Within the primary transit bay of the Carachles, Lucius stared in absolute disbelief at the deck space where Khârn's broken form had just been severed and claimed by the tides of the Immaterium. A chaotic tempest of calculations flashed through his mind.
Though Khârn's mocking insults had ignited a blinding fury within him, Lucius was a veteran of ten millennia of slaughter; he knew precisely how devastatingly lethal the Chosen of Khorne truly was in close combat.
Yet this Ork Warboss had systematically dismantled him with an ease that bordered on the impossible. This brute was a far more terrifying entity than Lucius had originally estimated.
Meanwhile, Zog Steeltoof stared at the spot where Khârn's remains had vanished into warp-ash. A look of dull, bestial confusion crossed his massive features. He raised the edge of one devastating power klaw, using its micro-serrated teeth to idly scratch his thick green scalp.
Then, his small, red eyes narrowed, shifting a look of low, cunning malice toward Lucius, who was still paralyzed by shock.
Before the Champion of Slaanesh could process the threat, Steeltoof's colossal power klaw clamped down like a pair of industrial blast-locks. The hydraulic pincers pinned Lucius's armor, completely neutralizing his leverage and leaving him utterly immobile.
Even as his ceramite ground against the metal teeth, Lucius felt no fear. He tilted his head back, staring up into the Warboss's massive face, his heavily scarred features contorted into a manic, condescending sneer.
"You mindless, oversized parasite! Do you even possess the cognitive capacity to comprehend what you are touching? You believe holding me caged alters your fate? You are nothing but an animal driven by base instinct, parading around with stolen bulk and primitive scrap-metal!"
Lucius shrieked at the top of his lungs, his voice rising to a piercing, metallic pitch that vibrated through the deck plates.
"You are terrified of a true duel! You know that the moment you release me, your pathetic strength will be sliced into ribbons by my artistry! Your entire existence is a farce!"
Lucius hissed curses through his teeth, thrashing his torso violently in a vain attempt to break the hydraulic grip. Even pinned flat, his gaze remained an open wound of pure defiance.
Yet, Steeltoof merely parted his massive jaws, pulling his lips back into a wide, fanged grin that even another Ork would have found deeply unsettling.
"I know what yer plottin', ya weird humie."
At those words, a rare, chilling knot of unease tightened in Lucius's chest.
Centuries ago, the Imperial Inquisition had managed to capture him. The Imperium possessed an exhaustive record of his metaphysical nature. The Inquisitors had abstained from executing him, choosing instead to entomb him deep within a Watch Fortress of the Deathwatch. They had sealed him inside a stasis-vault lined with psychic dampeners, null-grids, and specialized suppression arrays.
For every standard day of his internment, they had subjected his flesh to chemical scourging, attempting to force a confession of repentance while inundating his mind with a continuous, looping broadcast of Imperial Liturgies and Aquila hymns.
The Adeptus Mechanicus had engineered a terrifying, sensory-deprivation sarcophagus that stripped away his five senses, neutralized his warp signature, and locked his transhuman physiology into a state of living paralysis.
The baseline agonizing denial of his desires, combined with the sterile monotony of the torture, had corroded his sanity.
He would a thousand times rather suffer complete corporate dissolution than endure the horror of perpetual containment.
As if catching the drift of Lucius's dark thoughts, one of the nearby Weirdboyz stepped forward. He struck his heavy, warped copper staff against the deck plates with a resounding clang.
The apex of the staff, a crude, twisted apparatus resembling a jagged metallic sunflower, erupted with an erratic discharge of raw psychic energy heavily laced with Waaagh! field potential.
Under the green, roiling glare of the warp-fire, a massive section of the bulkheads detached, twisting and reshaping themselves with agonized shrieks of tearing metal until they formed a crude, heavy iron cage.
"Boss! I reckon dis skinny humie is propa weird. Dis box'll keep 'im locked up tight, it will."
Even among the greenskins, certain Weirdboyz possessed a hyper-developed, instinctual intellect. They had witnessed Lucius's unnatural resurrection from the flesh of their fallen kin and immediately deduced the metaphysical threat.
In the absence of a comprehensive understanding of how this warp-spawned trick functioned, keeping the specimen breathing but securely contained was the most logical directive.
"I always said my boyz got da biggest brains," Steeltoof growled, highly satisfied with the initiative. Without an ounce of hesitation, he systemically snapped Lucius's transhuman limbs with his bare hands, then shoved him into the crude iron cage like a sack of battlefield refuse.
Seeing their comrade receive praise from the Warboss, the remaining Weirdboyz realized they had been outmaneuvered for favor. Desperate to demonstrate their own worth to Steeltoof, they began frantically channeling their psychic power, violently tearing up the ship's internal structures to forge a chaotic array of bizarrely shaped iron cages.
"Look 'ere, Boss! I reckon my box is way betta for holdin' da weird humie!"
Steeltoof stared at the corridor, which had suddenly been stripped of its structural bulkheads, leaving gaping holes that exposed the plasma conduits beneath. Enraged, he brought his massive power klaw down onto the deck, smashing a crater into the floor and sending a jarring vibration through the vessel's primary adamantium keel.
"Ya absolute squig-brained gits! Ya tryin' to rip my ship apart?! Ya use dat warp-juice again without my say-so, an' I'm packin' da lot of ya into da front of da truks as scrap shields!"
Terrified by the Warboss's fury, the Weirdboyz scattered in all directions, their psychic manifestations snapping out instantly.
Steeltoof grunted, scooping up the heavy iron cage containing Lucius. He gave it a violent, bone-jarring shake before carelessly tossing it into a dark corner of the transit bay.
To a baseline Astartes, four shattered limbs would constitute a catastrophic, combat-ending trauma. To the Eternal Champion of the Dark Prince, however, such physical degradation was merely a temporary inconvenience.
Lucius remained entirely silent, deliberately masking his presence to avoid drawing further attention from the giant warlord. A crude iron cage forged by xenos hands was an obstacle he held in utter contempt.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The moment Steeltoof's heavy, thudding footsteps faded down the corridor, Lucius immediately channeled his dark will to begin eroding his confinement. But within seconds, his psychic senses went entirely numb.
"What is this madness...? Why are the deck plates of this Imperial battleship refusing to yield? Why can my essence not corrupt this base metal?"
What Lucius failed to comprehend was that Steeltoof's careless departure was rooted in absolute certainty. The cage was an immutable reality.
Ordinary Ork Warbosses might view Weirdboyz with superstitious detachment, but Steeltoof had run with Ghazghkull Thraka himself; he had seen the true depth of the galaxy and understood how to direct his sub-ordinates.
The prison forged by the Weirdboy's Waaagh! energy carried a latent psychic power, but it was Steeltoof's own unshakeable, subconscious belief that applied the ultimate seal: he believed the cage was completely unbreakable for a non-greenskin.
Unless Lucius could muster a localized warp presence capable of overwhelming the collective willpower of the Warboss and his horde, he was perceived by the Waaagh! field as nothing more than a strange, distinctly un-Waaagh! piece of baggage. He was utterly incapable of escaping on his own.
Meanwhile, throughout the remaining sectors of the vessel, the Red Corsairs received confirmation that Khârn had been banished back to the Warp and that Lucius had been effortlessly bagged by the xenos. Without a moment's hesitation, they severed their boarding lines and abandoned the Carachles to its fate.
If the Chosen of Khorne could not break the greenskin vanguard, any further engagement was a pointless expenditure of meat. Huron Blackheart would not squander his fleet assets on a dead theater.
However, the Chaos Space Marines ensured they did not leave the Imperial battleship as a functional prize for the xenos.
Before extracting, the Corsairs methodically slaughtered every pocket of Imperial Navy personnel and serfs they encountered across the lower decks, ensuring the Orks could not press the human crew into slave labor to pilot the capital ship.
The scorched-earth tactic was brutally effective.
Finding no surviving baseline humans to operate the macro-conduits and helm arrays, the Orks were forced to take the controls themselves.
Yet, while the members of Steeltoof's vanguard were colossal in stature and devastating in close-quarters butchery, they completely lacked the mechanical affinity of Mekboyz.
A collective of massive Orks, whose individual fingers were thick enough to crush a dozen fragile control toggles at once, crowded around the compact, delicate logic-consoles, staring at the High Gothic pict-scripts with expressions of deep, irritated misery.
"Why's dis stupid metal box gotta be so soddin' complicated?!"
One massive Ork slammed his fist down onto a primary cogitator console, causing the array to erupt into a blinding shower of sparks and an obnoxiously loud klaxon warning.
Steeltoof strode into the command bridge, taking in the chaotic, ineffective scene with rising impatience. When he initiated the boarding action, he had left his primary Big Mek aboard the fleet's kroozer, prioritizing large, aggressive, Waaagh!-capable boyz for the drop.
But these frontline killers possessed no mechanical intuition whatsoever.
"Move yer fat gits, da lot of ya! If ya don't get dis metal beast movin' fast, I'm pullin' every teef out of yer heads an' tossin' yer carcasses to da giant squigs!"
As the Warboss bellowed his threats and the boyz frantically smashed at the controls, neither Steeltoof nor his bridge crew possessed the technical training to read the primary auspex scanner on the central dais.
Across the glowing green terminal, a massive array of encrypted friendly signatures had just blinked into view, rapidly closing on their position.
It was the mechanical fleet under the personal command of Axion.
——————
If you want to read ahead of everyone, go to my pat-reon: pat-re-on.c-om/magnor (remove the hyphen to access normally)