Chapter 179: The Two-Headed Antler-Fiend
The staging bay was a vast, lightless cavern. Fortunately, the squad's weapons were equipped with under-barrel tactical lights, and their Abyssal Power Frames featured shoulder-mounted high-intensity lamps. They swept the darkness with beams of sterile white light, but the more they saw, the more their dread intensified.
Kian Voss gripped his heavy-barrel Lasgun, the muzzle pointed toward the floor. Under the glare of his weapon-light, he saw that the deck—solid Imperial plasteel—was covered in a thin, translucent layer of ice.
This was Warp-Rime, a physical manifestation of Empyrean leakage. Combined with the spontaneous combustion of their Purity Seals, it was an absolute confirmation: the thing ahead was no mere mutant. It was a true denizen of the Beyond.
They advanced toward the center of the bay, near the gargantuan base of the primary well. A sound drifted through the dark—a distorted, overlapping argument between two voices.
"Liar... Liar! This is not eternal life! This is a curse! A rotting tomb!"
"No, child. This is eternity. All things must decay, but to decay without end, to rot without dying... that is the Grandfather's greatest blessing."
"NO!! I did not ask for this! I wanted to live forever, not to be a breeding ground for flies! You demons! You parasites!"
"Hehehe... you scream because your mind is still small. You cannot yet grasp the magnitude of His love. Once you understand, you will thank the Father for every maggot that calls you home."
Kian and his men rounded a massive industrial repair-hauler and froze. Their tactical lights converged on a figure sitting cross-legged in the center of the clearing.
It was a humanoid horror, standing just over two meters tall. Its body was a landscape of Nurgle's "gifts": bloated, grey-green flesh, weeping sores, and patches of moss. It was dressed in the tattered, filth-caked remains of a High-Spire tuxedo. The fabric seemed to have fused with the monster's skin, sections of it crawling with writhing white grubs.
The creature held a rusted iron bell in its left hand and a jagged, wooden blade—resembling a ritualistic Kris—in its right. But the most bone-chilling detail was its heads.
It had two.
The first was a normal human head, pushed down to the center of the chest. It was pale, tear-streaked, and howling in a state of lucid madness.
Protruding from where the original neck should have been was a much thicker, elongated throat topped with a monstrous head. This secondary head possessed a pair of jagged, wooden antlers and a face frozen in a look of serene, fatherly benevolence.
The Antler-Fiend looked at the light, its milky eyes blinking.
"Oh? New guests for the garden?"
"PDF?! Please!" the human head on the chest shrieked, looking at Kian. "Kill me! Put a bolt in my brain! End this nightmare, I beg of you!!"
Kian didn't wait for a formal introduction. "PURGE THE ABOMINATION!!"
The Voss Guard pulled their triggers. A wall of ruby light erupted from sixteen Lasguns, a concentrated storm of sun-fire aimed directly at the monster's chest. Kian worked the slide on his 30mm launcher, sending a high-tier Bolt-round shrieking toward the beast's antlered skull.
But the "Final Boss" of the Spire wasn't going down to a single volley.
As the lasers approached the monster, they hit an invisible barrier. The red beams sizzled and dissolved into clouds of thick white steam, as if the energy was being absorbed by a localized field of biological entropy.
The 30mm Bolt was even more pathetic. As it entered a ten-meter radius of the creature, the rocket-motor sputtered and died. The casing rusted into a dull brown in mid-air, the metal flaking away like ancient parchment. The legendary "Grade-7" shell hit the floor as a useless, inert lump of iron, having rotted into a relic of the past in a fraction of a second.
The squad continued to fire, turning the air into a soup of white mist and ozone, but the Antler-Fiend remained untouched.
Kian's heart hammered. Accelerated Entropy. A passive decay-field.
He snatched a fragmentation grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and hurled it with all his strength. He watched the arc perfectly. As the grenade entered the "Dead Zone" around the monster, the iron casing turned to rust-dust, and the high-explosive filler spilled out like grey sand. The fuse simply vanished.
The PDF regulars stopped firing, their hands shaking as they stared at their "God-tier" weapons rendered useless.
"Sergeant... what do we do?!" Egghead wailed, his voice cracking with terror. "The sun-guns aren't working!!"
Before Kian could answer, the monster moved.
"Our guests are quite loud," the Antler-head murmured. "They require a moment of silence... to hear the first breath of the world."
The Fiend raised the rusted iron bell and struck it with the wooden blade.
DING.
The sound wasn't loud, but it carried a psychic weight that felt like a physical impact. It was the "Cry of the Newborn."
Kian felt a white-hot spike of agony explode behind his eyes. The sound carried the overlapping echoes of a million births—human infants, grox-calves, insects, and monsters—all screaming their first breath in unison. It was a tidal wave of biological sound that bypassed their ears and struck directly at their souls.
Kian stumbled, his vision swimming. He felt like someone had hit him in the skull with a power-maul.
Around him, his fifteen soldiers collapsed. They dropped their rifles, clutching their bird-masks and wailing in pain. The psychic "Loudness" had nearly liquidated their nervous systems.
The Antler-Fiend looked at the fallen squad, then turned its gaze to Kian, who was still standing—though swaying dangerously.
"You are strong, little guest," the monster whispered, its voice a wet drone. "You have the scent of the Emperor on you... but even His light must eventually dim into the rot. Join us. Become a seed in the Grandfather's garden."
Kian shook his head violently, biting his tongue until the copper taste of blood snapped him out of the trance. He raised a trembling hand and gave the monster a middle finger.
The Antler-Fiend let out a soft, amused chuckle and raised its wooden sword.
"Very well. I shall grant you the gift of death. And from your corpse, a thousand beautiful things shall grow. You will understand everything once you are fertile soil."
The monster began to walk toward Kian. Every step it took on the plasteel floor caused the metal to groan, rust, and expand into jagged orange flakes.
It was as if he carried a Halo of Decay, and everything within that aura was condemned to rapid entropy.
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