It was at the fifth ritual site that something strange happened, just as I finished turning a bunch of Bloodletters into filet. This ritual had been conducted in a damp cave that somehow managed to be even drearier and even more ominous than the rest of this damned ball of mud and misery. The disembowelled corpses of the erstwhile cultists covering most of the ground in here that was not shining with the baleful light of the Warp only added to the ambience, and the smell. Mostly the smell. God, this cave stank.

  But at least I got a distraction soon enough, just after I swallowed the newest tiny sip of Warp-energy. It tasted foul, like rotten eggs and fertiliser, but I ignored the fvour with a slight grimace, anyway. My attention drifted towards the Warp, my third eye slowly opening as I saw something strange happening.

  The horde scattered, though not really; they just pulled away. Large gaps opened up in their previously cohesive swarm, new spots that were frothing at the surface, for the ck of a better word. From somewhere deep, deep within the Warp, energy flooded up to the surface.

  The frothing waters concealed whatever was coming, making me frown and snap back into full combat focus. Atiesh shimmered into existence, my bio-armour formed, and then my silver regalia yered itself over it. Then I waited, and I wasn’t made to do so for long.

  The tear ahead, at the centre of the ritual, became a thousand times firmer than before, no longer a flickering wound that might get stamped on by reality at any moment, but something that seemed capable of persisting for good.

  A rainbow of colours bubbled to the surface of the Warp in those frothing spots, sending a cold dread down my spine. Did my killing off his Greater Daemon piss off Tzeetch so much that he decided to throw something even nastier at me than before?

  But it wasn’t a Tzeentchian daemon that emerged, not at all. They came bursting out of the spatial tear, one after the other, with the grace of a pair of cannonballs. They flew ass over teakettle, like a pair of toys thrown by a child throwing a tantrum.

  They smmed into the far walls of the cavern, one giving a groan that was a mix of delight and pain, while the other nded with a disgusting, wet squelch.

  I just ever so faintly caught a whiff of incredible smugness from the depths of the Warp, and then the spatial tear snapped shut behind me, leaving me in the cavern alone with my new visitors.

  They cmbered to their feet, both looking frazzled and somewhat dazed, though it was hard to tell with both.

  A Keeper of Secrets, Sanesh’s Greater Daemon. Sleek, slender, beautiful and horrible. Four arms, hooved feet, horns and a barbed tongue in both metaphorical and the literal sense.

  A Great Unclean One, Nurgle’s Greater Daemon. Big, fat, disgusting. It was decay and disease made manifest, and I hated it with every fibre of my being from the moment I first id eyes on it.

  Did they just … did I just get a free meal from Tzeentch? I mean, he would know that, unlike his fucky Lord of Change, I would be a much better match for these two. He sent them here to get sughtered.

  Khornite Daemons were tricky opponents for me because they were resistant to ‘magic’, almost to the point of immunity, so I had to beat them to death the old-school way. In contrast, Tzeentchian Daemons were better at ‘magic’ than I, so they could — as I’d learned earlier today — mitigate the damage I did to them, to an extent.

  These two looked no happier to be in here with me than I was, that I could feel. Both of the twats radiated confusion, daze, annoyance and even some resignation. Of course, all that was hidden under a thick yer of the usual demonic reaction to me: hate, hunger and greed.

  What the fuck was going on? Did Tzeentch get annoyed that I broke his toy, and so he decided to spread the misery around by throwing two Greater Daemons of the other two Chaos Gods at me?

  I shrugged my shoulders; it seemed … possible, maybe even probable. Tzeentch was a weird one. They said no one fucks over Tzeentch as much as Tzeentch does. He was also known to prolong the Great Game, because winning meant the world would stagnate, which meant no more Change, which would have been bad for the Chaos God of Change.

  Back to the matter at hand: the two Greater Daemons polluting the air I was breathing. The Keeper of Secrets stepped forward, cloven feet clicking on the stone floor as it moved with a sinuous, deadly grace. The creature was temptation and sexual allure made manifest in the most horrible way, and I doubted I’d have been immune to its charm had it not been for one thing: its very existence disgusted me on a deep, spiritual level. Just looking at it, the analytical part of my brain could deduce that it was supposed to be beautiful, but that helped little when just being in its presence nearly made me retch.

  It was unfortunate for the Daemon, that is. Where Lords of Change specialised in psychic manipution, plotting and sorcery, these cunts were maniputors of the emotional and social kind, and the fastest things on the other side of the Veil. They knew what made people tick at a gnce, knew how to get under their skin, how to tempt, seduce and corrupt.

  There was a moment I could tell it was going for the temptation and seduction angle at first, then its gait shifted into something much more predatory as it took in my tightly wound form.

  One step, it was walking, the next, it was racing at me like a missile. It was fast, faster than any daemon I’d met before, faster than the Swarmlord, though not nearly as swift as the Norn Emissary had been. Which meant it wasn’t nearly fast enough to do what it intended to do.

  I stood still, feigning that I was just barely fast enough to track its approach but not quick enough to react. I watched its lips peel back to reveal rows upon rows of bckened, needle-like teeth. Its eyes darkened with twisted glee and utter malice, driving it to sh out at me with its barbed scythe-like bde. So confident in its own superiority it was, that it didn’t even aim at anything vital, just a rake across my side that would undoubtedly hurt like a bitch if it pierced my armour.

  I didn’t give it the satisfaction of even touching my armour. Bio-energy flooded my Avatar, and while before I could have gone toe-to-toe with the Saneshi daemon, with the boost, its prodigious speed seemed too slow to a near crawl.

  I smirked, sent a surge of Smite down the length of my bde and lunged, slipping through its cumbersome guard like an eel and plunging my bde through its chest.

  It froze, and I felt its essence stutter and convulse. I knew Greater Daemons tended to have some regeneration, and if that blow hadn’t been enhanced by Smite, it might have managed to keep its manifestation intact. It wasn’t so lucky.

  I manifested Atiesh in my grasp, grabbed the daemon’s dissipating energy with its reality-warping power and sent it up to my Realm for purification. Now that had been a proper meal, recovering a much more substantial portion of my missing soul energy in one go.

  My smirk widened into a grin as I let a wistful sigh slip through my lips. That had been a Greater Daemon, just like Ka’Bandha, just like the Lord of Change that’d given me so much trouble earlier. And I sughtered it with ughable ease. It felt good.

  My mind-core helpfully poked me in the brain, suggesting that Tzeentch might have thrown these weaklings at me so I’d recim some of my earlier confidence, and with it, become somewhat compcent again.

  My grin fell away, turning into a frown that I aimed at my next foe. The Great Unclean One watched with its baleful yellow eyes, standing with its back against the wall on trunk-like legs.

  Its form was riddled with nasty wounds, leaking blood, pus and worse. Its stench was more than physical; its very presence was disease and decay made manifest. This creature, if left alone, could spread millions of more or less supernatural diseases clinging to its rotting carcass like the mother of all pgues. Maybe more than any other kind of Daemon, Nurgle’s lot ruined the words they were summoned to. Why? Because a Bloodthirster needed to sughter enough foes to plunge a world into the grasp of Chaos, a Keeper of Secrets had to corrupt the popuce, and a Lord of Change would need rituals and vast sorcery.

  The Great Unclean One? It just needed to sit on its fat arse and let its pgues loose. In months, the world would be an uninhabitable hellhole that not even terraforming would be able to make fit for human habitation ever again.

  These fuckers were the primary cause of Exterminatus orders, according to the Deathwatch records I’d extracted from my prisoners’ minds.

  The disgusting creature stared at me, a far-too-wide mouth stretching into a disturbing grin. Everything about it was wrong, decaying, diseased.

  “Die.” The word was spoken as a curse, and I knew the creature was just as much, if not even more, disgusted by my presence than I was of its own.

  The aura of decay, riddled with millions of diseases, pgues and sicknesses, colpsed upon me from all around. Some of it was mundane, as normal as smallpox or tuberculosis, and some not so much. There were pgues that would twist a man into a zombie, another that would rot his blood over the course of months, another that turned the skin poisonous, another that riddled the brain with tumours and many, many more. All are empowered by the psychic power of this Greater Daemon of Nurgle, the Chaos God of Disease, Decay, Death and Destruction.

  It wrapped around my silver regalia, but found no purchase. The silvery energy of Smite tched onto the potent Warp-energy in the aura, its very own antithesis, and obliterated it as the two cshed. Smite-infused soul energy was to Chaos-tainted Warp energy what antimatter is to regur matter. When the two met, they obliterated each other.

  That’s why I had to drag the Warp-energy into my Realm if I wanted to purify it into soul energy; only my soul could do that.

  I took a step forward, light and rexed. The revolting greenish aura intensified around me, trying to press in, decay my defences into nothing, riddle my body and soul with such diseases that I’d beg for the release of death, or the embrace of the Grandfather.

  Some of the armour perished, its surface yers fading away as they erased the Warp-energy striking them, but I kept the flow of energy steady and kept the armour in pce.

  With another step, the surrounding stone started rotting, the air grew misty and green, tumours grew on the walls and ceiling, leaking sacs filled with condensed diseases.

  My third step let loose a bst of silver fire, a circur shockwave expanding outwards. The plumes of argent fmes tched onto the new growth; they ignited the very air thick with pathogens. I stepped through and now had the Great Unclean One within arm’s reach.

  It had its back pressed up against the wall, sweating rivulets of acidic green liquid that sizzled as they touched the ground.

  The silvery fmes kept leaping at the creature, but the thick waves of pulsating decay aura washing off of its body kept them at bay. There was just too much Warp-energy for those fmes, since they could only erase about an equal amount of Warp-energy to the amount of soul energy they’d been created with.

  None of that helped it when I wrapped my sword in the stuff and shoved it up its ass, though. Well, not its ass, and I didn’t do it by hand. I threw the sword bzing with argent fmes at the disgusting creature so fast it broke the sound barrier and pinned the Great Unclean One to the cavern wall. I stepped just a single step closer and bonked the Greater Daemon right in its ugly face with Atiesh, the tip of my staff charged with enough power to destroy a mountain.

  The attack all but erased its head, and that pushed it the rest of the way towards banishment. It was significantly tougher than the Keeper of Secrets, thus the fact that it took an entire two blows instead of one.

  I grabbed its fading essence and devoured it, like it would have devoured my own soul if it could have.

  There was a twisted irony in that. One I found myself appreciating somewhat, which made the utterly abhorrent ‘taste’ of the Nurglite daemon somewhat bearable. It was the most revolting daemon I’d ever encountered by a good margin, and touching its essence with my soul made it even worse.

  Too bad everything outside my Realm was more or less tainted by the Warp, meaning I’d never find a palette cleanser, just more or less disgusting sources of soul energy.

  I took extra care to fully digest these two, since they were the first Greater Daemons I’d gobbled up, not considering that Lord of Change, since it had been rather spent — both mentally and in power — by the time it jumped headfirst into my maw. I watched for any spreading pgue or disease trying to reach for the souls under my protection, and while there were more than a few, their Warp-taint stood out like a blotch of dark ink on a pristine white piece of paper.

  The Keeper of Secrets, meanwhile, seemed far too enraptured by the agony of having its entire existence come undone to do anything naughty.

  It took almost a minute to fully digest them, but it was worth it. So much ‘free’ energy.

  Next up, I made extra sure to erase every lingering Warp-taint left behind by the pair of cunts. On the off chance that the Tau hoisted this dreary shithole on me in the future, I didn’t want to have to worry about one of Grandpa Nurgle’s handcrafted pgues making a mess of things. Nor did I want a cult of Sanesh to be popping up because some idiot stumbled into this cavern and got his brain twisted into a pretzel by the Keeper of Secrets’ lingering taint.

  Nope, no such bullshit on my watch! And if it added just another twenty minutes to the time I had before I had to do politics, then what? It was important work; it’d have been the height of idiocy to leave it for ter and let it fester. Procrastination? What’s that? Can I eat it?

  P3t1