Day 1 Morning

[Okor]

A grimace spread across the marine’s face as the Avatar of Omni worked its reality-warping magicks, the very fabric of realspace bending to its whims. The floor, its once-pristine beauty corrupted by the foul substances seeping from Okor’s corroded armour, split open, a yawning abyss formed from darkness pulling the necrotic nightmare down, down, down. Gravity, that cruel, capricious, and heartless bitch called him, his titanic frame twisting and turning throughout the seemingly infinite fall, the pitch-black nothingness that surrounded him seemingly denying him the luxury of existence. He could feel nothing, see nothing, and could scarcely hear the ichor pounding through his veins. It was as if his blighted life has finally come to an end, snuffed out in this emptiness, and left to rot.

This would never be the case. He was Okor Paleblood, son of the Fourteenth Legion, chosen warrior of The Lord of All, and, most recently, Dean of Security. He had but a single life, and he would be damned if it was wasted in such a contemptuous manner. Shattered ebony obelisks bared themselves beneath the helmet in a snarl as he realigned himself, pinpricks of light penetrating the perpetual purgatory in which Omni had consigned him to.

He broke the stasis, and brought entropy in its place.

His malodorous mass collapsed from the sky, landing against soft emerald grass, its sublime beauty quickly ruined by several hundred kilograms of rotten meat and rusted metal landing on top of it, grinding chlorophyll-filled blades into the mud.

He laid there for a moment, idly staring into the aftermath of the localized devastation brought by his oh-so-graceful arrival. Ragged remnants of vegetation laid half-buried in the earth around him, mirroring his own embedded position.

A claw pressed against the wet earth, its bony grasp leaving a handprint in the black mud as he pushed himself up, the ground clinging to his armour as it left its cold embrace, denying himself the long-sought respite of the dead.

He stumbled to his feet, breathing in the familiar toxins poisoning his ‘Oxygen’ reservoirs. He blinked as he looked over the idyllic landscape, small mammals cavorting through long grass, currently unafraid of the ambulatory carrion in their midst.

This would, of course, be changing in the foreseeable future. A hand drifted over his few worldly possessions, running across his emblazoned tabard, the three circles that formed Nurgle’s mark as prominent as always. While the Gods were, of course, ever-present, the noted disappearance of his weaponry was more worrying. A gurgling hiss rose from his ravaged throat, the inhuman noise making his displeasure quite clear. Would it be too much to ask for his weapons? He had been tossed into a killing field, given a clear goal, and had made a sufficient amount of allies. Targeting algorithms, long-since infested by malicious warp sprites seeking bloodshed and a sanctuary in realspace, joined him in mourning for his lost bolt weapons. Their howl had been a constant companion across a hundred worlds. Battle-brothers died, reclaimed by The Lord of All across the millennia of never-ending war.

But his weapons never left him, except in this damned dimension. They were as much a part of him as his Betcher’s Gland, his Oolotic Kidney, the Omophagea, his Progenoids. He was as much of a weapon as they were, and his kindred had been stolen.

It was but another grudge to hold against The Smiling One, the mad god-child that tormented his prisoners in a twisted hellscape of his own making. One day, they’d find a way to unlock the corporeal constraints forced upon them. They’d find Omni, and they would repay his predations in kind.

But for now, there were more immediate, more… vulnerable concerns.

His decrepit eye spotted a glimmer in the fallout of his arrival. Two shaped crescents of steel laid in the shattered earth. Stooping down, he pried his trophies from the wreckage, emaciated fingers naturally slipping into the metallic rings. He flexed his dead extremities, nodding in approval at the simple effectiveness of the weapon.

Better than a single damned bullet, at least.

He set himself in motion, shambling forward. With luck, he’d find something to work out his building frustration on.