In the days that followed, Andrallo made no major moves.
He spent his time talking with Maen and Charlotte, learning what he could about the state of the Imperium of Man, while quietly looking for a chance to wipe out the Chaos warband.
The screams of the tortured captives battered at his mind constantly.
Even when he threw everything he had into blocking them out, his own overpowering psychic sensitivity meant those soul-deep wails still found their way into his head.
But before long, the sounds stopped, because the warband had simply used the captives up, and these Slaanesh-worshipping Space Marines had no interest in touching the mortals who actually kept the ship running.
Those mortals were essential to the ship’s operation, and besides, the Chaos Space Marines considered them “imperfect,” unworthy of serving as raw material for their art.
Every time another human died screaming, fury kindled in Andrallo’s chest, and an ever-stronger urge to destroy this whole place filled his mind.
He’d also discovered that the souls of the dead were all being pulled into a place called the Warp.
Maen and Charlotte called it the Sea of Souls; Andrallo preferred to call it the Void.
Andrallo had tried entering the Warp once.
It hadn’t been especially difficult for him, which only confirmed that the species template he’d built in Stellaris was actually functioning here.
But that first trip into the Warp left him thoroughly sick.
Rage, grief, agony, greed, excess…
the instant he crossed over, an endless flood of negative emotion slammed into him all at once, and it drove him straight back out.
“Christ, what’s the difference between this place and a septic tank?
Why is the entire Warp nothing but negative emotion?
What the hell did the Zroni cook up this time?”
The moment Andrallo got back from that mouthful of misery, a summons arrived from the warband’s lord, calling everyone together to discuss their next move.
Andrallo would need to step out for a while, but the good news was that his lord forbade anyone from taking a brother’s property, and Maen and Charlotte counted as property.
He said goodbye to the two sisters and opened his door for the first time in days.
To his surprise, the ship’s corridors today were crawling with daemons.
Andrallo already knew about daemons from what Charlotte had told him, and he now understood that the very first thing he’d done upon arriving in this world was fight a Daemonette.
But every daemon he passed steered well clear of him, not one of them so much as daring to meet his eyes.
Andrallo found that a little disappointing.
He’d been hoping to test his psychic strength against one.
He walked down a passage decorated with flowers and gold until he reached a hall that looked almost like paradise: fountains, running water, greenery everywhere, fine wine and unfamiliar fruits scattered all around.
For a moment Andrallo thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.
He hadn’t expected to find something like an idyllic garden tucked inside this ship of depravity and excess.
But the daemons and Chaos Space Marines who followed pulled him straight back to reality.
The degenerate crowd filed in one after another, putting on airs of nobility and elegance at first, but the moment they injected themselves with vials of every color imaginable, they threw themselves headlong into revelry and excess.
Every Chaos Space Marine on the ship had gathered here.
Counting quietly to himself, Andrallo put the number at over six hundred.
A massive warrior who was clearly the lord walked in soon after, an unusually hideous Daemonette trailing at his side.
The other Chaos Space Marines who kept daemons of their own gradually closed in around him, forming a circle around the Chaos Lord.
“Celebrate, my brothers!
Let us cheer our recent victory and take our pleasure without restraint.
The False Emperor’s lapdogs have been dealt with, beautifully, and now it’s time for the feast!”
As the lord’s cheer went up, the warband members around him roared their agreement and fell on the delicacies laid out around them.
Groups of young men and women dressed in lavish silk filed out, trailed by a Space Marine whose whole body radiated a heavy perfume.
Andrallo recognized these people.
They were slaves the warband’s Apothecary had personally handpicked for himself.
The Apothecary followed close behind his slaves.
At a clap of his hands, the beautiful, trembling slaves carried trays of vials over to the assembled warband.
The addicts among them lost every shred of restraint the second they saw the vials, snatching them up and injecting themselves before the slaves could even offer help.
The Chaos Space Marines who took the drugs sparked to life instantly, howling and shouting through the hall, while the Chaos Lord lounged above them on his throne, one arm around his daemon, laughing.
There was one exception.
Andrallo refused the vials outright, and the slave who’d come to serve him dropped to the floor in terror.
“What’s wrong, brother?
Not to your taste anymore?” The Apothecary sauntered over with a smirk.
“You used to love painting with a little chemical help.”
Andrallo answered with unnerving calm.
“Nothing wrong with the drugs.
I just don’t need them anymore.”
The moment the words left his mouth, Andrallo felt the whole hall go quiet.
He noticed the other warband members staring at him like he’d sprouted a second head.
The Apothecary’s expression flickered between moods.
He glanced at the slave kneeling on the floor, then bared his teeth in a vicious grin.
“Brother, this slave must have served you poorly.
Allow me to take care of him.”
An ornate, gleaming curved blade slid free in an instant and swept toward the slave’s bare throat.
But the spray of blood and the falling head never came.
The blade stopped dead beside the slave’s neck, caught bare-handed by Andrallo, who’d closed his fist around the monomolecular edge.
“Brother.
It’s not every day we throw a feast like this, and I’d rather not get blood on the food.”
The warband members standing around gaped at the sight, a monomolecular blade caught barehanded and the warband’s own Apothecary denied his face in front of everyone.
They all knew they were in for a show.
The Chaos Lord, seated high above them, watched Andrallo and the Apothecary with obvious interest, making no move to intervene.
“Are you…
provoking me?!” the Apothecary demanded through gritted teeth.
Andrallo thought he’d been perfectly reasonable, but the Apothecary was screaming at him like a lunatic regardless, and the rest of the warband just kept watching like it was theatre.
He glanced toward the Chaos Lord.
The man made no move whatsoever.
“Ugh…”
Andrallo grabbed the slave and shoved him back and out of the way, which, to the Apothecary, read as nothing short of naked disrespect.
The fight ignited instantly.
The Apothecary wrenched his blade free and swung the pommel back at Andrallo’s head.
Andrallo blocked with his left fist, then drove his loaded right straight into the Apothecary’s undefended gut, sending him staggering backward.
Humiliated and furious, the Apothecary accelerated his blade, fighting Andrallo with movements that verged on dance.
The blade fluttered through the air like a butterfly, then struck like a nimble viper, light and lethal, every strike aimed for a killing point.
Even to the other Space Marines watching, all they could make out was a blur.
But Andrallo, oddly, just dodged and parried the critical strikes without effort.
To him, every one of the Apothecary’s attacks looked like it was running in slow motion.
He barely had to try.
So my species template’s a lot stronger than a Space Marine’s, huh, Andrallo thought.
Finally getting a sense of where my limits actually are.
Once, twice, three times…
every attack the Apothecary threw was turned aside, one after another, and the drugs in his system only made him more frenzied with every failure.
Eventually Andrallo had enough of the endless harassment.
He seized his moment, backhanded the blade clean out of the Apothecary’s grip, then drove a psionically-charged right fist forward in an instant, shattering the man’s chest plate outright.
“Gah!!”
The Apothecary let out a short, muffled grunt before he was blasted off his feet entirely, crashing down onto the white marble floor.
Andrallo hadn’t put his full strength behind it.
The Chaos Lord would never have allowed him to kill off a valuable Apothecary.
Clap.
Clap.
Clap.
Applause rang out.
From his throne, the Chaos Lord gave Andrallo a nod of approval, and the rest of the warband broke into scattered cheers, one after another.
The revelry carried on, but from then on, everyone who looked at Andrallo did so with a little more fear in their eyes, and a little more envy.