The underhive swallowed us like the gullet of some ravenous beast. Acrid smoke clung to the back of my throat even through the rebreather of my helm. In the gloom ahead, lumens flickered and died, brief flashes illuminating the rusted pipes weeping toxins down corroded walls.
Behind me, the measured tread of boots on metal grating signaled the advance of my regiment, moving in perfect unison. Our drab uniforms were the color of old blood, blending into the decay around us. Only the lenses of our gas-masks betrayed any hint of life, twin orbs glinting an icy, merciless blue.
I led from the front, lasgun held tight to my shoulder, finger resting on the trigger guard. Shadows danced at the edge of my vision, promising threat, but I paid them no heed. The wailing klaxons and screams echoing from deeper in the hive were a more pressing concern. We had to reach Hive Primus. There could be no failure.
A voice suddenly hissed in my ear, distorted by the vox. "Movement, left corridor." I halted, raising a fist, and a dozen lasguns swung as one to cover the passage. Silence reigned, oppressive and cloying. Then a skittering, the crack of breaking bone.
A tide of twisted flesh poured from the corridor, pale and glistening in the half-light. Cultists, their bodies warped by the touch of Chaos. Extra limbs flailed, tumorous growths pulsed, and jaws distended in wordless shrieks of rage and torment.
I gave no order. None was needed. Concentrated lasfire erupted from our line, stitching glowing holes across bloated bodies. The air filled with the stench of burned meat. Viscera splattered the walls. Still they came on, heedless of losses, scrambling over their own dead in their desperation to reach us.
A trooper to my right fell, his chest torn open by some crude blade. I did not turn, did not flinch. Stepping over his body, I continued to fire with metronome regularity, the litanies of the God-Emperor a steadying cadence beneath my breath.
By the time silence fell once more, the corridor was a charnel house. Ruined bodies lay piled three deep, twisted limbs twitching in pools of noisome fluids. I reloaded by muscle memory alone, barely glancing down.
"Advance." My voice through the vox was cold, inflectionless. We left the dead where they lay. Casualty assessment would come later. Duty came first. It always did.
We pushed deeper into the underhive, booted feet tramping through filth. The lumens grew dimmer, the air thicker. Each breath was a labored rasp in my ears. The corruption of this place was a palpable thing, trying to worm its way through the seals of our armor, into our very thoughts.
A trooper stumbled, caught himself on a bulkhead. When he straightened, I saw blood oozing from the lenses of his mask, painting crimson tears down his cheeks. The rot of Chaos grew heavier with every step, an oily miasma that clung to skin and soul alike.
But I set my shoulders and pressed on, descending ever deeper into the nightmare of Hive Primus. Doubt was a luxury I could ill afford. The Emperor demanded our service, and we would give it unto death. My hand tightened on my lasgun. In this lightless abyss, it was the only truth that mattered.
——————————————
The halls of the underhive became a kaleidoscope of atrocity. Lunatic scrawls in blood and excrement marred the walls, vile exhortations to dark gods better left unspoken. Corpse-piles slumped in alcoves and side passages, the flesh carved with ritual precision.
And still the enemy came. Cultists with sigils gouged into their skin hurled themselves at our lines, their twisted faces split in rictus grins. They cared nothing for their own lives, throwing themselves onto our bayonets with ecstatic shrieks.
One fell near me, his legs sheared off by lasfire. He scrabbled at my boots, fingers clutching a makeshift device studded with rusted wires and pulsing flesh. I put a bolt through his skull without breaking stride. Whatever warp-born horror he meant to unleash died with him in a welter of brain and bone.
The miasma grew thicker as we advanced, an oily dread that seeped through the filters of our rebreathers to coat our tongues in the taste of despair. I heard retching over the vox, glimpsed blood seeping from the eye-lenses of the troopers nearest me. The touch of Chaos was anathema, straining minds and souls past all natural endurance.
But I would not stop. Could not. I was steel and ice, cold purpose incarnate. What nightmares assailed me in the labyrinthine darkness of Hive Primus were as nothing compared to the imperative of duty. The God-Emperor had forged me in the fires of war, and I would not bend now at the precipice of victory.
A shudder ran through the deck, followed by a blast-wave of heat that seared exposed skin and set cloaks smoldering. From the shadows of the grand chamber ahead came a behemoth of steel and flesh, the warp made manifest in the materium.
The daemon engine towered three times the height of a man, its surface a patchwork of riveted metal and suppurating meat. Eyeless faces screamed in silent agony from its flanks. Pipes and cables pulsed like exposed viscera. And from its maw belched a gout of unnatural flame, actinic green edged in nightmare black.
Half my remaining regiment vanished in that first molten blast, reduced to ash and charred bone. The remainder scattered, all discipline forgotten in the primal need to survive. Screams of pain and terror filled the vox, undercut by the wet, mocking laughter of neverborn fiends.
I alone stood firm, my greatcoat whipping about me in the backwash of eldritch energies. A prayer to the Emperor spilled from my lips, the words tasting of blood and bile. The thing before me was an abomination, a cruel mockery of the Emperor's divine order. It could not be allowed to endure.
"Flank and suppress." The command left me without inflection, cold as the void between stars. I watched a trio of troopers peel away at my order, darting through the inferno toward the daemon engine's side. They knew what I asked of them. Knew the price of obedience.
Their lives for our victory. The calculus of war, as immutable as the stars.
As the doomed men drew the monster's fire, I led the remainder of the regiment through a twisting network of access tunnels, the stench of cooking meat and burning plasteel harsh in our nostrils. We emerged behind the construct, lasguns already barking.
Focused fire scoured its back, peeling away layers of fused bone and tainted metal to expose pulsing, venomous organs. A lucky shot found some vital mechanism and the daemon engine spasmed, gobbets of flaming ichor spraying from its torn flanks.
A final, thunderous detonation sent me sprawling, a shard of shrapnel the size of my fist missing my head by a finger's breadth. I rose from a pile of sundered corpses, uniform shredded, skin blistered by the heat. The engine was dead, its carcass a collapsed ruin of hissing meat and slag.
Barely a third of my men still stood, their armor pitted and scarred, faces haggard behind soot-streaked lenses. I regarded them, searching for signs of faltering purpose. There were none. They had been forged as I was, honed to a single, inviolable truth - duty above all.
I checked my chronometer, its face cracked but display still functional. We were behind schedule, but not irretrievably so. The mission could still be completed. Must be completed.
No matter the cost.
————————————————————
We reached the sanctum doors with little more than a squad remaining, numberless cultist dead behind us and tides of insanity still to come. The great portal was a slab of blackened adamantium thrice the height of the tallest trooper, engraved from top to bottom with dizzying sigils and obscene runes. It existed in nauseating defiance of Euclidean geometry, its angles shifting, its borders twisting in some unseen dimension.
I stood before it, my greatcoat hung in charred tatters, the lenses of my mask starred by a spider's web of cracks. Every muscle ached, every joint screamed in protest at the slightest movement. The skin of my hands had cracked and split inside my gloves, leaving them slick with blood.
But I pushed the pain down, deep into the lightless corners of my mind. Such weakness could not be tolerated, not now, not at this final threshold. The God-Emperor needed me strong, a vessel of His unbreakable will. I would not falter.
"Demolition charges." My voice was a broken croak through my helm's vox-grille, more machine than man. The troopers moved to obey with wordless efficiency. We were far beyond speech, beyond thought. Only duty remained, the drive to completeour mission no matter the cost.
I worked shoulder to shoulder with my men, affixing the charges with hands that trembled from exhaustion and loss of blood. Each movement was agony, each breath a trial. But I did not slow, did not stumble. The holy litanies of preparation spilled from my cracked lips, a mantra against doubt, against fear.
When the last charge was set, I fell back, gesturing the remnants of my regiment to what meager cover remained. The detonation would be cataclysmic, the forces unleashed enough to atomize unprotected flesh. A few troopers still harbored hope of survival. I did not begrudge them their delusions.
"Fire in the hole." The words tasted of rust and ruin. A heartbeat later, the world turned white.
The blast threw me to the deck, my armor drinking the heat, the pressure wave. I felt something rupture in my chest, a dull, distant burst of agony. Rising on trembling limbs, I blinked the static from my vision.
Where the great door had stood was now a gaping maw, its edges glowing a sullen, angry orange. Flames danced within the chamber beyond, throwing monstrous shadows on the walls. And at its center...
An eternal moment stretched, my mind refusing to parse what it witnessed. The warp portal shimmered, its surface a kaleidoscope of impossible colors and maddening geometries. And before it, a knot of hooded figures, their voices raised in a cacophonous chant that sent icy rivulets of despair down my spine.
Then training overtook horror and I was moving, stumbling, chainsword snarling to life in my fist. The weapon felt impossibly heavy, as if I sought to swing a mountain, but I pushed through the fatigue, the weakness of my treacherous flesh.
The first cultist died before he registered my presence, my blade shearing through his neck in a spray of arterial crimson. His head struck the floor, the fathomless pits of his eyes still wide in surprise. I turned, seeking my next foe.
They came at me in a rush, howling invocations to their dark masters. Some wielded ritual blades, others nothing more than their flailing fists and gnashing teeth. They were beyond reason, beyond sanity. There could be no quarter given, no mercy shown.
I met them in a whirlwind of steel and gore, my chainsword keening a dirge for the lost. I parried a cruel sword on the shrieking teeth of my blade, then gutted its wielder in an explosion of ruptured viscera. A clawed hand raked across my helm, throwing a crazed latticework of fractures across my lens. I drove an armored knee into the cultist's groin, then decapitated it as it doubled over.
Time lost all meaning, all significance beyond the next kill, and the next. I fought as I had been shaped to fight, cold reason subsumed beneath the roar of blood and the screech of torn metal. I was an engine of slaughter, fueled by faith and duty, my purpose as unclouded as it was uncompromising.
And then, between one hammering heartbeat and the next, I stood alone. The last cultist hung impaled on my blade, his black robes smoldering, his face a rictus of ecstatic agony. I shook his corpse free with a wet, tearing sound.
Silence fell, marred only by the crackle of spreading flames and the wheeze of my own labored breathing. The portal pulsed before me, a nightmarish heartbeat in the fabric of reality. Its surface seemed to grow, to swell outward as if straining to birth some unimaginable horror into the materium.
But it held. The ritual had been stopped, the breach contained. The God-Emperor's will had been done, His realm protected from the predations of the warp. All that remained was the final reckoning.
I sank to my knees, shards of shattered bone grinding in my chest. The pain was immense, all-consuming, but distant too. A small price to pay for victory. My hands were clasped around the hilt of my chainsword, the blood-slick adamantium still warm in my fading grasp.
"The Emperor protects," I whispered into the gathering dark, my words a prayer and a benediction in one. "And we...we serve."
A strange peace descended, a certainty of purpose fulfilled. I had done my duty, held to my oath. No man could ask for more.
The warp portal flared, a blinding starburst of utterly alien hues. Streamers of impossible light arced out, wrapping me in spectral coils. I felt my flesh unravel, my very essence unfurling like a banner caught in a gale.
There was no pain, no fear, only the iron weight of acceptance. Whatever awaited me beyond this place, this life, I would greet it as I had always done - with unshakeable resolve and a prayer to the Emperor on my lips.
As the boundaries of my being dissolved, as the warp claimed me in a scintillating maelstrom of shattered chronology and spatial distortion, a final thought flickered through the receding corners of my mind.
Duty...fulfilled.
------------------------------
A/N: Please let me know your thoughts or suggestions below! If you enjoy your read - leave a stone!! ٩(｡•́‿•̀｡)۶
Discord Server: 65z8w4snys
Release Tempo: 5-10 Chapters weekly.