Lawson stared expressionlessly at the two ghostly faces in the bulkhead.
Numbers One through Five all tightened their grip on their Fangs of Catachan.
Lawson gave a faint smile.
"The only thing I'm truly afraid of is the mushroom soup made by Catachan field cooks."
"But you two aren't even as scary as that."
The two warp imps froze for an instant.
The first one let out an even shriller laugh.
"You'll cry."
"All humans cry in the end. We've seen so many of them. Imperial generals, Inquisitors, even Space Marines. In the darkness of the warp, they all cry. Your mortal souls are too fragile, like paper. Tear once, and they fall apart..."
"Do you know what your biggest problem is?" Lawson asked.
The two warp imps tilted their heads curiously.
"You talk too much."
Lawson exploded into motion.
The Fang of Catachan shot toward the first warp imp in the left-side bulkhead.
Warp imps could poke their heads out from a wall, but that did not mean they could withdraw at will.
Projecting an entity from the warp into realspace required an anchor point. The part of their body that emerged was temporarily fixed on the realspace side.
To retreat back, they needed a split-second unanchoring process.
Lawson struck before that process could finish.
The tip of the Fang of Catachan pierced straight through that ugly face.
The blade entered through the left eye socket and punched through the entire skull.
At the same time, Lawson's left hand shot toward the other side.
Inside the narrow shuttle cabin, less than one and a half meters wide, he used his physical advantage to strike both sides at once, clamping down hard around the neck of the one-eyed warp imp that was protruding from the right-side bulkhead.
The one-eyed imp clearly had not expected a mortal to launch a direct attack while facing two warp entities. Its full attention had been focused on manipulating their emotions.
Only when Lawson's fingers locked around its throat did it realize in terror that it was being dragged bodily out of the wall.
"Hrk!"
The one-eyed warp imp was violently yanked out of that blurred boundary layer.
Its full form was exposed in realspace.
A hideous little creature about forty centimeters tall, covered in dark purple skin like bat-wing membrane, with two degenerated little wings on its back. Its long tail forked into two points at the end and whipped madly through the air.
[Detected a lesser warp entity, warp imp, physically destroyed.]
[Soul energy intercepted and purified.]
[Warp Energy +1.]
That was the system's settlement for the first warp imp, the one on the left wall that had been skewered through the head by the Fang of Catachan.
Lawson's pupils contracted slightly.
Warp Energy.
This was a resource type he had never seen before.
But he had no time to study it.
Because he was still holding a wildly struggling warp imp in his left hand.
The one-eyed imp twisted violently from head to toe. Its tail coiled around Lawson's wrist, and its tiny sharp teeth kept snapping at his fingers, but attacks of that level felt no worse than a few mosquito bites.
After the initial shock passed, the one-eyed warp imp split its mouth into a grin full of malice.
"Hee hee hee... idiot!"
"You think killing my companion is impressive? You think you've actually hurt us?"
"We are the children of the warp! Killing us only sends us home! In a few days, we'll gather ourselves again and come back! We are immortal, worm! That is what pathetic mortals like you can never understand. When you die, you die. You turn to dust. Your soul gets shredded apart by the storms of the warp, and then nothing remains. But we come back! Again and again and again!"
It broke into a fit of lunatic laughter.
"So what if you're choking me? Even if you tear me into pieces, before long I'll be back in some other wall, watching you cry, watching you bleed, watching you die."
The one-eyed warp imp's laughter stopped abruptly.
It had suddenly noticed something.
When a daemon was killed in realspace, its materialized body should dissolve within seconds into a churning mass of warp-energy residue, and that residue should flow back through the cracks between reality and the warp, returning to the chaotic abyss.
But there was nothing left on the left-side bulkhead.
Nothing at all.
Clean.
As if its companion had never existed in the first place.
The grin drained from the one-eyed warp imp's face at a visible speed.
"It... where did it go?"
"It should be returning to the warp. It should be re-forming. I should be able to feel it..."
The dark red parasites writhing in its eye socket squirmed madly, as if they too had sensed the terror of their host.
"Why can't I feel it anymore?"
It snapped its gaze toward Lawson's eyes.
"What did you do to it?"
Lawson did not answer.
Because he himself did not fully understand how the system had done it.
But based on the wording of the system prompt, Soul energy intercepted and purified.
That warp imp's essence, its soul-core, the thing that in theory should have returned to the warp once its material shell was destroyed, had been intercepted by the system.
It had been destroyed in the truest possible sense.
There would be no re-forming.
No return.
In a universe where souls did not truly die and daemons were eternal, that kind of death was more terrifying than death itself.
The one-eyed warp imp was finally afraid.
"What in the warp are you?"
Lawson stared coldly at it.
"I'm the one asking questions, not you."
"Tell me your true name."
A daemon's true name was the symbolic expression of its essential being. To know a daemon's true name was to gain a degree of control over it. This was the thing Imperial daemonhunters and the Grey Knights would pay any price to obtain, and the secret any daemon would rather die than reveal.
The one-eyed warp imp's face changed.
Even with its throat crushed in Lawson's grip, even with the terror of seeing its companion truly erased, the imp's nature had not changed.
They were born liars, deceivers, plotters.
To them, lying was as natural as breathing. Even under threat of death, their first instinct was still to bluff and deceive.
"My true name? I don't have a true name! Small fry like us, warp trash, even the Chaos Gods can't be bothered naming us..."
Lawson's grip on its throat tightened.
That single eye darted around quickly.
"All right, all right, if you insist on knowing, my true name is..."
"Ksukalos Erym Zandaquiel."
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Oh, you like the story? Wow, who knew. Go ahead, drop a review and throw some power stones maybe I'll be motivated to keep going.