CaseOH, the self-proclaimed Helldiver legend, stood atop the steaming corpse of the Tyranid Warrior.
His armor was a wreck, his abdominal wound was a biological disaster zone, and his hands were two ruined, pulsing bags of meat and bone. He was, by any measure of reality, dead ten times over.
But the stims were a cruel mistress, and the chat was hungry.
"Alright, chat! You heard the man!" CaseOH yelled, his voice strained and high-pitched from the adrenaline and pain suppression. He used the butt of the dead warrior's scything claw to steady himself.
The livestream interface showed a donation bar already climbing past the five-figure mark. Brother Bronie's challenge had gone viral faster than a video of a toddler drinking motor oil.
"Bronie challenged the Lictor, and CaseOH accepts! We're not just making lore, baby, we're making meta! Bare-handed Lictor kill!
Forget about Ciaphas Cain, they're gonna build MEH statues!"
[Lictor? BRO IS FACING THE CHAMELEON OF DEATH WITH NO ARMS]
[The Lictor saw bro's size and uninstalled the game.]
[100% chance he tries to sit on it. Clip it now.]
[HE NEEDS TO FIND A BIGGER ENEMY SO HE CAN ACTUALLY PIN IT FOR HIS SIZE]
[Place your bets on the Lictor's method of assassination:
A) Head pop
B) Tendon slice
C) Confuses him with stealth
D) Gets offended by the smell of his unshowered ass]
CaseOH ignored the warnings, focusing instead on the hype.
He knew Lictors, he ate them for breakfast.
They were the apex predators of the swarm, stealthy, fast, and horrifyingly smart.
They were sensory nightmares, capable of reading the neural impulses of their prey. To charge one bare-handed was functionally worse than suicide; it was pure stupidity.
"LISTEN HERE, BUGS! I KNOW you out here somewhere, bro!" he yells, spinning in like five circles while pointing his gun at the sky.
"You think you're slick? You think you're doin' that little Predator invisibility thing? Nah, nah, nah—we patched that out, chief!
Tonight, we're runnin' the NEW BUILD! The Human. Meat. Shield.
You ain't ready for this! You ever seen the Emperor's most confident soldier? That's me, baby!
I got no plan, no cover, and about three brain cells left—LET'S GO!"
He braced himself, knees slightly bent, his gaze darting across the fungal forest floor.
The Lictor decided to reveal itself with quiet brutality.
It didn't decloak dramatically. It simply was there, twenty feet away, a shimmering, multi-limbed nightmare blending perfectly with the sickly purple flora.
It had read the Helldiver's bio-signature.
High Adrenaline. Low Pain Threshold. Stupidity Overwhelming.
"There you are, ya little punk!" CaseOH roared, pumping his chest like a gorilla trying to scare away a tank.
The chat started spamming SIT ON IT! SIT ON IT! SIT ON IT!
CaseOH's eyes lit up. "They got a point, chat! The last guy was a bit small. This thing? This thing got some junk in the trunk! We goin' for the WrestleMania pin!"
He charged.
The ground shook beneath his heavy bootfalls, punctuated by the gruesome slap-slap-slap of his loose massive balls dragging behind him.
The Lictor didn't even flinch.
It waited until CaseOH was five feet away, committed to the charge, and then it executed a simple, elegant sidestep to the right, making it look effortless.
CaseOH, running at maximum velocity, had nothing to tackle but air.
The centrifugal force of his own turn, combined with the momentum, sent him careening off the invisible target line, it like watching an old cartoon.
He didn't just miss the Lictor; he went straight into a dense cluster of towering, pulsating fungal structures known locally as 'Spore Sacks.'
FWOOMP.
The Spore Sacks burst in a disgusting symphony of sticky, green fluid and noxious yellow spores.
CaseOH disappeared entirely into the resulting biological cloud, emerging seconds later covered head-to-toe in glistening, alien slime.
He looked less like a warrior and more like a poorly-rolled vegetable spring roll.
The Lictor remained untouched, its chameleon skin now reflecting a slight, almost imperceptible twitch of amusement.
CaseOH lay flat on his back, sputtering. "Ugh! Did I get him? Did I pin him, chat?"
The chat was completely derailed by laughter and crying emojis.
[LMAO I TOLD YOU TO CLIP IT]
[HE MISSED THE ENTIRE CONTINENT]
[Biomass Splashdown Confirmed]
[Dude is playing WWE 40K and keeps missing the dropkick]
[CaseOH is literally a fungal growth now. Bro's gonna spawn the Flood, a whole new swarm to deal with...]
[This is why we have weapons, bro. FOR THE LOVE OF SUPER EARTH, PICK UP A GUN!]
[The Lictor probably thinks he's just a new hive tyrant variant.]
CaseOH scrambled back to his feet, furious.
The burst Spore Sack fluid was now irritating his exposed wounds and making his shredded hands sting with a thousand tiny chemical burns.
"Aight, aight, screw the wrestling moves!" he yelled, wiping a handful of slime off his face. "This thing thinks it's funny, huh? It thinks it's playing games? You know what? It's time for the final form!"
"HAYAAAAAA!"
He reached down to his stim injector panel, which was already blinking red, and slammed his mangled thumb down on the emergency override.
A deep, mechanical thrum echoed through his helmet as the armor pumped another cocktail of highly illegal, highly potent drugs straight into his main arteries.
This time, the stimulant effect wasn't just pain suppression, it was raw, unrefined rage combined with impossible speed.
He moved, but his perception couldn't keep up. He saw the Lictor darting between the trees, a translucent blur.
"I'm faster now, bug! You can't hide from peak human velocity!"
He began punching the air wildly, trying to hit the Lictor's last known location.
He wasn't aiming for the Lictor; he was aiming for the space the Lictor was about to occupy. The result was a continuous, furious flurry of punches that looked like a toddler throwing a tantrum.
The Lictor decided to play. It didn't try to kill him. Instead, it used its speed advantage to land several precision cuts designed purely to disorient.
Snick. Snick. Slash.
A deep gash opened on his left thigh. A claw raked across his helmet visor. Another nicked the remains of his left hand, separating a sliver of exposed bone.
Each strike was too fast to register as an attack; it just felt like the air itself was turning into a razor blade.
CaseOH was spinning, throwing bone-shattering blows that hit nothing but atmosphere, all while the Lictor danced around him. He was turning into a hyper-speed, screaming ballet of blood and shredded metal.
Finally, the Lictor struck a specific pressure point, a quick, deep slice to the knee joint.
CaseOH's leg instantly gave out. His momentum carried him forward, but his knee wasn't working, sending him tumbling head-over-heels across the ground in an uncontrolled, messy roll.
He landed on his stomach with a groan, the exposed, shredded tissue of his hands grinding against the razor-sharp alien shale on the ground.
[CaseOH is going full Beyblade! He's spinning, chat! He's spinning!]
[The Lictor is literally speed-running this encounter.]
[That was the sickest combo of nothing I've ever seen.]
[Lictor: Teleports behind you 'Nothin' personnel, kid.']
[Dude, stop punching the air. You're gonna start an ozone layer crisis.]
CaseOH lay still for a moment, his breathing ragged, his body aching.
The Lictor stood over him, its head slightly tilted, the multi-faceted eyes analyzing his form like a shopper deciding if the produce was worth the price.
He's waiting for me to move, CaseOH realized, his brain struggling to process strategy through the stim fog. He's waiting for the panic. I gotta hit him with the element of surprise.
The Lictor was using its advanced biology to track him. He needed an un-Lictor-like distraction. Something chaotic. Something that broke every rule of stealth and sanity.
"Aight, chat, listen up—this is it. The strategy phase," Caseoh whispers "He thinks I'm all muscle, right? WRONG. I'm about to hit him with the galaxy brain strat, okay? Watch this. He's over there thinkin' I'm just gonna charge in like an NPC—nah, nah, nah. I've been studying Sun Tzu and watching Jackie Chan movies for like… twenty minutes. We're locked in."
He fumbled with the shattered comms unit on his helmet. He didn't have a weapon, but he still had audio capability.
In a move that truly defined his status as a clown-show gamer, he managed to override the standard distress beacon with the only saved file he had access to: a heavily compressed, low-quality loop of a highly annoying internet sound bite.
A sudden, deafening burst of distorted, tinny sound erupted from his helmet speakers.
The sound was so loud, so abrasive, and so completely out of place that the local flora seemed to shiver.
"Haha! What you gonna do about that, bug?!" CaseOH screamed, crawling behind a small, broken outcrop of ferrocrete. "I'm hidden! You can't see me! My bio-signature is masked by the sheer stupidity of my distraction!"
He was, of course, absolutely wrong.
The Lictor's method of tracking had nothing to do with sight or sound. It tracked the heat, the pheromones, and the surging neural chaos that was currently radiating off the human pinned behind the concrete slab. The tinny audio was, to the Lictor, merely an odd, irrelevant humming.
It didn't approach from the front. It didn't sneak around the side.
It simply dropped.
The Lictor, using its specialized climbing claws, had scaled the fungus behind him and was now suspended directly above the ferrocrete slab. With a liquid grace that defied gravity, it dropped silently onto the concrete, its bulk easily concealing the motion.
CaseOH, still giggling and whispering "Clip it, clip it," didn't even realize his error until a massive, needle-sharp scything claw punched straight through his right shoulder pad, pinning him with brutal force to the ground.
The Lictor leaned its large, sensory-organ covered head close to CaseOH's helmet visor, sniffing the volatile mix of stims and blood.
[HAH GOT HIM!]
[He thought a 2017 meme audio was gonna stop an alien hunter]
The Lictor began to apply pressure, slowly and deliberately, intending to crush the Helldiver's clavicle and then go for the head. CaseOH struggled, screaming, his mangled fists flailing uselessly at the Lictor's armored body.
"No! No, I'm not going out to a drop attack!" he shrieked, the pain finally starting to pierce the veil of the stims. "That's weak! That's cheap!"
He looked down at his ruined hands, flexing the broken bone stubs. Then his eyes locked on the prize: the dead Tyranid Warrior fifteen feet away. More specifically, the pooled, sticky, bright green ichor surrounding its shattered head.
The Lictor tracks bio-signatures. It hunts clean. It relies on its senses...
And CaseOH was covered in the most confusing bio-mess imaginable.
In a final, desperate surge of manic strength, CaseOH didn't try to pull the claw out of his shoulder. Instead, he forced his body down, tearing his shoulder wider against the bone spike. The pain was astronomical, but the stims turned it into the only energy source he had left.
With his left, even more shredded hand, he launched himself backward, scrabbling like a frantic crab toward the Warrior carcass. He reached the dead bug, plunged his ruined hand straight into the pool of thick, green Tyranid ichor and brains, and scooped up a massive, dripping handful of the biological slurry.
"Here's your signal, you freaky little hunter!" he screamed, his eyes wide and bloodshot.
He turned, the Lictor still slightly confused by the human worsening his own injury. The creature started moving toward him, sensing the imminent kill.
CaseOH didn't wait. He didn't punch. He threw the dripping, caustic handful of Warrior guts and green blood like a baseball pitcher aiming for the strike zone.
The Lictor's targeting systems were complex, but they were not designed for an organic, acidic projectile being hurled at point-blank range.
SPLAT!
The Tyranid ichor, mixed with the Warrior's acidic brain matter, slammed directly into the Lictor's cluster of sensory vents and compound eyes.
The effect was instantaneous. The Lictor recoiled with an alien shriek, its camouflage flickering uncontrollably as the acid began to burn its delicate sensory organs.
It stumbled backward, swiping at its face, its entire hunting system suddenly replaced by white noise and agony.
"Now you're blind, bruh! You can't see me!" CaseOH howled, seizing the only tactical advantage he would ever have.
He launched forward, not using his feet, but pushing off with his working right elbow, dragging his body and the trailing mess of his intestines across the ground. He didn't have time to form a fist.
He had no strength for a punch.
All he had was his forearm.
The force of the stims had made his bone structure brittle but incredibly dense. As he dragged himself, he used the jagged, exposed bone of his shattered right radius as a weapon.
With one last, impossible burst of momentum, he rammed the sharp, protruding white spike of bone straight into the soft, unarmored tissue where the Lictor's neck met its carapace.
CHRUNK.
It was a sound like a wet stick snapping. The Lictor froze, its panicked shrieks turning into a gurgling, horrible choke. Its claws went limp. It swayed for a moment, then pitched backward, collapsing with a surprisingly graceful thud.
CaseOH lay beside the massive corpse, his body shaking, his ears ringing.
He was a broken mess of a man, but the Lictor was dead.
His helmet speakers crackled with a triumphant, if wheezing, sound. "W-we got him, chat. We got the Lictor. Bare. Handed. Woooo- cough cough - I think I'm gonna die now!"
[RIP]
[WHAT WAS THAT?!]
[BRO USED HIS OWN BONE AS A KNIFE]
[BROTHER BRONIE HAS GIFTED 1000 SUBS!!!]
CaseOH managed a weak, blood-soaked smile. "Thanks, Bronie! Told you I'd clip it! Now... what's next? Gotta be something bigger, right?"
He paused, scanning the battlefield as a new message from Brother Bronie took over the screen.
[A CARNIFEX. BARE HANDED. DO IT.]
"A Carnifex?" His voice was a rasp, but the streamer hustle was back. "Aight. Bet. Let's find me a big one."
_______________________________
This is just an omake from me Ainz