War Hammer: The reality Bender Chapter 21 21: Daemon Prince's Descent

Riding the current of her psychic incantation, Cybia's vision bypassed the imnsely thick ceramite blast doors, directly observing the interior of the bridge.

She entirely ignored the aningless, blasphemous art decorating the bulkheads, her attention instantly drawn to a ritual altar situated dead-center in the chamber.

The stone altar was constructed of concentric rings—six in total radiating outward from the center. Upon each ring stood six stone pillars.

A total of thirty-six pillars, and bound to each by thick iron chains was a human being.

They varied entirely in height, build, age, and appearance. All of them hung their heads in unconsciousness, their flesh carved with bloody, blasphemous brands.

And what caused Cybia to montarily stop breathing was the faint, unmistakable luminescence radiating from every single captive—a clear indicator that all thirty-six were psykers.

"Damnation, this ritual must be stopped!"

The vast experience of a senior Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus allowed Cybia to react instantly.

There was absolutely no need to waste ti deciphering the specific intent of the ritual. If a Chaos ritual required the potent souls of psykers as fuel, its destructive yield was unequivocally massive and demanded imdiate Exterminatus!

Judging that there was no ti to relay tactical data to her retainers, Cybia acted unilaterally. Invisible telekinetic force condensed within the air, violently slamming down toward the ritual altar!

Nothing happened.

"It was deflected?!"

Cybia's pupils contracted sharply.

Standing elevated above the altar, the Chaos Lord, sporting a faint, mocking smile, suddenly turned his head, his gaze perfectly locking onto her psychic projection.

"Curse it all, I was a second too late!"

Cybia's heart plumted.

Exactly as she had feared, the thirty-six bound psykers simultaneously unleashed an agonizing, blood-curdling shriek. A torrential ocean of psychic energy violently bled from their forms as their very souls were violently flayed from their bodies.

Guided by the ritual circles, the thirty-six souls converged upon the dead center of the altar, condensing into a singular singularity, from which frenzied arcs of white warp-lightning began to violently lash out.

As a master psyker, Cybia's hyper-sensitive perceptions forced a phantom hallucination upon her: she could practically hear the agonizing, grinding shriek of the Veil tearing apart, the boundary between realspace and the immaterium fracturing under the strain.

"This is catastrophic!"

With the ritual successfully completed, a psychic detonation ensued, whipping up a violent warp storm whose area of effect rapidly expanded, drowning the entire imdiate vicinity.

What was happening?

Even Rowan—an entity completely detached from the immaterium, lacking any warp shadow whatsoever—perceived the subtle shift in the atmosphere.

A highly volatile, hyper-active energy saturated the air. The ambient temperature plumted rapidly, and faint traces of frost materialized upon the deck plating.

"Urgh!"

A low groan of agony echoed from behind him. Rowan abruptly turned his head, only to see his three retainers slumped helplessly upon the deck, their expressions violently contorted as they seemingly engaged in a desperate ntal struggle against so unseen force.

Rowan imdiately raised his hands, projecting his ontological dominion to blanket their consciousness, intending to alleviate their tornt and bolster their resistance.

"It is insufficient..."

However, he quickly frowned, arriving at a grim conclusion.

His authority over reality could indeed numb their agony, but the warp influence was continuous, and this localized warp storm was still intensifying.

The mont he retracted his dominion, they would imdiately be forced to resu their struggle against the tides of the immaterium. It was functionally useless; they would likely be incapacitated until this localized warp storm finally subsided.

Temporarily regaining a sliver of ntal clarity, Cybia, relying on her ironclad willpower, struggled to raise her head. Her eyes entirely bloodshot, she mouthed a silent directive to Rowan.

Do... not... mind... us...

Understood.

Through the hierarchical tether established between an architect and his transmuted subordinates, Rowan instantaneously parsed her intent.

Indeed, there were far more pressing matters at hand.

His resolve hardening, Rowan turned back without hesitation, his gaze locking onto the ceramite blast doors. With a single pulse of his will, his ontological dominion instantly annihilated a massive, gaping hole directly through the heavy plating.

Beside him, the Leman Russ Executioner main gun violently tore away its optical camouflage. Its track chassis rolled forward, rapidly closing the distance to the doors, and thrust its heavy barrel straight through the breached opening.

The machine spirit roared in absolute, exalted frenzy as blinding, incandescent plasma energy rapidly charged within its coils.

"Let the cannons roar!"

...

Victory is assured.

At practically the exact sa mont, the Chaos Lord was thinking this with absolute certainty.

Following the violent psychic shockwave, the ritual altar had been brutally blown apart from within, reducing stone and human flesh alike into a pulverized, ruined crater.

And standing amidst the rubble was a monstrosity possessing grotesquely mutated limbs.

Her fra was towering, her flesh violently twisted into an inhuman mockery. Possessing four arms ending in crab-like pincers, she wielded four distinct, elegantly curved blades, looking nothing like a mortal being.

This was the Slaaneshi Daemon Prince, Miriael Sabathiel.

As the first Battle Sister to fall from grace, the beloved darling of Slaanesh, she had received an exceedingly generous bounty of chaotic gifts from the Prince of Pleasure.

Consequently, she was an apex predator within the galaxy; absolutely nothing could stop her from offering the souls of her prey to the Lord of Excess.

Enveloped in her terrifying aura of dark seduction, even warriors of ironclad resolve, upon rely laying eyes on such a monstrosity, would suffer catastrophic spiritual corruption, reduced to mindless, drooling husks.

The Chaos Lord's ritual was not particularly complex; it simply utilized a specific thodology to violently detonate a breach in the Veil between realspace and the immaterium.

Through this breach, an entity residing within Slaanesh's domain could answer the summons and cross over into the material universe.

The primary flaw of this thod was severe: within a few solar days, the gradually sealing Veil would cut off the entity's tether, causing it to literally "starve to death" in realspace before being violently banished back to the warp.

But to the Chaos Lord, a few days was more than sufficient.

Even if the intruder truly was a Living Saint of the Corpse-Emperor, it was absolutely impossible for her to defeat a Daemon Prince!

However, just as this thought crossed his mind...

The cavernous muzzle of a cannon breached the hole in the blast doors. In the next microsecond, a massive, blinding beam of azure plasma violently lanced forward.

The Slaaneshi Daemon Prince, having only just materialized in realspace, completely failed to anticipate such a sudden, overwhelming assault. She instinctively twisted sideways to evade, but her transhuman reflexes were a fraction of a microsecond too slow.

HSSSSS—!

The blinding blue plasma instantly engulfed half her form, utterly vaporizing two of her arms into absolute nothingness.

"AAAAAARRRGHHHH!"

Miriael had clearly not expected to face an attack of such devastating magnitude.

The apocalyptic agony inflicted by the searing plasma forced an agonizing shriek from her throat, but the sound rapidly twisted into an ethereal, languid moan, as if she were perverse enough to derive ecstasy from the lingering tornt.

The Executioner main gun fired continuously, launching sphere after sphere of hyper-accelerated plasma toward her.

The Daemon Prince did not hesitate. Breaking into an impossibly elegant dance, she evaded the incoming fire with a velocity that entirely outpaced the targeting logic of the machine spirit.

Ultimately, seemingly bored with the ga, she casually hurled one of her blades.

The blade transford into a streak of flying light, its velocity so terrifying that the displaced air failed to escape, compressing into overlapping shockwaves along the edge of the weapon.

BOOM!

The blade impacted the plasma coils, instantaneously detonating the cannon into a shower of flying shrapnel. The ensuing violent shockwave simultaneously tore the heavy ceramite blast doors off their hinges, sending them crashing heavily to the deck in several shattered pieces.

The ambient light from the corridor spilled into the bridge, and standing directly within that light, Rowan locked eyes with Miriael.