[4-12] The Mines

[Okor]

Talons steeped in corruption and blood clenched around the scavenged weapon, wrapping themselves around the twisted spine of the aspiring god. ”Don’t… thank me yet, Fiara. Do you hear them… scurry?” The scratch of claws on stone echoed around them, the chittering horde of foul spawn being vomited up from the bowels of the earth growing ever closer. His single eye looked past his wounded ally, bandages wrapped around her cracked skull stained red with the blood of both herself and the foe, staring blankly into the darkness. ”I hear the clatter of claw upon the Earth’s bones, I smell the cancerous stench of their corruption.” Jaundiced hide pulled back, sable sabres of shattered teeth dripping with rot beneath the rusted iron of his helmet, a necrotized tongue running along his fangs. ”I can taste their fear.”

The corroded ceramite of his pauldrons began to move, the reformed flesh beneath his armour already reinfested after his earlier cremation, twin hearts pounding beneath his fused ribcage. The Phoenix struggled to keep up, every scratch upon her body weeping blood, despite her efforts to repair the damage. “You just charged into a cavern of those… things, and now you’re going in again? Do you have a death wish?!”

”Probably. But that is not the point, young… one.”

“You were put here to learn, to create, to inspire. To live.”

The clatter of claws on stone intensified, a many-faced, hunchbacked freak of magic leaping from the shadows, its seven maws baring to reveal leech-like rings of teeth, scraps of flesh lodged between the needle-like points.

The skull of its god crashed down upon it, its own cranium splintering as the Omnillium-infused weight sent shards of bone flying through the air, the Daemon-touched orb greedily drinking the blood of its former supplicant.

”I was created to kill.”

With a flick of his wasted wrist, he dragged the head of his flail from the corpse, his other hand depressing the trigger of his bolter, driving a radioactive round into the still-twitching corpse, howls of rage and agony echoing from deeper within these damned catacombs.

Think.

Their Deity had been slain and defiled. This meant either unthinking rage, or silent despair as their miserable existence lost all meaning. Clearly, they had chosen the former.

They were men once. Whatever entity had swayed them into their service had warped them, twisted the pure human form into a mockery of life, and sent its abominations out to kill and add to its own mass and power. Each ex-Cultist was undoubtedly mad beyond redemption, and given by its earlier telepathic messages, it was constantly guiding its minions. All they had known had been ripped away a second time, their ascension denied, left as monsters far from the sight of humanity.

Perhaps he could sympathize. He’d lost his chance at the life of a Mortal, and the life of a conquering Hero, forever damned to tear down the Empire he built.

His grin stretched ever-wider as he sent a shell down the tunnel, the green flame of the self-propelled ballistic briefly illumining the tunnel, revealing the dilated crimson pupils of the amalgamation before them, before burst against the masses of deadened flesh. Limbs bonded to the amorphous mass of meat twitched, each atrophied appendage seeking the lives of the god-slayers, a thousand twisted faces opening in an ear-piercing screech of undying hatred. Pseudopods of rotting muscle reached out, pulling the seemingly unending tide of corpses forwards towards what seemed to be the final survivors of the crash.

But at least he was sane.

He took a step backwards, another shell falling to the ground, noxious smoke pouring from the spent cartridge. ”Fiara. Get to the elevator.”

“What in Izanagi’s’s name is that thing?!” Screamed Fiara, sending a shell shooting down the corridor, carving a bloody rent in its flesh, watching helplessly as a tide of tissue flowed over it, ensuring its mass remained suitably massive.

”Rejects,” hissed Okor, crushing a small rock beneath his weight as he continued his rate of fire. ”All the… cultists too broken in mind or body to remain an individual. It is every… lost and damned soul among them.”

Another blast from the mythical creature severed an arm, the limb flying from its position atop the abomination, only to be reabsorbed as it passed back over it, a wordless roar of thoughtless rage echoing throughout the caverns. “How are we going to kill it?” asked Fiara, having seen far too much of the Death Guard’s commitment to slaughter to doubt his will to end the beast.

”We’d need more fire and explosives than I… brought. Too much flesh to cut, too few fire-based weapons, and not nearly enough grenades.” He snarled as his clip ran empty, the hollow magazine dropping into the darkness as he turned to run as fast as his rot would carry him.

”Fall back, regroup, and find heavy weapons.” The shame of retreat suffused his soul. While there was no point in throwing his life away against a foe clearly in an advantageous position, to show the enemy his back was an unforgivable offence against his pride. The fluorescent lights of the lift were not far now, the rift in the earth above it promising a reprise from their relentless attacker.

Fiara easily kept pace, for, even wounded, there were very few mortals alive who were slower than the eternal warriors of Nurgle. “Wait… The elevator! Is it heavy enough to crush this Oni?”

Nurgle’s chosen stumbled briefly, internally berating himself for failing to come up with the idea himself. ”Have to get there first.” He growled, the skull of the aspiring deity bouncing on his hip as he continued his dash forward. The rusted rails were tantalizingly close, the promised salvation above them just outside of his grasp. He risked one last shot, tearing the mag-locked pistol from his side and letting loose a phosphex round, the infernal flames blossoming as they began to eat away at the Abominable creation, eliciting a screech of torment.

Any reason within the remnants needed to be annihilated for the plan to work. It needed to be tortured, goaded, driven forward into its own demise to ensure its annihilation.

And if there was good thing Mortation’s Sons excelled at, it was drawing enemy fire.

”I have drunk the blood of your god! Come forth and… reclaim it!”

1115 Words according to google docs.