"What exactly are you?"
Ky'ei's piercing gaze locked onto Qin Mo, but all it could see was an emptiness that defied comprehension. A void, an absence where sothing should exist but did not.
For a daemon of Tzeentch, Lord of Change and Architect of Fate, such an absence was blasphemy in its purest form. The Empyrean was shaped by thought, by will, by the great weave of fate, but this... thing? He stood apart. Outside the grand design. A blind spot in the infinite tapestry. It was heretical in its own right.
The daemon felt sothing it had not in eons: fear. It longed for banishnt, an escape from this losing battle, but before that, it had to understand the anomaly before it.
Yet Qin Mo was not the only enigma in this cursed place.
Ky'ei turned its gaze to Yoan, and in doing so, saw his past, his present, his future, and therein lay the horror.
Yoan's past burned into its mind's eye: Betrayed by bounty hunters. Devoured by mutants in the underhive, his final scream swallowed in darkness, his flesh torn apart by tooth and claw.
Yoan's future: A re photograph clutched in his widow's trembling hands, his body long since reduced to bleached bone in a forgotten corner of the hive.
But here he was. Alive. Breathing. Standing in the doorway, an affront to fate itself.
Standing in the doorway, very much real.
Ky'ei's feathers ruffled in unease, iridescent plus shivering as though caught in an unseen wind. The strands of fate were fraying, threads unraveling before its eyes.
It spoke aloud its findings, each syllable like the unraveling of a prophecy, describing Yoan's contradictory existence.
Then, with a voice that was part hiss, part choral lant, it demanded an answer from Qin Mo.
"Do you understand how terrifying this is for ?"
Qin Mo rely nodded, his expression unreadable.
"I do." A pause. Then, with a smirk, he added, "You should be grateful you can still perceive the present. If Kairos, that two-headed fool, were here, he'd be as blind as a newborn."
Ky'ei's pupils contracted into pinpricks of incandescent light. Its twin hearts seized in shock.
"Wait… Kairos… How do you know my master's na—?!"
Panic. Real, visceral panic.
Qin Mo had spoken ofKairos Fateweaveras if he were nothing, a na that should have been unknowable to mortals, spoken with casual irreverence.
Ky'ei had always been a fragnt of Kairos' will, an extension of its master's boundless sight. It could glimpse past and future, albeit only a short distance.
But this man. No, this being, how did it know?
"You talk too much, daemon."
Qin Mo raised his weapons and opened fire.
Yoan's Null-field aura weakened Ky'ei, disrupting the unholy energies that sustained it in the Materium, but it was not enough.
He was no strong Untouchable, no paragon of the Pariah gene, but it was enough to unbalance the daemon.
Still, the scatter-lasers tore through daemon-flesh, sizzling holes into its form, burning, searing, rending chunks from Ky'ei's transdinsional flesh.
The air reeked of ozone and immolated Warp-matter, yet the daemon refused to die.
"This is why I told you to use lee," Qin Mo said as he fired again.
"I know. Because ranged weapons alone can't fully kill them, right?" Yoan tightened his grip on his chainsword and grav-hamr.
Then, he charged.
Ky'ei's right eye flicked to Archon's liquefied corpse.
Its left eye tracked Yoan's incoming attack.
The graviton shield flickered and failed, but Yoan had never relied on it.
Ti slowed.
In that frozen mont, Yoan saw everything: Ky'ei's eyes still moving.
It was aware. Calculating.
Then, it vanished.
"It's here."
Qin Mo stepped through the wall without hesitation, phasing effortlessly, his uncanny perception of Warp entities locking onto the fleeing daemon like a hawk to prey.
Both warriors sprinted down the twisting corridors, following their prey until they erged in the training hall.
Dozens of charred corpses littered the ground, burnt husks that had once been soldiers.
Ky'ei stood waiting, its body smoking, hunched over like a gargoyle at the gates of damnation.
It glanced at its mutilated flesh, then raised a claw.
A wall of Warp-fla erupted, blue and hungry, a desperate gambit to stall for ti.
Instead, the battlefield warped.
Ky'ei's own ground distorted beneath it, dragged forward through its own fire and pulled directly into Qin Mo's waiting strike.
"EAT THIS, WARP-SCUM!"
The Aquila Staff swung like a thunderbolt-turned-warhamr.
Yoan moved in tandem, chainsword screeching as it descended.
Impact.
Ky'ei's skull cracked, the blow sending a shockwave through its form.
The chainsword bit deep into its wing, rending sinew and bone, while the Staff's strike launched it ten ters across the hall, crashing against an adamantium wall.
Before it could react, Qin Mo attacked again.
Ky'ei's mind raced.
The ground had warped again.
It was not simple teleportation, the training hall itself had been shrunk, twenty ters compressed into nothing.
The battlefield itself was being rewritten.
Then, it saw the Aquila Staff.
The impact had left a mark.
Its head was caved in, a deep, festering gash across its form, its substance corroding where the Aquila had touched it.
Not a relic. Not a re symbol.
But ten thousand years of worship made manifest.
Faith, given form.
It had beco a Divine weapon in truth.
Ky'ei had no ti to reflect, Qin Mo's Staff rose again.
Space collapsed.
Ky'ei and the entire wall were dragged forward, twisted like cloth in a storm.
Then, "Crack∼!"
The Staff shattered its beak.
Yoan's grav-hamr crushed its leg, bones pulverized into ectoplasmic sludge.
Qin Mo swung upward, like a golfer teeing off.
The Staff connected, surge of luminous energy detonated upon impact. Ky'ei's body burst into light, fragnts torn from reality.
The force of the impact sent Ky'ei hurtling through the air. It should have stopped against the wall.
But Qin Mo willed the wall away.
It flew one hundred ters before crashing.
Before it could recover, Qin Mo pulled it back.
A re gesture of his hand and it was dragged before him once more.
Then the final strike.
The Staff crushed its throat.
Yoan drove the chainsword into its belly. The weapon scread, a roar of chanical teeth grinding through Warp-flesh.
"Well done."
Ky'ei spoke despite its ruined mouth, words wet with blood and unreality.
"You have bested . But rember, this only happened because I was weakened. The Null. This weak mortal shell. The Materium. The constraints of reality."
Qin Mo smiled.
"Oh? Then tell ... can you ever enter the Materium without being weakened?"
Ky'ei fell silent.
Because it knew the answer.
"Unless the Eye of Terror swells a hundredfold…"
"No. It is impossible."
Qin Mo grinned.
"Then this is farewell, daemon."
His hand closed over Ky'ei's skull.
"In the na of humanity. I BANISH YOU!"
White-hot fla erupted.
Not normal fire. Not Warp-fire.
But the fla of a Star God.
Ky'ei scread as its form lted, body unraveling into flickers of myth and madness.
In its final mont, it uttered one last whisper.
"This… was part of the plan."
Then, it was gone.
Reviews
All reviews (0)