How could Titus possibly be allowed too many allies? As the Lieutenant's squad mobilized, a certain "Great Horned Rat," who preferred to remain anonymous, personally intervened. Suddenly, the vox-casters and cogitator banks aboard Titus's gunship wailed with piercing alarms.
"Bleep… Bleep! Cogitator matrix warning: Unidentified interference detected. Rerouting landing coordinates… rerouting landing coordinates!"
The Astartes pilot cried out in disbelief, his fingers flying across the terminal as he desperately tried to override the logic-engines and restore their original flight path.
It was an exercise in futility. In the Immaterium, Lucius sat cross-legged upon the Throne of Ruins, his chin resting on his palms. Through his divine will, he projected a shimmering psychic image of the material universe, watching the unfolding scene like a high-definition cinematic.
Seeing the Space Marine struggle against the controls, Lucius let out a derisive snort.
"If you can wrestle control back from a machine-spirit I've personally shackled, I'll ascend you to daemonhood on the spot!" Lucius chuckled with satisfaction. However, to ensure the "game" remained playable, he set the new landing zone near a minor outpost belonging to a subsidiary Moulder rat-clan.
Titus, realizing the descent was beyond their control, barked orders to prepare for a hot landing, commanding his brothers to engage their Auspex scanners immediately.
The moment the gunship's sensors flared to life, they revealed a swarm of thermal signatures emerging from the skeletal ruins and petrified forests below. Screeching "Bat-rats," winged abominations with warp-forged talons and muzzles filled with predatory fangs, swarmed the gunships like a living shroud.
The door-gunners unleashed a torrential hail of fire from their storm bolters. Red gore and severed leathery wings erupted in the air, but the sheer, suffocating weight of the swarm was undiminished.
Soon, the reinforced hulls of three of the five gunships were torn open by warp-talons. Screaming monsters poured into the holds, and the craft spun out of control, trailing fire as they plummeted toward the surface.
"All units, forced deployment! Consolidate at the designated rally point!" Titus roared. He stood at the jagged breach of his own gunship's bay, his chainsword a blur of silver and red as he bisected every Bat-rat that dared enter. He punched the coordinates into the squad-link.
"Understood, my Lord!" Gadriel shouted back.
From a height of nearly fifty meters, the Astartes leaped. They fell like meteoric stones, slamming into the earth with bone-shaking force.
Curiously, once the gunships had been shredded and brought down, the Bat-rats seemed to consider their objective complete. They did not pursue the falling warriors but circled high above like carrion birds, acting as little more than a macabre backdrop for the carnage to follow.
As the squad regrouped, Titus made a grim tally. Only twenty-three combat-effective Astartes remained; the rest were either dead or too shattered to fight.
Titus reflected that this felt remarkably similar to his days in the Deathwatch, or perhaps his trials prior to the Rubicon Primaris. And, as if dictated by some cosmic script, Metaurus and Gadriel stood beside him, entirely unscathed.
"Hold this position. Establish a perimeter and salvage what supplies remain," Titus commanded the survivors. "Metaurus, Gadriel… with me!"
Gadriel checked his bolter. "Yes, Lord. This feels strangely familiar."
"As you command," Metaurus added.
The trio moved out, navigating a path that felt hauntingly scripted, clashing with scattered Skaven patrols.
"Man-things! Man-things!"
Clanrats and a sea of Slaves shrieked in terror as the blue-clad giants erupted from the gloom. Titus and his team showed no mercy. They led with disciplined volleys of bolt and plasma fire before charging in to settle matters with cold steel.
"Careful! Their rounds can disrupt machine spirits and pierce ceramite!" Titus warned. A jagged hole had already been punched into his pauldron by a Clanrat's warp-musket.
The strongest of the patrol was a Rat Ogre encased in salvaged Ambull plating. The beast lashed out with berserk fury.
"Nothing but a mindless beast!" Gadriel barked, ducking beneath a sweeping claw before carving a ragged trench through the creature's chitinous armor.
Metaurus followed up with a plasma blast that turned the monster's chest into a crater of scorched meat. Titus finished the encounter with a practiced flourish: he vaulted onto the beast's shoulders, his left hand pinning its skull while his chainsword roared through its throat in a single, horizontal spray of gore.
Watching Titus execute the "finisher" move, Lucius nodded in approval. "Now that's the spirit. A shame I can't control Titus directly, though I doubt the Golden Man would allow that anyway. Haha!"
The trio fought their way into the heart of the nest, eventually reaching the Skaven Warlord. As a high-ranking chieftain of the Moulder faction, this rat was not only formidable in his own right but rode atop a "Bonebreaker" Rat Ogre, a four-armed titan outfitted with warpfire throwers, Ratling guns, and a pair of serrated flaying-gauntlets.
"YES-YES! Iron-clad things! You fall into the hands of the mighty Hezar Tailsnatcher! I will dig-pluck the seeds from your bellies and sew-stuff them into my Bone-breaker!!" the Warlord shrieked from his high saddle.
"Xenos! What have you done with the heritage of our Chapter?!" Metaurus, Titus's former mentor, roared in righteous fury, leveling his power sword at the chieftain.
"Hahaha! Good-spoils, shiny-prizes! All Skaven know, man-clad things have good-meat inside! Mutator-Masters love it! Great Horned One loves it! Use it to grow big-strong! VERY STRONG!!" The Warlord cackled, commanding the Bonebreaker to raise its heavy flamer-arm. A torrent of sickly green warpfire bathed the area.
Titus and his brothers rolled clear of the inferno.
"Hezar has Iron-thing seed-bits! Bonebreaker has them too! But we want more-more!"
"These lunatics," Titus cursed, firing as he moved. "They have blasphemed the gene-seed... grafted it directly into their foul bodies!"
Under the erratic and corner-cutting experiments of the Master Mutators, stitching gene-seed directly into the flesh of their monsters had become a favored shortcut. It granted behemoths like the Bonebreaker unnatural reflexes and speed. The creature's flaying-gauntlets moved with a precision that allowed it to parry the strikes of Gadriel and Metaurus with ease.
"Titus! We must end this now! The gene-seed cannot be allowed to suffer such desecration!" Metaurus cried out.
"I know, Sergeant!"
Watching Titus struggle against the odds, Lucius felt a marvelous sense of fulfillment. But simply observing was no longer enough. Before his ascension, he had been a devotee of Total War: Warhammer, Vermintide, Darktide, and Space Marine. It was time to join the fray.
He reached out his divine will and seized direct control of Hezar's body. Like stepping into a VR simulation, Lucius took the reins of the Skaven Warlord, staring down at the three legendary Astartes through the rat's own greedy eyes.
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