“You two will live here from now on.
Don’t go outside without my permission, or you might end up in the hands of that pack of lunatics.”
The two girls followed Andrallo’s gesture and stared, stunned, at the room in front of them: a chamber inside an Emperor’s Children warband ship.
Tidy furnishings, plain decor, clean air, a room that actually felt comfortable.
Then they looked back at the barely-human Chaos Space Marine standing beside them, and their minds went blank.
A room this clean, in an Emperor’s Children warband?
Something like this, existing among the Emperor’s Children?
Every other Emperor’s Children Space Marine they’d seen was a blasphemous, degenerate slave to excess.
So why did this one have such plain tastes?
Andrallo shoved the two of them into the room and walked off alone down the corridor.
Whatever shock the girls felt, his own confusion ran no shallower.
Just a little while ago, he’d been sitting at home playing Stellaris, when he stumbled on a mod called Warhammer 40K.
Curiosity got the better of him, and he installed it.
“Uh, I’m already running close to a hundred mods.
Load Warhammer 40K on top of that and this thing’s probably gonna crash.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Andrallo checked the box anyway.
It was a new save file.
Worst case, it crashed and he just uninstalled the mod.
“Come to think of it, Warhammer 40K’s pretty big online.
No idea what it’s actually about, but it’s space-themed too, so it can’t be that different from anything else out there.”
Buzzing with anticipation, Andrallo launched the game.
But the familiar loading screen never came.
The whole monitor just went dead.
“The hell?
Don’t tell me it actually crashed.”
Andrallo fought with the black screen for a while, but nothing worked.
He couldn’t even power the machine off.
Just as he was cursing himself for running too many mods, the screen flared to life — rings of purple light rippling across the whole display.
“That’s…
the sigil of the End of the Cycle.
Why is that showing up here?”
Before Andrallo could get a proper look, the screen erupted in blinding gold light.
He shut his eyes on reflex, and when he opened them again, he was standing in an unfamiliar room.
As his vision cleared, the sight in front of him hit him like a blow.
The whole room was decadent to the point of rot, crammed with art of every kind: sculptures, oil paintings, jewelry crammed into every corner until there wasn’t a gap left in the small space.
The air hung thick with a cloying, sickly-sweet scent, as if the essence of a thousand different flowers had been distilled into one, mixed through with something musky and animal.
The overload to sight and smell hammered at Andrallo’s mind.
Within seconds he felt nothing but nausea, his body instinctively rejecting everything in front of him.
“Where the hell is this?
What even are these things?”
Andrallo clutched his head, fighting to stay upright, but the strange, delicate sensation that followed left him stunned.
He looked down at his hands and body, and found, to his shock, that he was wearing warped, twisted armor in violet and black.
But whatever he’d just felt against his skin, it was as if the heavy plate wasn’t even there.
Right then a flash of violet light cut through the room.
Drawn to it, Andrallo looked around, and the once-opulent chamber began to warp.
The jewelry, the paintings, the sculptures all began to shift, shedding their disguise to reveal what they truly were.
Only now did Andrallo realize he was standing in the middle of a charnel-house tableau built from flesh and bone.
Human skeletons, and the bones of things he couldn’t identify, had been fashioned into ornaments.
Flesh and viscera had been smeared across canvases.
Every corner of the room held some work of excess, depravity, and blood.
Andrallo recoiled, stumbling back until he came up against a mirror.
Only then did he see what he’d actually become.
Indigo-violet armor hung sparse and ragged off his frame, leaving his abdomen and groin completely unprotected, strange black markings crawling across whatever plate remained.
His exposed skin had gone a pale, fleshy color, studded with piercings and hypodermic needles.
In places it had been deliberately torn open, the raw flesh beneath arranged into some unsettling mark.
His head was worse than the rest.
He had no eyelids left, no lips, his teeth bared in a permanent snarl.
His nose was gone entirely.
His eyes bulged, solid black, without a trace of white left in them.
“What in the—”
Andrallo’s mind had gone completely blank.
He couldn’t work out how he’d turned into this thing in the blink of an eye.
Before he could gather himself, a seductive whisper brushed like a breeze against the exposed holes where his ears should have been.
“A new soul?
How interesting~”
The next instant, agony tore through Andrallo’s stomach and he was thrown bodily across the room, slamming into the pile of grotesque flesh-art.
His armored bulk plowed a gouge through the cluttered chamber, grinding the artwork to powder.
Through the pain, Andrallo forced his head up to look at his attacker.
It was a Daemonette: goat’s legs, an androgynous face, a massive crab claw for a right hand, a mass of mucus-slick tentacles sprouting from its back.
It matched the image of a lesser daemon straight out of scripture.
“Ohh~ An attack like that, and all it did was nick the skin on your waist~ So you really aren’t my sweet Andrallo, are you.”
“Then who exactly are you?!”
The Daemonette’s tone snapped from honeyed and drawn-out to something venomous.
Andrallo’s head was still spinning.
He had no idea what it was talking about and could only stare back in silence.
Taking his silence for mockery, the Daemonette flew into a rage and charged straight at him.
Andrallo threw a wild punch on pure instinct.
Seeing that, the Daemonette let out another mocking laugh.
“You can’t even fight, and you dared to steal my sweet Andrallo’s body?!”
Blade and whip met fist, and in the span of a heartbeat, dozens of blows were traded.
Utterly untrained in combat, Andrallo took hit after hit, his skin sliced open, his armor cracked apart, until he was nothing but a wreck.
But a few of his punches landed too, and each one sent the sexless thing crashing into the wall.
The Daemonette kept up its assault, even as something in it began to shake.
“Why isn’t my attack working?
He’s clearly being hit.”
In every fight before this one, mortal or Space Marine alike, a single lash from that whip had been enough to plunge its victim into endless pleasure and agony together, their life and soul bleeding away with it.
But Andrallo just kept scrambling and flailing, his soul completely untouched.
That was enough to unsettle the Daemonette.
It realized it couldn’t afford to drag this out any longer, and threw itself into the attack with even greater ferocity.
Andrallo was hopelessly outmatched.
He couldn’t understand it: his armor was clearly blocking the blows, and yet he could feel every strike of whip and blade against the plate as clearly as if it wasn’t there at all.
As the Daemonette’s assault continued, Andrallo’s pain deepened, and with it, his anger.
Nothing since he’d been thrown into this room had gone the way he expected.
One second he’d been reeling from a room full of grotesque, bloody art, and the next he was under attack from some monster for reasons he couldn’t even guess at.
Andrallo started fighting back.
At first it was nothing but wild, formless swinging, but as the fight dragged on, his fists began finding form on instinct, some kind of combat technique surfacing without him thinking about it at all.
The Daemonette, which had started this fight utterly at ease, was now scrambling, taking hit after hit as Andrallo traded wound for wound.
It was getting hit more often, and each wound landed worse than the last.
But Andrallo was in even worse shape.
The brutal pace of the fight and his mounting injuries were dragging his limbs down like lead.
And yet nothing seemed able to actually hurt the thing.
Even when Andrallo grabbed whatever was at hand and smashed its body apart, the Daemonette knit itself back together in an instant.
Panic was starting to set in.
Andrallo had no idea how to deal with an enemy like this.
If things kept going the way they were, he was going to die right here.
Then, out of nowhere, a voice reached him.
“Accept yourself.
Unleash your power.”
Andrallo had no idea where the voice had come from.
His mind was already overloaded, past the point of telling real from unreal.
But the Daemonette stopped.
Looking closer, it was still moving, just as if someone had dropped the playback speed on a video.
Its movements had slowed to a crawl.
A child could have dodged it without breaking a sweat, let alone Andrallo.
Then the voice came again.
A bone-deep cold settled over Andrallo, and the scene in front of him began to shift and warp, until it resolved into something radiating golden light: a black sun?
The moment he laid eyes on the black sun, revulsion crawled through every inch of him.
Violet energy burst from beneath his skin, tore through the vision, and dragged him back into the room.
The room was exactly as it had been.
The Daemonette still hung frozen in the same attacking stance.
What the hell had that been?
Andrallo didn’t know, and he wasn’t about to stop and figure it out.
All he wanted was to use this chance to finish the thing in front of him.
He threw a punch.
His own strength, amplified by the power armor, unleashed force beyond anything he could have imagined, and it punched clean through the Daemonette’s body.
“Ohh~ Didn’t expect you had that kind of power in you.
Still, fists alone won’t be enough to—”
!!!
At first, having a hole punched clean through its body didn’t rattle the Daemonette at all.
If anything, it started mocking Andrallo’s feeble effort, as if it had long since gotten used to wounds like that.
But it snapped its mouth shut almost at once, its androgynous, beautiful face twisting, contorting into open terror.
“What did you do to me?!”
The Daemonette roared at him, because for the first time, it felt pain.
As a favored creature of the Prince of Pleasure, pain should have been the ultimate indulgence for something like it.
But this blow carried no pleasure at all, only agony, straight through to whatever passed for its soul.
This wasn’t physical pain.
It was a wound struck at the level of the soul itself.
Screaming, the Daemonette looked down and saw violet energy pouring off every inch of Andrallo’s body.
The energy drifted through the air like a dancer’s sheer veils, spreading outward like the murmur of a running stream.
The instant the Daemonette’s body touched it, the flesh began to crack and crumble apart, dissolving into that same violet energy and merging with it.
It let out a horrifying scream, like the wail of people being tortured.
Andrallo could actually make out the age, the sex, the build of the individual voices buried in that howl.
It was not a good feeling.
“No!
No!
No!
You cursed thing, are you cursed too?!”
The Daemonette shrieked, spitting out words Andrallo couldn’t understand, shoving at him desperately, trying to get away from this harbinger of ruin.
But its arm dissolved the instant it made contact with him.
In the end, the Daemonette dissolved into the air amid pleading and wailing, and the energy it had become flowed back into Andrallo’s body along with the rest.
The moment the fight ended, the strength went out of Andrallo and he collapsed, unconscious.
Even as the darkness took him, his wounds had already begun closing at an astonishing rate.