Chapter 44: The Daemon's True Name
Duvette looked at the hundred points of Emperor's Wrath in his display and activated Burn the Boats without hesitation.
An invisible ripple spread outward from him and swept through every soldier still alive. In the upper right of his vision, the unit's readings locked hard and held.
"Charge!" He drove the word into the channel at full volume and raised the chainsword. "Don't stop! Follow me!"
Fewer than twenty soldiers fell in behind him. They ran through the collapsing corridor, stepping over the fallen, the warped and shifting walls pressing in on both sides as the tunnel deteriorated around them with every second.
The daemon's tentacles came from everywhere.
Anderson's meltagun had been running hot for too long. He put the last discharge into a tentacle dropping from the ceiling above him, the thermal blast vaporizing the mass of it on contact. But a second tentacle had already come through a crack in the floor plates behind a soldier to his left, coiling around the man's leg before he could move.
"Help me!"
The scream cut off. The tentacle contracted with a speed that had nothing mechanical about it, and the soldier was dragged downward into the fissure, the sound of carapace armour grinding against the compressing metal walls echoing up for a few seconds before it stopped.
Duvette did not look back.
He knew what stopping meant. They did not stop.
They broke out of the corridor.
Ahead was the powered open area they had come through earlier. The lighting still held. The floor was still intact. But the daemon had followed them through.
In the same moment they cleared the corridor, the passage behind them came apart entirely. Metal, conduit, pipe networks, all of it collapsed inward at once, folding into itself and forming an expanding rift in the wall with a bleeding edge of prismatic light that cycled through colors without settling on any.
Then the daemon came through the rift.
It forced itself through the gap and Duvette finally saw the full extent of what they had been fighting.
What stood in the open space was not a creature in any sense he could apply the word to. Its main mass suggested something like an ocean predator scaled up a thousandfold, but there was no flesh and no matter to it, only Warp energy in a state of continuous and purposeless motion, murky and shifting through colors that had no stable designation. It had no fixed form. In one second its surface was tentacles covered in suckers, in the next it had spread into a flat carpet of oozing organic matter, then re-formed into a collection of bone-spur-covered whipping limbs without any apparent reason for choosing one configuration over another.
Across its entire shifting body, countless eyes were set into the surface. Each one rotated constantly, and in the pupil of each one a different scene played out: worlds on fire, viscera being pulled apart, a child's face crying with no one to hear it, faces contorted into laughter that was not connected to any experience of joy. Every eye showing something different. Every eye directed at whatever was in front of it.
Everyone who looked directly at it felt the images pour into their minds. Sanity, under the weight of that direct exposure, developed the exact structural problem that glass develops when put under sufficient pressure.
In Duvette's HUD, Burn the Boats was fluctuating against the assault in a way he had not seen it behave before, actively wrestling with the corruption rather than simply maintaining its lock.
"Don't look at it!" He drove his voice into every helmet. "Attack! Keep attacking!"
The soldiers raised their weapons.
The ammunition situation was not good.
The daemon began to move.
Its vast and continuously shapeshifting body flowed across the floor in a slow current, the metal beneath each section of it instantly corroding wherever contact was made, bubbling craters forming and spreading in concentric patterns. The stone that remained scattered from the earlier collapse melted where it touched the daemon's energy, running into pools of softly luminescent liquid. From its main body, tentacles separated and extended in all directions, dozens of them, a dense and shifting forest of writhing, multicolored limbs reaching toward the human survivors.
One came first.
Duvette raised the bolt pistol and fired three rounds in sequence. The bolts detonated against the tentacle's surface, blowing dark craters in the energy-flesh, and the tentacle paused for a fraction of a second and then continued forward.
"Concentrated fire! All weapons on one!"
Fifteen laser beams converged on the same tentacle simultaneously. The combined energy burned through the outer energy shell, the concentrated heat achieving what individual shots had not. The tentacle convulsed violently and tore apart at the midpoint. The forward section dropped to the floor and thrashed like something that had not yet understood what had happened to it, then began to melt from the edges inward, dissolving into a spreading pool of substance that smelled like burning organic matter and nothing else.
More tentacles. Two more. Then three. Then five. Then a count that stopped being useful to track.
The soldiers were forced apart. They pressed back against each other and formed a rough circle, weapons outward, the formation contracting as the tentacle forest closed around them from every direction. Laser beams crossed the space in a fire net that was thinning with every exchange.
A tentacle caught a soldier around the waist. He got the combat knife out and drove it into the organic surface, the blade cutting through the writhing flesh with real effect, but the tentacle contracted in response to the cut rather than pulling away. The carapace armour made a sound that indicated it was meeting the limit of its design tolerances. The sound that followed in the channel was brief.
Sixteen soldiers remaining.
The tentacle forest had enclosed the survivors inside a circle of not more than twenty meters across. The nearest tentacle was five meters from Duvette's face, and every eye along that five-meter length was looking at him, his own helmet reflected back at him from each pupil.
He tightened his grip on the chainsword. If this was the end, he would at least account for something before it arrived.
He was preparing to activate Silence and commit everything to a final stand when a thick column of blue-white plasma fire hit the daemon from the side.
The plasma struck the daemon's flank mass and vaporized a substantial section of it in the instant of contact. The howl the daemon produced was not a sound that entered through the ears. Every soul present felt it arriving from a direction that had no name. The tentacle forest recoiled violently, the limbs pulling back all at once.
Duvette spun.
At the far entrance to the open space, figures had appeared.
Juno stood at the front. Beside her, three Battle Sisters.
Stroud was in the group, his right hand holding a plasma gun that was still venting heat. Under the amplification of his abilities, the shot had finally connected with the daemon's essential nature in a way that mattered.
"Boss, we're here!" Stroud's voice came through the channel.
Juno's voice arrived differently. It reached Duvette directly through some non-acoustic means, rough and depleted, but carrying the familiar edge that had been present in it since he had first heard it. "It seems I have to come personally after all."
The squad with her opened fire, pushing the tentacles back from the space between their position and the survivors. Juno walked forward.
Then she raised her left hand to her right eye.
The eye that the black eyepatch had covered since the first time Duvette had seen her.
She tore the eyepatch away.
The eye beneath it was gold. The iris was perfect in the way that handcrafted things are perfect, with no variation and no ambiguity, and it sat in her socket with the quality of something that had been placed there rather than grown there.
She continued walking toward the daemon. Light began to gather around her body, psychic luminescence rising from her skin and radiating outward into the contaminated air.
The daemon registered something.
Every tentacle, in the same moment, turned toward the Inquisitor. Hundreds of eyes fixed on that golden iris. The nightmare images cycling through those pupils began to distort, to develop interference, to break apart at their edges. The daemon produced a sound that carried both rage and something it had not produced before.
Fear.
The tentacle forest erupted.
Dozens of limbs came at Juno from every angle simultaneously, the speed of them splitting the air, the Warp energy flowing along their surfaces warping the geometry of the space they moved through.
Juno did not move.
She stopped walking. She raised her head. She looked directly at the incoming tentacles with the golden eye.
Then she opened her mouth.
What came out from deep in her throat was not a human sound. It contained her voice, and it contained something else alongside it, something vast and ancient that resonated underneath the human frequencies and turned every syllable into something the air itself reacted to with visible vibration.
"Xal'athok Ur-Ghar!"
Duvette did not know what the words meant. But he could feel what was contained in the syllables: something fundamental and targeted, a force that had been shaped specifically for the thing standing in front of her.
Every tentacle froze.
All of them. Simultaneously. Fixed in position as though driven through by invisible spikes, their movement arrested in whatever configuration they had been in at the moment the last syllable left her mouth.
Juno screamed the words again, her voice climbing higher with each repetition until the sound crossed the threshold of what should have been possible for a human throat.
"Get back! Return to your false dwelling!"
At the final syllable, the golden eye in her socket exploded.
Gold fragments and blood erupted from the socket together. Juno made a single short, brutally pained sound and her body pitched forward, one knee going to the floor.
And then it did not stop there.
Blood came from every orifice in her body. Her eyes, her nose, her ears, the corners of her mouth. The pores of her skin. The black Inquisitor's coat absorbed what it could and was saturated in moments, the blood running down the hem and pooling on the floor around her in a spreading dark circle.
Her body shook without pause. Her breathing had broken down into something irregular and barely functional. But she forced her head up, forced her voice through whatever was still working in her throat, and pointed it toward Duvette.
"Hurry... keep... attacking..."
The daemon's behavior had changed.
The tentacles that had been locked in place began moving again, but without direction, without intention, swinging and striking at random targets, occasionally at each other, the coordination that had made them a coherent threat no longer present. The eyes distributed across its body, which had been focused and purposeful, were clouded now with something that looked like disorientation.
Duvette understood immediately.
She had spoken the daemon's true name.
In the laws that governed Warp entities, knowing the true name of a daemon was knowing something it could not take back. It meant a degree of dominion, however brief and however incomplete. Even a partial true name, imperfectly recalled, was sufficient to cause interference of the scale he was watching.
And right now was the only window they would get.
"Now!" He pushed himself up from the floor and swung the chainsword toward the confused, reeling entity. "Everything! Anything that causes damage! All of it into that thing, right now!"
The daemon must have felt what was coming for it.
A psychic shriek detonated inside every mind present, making no sound that the physical world registered, reaching past every defense and driving directly into the core of each person's awareness. Even with Soul of the Legion's sustained presence across the formation, every living being in the space went down simultaneously: blood from eyes, nose, ears, mouth, hands pressed to helmets, vision gone.
The three Battle Sisters dropped to one knee under the shriek, blood running from every orifice, but did not release their bolt rifles. They screamed their exorcism litanies into the space around them at the top of their failing voices, faith operating where physiology had stopped, the devout fury of the Adepta Sororitas holding its ground against the intrusion the only way it knew how.
Juno collapsed fully to the floor without another sound.
Duvette got one hand under himself. His vision was distorted into something he could barely read. He roared into the channel with everything his voice still had: "Close on me!"
The daemon's name had bound it. The window was limited. But it was enough.
Silence.
The skill opened and the thirty-second field expanded outward from him, covering twenty meters in every direction. Inside the daemon, something changed in response to the field's presence, a crackling interference that built rapidly across its surface as the Reality Anchoring Field made contact. Silence compounded what the true name had already done. The daemon was weaker than it had been at any point since the containment field failed.
Inside the field, the soldiers recovered first. They came back to their hands and knees, then to their feet, and they picked up every weapon they still had.
Las-carbines. Combat shotguns. Plasma guns. Meltaguns. Frag grenades. They ripped the power cells from their lasrifles, overloaded them deliberately, and threw them as improvised explosive charges directly into the daemon's body.
The detonations began.
Fire swallowed the center of the space.
Then a white light arrived that was not fire. It consumed everything. Duvette's eyes shut on instinct but the light came through his eyelids and left burning shapes in his vision that he could not clear. The sound of the detonations layered with something that existed below sound, a howl from an entity that had not made that specific sound since the Age before the Emperor.
The howl lasted approximately three seconds.
Then it stopped.
The white light faded.
Duvette opened his eyes slowly.
In the center of the open space, the daemon was gone.
No remains. No trace of organic matter. No evidence of its passage through the physical world. Only the floor beneath where it had been, scorched black in a rough circle with the edges still producing thin smoke, and around that circle the scattered weapons and equipment of the soldiers who had fought here, and the soldiers themselves who were not getting up.
In his field of vision, a System notification appeared.
[You have successfully banished a daemon of the Sea of Souls. The Emperor appreciates your courage and will. Emperor's Wrath +500]
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