Far Future Ch. 199 – A Fire in the Belly

They went into the tunnel, up the stairs there, and plowed into hundreds of Warped coming to reinforce the assault, who were blown into pieces by more of the Techmeister's rockets. They went up further, bounding up flights of stairs, along a long concourse, and up yet one more flight of stairs.

But they were still advancing over literally dozens, hundreds, thousands of Warped dead, all burning unwhite, and there was something going on ahead as the enemy was shooting wildly there, screaming in strange, squealing voices as shafts of violet light swept across them, and the Warped exploded in tri-colored flames as they did so.

It was another large room, and all the writhing lines on the floor, walls, and ceiling were heading that way. It was huge enough on its own, easily able to fit a grav-ball game, perhaps some kind of venue for performances, once able to hold hundreds of thousands of people.

Now, it was filled with corruption.

They had naturally noticed the Warped, screaming and lurching, shooting wildly at something below, and the violet, flame-coiled pulses of light that swept across them, blowing them apart with impressive power.

Then they noticed the droning. The humming was deep and constant, the buzzing and swirling of the insects that often swarmed around servants of Riggibuhl, but so deep and forceful that the very plascrete beneath them seemed to be vibrating to it.

Lifting their eyes, they saw the massive room before them was occupied with a swarm cloud of verminous flies so thick they could not see the other side, and strange and baleful lights were flickering and playing about within the swirling mass of insects.

Down below them, covering the floor of this venue, was abomination.

There was no telling how many corpses were down there, but they had been heaped up high, at least a hundred feet deep, a mass of rotting flesh flowing with dark and unstable power. Seething black-green light of necroic energy lit up uncountable skulls, and foul lights rose from them in unholy streams, condensing into the great stones that now ringed this chamber.

There were eight of them, and they were the destination of all the coiling rune-trails that had swept through the entire city outside. Breathing in the vapors arising from the millions of undead heaped beneath and around them, the glyph-carved menhirs pulsed with a terrifying power that seemed very, very close to being unleashed.

Standing just outside the heaping morass of the dead was the Dark Angel, and she was shooting everything.

Tendrils of the bug cloud above her were lashing down like whips, and burning against the flaming wings she was manifesting to stop them, exploding into flashes of vivus and scattering everywhere. The arms at her hips were shooting in every direction, and the Warped flooding in from all directions were running into unerringly accurate and devastatingly strong blasts of violet lasfire wrapped with phrenic baneflames, reaping them with constant raking scythes of light and fire. Pulses of force punched out and the Possessed dropped, while burning Spikes swiveled and spun on any Demons that manifested themselves, turning them into pincushioned infernos as they sank deep into bloated flesh.

She was sweeping her Sword in figure eights so fast it was impossible to determine where her Blade was at any given moment. Scything, sweeping blades of force, flaring with Sun Strikes in regular pulses and laden in the unwhite fire, were driving into the base of one of the menhirs, igniting the corpses about its base, and burning a path deeper into the mass of the dead there. The tunnel she was burning through it extended down out of sight, but obviously had not ended yet.

The psions in the party gawked at seeing the flaring regularity of those Sun Strikes, feeling their heads pounding just watching. How was she getting off so many of them, so fast, with five Stars and two Suns on each of them...

"Are we capturing her or helping her?" Bemrin had to say, as he headshot a Possessed a hundred yards around the circle with a snapshot.

"That depends on what she is doing..." Sir Mugamu murmured, but he didn't sound very convinced of his own hostility. Whatever she was doing was definitely not in support of the horror taking place here.

"The swarm is coming!" Sergeant Kampi said, as he chewed his autolaser through everything coming up behind them.

Kiprugh looked up, his eyes focusing as he took a deep breath. There was a pause and tenseness in the air, a swelling of power below visible sight, and then a snap and gut-wrenching pulse as psionic power flared in a wave of burning psionic force, and blew out from the head of the Mentat into the onrushing wall of vermin streaking for them.

The force of the flaming wave was not that high, and likely wouldn't even have killed an Imperial Marine. However, it didn't need to; it needed to kill every bug in its area, and it needed to cover a large area. Intensity of damage was passed over for area of effect, and the pyroclasmic wall of fire blew out in a massive cone of effect... and charred every insect and fly in its path to ash as it did.

"Get down to her, but don't interrupt what she is doing!" Inquistor Hrom ordered, matching word to deed as he flowed down the seats and stairs towards her, dancing over the walls and backs of the chairs easily.

There actually weren't many Warped left in front of them, most of them reeling as the play of violet lasfire tore through their comrades and left the rare one untouched, to be killed in passing as Assassin, Inquisitor and Knight raced by and sent them spinning into the burning corpses of their friends, promptly igniting them as well.

Their fire support ended up being focused on the constant reinforcements streaming in through multiple entrances... until Sergeant Kampi swung up his own shoulder-battery of rockets, and targeted all those entrances one by one, sending pairs of ridiculously overpowered mini-rockets into the tunnels, collapsing them on those using them in looping, precise arcs, the unwhite fires from the corpses he was stomping on seeming to follow the rockets through the air and make sure the Warp chaos seething about them didn't affect his aim.

It was also noteworthy that she didn't shoot them as they approached, and indeed, coordinated her fire effortlessly with their own shooting.

The burning shield of her lifted wings flared and parted before them as they raced up next to her, lashing back and forth and keeping the humming drone of that seething swarm above them at bay.

"What are you doing?" Sir Mugamu shouted above the droning before anyone could say anything.

A diagram of the planet flickered up before them, and points of light ignited around it, linking up into the great chain that actually seemed to surround the entire world. When the sphere of the world was removed, the connected lights formed a runic pattern that looked very much like... a crown...

"They are trying to Invest the planet as a Shrineworld to Riggibuhl! If this Ritual completes in fifteen minutes, the entire planet is going on a trip into the Warp and likely getting tossed into the Abyss as a chew toy for the Warped, and a new Forgeworld for the Gears of Change." Techmeister Vahix actually emitted a squeal of feedback as her calm, clear voice cut through the drone perfectly, and everyone there couldn't help but turn eyes on her. "I am digging a path to the base of this menhir, and hoping one of you have at least a pocket nuke there to blow out the floor and get it to collapse under its own weight. Nothing short of a god can use external force to move them now.

"So, how are you geared for really high explosives?" Her tone was light and completely unconcerned with the gravity of the situation.

They looked back and forth at one another. That had not been their purpose for coming here...

"There may be a problem," Sir Mugamu replied with all the calm he could muster.

"No issue. The traitor can do it."

As everyone was blinking at her words, her Tails reoriented, her guns shifted at angles impossible for real limbs, and she discharged without interrupting her swordstrokes down.

All of Techmeister Vahix's power relays were blown out instantly. Strobing lasers sheered through casings and locks, and before they could respond, or the paralyzed cyborg Mechanist could do anything, her Tails reached out, dragged his spider-limbed body closer without seeming effort, and began to rip into the casing behind his back.

"This traitor's fusion core should be able to do the job with a bit of twinking, and he's got all the materials to do the job." The multi-jointed Tails ripped through the durasteel of the Techmeister's battleframe with glowing tips, wires and circuits being TK'd up around them as they tore out the glowing core that powered his cyborg body.

"Traitor?" demanded Inquistor Hrom, barely restraining himself from shooting her.

"He didn't tell you about the Qim'bai Preservation Protocol Evaluations?" she replied without looking about, while her Tails were looking like semi-TK manipulators and welders, tearing circuits and wires away from the Techmeister and doing something to his power core with a speed that looked both frantic and impossibly disciplined. "Strange that." The Inquisitor didn't fail to notice the spark of horror on the Techmeister's normally unmoving face.

"If you had done a flythrough of any of the buildings here, you could have done a Materia scan. You would have found that every single building, machine, roadway, tunnel, and conduit is Warp-Tainted.

"There is nothing on this planet that can be saved. The forces here and the restrictions they've been fighting under are pointless. Every single thing on this planet has to be melted down in fusion fire to be cleansed. There is nothing the Mechanists can salvage here.

"This whole planet should have been glassed from space six months ago, when they discovered the breadth of the systematic blaspheming of the technology here. It wasn't, and now all the armies here are going to be another sacrifice to the Warp as they get a fully intact Forgeworld for the war machines of the Demon Princes of the Abyss.

"Unless we stop it here. So, keep shooting while I work."

Only two of the entrances were open, and it was easy to focus fire on them. At one point, she grabbed the rocket launcher off the mount of the Techmeister's frame, plugged one of her Tails into it, lifted it ten feet into the air above her head with her largest central Tail, and promptly launched every compressed rocket in its battery into both openings. Both were covered with multiple plascrete-shredding explosions, and brought down in a roar of ruptured artificial stone and rubble.

As the sound of the explosions faded, the Inquiry team found that nothing was left for the moment but the pounding drone of Warped beating on the walls, and the nasty hum of the fruitless Swarm overhead.

Her other four Tails were doing things to the fusion core like a spider weaving webs, circuits being snap-welded and traced into place with utterly unerring precision, and she still wasn't even looking at it!

The Inquisitor and Knight glanced at one another, having the same thought about exactly how dangerous this woman was. She plainly wasn't afraid of them at all, to the point where she had cut down one of them without any hesitation to do what needed to be done.

"The entire planet's technology corrupted." Inquisitor Hrom didn't want to believe it, but he remembered the many trails of glyphs and sigils painted, cut, welded, seared, melted, hacked, and hammered into metal and plascrete, and could not argue with her.

The amount of work required to do such things would have taken billions of people months of work, under incredible unity and purpose... and that was exactly what the Warped of Qim'bai had.

Delivering an entire Forgeworld into the Warp. Madness, and worth a truly great reward.

And all of it could have been stopped six months ago...