One is the loneliest number

[Okor]

Yellowed fangs ground together as antiquated armour pounded against the faded floor of the Nexus, the echoing impact of each step the only sound in this realm of nothingness. In a land of infinite power and far too many fools to wield it, the fact that this void served as the centerpiece of The Smiling One’s prison was maddening.

Without anything to navigate by, time blended together. Each step became twelve, all while the horizon never seemed to come any closer. Syphilitic synapses screamed for oxygen, their protests drowned out by the parasitic host feasting upon his ever-regenerating nervous system.

And yet still, he marched. Some shard of sanity sequestered within his psyche spread seditious whispers into his mind, reminding the rotten ravager that it was all too easy to simply stop. To fall, and never rise again, allowing himself to disperse and decompose, a final release from this torturous hell he found himself in.

But death and life alike had relinquished their hold on his blessed self, the perpetual limbo of his existence still sustaining him in this sisyphean nightmare.

Words from the past echoed through his ossified skull, one of the few souvenirs of his first voyage into Dante’s Abyss. When the Legions still marched alongside each other, when the sacred call to war burned in their blood hotter than it ever had before. His vitae boiled over as he remembered his final words, his defiance of defeat.

I am not finished.

He quickened his pace, scintillating streams of Omnillium flowing over his scarred plate as he breathed in the potent mixture of plague and power. There were still worlds left to burn. Sinners and Saints alike to scour from this sphere of suffering.

There were still relics to reclaim.

His wargear was silent, the familiar hum and hiss of the malevolent machine spirit that crawled across the corroded circuitry curiously absent. Silence reigned within his prison of steel, his laboured breaths eternally echoing off of his atomics-fuelled armour.

For the first time in Millennia, Okor was entirely alone, abandoned in this atrophy-free abyss. He could feel the ferric weight of his warplate pressing down on him, acutely aware of the three hundred kilograms of ceramite concealing him from the world. Hearts hammered as he ventured forward.

Hiro. The cybernetic samurai that had shed blood alongside him. They had salvaged the spirit, allowed it into their arcane technology. Stolen it from its rightful place.

A susurrus of near-silent whispers arose, patterns in the perpetual hum of his power pack indiscernible to those who were not as touched by the Gods as Okor. The carcasses of suns burned behind him, split atoms sending him forward.

He needed to find Hiro. He needed to think, a rare luxury he could afford now that he was bereft of the belligerent mind sharing the armour melded to his festering flesh. The all-too-familiar nothingness of the Nexus was entirely devoid of targets for him to sate his bloodlust upon, allowing him to push the eternal hunger to the back of his malformed mind.

They would have aligned themselves with Coruscant. That much was obvious. Their prattle of justice and accursed Order, their wargear, and the sum the sycophants of whatever Emperor ruled over this damned dimension, made that clear. The price on his head made them a challenge worth attempting, a test of his skills against the warped whims of their demented demiurge.

He crushed a rusted helmet beneath his stride, the flotsam from some forgotten battle being returned to the same abyss of ignominy from which its unfortunate user sprung from. How many pawns had been sacrificed to lay claim to this featureless plane of existence?

He did not need to even ponder that question. Enough blood had been spilled on this land to sate the thirst of a thousand Daemons, and he had shed his fair share of it.

But the hacker’s home was hardly the no-man’s land of the Nexus. Coruscant was a seething hive of Stormtroopers, every inch of the Imperial city under the vigilant gaze of the Emperor’s second-finest. While his blessed self could undoubtedly carve a bloody path through the Empire’s defenses, it would be a route that left little possibility for an amicable audience with the reprogrammed Ronin.

But infection does not take root in the heart. It slithers in through scratches and scrapes, carried along into the body before it has the chance to realize its error. Even in this land of plenty, trade served as the lifeblood of any nation. Before much of the civilian populace had fled in terror during his prior visit to the city, airborne craft soared through the gates between the shining city and the shimmering sea. One of those would suffice to carry him into Coruscant.

Desiccated lips pulled back to reveal tarnished fangs, a stained and scorched cloak flowing forth from the rot coating him, Omnillium shielding his diseased bulk from sight, cracked ceramite and corruption concealed from view.

The twisted trees that marked the entrance to the Vastly Deeps rose before him, the Omnillium stretched between the arboreal architecture shimmering and rippling, like a pool of iridescent mercury. Out of habit, useless lungs imbibed one last breath before passing through, leaving behind the nothingness in favour of the fetid atmosphere of the Deeps.