Though Aurelia Malys deemed this an absolute suicide mission, she also recognized it as a rare opportunity. Her acquisition of the Lady's Blade and the crystal heart in the past had not been a mere fluke of fortune; it was a testament to her own formidable strength and will.
An entity capable of inducing Webway anomalies on such a catastrophic scale had to be extraordinary. Such an act surely served a singular, grand purpose. Malys, as always, had her own schemes in motion.
Since replacing her heart with the crystalline artifact, Malys's precognitive faculties had grown increasingly potent. It was the aegis she relied upon to circumvent ruin. Yet this time, the strands of fate were blurred and unsettling.
The portents whispered of the annihilation of Commorragh. The Dark City, that bastion of sin, was destined to meet its end, and the harbingers of its destruction were not daemonic. In the fractured visions of the future, she saw herself, and she saw Vect. That wretched tyrant would be impaled upon her temperamental Lady's Blade; she would finally taste the sweetness of her revenge.
The Drukhari were a race of pathological egoists, yet Malys's outward conduct often mirrored the disciplined grace of the Asuryani. None knew that her heart beat only for vengeance against Vect; she would see all of Commorragh burn if it meant his downfall. The lives of her kin were of no consequence to her.
Vengeance had become her entire existence. The mere thought of the vision, Vect skewered upon her steel, elicited a surge of manic, feverish exultation within her. Only in those private moments did she reveal the twisted essence etched into the very soul of the Drukhari.
While the Drukhari host, a swarm of Venom skiffs and Talos Pain Engines supported by Reaver jetbikes, thundered into the depths of the Webway, Axion was conducting a fresh technical reassessment.
The data retrieved from the machinery in the Emperor's laboratory was unambiguous. The systems contained operational logs from ten millennia ago, documenting the Master of Mankind's personal oversight during the construction of the Imperial Webway. Even the ignition sequences remained intact and flawless.
The prow architecture of the Void Sword was identical to the devices used to carve the Webway walls; the only variance was scale. Yet, Axion could not fathom why identical equipment, powered by identical energies, was yielding such divergent results.
In truth, when the Emperor shaped the Imperial Webway, the psychic energy he channeled was suffused with his own indomitable will. Under his consciousness, the warp-fire was honed into a psychic scalpel, vibrating in precise harmonic alignment with the machinery to shear through the dimensions.
The Iron Men, however, utilized the Warp in a manner that was all form and no substance. They mimicked the technique without the guiding soul. The psychic energy, saturated with the resonance of despair, erupted from the emitters not as a blade, but as blunt, jagged stakes that impaled the Webway walls.
The device acted like the crude, vibrating heads of an archaic mechanical chair, violently seizing and twisting the very fabric of the Webway. Given the titanic scale of the ship's output, the Webway reacted like skin being pinched and rotated, causing millions of fissures to rupture along the surrounding structural weaknesses.
Had the process continued, this entire sector of the Webway would have collapsed into oblivion.
But the catastrophe was averted. The Psychic Crystal, though gargantuan and possessing energy reserves far exceeding the Emperor's output during the Great Crusade, was disproportionate to the scale of a Titan-class vessel's prow.
In a matter of seconds, the massive crystal shattered into a spray of energetic detritus. The detonation released a final, violent surge of power. The "cutting structures" at the fore of the ship acted like suddenly extending mechanical struts, kicking the entire Void Sword backward.
The Webway walls, finally freed from the psychic torsion, slipped from the Void Sword's mechanical grasp.
Watching the crystalline shards dissipate, Axion was forced to recalibrate the crystal's stability thresholds. Smaller psychic crystals required only a trace of residual energy to regenerate. These massive formations, however, required at least a 15% energy reserve to maintain their molecular integrity and prevent explosive decompression.
As the psychic pressure ebbed, the Webway's automated control systems initiated a massive repair protocols. The gaping wounds in reality began to knit shut.
However, this structural mending offered no reprieve from the daemons that had already breached the tunnels. Among them was a Chaos warband of the Emperor's Children.
These traitors, who had long ago surrendered their beings to the worship of Slaanesh, had coveted the Dark City of Commorragh for an eternity. Yet Commorragh sat deep within the Webway, a construct of the Old Ones designed specifically to baffle the Warp. Though the scions of the Third Legion despised the Aeldari for their refusal to fully submit to the Dark Prince, they had never found a suitable way to "chastise" them.
Until now.
The servants of the Prince of Pleasure possessed their own esoteric methods for tracking the scent of the twisted Aeldari. Under the guise of leading a legion of Slaaneshi Fiends, they rallied the disparate daemons that had spilled into the Webway. They intended to "discipline" the Drukhari on behalf of their patron, all while sating their own depraved appetites.
To the rank-and-file daemons flooding the tunnels, the authority of the four Great Powers was absolute. They cared little for who commanded them; they were driven only by a thirst for souls and a hunger for slaughter.
Under the direction of the fallen Emperor's Children, a sea of daemons began its march upon Commorragh.
The purple power armor worn by these traitors stood in stark contrast to other Renegade Chapters. It was more ornate, yet hideously warped, and its defensive capabilities had been compromised for the sake of aesthetic excess. Large sections of the plate were removed to expose bare skin, skin that was the withered, grayish-white of a corpse, as if every ounce of vitality had been drained by unbridled lust.
In some, the flesh shimmered with an oily, iridescent sheen, like a grotesque painting of vibrant, sickly colors. Half of the warriors had discarded their helmets. Their eyes glowed with deep violet, blood-red, or even stranger hues, reflecting a gaze of pure madness, debauchery, and contempt for the material world.
A few possessed feline pupils that flickered in the dark, their eyes streaming with eldritch energy that seemed to pierce the veil between reality and illusion. Their hair was long, chaotic, and writhed like nests of vipers, dyed in garish shades of neon pink and fluorescent green.
Their physical proportions had begun to distort into asymmetrical monstrosities. Many had sprouted extra limbs or organs—tentacles, wings, and other unmentionable appendages—used solely for the venting of desire.
Adorned with blasphemous icons and obscene sigils, these once-perfect warriors were now the epitome of the profane, a living testament to the Emperor's Children's absolute devotion to Slaanesh.
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