Chapter 521: The Prophet's Training Manual
The moment they breached the Labyrinthine Dimension, the cacophony of the material realm was severed as if by a clinical blade.
The landscape within was a haunting masterpiece.
Behind them lay a shroud of milky, iridescent radiance; ahead, the prismatic sprawl of the Webway veins stretched like an inverted galaxy. Beneath the vaulted arches of psychoreactive bone, rivers of shifting color flowed, punctuated by the rhythmic leaping of spectral fauna and the splashing of soul-residue.
These currents drifted toward a singular horizon, merging into a blinding nexus of light.
It looked like a lost child finally returning to the womb of its birth.
Ghazghkull had never experienced a sensation so profound. Even for him, the Prophet of the Waaagh!, this world was a revelation.
The thunder of the battlefield had died away. The only sounds remaining were the rasp of his Boyz' heavy breathing and the ticking of overheated scrap-metal cooling in the thin, metallic air.
Ghazghkull brushed a piece of pulverized rockcrete from his pauldron and stepped forward. He inhaled the air—it smelled of ancient ozone and the dry scent of stagnant eons. He felt a primal urge in his marrow to see it all, to obey the genetic instinct that told him this dimension was once a highway for the Krork.
And then...
Ghazghkull saw the truth.
BOOM!
A magnificent explosion erupted directly ahead.
As the Prophet stepped beyond the "sanctified" zone provided by the transit, he witnessed the reality of the world he had entered—a realm that had briefly offered him a false sense of security.
It was the incandescent fury of the Blood God. Hellfire lanced from the maws of Skull Cannons forged from a thousand martyrs, striking a host of Webway denizens entangled with Slaaneshi fiends. The shockwave was a monomolecular scythe; it reaped every soul within an eight-kilometer radius, decapitating mortal and daemon alike without discrimination.
Daemons were banished only to manifest again a heartbeat later. The "Ghosts" of the Webway—the predators and the lost—surged from every jagged breach in the tunnel walls.
CRACK!
A Drukhari Kabalite warrior sheared the head from a daemon's shoulders. Before he could savor the spike of agony, a mass of translucent, jelly-like tissue descended from the vaulted ceiling, latching onto his cranium.
The Dark Eldar's movements turned sluggish, as if he had been injected with a massive dose of sedative. His cruel features slackened into an eerily peaceful, terrifying smile.
Stumbling for a moment, he regained a jerky sort of control and merged back into a massive column of thralls.
It was an army composed of a thousand different species, marching with a unified, mechanical purpose, wielding the combat styles of their former lives with a haunting, parasitic grace.
Hovering over this host were thousands of those translucent medusoid forms—the brain-slaves humans called Medusae.
Ghazghkull's genetic memory identified them instantly: psychic parasites that fed upon the dreams of the sentient, replacing the host's will with their own alien logic.
Wooo—Wooo—
Before the army of thralls could clash with the warring daemons, a freezing gale swept across the corridor.
The Drukhari warriors froze in their aiming stances. The blades of SSlyth mercenaries remained fixed an inch from the throats of Slaaneshi daemonettes.
The roar of a Bloodletter echoed through the hall, yet its hellblade stopped mid-swing beside a Clawed Fiend.
Confusion flickered across the battlefield, followed by a visceral terror as every creature looked at the floor.
Shadows. Massive, physical shadows cast by every combatant began to shift and grow. In a heartbeat, the battlefield was paralyzed by a darkness that possessed weight.
Wails of despair erupted from the daemons. The Drukhari frantically engaged their emergency teleport-whips and combat-stims, but the power granted by their shadows dragged them down, swallowing them into the very ground they stood upon.
Figures of absolute, abyssal black emerged from the floor. They were ink-blots in reality, their hair white as bone, their faces voids of shifting smoke. They wore rags of flayed skin and carried jagged, bone-sawing blades etched with runes that drained the very light from the air.
The Mandrakes.
These were creatures of a sub-dimension, entities capable of sliding between the Warp, the Webway, and realspace at will. They slaughtered everything in their line of sight with a cold, geometric efficiency.
The Prophet's memory flared once more. These were images that required the stimulus of extreme violence to unlock. He realized with a start that if he didn't remember the counters to these horrors now, he would be dead in the next second.
The tide of blood reached his feet.
As Ghazghkull's massive weight caused the floor to sink a fraction, the heat of the gore melted the frost-crystals forming on the bone-walls. The blood coalesced into a crimson lake around the Prophet's boots.
His black iron greaves were stained a dark, wet red.
"FALL BACK!"
A terminal warning, delivered with the same clinical authority as the "Cans" on the surface, snapped the tension in his muscles.
The predators on the field had noticed him. The "Sanctuary" was failing. The rivers of shadows and monsters began to curve toward his position, intent on swallowing the new arrivals.
The survivors of the previous skirmishes, now broken and desperate, ran toward the Orks, begging for a respite from the hell behind them.
"KEEP 'EM BACK!!!"
RAT-TAT-TAT!
Orkimedes fired a Supah-Grav Bomb—assembled from the scrap they had carried through the rift—into a cluster of shadows ten kilometers ahead.
The localized gravity spiked to impossible levels, flattening everything within kilometers into a two-dimensional slurry. A massive splash erupted from the river of souls.
The Mandrakes were shattered, forced back into their dark dimension. The daemons, their physical anchors crushed, were banished back to the Empyrean.
A localized vacuum of silence appeared in the corridor.
"DA WAAAGH! IS GETTIN' HARDER!" Orkimedes shouted, checking his scrap-logic sensors. "This 'ere Webway ain't right, Boss. It'z s'posed to be for da Beaded-Ones (Eldar), right?"
"How am I s'posed to know?!" Ghazghkull growled, shaking his power-claw.
He tossed the head of an Aether-Hound aside and looked up. His small, red eyes pierced through the mountain of corpses at the enemies emerging from the fog—some eager for a fight, some paralyzed by indecision, some trembling in fear, yet all driven forward by the sheer momentum of the dimension.
The discordant cries of the lost shattered the last bit of silence in their pocket of reality. Ghazghkull saw the path laid out for him.
Splash.
A wave of mixed ichor and blood washed over the Prophet's boots.
He followed the flow of the liquid, looking at the "rivers."
They weren't conduits or arteries. They were daemons. They were Webway dwellers. They were a mass of warring species, a festering sore formed by millions of years of accumulated hatred. They were the rot in the bone of the universe.
Ghazghkull looked at the "Sky"—the ceiling of the tunnel wreathed in the light of a thousand distant stars.
They weren't stars. They were holes in the Webway wall, leaking the light of the Warp.
The paths converged in the distance, forming a scene the Prophet knew better than any other.
Eternal War.
"..."
"Boss," Mad Dok Grotsnik asked, "whot'z da 'Practical'?"
Ghazghkull looked at his most brilliant advisor.
"We got plenty of scrap under our feet. I reckon we can build a proper Scrap-Hive in a jiffy," Orkimedes said. He pulled a screw from the floor and chewed on it thoughtfully. He pointed to the blood-soaked soil behind them. "Dat dirt'z good. Got plenty of juice. I reckon we can grow a lot of Boyz with Big Shootas on that ground."
The Warbosses looked.
A Gretchin, eager to prove his worth, ran toward the soil where Ghazghkull had first stepped.
As the runt reached the dirt, the ground began to writhe. Tendrils of meat sprouted from the mulch. Dozens of eyes opened in the soil, locking onto the small prey. The Gretchin was swallowed whole by the earth before he could even plant a seed.
The surrounding Grots shrieked in terror and scrambled back toward the Nobz.
Aye, it's got plenty of juice, Ghazghkull thought.
"We ain't stayin' 'ere forever," Orkimedes added, pointing at the Webway gate they had just used. He spoke the unspoken thought of every vengeful Nob in the mob.
"I reckon when we'z big enough, we'z gonna leg it. The Humie-Boss and his Cans can't guard a hole this big forever!"
DONG—
As if responding to the Mek's defiance, the gate-aperture flickered.
It shuddered once and then went dark, becoming a featureless black scar on the psychoreactive wall.
"..."
The mob went silent.
Bad news. We've been set up.
"Forget I said nuthin'," Orkimedes muttered, scratching his head while secretly wondering if he could loot the gate for parts.
Every Boss turned to look at Ghazghkull.
They had been beaten into the dirt by the Cans. Now, they were standing on a tiny patch of ground in hell.
They had to survive the daemons, the Drukhari, and the nightmare-fauna of the Webway before they could even dream of revenge.
"THEN GET TA WORK!"
Ghazghkull was done with thinking. He would handle the "Gods" and "Shadows" the old-fashioned way.
He had already cursed the "Asymmetric War" tactics of the Cans a thousand times in his mind.
He knew the gate was too easy a prize!
"WAAAAAAGH!!!!"
He crushed the skull of an Ur-Ghul beneath his boot. Fueled by a heart full of resentment, the Prophet let out a roar that shook the very foundations of the tunnel.
In this realm so close to the Warp, his voice rippled through the air, finally free from the suppression of the "Star-God" (Arthur) who had enforced a law of logic upon the world. A million bloodthirsty cries answered him.
"WAAAAAAGH!!!"
He led his Nobz in a charge, pulverizing anything that tried to treat them like an easy target. The Orks had officially joined the free-for-all.
They ripped the Medusae from the walking dead and crushed them.
They hacked through the bizarre inhabitants of the Labyrinth, tossing their bones into the soil so the Gretchin could feed the next generation of Boyz.
They pulverized Bloodletters. They kicked Slaaneshi fiends into the abyss. They drove power-tools into the brains of Nurgle-spawn and used the pressurized bile of Snotlings to incinerate the horrors of Tzeentch.
No prayers to the Gods. Only the relentless, forward-moving joy of the scrap.
Faced with war, the Orks found their rhythm. They merged seamlessly into the river of violence.
High above, in a place Ghazghkull's eyes could not reach...
"Perfect. The greenskins are biologically engineered for this labor," a flickering, distorted light remarked, nodding with satisfaction.
He was a daemon to daemons—a twisted radiance that defied definition.
He held a relic of the Old Ones in his hand as he stood at the seam where the Webway met the Warp. He was preparing to tear this specific fragment of hell away from the infinite network.
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