Chapter 1: Blood, Screams, and a Very Bad First Impression
The spreadsheet wouldn’t balance. The numbers in column E, the shipping tonnage for Fenksworld, kept shimmering, the digits on Rutaba’s monitor dissolving into grey static. He blinked, hard, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Too much coffee, not enough sleep. The faint, ever-present odor of industrial carpet cleaner and stale microwave meals filled his cubicle.
“Come on, you piece of junk,” he muttered, tapping the keyboard. The static pulsed, a virulent green now.
Then the world tore.
It wasn’t a sound. It was the absence of all sound, replaced by a physical ripping sensation in his gut. His ergonomic chair, the faded Dilbert comic taped to the partition, the hum of fluorescent lights—all were yanked away into a smear of meaningless color. He tried to scream, but his lungs were full of liquid iron. He was falling, spinning, through a kaleidoscope of shrieking faces and molten geometries that defied eyes and mind.
He hit solid ground with a jarring crunch, landing on his side in a shallow, sticky puddle.
The stench hit him first. It was a physical wall: burning oil, rotten meat, copper, and something sweetly chemical that clawed at the back of his throat. He gagged, pushing himself up. His hands sank into a layer of grime-slick paste.He looked down. The puddle wasn’t water. It was a dark, congealed maroon, dotted with pale, fibrous lumps.
His brain, trained on logistics and database management, tried to catalogue it.Biological matter. Viscous. Approximately three centimeters deep.
His stomach revolted. He scrambled back, sneakers slipping, and slammed against a cold, riveted wall. The office was gone. He was in a corridor, but one that had been gutted. The ceiling was a jagged maw of torn plating, twisted cables drooping like intestines. The light didn’t come from fixtures. It came from the walls themselves—pulsing, sickly veins of green and violet energy that snaked through the metal, casting a fever-dream glow. The air thrummed with a sub-audible groan, the sound of a vast, dying thing.This is a dream. A bad, bad dream.
He pinched his own arm, hard. The pain was sharp, bright, and utterly convincing. A wave of panic, pure and blinding, rose in his chest. His heart began to hammer against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. He could feel the scream building again.
Then, a coolness spread from the center of his mind. It was familiar, a sensation he knew from countless late-night gaming sessions when a raid was falling apart, when the boss was at 1% health and the healer was down. A focused, almost alien calm. The panic hit it and splashed apart, dissolving into manageable data points.Heart rate elevated. Adrenaline spike noted. Sensory overload occurring. Assess environment.
Gamer’s Peace. He hadn’t named it before, but the term clicked into place now. It was the part of him that could parse chaos into a series of problems to be solved. It didn’t remove the fear. It just put it in a box and set it aside.
He took a deliberate, shuddering breath. The air tasted of rust and poison.
“Okay,” he whispered to himself, his voice lost in the cavernous groaning of the ship.“New server. Hardcore survival mode. No tutorial. Great.”
He pushed himself to his feet. His body ached, but everything worked. He was still in his chinos and polo shirt, his company ID badge still clipped to his waist. The absurdity of it almost made him laugh. He was 5’2”. The corridor was built for giants. Everything was massive, the doorways towering, the girders overhead like the ribs of a cathedral-sized beast.
A sound echoed from somewhere deep within the ship’s bowels. Not a groan.A scream. Human, or something that had been human once, cut off with wet finality.Nope. Time to move.
He picked a direction, away from the scream, moving with a cautious, semi-crouched gait he’d learned from a thousand stealth games. He stepped over a skeleton, not a clean one, but a mess of bones still half-wrapped in the crisp, desiccated remains of a uniform, fused to the deck plating by a crust of crystal-like growths. The details were hyper-real. A wedding ring on a finger bone. A data-slate cracked under a boot-print.
He rounded a corner and froze.
This was a wider chamber, maybe a mess hall. Tabled were overturned. And it was full of corpses.Not skeletons. These were recent. Bloated, discolored, piled in heaps where they’d made a last stand. The butchery was comprehensive. He saw las-burns, massive puncture wounds, limbs simply torn off. The smell here was unbearable, a ripe, gassy foulness. Flies, huge and iridescent, buzzed in thick clouds.
In the center of the room, something moved.
It was a man, or had been. He was dragging himself across the floor, one leg a ruined mess of meat and shattered ceramite. He wore the remnants of Imperial Guard flak armor, the once-bold colors faded and stained. He had a laspistol clenched in a blood-slick hand.
Rutaba’s Gamer’s Peace calculated. Injured combatant. Armed.Possible ally. High threat environment.
“Hey,” Rutaba said, his voice too loud in the silent chamber of the dead.
The soldier jerked, bringing the laspistol up. His eyes were wide, white with terror and pain. “Who’s there? Reveal yourself in the name of the Emperor!”
“I’m… I’m lost,” Rutaba said, hands held up, taking a slow step forward.“I need help. What is this place?”
The soldier’s face, grimy and etched with agony, twisted in confusion. “The Valhalla’s Wrath. Are you crew? Survivors?” His eyes darted past Rutaba, paranoid. “The xenos… they’re still here. In the walls. And the heretics… the Traitor Legion…”
“Traitor Legion?”
A new sound cut through the ship’s moan. It was a heavy, rhythmic CLANK-CLANK-CLANK, like a piston driving a nail into the world. It was coming from the corridor Rutaba had just left.
The soldier’s face drained of all remaining color. “Oh, Throne.No. He’s still hunting.”
“Who?”
“The World Eater.” The words were a breathless sob. The soldier looked at his laspistol, then at his ruined leg, a terrible resignation settling over him. He looked back at Rutaba, a frantic light in his eyes. “Run, you fool.Run and hide. He doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.”
The clanking grew louder, closer. A bestial grunt echoed down the hallway, followed by the whining rev of a motorized weapon.
The Gamer’s Peace presented two options. Option One: Aid soldier. Probability of mutual death: 99.7%. Option Two: Retreat. Live another minute.
Rutaba hated the math. He met the soldier’s eyes, gave a tiny, helpless shake of his head. The soldier understood. He nodded once, grim, and turned his laspistol, not towards the corridor, but towards his own temple.
“The Emperor protects,” the soldier whispered.
Rutaba was already moving, diving behind a shattered piece of heavy machinery just as the thing entered the chamber.
It was a mountain of corrupted iron and fleshy ruin. Eight feet tall at least, its armor was a brutalist nightmare of spikes, chains, and jagged brass symbols that hurt to look at. One arm ended in a spinning, roaring chainaxe, teeth dripping with gore. The other was a monstrous power fist. Its helm was a snarling, bestial muzzle, from which a single, bloodshot eye-lens glowed with malign intelligence. It radiated a heat and a stink of slaughter that made the air quiver.
The World Eater.The name fit.
It stomped into the center of the room, ignoring the corpses. It scanned, its chainaxe idling with a hungry growl. It saw the wounded soldier.The soldier fired. A bright red las-bolt pinged harmlessly off the monster’s chest plate. The World Eater didn’t even flinch. It took two earth-shaking steps forward.
“Blood for the Blood God!” the monster bellowed, its voice a distorted, grating roar that vibrated in Rutaba’s teeth.
The chainaxe fell. It wasn’t a chop. It was an eruption of blood, bone, and armor. The sound was wet and final.
Rutaba squeezed his eyes shut, but he couldn’t block out the sound of the axe rising and falling again.And again. The revving. The splattering. The low, satisfied grunts.
His Gamer’s Peace held, but it was strained, a dam holding back a ocean of raw, screaming terror. He focused on his breathing.Out. You are a pixel in the scenery. Do not aggro the boss.
The killing stopped. The only sound was the sputtering putter of the chainaxe and heavy, wet breaths. Rutaba dared to peer through a crack in his cover.
The World Eater was standing over the red ruin, its weapon hanging at its side. Its helmet was tilted, as if listening. Then, slowly, impossibly, it turned its head. That single red eye-lens swept past the piles of the dead… and paused, fixed on the machinery Rutaba hid behind.
It had heard him. Or smelled him. Or just sensed the heat of his living, terrified blood.
It took a step. CLANK.Then another. CLANK.
Rutaba’s mind went blank, then crystal clear.No options. No percentages.Just runway. Opposite end of the chamber, another shattered doorway, leading into deeper, darker guts.
The World Eater began to run. The floor shook.
Rutaba exploded from his hiding spot, his short legs pumping harder than they ever had. He didn’t look back. He heard the roar of the chainaxe revving to a fever pitch, the deafening clatter of the monster giving chase.
He slipped on blood, righted himself, and sprinted. The doorway loomed. He dove through it just as a shower of sparks erupted from the wall where the chainaxe bit deep into the metal behind him.
He was in another corridor, darker, veins of warp-light thinner here. He ran blindly, taking turns at random, driven by a primal need for distance. The thunderous pursuit faded, but he didn’t stop. He ran until a stitch like a knife gouged his side and his lungs were burning rags.
He collapsed, not in a puddle, but against a relatively clean wall, sliding down to sit on the deck, gasping. The image of the soldier, of the falling axe, played on a loop behind his eyes.
A long minute passed.Then another. The silence was almost worse.
A new sound reached him. Not clanking. Not roaring.A voice. Muffled, strained, coming from behind a heavy, partially ajar bulkhead marked ‘Maintenance Locker 73-G’.
“…can’t hold it! The seal is buckling! Throne damn it, is anyone out there?!”
It was human.It was alive. And it was in trouble.
Rutaba sat in the corrosive darkness, the last echo of a chainaxe’s snarl still haunting the air around him, and looked at the trembling bulkhead. The math was different now. Option One: Investigate. Probability of death: unknown. Option Two: Stay here. Probability of death: 100%, eventually.
He took a final, sharp breath, and pushed himself up.
He took a final, sharp breath, and pushed himself up. The metal wall against his back vibrated with a deep, worrying hum. The voice came again, tighter now, fraying at the edges.
“—flux coil is at twelve percent! It’s going to blow! Someone, for the love of the Omnissiah, answer!”
Rutaba moved. He wedged his fingers into the gap of the bulkhead door. It was heavier than anything he’d ever touched, cold and unyielding. He pulled, his shoes slipping on the deck. A tendon in his neck protested. Nothing.
“It’s… stuck!” he called out, his voice thin against the ship’s groans.
“The manual release! A lever, on your side, below the viewport!” the voice shot back, immediate.
Rutaba dropped to his knees, scrabbling over the grimy surface. There. A rusted metal bar, almost fused in place. He hauled on it with his entire weight. For a second, nothing. Then, with a shriek of shearing rust, it gave. A series of heavy clunks echoed inside the door’s mechanism.
He grabbed the edge again and pulled. This time, it moved, grinding open a foot-wide slice of darkness.
An arm shot out, grabbing his wrist. The grip was strong, mechanical, and cold. Rutaba yelped, trying to pull back, but he was hauled forward, his face almost pressed to the opening. Inside the gloom, he could make out a single, glowing green eye-lens and the lower half of a face that was more augmetic than flesh, a jaw of polished steel and rubber cables.
“The seal is compromised! Ingress is immediate! Do you understand?” The words were synthesized, but the panic underneath was human.
A hissing, shrieking sound erupted from around the doorframe. A fine, acrid mist, glowing the same poisonous green as the veins in the walls, began to spray from a ruptured conduit above the door. Where it touched the deck plating, the metal sizzled and pitted.
Gamer’s Peace assessed. Corrosive atmospheric breach. Immediate environmental hazard. Door mechanism partially engaged.
He didn’t have the strength to pull it open fully. But he didn’t need to.
“Can you make yourself smaller?” Rutaba yelled over the rising shriek.
“What?”
“Can you compact? I can’t open it all the way!”
A beat of silence. The mechanical hand released his wrist. He heard a series of sharp clicks and hydraulic sighs from within the locker. “Acknowledged. Proceed.”
Rutaba threw his weight against the door again. It moved another six inches. The green mist was falling like rain now, eating into the shoulder of his polo shirt. He felt a burn, sharp and deep.
“Now! Crawl!”
From the darkness, the figure emerged. It was a tangle of mechanical limbs and red robe, folding itself with unnatural, joint-bending precision through the narrow gap. A humanoid shape, but wrong in a dozen subtle ways. One leg was a piston, the other flesh encased in clawed metal. Its left arm ended in a cluster of mechadendrites that writhed like metallic snakes. It tumbled onto the deck beside him, rolling clear of the mist.
Rutaba let go of the door. It slammed shut with a final, resonant boom, immediately denting inward as a torrent of the corrosive green vapor burst through the failing seal, flooding the corridor in a deadly fog.
“Move!” the metal-voiced figure barked, surging to its feet with a whir of servos. It grabbed the back of Rutaba’s collar and yanked him backward just as the fog pooled where he’d been standing.
They stumbled down the corridor, putting distance between them and the spewing gas. After twenty yards, the figure stopped, its single green lens rotating, focusing on Rutaba. Up close, Rutaba could see the truth. It was a man, or had been. Half his face was polished cranial plating, one eye replaced by the lens, his mouth a thin seam above the steel jaw. The red robes were stained with oil and soot.
“You are not crew,” the figure stated, its voice flat.
“No,” Rutaba wheezed, clutching his burned shoulder. The pain was a hot, focused thing. “I’m… lost.”
“A stowaway? On a vessel lost in the Warp for standard centuries?” The green lens brightened. “Implausible.”
“You’re telling me,” Rutaba muttered, examining the damage to his shirt. The fabric was eaten away, the skin beneath an angry, blistering red.
The figure observed him. Its mechadendrites twitched, one extruding a slender proboscis that scanned him with a faint blue light. “Minimal augmentation. Primitive attire. Life signs consistent with baseline human, though stress indicators are elevated. You are an anomaly.”
“You’re one to talk,” Rutaba shot back, then immediately regretted it. This thing had a plasma cutter for a finger.
To his surprise, the steel jaw produced a sound like grinding gears—a laugh. “Adept Zynth, of the Cult Mechanicus. Protector of the Valhalla’s Wrath’s Sacred Engine Core. Or… I was.” The green lens dimmed slightly. “The core is dead. The ship is dead. I am merely a remnant, performing final rites.”
“Rutaba,” he offered, unsure of the protocol. “Logistics.”
“Logistics,” Zynth repeated, as if tasting the word. “Efficiency. Allocation. You are a quantifier of resources.”
“Yeah. Usually for a pharmaceutical wholesaler.”
Zynth’s head tilted. The gesture was avian, curious. “The universe has delivered a peculiar resource to this terminus point. Why did you assist?”
Rutaba looked back at the fog-filled corridor. The thought of the soldier, and the choice he didn’t make, flashed behind his eyes. “You were a voice. In all this… noise.”
The adept regarded him for a long moment. “A logical, if emotionally compromised, rationale. The mist will dissipate in eleven standard minutes. Our immediate survival probability is low. This deck is undergoing progressive structural failure due to Warp-fueled corrosion. Furthermore, the death-throes of this vessel have attracted… scavengers.”
“The World Eater.”
Zynth’s lens snapped to a brighter setting. “You have encountered the Traitor Astartes.” It wasn’t a question.
“He was busy.”
“Then he remains a primary threat. Secondary threats include the ship’s former crew, now mutated by immaterial energy, and a xenos bio-form that has infested the lower holds. It attempts to merge with the vessel’s nervous system.”
Rutaba just stared. He felt the Gamer’s Peace struggling to file all that under ‘Actionable Intel.’ It all just sounded like ‘Certain Death.’
A new sound cut through the ever-present groan of the ship. It was a dragging, scraping metal sound, accompanied by a wet, bubbling sigh. It was close. Around the next corner, maybe.
Zynth’s mechadendrites stiffened. “Crew. Mutated. Two individuals. Converging.”
“You can hear that?”
“I hear the degradation of their joint actuators and the collapse of their pulmonary systems. They are slow. Heavily corrupted.”
Rutaba’s mind raced. He had no weapons. Zynth had… tools. “Can you fight?”
“My combat protocols are limited. My plasma cutter is at eight percent charge. My physical chassis is damaged.” The adept paused. “But I can calculate trajectories.”
The scraping grew louder. A shadow, malformed and multi-limbed, lengthened on the wall at the corridor’s T-junction ahead.
“Okay,” Rutaba said, the calm settling over him like a blanket. He scanned their immediate surroundings: the corroded wall panels, a scattered pile of shattered crates, a lone, inactive lumogel orb rolling in the drafts. “New plan. We don’t fight. We redirect.”
He pointed to a section of wall where the pulsing green veins were thickest, swollen like abscesses. “That looks… volatile.”
Zynth’s lens zoomed in. “Warp-energy confluence. Unstable. A puncture would likely cause a localized implosive discharge.”
“Good.” Rutaba snatched up the heavy lumogel orb. It was cold and dense. “You got a arc-wrench or something? Something that makes a spark.”
One of Zynth’s mechadendrites whipped forward, its tip crackling with a tiny, fierce blue arc of electricity.
The first of the things shuffled into view. It was once a human, maybe. Now it was a column of fused, weeping flesh and ship components, moving on three distended legs. It had no head, just a screaming mouth where its chest should be.
“On my mark,” Rutaba whispered, hefting the orb. “Aim for the wall after I throw.”
The creature moaned, a sound that was half mechanical whine, half biological agony. It picked up speed.
Rutaba threw. The orb sailed, a clumsy lob, and struck the swollen vein cluster dead center.
“Now!”
Zynth’s mechadendrite struck the wall a foot away from the impact. A brilliant arc of blue lightning licked the metal.
For a split second, nothing.
Then the wall bulged inward, the green light turning blindingly white. The air itself was sucked toward it with a whump. Then it burst.
The explosion wasn’t fire. It was a shockwave of concussive force and shrapnel made of solidified Warp energy. The mutated crewman was ripped apart, dissolved into swirling motes of ash. The corridor shuddered, and a whole section of ceiling further down collapsed with a thunderous crash, sealing the passage in a tomb of debris.
Silence, filled with the ringing in Rutaba’s ears and the patter of falling dust.
Zynth retracted his mechadendrite. “Efficient.”
Rutaba’s hands were shaking. He clasped them together. “Logistics,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
A new sound echoed from deep within the fresh rubble. Not a moan. Not a sigh.
It was the distinct, hungry revving of a chainaxe, muffled by megatons of plasteel, but unmistakably closer than before. Something had heard the explosion.
Zynth’s green lens fixed on the sealed corridor, then swiveled to Rutaba. “The resource allocation has changed. The primary threat is now aware of our location vector.” He pointed a clawed metal foot in the opposite direction. “The secondary threat—the xenos bio-form—infests the route to the only potentially functional shuttle bay I am aware of.”
Rutaba looked at the rubble, then down the dark, vein-stitched corridor Zynth indicated. Two horrors. One behind, one ahead. He met the adept’s glowing lens.
“Which one hates logistics more?”