The sky burned.

  Not with fire alone, but with the aftermath of impossible violence—embers of warp-flesh drifting like obscene snow, shockwaves still rippling through dust and ruin. At the heart of it all, suspended above the killing field as if the laws of reality had briefly abdicated their duty, hung the Castaway.

  The battle suit revealed itself fully now.

  It was not a thing of brutish slabs and riveted plates like the armor of the Imperium. Its form was smooth, continuous, intentional—a silhouette shaped by purpose rather than dogma. The material shimmered with an iridescence that defied easy color, a liquid-metal sheen that flowed like oil over water, yet held rigid against the howling pressure of the Immaterium. Silver bled into teal, teal into deep auric green, the surface subtly shifting as if responding to unseen fields.

  There was no jump pack. No roaring exhausts.

  Instead, low-frequency thrums pulsed through the air—felt rather than heard. Silent propulsion nodes along his back and hips emitted rippling waves that bent dust and debris away from him, holding the suit perfectly still. He did not hover so much as deny gravity permission.

  Both arms extended outward.

  They changed.

  The forearms unfolded with seamless grace, armor plates sliding over one another like living anatomy. Fingers retracted, palms dissolving into smooth apertures as the limbs elongated, reshaping into cylindrical weapon-forms—barrels without seams, throats of restrained annihilation.

  Data flowed.

  —FULL CAPACITY REACHED

  —NEURAL HANDSHAKE: 100% STABILITY

  —COGNITIVE LAG: NON-EXISTENT

  —ALL WEAPON SYSTEMS: ARMED AND RESPONSIVE

  —INNER MESH: LAST BREATH — PRIMED

  The words did not appear as text. They arrived—understood instantly, perfectly, as if the machine and the man no longer needed language between them.

  The Castaway exhaled.

  Not in relief.

  In readiness.

  Below him, the neverborn recoiled—not from fear, but from wrongness. His presence crushed the warp like a dead zone of silence, a Pariah wound carved into the battlefield. Lesser daemons stumbled mid-charge, forms stuttering, wings spasming as reality asserted itself around him with brutal insistence.

  Then the sky tore again.

  A swarm of malformed horrors descended—things that pretended to be avian. Twisting silhouettes of Tzeentchian mockery, wings made of stained parchment and burning sigils, bodies fractal and asymmetrical, eyes multiplying and vanishing with every flap. They screamed in colors, voices overlapping in dissonant choirs, spells already coiling at their talons.

  They rushed him.

  At their center came something larger.

  A Greater Neverborn unfolded itself from the warp like a blasphemous herald. Two long, pelican-like heads craned forward from a single serpentine body, beaks splitting into grinning maws lined with glyph-etched bone. Its wings were vast, pinioned with chains of screaming light, and with each beat reality bent, colors bleeding and snapping back.

  It slowed.

  Not because it wished to.

  Because something in it recognized him.

  The daemon’s voices merged into one, wet and echoing, words bubbling out as if spoken through drowning lungs.

  “ANOMALY…” it crooned, heads tilting in opposite directions.

  “You are not sung of. Not counted. Not woven.”

  Warp-light flared around it as it tasted the battlefield, the dead, the breach.

  “You stand where gods contend… and yet you kneel to none.”

  The Castaway did not answer at once.

  His arms finished calibrating, the weapon-forms locking with a soundless certainty. Fields stabilized. Targeting lattices bloomed and collapsed in fractions of a second, discarding the unnecessary, the inefficient.

  The twin-headed creature continued in tandem.

  “What are you now?” one head crooned, beak tilting, eyes fracturing into spirals of impossible color.

  “A creator?”

  “The Destroyer!” the other screamed skyward, its voice splitting into a dozen overlapping registers that made the air bend. The sound rolled outward in a pressure wave, shaking dust from ruined walls and setting teeth on edge miles away.

  The two heads convulsed, flesh crawling, necks knotting as they forced themselves back into unity. When they spoke again, it was as one—deep, resonant, wrong—an echo that made the fabric of reality itself tremble.

  “You are a shattered pawn in the Great Game. Abandoned by time. Abandoned by your people. Rest your head beneath our axe and be gone, so the plan may continue.”

  It advanced.

  With every meter it closed, the impossible became difficult. The colors bleeding from its form dulled, iridescence sloughing away like dying paint. Warp-fire guttered. Feathers of sigil-light cracked and fell apart into ash that never reached the ground. Its wings strained, beating harder, slower, as if pushing through deep water.

  Pain found it.

  The space around the Castaway was dead to the Immaterium—a widening pariah wound that flayed unreality from anything foolish enough to enter it. The daemon’s flesh split along stress lines that should not exist. Its beaks bared in rage and agony as its essence unraveled, screaming not just in sound but in concept.

  Still, it came on.

  The Castaway did not move.

  “I am a man,” he said, voice steady, carrying with a finality that did not need volume, “sworn to my own rules. My own decisions. My own choices.”

  The daemon reeled another step closer, limbs spasming, its shadow tearing itself apart beneath it.

  “You,” he continued, eyes fixed on the thing as if it were already a corpse, “nor any other insane spawn of the Immaterium, shall rule over me. Nor claim my life.”

  The propulsion fields hummed lower, tighter. Weapon-forms subtly reconfigured, internal geometries aligning for release.

  “For I am your end,” he said.

  “I am what comes after the last scream. After the last breath. When the eyes close for the final time.”

  The daemon’s voice fractured, trying to speak, trying to bargain, but only static and shrieks escaped as its form continued to degrade.

  “I am what is, when none remains,” the Castaway finished.

  “A blank page.”

  A pause.

  Then, softly—

  “Now meet your end.”

  The defiance enraged the pelikan twin-headed creature.

  It shrieked—not in rage alone, but in invocation—and tore reality open enough to draw from it. From split wrists emerged twin scimitars, one gold, one blue, their edges not sharp so much as decisive, cutting along vectors of fate and unmaking. The screech was a spell, a changer’s cry meant to deform, to twist, to rewrite the real into something more… pliable.

  For the Changer, it whispered.

  For the Castaway, it fell on deaf ears.

  Around him there was only silence.

  Not the absence of sound, but the presence of nothing—a void where the Immaterium could not echo, where meaning itself went to die. The daemon’s spell unraveled the instant it crossed that threshold, sigils collapsing into inert light, intent stripped bare and discarded.

  Within that silence, the Castaway raised his arms.

  The mounted cannons shifted, apertures dilating as internal housings rotated with machine-perfect grace. Along their inner rails, specks of black stone surfaced—polished, faceted, wrong. Obsidian, not of any natural geology, but grown, tuned, its crystalline structure designed to resonate with absence.

  Pariah stone.

  The suit’s systems aligned, feeding his null-field into the material, focusing it, compressing it until even nothing had weight.

  He fired.

  There was no sound.

  There was no flash.

  There was only effect.

  The blast tore outward as a silent detonation, a concussion of anti-warp force that did not burn or explode, but erased. The rushing warp spawn was stripped of color first—vivid hues bleaching into sickly gray, then into nothing at all. Flesh followed, unraveling into particulate ash that never had the dignity of falling. Essence came last, torn loose and dispersed like mist in a vacuum.

  The shockwave rolled on, invisible but absolute.

  Lesser neverborn caught at its edge simply ceased to be, their tenuous energies too weak to resist the dispersal. They burst apart into dust and memory, erased so completely that even the warp failed to remember them.

  The twin-headed pelikan was flung backward, scimitars tumbling from nerveless hands as it screamed—not in rage now, but in terror. It struck the ground hard, skidding across fractured stone, its form shedding fragments of itself with every impact.

  Above it, the Castaway hovered, unmoving, the engines’ low thrumming the only sound permitted to exist near him.

  Then—something else stirred.

  He felt it before he saw it.

  The earth cracked.

  Not a single rupture, but many—spiderweb fractures racing outward beneath the daemon corpse, splitting streets and plazas alike. Massive mounds of soil and broken rock heaved upward as if the planet itself were trying to expel an infection. Plumes of dust and ash burst skyward, choking the air, as something vast shifted beneath the surface.

  One mound collapsed inward.

  Another exploded outward.

  More followed, closer now, encircling the battlefield in a tightening ring.

  Whatever was coming was big.

  Whatever was coming had been waiting.

  And it was not alone.

  A cannonade resounded—wet, choking, obscene—like an old man’s dying cough dragged through phlegm and torn vocal cords. It did not come from guns, nor engines, but from below. From depth. From rot.

  Sound lost its meaning as it spread. The clash of battle, the howl of engines, the crack of lasfire—all of it bled together into a single, nauseating resonance as reality itself began to soften. Stone sagged. Rockcrete slumped inward like spoiled meat. The ground surrendered its shape and became sludge, bubbling and pulsing as if it breathed.

  Then the worms came.

  They shot upward in violent spirals, titanic things of pallid flesh and ruptured rings, each segment studded with myriad mouths—some circular and lamprey-like, others split into grinning maws lined with broken, rotting teeth. From those mouths they vomited forth corrosive filth, a rain of hissing acid and putrefaction that fell in sheets across the battlefield.

  The spray coated everything.

  Daemons of Tzeentch shrieked as their ever-shifting forms curdled, colors running and collapsing into diseased monotony, wings sloughing into tatters as alchemical rot ate through sorcery and flesh alike. Even the air screamed as it burned, vapors turning yellow-green, thick enough to taste through sealed filters.

  The Castaway was struck as well.

  The filth splashed across his iridescent armor, sizzling and crawling like a living thing. Warning glyphs flared across his vision as layers of adaptive plating hardened, shed, reconstituted—sacrificial strata burning away to preserve the core. His null-field surged in response, flaring outward in defiance, but it did not erase the corruption entirely.

  Because this thing was different.

  The Beast of Nurgle—if it could be called a beast—was not merely a warp-spawn howling for purchase. It was anchored. Rooted in realspace by biomass, by infection, by the sheer obscene weight of corrupted matter. It did not rely solely on the Immaterium to exist.

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  It infested reality.

  And so, it held sway.

  The Castaway felt it then—a pressure, dull and nauseating, pushing back against the void he projected. His pariah aura did not fail, but it was mitigated, forced to contend with a presence that obeyed different rules. The worms burrowed and reemerged, their bulk tearing apart streets and foundations, spreading rot with every convulsion.

  From the largest rupture, something vast began to rise.

  A mountainous bulk hauled itself free of the earth, layers of bloated flesh sloughing off as it emerged, revealing a body riddled with sores, ruptures, and weeping rents that leaked filth and crawling things. Limbs—if they were limbs—dragged behind it, each ending in clusters of grasping mouths and vestigial claws.

  It exhaled.

  The breath rolled across the battlefield like a funeral fog, thick with spores and decay, and where it passed, metal corroded, flesh blistered, and courage faltered.

  This was not a herald.

  Not a champion.

  This was a plague made manifest, a neverborn conglomerate grown fat on suffering, given shape by excess and neglect, an engine of entropy that existed to endure and spread.

  Above it, hovering amid burning air and falling ash, the Castaway steadied himself.

  His engines thrummed louder now, compensating. Internal systems rerouted power, reinforcing the Inner Mesh of the Last Breath, tightening the seal between his mind and the void he carried. The obsidian channels along his weapon-forms darkened further, drinking in light.

  “So,” he said quietly, his voice carried across vox and noosphere alike, cold and iron-bound.

  “You cling to the real because the unreal will not have you.”

  Below him, the Beast of Nurgle convulsed, a sound like laughter and retching combined rolling from its many throats.

  The ground continued to rot.

  And the war, far from ending, had only just found its true shape.

  The Castaway shuddered as internal dampeners spiked. A harmonic pulse rippled through his frame and the vibrations sheared the corrosive filth from his armor in sheets, droplets tearing free and atomizing into hissing vapor before they could finish their work. Warning runes dimmed. Adaptive layers reknit. The suit drank punishment and answered with stillness.

  He extended one arm.

  The cannon reconfigured in a fluid, almost contemptuous motion—segments sliding, telescoping, locking. No muzzle flare. No roar. Just a voided thump as the weapon discharged.

  The blast crossed the distance in an instant.

  Where it struck, the Beast of Nurgle did not burn or shatter. It simply… ceased. A hemisphere of unmaking blossomed across its bulk, silence swallowing sound as flesh, rot, and mass were erased down to nothing. The shockwave arrived a heartbeat later, flattening lesser neverborn, flensing them into greasy vapor and scraps of unreality.

  The creature screamed—but not from the wound.

  From a swollen boil above one of its jaundiced eyes, the flesh ruptured outward. Lard upon lard split and spilled as something forced its way free, dragging itself into being with wet, eager violence. Tentacles uncoiled like whips, slick and barbed. A storm of insects poured from its body—flies, beetles, crawling things—cloaking its half-formed shape as it hung there, embedded in the remains of its host.

  It spoke, and its voice was thick with mirth and decay.

  “The Grandfather sends his regards,” it crooned, each word accompanied by the popping of ruptured sacs. “He says hello… and blesses your world. Envoy of nothing. Voice of silence. I have come to collect what is owed.”

  The Castaway’s posture did not change.

  “Did Nurgle miss me?” he replied calmly, systems cycling as additional mass flowed into his weapons. The cannons lengthened further, obsidian channels deepening, humming with restrained negation. “Was my presence within his garden not enough? Does Grandfather need more of his weeds culled, more of his spawn laid to a lasting end?”

  The taunt landed true.

  The envoy laughed—a bubbling, joyous sound—and peeled back what passed for its face. No skull lay beneath, only a vast, yawning maw, rings of rotten teeth framing melted eyes that pulsed and wept. With every blink they birthed new flies, beetles crawling free in glistening streams, their wings buzzing with obscene devotion.

  “Oh no!” it gurgled, delighted. “Nurgle—praise be his humor—invites you back to his domain! Your body shall be our fertiliser. Your soulless being will pay the price for the jar in his stagnation!”

  Its tentacles spread wide, welcoming.

  “Come,” it beckoned, flesh quivering. “Allow my embrace. We shall set you free.”

  The Castaway’s systems completed their cycle.

  Power rerouted. Fields overcharged. The cannons locked into their final configuration, lengths extending beyond human proportion, geometry sharpening into something older than doctrine and colder than faith.

  “Gladly,” he said, voice dropping, the void around him deepening as his pariah presence intensified, crushing sound and color alike.

  “I shall set you free from his grasp.”

  The weapons spoke.

  And this time, the silence they carried promised not erasure—but ending.

  A cannonade of filth met a carpet bombing of cleansing.

  The exchange tore at the foundations of existence itself—Putulent warp-matter colliding with annihilating null-force in detonations that had no sound, no light, only absence. Reality and unreality unraveled where they met, concepts fraying as cause and effect struggled to remember which came first. Space buckled. Distance lost meaning. The sky split along invisible fault lines as the laws that governed it were forced into violent compromise.

  The anomaly tore across the heavens like a judgment writ in motion.

  He moved without jets, without exhaust—silent propulsion fields bending vectors and gravity alike as he scythed through the air, bombarding the Nurglite mass below. Each strike peeled away layers of rot and corrupted flesh, reducing swollen bulk to drifting particulate nothingness. Bile and acidic spore-clouds erupted upward in response, splashing against his armor in corrosive waves, some strikes slipping through mitigation and forcing warning sigils to flare briefly before adaptive systems devoured the damage.

  He did not slow.

  The more ruin he inflicted, the louder the envoy’s joy became.

  Laughter rolled from the creature in wet, delighted peals as entire portions of its body were erased. “Yes!” it crooned, flesh sloughing even as it regenerated in obscene abundance. “Yes! Tear us apart! Grandfather rejoices in the harvest! Every ending feeds the cycle!”

  With every loss, it gave more.

  The ground below collapsed into itself, soil turning necrotic and hostile, bubbling as rot-fields spread outward in choking waves. Corpse-things clawed their way free, half-formed neverborn and plague-thralls rising only to be obliterated moments later. The land itself became an enemy—slick, bloated, alive with crawling contagion—opposing the empty stillness that pressed outward from the Castaway like an invisible tide.

  Then the sky screamed.

  Warp-light fractured the firmament as the twin-headed pelikan daemon of Tzeentch returned, its presence announced by impossible geometry and a shrill chorus of discordant laughter. It swept in at the head of an entourage—hosts of changelings, warp-mutants, and avian horrors spilling across the heavens in a living storm. Feathers burned with unreality. Limbs twisted mid-flight. From above, they rained corruption and change, ichor and mutagenic spores cascading down upon the anomaly in prismatic sheets.

  Spells were woven in motion. Words of unmaking screamed without sound.

  For the first time, the Castaway was pressed.

  And then—

  The city answered.

  Macro-turrets along the ferrocrete walls rotated as one, machine-spirits awakened to wrath. Energy grids flared incandescent. From the ship at the city’s heart, ancient batteries roared to life—artillery that had not spoken in millennia disgorging payloads of incandescent fury into the sky. Flak curtains blossomed like steel flowers, tearing changelings apart in midair. Lance fire speared upward, punching holes through warp-flesh and boiling reality clean in its wake.

  Missile salvos followed, saturating the heavens.

  From the walls, armsmen added their voices—las-fire stitching the air, heavy weapons thundering in disciplined cadence. The Magos Dominus’s guidance threaded through it all, drones swarming in precise vectors, intercepting spells and bombardment alike, dying by the dozens to spare the line.

  Above it all, framed by fire and falling monsters, the anomaly held position.

  Supported now. Reinforced.

  The sky burned. The ground rotted. The warp screamed.

  And between them, held aloft by silent engines and inexorable will, the Castaway continued his work—methodical, merciless, and utterly unyielding—as the war for the city escalated from survival into annihilation.

  The vox cut in through layered channels and screaming machine-spirits, the Captain’s voice forcing order into the noise by sheer will.

  “Castaway,” she said, clipped, controlled—too controlled. “Status. Inner city perimeter is under multi-vector assault. Neverborn breaching from sewer-lines, hab-block sublevels, and aerial ingress. My forces are concentrated and holding, but pressure is mounting. Ammunition reserves are critical. Shields will not survive another sustained push.”

  A half-second pause. Then, quieter:

  “Give me our options.”

  The Castaway’s reply came almost immediately, his voice resonating through the link with an edge she hadn’t heard before—focused, alive.

  “Options?” he echoed, and there was the faintest hint of a smile in it. “You’re doing well, Captain. Better than I expected. The city still stands. That alone narrows the enemy’s advantage.”

  She snorted despite herself. “Flattery won’t hold the walls.”

  “No,” he agreed. “But timing will. Collapse your outer rings in sequence, not all at once. Let them think you’re breaking. Draw them inward—compress the swarm. I can thin them faster if they’re foolish enough to mass.”

  Another pause. She heard it now—the undercurrent beneath his calm. Calculation layered with concern.

  “And the cost?” she asked.

  “High,” he admitted. “Acceptable. Not comfortable.”

  The stress finally bled through her iron discipline. “That’s not reassuring.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” he said, and now the excitement crept in, unmistakable. “This isn’t a problem to be solved cleanly. This is a test. One they’re overcommitting to.”

  Before she could answer, another voice cut across the channel—booming, fervent, wrapped in vox-distorted zeal.

  “Then let them choke on their excess!”

  The Preacher.

  “By the Emperor’s burning truth, I will not cower behind voided walls while His enemies defile the ground unopposed!” Pistons roared in the background, plasma coils screaming as they climbed toward lethal output. “Castaway! Mark me a path!”

  “Preacher—” the Captain snapped, already knowing it was too late.

  “I go to war!” he roared, and the channel flooded with the thunder of his armor as he broke from cover.

  Outside the void shield, the ground split again.

  Rotworms—more of them—burst free in obscene spirals, earth and corpse-matter flung skyward as their vast bodies coiled and encircled the Castaway’s position. Acid and spore-clouds belched from their maws, the air turning into a choking, corroding haze.

  The Castaway exhaled slowly, almost reverently.

  “…Bold,” he murmured. “Reckless. Emperor help us, effective.”

  The Preacher’s armor flared like a rising sun as he hurled himself into the breach, twin plasma spewers howling in holy fury.

  “Captain,” the Castaway voxed, excitement now fully unmasked, “hold your line. Tighten your formations. You have minutes—maybe less.”

  “And you?” she demanded.

  He laughed—low, sharp, exhilarated—as the worms closed in and the sky burned above him.

  “I’ll make them earn every meter.”

  The Castaway stood amid the ruin as the storm broke around him.

  Myriad assaults came at once—warp-lances screaming through the air, corrosive filth arcing in bloated parabolae, talons and pseudopods striking from impossible angles. He moved through it all with preternatural economy. Each step was a correction. Each turn a refusal. Blades of unreality glanced off invisible fields, bolts of change unraveled before impact, and every shot he accepted was answered tenfold.

  His cannons spoke in measured, annihilating cadence.

  Flesh ruptured.

  Bone vaporized.

  The ground convulsed as if recoiling from the violence done upon it.

  Null shockwaves rippled outward, collapsing lesser neverborn into drifting ash, their forms failing, their colors bleeding away as if ashamed to persist. Yet still they came. The skies darkened further, choked with wings, mutation, and shrieking hate. The horizon was a writhing wall of enemy mass.

  Then—

  Light.

  A single, blinding lance tore out from the city’s inner line, cutting through smoke, spore-clouds, and warp haze alike. It was not cold, not sterile. It was incandescent—golden-white, roaring with heat and conviction.

  The Preacher.

  He descended like a falling star, Scorch Pattern armor howling in protest as it was driven far beyond intended tolerances. Borrowed systems screamed warning-runes that were summarily ignored. Plasma spewers burned at output levels that should have liquefied their bearer. Safety interlocks shattered under sheer refusal.

  The Castaway turned, momentarily still.

  Impossible, a part of him noted.

  This level of access should be sealed.

  This degree of control—this recklessness—should be fatal.

  And yet the mortal did not falter.

  He charged headlong into the mass of the neverborn, laughing and screaming prayer in the same breath. Twin plasma clouds erupted from his arms, blooming outward in incandescent devastation. Hundreds of warp-things vanished in an instant, their forms erased in sanctified fire as the plumes of his descent embraced them.

  Golden light drowned corruption.

  Piety overwrote blasphemy.

  “BY HIS WILL!” the Preacher roared, swinging with furnace-force, each blow a sermon, each impact a sacrament. “BE CLEANSED!”

  Abominations burst apart beneath him. Twisted limbs flew. Warp-flesh sloughed away, unmade by heat and faith in equal measure. His voice carried across the battlefield, vox-distorted hymns colliding with the screams of dying daemons.

  He baptized the fallen in plasma and fire.

  The Castaway watched for a heartbeat longer than necessary.

  “…Remarkable,” he said softly, and then turned back to the war, weapons reconfiguring, excitement sharpening into something almost akin to pride.

  Together, machine and man tore into the horde—

  and for the first time since the breach opened, the neverborn faltered.

  One moved like silence given shape.

  A pale blur carved through the tide of neverborn, precise and merciless, each motion surgical. The Castaway glided above the battlefield, propulsion waves whispering beneath him as his weapon-forms reshaped and fired in flawless rhythm. Every discharge erased a corridor through the horde — not explosions, not spectacle, but absence. Enemies simply ceased, their essence severed cleanly from reality.

  The other burned like judgment incarnate.

  The Preacher was a descending sun of crimson fury, plasma spewers roaring without restraint. Firestorms blossomed wherever he turned, detonations cascading outward in overlapping halos of destruction. Warp flesh ignited, sinew liquefied, and shrieking abominations collapsed beneath torrents of incandescent wrath.

  Together they became contrast made war:

  scalpel and inferno, silence and sermon.

  Seconds stretched into minutes.

  Artillery began to fall in disciplined cadence. Guided by the ship’s awakened machine-spirit and the Logis’ expanding oversight, shells screamed overhead and struck impossibly close — danger close by any sane doctrine. Yet targeting corrections unfolded in real time, trajectories bending through predictive calculus. Explosions blossomed around the two warriors without touching them, carving safe corridors through the enemy tide.

  Armsmen on the walls cheered as pressure eased. Vox channels filled with awe, prayer, disbelief.

  But the Castaway felt none of their relief.

  Something tugged at him.

  Not sound. Not sight.

  A pressure.

  Each strike he delivered, each daemon erased, fed a growing wrongness crawling beneath his senses. The Preacher’s blazing presence pulsed too brightly. The neverborn ahead did not merely attack — they waited. Their movements shifted subtly, forming gaps, yielding ground too easily.

  A trap.

  His instincts screamed.

  “Preacher—” he began over vox.

  Too late.

  Driven by zeal, the armored cleric surged forward, plunging deeper into the thinning mass, plasma flares carving a radiant path. He raised his arms, unleashing another cleansing torrent, laughter and prayer merging into ecstatic fury.

  The earth answered.

  It trembled once.

  Then split.

  A thunderous rupture tore across the battlefield as the Nurgle envoy’s voice boomed with grotesque delight, echoing through vox and air alike.

  “His pets are here to join the play! Oh, tainted of birth— behold their splendor! See life reclaimed in glorious thriving! For the Grandfather!”

  The ground exploded outward.

  Rotworms burst forth in dozens, then hundreds — not striking wildly as before. They moved with purpose. Massive bodies coiled and twisted together, enamel plates grinding, teeth interlocking, rivers of bile binding them into a single grotesque structure.

  A living braid of corruption.

  A colossal cord of flesh and decay spiraled upward, segments tightening around one another, strengthening, reinforcing — kilometer-long monstrosities weaving themselves into a towering helix of rot and gnashing maws. Their clicking thundered like tectonic plates grinding together.

  The Castaway’s realization came instantly.

  Not for me.

  The abomination unfurled.

  And struck.

  The woven mass snapped forward with catastrophic force, smashing into the unsuspecting Preacher mid-charge. The impact detonated the air itself — a concussive roar that flattened nearby daemon swarms and sent burning debris spiraling across the battlefield.

  Crimson fire vanished beneath a tidal collision of rot, enamel, and teeth.

  For a heartbeat, the battlefield fell silent.

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