Waiting for the Worms (Dark Data)

[Okor]

Corrupted claws reached up to the corroded helmet donned by Okor, twisting the tortured metal and lifting it from his syphilitic skull, scraps of festering flesh peeling away with the armour. The Plague Marine’s pestilential visage was left bared, buboes and blisters blossoming underneath a frayed, jaundiced hide. Fangs as dark as the deepest fathoms of Terra’s polluted seas glistened within his gob, seeping with sepsis. An eye glared with three crimson pupils, weeping with pus and blood, set in the center of his face, flesh and bone clearly warped to allow for this cyclopean mutation.

”Gratuitous violence? Shaming a… weakling empire? Enough mayhem and murder to make Omni himself take notice?”

A gangrenous grin spread, the corners of his maw twitching up in a mockery of a smile.

”Why Hiro, I didn’t know it was my birthday,” spoke the skeletal soldier, his own birth date long lost to millennia of war.

His twisted spine creaked as he turned, his lone eye sizing up the recent arrival, black brows furrowing as fluids of unknown provenance pooled into his coarse beard, the foul breath coming from within his festering corpse causing Madotsuki to recoil from the rotting renegade.

”Although… Hiro, my eye may be ridden with worms, but she is naught but a child, is she not? Recent events have given me cause to be more… discerning, when it comes to allies,” he said, the weight of his so-called ally’s blade still heavy on his ruined hearts.

”Can she fight?”

A smile broke across the synthetic shogun’s face, his goggles slipping down over his eyes. “Like a Demon. She knows her way around a knife, and she’s got this weird-ass nightmare magic shit going on.”

”If you endorse her, then I will be happy to have her at my side,” gurgled the gangrenous giant, his skin crawling as his parasites burrowed beneath his flesh, feasting on the ever-regenerating rot that made up his innards.

“So what’s the plan?” Asked the child, her voice soft and eerily empty, indicative of a pained past.

A manic grin answered her.

”Why, I’m glad you asked.” Okor turned, beginning to pace as four leprous lungs strived to deliver his speech with the proper impact.

”The Omniverse, as far as we know is little more than… Omni’s personal sandbox. Omnillium flows and becomes new shapes, but never does it truly change, or end. We are but toys in his eyes, trudging through the shifting sands, damned to a life amongst meaningless, endless evolution.”

“This is the world we are trapped in, forced to dance on Omni’s strings for his amusement. But today, we take the first step to cutting ourselves free.”

“He gives us a realm of royalty and regality, beset by corruption. So much time and effort, spent rejecting millennia of human progress. I say we show them what we’ve been missing.”

He hefted the blocky bolter onto his shoulder, its rusted mass oozing with oil, dripping down into the marks of devotion carved into the pestilential pauldron.

”Let’s knock over some Gods-damned castles.”