[M] Shades of Grey - IC

[Azazeal849]

Rated M for violence and distressing themes.
Potential strong language and drug references

Banner credit: Karma

LINK TO OOC

The night-time hive was a billion points of light, arranged in rows and rings and spires. It almost mesmerised Kim as she plummeted towards it, the wind roaring in her ears and snatching at her clothes and pleated hair. Somehow, without daylight to reveal the ugly truth, even the corrupt, suffering city of Vaxanhive conspired to be beautiful.

The daemon wears an angel's face. The warning came back to her in her father's voice; the calm, confident tone that had originally convinced her of the rightness of the Imperial Creed and inspired her to join the missionarius galaxia. Back when life was simple, and right and wrong were more clearly defined.

The hive city twinkled, but above and around her everything was inky black. The agents of fire-team Aegia had disappeared into the night, and she was only vaguely aware of the rest of Kronis team tumbling through the darkness alongside her. The positioning tracker on Kim's wrist shrilled as it detected her reaching deployment height, and she dropped one arm from beside her head to yank on the activation toggle flapping around her chest webbing. A dull hum vibrated through her as the anti-grav plate strapped to her back thrummed into life. Grav chutes were faster, safer and more reliable than traditional parachutes - or so the electro-priest Burakgazi had assured her, in his usual condescending manner. Kim couldn't be sure if it was her alignment with a parallel, "lesser" faith that prompted the electro-priest's patronising response, or the fact that she was a woman. Burakgazi originally hailed from Vostroya, and that planet's near-religious veneration of their firstborn sons did not give many of its scions a favourable opinion of the female gender - unless they were at home breeding up said firstborn, or else staying far away from the men's world of front-line combat.

Whatever his personal views, Burakgazi's faith in the grav-chute packs seemed to be justified. Kim felt herself gradually slowing down, and then being pulled upright as the pack's gyroscope orientated itself. The Emperor protects, she thought gratefully, although Burakgazi would no doubt have ascribed it to the accuracy and timing of a machine that none of the rest of them understood.

Hanging from her harness, she wrapped one hand round the grip of her lasgun and turned her other wrist to look at her position tracker. The crosshairs on the screen were drifting away from the central dot, and she tapped a button on the control pad attached to her grav-chute harness. A small thruster behind her left shoulder flared, and the jet of compressed air pushed her right, away from one of the towering hive spires and towards the murky darkness of the city's eastern docklands.

"Chute deployed." she reported into the microphone stalk curving round her jaw, and checked her position tracker again. "Sixty seconds."

As fire-team Kronis activated their packs and began to drift silently downwards, fire-team Aegia were already approaching their objective. Following the wide arc of the river that cut through the centre of Vaxanhive, they descended towards an abandoned industrial estate. It was a wide concrete plaza, littered with stripped-out workshops and stacks of industrial scrap, and nestled between a run-down hab block and one of the shanty camps that grew up like weeds around the riverside water-treatment plants.

Abner Able thought he could feel his teeth itching as he picked up on a latent psychic presence below them, and he knew that they were running out of time. As the fire-team dropped, thrusters flaring to compensate for the buffeting wind, a blue light flashed near the shell of a gatehouse. It was swiftly followed by another, and then a third which cut across the blue lights with a thread of green. Abner realised that he was looking at the strobe of lasfire. He saw people moving in the gloom, sprinting between piles of old scaffolding and lifter rigs that had rusted to death years before. The darting figures were punching shots into a boarded-up warehouse, while men in dark clothes were returning fire through gaps in the flak-board. The defenders seemed organised, and well-equipped by the standards of a slum-level gang - Abner saw them snapping hand signals and barking into vox-radios strapped to their shoulders as they deployed to meet the assault. The psychic pulse he had sensed was stronger now, and it was coming from inside the warehouse.

Sarna was the first to touch the ground, landing lightly as a cat, and the attacker in front of her was the first to die. Crouched behind a pile of corrugated iron, his eyes fixed along the barrel of his battered lasgun, he didn't even see the Moritat as she dropped down behind him and ended his life with a single cut of her shimmering power sabre. Swiftly kicking the corpse over, Sarna saw a cross tattooed in white and blue on the palm of the man's limp hand. It was a cross she had seen before; scribbled on a scrap of parchment by astropath D'Lane, in the middle of one of his fevered visions. The poor astropath was pushing 70 and ailing fast, Sarna knew - small wonder then that Lucullis had recruited the precog Mai to replace him - but his vision on this matter had been clear enough. The tattoo was a heretical sign. It was the mark of the Slaaneshi cult that called itself the Refuge.

Hadrak and Burakgazi touched down together, behind the shelter offered by the rusting skeleton of an amenities block. As he crouched to lean round the corner of the wall, Hadrak saw X's and crude skulls spray-painted onto the rear wall of the warehouse. He felt a twinge in his stomach, feeling physically sick. Something within the building was lending unholy power to the otherwise mundane sigils.

As he watched, Hadrak saw a trio of the attackers break cover and rush the rear side of the building. One of them was fumbling with what looked like a pipe bomb. The warehouse door in front of the three burst open and a figure darted out, a figure clad in a black jumpsuit whose loose sleeves were secured by tightly-wound strips of dark leather. A long, single-edged blade in the figure's hand flashed in a horizontal arc, and the man carrying the pipe bomb reeled aside as his severed head went spinning away across the concrete. One of the bomber's companions, a gangly young man, dropped his lasgun with a yelp of terror and dived for cover amongst a stack of rusting pipes. The third tried to shoot back at the charging swordsman, but shot wide in his panic, the blue threads of his lasbolts punching a row of holes in the warehouse concrete. The swordsman made another cut and the man staggered back, dropping his lasgun to clutch at his throat as blood jetted between his fingers. There were more shouts of alarm from the attackers, and a flurry of las-fire. The shots punched the ground and sent geysers of burnt concrete erupting into the air, but they all missed the swordsman as he came weaving and leaping through the industrial detritus towards the shooters. Green lasers still blitzed from the front side of the warehouse, but as the attackers focused on the rampaging swordsman, Hadrak saw that the door to the warehouse was now unguarded.

+ + + + + +

Fire-team Kronis dropped, descending in close formation. Loading cranes reared up towards Kim like pointing fingers, and steel boat sheds were painted orange by the phosphor glow of lamp posts. Kim's vox-radio was full of whispering static as she dropped into the warren of narrow streets that surrounded the dock. The daemon was close, picking at the airwaves as it tried to tear through the fabric of their reality, and they were running out of time. For a moment, she thought she heard someone whisper her name through the static.

She tore the microphone hook away from her ear and flung it as far as she could. The communicator tumbled away and landed somewhere in the street below, taking the unholy whispering with it. Still ten metres above the ground, Kim suddenly spotted a pair of young men standing sentinel at the roadside. The yellow street-lights washed the colour from their clothes, and splashed their shadows against the flank of a cargo hauler that was parked behind them. The shadows showed the jagged outlines of the las-rifles in their hands.

One of the men suddenly looked up, straight at the descending agents. He shouted, pointing upwards to his companion as he raised his lasgun. A thread of light sizzled into the air, narrowly missing Kim's team-mate Anais.

"Shit, they're onto us!" Kim shouted, not even sure if her fellow agents could still hear her without her vox-radio. "Drop, drop, drop!"

She braced her Volpone lasgun awkwardly against her chest and fired a volley of red las-beams down at the two men. She missed them both but the shots had the desired effect, sending the men ducking aside as flashes of melted steel bloomed off the side of the cargo hauler. Kim mashed the control panel of her grav-chute, rapidly dialing down the anti-grav plate. She went into freefall and landed hard a second later, the impact forcing her to drop and roll to avoid breaking an ankle.

The two reeling guards began to recover as Anais dropped to the ground next to Kim. They snarled as they re-aimed their guns at the tall warrior woman.

Mai landed on one hand, feeling the potential of imminent futures shiver up through the tarmac into her fingertips. The daemon tearing at the thin veil of reality was scattering and stretching the images she saw, filling the usually chipper psyker with a sense of foreboding. Alexi Holt hit the ground beside her a half-second later. Casting his gaze past the smoking cargo hauler, he saw a purple light flickering in the distance. Of greater concern, however, were the five gun-toting underhivers running down the road towards him, responding to the shouts of their two comrades.

[dakkagor]

This was not her first drop by grav chute. She had infiltrated a desert city alongside Priestess Orla some three standard years ago, her first operation away from the temple. It had been a difficult mission. Not only was Orla one of her first teachers, and held her to an exacting standard, but it was her first time off world, and her first time working for a master other than the temple. And while she had learnt much, on that mission and since then, she was still not looking forward to jumping again.

"Aegia team, deploy."

She wordlessly got up, and flashed a smile at Kimmie and Mai. There was nothing to fear. Either she would land, and do her duty, or she would die, and the manner of her death mattered little. Only how many souls she sent ahead to the Emperors table, how much blood she could fill his chalice with, how much torn flesh she could pile on his table. The Corpse God, for whom blood is drunk and flesh is eaten.

She picked up her pace and hit the exit at a dead run, flinging herself into the void. Down in that city of sin and debauchery was enough flesh and blood to earn her a high seat at the table. A near limitless supply of heretics, recidivists, traitors, murderers, rapists, thieves, cowards and killers.

Emperor willing, her blade would bring justice to them all. And it was that thought that kept her smiling all the way to the ground.

+++++

Sloppy.

Sarna recovered from the blow, flicked her blade clean. The words of her first instructor rang through her head.

Flow from blow to blow. Kill to kill. Motion to Motion. Nothing is wasted. Every movement must be considered part of the next. Every step, and every strike, part of the wider dance.

"Yeah yeah. Easy for you to say, Reaper. You didn't just fall out of a perfectly good dropship." she muttered as she stepped over the spreading pool of gore.

She ducked low and crouched next to the fresh corpse, as bullets began to ping and rattle from her cover. Looking up and down the line of scrap, she saw that at most of the men around her had not even noticed their comrades death. She cast her gaze out towards the courtyard and saw that they were focusing their fire on the man with the sword. He moved with an admirable speed and vital strength, but his fighting style was predicated on one objective. As another head sailed clear of its owner, Sarna smiled.

"I've got the pretty boy with the butter knife gentlemen. Book for the door once we're dancing and I'll follow you when I'm done having my wicked way with him."

She darted from her position, moving left. Lasbolts and solid slugs whined and snapped over her head as she ran at a low crouch.

The next cultist turned and started to bring his lasgun around to fire. Sarna planted a foot on the wreckage barricade, and pushed herself upwards as she brought her sword over her head. She descended like a wrathful angel, powered blade shearing rifle raised in defence, crown, temple, face, jaw, collarbone and ribs in one glorious blow that exited just above his hip. As she completed the fall her left hand held the blade as she landed on her right, and vaulted over the corpse and a spray of bullets. Laughing, she landed on her feet in front of another cultist, and this time her blade travelled through his waist, severing his spine and the trunk of his body in a fountain of hot gore. She weaved around the toppling chunks of man as more bullets sought her out, now that the attackers were aware something was in their midst, killing them. As she ran her throwing knifes sang, sinking into a pair of throats that cut battle cries short, to replace them with gurgled screams. Her final victim threw down his rifle, and turned to run. She cut out his knees, and then spun her blade in a figure of eight, scissoring him apart.

Better.

She laughed again, and vaulted the barricade. The swordsman, his own blade wet with blood, stood before her.

"Hello pretty boy." She purred, flicking her sword clean as she approached. "Care to dance?"

[Felwether]

Abner had been looking forward to the drop. He had dipped into the mind of a Harakoni Warhawk deserter a number of years ago and he had to admit that the experience was quite exhilarating. The former drop trooper had the most vivid memories of participating in massed combat drops, diving through bursts of flak and white hot tracer fire, along with hundreds of her comrades, plummeting down from the heavens like it was the most natural and enjoyable thing in the world. Abner’s opinion of the experience could not have been more different.

Even after his pack had deployed the howling wind was deafening. It screamed in his ears and tossed him violently from side to side, causing his stomach to lurch. He felt helpless as he floated towards glittering lights of Vaxanhive, his legs dangled uselessly beneath him and he was resigned to the fact that he could be plucked from of the sky by an errant lasbolt at any moment. The mild discomfort he had first felt when the doors of the jet opened began to intensify as he continued his descent, and the distance between him and the summoning site decreased.

Through the light-enhancing lenses of his photovisor, he could just make out the Moritat, Sarna, going about her bloody work, carving through cultists with her deadly power sabre. Suddenly he had hit the ground, narrowly avoiding a jagged pile scrap. He staggered forward into cover behind a dilapidated lifting rig, shrugging off his pack as he did so like it was some kind of parasitic alien. Panting hard, with his back to the rig, he drew his revolver from the black leather holster that hung just beneath his left armpit as stray lasbolts whined past him.

“I can tell you one thing.” He called, to no one in particular. “I”m never bloody doing that again!”

Abner was about as far from his comfort zone as possible, preferring as he did, for his foes to be asleep or otherwise distracted. He had been in more than a few scraps in his time but this was a full-scale battle. He wasn’t here to fight though, at least not primarily, that was for the others. Abner had been included in the hopes that he could extract information from surviving cultists at the close of the operation - an eventuality that he dreaded.

Maybe we’ll kill them all. He thought, as he thumbed back the hammer of his pistol. He peered cautiously out of cover and resolved to make his way over to Hadrak and Burakgazi who had touched down just ahead of him, sheltered behind the ruins of some long abandoned building. As he prepared to make his move a young man, fumbling with a jammed autogun, his skin adorned with blasphemous symbols, emerged from behind a heap of detritus. A straggler, he reckoned, cut off from the attack. Abner panicked and fired three times. The revolver bucked in his hands and the cultist went down, his torso torn to pieces by poorly placed amputator rounds.

Abner bolted, not checking to see if the man was dead, and half running, half falling, made his way towards his team mates. The warehouse loomed up in front of him and the pain in his head threatened to become intolerable. He didn't have to be a diviner to know that something very bad was on its way, and soon. Abner skidded into cover next to Burakgazi and straightened his photovisor, the mirrored, circular lenses staring somewhat expectantly at the electro priest.

[Azazeal849]

Fire-team Aegia - Sarna, Abner, Hadrak, Konstantin

"Hello pretty boy." she purred, flicking her sword clean as she approached. "Care to dance?"

The black-clad figure turned on his heel, away from the headless body spasming at his feet. His face was striking; broad-browed and diamond-jawed, with fair, cleanshaven skin and black hair that fell in soft waves to his shoulders. His blue eyes were hooded, giving them a look of permanently narrowed amusement. He looked the young Moritat facing him up and down, and then his gaze shifted to the soft power-field shimmer haloing her blade.

"Hm." he grunted, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards.

Sarna heard rather than saw the snap-hiss of a matching power-field thrumming into life around the man's own blade. It twirled a blinding green circle around his head before swiping in from Sarna's left. She smiled; as she had expected, straight for the neck. She swung her own blade into a vertical parry, and there was a sparking flash as the two disruptor fields repelled each other. She pushed up and over, using the green blade's own momentum to send it sweeping harmlessly over her head, disengaged, and made her own downward cut. The swordsman twisted almost balletically to weave under it, and then drove forward, forcing Sarna to skip back a step to maintain her distance.

The green bar of the swordsman's weapon flicked out again as she retreated between the rusted corpses of two industrial skips. It engaged her own blade once, twice and again - crish, crish, crish - in a rapid trio of strikes and counters. Sarna's blade fanned a bright circle, designed to collect her opponent's sabre-point and sweep it aside, but the black-clad swordsman leapt backwards three paces, and her sword instead tore a glowing gash in the side of the skip.

"You're not from the Refuge." the swordsman said, smiling at Sarna as they both returned to guard. Neither of them were out of breath. "Go home, little sister."

He ran forward, pushed up off his left foot, and planted his right above the molten line Sarna had left on the skip, hacking down at her from above.

+ + + + + +

Abner bolted, not checking to see if the man was dead, and half running, half falling, made his way towards his team mates. The warehouse loomed up in front of him and the pain in his head threatened to become intolerable. He could hear a voice vibrating somewhere beyond hearing, thrumming through his bones like an electric shock.

Red King. it said, chanting in time to Abner's heartbeat, to the snap of criss-crossing lasbolts, to the invisible pulsing of the sigils daubed on the warehouse walls. Master of Mankind.

Rubber tyres and stacks of rotted construction wood had caught fire under the searing kiss of las-beams, and were vomiting thick smoke into the air. A Slaaneshi attacker flailed backwards, his chin snapping up as a lasbeam carved into his skull and blew the back of it off into the air. There were five or six of the attackers left; huddled behind cover, stunned by the ferocity of the Khornate counterattack and the sudden arrival of strike team Aegia. All of the ones on the other side of the warehouse had fallen silent after Sarna and the black-clad swordsman had disappeared into the smoke.

Crouched behind a stack of ceramic tiles that were cracking and sloughing away under the barrage from the warehouse, one of the Slaaneshis belatedly spied Abner and the others at the corner of the building. He slapped urgently at the shoulder of his nearest companion, before shuffling awkwardly round on his knees. Abner ducked back just in time, as a stuttering stream of blue las-fire seared past the corner of the building.

[ElizabethStark]

Time seemed to go by in small doses. This wasn't his first time falling into combat, and it certainly wouldn't be the last should he survive the onslaught. Hadrak thought of the Emperor in these last non-combative moments. He was doing this for him, and almost him alone. From his teenage years to this sound day, his determination sent him to please the Father, in order to find peace and forgiveness. To do some good. To rid himself of evil and sickness, from when he was a child. This was but another day for him to prove himself, prove his worth.

The moment of descending was upon them, and Hadrak felt his body move as he dived, plummeting to the hive's surface. The wild wind caused his reddish hair to whip in a myriad of different places behind him. When the time was right, he peeled his chute for deployment. He could see his team below him as they landed in separate locations, aside from Burakgazi, who found a spot directly near him. Violence was already ensuing around them, and moreover, there was an unholy feeling wafting in the air. Hadrak clenched his fist, but nevertheless pulled out his hellpistol.

Abruptly, a shadow of unknown origin cut its way through from the warehouse, leaving the building unguarded. This granted him an opportunity. However, that thought was struck short by powerful lasfire manifesting its way through to his and Burakgazi's location, and Hadrak had not taken into account of Abner's presence.

He took further covering from said lasfire. As soon as the fire had come to a holt, Hadrak readied his own firearm. The distance may have been too great, but steadying his pistol at just the right angle, he fired...

[Azazeal849]

Fire-team Aegia - Sarna Abner, Hadrak, Konstantin

As soon as the fire had come to a halt, Hadrak readied his own firearm. The distance may have been too great, but steadying his pistol at just the right angle, he fired.

The red thread of his hellpistol beam struck the stack of construction tiles, sending more white-hot shards of ceramic blooming into the air, and then hit the Slaaneshi as he was clawing for a fresh power pack for his lasgun. The man reeled back, clutching his arm. His nearest companion dragged him up, roughly, and suddenly all five attackers were retreating, scrambling away at a ducking run. A blitz of lasfire from the warehouse pursued them, and one man went skidding forward on his knees as a puff of vaporised blood exploded from his back.

The way was clear - until the defenders also noticed the team at least.

[Imperial1917]

The wind whipped past her as they descended from the dropship. Cold shards of ice struck her through the thin material of her clothes where they clung close to her skin, melting instantly against the warmth of her skin. Blood pounded in her ears as it coursed through her body, its thrum blocking out even the sound of the howling wind and the grav-chute when she activated it. She felt the wind diminish like the last echoes of the howl given voice by a wolf, the last of its pack. Deep within, she howled with it.

Below, the world passed in a whirl of strobing lights that stabbed out into the eternal darkness. She blinked away tears prompted by the piercing wind and saw Kimmie, dear Kimmie, fold her arm over an ear and rip it away, her slender figure silhouetted by the lights. An easy smile crept onto her face and she thought she could hear a voice not unlike the team leader whispering her name in a delicious murmur in her ear. For a moment the world seemed to float, suspended in time as she was suspended in the air, with neither heaven above nor earth below.

With an effort, she turned her face back to earth. Brilliant flashes of light flew from the ground and the moment shifted like the gear of a Leman Russ. The world seemed to crease around the beams flung skyward and she could abruptly feel the air folding as the ozone was seared. Her skin prickled and the hair on her arms rose as she felt the air vaporize, creating micro-voids that were insignificant individually, but together drew on the things around them as they collapsed and air rushed in to fill the void. She knew how they felt.

Then Kimmie was calling. She saw the team leader fold herself and return fire, the last vestiges of serenity shattered by the silent roar of raw red light that stabbed the retina, burning the image into the memory. Reaching around, she snapped at the grav-chute controls and went into freefall behind her leader as the enemy sought cover. The abrupt whip of the air as the field collapsed filled her being in the same moment it ended.

Mai landed on one hand, feeling the potential of imminent futures shiver up through the tarmac into her fingertips. The daemon tearing at the thin veil of reality was scattering and stretching the images she saw, filling the usually chipper psyker with a sense of foreboding. She stood, for a moment oblivious to the deadly fire blazing all around her. Her fire-red and neon-yellow headband fell around her eyes as she turned her head skyward and let out an unearthly howl that the turmoil around her did not mute, the images coursing through her body like an electric surge.

Reaching up a hand that shook like an obscura addict going through withdrawal, she grasped the cloth, her fingers digging into the skin below it. She flung the headband away, skin scraping away and hair being pulled from her scalp. Her gaze fell on the two closest cultists. She felt everything about them. Abruptly the first step to victory was apparent through the whirl of possibilities. Seizing the hilt of her force sword, she felt the pieces fall into place as the future unfurled before her like a banner in the wind. Drawing it, she howled as the power surged through her being, piercing air and warp as she leapt over their pitiful cover, bringing the blade down onto the closer of the two.

[Cfavano]

Anais hated falling. Too late she feared, it was to tell of her fear of heights.not that anyone would have cared, and it only would have made her look weak. The wind whipped against her, cold and bracing. The glimmering lights of the city were her only guide. Never before had she seen a place so big, not even in the Capitol. But now was not the time tor musing. Now was the time for action. When she approached the agreed zone, she activated her chute, slowing her descent.

It should have been fine, but luck was against her as they were spotted. Angling herself, instead of seeking cover, she changed her descent vector to head towards the two cultists. Las-fire crackled around her, many shots going wild or dissipating against her shield. When she was a few meters from the ground, she blew the emergency releace and the bolt straps disengaged, causing her to plummet toward's the one cultist, feet first. He stumbled out of the ways as she grafecully landed on her feet and drew her long knives. Though, they were knives in name only, being almost as large as the Fangs wielded by the Catachan Jungle Fighters.

As soon as she hit the ground, she was on him. He couldn't bring his lasgun to bear, and instead tried to use it as an awkward club. The cultist fought bravely, but eventually, Anais got in one his, to the calf, then another to the arm, the gut, the knee. Blood flowed freely, and as he finally dropped his guard, Anais came in with a wicked upward slash, coming up behind the jaw and cutting the front half of his skull off. As he fell to his knees, the rest of his brain fell out, followed by him. The one dead, she turned to the engaged one, and began pressuring his defense.

[dakkagor]

"You're not from the Refuge." the swordsman said, smiling at Sarna as they both returned to guard. Neither of them were out of breath. "Go home, little sister."

He ran forward, pushed up off his left foot, and planted his right above the molten line Sarna had left on the skip, hacking down at her from above.

Sarna pulled her sword up into a high block, and skidded backwards on the concrete controlling the blow. She broke the lock, stepping back before counter attacking with a series of high blows that rang from his sword.

"Little sister? I'm not your 'sister', cultist!"

The swordsman swept his blade in a flat, head taking arc, interrupting her sequence, and Sarna flipped away under the hissing edge, throwing a pair of knives as she went. He easily weaved through the deadly projectiles and attacked with a series of powerful, downwards hacks. Sarna met each one with a parry, but was losing ground until she felt her back slam into a rusted out cargo eight container.

The swordsman stepped back with a sardonic smile, and drew his blade up for a killing stroke, before charging with full force. Sarna stepped into the attack, relishing the surprise on his face as she finally caught his blade and guided its point into the metal of the shipping container with a molten hiss. With his momentum behind the blow, it sunk up to the hilt into the metal.

"Maybe. . ."

Sarna slammed her elbow into the back of his head, causing his face to smash into the container. He released his hold on the blade and staggered backwards, blood streaming from his nose as Sarna stood back, laughing.

"Not so pretty now, Heretic."

He was about to respond when a look of pain crossed his face, and he slumped to the ground, blood seeping from his side. Behind him, with an idiot smile, was one of the attacking cultists with a short combat knife covered in blood, and a spatter of crimson on her black coveralls.

"Good job distracting him Sister! Now we can. . ."

"YOU FRAKKING COCKTEASE!" Sarna yelled, resisting the urge to throw her sword to the ground in fury. "It was just getting to the good part and you STABBED HIM IN THE BACK LIKE A LITTLE BITCH!" The cultist recoiled, and realising her error, started to scramble for her autogun. Regrettably, Sarna was quicker and crossed the short distance between them in two ground eating strides, swinging her blade up and taking of the offenders right arm at the shoulder, before reversing the blow and severing the left. With a snarl she spun the blade in a flat wide arc, and the energised edge severed her head.

"Frakking killstealing cultist whore. . ." she muttered at the body as it slumped to the ground. Behind her, the swordsman stirred. Sarna stomped over and delivered a savage kick to his head, knocking him back to the ground.
"Might as well take you alive, frakking no good cultist shitbag. . . "
She quickly slapped a cuff on one of his arms, and dragged him to the corner of the container, running the cuffs through a loop before cuffing his other arm.
"You better not bleed to death while I'm gone." she muttered in a warning tone, before sliding into the shadows. She could hear that the fire-fight out here had changed character. Hadrak, Abner and Konstantin probably needed help.

[Azazeal849]

Fire-team Kronis - Kimmie, Anais, Alexi, Mai

The one dead, Anais turned to the other, and began pressuring his defence. As the cultist flailed backwards, trying desperately to scramble away from her flashing knives, Mai leapt over their pitiful cover, bringing her blade down. Mai's vision of the cultist looking up - open-mouthed, frozen in horror - converged with reality as her force spear drove him to the ground and pinned him there. The body convulsed once from the psychic shock washing through its limbs, and then went still.

Behind them, Kim regained her feet and shrugged off the dead weight of her grav-chute. Her strong, well-proportioned face, normally the sandy colour of summer wheat, was rendered colourless by the street lights, and her intense brown eyes had turned black. Bringing her lasgun up to her shoulder, she pivoted on one foot in response to Alexi's barked warning. A knot of five men were pounding up the road towards them, thumbing the safety catches of their autoguns. Kim's own hand went to the forward trigger of her lasgun's underslung launcher, and there was a sharp choom as an incendiary grenade corkscrewed away down the street. It hit the ground between two of the cultists with a flash and a firework scatter of white sparks.

All five men screamed out and reeled aside, dropping their weapons and clawing at their faces. Fire from the team dropped three, while the other two stumbled to the ground of their own accord a few moments later. They were still screaming as Kim and the others reformed and began to hurry up the narrow street between the warehouses. Kim felt a lump constrict in her throat as she glanced down at a red and black ruin that had been a face, its eyes reduced to a pale slime trailing across its charred jaw. No time. And no doubt - not in front of the agents who looked to her for their spiritual guidance.

"His will be done." she told herself, the words half a snarl as she left the mewling casualties to whatever mercy her teammates would provide, and covered her mouth with her sleeve against the fizzing phosphor residue. Pushing through the hot, white smoke, she was confronted by a glare of purple light as she stumbled out into the dockside loading area.

A set of skeletal wooden piers jutted out into the black water of the river, and empty pallets were stacked ready for the small-time traders who ferried their wares across from the north bank every sunrise. Heavy iron loops, sunk into the concrete, anchored chains which held the pallets in place, but two of the chains had been broken free and instead coiled around the arms of a lone man, from which the purple glow came. He was an old man but still strong - white-haired but with old muscle still showing beneath his thin, pale skin. Stripped to the waist, he was bleeding from a symbol that had been carved into the right side of his chest. The open wound was flickering purple, as if the man was burning from within with unholy fire.

Taking aim down the iron sights of her lasgun, Kim almost dropped the weapon as a sharp pain lanced through her head. The symbol remained burned into her scrunched-shut eyelids as she fought against a sudden, overwhelming urge to throw up. Ahead of her the chained man began to rise into the air, his feet hovering half a metre above the ground as actinic lightning began to spark around the chains that strained against his bound wrists. The man's head was thrown back, his mouth gaping open as if to let loose a mighty shout.

"Don't look straight at him!" Kim warned, trying to blink away her nausea as her team-mates came pounding up behind her. Alexi, gaunt and stoic, his hawkish features laced with tattooes; Anais, her blonde hair wild and an exultant look in her eyes, with blood spattering the leather bindings around her wrists; Mai, touched by the warp but still the emperor's child, her crackling force spear held at rest behind her back.

Kim motioned to Anais, who had a dragon-mouthed plasma pistol strapped to her leg. "Torch the heretic!"

No sooner had the words left her mouth, then a sickle-shaped knife came singing out of the darkness towards her. Kim's eyes widened in shock as she reflexively lurched her head backwards. The knife missed her throat by a hair's breadth, but the hooked blade snagged on her neck-chain, and she felt a brief, choking pull before the chain snapped and her Ministorum icon went pinwheeling away across the concrete. Her attacker was a young, chiselled man with acorn-brown skin and a manic look in his dark eyes. He wore a leather jacket that had been ripped open across the right side of his chest to reveal a smooth, muscular pectoral. A prescribed act for many Slaaneshi rituals, Kim knew. She staggered back, lashing the butt of her lasgun in frantic defence as the knife-fighter came at her again with blinding speed.

More of the Slaaneshi cultists appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; one leapt down from atop a gantry crane, and another came handspringing out between two uncoupled cargo trailers. A third came darting towards Alexi, seeming to simply dance around the scything burst of the agent's autogun. He grappled the still-smoking barrel with one hand and punched out at Alexi with the other, close enough for him to smell the odd sweetness of his breath and see the glimmer of something unnatural behind his eyes.

One of the cultists barrelled into Anais, the tatters of his ripped shirt dragging behind him like kill-pennants. He only carried one knife to the gladiatrix's two, but he was superhumanly fast, sparking a white flare from her refractor shield almost before she could counter. The amulet projector burned hot against her chest as it struggled not to overheat and cut out under the sustained attack.

Mai saw her opponent plain, an invisible halo of latent warp power dancing around his head as he came flailing towards her. She saw the incoming blow of his hooked knife a moment before it fell and it was still only just enough, the Slaaneshi coming at her with almost impossible speed.