half with their weaponry. Mikael watched as one of the Noise Marines was hit by a fleshborer beetle fired by a Termagant, and the Marine screamed in agony as it burrowed straight through a gap in his armor at the neck, traveling into the brain in seconds. His screams cut off instantly, and he dropped to the ground.
Then Levistus began to mutter words of power behind Mikael, and as he turned to look, he watched reality begin to warp around him. Runes that glowed with a sickly purple light appeared on the floor around him, seemingly unbidden, and the rockrete floor beneath him began to shimmer and warp, like viscous blood. The air crackled with bolts of energy as he drew heavily on the realm of the Warp for his strength. His chanting came to a climax with a great shout, and he pointed straight at the still-onrushing horde.
As one, all the countless dead and mutilated corpses of the Termagants exploded in a gory conflagration, dead flesh suddenly liquefying into purple flame that detonated, filling the entire hallway with clinging, daemonic fire that screamed with a high-pitched wail, like that of a thousand souls being tortured. The rush faltered, then halted completely as those still charging out burned and died. Within seconds, all was quiet again, except for the occasional chuckle that a plume of flame gave off now and then as it consumed a corpse. Mikael grinned in appreciation of his Lord's power, and congratulated himself again on his choice of allies. In his days as a Kasrkin, he definitely would never have had the opportunity to meet a plume of flame that laughed.