“Heh heh heh, interesting.
Very interesting.
You really are different, aren’t you?
I can’t influence you at all.
Seems like you and I are the same kind of thing!”
The Apothecary looked at Andrallo and burst out laughing.
He reached out to stroke the face in front of him, but the psychic power radiating off Andrallo stung him the instant he tried, and he had to pull his hand back.
“Ohh~ Look at that ignorant look in your eyes.
I’d guess you’re new here too, don’t know the first thing about this galaxy yet.
Don’t worry.
I can help you with that.”
“Come to the Empyrean.
Come to my palace.
I’ll give you the ultimate experience, the ultimate pleasure.
And if you’d like, those two young ladies behind you are welcome to join us as well!”
Andrallo didn’t answer.
His fist did the talking instead, driving straight for the Apothecary’s face.
Whump!!
A heavy crack rang out as the Apothecary caught the punch with ease, but before he could say another word, a straight kick sent him flying.
The Daemonettes outside the door burst into shrill laughter at the sight of the Apothecary flying past them, but the sight of Andrallo following right behind silenced every one of them instantly.
By now the Apothecary’s body had begun to dissolve and mutate.
The power flooding into him from the Warp had gone past whatever he could contain, and his skin was sloughing away even as the tissue underneath kept multiplying.
His body kept swelling, sprouting tentacles and crab-claws of every shape and size, and his ceramite armor split apart under the pressure of newly growing limbs and heads.
Even so, the thing the Apothecary had become, now little more than a ball of flesh, couldn’t so much as touch Andrallo’s power.
The moment its own psychic energy came into contact with him, it simply dissolved into pure energy and vanished.
“This is, this is wonderful.
You and I really are the same kind of thing!
Come, Andrallo, join us in the Great Game.
There’s no need for you to act like some cursed thing.
We could—”
“You’re giving me a headache with all this babbling!”
To Andrallo it was nothing but noise.
He brought his blade down in one stroke, his psychic power riding along the edge as it tore into the twisted monster the Apothecary had become.
A violent wail tore out of the mass of flesh.
The Apothecary’s body came apart inch by inch under Andrallo’s power, bones shattering, flesh dissolving.
The Apothecary struggled to flee, but the moment his body touched Andrallo’s violet power, it shattered and unraveled entirely.
Without the Warp’s power to sustain them, the tissues it had grown couldn’t hold together anymore.
In the end, all the mass of flesh could do was stare at Andrallo with something like resentment, before dissolving into a pool of blood amid unbearable agony.
When it was over, Andrallo looked around and found the daemons and warband members nearby all frozen in place, jaws hanging open.
“Andrallo, he, he wiped out that Chaos abomination with a single stroke?”
“No way.
Since when was Andrallo that strong?
How is he even able to—”
The daemons reacted with far more than shock.
The instant they met Andrallo’s eyes, they turned tail and fled.
Some, bound to their Chaos Space Marine hosts, chose to injure themselves rather than stay, tearing themselves free just to escape back into the Warp.
Andrallo didn’t bother with any of it.
He went straight back to his quarters and began preparing.
Not long after the warband’s ship dropped out of the Warp, it arrived at the target world, a vibrant blue planet where even from orbit you could make out the vast fields and agricultural machinery blanketing the surface.
The Chaos Lord had already worked out his invasion strategy when, right at that moment, a distress signal came in from the planet below.
Once they picked it up, everyone realized the world was already under attack, from a warband of World Eaters devoted to Khorne.
The news sent the whole warband into a fury.
“Those heretical lunatics, stealing our loot right out from under us!
Let’s go down there and cut them to pieces!”
“Damn right!
We can’t let those bloodthirsty morons defile a beautiful world like this!”
“My lord, give the order!
If the World Eaters kill enough people down there, Khorne’s daemon host will manifest, and once that happens, we really won’t stand a chance!”
The Chaos Lord listened to the report, a vein pulsing visibly in his forehead.
He looked at the news of the World Eaters the way a man might look at a cake covered in shit.
“Everyone, get ready.
We’re going down there together to cut those lunatics down and take back what’s ours!”
At the Chaos Lord’s command, the whole ship began preparing to make planetfall, and the Lord himself sought Andrallo out.
“Brother Andrallo, what’s your plan?”
“I’ll land last, in a transport.
I need to sacrifice those two humans first, to feed my strength.”
Andrallo lied without missing a beat.
The Chaos Lord studied him for a long moment, found nothing off about it, and let the matter drop, giving him a pat on the shoulder and telling him to hurry it up. The source of this chapter is g.com.
The Chaos Lord had already heard about what happened with the Apothecary.
He understood it as a mark of favor, bestowed on Andrallo by the gods themselves, from somewhere deep in the Empyrean.
Thinking about how many worlds he’d offered up to the Dark Gods in devotion, only to receive nothing in return, forced to rely on a bound Daemonette just to grow stronger at all, the Chaos Lord felt a bitter pang of envy.
And that resentment, amplified in turn by the daemon inside him, only fed back into itself.
The Chaos Lord found the whole thing pathetic, almost laughable.
Ignoring every warning from the Daemonette bound within him, he left Andrallo behind on the ship.
“This time, I will make certain the gods see exactly what I’m capable of!”
Before long, the Chaos Lord led the vast majority of the Chaos Astartes down to the planet’s surface, leaving barely fifty behind to hold the ship.
Andrallo never boarded a transport at all.
Instead, he moved through the ship itself, Maen and Charlotte at his side.
“Your divination and psychic senses are sharper than mine.
You two handle reconnaissance and warning, I’ll handle the killing.
We clear this ship first, then figure out the rest.”
This was the first time either sister had willingly walked into a fight, and neither of them could shake a certain unease.
But watching Andrallo’s steady stride, feeling his dependable power wrapped around them, they found the nerve to go through with it.
Andrallo’s first target was the cultists scattered throughout the ship.
He had no interest in letting these irritating eyes and ears throw off his plan.
With Charlotte’s scouting, the layout of everyone aboard became clear at a glance, while Maen linked the three of them together through telepathy.
The moment they connected to Andrallo’s power, the sisters’ souls found themselves back at that same misty pond, with the roiling Warp churning somewhere above it.
Here, the sisters could draw on their own power without fear.
Everything the Warp contained, entities, emotions, raw energy, turned to still, pure psychic power the instant it touched Andrallo’s inner world.
Through Charlotte’s power, Andrallo could see every corner of the ship with total clarity, and the sheer transparency of it left him feeling almost giddy.
The killing began.
The cultists were still busy arranging their human skin and bone when a violent violet wind tore through them without warning, followed an instant later by a storm of scattered remains flung into the air.
The blade forged by that Terran craftsman had already been sharp to begin with; with psychic power layered into it, nothing could withstand it at all.
Every cultist in its path fell without exception.
Every cultist Andrallo struck lost whatever blessing their dark god had granted them, left to feel raw, unfiltered pain and terror instead.
Andrallo moved through the crowd like a passing breeze, cutting a cultist clean in half with every swing, his movements growing more fluid with each strike.
His genetics had reshaped his entire body, but the body itself still carried its old combat memory, and it moved almost like a dance without Andrallo consciously willing it to.
Andrallo moved too fast for even an ordinary Space Marine to track, let alone a mortal.
More often than not, a cultist only caught sight of his back after they’d already been cut in two.
The three of them cut their way from the cultists’ gathering hall all the way to the slave holding cells.
When Andrallo split the cage open, the captives inside were still too dazed to react.
“Anyone who wants to live, come with me!”