[4-12] The Mines

[Okor]

A bile-ridden laugh greeted the question, the sickly sound echoing off the cavern walls. ”Not… Any  more.” He hefted the corroded bulk of his bolter, softly snarling as he felt the lack of weight, the hollow emptiness where there should be the brass-clad radioactive rounds. ”Some aspirant aberrant corrupted the secondaries here.” He drew in a deep breath between sentences, the fungal spores and bacterial clusters drifting within his long-tainted tanks eagerly joining the corruption already within him. A claw drifted down to the bone-forged flail at his hip, running along the twisted vertebrae of the slain godling. It, and its brood is no longer a.... Problem.”

He locked his firearms to his flanks, the revered wargear no longer able to be used without due consideration, the distinct lack of ammunition weighing heavily on his mind. An entire island of cannon fodder, and he lacked the rounds to send them crawling back to hell. He looked back to the newcomers, tearing his eyes away from his beloved death-dealers. ”We should not linger. We know where the… foe lurks, and where our allies prosper. We cut our way through to them, and make our way off this damned island.”

His baleful oculus fell upon the wounds of the pair, the sweet stench of their blood wafting through the air, permeating the pestilential aegis of his armour. The scent called forth an immediate reaction, stimulants coursing through his veins, the irresistible call to battle intoxicating. He loomed over the comparatively compact companions, a single septic scimitar of a talon pointing towards the chest of Arturia, the only other one here who seemed to have come prepared for a fight. The only other wise man in this world of madness.

”You are wounded.” Spoke the Legionnaire, heedless of the tattered shreds of skin hanging from his flayed stomach. ”If you fear the… inconvenience of death in this realm, then remain in this crypt. I have an oath to uphold.” He pulled the flail from his side, its skeletal length falling over his massive shoulders. The corrupted Orb lodged in the skull of the former God slowly pulsed, drawing in the blood splattered across its ivory mount, adding to the dark stains swirling upon its shimmering surface. Leprous legs began to move, carrying the Death Guard towards the Town.

“Wait.”

His post-human bulk turned, overgrown bones creaking as he shifted, watching the knight and the Phoenix depart further into the mines together, before forcing himself to gaze at the unfortunate freak of nature before him. The half-human creature gazed up at him, the abominable blood leaking from her flawed veins to rancid to even consider consumption. A cruel fate, to be a beast granted the semblance and mind of man, but denied the purity of form and purpose. Rotten flesh beneath jaundiced hide worked in concert with his armour to cross his arms in front of his broad and hollow chest, glaring down at the anthropomorphic creature.

“Why are you doing this?” Queried the literal Vixen, lifting a bushy eyebrow, the muzzle entirely out of place on their perverse parody of a human body.

”Why shouldn’t I?” Responded Nurgle’s Chosen, the worms and maggots within his ambulatory remains wriggling, consuming his constantly regenerating corpse. ”Is this not doing the Gods’ work?”

“You sure as hell aren’t what I’d call a good guy. They tend to have less skulls on their person.” They eyed the God-hammer slung over his shoulders, the severed heads upon his waist barely restraining the life-eating virus within.

”Point… Conceded. Tell me, Half-man, have you ever lost something… dear to you?”

Their blood still flowed. Slowly seeping from wounds, a sanguine offering to the Four Powers that sought dominion over reality. His twinned hearts pounded, speeding the stimulants through his system, focusing his attention on the subtle shifts of his subject. A brief instant in which they moved toward their weapons. A sharp intake of breath. An open wound of the mind, to be remembered when such a grotesque forgot their place.

“One: Don’t call me that. You look like you should leave three-quarters of yourself in the morgue.” They jabbed a claw-tipped finger at his chest, heedless of the pustules clustered around the cracks of the ceramite. “Two: What could someone like you lose? Let me guess, your deodorant? The only thing I’m enjoying about your company right now is that I can’t smell whatever the hell you two killed down there.”

”In the mists of Barbarus, I lost my kin. In the Legion’s Apothecarium, I sacrificed my humanity. Upon the surface of… Istvaan, I broke my bonds to the Imperium, and watched centuries of bloodshed wasted. In the grasp of hell itself, I lost my soul. On the walls of Terra, I saw myself severed from ten thousand brothers.” He snarled as he pressed his helmet closer to the animalistic arbitrator, the stench of his rot nearly overpowering her sensitive senses. ”And in Omni’s clutches, I have lost my war. If you think you know hate, you could not even begin to comprehend a hundredth of a hundredth of my wrath. The Smiling One has stolen everything I had left, but…” Carmelita was close enough to hear the sickly sound of his maw opening, the rancid strings of acid spit flowing and merging freely within the abyss. ”He will serve as a substitute. And if you still wish to know why I fight, Inspector Fox-Cooper,” he said, placing emphasis on each word of her title, still struggling to comprehend that the creature thought themselves his equal.

”I fight because I enjoy it. I fight because it’s all I can do. I break spines, not… bread. I shatter bones with my hands, not paint, I carve out hearts, not statues.”

“I slay our mutual foes, because I hate them. I hate their frailty, their greed, their sheer incompetence. There are a thousand simpering fools who aspire to rule this realm, and I carry a round for each of them. This damned world is a twisted parody of reality, and I refuse to allow the unworthy to inherit it.”