Day 29


Blood. Rage. Skulls.

He tore through flesh and sinew, roaring madly. None were safe from the bite of his chainaxes, all who came near would die for the glory of Khorne. Friend, foe, these were terms he barely understood at his calmest, and he was far from such a state now. And as he killed, as he spilled blood and took skulls, he felt the whispers in the back of his own skull grow stronger, felt himself grow stronger. It would have made him gleeful if only he could feel anything but wrath and anger and agony.

A stabbing pain in his side exploded through him, but this only served to fuel his fury. Whatever its source perished a moment later, chewed apart by a sawing axehead, and the pain was gone just as swiftly, severed flesh and muscle reknitting into something stronger than it had been.

Through the haze of blood, the tearing of flesh, and the flashing of metal that was his vision, he occasionally saw other things, things he did not understand, but knew well. Through the pounding of his heart in his ears and the whispers that screamed in his skull, he occasionally heard voices that were familiar, yet unrecognizable. He saw faces, leering with hatred and scorn. He heard laughter and words of disgust and each blow against his flesh, each rip of muscle and spilling of his blood caused them to laugh all the harder.

He might have known those faces once, might have feared them, might have reviled them, might have felt… anything towards them. Back when he was still more man than beast, when he had not yet felt the burning in his veins that was Khorne's seething fury, not scarred his flesh with marks of devotion, not received the gifts of the Blood God, he might have recognized the faces of those he'd once hated so dearly that he'd run into the arms of dark powers for revenge against them, for the strength to get back at them.

Yet, that was all gone now. The names he'd whispered to himself at night before falling asleep had not been spoken in years. The things they'd done that had so driven him towards darkness before were forgotten long ago, the scars that had covered his flesh torn away and covered by newer ones. Only their faces and their taunting voices remained, barely understood now by the mind of the thing that had suffered their vileness, only serving as further kindling to the flame of his wrath as he failed to understand what it meant, what any of it meant.

Kalak the Mutant, Kalak the Freak, Kalak the Beastman was dead. He had died years ago, when he had first stepped onto the altar of the Blood God, a willing sacrifice for power.

Kalak Bronze-Blood howled in fury and torment and continued the slaughter.

Aliciel opened her eyes slowly and groaned. Her head felt like she'd stuck her ear next to a voxcaster during a sermon, the pounding like the beats of a drum. She had felt worse, probably. The only time she could recall was the morning after her final rites to join the Sisterhood and the subsequent celebrations, a night whose events she could not recall even a century later.

If she were less than what she was, she might have sworn, might have taken more time to wallow in her pain. But she was a Sister of the Cleansing Rains and so she opened her eyes, ignoring the stinging pain of the dim lights that were still too bright, or the way her stomach felt like it was doing backflips at the sudden motion of her head looking up. Her vision clouded over for a second and she thought she might pass out, her pride getting the better of her, but she managed to fight away the embrace of sleep. While her vision was still reforming its images, she tried to learn what she could from her other senses.

Her body ached, though less than her head, and her armor was missing, leaving her in only the plainclothes tunics worn underneath. She could smell grease and rust, so she was still in the tunnels or nearby. Her ears only heard her own heartbeat and were slower to recover than her sight. She could not feel her left hand, save for a dull, pulsing pain. Her vision was slowly coming back to her and she looked down to see why.

Ah. It was gone. Replaced by a set of blood-soaked bandages wrapped tightly around the stump of her wrist, thick ropes binding her arms together. Hm.

Looking up, her vision still swimming slightly, Aliciel became more aware of her surroundings. She was indeed still in a tunnel, though whether it was the service duct or a different area was impossible to determine by sight alone. She saw several of her Sisters that she had led into the duct, all wounded but amateurishly patched up as she had been, all with their arms similarly tied.

Their captors stood nearby, around two dozen mutants of varying levels of deviation from the holy human form, but all equally vile. They wore ill-fitting PDF gear but were equipped with Lasguns and one even had a plasma gun.

Memory returned to her. They had been ambushed, their vox jammed through some unknown means. She remembered there had been well over a hundred to their twenty, relying on surprise and numbers to overcome them. She remembered her Sisters reacting admirably, slaughtering a quarter of their attackers in the first minute. Then, Uriah had gone down, a plasma blast vaporizing most of the right side of her body. After that… things got spotty.

She remembered something flooding her veins, different from the adrenaline rush she was had grown to be so familiar with. Like liquid fire, she had moved and thought faster, her reactions had come quicker. The blessings of the God-Emperor took different forms, she knew. Her faith had been rewarded, but it- no, she had not been enough. She had squandered His gift and allowed herself and her Sisters to be captured rather than die in glorious martyrdom like Uriah. Shame filled Aliciel, even as one of her captors noticed her eyes scanning the area.

"The corpse worshippers awake," He said, drawing the attention of another 'man', one even more grotesquely mutated then the rest. The one who she could only assume to be the leader was tall and wiry, one arm replaced by a long, dark blue tentacle that ended in nine, much shorter sprouts like fingers. It writhed even when he stood at rest, as though it had a mind of its own. Perhaps it did. One could never tell with his wretched ilk.

"Glad to see you're awake." The lead mutant's voice was just slightly off, as though it were being echoed despite not being loud enough to produce one in the tunnel they were in. He strode over to her, a malicious grin on his face. "We've got a few… questions for you."

"Eat grox manure, heretic," Aliciel spat. "The Faithful have nothing to fear from your filth."

"Oh, that's where you're quite wrong, dear," The mutant knelt down, bringing his face close to hers. "I think you should be quite-!"

The mutant's next words were cutoff as Aliciel rammed her forehead into his nose in a vicious headbutt, taking grim satisfaction in the feeling of cartilage and bone breaking beneath the force of her strike. For a moment, the world seemed to spin, but she felt the not-adrenaline flood her again and it returned to normal, then sharper.

The mutant howled in pain, rearing back, but Aliciel was already moving. She pushed herself from her sitting position, just enough for her to fall forwards, barreling into the wretch and shoving him to the ground. The tentacle whipped out and slammed into her side, an explosion of pain causing her to wince, only for it to disappear a moment later. She drove her elbows into the exposed throat of the whimpering cultist, a gruesome crunch echoing far down the halls of the tunnel.

The mutant's body spasmed, the tentacle slamming into her side again, this time with enough force to shove her off, and she groaned in pain at the feeling of her shattered ribs. Yet, once more, she could feel her wounds lessening. Even the ruined stump of her hand no longer hurt.

The rest of the cultists raised their weapons and the world seemed to slow, far more than it had ever in the second-by-second rush of battle. She could see everything, the looks of fear in their eyes, the tightening of their fingers, the beads of sweat rolling down their faces, even the slight twitch of muscles under skin.

She kicked off the wall with an explosion of force far greater than anything she should have been able to achieve outside her power armor, sending her skidding across the ground just as the triggers were depressed, a burst of lasfire slamming into the floor where she had been lying moments prior, cracking the rockrete.

Aliciel tested the ropes and found the thick cords snapped easily under her newfound strength. She shoved herself up off the ground with her one remaining hand, reaching out and grabbing hold of the collar of one mutant's uniform, ignoring her disgust at touching a heretic with her bare hand. She wrenched him towards her, just in time to catch another flurry of lasfire from his comrades. He was dead after the second shot exploded his skull and his usefulness as a meat shield ended after the ninth, when the last of his limbs had been blown clean off.

She dropped low and tossed the carcass remains at the nearest cultist, whose scream of horror was cutoff in a gurgle as a shard of bone that could have been a spine or rib mere moments prior impaled his throat, dropping him and the terrible projectile to the ground.

She was already moving by the time the next volley came, leaping up and over their heads, a leap no mortal athlete could hope to emulate in a dozen lifetimes, landing right behind the cultist equipped with a plasma gun.

He had barely started to turn when she was already upon him, the stump of her wrist, its bandage gone and now revealing a sharpened spike of white bone, yet strangely no blood, slicing into the soft meat and tendons of his neck, her other hand reaching out to grasp the hand that held the plasma gun. She squeezed and the weapon fired, a collection of mutants unable to even scream before they were reduced to a smoking pile of charred corpses.

The mutant's grip loosened as he choked on his own blood, and she grasped the plasma gun in her free hand even as she held her new shield aloft via the wrist bone that had pierced his neck. She ignored his feeble attempts to staunch the bleeding of his throat, holding the heavy plasma weapon with utter ease in her one hand.

Another flash and another clump of enemies were gone, reduced to ash. Lasfire slammed into her shield, ending his struggles. She fired the plasma gun again and again, feeling the heat beginning to build up within it. It burned her hand, searing the flesh, and she found she knew how many shots it had before it would have a catastrophic issue.

Three shots. Two shots. One shot.

She threw the weapon that blazed so hot it warped the air around it, leaping away from it as it soared over the heads of the dozen mutants who remained, onto the other side of the tunnel, far from herself and her sisters.

The explosion was breathtaking. It made her retinas sizzle and she thought her eyes might have melted, yet she felt no pain. The plasma fires consumed the mutants, their screams like choir music to her ears. The edge of the flames rushed over her, but she did not scream.

Then… it was over.

The light died down and she found she could no longer see, nor feel. She heard nothing and the only smell was that of her own cooked flesh. She breathed hard, the oxygen like fire in her lungs. Her body pulsed, convulsed, and she knew she ought to be in pain, in agony. And yet, she was not.

I have one of machine and nerve, who has its mind concluded. You are but flesh and faith, yet not the more deluded.

A voice spoke to her, like a lovely caress upon her very mind. Her heart swelled with recognition, a single thought in her mind:

God-Emperor?

She might have heard a sigh.

"Canoness, thank you for seeing me," Agrippa saluted and Praxiah nodded.

"Colonel," Praxiah greeted. "You wished to speak about the duct?"

"As it stands, the service duct presents a vulnerability to our siege," Agrippa stated succinctly. "If I'm not mistaken, you chose not to send any more Sisters into the duct?"

"That is correct," Praxiah said. The loss of twenty sisters were the most casualties the Cleansing Rains had taken in five decades, certainly the most taken in this siege so far. Praxiah was surprised to realize how heavy the blow had been to her. She had lost Sisters by the hundreds before.

Was it because these were the first to die since their glory days? Had she really grown so weak in a mere fifty years? Aliciel and the rest were martyrs now, gone to serve at the side of the God-Emperor Himself. So why were their deaths still weighing on her mind?

"If you are worried about a flanking maneuver, I have already assigned a battalion to guard the duct's entrance," Praxiah said, casting the thoughts from her mind and returning to the matter at hand.

"I'm aware, Canoness, however I wish permission to send another battalion into the service duct," Agrippa said and Praxiah raised an eyebrow. She had denied him once, before sending Aliciel. Did he really think his men could succeed where her sisters had failed? True, numbers were a quality of their own, but the service duct would almost certainly be even more heavily defended now than it had been before.

"If this is a request fueled by pride, colonel, I will be severely disappointed," Praxiah said, her eyes narrowing slightly.

"It is not, Canoness," Agrippa replied. "My request is not to fulfill the mission of the Sisters, but to recover them."

Praxiah raised an eyebrow at that. "You believe they're still alive?"

"If this campaign has taught me one thing, Canoness, you Sisters are hard to kill," Agrippa said and Praxiah couldn't help but smile a little at the irony of that statement. Death in battle for a Sister was a glorious thing, something to be yearned for even. However, the martyrs of this campaign had almost entirely been PDF, possibly even in spite of the best efforts of the Cleansing Rains.

"I'm afraid the chances of that are slim," Praxiah stated and Agrippa even nodded in agreement.

"Nonetheless, I have faith, Canoness."

For a moment, Praxiah wasn't sure whether she should congratulate the man for his earnestness or fire her bolter directly into his skull for his impertinence with that statement. In the end, she chose neither.

"You are aware the service duct will be crawling with enemies? Possibly even those beastmen that have begun assaulting our front lines?"

"I am. I've recently formed a new battalion of PDF I believe would be well-suited to the task."

"They're of strong faith?"

"They're crazy, Canoness."

Praxiah arched an eyebrow at that and Agrippa quickly continued.

"I formed the battalion of PDF companies who have proven to be more… independently-minded than others."

"Disobedient, you mean," Praxiah said, leaning back in her seat.

"They've tended towards aggressive actions," Agrippa added. Praxiah wondered why she hadn't heard of this battalion before now or about these… 'independent thinkers'. Perhaps the Agrippa had only sent his most disciplined battalions to work directly with the Sisters. Certainly, there were not enough Sisters to accompany every battalion or fight on every front of this siege, not without spreading themselves so thin as to render them impotent. Or, perhaps those men and women fighting alongside the Order of the Cleansing Rains were inspired by the presence of her Sisters and more disciplined because of it. Certainly, it would be nothing new.

Regardless, she could guess why Agrippa had formed and chosen this battalion for such a task. Their army needed to be coordinated and disciplined. There was no room for such troops in a well-oiled and sanctified machine.

However, rather than simply execute them for disobedience, as most other commanders would, Agrippa seemed to have decided to send them on a mission of high risk, one where their aggressive tendencies would even prove beneficial rather than detrimental to the rest of the army. If the lot of them perished, they would be martyrs dying for the God-Emperor's will and their army would be stronger without the malefactors. If they succeeded, even if they had only recovered the bodies… Well, Praxiah was certain there would be other missions requiring such a force in the future. Not to mention the morale boost such a victory would give them.

"Very well, colonel, you may send this battalion to recover Aliciel and the rest's bodies," Praxiah nodded.

"ONI will be pleased, Canoness." Once more, her brow rose slightly.

"Is that some kind of animal local to Malum?" Praxiah asked, confused. "I've never heard of it."

"Ah, no ma'am, it's the name they chose for themselves," Agrippa answered swiftly. "I believe it stands for 'Outstandingly Nefarious Idiots', or something like that."

Praxiah stared at him. "They… chose this name themselves?"

"As I said, Canoness, they're-,"

"Crazy," She finished, shaking her head, somewhat in disbelief. She waved her hand dismissively. "That will be all, colonel."

"Thank you, ma'am," Agrippa saluted once more before turning on his heel and departing. Praxiah leaned back, watching him go.

These are certainly the oddest planetary defense forces I've ever worked with. Brave… but odd.