Hate.
HateragepainfearrageKILL.
Hey, Vicky. Howdy-do this morning?
Invictorus is in her usual (bloody-minded) spirits today, as I straighten her from a landing crouch and guide her away from what's left of the target building. Meter-wide logs snap like toothpicks as the Warhound-class Titan grinds through the splintery wreck. Alright, who should we shoot today?
Thade just gives me a mental frown; I respond with a smiley face. Corrun projects the image of a black-clad soldier (and it is ALWAYS black - why can't special forces wear hot pink anyway?) - the personal minions of my new boss, Inquisitor Gillian. "Anyone who doesn't look like that is an enemy - which you would know if you weren't sleeping through the briefing, boss."
Oh. Right. Oops...-ish. I turn north, seeing a bunch (group? gaggle? murder? clusterfrak?) of enemies doing the same. No coordination, shitty fire discipline, eyes all pointed forward: my old Sentinel team would've eaten them for breakfast. I move Vicky forward quietly - for a 50-foot-tall machine-monster, at least.
Vicky does her best Kommando impersonation, and actually succeeds fairly well at it. Pointing her spiky feet downward and walking on 'tiptoes,' I muffle my girl's footsteps from GIANT MONSTER RUN AWAY into giant wanna-be sneaky. I make it to almost twenty feet before I'm spotted. Clowns.
Pretty much, boss, Corrun responds. As the first cultists turn towards me, I understand why I was so successful at 'sneaking.' The local yokels are Slaaneshi cultists, devoted to the Chaos God of pleasure. They're also high on some seriously screwed-up combat drugs; Vicky's autosenses are picking up near-unbelievable heart rates.
Looking over the cultists, I'm reminded why special forces shouldn't wear hot pink: they'd look too much like the enemy. Their leather, silk, jewelry, piercings and ohdearemperor I didn't know you could pierce that is bound to haunt my nightmares for a week or two. The cultists are an eclectic (read: "yikes") mix, and have weapons to match. Several rockets fly wide, and I can see several of the cultists unpacking grenades and Lucius-pattern meltabomb detected, caution advised – "Alright, frak this."
Inferno cannon firing, 1.5-second blast! "Mmm...barbequed banker." Corrun gives me a funny look at that. OK, I'll admit that it sounded creepy, even to me.
The 'friendly' special forces don't acknowledge the help, running beneath Vicky to help their comrades south of us. Ungrateful bastards. Thade somehow manages to convey a mental shrug over the mind-link in response. My Vulcan megabolter roars, Osirus plots a route forward, and I step back into the fight.
Allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and tas- actually scratch that, I don't get paid and my 'taste' hovers somewhere between propaganda holovids and dick jokes. My name is Tomas Arkady, Titan princeps and part of Inquisitor Gideon's "retinue" (read: his bitch). The love of my life stands beside me, in fifteen adamantium-clad meters of asskicking and name-taking. Invictorus is a Mars-pattern Warhound Titan, formerly of the Legio Gryphonicus - or what's left of it, at least.
With the Gryphonne system given the Tyranid-standard makeover (everything organic turned into more 'nids), the Legio Gryphonicus was on shaky legs even before my little 'incident.' After I (barely) survived a run-in with a particularly nasty variation of Nurgle's Rot, the Legio left me and my crew to the tender mercies of the Inquisition. Inquisitor Gideon decided that I was more useful to him with an intact skull, and "employed" me (without paying, the cheap bastard) to burn out particularly nasty groups of Chaos worshipers.
My crew, my girl, and I are housed on one of the Inquisitor's "repurposed" ships (Gideon killed the old crew and brought in his own flunkies). We are the cavalry, the best and last line of defense, the Big Poobah, and the Thrones Stop Here ('cuz we're really broke and need the money). Our little shit-show down on Mustafar might not have been exactly what the Inquisitor had wan-
"Hello, Princeps." Speak of the daemon…
Gliding forward, Inquisitor Gideon circled my crew as Corrun, Thade and I stopped dead. While my crew and I wore our usual drab-blue Titan clothes, Gideon was….fabulous. His bulk was concealed under a silk robe that could buy a middle-class family's room and board for a year, and he wore enough jewelry to blind someone (I'd seen him use that before). He'd lead a conversation with a kiss, and styled his hair with enough gel to deflect a lasround.
It was all a weapon. The Inquisitor's silks and fat could (and did) deflect blades. Kissing opponents let him deliver poison, and kissing allies allowed him to pass information. And yes, I'd fired a laspistol at his gelled-up hair once when I'd been sloshed.
Therefore, when the short, fat, and probably gay man spoke quietly and carefully, without a hint of theatrics, I shat bricks. Metaphorically.
Warning! Anomalous contact detected, 137 degrees range 43.6 meters – Shit.
Ignoring my crew and the vox, I swing Vicky to the right and towards the 'anomalous contact' – in Titan-speak, that means daemons. I can see cultists rampaging on all sides, Inquisitorial stormtroopers barely stemming the tide, but all my attention is focused on the charred wreck where I'd made planetfall. This many prepped cultists together meant that they'd been planning a ritual, and apparently someone in the basement's gotten their act together.
Warp-stuff coalesces in the clear air, Invictorus's autosenses registering a heat spike even as I thunder back towards the target. Target unidentified, range 23.3 meters and there it is, in its pierced and studded glory. A Slaaneshi greater daemon stands up from the charred wreckage, spreading pink-veined wings and raising an…ohdearEmperorthatsjustwrong.
Vicky has a good answer to Warp problems, though. Corrun's already targeted the thing, and Inferno cannon firing, 5-second blast! The heat bleed-off cooks nearby cultists, their bodies toppling as their brains fry. The daemon staggers under the fusion-fire, but the damn thing is recently summoned, with a Warp gate behind it – 'tough' is an understatement.
The daemon swings its…ewwww…at Vicky, and I crouch as the weapon approaches. My girl's reverse-jointed legs let her barely dodge the attack, and I follow it up by raising my Vulcan to fire. Corrun's already loaded blessed megabolter rounds, and five rounds rapid, detonation at 21.6 meters I let the creature have it. The daemon stumbles back as the groundcar-sized shells punch through it, but it's still there.
It isn't another Nurglite, but I can feel the old terror rising as I look at the monster. It's a daemon, it's here, and it won't – fucking – die! I take two quick steps back and let the creature have it. Inferno cannon firing, 10-second blast! Vicky's old weapon would have messily exploded from that sort of strain, but Osirus's upgrades let my girl fire for ten uninterrupted seconds.
The daemon vanishes under the flame, but I don't stop there. I walk straight up to the damn Gate, the unreal thing looming large in the wreckage of the target house. Heat normally felt at the center of a star washes over the splintered wreckage, cultists twenty meters away vanishing under the heat.
I'm yelling, a scream of terror and rage and hurt and damnit just make it stop all in one. My flesh-eyes can see Thade diving for his laspistol again, Corrun disconnecting the cannon feeds, while Vicky's autosenses show a blackened wasteland where our target used to me. All anomalous contacts eliminated, Vicky almost apologetically reports. "I'm done, I'm done," I croak, staring down a laspistol's barrel yet again.
With the few cultists quickly vanishing under disciplined Stormtrooper fire, I lean back and wait for the recovery crew. "Fuuuuuuuu-"
The Inquisitor spoke quietly, carefully, and almost respectfully. Years spent honing my self-discipline to keep an unruly Titan in line was the only thing stopping me from pissing my pants.
"Princeps, you destroyed the target building."
I stood my ground, letting my sarcasm do the talking. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea. "Arr, cap'n, we wrecked that-"
"Princeps, didn't I order you not to destroy the target?"
"Cap'n, we be a Titan. Destroyin' targets be a specialty of ours."
"You destroyed the target building."
"Aye, cap'n, be happy ta repeat meself-"
"You destroyed the only clues we had, that had taken me a small ocean of blood and treasure to gather."
"If'n ye wanted a quieter approach, Cap'n, ye shouldn't have sent a Titan to-"
"YOU DESTROYED IT ALL! WHY, DEAR EMPEROR, WHY?"
"Umm…arr?"