Chapter 43: Farewell, Commissar
"How did you do it?" Duvette asked, looking at those ruby-red pupils.
"My ability, Commissar." The Battle Sister answered with Juno's voice. "I can plant psychic seeds inside other people. They become my eyes. And in critical moments, I can take direct control of them."
She paused, and the smile became more pronounced.
"In any case, thank you, Commissar."
She turned sideways toward the Abominable Intelligence, extended her power-armoured left hand, and pressed her palm flat against the surface of the icosahedron device. She felt along it until she found the specific point she was looking for, then drove her palm down sharply. A fist-sized crystalline device came free, its surface cut into a perfect polyhedral structure.
She pulled it clear of the housing.
She drew a magnetic clasp from her belt and attached the crystal to it.
The instant the crystal left the device, the entire room began to shake.
The metal floor beneath them trembled like ground under an artillery strike. Cracks opened in the walls. The ceiling shed fragments in a continuous rain.
A roar of such terror that it had no business existing as sound tore through the minds of every person in the room, reaching past their ears directly into the deepest part of each of them and screaming from inside.
Duvette's eyes went to the upper left of his vision. In the Soul of the Legion's HUD, the Chaos Corruption readings across the entire formation were climbing at a visible rate.
[WARNING! Extreme lethal threat detected!]
[Immaterium entity (daemon) manifestation in progress!]
Beside him, the Battle Sister's expression did not shift. She kept the bolt pistol at Duvette's head and with her free left hand reached behind her back and produced a compact device.
Duvette recognized it immediately.
A personal teleporter. Standard Inquisitor equipment. Short-range instantaneous transit, civilian-space reliable, anything in the near vicinity.
The Battle Sister pressed the activation button.
Then she looked at Duvette with a composed smile and said, "Farewell, Commissar."
Nothing happened.
The indicator light on the device flickered twice and went dark. The smile on her face locked in place. She pressed the button again. No response. Again. Nothing.
"How is this possible," she said, very quietly.
Then the metal floor behind her was torn apart.
A thick tentacle drove upward from below, forcing the floor plates apart with a sound of metal failing under something that did not recognize resistance. The tentacle was vast around, its surface a continuous mass of writhing flesh and sharp bone spurs, and running the length of it, pressed into the organic matter at irregular intervals, were countless eyes — all of them open, all of them rolling with a manic energy, and every one of them locking onto the controlled Battle Sister the moment they cleared the floor.
The tentacle swung.
The Battle Sister did not have time to turn.
The sound that followed was not a weapon's sound. It was simply the sound of a human body encountering a force it was not built to encounter. The power armour shattered, the fragments and what had been inside it scattering across the chamber walls and floor. The magnetic clasp at the belt snapped under the impact. The crystal came free, rolled, and stopped at Duvette's feet.
He stood and looked at what had just occurred.
The Chaos Corruption reading in the upper corner of his vision had reached 45%. The tentacle rose slowly, covered in the evidence of what it had done. The countless eyes rotated toward Duvette one by one, each iris finding him, and in each of them he could see his own reflection in carapace armour staring back.
On the Abominable Intelligence's holographic display, one final line of text appeared.
[I told you. You will all die.]
The screen went dark.
Duvette bent down and picked up the crystal. It lay in his hand and emitted a faint blue light, the internal luminescence still shifting and moving as though something inside it had not received the message that everything had gone wrong.
He straightened. He looked at the tentacle. He looked at the eyes looking back at him.
A thought rose in his mind with a clarity he did not find particularly welcome.
This time, they were genuinely finished.
No hesitation. Duvette, Anderson, and Finn pulled out of the chamber under covering fire from the soldiers positioned in the corridor, and they did not stop moving.
The tentacle absorbed laser fire, plasma discharge, and a direct melta blast without going down. It pulled back and came again. Firing into it bought distance. Killing it was apparently not something they were able to do.
The daemon's shriek of pain and rage rose again directly inside every skull in the formation, bypassing the ears, burrowing straight into the mind and pulling at the coherence of everything it found there. Without Soul of the Legion's influence pressing down across the entire unit, most of the soldiers would have dropped their weapons by now. That much was clear from the readings.
They fell back through the corridor fighting.
The world around them was ending, and not slowly.
It was not only the tentacles that were the problem. More of them were breaking through the walls from every direction, from below the floor plates and from splits in the ceiling overhead. The deeper cause was the force field. The Abominable Intelligence's containment field was gone, and with it the only thing that had been holding the veil between realspace and the Warp intact in this section. The barrier between the two was coming apart.
The metal walls ran and twisted like wax held over a flame. The floor heaved upward in buckled ridges and then dropped away into rifts with no visible bottom. The air itself had taken on a texture and a refractive quality that belonged to nothing in any physical catalogue, bending light in ways that produced colors that should not have been there and geometries that the eye registered and then refused to process.
A corner they had passed through thirty seconds ago might be a solid wall by the time they reached it again, or a crack into nothing. Direction was gone. Time had become something that behaved inconsistently. The things they understood about how spaces worked had been revoked.
The soldiers fought. Bolt pistols fired in controlled bursts. Las-beams crossed the collapsing geometry in red lines. The meltaguns discharged their thermal columns against whatever came closest. In the chaos of a space that no longer had rules, these things continued because the people holding the weapons continued to hold them.
But they were mortal. That was the problem that could not be solved by discipline or by the System's presence. Against something so far beyond the scale of what mortal soldiers were designed to face, resilience and ammunition were both finite, and both were running down.
Screams. Each one brief. Each one final.
Duvette felt the soldier count in his upper field of vision falling without pause, each number a name he had not had time to learn, and the Chaos Corruption readings climbing across every readout simultaneously.
Corrupted voices had found the ones whose grip on themselves was weakest. Low whispers at the edge of hearing, telling them that what was real was what surrounded them now, that the weapons in their hands were a lie they no longer needed to carry.
"Hold your formation! Close on me!" Duvette drove his voice into the comms channel at full volume and kept firing, his bolt pistol putting a controlled round through a mass of flesh-studded tendrils that had begun to push through the left wall beside him. The mass burst and pulled back. The next one was already forming behind it.
Anderson fought with the particular quality of a man who had stopped calculating and was operating on something more fundamental. The meltagun discharged in sustained bursts at anything that came within range. His breathing through the channel was heavy and ragged, the sound of a transhuman-augmented body being pushed toward the limits of what even that augmentation could sustain.
Finn said nothing. The mechanical eyes cycled through their calibration without pause, finding the sensory organs — the clusters of twisted eyes distributed along each tentacle's surface — and the lasrifle struck each one in sequence with a precision that had no visible effort behind it. Each hit bought a moment of recoil from the tentacle. Moments accumulated. The unit kept moving.
But the moments were getting shorter. Hope was measured now in the width of the gap between what they could put out and what kept coming, and that gap was narrowing at a rate that arithmetic could not improve.
Was this it? Here, in a Warp-swallowed hulk with the walls dissolving around them, with no way to recover the bodies?
At that moment, with no warning, a notification appeared in the center of his vision.
[Intelligent core fully absorbed. Grand Strategic Display Module unlocked.]
[Awakening Value: 10%. Emperor's Wrath +100]
[Wake from the false illusions, my child.]
Something shifted. It was not dramatic. It was not a surge of power or a sudden clarity that blazed through the distortion. It was considerably smaller and considerably more useful: in Duvette's sight, certain patterns became marginally legible where they had been entirely buried under the non-reality of the collapsing space. A few corridor outlines — the actual structural bones of what this section of the hulk had been before the field failed — clarified slightly and held still while everything around them continued to dissolve.
At the edge of his vision, a semi-transparent minimap unfolded.
It was like striking a match in a room that had been dark long enough to forget what light looked like. Faint. Barely there. Enough.
Duvette's heart rate changed.
"Brothers! Stay on me!"
He raised the chainsword and pointed it toward the first waypoint marked on the minimap — a section of corridor wall that appeared to be melting and running in real space, material dripping from its surface in slow liquid sheets. On the map, that location was tagged as a faint stable structural node. A thread of fixed geometry in the dissolving maze.
"There's a way out! We can reach it! In the Emperor's name — with me! Now!"
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