[DW] Blackthorn/Swordhand: Episode III - The Sundered House

[Commissar Molotov]

As the first Tyranids spill into the chamber - dog-like 'Gaunts with bladed limbs - the runic counters on your helm displays race downward towards the nothingness of your impending oblivion. Twenty-nine... twenty-eight... twenty-seven...

Suddenly, the heavy doors to the chamber are smashed aside like a child throwing away a plaything. You recognise the creature shouldering its way into the room immediately - for there can be no mistaking the terrible and deadly form of a Carnifex. A living battering ram at the forefront of the Hive Fleet. Screamer-Killer.

Once in the chamber, the Carnifex seems to stretch, reaching its full height and revealing its full, terrible potential. Its upper limbs are tipped with black talons that gleam cruelly in the crackling electricity of the teleporter. Its lower limbs are occupied with a bag-like weapon symbiote, tipped with a bony funnel. As its tiny, deep-set eyes seem to focus upon the twelve of you, arrayed on the teleporter platform, its fanged jaw distends with a full-throated scream that seems to emanate from a thousand mouths at once.

Each of you have deep and abiding relationships with death - you have brought death to thousands upon uncounted thousands. Many of you have been the death of worlds that burned in the void. Some of you have stood upon the brink of death, and faced its inevitability.

But none of you have faced your imminent demise without fighting.

The Astartes were crafted as weapons by the Emperor's gene-wrights. The Masters of your Chapters have charged you with bringing death to the enemy. Your muscles burn with adrenal stimulants and your hands clench into fists around your weapon grips.

It takes supreme will not to bring death to the Carnifex; to resist your every imprinted urge. But such is the strangeness of service in the Deathwatch.

Three... two... one...

There is a burst of lightning and a roar like the death-cry of stars as the Gellar field generators discharge with a subsonic thunderclap. One by one, in quick succession, each of your brothers around you blink out of existence in a beam of searing white light.

A seething storm of blurred agony and flame.

A tempest of noise and carcinogenic colour.

A black ocean that grasps at your arms and legs as you fall through space and time.

The sensation, for the briefest moment, of being turned inside-out.

The conductor-spikes of your black carapace burning white-hot within your muscles and your bones.

The feeling of occupying two places at once.






GM: This split-second can stretch away into nothingness, should you wish...

Edited November 29, 2020 by Commissar Molotov

[Mazer Rackham]

Hammer stabs of flat rock punched, bullet-like against his chest, making no more sense than urgent delivery of a thrust with his banana wrist.  The loudest shadows flamed with noise and pulverising feathers as he found his knees and fell upright.

+Focus+

He plunged through a lake of branches, which whipped him like silken fish scales.  It rushed at him like an ice age, towering snow made of molten rocks.

+Focus+

He opened his eyes as the Oliphant with scything arms vanished and the hated rumbling of an insatiable beast receded.

 

Akkad stood on a bluff, burning from end to end as fire consumed it.  He could smell it, even through his closed helm - the stench of ancient cedar and pine, the gardens withering under the flames, the heat.  In the middle distance a mushroom erupted, sucking air with hurricane force, a blinding light akin to the detonation of a star.  His visor darkened to near-black but he could still see the distinct spires and crenellations of the Palace of Thorns, eruping, no stone or mortar allowed to stay bound.  The earth beneath his feet split, cracked open as the deep nucleonic stacks beneath the Palace sought escape in explosive ferocity.

 

Pain tore within as the wind tore at his hard shell without.  A keening noise in his ears as the sorrow of ten-thousand accusations sought to gain purchase in his soul.  He relaised he was howling.  The sound of his own anguished voice too much almost for his genhanced physiology.  His throat was raw and dry.  A paralysing dread not even his Astartes body could endure made his guts somersault, remembering all-too-human fear, like falling off his horse for the first time.

 

Badab Prime was burning.

 

Destroyed.

 

In the air hung iron ships, raining down fire in a torrent, a wall of punishing shells.  The axe blade of friends turned foes fell again and again, rupturing the body below, bleeding it dry of living force.  Over it all hung the pall of smoke, a lion's front paw, reaching out to grasp the heart of a nuclear star, then falling back into the murk beneath, trampled and destroyed into a barren, molten world.

 

MR.

[Steel Company]

They thundered down on him, a tidal wave of flesh, bone, and screeching nonsense. Tyber took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he said to himself, “I will not die here, I cannot die here.”

 

As his brothers vanished in beams of light around him, Tyber steeled himself against the coming onslaught, closing his eyes just as the first claw reached out to him, it began to twist and distort as the light took him. For the briefest of moments, he thought he could see everything and nothing at the same time, he could see the past, present, and future all at the same time. Brothers long dead, greeting brothers unknown, who they were he could no say as thick ice began to form across the lenses of his helm then just as quickly the ice was gone and he was in darkness, waiting for his armour to return his squad's identifiers.

[Nineswords]

IN THEIR THOUSANDS they came through the smoke-soaked rain, and they came for his brothers. Filthy, slab-muscled brutes stained by ash and fire, bellowing their guttural war cries with gleeful abandon as they churned through the mud. The massacre of Deluge replayed in Greysight's mind over and over again like a bad pict-feed as the seconds counted down. The cycle repeated itself: first the hain and now the tyranid. The Imperium would be besieged until it was nothing more than long-forgotten memory, consumed by an innumerable tide of hate.

 

Until then, Greysight would stem the tide. A boat against a tsunami, and yet, he would sail into the dark. That is his privilege and his duty. A thought, unbidden, swells in his mind, the words echoing a sentiment uttered on countless battlefields in countless epochs as long as humanity has waged war. If it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom nor technique has a place in this. A warrior does not think of victory or defeat; he plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.

 

Vengeance swells in his heart; for Khoisal and his brothers, lost in the deluge of history, for his bond-brothers of the Deathwatch, for his species. 

 

'And they shall know no fear,' Greysight whispers. 'And they shall never despair.'

[Commissar Molotov]

The searing light of the teleporter abruptly fades and you find yourselves in near-total darkness, save for the quickly dissipating energy discharges that crackle across your warplate. Your own senses and the lenses of your helm take precious moments to compensate.

 

Once again, you find yourselves in the fleshy tunnel network of the Hive Ship. The arterial walls around you are scorched and blackened by the abyssal energies unleashed in your translation.

 

Your auspices and data-scryers reveal that you are far closer to the core of the Bio-Ship, and to your objective. Sabaan's mastery of arcane machinery has - miraculously - paid off. The hypnogogic and mnemetic engrams implanted upon your induction to Watch-Station Azurea reveal to you the hard-won experience of previous Deathwatch Kill-Teams: you have evaded the warrior-beasts stationed close to the skin to repel boarders. This is an area that is sparsely populated, and if you move carefully, you can travel without obstruction.

 

The way is open.

[Xin Ceithan]

A lifetime passed between the binharic verses of the opening the way and the rejoicing at pattern-true cellular reassembly with  Sabaan continuously grating through  the catechisms of translocation. A lifetime. Nothingness.  The blink of an eye. 

>>You are obviously exceptionally blessed<< the voice on his thought stream remarked.

 

>> Or  exceptionally cursed...<<

The echo smile again.

 

>> One has to wonder if all those oaths to secrecy are mainly there to conceal  the blatant amount of tech heresy you accumulate, no? <<

 

He ignored the barb, his mind still going through the catechisms.

 

Two sets of runic numbers dominated his field of vision.

One was reassuringly green, Timestamp post transition. The digits were counting up,  chronological evidence to his continued existence.

 

The other was a deep angry red. It was also still counting, but the digits decreasing, rapidly approaching the final count of  00:00:00...the time before the detonation of the Voice of Thunder’s armoury.

 

Sabaan allowed himself  a moment of simulated smugness as he pictured the horde of xenos they had left behind suddenly deprived of their prey. Were they capable of feeling something like surprise or irritation? Frustration?  The Iron Hand sincerely hoped so. He also registered the of late increasingly familiar prickling pain as the biological remains of his face made another attempt at forming a grin.  In any case, the xenos’ emotional imbalance would be quite brief. There were very few of the red digits left...

He interrupted the positive serotonin feedback stemming from his estimated enemy casualty projections. This was not the time for idle daydreaming. His optical array was already tracking for new targets. 

 

+++Translocation sequence complete. Return to active extermination protocols+++

Edited December 3, 2020 by Xin Ceithan

[A.T.]

The rush of xenos into the teleportarum was almost welcome distraction from the unknown of the warp, their approach and threat calculable and understood.

 

Then a flash, and some sense of things that had passed unseen or unremembered. He was elsewhere in the bioship and the others were not. Seconds passed, more than enough time for the horde to have reached his brothers. Had they been overrun or misplaced? No bio-signal readings from his helm auspex, no location markers or comm static.

 

A hand on his shoulder roused him. Sabaan... the others were here. How long had he stood motionless? The warp offered no answers, and for once he sought none - a defence in ignorance against his nature but a defence none the less.

[Commissar Molotov]

GM: Xin - just as a clarification, the Voice of Thunder has not detonated yet(!) Edited December 3, 2020 by Commissar Molotov

[Reyner]

His first teleportation was not a pleasant one, Vorr felt his insides become his outsides and distant screaming and shrieking overwhelmed his hearing. His vision became nothing but searing white then total darkness like he had been blinded or something had gone wrong with the teleport but after a few moments his hearing kicked back in and his vision started to return like static on a vidscreen before a signal is cleaned up. He fought the urge to pull his helmet off and vomit but he wouldn't show such weakness of the flesh - he was a Red Talon a descendant of Ferrus Manus and an acolyte of Autek Mor. 

 

+++Fine work cousin your devotion to the machine is exemplary. Check your equipment Deathwatch the enemy will be upon us and I have scores to settle+++

[Commissar Molotov]

Having struck deep into the core of the bio-beast’s anatomy, you are achingly close to achieving your objective. But all of you are aware of the ever-present danger that looms large over you. Moving onward, guided by the Apothecaries’ knowledge and Akkad’s auspex, you all work to shrug off the disorienting mantle of your translocation like the last vestiges of a disquieting dream.

 

You must be closer to whatever passes for this creature’s heart - or hearts - as the giant arteries in the walls pulse with vigour, a surging not unlike the waves of an ocean. There is a pressure about your heads, pressing in on your temples, that makes it seem as though you are underground - or, rather, underwater. If this is the so-called Shadow in the Warp it must be affecting Montesa most severely of all, but all of you feel a pressing stillness as though you are passing through the nave of a great cathedral hewn from flesh and blood.

 

You pass through tunnels that flicker with green and purple with alien electricity. The humid air is thick with moisture that condenses on your warplate, trickling across your helm visors.

 

GM: Should any of you wish to get in any more posts before I move us towards the "boss battle", then this is your opportunity!

[Mazer Rackham]

A goopa fish caught in the hanging mantle of a Violet Sea Jellyfish.  A beast that gobbled up the stupid little boxfish by the shoal and was in turn speared with large harpoons by the fishermen literally risking life and limb.  He felt as one of those fish now.

 

His urge to collect momentos of holy battle against the foul, the craven, and the beastly was vacant here.  Like Hellsiris, a world boiling with the touch of the warp, he would take nothing from this place.  It was a devouring beast, only taking from that which sustained it, willing or no, and he was here to feed it the one thing that would choke it.

 

Death.

 

MR.

[Steel Company]

Once the autosenses returned the markers for his squad, Tyber stood from his kneeling position, looking to his right gauntlet, he saw some of the strange ice coating his fingers. Balling his fist to have it shatter, but rather than falling away it seems to flicker out of existence. Looking forward into the dark he said yet again, “I will not fall here, I cannot fall here.”

[A.T.]

At the head of the advance Atratus surveyed the path ahead for danger but his efforts felt increasingly futile with little to distinguish vital organs and lurking dangers from any other part of the ship. There was little left to do now but have faith in the planning made before the mission began, that the weapons and co-ordinates they were given would be enough.

[Commissar Molotov]

You advance onwards through arteries like mass-transit tunnels, chainblades and combat knives sawing through intercostal musculature and sinews like the bulkheads on a void-ship. In places, the gravity fluctuates, lessening and providing you with the opportunity to advance quicker. In such an environment, the Gatebreaker Yeng seems freed from his odd gait; the Apothecary seems able to move almost effortlessly in the void.

 

Your way is - thankfully - unimpeded by lesser Tyranid beasts; it feels as though you are finally able to make good time, pushing the blade deeper into the enemy.The young Raptor, Atratus, leads from the front, occasionally raising his fist and bringing the procession to a halt, only to guide the Kill-Team down another branching passageway. Your implicit trust in your brother is enough to follow his path without question.

 

As you push forward, your twin heartbeats sing in your ears like the tribal drums of a feral-world tribe calling for war. Your warplates’ machine spirits sing in harmony with your enhanced anatomies, pushing stimms into your surging bloodstreams.

 

Those of you in Swordhand bitterly remember the defeat you suffered within this beast; the loss of so many of your brothers-in-arms. Even those of Blackthorn recall advancing through the tunnel network in the hunt for the Genestealer’s Patriarch, now revealed as merely a vanguard of the true monstrous foe. This is a time for oaths to be repaid and for scores to be settled.

 

Death to the Xenos!

[Morovir]

Teralil bristled as reality reasserted itself and he was confronted once again with the sight of the innards of the hive-ship. He felt his armour's machine-spirit react aggressively, his breaching augur whirring into life in a simulacrum of his rage.

 

He clenched his fist and snarled underneath his breath. We endured this once. We will endure it again.

 

Augur held at the ready, he trailed near the back of the kill team, ready to confront anything seeking to attack them from the rear.

[Commissar Molotov]

Synapse Chamber

 

Finally, you reach a massive domed cavern of grey and purple flesh, dripping with thick, dark mucus. If you were hunting an Ork Warlord, resplendent within its scrap-heap, you might call this a throne room. Perhaps the biologists of the Ordo Xenos would say that you are, even now, traversing the brain of this beast itself. Call it what you wish; it is your objective, and the time of reckoning is at hand.

 

Death to the Xenos!

 

The Synapse Chamber itself is a large, oval space approximately 200 metres across. Great fleshy pillars dominate the chamber like ancient trees within a forest; they stretch to the apex of this chamber, throbbing with light and electrical energies that arc and coruscate throughout the chamber. The tactical data available to you indicates that severing these cords will destroy the hive node, crippling the Bio-Ship’s connection to the Hive Mind and removing its ability to control its minions. Yet as you appraise your target you realise that these are substantial indeed, and will require concentrated firepower to eliminate.

 

There are - almost incredibly - no signs of any Tyranid beasts within the chamber. And yet the presence of the Hive Mind is brutally strong here, pressing on all your minds. It is almost a physical thing, like a swarm of ripper-beasts devouring both your mind and your sanity as you raise your weapons to attack.

 

 

GM: What is your approach here? What do you do upon entering this chamber? Where do you go? What are your priorities?

 

The map is below here. Note: due to the limitations of my software, these squares should be considered to be 10m2 rather than my typical 5m2.

 

If necessary, you can consider that the Kill-Team enters from the "south".

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by Commissar Molotov

[Slips]

Very late placeholder, Solastion 'enjoys' the thrill of teleportation, resisting t he urge to slay the xenos that approach them, experiences being mollecularly re-translated into the materium...again...and hangs back to let the Kill-Team do what it does best - all of them being driven by the same, singular purpose.

[A.T.]

As the kill team ready their weapons and selects their targets Atratus holds back, deploying hopper mines at the entrance to the chamber. Once alerted the xenos would flood to this place, there would be no retreat.

[apologist]

The micro-gravity somehow helped settle Yeng's stomach, which had held onto the sensation of being turned inside-out. The familiar sense of moving through a ship helped centre him – though the Gatebreaker forced himself to concentrate; shutting out the memory of the translocation. The unsights and non-sounds had been... disassociating.

 

As the squad entered the large chamber, he, like the others, swept his boltgun back and forth, quickly and efficiently tracking across and between the fleshy growths that connected the nominal ceiling and floor of the place. He resisted trying to apply too much of his medical experience to the sights in front of him – the tyranids seemed beyond even the brutal logic of biology – but the pillars were clearly of some import. 

 

Once the all-clear had come; indicating the lack of immediate enemy presence, he mused out loud:

"The leopard's hair, chopped up finely and administered in food, is subtle enough to be swallowed – but sturdy enough to puncture the stomach lining. It is a bad death."

The nearby techmarine turned to glance at him, without rancour. 

 

"Your Codex, it says that death by a thousand cuts is a strategy of use. Here, perhaps," he paused, hefting the reassuring weight of one of the krak grenade bandoliers salvaged from the Voice of Thunder, "we apply such thought in a more direct way?"

 

 

The Crimson Fist nodded assent to Yeng's suggestion – though a word of scepticism came the Gatebreakers' way from Greysight.

 

"Of course; not normally inside the victim of the cuts," Yeng conceded. "Perhaps Montesa might find us an exit?"

Edited December 14, 2020 by apologist

[Commissar Molotov]

GM: As a note -

 

Solastion's demi-squad were able to delve into the cargo-holds of the Voice of Thunder and retrieve some of the supplies that Blackthorn left behind when they were forced to abandon the ship. This means you all have your starting equipment - including three frag grenades and three krak grenades. (So between you you have thirty-six krak grenades!)

 

How does the Kill-Team plan to proceed? Which pillars will you rig, and in which order? Will you all go together, or split up?

[Noctus Cornix]

The Codicier felt bile in the back of his throat, a tingling sensation of the virile acid that he swallowed down in a moment of discipline. 

 

The mind of the beast...  As his eyes scanned across the vast darkness, he could see the cerebral grooves in the uneasy surface, similar to the exposed mass of the Zoanthrope sub-species.... though perhaps not to the same scale. It ached to be here, in the presence of this vast of lumbering consciousness that he could tangibly feel bubbling at his feets. It was all too alien, like the nascent movements of some vast whale beneath the surface of the water, brushing against a vessel at sea. He couldn't see it the thing... But oh he could feel it. 

 

Montessa even paused as he caught himself subconsciously dragging down harder on his weight, trying to dig his heels into the meat of the brain mass beneath him. He wanted to hurt the damn thing for what it did to them, for the pain it caused and the lives of brothers it had stolen away... In truth, he doubted the beast even registered the sensation.. he didn't care, though. They'd kill this thing soon.. And they'd make it suffer as it died. 

 

His body tuned with his attention as the Crimson Fist looked the Yeng, observing the Gate Breaker's quartered heraldry of green and yellow for a moment as he contemplated the proposition.

 

++ There is wisdom to your words, brother. Very well. I would suggest that you form into demi-squads and flank around the outward pillars to set the charges. I will move to the central column and see what I can do. ++

 

With that, the Codicier made the sign of the Aquilla to his brothers of Blackthorn and Swordhand before he stepped away to move forward. 

 

Montessa will move towards column 5 and try to use his powers to find an exact route. Is it possible that I could utilize Augury or Mind Scan? Perhaps attempt the dangerous gamble of tapping into creature's synaptic subconscious to try and map out a way to escape once the work is done?

Edited December 12, 2020 by Noctus Cornix

[apologist]

Yeng nodded his assent, then jogged over to the leftmost pillar [Pillar 4], his boots sinking slightly in the rubbery pink-grey of the floor-matter. It reminded him of a combination of Sa neural tissue – though even the Stilties didn't deserve this – and tripe. A weird urge to sample the material swept up on him, but passed almost as quickly. Was is a result of the teleportation? Some lingering warptaint? 

 

No, he decided. It's something about this place. 

"Witchery in the air," he voxed. "Does anyone else feel it?" 

 

The pressure in his head wasn't physical, he knew, and he muttered imprecations to He-that-fathers-himself and the rest of the Divine Princes for protection as he rigged the charges at the base of the fleshy mass. For maximum damage, he used the blade of his narthecium to make a large incision.

 

Ignoring the transparent, gelid fluid that spilled out as best he could, the apothecary-gentle rammed the charges in elbow deep, before crudely suturing the flesh back together, the bombs inside like a bad promise.

[A.T.]

Mining complete, Atratus moves with his demi-squad. Severing the pillars high and low would decrease the chance of regeneration but there was no opportunity to test if the explosives carried were sufficient for even a single cut.

"Suggest sealing the explosives in place with repair cement" he indicated, seeing Yengs efforts to contain the blast.

[Mazer Rackham]

A hearty chop opened a wheal in the rubbery thicket.  Viscous ichor slopped out in a slow pulse, the colour lost in the semi-darkness of a brain cavity.  That was what the patterns of alien flesh reminded him of, anyway.  He grimaced as his ceramite skin brushed against the tendrils and the grey meat beneath his cleats as he considered Atratus' advice and Yeng's example.  The Librarian paced, seeking a way out, but to Akkad, it could be akin to a blind man, his eyes roving the darkness within his mind, not seeing the light beyond.

 

At least that's what it felt like in his own helm.  A pressing depth of water, condensing thought and will to the limits of his own cranium.  If that was the effect he was suffering, then the Crimson Fist must have been drowning in the slop of an alien presence.  Which brought his thoughts full circle to admire the Asurru smearing his gauntlets.  He tried the repair cement, but the wound just pulsed out too much blood.

 

At least the giant beast bled.  He stood up and looked around the giant grove, thick with the tree-pillar tendrils, seeking some of the lurker beasts at the top.

 

If it bled, they could kill it - and whatever else passed for its misbegotten kind.

 

MR.

[Steel Company]

Tyber paced around the chamber, looking for an unseen threat. The pressure in his skull digging at him like daggers. Risking a glance to his brothers to make sure nothing had arrived to strike them with their backs turned, he let out a sigh as he said, "Soon. A worthy foe will arrive..."