There would be much killing here. Yes.

Back to Terra: The defeat. The flight. The thirst for vengeance. Ten thousand years of rage and anger and bitterness. His fury could drive a dynamo—

They came at him in a gaggle — not even watching where they were going, too absorbed in the task of finding an evacuation craft. Two were locked in a running argument, shouting inconsequential rubbish in their inconsequential patois, waving their inconsequential weapons and making inconsequential threats. If they saw him at all from the corner of their eyes, perhaps they mistook him for a heap of piled crates. Cargo. Certainly not alive.

He timed himself, just for fun. It took him 4.78 seconds to remove their legs, at the hip. By 6.34 seconds only one of them had any hands left, and both were shorn of fingers — opposable thumbs wriggling like lonely maggots. By eight seconds on the dot they were mewling, dying, shellshocked mannequins, limbs detached, heads flexing and twisting in splattershriek pain. He could have beheaded them at any moment.

He left them to roll on the deck. It was more fun that way.

Back to the desert-world: Back to the eldar avatar, roaring and hissing and spitting its ember rage. Something’s wrong and the Chaos warhost knows it. There’s something in the air: a sound, perhaps, just beyond perception. The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax roars so loud that the skies go black and the Marines nearest to its vast hostbody clutch at their heads, and everything...

Everything vanishes—

The memory made him stop and flex his claws hungrily. Three thousand years of imprisonment was a scar worn heavily on his blistered, cancerous soul.

No more reminiscing, he decided, just as someone shot him.

Bright blue droplets rattled ineffectually on his chassis, lightning storm phosphorescence giving the circular chamber a ghastly strobelit animation. There was no pain. No damage, beyond a few more sooty chrysanthemums of plasma impact to be worn proudly on the dreadnought’s plating. Medals of honour, almost.

If he could have laughed, he would have.

The gun chattered again, as impotent as drizzle against a steel sheet. He raised his talons and flexed them slowly, one by one, letting the velvet remark of each metal-on-metal hiss echo softly around the room. The enemy was a white heat ghost in his eyes.

He rushed forwards in a storm of clattering footsteps and snick-snacking knives, reaching out in a lover’s embrace to welcome the petulant little creature to its end. Moments before the mantis claws closed on their prey, the figure bounded up the curling ramp to the next mezzanine level, sidestepping clumsily. The Blade-master’s talons lacerated the steel guide rail in a flurry of tube sections and hot-edged piping, leaving him roaring silently inside his mechanical tomb.

The Skaarflax was rotated elegantly towards the ramp, stepping forwards and upwards in a succession of deck-gouging clawsteps. Tikoloshe was in no mood to play cat and mouse.

He spoke to himself as he chased, words silent within his mind. “I will catch you and dejoint you, little thing,” he promised. “I’ll make boneless flesh sacks of your torso and cut out each eye, each ear, each fluid and gristle lump of offal in your guts — before I let you die.”

The figure scrabbled away from its hulking pursuer, rolling a grenade down the ramp. The Blademaster stamped on the bauble nonchalantly and barely even wobbled when it detonated beneath his ablative feet. He stalked onwards, implacable.

Like waves of goosebumps rising in shivery anticipation, the tiny blades covering every centimetre of the dreadnought’s chassis stood upright hungrily. In his mind, Tikoloshe saw giblet filth covering every planet, checkerboard slices on every skin surface. He’d eviscerate the world, dismember the galaxy, slice the universe! He reached the top of the ramp and swivelled again, following his prey.

The figure was hurt, he saw, limping badly on a wounded leg that left a spatter trail of white heat on his vision. It paused against a rail, slumping breathlessly, chest gulping for air. The Blademaster upped the sensitivity of Skaarflax’s audio sensors, perversely keen to hear the figure’s burning lungs pumping and heaving.

It was a dry rattle. A wondrous melody. Music to murder by.

He spread his upper limbs to their full span, mantis claws extended like flesh cleaving wings. And he charged.

It was the simplest thing in the world.

Breathe deep. Groan.

Kais put his weight on his good leg, exaggerating the feeble uselessness of the wounded one.

He craned his neck and gasped for air he didn’t need.

You’re exhausted, he told himself. You’re in pain. You’re ready to give up and you’re shaking. Yes, that’s it. You’re shaking in fear and madness.

And the monster charged.

Like a rampaging grazebeast. It pawed at the ground, articulated at its hips, displayed its glittering galaxy of knifeclaws and hurtled towards him. Every footstep shook the world.

He didn’t know what it was. Didn’t care. It was an obscenity: a hulking corruption of the Machine his father spoke of.

Its claws scissored against each other icily, grinding and hissing.

Not yet.

Highlights shimmered across it in waves, oscillating emergency lights distorted and shattered by each and every cutting edge.

Not yet—

Its spine-encrusted shoulders, vast chassis collar rolling and pistoning furiously, gouted a thick miasma of smoke and spent fuel.

Not yet!

Snick-snack-snick!

He dived aside and rolled and rolled and rolled.

Something slashed at his back distantly, slicing across his pack and flipping him over. It was a knife-tip cut, just beyond the metal monster’s reach, spilling ration packs and ammunition clips across the deck. The beast was moving too fast. It swivelled to follow his sideways movement, motors growling in protest, but it was too late. Its legs kicked effortlessly through the mezzanine-railing and for a second, for a perfect moment of stillness, it hung in the air over the drop to the deck below.

Then it was gone.

When it landed it cracked open like an egg, and when Kais examined the withered thing inside he thought of aborted reptiles and blind, nourishment-starved clonebeasts. It hissed a final protracted breath and was dead.

Was this Mont’au too? A facade of brutality, a sham-devil with razor flesh and bloody claws, concealing within itself a shrivelled thing no more deadly than a corpse. There were too many thoughts in his head, con-flirting and battering one another. A Brownian motion of consequence and consideration, fighting for dominance.

Weary with confusion, exhaustion hanging from every muscle and bone, Kais slumped into the one remaining drop pod and stabbed at the launch trigger.

He slept the whole way down.