At long last, the mighty Grand Master Belial, leading the thirty remaining Terminators of his host, carved a path of slaughter through a warren belonging to Clan Ironfang. They emerged into a heavily fortified zone, a chaotic labyrinth where massive industrial machinery stood crowded together.
Immense, generator-like apparatuses were connected by thick, pulsating cables to a gargantuan metal wheel that dominated the chamber. Belial consulted his auspex, confirming the energy signatures provided by the Lion himself.
"Well done, Brothers. Destroy these xenos constructs. Claim glory for the Dark Angels!"
Belial let out a vox-roar. Immediately, several Terminators armed with Thunder Hammers surged forward.
"For the Emperor!!"
As a veteran raised his hammer, the crackling disruption field hungry for impact, a volley of emerald shuriken hissed from the impenetrable shadows.
Thwip-thwip-thwip!
The green projectiles punched through the Terminator's heavy plate, a feat that caused even these hardened veterans to stagger. Yet, through gritted teeth and sheer force of will, they brought their hammers down.
CRUNCH—!
With a thunderous impact, a section of the great metal wheel buckled and shattered, exposing a mess of convoluted components and sparking wires. It was a marvel of tech-heresy that such a ramshackle construction could function at all.
"Enemy contact! Defensive patterns!"
Belial's command was instantaneous. The Terminators formed an impenetrable circle of ceramite and steel, their weapons leveled at the shifting darkness.
Suddenly, dozens of shuriken screamed through the air from every direction, each one aimed with preternatural precision at the joints and ocular lenses of their tactical dreadnought armor. The Terminators retaliated with disciplined bursts from their storm bolters and heavy flamers. Coruscating blooms of promethium lit the shadows, but the enemy remained unseen.
"Assassins?" Belial muttered.
He was intimately familiar with this oppressive style of engagement. Throughout his long and arduous service to the Chapter, he had faced the shadow-killers of a dozen xenos species and even the high-tier executioners of the Imperium itself. These things in the dark were always the most lethal to contend with.
A black blur flickered across the overhead iron rafters. In the span of a millisecond, a Terminator fired, but his bolt shells struck only small, thrown spheres. Upon impact, the spheres detonated, unleashing a thick, choking cloud of emerald mist that swallowed the battlefield.
To their alarm, the veterans found the mist did not merely obscure sight; their auspex arrays, infrared sensors, and even warp-signature trackers were rendered useless.
Leaning against a steel pillar, watching the scene with cold, predatory detachment, was a lithe, black-cloaked skaven. This was the second-in-command of Clan Eshin, the reigning Deathmaster, Snikch.
He spoke, his voice a rasping hiss. "The man-thing chieftain is mine-mine. The other trash-spawn... you deal-kill."
Though he had witnessed these thirty warriors butcher their way through several clans, Snikch felt no trepidation. To a master of his caliber, the "trash clans" they had defeated were beneath notice, any one of the assassins present could have decimated them given enough time.
The legendary elite unit known as the Black Thirteen bowed their heads in silence and vanished into the fog.
They moved like ghosts, their passage so subtle that the mist did not even swirl in their wake. Suddenly, a Weeping Blade flashed, biting deep into a Terminator's thigh. The thick ceramite plating, supposedly impenetrable, split apart like parchment. The cursed blade plunged through the veteran's transhuman flesh.
"Agh!!"
The Astartes did not scream in pain but immediately pivoted to strike back. Power fists and swords swung through the air, hitting nothing but vapor. Two light footprints appeared briefly on a Terminator's pauldron before a green-slicked dagger drew across his throat. Even the most indomitable will cannot resist the finality of Eshin's poison.
In a heartbeat, twelve Terminators fell, beheaded or their brains pierced. Only one survived with a grievous chest wound, causing the Black Thirteen assassin responsible to hiss in frustration.
"Useless-waste! You should be cast back-back to the Gutter Runners!" the lead assassin snarled before they attempted to melt back into the gloom.
But Belial would not allow it. With a roar of righteous fury, he charged. His large-caliber Volkite weapon barked, the thermal rays incinerating both the toxic mist and the shadows in a blinding flash of fire.
Finally, the enemy was revealed: skaven clad in black shinobi-garb, their limbs reinforced by crude, auxiliary exo-skeletons.
"Die, xenos!"
The Lion of the battlefield had gone feral. Belial lunged forward, intent on crushing the vermin beneath his armored bulk.
But then, a shadow so fast it was barely a blur flickered past. Three green trails of afterimage, like a toxic whirlwind, descended upon him from behind. Belial reacted with reflexive speed, spinning to block, but his Volkite weapon was instantly sliced into a dozen useless fragments.
"Tsk... sniff-sniff... man-thing. You cannot run-flee." Snikch landed with one hand on the ground, the very image of a lethal grandmaster.
"For the Emperor!" a Terminator yelled, swinging his power sword at the Deathmaster.
Snikch leaped effortlessly over the strike. In mid-air, he performed a sickening "Thomas Flare" rotation; the Weeping Blade held in his tail whipped around and punched straight through the Astartes' neck.
The Terminator collapsed. Snikch stood atop the Dark Angel's back in a posture of absolute triumph, his eyes never leaving Belial's.
In an instant, Belial, the Grand Master of the Deathwing, who had rarely known defeat in close quarters, shed his anger. It was replaced by a grim, focused solemnity. He recognized the creature before him as a peer in the art of death.
"He is mine," Belial voxed to his remaining brothers. "Deal with the other xenos."
"Understood, my Lord!" The surviving Terminators formed a wide perimeter, pushing the Black Thirteen back and creating a dueling circle of several dozen square meters.
In the center stood a four-meter-tall living tank in bone-white armor, wielding a power sword shimmering with a disruption field and a storm bolter. He faced a hunched, rat-like ninja holding a Weeping Blade in each hand and a third in his prehensile tail.
Duels were nothing new to Snikch. When a target was too heavily guarded, he often found it efficient to kill everyone in the room to reach them, further spreading the terrifying infamy of Clan Eshin.
The Black Thirteen merged into the shadows, keeping the other Terminators at bay. They struck in waves like wraiths of the dark, but under such heightened vigilance, not another Dark Angel fell to their blades.
Inside the circle, Belial unleashed a masterwork display of swordsmanship. Yet Snikch's movements were more subtle, more mercurial. The Deathmaster's small frame moved with impossible flexibility, evading every killing blow. Occasionally, the three green-slicked blades would lash out, leaving shallow scores and hissing gouges in the Grand Master's ancient plate.
Snikch, too, realized his opponent was troublesome. Had it not been for the human's freakishly high combat intuition, those scores on the armor would have been fatal thrusts to the heart.
After evading another overhead cleave, Snikch performed a series of rapid backflips to create distance. He drove two of his blades into the ground and his hands began to move in a series of strange, ritualistic mudras.
Belial did not know what sorcery this was, but he had no intention of finding out. He launched himself forward in a thunderous leap!
Snikch finished the seals. In a flash of warp-smoke, three identical copies of the Deathmaster manifested. Four Snikchs now stood at the cardinal points, occupying every direction, their blades raised simultaneously for the slaughter.