The Crimson Grasp: A World Eaters Story

[Maatith]

THE CRIMSON GRASP

 

“War gives the right to the conquerors to impose any condition they please upon the vanquished.”

 

-attributed to Shakespire,

Terran dramaturge, M2

 

 

 

I

 

The assault boat floated through the light debris field, ancient and seemingly forgotten, as the strike cruiser approached. Not a single light or control rune blinked to life across its surface, and its engines and weapons sat cold as the grave.

 

It was a truly old vessel - a Trireme-class Assault Boat. Once a mainstay of the Saturnine fleets in the days before full Imperial unification of the Sol System, a handful of Trireme were used by the Legiones Astartes in a handful of their earliest battles, and yet even by the time that the last true rebellions and uprisings died away on Terra they had been almost entirely replaced; the Space Marines had quickly come to favour Dreadclaw and Caestus, whilst the early regiments of the Imperial Army were already beginning to move towards the easier to produce Shark and Condor pattern Assault Boats. The Trireme was quickly forgotten, and now it was rare for a ship in the Imperium’s fleets to even have a way to recognise the obsolete craft in its vast cogitator banks.

 

And that was exactly what Saggar was counting on.

 

Saggar stood in the cramped troop bay of the Trireme, his gaze seemingly locked on his squad’s helms. The light of their emerald lenses were amongst the only sources of light in the mostly powered-down assault craft, and that thin and sickly light caught the edges of the helmet crests of their kin, rendering the Sarum-forged shapes even more monstrous than normal. However, his attention was firmly within his own helm, focused utterly on the runes flickering over his display, showing the approach of the strike cruiser.

 

The plan had seemed so very simple back in the launch bays of the Axeman’s Mercy. The strike cruiser that was approaching belonged to one of the thin-blood ‘Successor Chapters’ of the Imperium, and was unlikely to be able to tell the Trireme apart from the endless debris and flotsam of the void. Built for war in the densely populated Sol System, the Trireme was built to be far more resilient than the later generations of Imperial assault boats - in the battles over Saturn, there was a chance if you missed your target that a ship might actually be able to pick you up, and so the Trireme was able to maintain life support for incredible lengths of time. Especially when most of its occupants had the legendary constitutions of Space Marine Legionnaires.

 

Now though, with the Butcher’s Nails biting hard into the back of his brain, and the vast form of a strike cruiser bearing down on him with no way of defending himself, Saggar was beginning to see all the ways this plan could go wrong.

 

The runes displaying the status of the strike cruiser blinked bright, and Saggar held his breath. Even now, the hundreds of servitors linked to the strike cruiser’s defence turrets would be scanning the Trireme, trying to identify any threats. One long second passed. Then two. Three. Saggar was used to the lightning-grind of melee and the ground war, and each second sat in the dark, simply waiting, felt like a lifetime of agony. Eventually, after five more agonising seconds, a pinging green rune appeared imposed over the strike cruiser rune on his display.

 

Saggar grinned, his tongue clicking off his iron teeth as he opened a vox-link to the hereteks and engine-cultists in the Trireme’s cockpit, Nails at once seeming to calm and tense further as the chance for violence approached.

 

“Bring us in.”

 

Slowly, achingly slowly, the Trireme began to move. It couldn’t ignite its main engines, not without becoming a blazing beacon on every sensor aboard the strike cruiser, and so it had to sputter and limp towards its prey on emergency micro-thrusters - drifting into the cruiser’s path more than actively closing the gap.

 

In the troop bay, Saggar’s squad had begun to notice the movement. To an Astartes, well used to the feeling of an assault craft plying its trade, even these tiny movements spoke volumes. The Berzerkers began to twitch and fidget. The most controlled amongst them ran practised hands over their pistols and axes, performing weapons checks as a small ritual to try and appease and calm the pain engines singing in their skulls. The least controlled began to murmur and convulse, barely holding back their contempt and fury at not yet being in soothing battle.

 

So began Saggar’s main task as a squad leader - trying to keep the World Eaters under his command dancing on the knife edge between mindless, frothing madmen barely useful as even the bluntest of weapons, and the long and painful failure that came from trying to deny the Nails. He laid a hand on the pauldron of one of the nearest struggling Berzerker, Kayst, the sudden and deliberate movement drawing the rest of the squad’s attention. That, at least, was a good sign; before some battles such small social queues had been completely beneath their notice.

 

“Hold steady, brother. Soon, we will be ankle-deep in the blood of Imperials. The Blood God and the Nails will both have their fill and more, and our brothers will praise us as the heralds of yet another glorious victory. Is this not why we are the favoured of the Fell? Trusted above all others to be his preferred companions? We strike smart first, and it does not dull our fury. Blood for the Blood God!”

 

“Blood for the Blood God!”

 

The squad’s response shout was crisp and eager, and Saggar smiled again. Playing to their egos, and reminding them that the eye of one of Khorne’s favoured was on them in part because they could still be trusted to show at least a little restraint, had done its job, and Saggar felt some of his earlier confidence return.

 

A different vox-link chimed, filling Saggar’s ear with the adrenaline-buzz of the Trireme’s heretek pilot-devotee, “Boarding proximity achieved, Lord Saggar. Bringing mag-clamps online.”

 

The assault boat shuddered and hummed as, beyond the thick walls of the troop bay, it gently connected with the hull of the strike cruiser before locking itself into place with an array of esoteric mag-locks and proto-ursus harpoons, sharp as lamprey teeth.

 

“Sealed and airtight, Lord Saggar. Melta-rams are now back online. We fire at your command.”

 

Saggar slammed a fist into the release rune beside him, rising with the unlocked harness and forcing his way through his Berzerkers and the small knot of cultist and subhuman support they had brought with them until he stood at their fore, eyes almost boring a hole through the assault boat’s ramp.

 

“Do it.”

 

Saggar’s squad ran through the sparse outer corridors of the strike cruiser at a speed far beyond a jog. There was little restraint or control here, and even less attempt to move with any true silence or stealth. However, it had not yet devolved into a full and unrestrained charge, and even Kayst was still pausing and changing direction almost immediately after Saggar gave the order, and given how loud and insistent his own Nails were growing, that gave him no small amount of satisfaction.

 

Besides, true stealth would barely have served them here. If the Astartes on this ship had not immediately noticed the assault boat breaching their hull, they would notice soon. Saggar simply had to complete his mission before the Imperials managed to stop him.

 

They had yet to encounter any meaningful resistance. There had been a few knots of mortals here and there, most likely Chapter Serfs trying to eke out a handful of personal, human moments here, far enough from their duties, masters, and the ship’s key systems that the small sins of human inefficiency - love, tabac, and the other tiny excesses of dutiful slaves - were tolerated or ignored. None had survived contact with Saggar’s Berzerkers.

 

He had let Kayst lead the way. The Berzerker had flung himself at each and every small mob of mortals, scattering them like a felinid coming down amidst song birds; with rent lines of blood and shrill cries of weakling panic cast all about him as his chainsword swung. The rest of the squad was barely a breath behind him, chainaxes and eviscerators lashing out at the mortals that tried to move away from Kayst’s frantic swordstrokes. 

 

In the wake of each cull (Saggar refused to insult Khorne or his own squad by calling the events ‘battles’, or even ‘skirmishes’) Rell had paused for a half moment to stoop amongst the corpses, the strange tools of his twin disciplines rattling at his waist as he bent to coat his fingers in the rapidly cooling blood of their victims, using it to daub crude runes on the walls and on his own armour even as he rose and moved to catch up with his fellow World Eaters. After the fourth such small ritual, Saggar spared Rell a nod, trusting the old Berzerker to read the implicit question in the gesture.

 

Rell did, but his answer was full of his usual vagaries. “Too soon to tell, Saggar. It’ll all depend on how many thinbloods are on this ship once we are through proper.”

 

Saggar grunted, annoyed but not surprised, before turning back to run with Kayst at the head of the squad. They were coming up on the objective, and there was precious little time to waste. There would be time enough to wrench answers out of Rell later.

 

A few corridors more, and another mob of serfs, and something in the air changed. The keening pitch of the Nails sang higher in Saggar’s skull, and the faint scent of sanctified Mechanicus oils and the burnt residue of gun lubricant began to filter through his helmet.

 

“Kayst, blade up and faster - I taste Imperial corpse-machines on the wind.”

 

Kayst snarled, and Saggar braced himself for a backhand from the Berzerker’s sword, worried for a moment that the bite of the Nails would cause him to lash out at the implicit chains of authority in Saggar’s words. Then the snarl continued, morphing into something akin to a laugh, and Kayst broke into a full-tilt charge, bringing his chainsword up from the lazy and vaguely ready position it had lived in since they had deployed to a proper guard, from where it could be deployed against an actual opponent.

 

Saggar lengthened his own stride, rushing to keep up with Kayst, and as the pair rounded a sharp bend in the corridor, they were met by a hail of solid slugs. A trio of heavy servitors - semi-living and lobotomised human bodies, filled up with simple aggressor machines, targeting matrices, and massive slabs of armour, and literally armed with some form of primitive rotary cannons - had locked their feet against the deck, choking the air down the long corridor with blazing hot ammunition. It was a kill-zone that few forces in the galaxy would be able to push through with ease.

 

The World Eaters had never been a typical force.

 

A veteran of the Long War in the truest sense, Kayst had served in the XII Legion’s Destroyer cadres, even earning the Blood Hand and fighting in the elite Red Hand Squads when Horus’ doomed rebellion had reached Terra. His place had always been in the teeth of the enemy, screaming back in the face of firepower that should have been overwhelming. He had survived the heavy weapons of Dorn’s precious Imperial Fists, the massed fire of entire Aeldari corsair bands, his own lethal and sickening wargear, and even, at the height of the Legion Wars, a full salvo of lascannon beams from the Sun Killer elite of the III Legion. These servitors were nothing in the face of such a legacy.

 

The Destroyer lowered his shoulders, turning as he ran so that most of the howling slugs struck the already scarred Legion badge on his heavy pauldron. The weight of fire seemed to barely slow Kayst, and he howled as he continued to put one foot in front of the other, closing the gap between the squad and the servitors with the unnerving speed of a true Astartes. The bullets could do little against the ceramite of power armour, and where they found the soft armour of joints and armour seals, the sting of pain simply caused Kayst to howl louder and run faster, fury burning his blood as he sought to avenge himself upon the machine-men.

 

As Kayst reached the servitors, he laid into them with his chainsword, crashing into the Imperial cyborgs with a series of heavy, two-handed swings. The first few blows struck at the weapon limbs of the servitors, although Saggar was unwilling to assign that to a desire to help cover the advance of the rest of the squad, or to any sense of strategy or tactics, rather than the blind and mad luck of a warrior lost to the Butcher’s Nails.

 

Regardless of why he had done it, Kayst’s first flurry of blows had nonetheless knocked their heavy guns out of their pre-sighted alignments, and the rest of the Berzerkers were left unopposed as they ran the last stretch of the corridor, their own howls joining Kayst as they joined the fray.

 

There was more of a fight here than there had been with the Chapter serfs. The blade-limbs of the servitors were just fast enough to parry one or two of the World Eaters’ swings, and a desperate close-range salvo from one of their cannons brought Badis crashing to a knee, a string of impact craters running down his breastplate. However, they were just three simple machines, and in the face of ten of the most powerful assault specialists the Imperium and the Eye had ever produced, they had never stood a chance, and by the time Badis had heaved himself back up with his eviscerator, the fight was over.

 

It took Saggar long seconds to silence his own Nails enough to look to his squad after the last of the servitors fell, and even more valuable moments were lost as Saggar and his Brothers pulled the worst of their members back from the abyss. Even once calmed, Kayst paced like a caged predator as he waited for the squad to advance again, and Badis had been lost for a while, furiously tearing into the collapsed servitor that had shot him.

 

However, eventually Saggar was able to drag his squad back from the fog of the Butcher’s Nails enough that he could stand and take stock, grinning as he saw what the servitors had been guarding: an interior bulkhead door, marked with an eyeless skull emblem - the same heraldry that had been emblazoned across the side of the strike cruiser. Another iron-toothed smile broke behind his helmet.

 

Saggar turned, barking at Rell to get to the door. He paused, his eye lenses rising up to meet Saggar’s. He had taken advantage of the squad’s brief halt, daubing a dozen crude runes in the thick blood of the squad and the vital almost-oil of the servitors, and all but covering both of his vambraces in the strange half-script. The lifeblood was stark and bright against the death-grey of his armour, and as he moved past Saggar to investigate the door, it seemed to move slower than the rest of him, lingering like the afterthought of ritual in his wake.

 

“Can you get it open, Rell?”

 

Rell’s first response was little more than a grunt; a distracted half-snarl of Nail-bite and focus that made it very clear he would answer when he was good and ready, and not when Saggar asked. Saggar felt his anger rise in response to the implied disrespect, and forced his ire back down as Rell set to work, pulling a series of dataspikes and grav-drivers from his belt in order to assault the command console next to the bulkhead door.

 

Long ago, Rell had been an initiate of the XII Legion’s Forge. Having shown a natural aptitude for machinery and mechanisms, he had been pulled from the line and named a Techmarine Initiate. However, Rell had never been sent to Sacred Mars to learn the great mysteries of the Machine Cult; just as his aptitude had been discovered, Angron and his sons had been called to Istvann by the Warmaster Horus, and would soon be embroiled in the all-consuming chaos of Horus’ Rebellion. With the World Eaters dispatched to Ultramar for Lorgar’s Shadow Crusade, and Mars besieged by those still loyal to the Throne, Rell had been taught his trade not in the Forge-Shrine, but in the crucible of war.

 

As a result, Rell had never learned the higher mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus, but he had learned a brutal practicality that appealed to Angron’s Legion. No deep studies of the ancient Cybernetica or the lore-matrices of the great cogitators for Rell, instead he learned to repair a tank whilst under attack by Guilliman’s precious Locutarus Squads. No chance to ever learn the nuances of voltike production or how to set a voxgheist upon an entire world, instead Rell had learned the art of forging weapons from the broken machines of the XIII Legion. Rell might never have been considered a ‘true’ Techmarine, and even now boasted little of the true heretek mastery of the Warpsmiths of other warbands, and yet his ability to function as a rough mechanist under fire and through the howling of his Nails was an asset Saggar had long-since come to rely on.

 

It had left its mark on Rell, though. There was a petty spitefulness that ran through the very core of Rell’s psyche; the old wound of never being allowed to study and master the great war-arts of the Mechanicum had never healed. Saggar had once heard that during the Shadow Crusade, Rell had made it his personal mission to kill as many of the Ultramarines’ Techmarines as he could, robbing the enemy of the knowledge and expertise he would never have the chance to obtain. Those same rumours had claimed that each of the tools of the Techpriest that Rell carried had been taken from those same murdered foes - each dataspike and wrench and plasma-cutter a trophy of a foe slain and a blow delivered to the accumulated wisdom of the enemy. Saggar had no idea if such tales were true, but having seen Rell’s fury in the face of Imperial Techmarines in the long years since Skalathrax, he could well believe it.

 

“Saggar, it’s as we feared,” there was a rumble beneath Rell’s voice, an anger borne of having to admit defeat - admit weakness - for even a moment, “Whoever these thinbloods are, they actually put some thought into defending themselves. The inner bulkheads have a kinlock on them. I could force this one open, but all the others would stay locked shut. My dataspikes and petty scrapcode will never convince the door we are supposed to be here.”

 

Saggar nodded, slapping a hand against Rell’s power pack, hoping that the gesture of camaraderie would reach through the Nails and the Berzerker’s wounded pride. They had always known there was a chance Rell would be unable to breach these sorts of defences - the soft work of corrupting and deceiving augury and identification systems had never been his great strength - and so they had come prepared. Saggar shouted an order back down the corridor, to where a small knot of cultists and mutants were slowly making their way through the strike cruiser in the Berzerkers’ wake.

 

Several bestial mutants lumbered forwards, braying and bellowing in something between brash posturing challenges and pious prayers to their Astartes masters. Two were pure brutes, towering over the mortal cultists and blessed with spiralling crowns of horns atop their elongated heads, and swung their heavy chainswords with the righteous arrogance of bodyguards, but it was the third beastman that Saggar had called forward.

 

Smaller than its kin, the third beast was hooded in the ragged approximation of robes, and carried a long stave - a cobbled-together badge of office made from broken icons, glyph-stained bones, and a twisted skull. The beastherds that dwelt in the depths of the Axeman’s Mercy called creatures such as these “shamans” - petty witches and pseudo-psykers whose extensive mutations had given it some deeper connection to the Warp.

 

As the shaman approached, Saggar felt the edges of a Nails headache press at his mind. It was nothing compared to a purer human psyker or true Astartes Librarian, though - Saggar had often wondered if the beastmen’s sheer Warp pollution registered differently to the pain engines in some way, although whenever he had attempted to discuss it with his brothers they had laughed at his interest. However, the ‘softer’ impact of the mutant witches made it easier for the Berzerkers to stomach their presence, which is why they had been picked for this mission.

 

“Burn their pathetic machines awake, witchblood. Open this ship to the Crimson Grasp.”

 

The shaman brayed a response and lumbered forward, beginning to gesture and murmur in a language uncomfortably close to High Gothic for something with such bovine features.

 

Where Saggar and his kin worshipped Khorne above the other gods, and as a grand warrior and pillar of fury and sacred rage, the beastherds worshipped Chaos as a single, primordial whole - an antithesis to order and civilisation. Whatever magic the shaman had taught itself to call upon was clearly borne from this idea of a Primordial Annihilator; it was the magic of disorder, the sorcery of lies and deception, the song of the twisting of bonds and proper function and loyalty. And it was exactly what the squad needed.

 

The Nails buzzed louder in Saggar’s skull as writhing shadows began to dance between the shaman’s staff and the console, and he bit down hard on the urge to cut the beastman down, casting an eye over his squad to make sure that they were doing the same. The shaman’s dark magic poured through the bulkhead door’s sensor-arrays and gene-protocols, myriad illusions confounding it and overwhelming the simple machine spirit. The sensors scanned and scanned again, and a donut emerged in its protocols. There were Astartes in front of it, and surely they were its masters? What other Astartes could be on the ship? It served the Astartes. It served these Astartes?

 

“Rell, now.”

 

Saggar’s command cut through Rell’s battle with his own Nails, and he pushed his way back towards the console, grunting in disgust as the tendrils of the shaman’s magic caressed his armour. A dataspike slammed roughly into the console, and with that the machine spirit’s defences were finally completely overwhelmed. Rell grinned, feral delight overwhelming him despite the proximity of the mutant’s foul sorcery as he punched in a command.

 

Emergency Protocol Exile Extremis Initiated. Unsealing all inner bulkhead chambers. Ave Imperator.

 

The bulkhead door began to scream and screech as it slowly unlocked and rolled open, revealing the dimly lit corridor beyond. For a second, nothing beyond the bulkhead changed. Then, as the rest of the strike cruiser began to realise what was befalling it, the corridor beyond was lit by the flashing strobe of warning crimson, and the screaming of the door was joined by the wailing of klaxons.

 

Saggar began to laugh, and punched through a vox command to the waiting Trireme.

 

“Pilot, relay the following back to Axeman’s Mercy: Mission accomplished, Lord. We have our way in.”

[Maatith]

II

 

The scale of voidwar has an unusual effect on the passage of time.

 

The Axeman’s Mercy, a Light Cruiser with great, howling engines, that had served the warriors of the XII Legion since the days of the Great Crusade, had been hidden beyond the range of the strike cruiser’s main sensors. Built for speed and for rushing charges, it charged out ahead of its escorts, swifter and more aggressive than any ship of its size had any right to be.

 

It was so fast that the main targeting arrays and cogitators on the strike cruiser were unable to get a true lock on it as it approached. Instead, its commanders were forced to calculate intercept patterns and guess at firing solutions for where it was going to be, hoping that such inaccurate calculations still inflicted enough damage to turn aside the Mercy’s attack. The bridge of the strike cruiser would doubtless be a cacophony of orders and reports and hurried compliance, as the speed of their enemy brought it into boarding range in an impossibly short span of time.

 

In a voidwar, where ships kilometres in length frequently fought at such distances that mortal eyes could often struggle to pinpoint their targets at extreme range through viewing ports, this impossibly small window of time was almost a standard Terran hour.

 

Whilst an impossibly short amount of time for a Cruiser to make a charge from outside of sensor range into boarding range, for Saggar and his squad, an hour was an incredibly long time to be alone on an Astartes ship.

 

At first, much of the resistance had come in the form of Chapter serf armsmen teams. Unlike the off-duty serfs in the outer hull chambers, these serfs were ready for the Berzerkers. Clad in a variety of void armour suits topped in layers of flakweave or carapace and armed with powerful naval shotcannons and boarding pikes, the serf’s greatest strength was the training given to them by their Astartes masters - they were disciplined, skilled with their weapons, and utterly zealous in their devotion to their ship and their duty.

 

Saggar always enjoyed battles like this. With their powerful shotguns and sheer dedication, in the cramped confines of a boarding assault the serfs of the Imperium’s Chapters could prove to be tenacious and dangerous opponents - amongst the finest and most worthy foes that he had ever found amongst the masses of baseline humanity.

 

The serfs had still died, of course. In the face of a close-quarters assault by Berzerkers of the World Eaters, that had never been in doubt. But they had died facing their enemies, and had given a good account of themselves before they died; Kayst and Badis had taken the worst of it, and both now had a number of deep impact craters across their armour, and were bleeding from a score of small wounds through their soft armour, but even Saggar’s display was flashing a red warning as the integrity of one of his greaves threatened to give out. They had even managed to kill a pair of the beatmen warriors that had managed to keep up with the squad’s charge.

 

That had impressed Saggar, and he had paused to take the head of one of the serfs he had killed from that fireteam. When he returned to the Mercy, he would clean up that skull and offer it to one of the shrines of Khorne. The serf had earned that honour.

 

However, the pace of their assault had changed rapidly when the Imperial Space Marines had arrived.

 

They had struck like a lightning bolt as the World Eaters had entered a gunnery chamber. There had been a hail of mass-reactive bolts, each the size of a fist, and Saggar had managed to catch the briefest of glimpses at the foe as he had barked his orders, the Berzerkers scattering behind pipes and battery cannons and the other scraps of meagre cover in the chamber. It looked like a full squad, and at a glance Saggar thought their bulk matched the new hulking breed of Astartes that the Imperium called the ‘Primaris’. They were clad in thick armour well beyond anything still in the service of the XII Legion, and even as Saggar thought it, a small part of his mind not burning hot under the bite of the Nails gave him a name - Gravis Armour. Defensive specialists then; moving fortresses presumably tasked with blunting his squad’s advance whilst other forces moved in to help finish them off.

 

That wouldn’t do. The squad needed to keep up its momentum. They were, in many ways, like the selachii of Old Earth - if they stopped moving, they would surely die.

 

As Saggar scanned the room, trying to formulate a plan, the Butcher’s Nails sang too loud for young Karkarus. Even as Saggar yelled at him to hold, Karkarus was vaulting the snaking power cables and potentia coils, rushing headlong towards the Imperials. He clipped one with a searing shot from his plasma pistol, drawing the focused ire of the others. The heavy bolt rounds struck over and over, cracking ceramite and bone, and a little over halfway to the first enemy Karkarus toppled over. There was no way of knowing if he was truly dead or just injured, but in truth it mattered little for the moment - Saggar was down a full Astartes warrior, and if they could not get moving again the rest of the squad would quickly join Karkarus on the deck.

 

Saggar felt the howl of the Nails rise in his skull, and knew it was now or never, or he would lose the Berzerker’s fragile cohesion. He looked hurriedly around, and very quickly forged a plan, opening the squad vox to be heard over the din of bolter fire.

 

“Kayst! Nearest foe! With me! Tugludar! Badis! Grenades! Now!”

 

Kayst was already in motion as the grenades began to soar through the air. This was how it had to be in the face of Space Marine foes. Against mortals, or most of the xenos that polluted the stars, grenade shock held the mind long enough to cover the squad’s advance, allowing them to eat up the ground between them and their foes before the enemy could recover, but Space Marines were different. Even the weakest Space Marine could recover in moments from the concussive blast of a grenade, and so the squad had to already be in motion - to use the chaos of grenade blasts to shield the squad from accurate point-blank fire for a single, crucial second.

Bolter rounds struck Saggar, enough that he was briefly worried that they would stagger him and slow his charge, but he was able to keep his feet, gritting his teeth against the starbursts of pain. Just a few more steps. The grenades exploded ahead, and Saggar surged forward as he felt a tiny ease in the storm of fire. He soared over a heavy pipe, and suddenly he was staring down an Imperial, watching the enemy as they struggled to swing their heavy bolter around to fire upon the pair of World Eaters that were suddenly beside him.

 

They never gave the Imperial the chance. Saggar’s axe came down, shrieking through the air with all the momentum of his charge even as Kayst’s chainsword came up from the other side. Even as the Imperial staggered back, Saggar was swinging again. And again. And again. On and on, until the Imperial fell, first to his knees, and then to the floor.

 

Saggar snarled, throwing off the total fog of the Nails as best as he could as he tried to take stock of the battle. If there was any life left in the Imperial at his feet, the cultists following in the squad’s wake would snuff it out, or drag it back howling to the cells of the Axeman’s Mercy. Assuming the cultists were still alive.

 

The rest of the squad had done exactly what Saggar had hoped they would. As Saggar and Kayst had set to work murdering the closest foe, the rest of the Berzerkers had rushed past them, engaging the rest of the Primaris who had dug into the chamber’s sparse cover, and forcing them all to fight for their lives rather than providing support to their brothers from afar with those heavy bolt rifles. Even without the honed instincts won by fighting through the Long War, their enemies were fast, and fierce, and the squad’s blood was up now that they finally had a challenging foe.

 

Kayst was already with his brothers as Saggar began to move, howling as he hacked at an Imperial alongside Tugludar. Saggar paused another fraction of a second, concern bleeding through the bliss-scream of the Nails as he saw the sheer damage wrought to Tugludar’s armour and the amount of crimson staining the areas around each impact crater and gouge. Even for an Astartes, that was a lot of blood, and unless things changed dramatically, Saggar doubted that Tugludar would still be fighting with them all by the time they left this ship.

 

Still, there was no time to dwell on it. Beyond Kayst and Tugludar’s brawl, Saggar could see Rell engaging an Imperial with a plumed crest on his helmet and gaudy rank signifiers across his chest - the squad’s sergeant-commander, no doubt. The Imperial had been forced to abandon his oversized boltgun, meeting Rell’s chainaxe with a broad-bladed gladius in rapid, screeching showers of sparks. The Imperial was a good duelist, and if he could somehow manage to hold off Rell’s assault for another half-minute -long odds, but not completely impossible - then Rell might just tire enough that the Imperial could turn the fight in his favour.

 

Saggar had no intention of giving him that chance.

 

“For Khorne!”

 

Saggar screamed the Blood God’s name as he barreled into the fight beside Rell, his helmet speakers bellowing the profane syllables loud enough to shake his eyes in their sockets. The Imperial was struck by the word as much as the sound, his body attempting to riot and twist away from the forbidden name of the Lord of Battle, and to his credit he mastered himself swifty, his composure broken for only a fraction of a second before he shook off the dread of Saggar’s invocation.

 

But in the face of two World Eaters, honed by millennia of war, a fraction of a second was all it took to die. In that instant, Saggar was able to get his axe through the Imperial’s guard, hacking a deep gouge along the armour of his sword arm and, crucially, leaving him unable to block the next swing of Rell’s weapon. The Imperial saw the attack coming and tried to pull back, but it was never going to be enough. Rell’s chainaxe found the soft armour at his neck, and the Imperial fell in a curtain of lifeblood.

 

Rell’s hands were already in the wound at the Imperial’s neck as the body’s twitching slowed on the deck, daubing more runes across the ground and his own armour. There was a throbbing itch in the air around the former Techmarine now, an insistent almost-buzzing that seemed to whisper from the runes and came maddeningly close to sounding like words the longer Saggar listened.

 

“I had him, brother. I did not require your assistance.”

 

Saggar grunted. “I don’t doubt it. I’ve been opposite you in the pits often enough to know when you have the better of your prey - even prey as formidable as these thinbloods. But what you do not have is time. We cannot get pinned here, and if we let them these Imperials will kill us long before the Mercy reaches us. Besides, I let you claim the kill, didn’t I?”

 

Rell grunted, some of the aggression and venom bleeding from his posture. Saggar mentally took a single sigh of relief. All of his Berzerkers were deadly, and if one ever came at him with lethal intent, there was a chance they would claim his skull for Khorne, but Rell was especially threatening - he was able to work with his Nails more than most, retaining a hunters’ instinct and a warrior’s keen eye rather than simply fighting like a maddened beast. Of all his squad, Saggar thought he would most regret crossing axes with Rell, and not just because of their friendship.

 

As Rell continued to work, now filling a pair of the small vials that hung from his armour with the Imperial’s blood and working to remove the warrior’s head, Saggar took a moment to take in the rest of the fight. It was already all but over, with the last few Imperials being surrounded and overwhelmed as the World Eaters finished off their brothers. Even as he watched Badis was dispatching the last of them, his heavy eviscerator smashing through their armour and caving in the head inside. They were all still up, even Tugludar, and there was a howl of triumph as the Imperial Space Marine slumped, his bolter finally falling from his grip.

 

Saggar gave them three whole seconds to revel in the slaughter. Any more, and the Nails would have begun to creep back in, looking for a new fight now that the squad’s momentum had stopped. Any less, and they might have resented him for interrupting their revelry and trophy-taking, and World Eaters never resented you quietly. It was also just enough time for him to see that some of the cultists that the squad had brought with them were still alive - the fastest of them appearing in the doorway now that the sounds of battle had stopped. Good, that meant he didn’t need to worry about the Astartes bodies, or about Karkarus.

 

“Come on! These ones are already going cold - let’s go find some that still have some teeth to them! Or do you want our brothers to claim all the best kills after we did all the hard work?”

 

The squad roared back at him, twisting the last of their claimed skulls and trophies free as they set off at his heels. They had been given their first true taste of blood for the day, and now they were eager for more.

 

It didn’t take them long to get their wish. The squad encountered enemy Astartes twice more before the hour had passed.

 

The first were a squad of snipers, hidden in the gangways shrouded vantages overlooking a gundeck. As the Berzerkers had charged through the serf bondsmen and galley slaves trying to keep the ship’s weapons firing at the approaching fleet, hacking and slashing and sending a bow wave of panic and retreat through the mortals, the bright beams of las fusils had stabbed down into them. Before the squad could reach their enemy, climbing hand over hand up the steaming cannons themselves to reach the raised vantages of the snipers, Tugludar had been killed, and swift young Aksil had been blasted to the ground, an arm severed by the laser bolts. He had risen again, apoplectic with rage as he took up his axe in his other hand, but by that point the last of the snipers had been tossed, dead, to the deck around him.

 

The second had been a lone Techmarine, his armour almost entirely the sacred red of Mars, who had been busy trying to forge quick barricades across one of the ship’s arterial corridors, booming orders to servitors and serfs. That had ended swiftly. Rell had been upon the enemy even before the Techmarine had finished issuing new orders to make ready to fight. Even as he had set to work cutting down the servitors and serfs that moved to intercept him, Saggar had been compelled to watch the Duel, hypnotised by the savage meticulousness of it.

 

Rell’s first swing had severed the control link between the Techmarine’s armour and his bolter and servo-arm, robbing his foe of the use of those weapons entirely. The next had parried the Techmarine’s own axe even as he brought up his bolt pistol - not to kill, but to fire a chattering salvo of shells into the Techmarine’s other arm and hand, forcing him to drop the grav pistol he had been trying to bring to bear. The third swing had aimed to cut in above the knee, but had missed by a hair’s breadth, shrieking as it skimmed and scratched the Primaris’ armour, failing to find purchase. That mistake had cost Rell, and with his axe out of position the Techmarine had been able to deliver a heavy blow with his cog-toothed axe, buckling one of Rell’s pauldrons and cutting deep enough that Saggar could hear the searing of an energy field cooking flesh. Rell had howled in pain at that, and dropped his bolt pistol in order to take his axe in both hands. The next few blows of the duel Saggar had not seen, as a trio of serfs with heavy plasma torches had demanded his focus to kill before their tools could be put to work on his armour and bones. By the time he was able to look again, Rell was without his helmet, blood already clotting in a heavy gash down one side of his skull, and the Techmarine was reeling, one arm now ending at the elbow.

 

The bout didn’t last long after that. Rell’s next strike ripped the heavy axe from the Techmarine’s remaining hand, and before the Imperial could try and draw the combat knife from his waist Rell was on him. He tackled his foe to the ground before bringing his axe down again and again against the chest until the chainaxe’s whirling teeth had managed to gain access to the fragile organs hidden behind ceramite and ossified ribplate.

 

Saggar had already sent several of the squad to tear down the barricades before the Nails calmed enough for him to realise that his armour was ringing with the sound of a vox request from the Trireme.

 

“Message relayed from the Axeman’s Mercy, Lord Saggar. Received by us six minutes ago. Message simply states “Launch underway.””

 

Saggar grinned wide, and turned to find Rell stood only a few steps away, his damaged pauldron abandoned on the floor beside him as he fixed one of the Techmarine’s cog-edged plates, newly daubed with more of the profane runes over the symbol of the Mechanicus, in its place.

 

“What news, brother?”

 

Before Saggar could answer himself, the deck shuddered slightly, betraying a series of distant heavy impacts against one of the ship’s flanks. A second later, the warband-wide vox-link burst to life, filling the ears of every Berzerker.

 

“Warriors of the Crimson Grasp, the Blood God is watching! Do not disappoint me! Forward! Forward for blood and slaughter! Forward for revelation! Forward for victory after victory!”

 

The link was suddenly dominated by dozens of voices, howling and snarling battlecries and benedictions of Khorne in response to the broadcast. Saggar watched as Rell’s face split into a grin that matched his own. Lord Grarl the Fell, master of the Crimson Grasp, had led the rest of his warriors through the inner bulkheads opened by Rell’s scrapcode, and even now were rushing towards every vulnerable part of the ship.

 

And where Grarl walked, death and glory followed on behind.