Chapter 364: Khorne's Blessing
A Chaos Spawn was what resulted when a Chaos God's blessing overloaded and mutated out of control.
The four Chaos Powers ran a whole system for promoting their followers. Mortal, daemon, or Astartes, it didn't matter. Pledge yourself to one of them, do what pleased that god, and advancement followed.
Normally that advancement came gradually, doled out piece by piece, letting the recipient adapt as they went.
But if a god took a dislike to a particular follower, the blessing didn't come gradually at all. It came all at once, in a single overwhelming flood of Warp energy.
If the recipient couldn't handle that flood, their body simply broke down.
It twisted, mutated, sprouted a tangle of extra limbs and tentacles, extra heads, extra legs, mounds of proliferating flesh.
The end result, more often than not, ended up as a rough, roiling blob of a creature, what got called a Chaos Spawn.
To put it bluntly: overloaded on divine power until you burst like an overfilled cream puff.
That's exactly what was happening to the warlord now, unable to handle the surge of power flooding into him, his body twisting from a towering Greater Daemon into something closer to a shapeless mound of writhing flesh.
"No! Stop it! STOP IT!!"
Some sliver of consciousness still remained in the warlord, but he'd lost all control over his own body.
His twisted face was already being swallowed by the mounds of tumorous flesh sprouting across it, barely visible anymore.
Kian didn't waste the opening. He got to his feet, sword in hand, activated the disruption field, and charged straight at the writhing mass, hacking at it without mercy.
Now that the warlord had collapsed into a shapeless heap, he'd lost every bit of the absurd durability he'd had before.
Kian's blade tore through the proliferating flesh easily, carving deep gashes over a meter into the mass with every swing, exposing raw crimson muscle tissue underneath.
Agonizing pain tore through the Spawn, its remaining head letting out a scream, and the tentacles and extra limbs writhing off its body tried to fend off Kian's attacks.
But Kian's blade moved too fast, and every one of those limbs and tendrils got severed cleanly.
Chaos Spawns had an enormous range between weakest and strongest. The weak ones were barely more than dogs, killed with a single kick. The strong ones could tower like mountains, stretching for kilometers.
This particular Spawn, born out of a mere mortal, had rolled about as low as it got, a slow, shapeless mound of flesh incapable of moving with any real speed.
Once Kian had severed every tentacle and extra limb it had grown, he drove the sword straight into its body, leaving only the hilt exposed, gripped it with both hands, and walked a full circle around the mass.
The motion cut the fleshy ball clean in half, spilling a chaotic mess of organs out onto the ground.
The Spawn had no fight left in it at all. Only the warlord's original head remained, still screaming.
"Kill me! Kill me!! Please, just kill me..."
Only his mouth still worked now, and even his daemon-warped face had started mutating further, thick knots of flesh swelling up across it, his eyes squeezed nearly shut, begging Kian for mercy through the agony.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk."
Kian looked down at the pathetic wreck. This was what happened when you pledged yourself to Chaos and made one wrong move.
He raised his sword and brought it down hard. A wet crunch, and the warlord's hideously mutated head was severed clean off.
The head hit the ground, and the still-writhing mass of the Spawn lost whatever was holding it together, going rigid all at once and collapsing into a motionless heap of ruined flesh.
It was over. Kian deactivated the disruption field, gave the blade a small flourish, looked down at the mangled remains, and shook his head.
Outside the walls, the battle had wound down as well. A rhythmic tremor rolled through the ground, accompanied by a series of heavy crashes. Knight suits, inside the city now, plowing through buildings and toppling them outright.
By the gatehouse, the great ceramite gate had been fully raised, the drawbridge fully lowered.
Luca's Knight and both his squire-suits were already inside the city, tearing through the enemy.
Standing nearly twelve meters tall, the Knight brought a level of destruction that bordered on apocalyptic, sprinting down the streets and leaving nothing but rubble behind wherever rebel troops had gathered.
The two six-meter squire-suits kept pace effortlessly, moving like oversized ostriches, each stride covering nearly ten meters, charging straight toward wherever the enemy massed thickest.
The cultists packed into the streets had no time to scatter clear, and were reduced to paste under the squire-suits' feet.
Once inside, all three suits split up. Luca's Knight tore through the heart of the city in a rampage of destruction, while the two squires broke off to seal the two smaller gates.
Luca had no intention of letting a single cultist escape. He meant to wipe every last one of them out.
Because once inside, he'd seen firsthand exactly what these cultists had done, atrocities that defied any justice.
The city's hundred and fifty thousand people had been slaughtered to the last soul, bodies littering every street, every rooftop.
Worse than the killing itself, the cultists had defiled the corpses afterward, stringing them up on buildings, arranging them into things that assaulted the eye and the mind alike.
These weren't men anymore. Khorne's corruption had turned every one of them into something closer to daemon than human.
"DIE!! Only death can cleanse the guilt of such desecration!!"
Luca's furious roar tore out of the Knight's vox-amplifier as he ran down fleeing cultists and stamped them into the pavement.
The terrified cultists screamed and fled into nearby buildings for cover.
Luca simply accelerated the Knight and rammed straight through the walls with its massive shoulder plating.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
Three- and four-story marble buildings collapsed entirely under the impact, and the Knight's momentum barely slowed at all, plowing straight into the second, third, fourth building in a row.
The Knight's skeletal frame and armour were forged entirely from adamantium, a metal dense enough to give the suit a truly terrifying mass. It punched through solid stone like paper.
Luca's three-thousand-strong army poured into the city behind the Knights, hunting down scattered survivors the war engines couldn't easily reach. The whole city rang with the screams of dying cultists.
Listening to those cries echo through the city, Kian considered heading out to join the slaughter, get in a few more kills, pad out his melee proficiency a bit more while he was at it.
But just as he turned to move, the red light still churning in the ritual circle locked onto him.
Some vast, terrible will turned its attention squarely on Kian. His performance had, apparently, impressed it greatly.
The next instant, the surrounding red light seemed to grow eyes, and surged directly toward him.
Kian, mid-step toward the exit, felt his whole body seize up. A violent, blood-soaked surge of Warp energy poured straight into him.
His muscles and bones roared with sudden pressure, and his mind filled with the war-cries of a thousand different sentient species locked in mortal combat, and the agonized screams of just as many, dying, beheaded, torn apart.
Kian let out a strangled grunt and dropped straight to his knees.
"Oh no. Oh HELL no. Khorne, buddy, do NOT come over here—"
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