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At that moment, the rhythm of battle had become a hymn dedicated to humanity, and Chaplain Korol was its lead cantor.
Korol had transcended the bounds of a warrior entirely, transformed into a war machine driven by sacred fury, a walking, sermon-delivering engine of extermination.
The dark-grey Terminator Armour had long since been coated in a thick, viscous layer of pale-blue xenos blood.
Every heavy footstep stamped into the hard floor with the weight of judgment.
Korol cried out the oaths of the Word Bearers Legion and the words Lorgar had written in the Book of Lorgar, voice twisted by the helmet’s vox-grille into a roar thick with metallic resonance and fanatical devotion.
“In the name of the Emperor — you xenos are nothing but falsehood!” “By our intellect, your deceptions shall be laid bare!” “By our courage, you xenos shall be driven to extinction!” The “sermon” was no hollow rhetoric.
It was a sermon in the most physical sense, composed of the roar of a Bolt Pistol and the crushing strikes of a master-crafted Scepter.
The Bolt Pistol in the right hand, blessed by the Chaplain’s own rites, never ceased.
Every precise burst was the wrath of the God-Emperor made manifest, violent force blasting those pearl-white bodies apart into spraying pulp.
The left hand gripped the heavy Scepter.
Set into its face was a metal warhammer bearing an icon of the Emperor, surrounded by sharp blades shaped like scrolls of scripture.
And Korol’s method of “preaching” was to drive that sacred weight down upon those blasphemous creatures with everything behind it.
Teaching the xenos before them, in the simplest and most direct way possible, what the wrath of the Emperor truly meant.
Bone shattered.
Carapace split with a terrible crack.
One xenos’s skull was driven entirely into its own chest cavity, as though its abominable existence had been forcibly crammed back into its own misshapen body.
A sideways sweep, and the scripture-scroll blades along the Scepter’s edge tore another xenos apart at the middle, body rending in two, shattered viscera and glowing blue blood spattering across the still-pulsing walls.
“For the Emperor!” “Witness me!
In the name of the God-Emperor!” “Witness the truth of the Emperor!
You shall witness it in your destruction!” Korol roared, and at times activated the built-in Flamer at the base of the Scepter.
Brief scorching flames reduced the wreckage to hissing, blackened, smoking ash.
Sacred fire to scour the xenos’s polluted existence from reality entirely, in the name of the Emperor and the countless tormented souls of humanity.
Under Korol’s lead, the assault squad moved like a torrent of steel and fury, washing over and crushing every point of resistance.
The chorus of Bolters and the screaming of Chainswords were their only litany.
The death-cries of the xenos were the only closing words when their sermon was done.
They ground through corridor after corridor of unknown silver metal, destroyed several xenos defensive positions that had tried to rally, and finally reached a gate of exceptional thickness, some composite of chitin and reinforced metal, solid and unyielding.
No order was needed.
A warrior bearing a Heavy Flamer stepped forward.
White-hot flames licked across the gate’s surface, warping it, carbonising it, reducing it to a brittle charred shell.
Korol stepped forward and smashed through it effortlessly with the Scepter.
What lay beyond made even these battle-hardened veterans, soldiers who had witnessed countless horrors across the galaxy, unable to suppress their fury.
A vast chamber.
A laboratory.
The air was suffused with a cold, eerie odour, antiseptic mixed with something sickly-sweet and organic, that overwhelmed the smoke and blood of battle.
The chamber walls were some smooth, pallid, calcium-like material, set with bio-conduits emitting a pale green luminescence, like the veins of a human body, supplying energy and light to the entire room.
And what was displayed inside, that was the room’s true core.
Row upon row, column upon column of transparent canister-like containers stood in neat order, like products on the shelves of a factory warehouse.
Each one filled with nutrient fluid that gave off an eerie green glow, connected to systems above by dense clusters of soft tubing, small bubbles rising slowly through the liquid at intervals.
And what was immersed in those canisters, was human beings.
Korol’s gaze locked onto the nearest canister.
Through the thick glass, the “specimen” inside came into view.
It was dimly recognisable as the form of a human female, twisted into an eternal posture of agony.
The skin across her entire body had been peeled outward with precise, exacting technique, like a jumpsuit cruelly half-stripped away, exposing pale, bloodless musculature beneath and the stark white of her ribs.
Her face was contorted.
Her mouth stretched open in a silent scream.
Her eye sockets were hollow, the eyes apparently removed or altered.
But the true blasphemy lay in her abdomen.
Her abdominal cavity had been opened in a manner clearly meant for display.
And there, in the exposed depths of that cavity, Something.
Something that was by no means the product of natural gestation.
That thing was in the process of being “born.” It was a large, pale, segmented worm-like creature.
Its forward end bore a miniature yet equally contorted human face, dimly recognisable as possessing the features of an infant.
It was forcing its way out of the host body’s remains in a horrifying mimicry of birth, a thick, pulsing umbilical cord still connecting it to the tormented host.
This form of life was a perversion.
The most extreme mockery and blasphemy against the most sacred process of life, and the greatest affront to the Word Bearers who held to Human Supremacist belief.
When Lorgar penned the first edition of the Book of Lorgar, the central tenets were already made explicit: humanity stands above all things, humanity endures eternal, and the xenos have only annihilation awaiting them.
Encounter a xenos, destroy it.
Find one in the wilderness, cut it down in the wilderness.
Find one in a latrine, drown it in the latrine.
Only a dead xenos, a xenos that leaves not even ash behind, is a good xenos.
And now these blasphemous xenos had the audacity to alter the noble bloodline of humanity in such a manner.
To desecrate the sacred body.
“Emperor…
above…” Korol’s voice dropped low and hoarse, as though rising from some deep abyss.
The helmet’s scanning array magnified the scene, every terrible detail seared onto the retinas, seared into the very depths of the soul.
An emotion unlike any felt before, surpassing the battlefield rage, pure, cold, the kind of hatred cold enough to freeze the core of a star, detonated within.
“This is…” The voice began to tremble.
Not from fear.
From a supreme fury that all but threatened to burst the Power Armour apart.
“WHAT—!” The Scepter hummed in Korol’s grip.
The Servo-Muscles pulled taut in a frenzy.
“WHAT—!” The warriors nearby had seen it too.
The roar of Bolters fell silent in a rare moment of stillness.
Only the Chainswords kept spinning, snarling on reflex, as though they too had felt their wielders’ shock and the towering wrath rising around them.
“WHAT BLASPHEMY IS THIS!” The final words erupted as a deafening roar, filled with boundless anguish and the absolute desire to destroy.
Korol wrenched the Scepter upward and brought it down with every ounce of strength, straight into that transparent canister.
CRACK, SHATTER.
The reinforced glass exploded into fragments.
The nutrient fluid surged outward like a bursting dam, washing over the heavy armour in a wave of bone-deep cold, carrying with it that cloying, sickening stench.
Deprived of the fluid’s support, the altered host body and her worm-like “offspring” slumped at once, collapsing to hang from the tubes that still connected them.
The worm-like creature met the open air.
Its miniature human face twisted, and it let out a shrill, grating shriek, utterly unlike any human voice.
Korol looked down upon it.
No mercy in those eyes.
Only the purest will to purge, the wrath of humanity given form.
An armoured leg rose.
That sole, capable of crushing tank plating, lifted, and came down with full force.
CRUNCH!
A nauseating brittle snap.
The shrieking ceased instantly.
The worm-like creature was ground completely into a smear embedded in the floor, pale shredded flesh and glowing blue blood.
Korol lowered the gaze to the female corpse beside it, equally and definitively dead, her skin peeled outward, her suffering appearing at last to have found its end.
That low voice carried within it a rare note of solemnity, something almost, but not quite, approaching sorrow.
➤ Next: Annihilation Approaches