"Everyone! Vacate the blast radius imdiately!"
Enkidu snarled into the vox. His psychic screen was retracted violently, condensed into a tight, hemispherical shield around his imdiate position.
"What in the na of the Throne is that?!" Pius shouted, staring in disbelief at the buckling bulkheads in the distance.
Sothing massive was moving through the ship's guts. Steel groaned and shrieked; power lines snapped like dry twigs. The heavy thuds of its movent sounded like funeral bells—as if a Knight-Titan were stomping behind the walls. Through the torn tal, a flash of dark purple chitin appeared, covered in the scars and gouges of a thousand battles. It looked like a demon crawled out of an ancient myth.
"A troubleso one," Bellator hissed. "Should I draw it off? Give the rest of you ti?"
"Don't be a fool. You can't touch that thing," Varangis replied coldly. He shifted his vantage point, testing the creature's armor with a few precise shots into the gaps of the buckled plating. The rounds sparked and ricocheted harmlessly. "Ignore it. We aren't its target."
Enkidu watched the crumbling bulkheads with a heavy heart, but he remained focused. The arrival of a Patriarch was noisy, but it hadn't exceeded his tactical projections. For a creature standing six ters tall to move at all, it required specific structural clearances. He had already mapped every corridor on The Lash of Agony capable of accommodating such a nightmare.
"Adelina, status. Are you secure? What is the state of the ship's vitals?"
"...Secure..." Her voice crackled through the psychic interference. "...Lighting and vox... damaged. Warp drive... water reclamation... intact."
"Good. Can you track the heavy signatures? Report their vector."
Static hissed for a mont before the feed stabilized. "Two primary signatures. Based on the structural damage, they are closing on each other. One is approaching your designated Point Four."
Before she could finish, a second, bone-shaking roar tore through the deck. Simultaneously, a tsunami of psychic pressure slamd into Enkidu's shield.
The barrier flickered, but it held.
Enkidu's eyes sharpened, a cold smile touching his lips. The Patriarchs were challenging each other. Everything was proceeding exactly as he had planned.
Point Four: an abandoned, deep-level vertical shaft. Here, the two Genestealer Patriarchs finally clashed.
This was a war of total erasure. Victory ant the winner took everything—consuming the biomass of the loser and absorbing the decades of resources and population the rival had cultivated. In the years to follow, the ascended victor would lead the "Great Uprising," calling out to the gods in the stars to bring a "perfect" end to the world.
The two titans blurred through the maze of rusted cables and iron walls. Despite their size, they moved with the speed of a lightning strike. Within seconds, they had exchanged dozens of blows, the screech of diamond-hard claws on chitin echoing through the shaft until it twisted into a high-pitched, agonizing wail.
Fury poured from the combatants, rippling through the blood-bonds to every hybrid on the ship. Across the lower decks, the "people" scread in unison, their actions becoming a frenzied, mindless blur of violence.
But the physical struggle was only half the battle.
As the source of their respective broods' genetic line, the Patriarchs possessed imnse psychic power. Now, in this life-or-death struggle, they unleashed it without restraint.
Frost, lightning, domination, enfeebling rot... a vortex of psychic energy swirled around the shaft, tearing a hole in the fabric of reality.
Enkidu flexed his fingers, his own psychic power curling into a tight ball within his chest. He could feel it—the area of the Warp corresponding to this ship was being "lit up" by the Patriarchs' duel. Under the weight of their combat, the Veil between the Materium and the Sea of Souls was flapping like a curtain in a gale.
And the scavengers were noticing.
The scent of sulfur and copper arrived first. A pile of brass-bound skulls stared from across the red river, cheering for every drop of spilled blood. Then ca the pink-hued dancer, reclining on a bed of living nerves, watching the performance with predatory delight. Then, the wet, bloated rot—the grandfather of decay—crawled forward, waiting with patient pity for the bodies to fail so that new life could bloom in the filth.
Only the blue-feathered bird seed distracted, searching for sothing else entirely.
Enkidu held his breath, forcing his psychic presence into total silence. He knew it was a desperate gamble—hiding from the Neverborn was rarely a matter of effort—but he prayed to pass unnoticed.
Perhaps his prayer was heard. The dancer grew bored, blowing a puff of scented musk into the face of the skull-pile. The resulting fury saw a hound leap from the blood-river to tear a chunk from the dancer's thigh. The blue bird shrieked with laughter, flapping its wings as it alternated sides, only to be sprayed by a jet of bile from the rotting mound.
The Immaterium descended into its natural state: a chaotic, four-way free-for-all.
If a Legion of the Damned appeared now, Enkidu thought with dark humor, we'd have a full house.
Then, a gargantuan shadow lood over the squabbling Neverborn.
Enkidu couldn't describe what it was. He "saw" a crude, colossal figure composed of rushing water, ancient earth, and scrolls of tattered parchnt. It raised a foot to crush the brawling entities. Faced with an entity of such overwhelming, primordial scale, three of the Neverborn vanished instantly. The grandfather of rot was the only one left to be "squashed" into a puddle of stagnant filth.
A strange sensation grew within Enkidu's mind. A na appeared, surfacing as if he had known it since the dawn of ti.
"Ur-Apsu--Nam-Ku-Zu."
The Veil buckled and snapped, hurling his consciousness back into his body. Enkidu blinked, finding himself once more in the shadows near the vertical shaft. His vox-unit was screaming with Telax's voice.
"...you damnable whelp! What are you doing?! Why did a massive explosion just report from the lower decks? If I find out you're sabotaging my ship, I'll..."
"It's nothing, Lord Telax," Enkidu replied, wiping the "vision" from his mind. "Just a minor complication in the process of purging the heretics."
He reached down and pressed the detonator in his hand.
~~----------------------
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