The tundra was a graveyard of banners.
Xarcarion standards, once rigid and proud, jutted at wrong angles from wind-scoured snowdrifts, their gold chained sunbursts smeared in ash and blood.
The pennants snapped and stuttered in the iron wind, stitched emblems twitching like wounded things. Drifts swallowed bootprints. Corpses glazed over in a rim of rime. The air tasted of iron and powder and the mineral bite of shattered stone.
Beastmen surged between fallen colors, horns down, tusks wet, hooves crunching through frozen ribs. Their axes rose and fell in a rhythm older than language. Every impact sent up petals of red on white.
—
Kochav moved through it like a blade pulled slow from a scabbard.
His revolver barked and flashed, each shot a clean, hard syllable that punched daylight through visors. His dagger's edge sketched quick arcs, neat as calligraphy, finishing sentences those rounds had begun.
His left hand—the cursed hand—spooled with jittering light, violet threads crawling like veins across shimmering blue, telekinetic pressure popping breastplates, crumpling carapace, folding men inward.
Where he passed, bodies lay precisely wrong—folded, divided, unmade, like stalks cropped by a relentless scythe.
—
Above the din, Mira moved without a word.
Her gauntlets met armor and made it into powder. A helmet kissed her fist and came away as two misshapen halves.
She stepped through men like a tide moving through reeds, not hesitating to watch anything fall.
Silence clung to her like a mantle; the beastmen roared more loudly because she did not. Their frenzy bent around her into something near to discipline.
—
The line buckled. The retreat unraveled.
Xarcarion troopers, who had started in order, now broke by squads and clumps and frightened pairs. Sunbursts dipped. A few dropped packs to run faster. The hauling servitors—white with frost and grease—trundled dumbly through the rout with crates of ammunition, and then toppled when an axe found a hydraulic line and turned it into a fountain.
Kochav pressed forward. Steam curled from his breath; it seemed to curl from his coat as well, heat bleeding off his skin where sweat met air that wanted to devour it. The snow under his boots took the red and held it, flushing like a bruise.
—
Then,
the noise bled away.
Not silence. It was something like distance sound, caught and swallowed by unseen walls.
His own breath came back at him louder than screams; his pulse throttled the world into a metronome.
The ward above his stump stung as if a brand pressed fresh to flesh. A whisper probed the wound, soft as oil poured over steel.
The field tilts, it murmured, crytic and forshadowing.
"Another comes. Bone and blood. Rage unchained."
—
Kochav's stride stuttered. Vision quivered, foresight shearing into splinters: red threads braided into knots he could not tease apart.
Future-images hooked and flashed, horns wet with spray, a spine uncoiling like a whip, a heartbeat in his chest that was not his own.
He lifted his head and found the answer with his ears.
CRACK—
A tree split as neatly as a ribcage. Its trunk scattered into explosive splinters; a sheet of snow went up like dust and fell back in glitter.
Even the beastmen flinched. Even the dying looked over.
—
When the white settled, a figure stepped through the ruin.
Jaeger.
He was too tall by half and the height took all the wrong places : forearms knotted like cable, shoulders jagged with bone like guards. Crimson flesh steamed each time a snowflake kissed it, vapor curling from him in slow veils.
Horns had erupted from his brow in a tangle that made no sense and yet fit the skull like a crown forged by malice. Black nails had grown into hooked talons.
—
Around him the world held its breath.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The heartbeat arrived as pressure, as instruction.
It matched Kochav's pulse a tick late, then exact, then forced his chest to rise and fall on a schedule not his own.
—
A second whisper, closer, colder.
"Khornate…"
came the daemon's breath behind his teeth, surprised in a way that read like delight.
—
A tree beside Jaeger disintegrated under his grip, crushed to splinters.
Sawdust fell around him like a fine brown snow.
He looked across the killing-field and found Kochav without searching.
Two haunted beings, one line of sight. Everything between them—a storm.
—
Kochav stood high on the jagged rise he'd torn from the earth earlier—a crown of broken stone jutting from the tundra like fangs. His revolver smoked. His cursed palm pulsed.
Below, the rout became churn; above, wind combed the ridges like a rake through iron filings.
Something moved. Not a charge. A step through.
—
The air where Jaeger had been became empty and the space in front of the retreating line became him, crimson and wrong. Bone-blades jutted from his forearms. They hummed a note Kochav felt in his fillings.
Men started dying left and right.
Bodies jerked sideways, torsos gone where a blade had been a moment earlier. A soldier turned to shout and found his chest separate from his spine with a sound like a sigh.
Blood slashed the snow and steamed where it lay. Screams began and stopped halfway with ugly wet endings.
Ten seconds came thirty dead. Panic combusted. The neat geometry of retreat collapsed into a sprawl of elbows and knees and dropped guns.
The cursed eye in Kochav's palm throbbed, an old recognition pressing into flesh.
"Another Daemon..."
—
The red mouth grinned, splitting into too many teeth.
"The coward's puppet," he said,
voice doubled—his and another tasting the words behind him.
—
Between the echo and the wind there was an instant of sheer, surgical quiet, as if the tundra had leaned in, to hear their first strike.
It landed like a storm.
Psychic force flung sideways; bone and blood met it like a spear into surf.
The snow went up in sheets; trees leaned; bodies lifted clean away and fell like bags of wet cloth. The ridge cracked under the insult.
Beastmen and humans alike were caught by the edges of power and ruined. A beastman howled as his ribs folded; a lapis soldier pinwheeled in the air and came down minus his helm and the piece of his head that had occupied it.
—
Mira, at the periphery of the blast, pivoted smooth and quick. She reached down and tore an arm free where it barely clung to a beastman's torso. The limb trailed a glittering arc of red like a comet tail as she hurled it inward.
—
Thud..
It struck Jaeger's flank with a low smack that would have felled a normal thing. He staggered a step, more from surprise than pain.
"The silence spoils the song,"
hissed the Khornate Daemon inside him, displeasure like metal headache.
—
Kochav did not waste the opening. The cursed hand flared, blue forced to eat a strip of violet and make something brighter. He came on fast. Momentum shredded the world into segments.
WHIP!
Jaeger's forearm blade carved, the strike wrapping the air around its edge like a coat.
—
Kochav brought up a wall of stone without breaking stride, the ground heaving as if his will had grasped its spine and twisted.
CRACK!
The blow hit with a mountain sound. Cracks ran wild. Blood bled through Kochav's palm as if the power had decided to toll with a tithe.
"Leash," Jaeger said, not to Kochav but about him.
Laughter sat in the back of the word like a passenger. "Break."
—
"Says the one with a tight collar" Kochav answered, and the word left frost on his lips.
—
BANG!
He fired.
Psychic rounds hammered from the revolver's cylinder, cerulean meteors with teeth.
The crimson thing met them with a forest of bone that grew where there had been none, spurs and plates shedding sparks of bloodfire when projectiles shattered.
—
Jaeger dragged a spine-blade through the snow; the snow became froth; the froth became red.
Kochav did not let the distance vanish-
They touched only with force, with tools, with will. Each contact unmade more of the valley.
—
Mira moved like a blade caught in a river of bodies.
The crush pressed in. Bodies surged on all sides—horns, tusks, plates of iron, blood-slick blades.
To any other, it was suffocation.
To Mira, it was only arithmetic.
—
A helmet turned toward her. She saw its crack, the weak seam at the jaw.
Her fist moved once, and the head folded sideways.
She did not watch it fall. She had already marked the next.
A hoof hammered down, wide as her chest.
She shifted half a step; the hoof found another man's spine instead.
An elbow rose beside her cheek—she broke it against her gauntlet and stepped past.
Every breath was controlled. Every strike precise.
The weight of bodies pressed at her ribs, but inside she was still.
The world narrowed to corridors between flesh and steel, and she walked them with purpose.
Through the brief gaps, her gaze flickered forward:Kochav, a shard of blue coat on his jagged ridge.
The other being, steaming, bone swirling like a storm around him.
She pressed harder. The crowd buckled, shifted with her as if the mass itself was being persuaded.
A man croaked nearby, visor shattered, eyes wide with a recognition he should not have had.
—
"...Merc?" croaked a Xarcarion nearby, visor spiderwebbed, disbelief shaking his voice.
He stared toward the crimson figure through the snow. Recognition mixed with horror.
A bone shard ended the question, punching through his throat, pinning him to the ice like a specimen.
—
The beastmen roared numbers instead.
"Seven!" bellowed one, tusks gleaming.
"Ten more for her hand!" another howled, his spear soaked red.
The blood tally rose around her like a competition.
"You got enough for-" another responded but cut short by unseen bullet.
—
She ignored them. She was not here for their games. Her hands spoke clearer than any roar.
The duel above she could no longer see. That did not matter.
Each step was clarity. Each motion was purpose.
Mira would not be buried here.
—
Up on the broken crown, Kochav's thoughts snagged where the word 'Merc' had landed.
A thread, a tie? Xarcarion connected to that red thing?
He snapped back to the fight, eyes sweeping for the red-handed monster— And froze. Jaeger was gone.
The battlefield heaved and churned around him, the tide of beastmen and retreating Xarcarions surging like waves in a storm, but the khorne-red figure had vanished into the haze of snow and blood.
Kochav spat, the taste of iron sharp on his tongue, and raised his blade again.
Questions could wait. Survival could not.
The tide of Xarcarion troops pressed harder, their retreat turning desperate as beastmen surged from all sides.
—
Kochav's breath came sharp, his dagger flashing and cursed hand tearing men apart, but for every one that fell, two more pushed forward.
He was slipping. Out of pace, out of rhythm.
The whispers hissed in his skull, Divinity warning clashing with the daemon's hints, splitting his focus when he needed it most.
That's when the air split. Something red cut through the chaos.
The bone blade struck like lightning, raking across his shoulder. The edge carved deep, through bodyglove and flesh alike, hot blood spraying across the snow.
Kochav staggered back, teeth bared, the voices shrieking over one another inside his skull.
His grip faltered, his stance broken—
WHAMP!
A boot stamped into his chest with confident contempt.
The ground came up hard. Stone cracked under him with a satisfying, wrong sound; his vision sparkled coins at the edges. Voices came loud, too loud—foresight warning and the daemon's urging jarred together like bad teeth.
—
Snow hissed under Jaeger's boots as he bore down, the bone blade dripping with Kochav's blood. His crimson skin glowed faintly under the grey sky, horns casting jagged shadows.
the shadow of jagged edge leveled at Kochav's throat.
"Predict this," voice low and guttural, every syllable thick with venom.
—
SWOOSH!
The blade lunged down.
Kochav's eyes narrowed, the world bending around him.
For a moment, the noise of battle dimmed, leaving only a single voice whispering through his skull, sharp, urgent, impossible to ignore:
"Move."
—
WHOOSH!
The bone blade split only empty snow.
Kochav's form blurred, displaced by raw psychic force. He reappeared several paces aside, shoulder still bleeding but alive, breath ragged, dagger raised, cursed hand smoldering.
"That's new.." He muttered at his new found ability.
—
Jaeger's strike carved a gouge into the rock instead, snow bursting upward in a spray of shards and gore from an unfortunate Xarcarion soldier caught in the arc.
The Khornate warrior turned, lips peeling back into a grin, his blade slick with both blood and stone dust.
—
Jaeger lunged again, the blade screaming through the air, jagged edge crackling with the daemon's hunger.
Kochav met the strike head-on. His cursed hand snapped up, palm outstretched.
The bone cut should have gone through muscle and pinned him to his own ridge.
—
Instead,
The blade sank into it, only to pass through as if striking smoke.
The warped flesh shimmered, phasing in and out of reality.
Kochav's fingers closed like a vice.
The cursed hand locked around the bone blade, gripping the impossible.
His teeth clenched.
"Now."
—
BOOM!
A force explosion detonated from his palm, raw psychic might roaring outward.
The blast shattered the weapon's form, exploding Jaeger's entire hand into a rain of flesh, bone, and blood.
The ground trembled. The shockwave hurled corpses aside like dolls.
But Jaeger did not flinch. His red-streaked face pulled into a grimace that was closer to amusement than pain.
—
He drove his stump down into the chest of a nearby fallen man like a beast rooting into meat.
The body twitched and poured its inside out over Jaeger's arm. The crimson soaked into him, hissing as it vanished into his flesh.
When his arm came up the hand was back. New, glossy, flexing.
—
He took something with it: a spine,
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop....Pop.
one vertebrae at a time, each popping wetly in private little detonations.
The chain of bone came out like a magician's rope, longer than there had been room for, longer than the man that had owned it.
Blood trickled along the groove where marrow had been and stiffened into serrations.
Jaeger rolled his wrist, the chain clattering once, eager. His grin split wider, eyes glowing with bloodlust.
"Dodge," he said.
—
He didn't throw it. He spun it and It sang the way a saw sings.
It drew a letter across the line of retreat and erased anything that had been written there. A trooper separated into halves so clean the steam lines matched; a beastman lost a head and an arm and continued two more paces before his legs thought better.
The ground itself shuddered with each swing, as though the land recoiled from the carnage.
Blood and viscera rained down in steaming torrents. Some of it hissed as it struck Kochav's shoulder, boiling on contact with his cursed flesh.
He grit his teeth, the stench of cooked blood clawing at his throat.
Then—
BOOM.
The chain snapped taut. The bodies it had shredded detonated all at once, exploding into a storm of gore.
The shockwave hit like a hammer.
Kochav was hurled back, tumbling across the churned snow before slamming against a jagged outcrop of rock.
The impact rattled his ribs, sparks bursting across his vision.
For a heartbeat, silence pressed in — then Kochav spat blood, his voice low, contemptuous:
"...Annoying."
—
The impact ripped bodies apart and flung them aside like ragdolls.
For a moment, it cleared a path.
Mira surged forward through the carnage, her boots hammering into blood-slick snow.
Her eyes locked on the clash ahead — Kochav and Jaeger, monsters among slaughter.
Then—
A riderless hound burst from the haze, its slavering jaws snapping wild, foam and gore dripping from its maw. It crashed into her before she could brace.
The impact slammed her sideways, hurling her into the press of beastmen.
She staggered, shoulders screaming, but rough hands caught her before she fell.
One tusked warrior shoved the beast back with a crude spear, snarling, while another raised a jagged axe over her head, fending off a lunging Xarcarion trooper.
Mira pulled herself upright, silent, her gauntlets still crackling faintly with blood.
The beastmen ringed her, bellowing as they cut down anything that drew too close, shielding their Queen.
She lifted her head, scanning the chaos. The ridge was a storm of movement, a blur of tusks, steel, and fire. She searched for Kochav, for Jaeger's crimson shadow—
Then it came.
THOOM!
Jaeger swung his new-forged chain, vertebrae clattering like teeth.
The weapon carved a bloody crescent, shearing through men and beast alike. Every severed body, every spill of blood hissed as it hit the snow— then detonated in a boiling spray of gore.
The blast hurled Mira back, bodies collapsing across her path, beastmen scrambling to their feet. She clenched her jaw, forcing through the ringing in her ears—
But before the echo even faded, another burst struck.
WHOOM!
Kochav's cursed hand slammed into the jagged earth, psychic energy crackling outward in a violent wave. The ground split and spat shards of stone like shrapnel.
—
"Damn it, are they just gonna play by themselves?"
She accidentally muttered to herself, but it was audible enough for a nearby beastman.
—
".....Did you just speak, my queen?" the beastman asked, his face was a mixed of surprised and suspicion.
—
Mira quickly shook her head in denial.
"Everyone The Queen just—" before he could finish, a fist slammed into his jaw, breaking his face.
—
Mira quickly looked around for any witnesses, found none then quickly moved.
—
Back to the stage.
Jaeger staggered a step, the raw force driving him back, though his grin only widened in the haze. The two detonations rolled over each other like colliding storms.
Snow, dirt, and blood rained down in sheets. Beastmen and Xarcarions alike screamed, scrambling to survive in the chaos between the monsters.
—
Mira pushed forward, teeth bared, blood slicking her gauntlets.
Her eyes locked on the clash ahead, two predators circling, their fury reshaping the battlefield itself. And still, between them, more bodies fell.
—
The battlefield had fallen eerily still around them, save for the drip of gore.
Jaeger rolled his shoulders like a man limbering for a lift. The chain slithered up his back with the fondness of a pet.
With a sickening crunch, it fused into his own spine. His flesh split to welcome it, crimson running down the ridges as the vertebrae stretched and reformed.
From his back, jagged spines jutted outward, writhing until they snapped together into a long, segmented tail of bone. It flexed with a precision that read like habit, as if this had always been where the story intended to go.
Jaeger's grin widened.
Then-
SWOOSH!
The bone-tail lashed forward with whip-like speed.
Mid-flight a shard split from the tip—a tooth from a smile—and arrowed for Kochav's eye.
—
Kochav twisted, fast—but not fast enough.
The shard ripped across his cheek, a line of blood opening beneath his eye.
"Even with...multiple layers of foresight..." The whispers hissed,
"Just end him!"
—Kochav spat blood, jaw clenched.
"I have been fine without your stupid help, and I will continue to do so."
—
The heat of it stung. His jaw tightened as he steadied his stance, cursed hand glowing faintly.
For a heartbeat, they only stared at one another through the haze of smoke and snow.
One bleeding, the other grinning with fresh-born malice.
Then the tail coiled back for another strike.
Kochav braced for another shard to snap loose from the bone-tail—his cursed hand already raised to catch it.
—
The tail snapped forward, the whole length of vertebrae shooting like a spear.
Kochav barely twisted aside, the point slamming into the frozen ground with a thunderous crack, shards of ice and dirt exploding into the air.
Before Kochav could even look back, the tail coiled. Vertebrae bit through coat, through skin.
"—Tch!" Kochav hissed, his breath forced from his lungs.
His cursed hand glowed, but the crushing pull was faster.
—
The coil tightened and gravity became a toy between Jaeger's hands.
With a violent heave, Jaeger dragged him down.
—
Kochav slammed into the snow and rock, his back scraping across the frozen earth as the tail reeled him in like a hooked beast.
The world lurched, the cold air whipping past his face until Jaeger's looming silhouette filled his vision, red and black against the snowstorm.
The Khornate's teeth gleamed through his grin as he hauled Kochav closer, bones grinding with the sound of chains rattling.
"You're mine now," Jaeger growled, voice like gravel drowned in blood.
—
Jaeger roared, and the bone-tail tightened its hold. With a savage swing, he hurled Kochav bodily through the melee.
The Apex smashed into a knot of Xarcarions—bone and steel alike shattered on impact, blood misting the air as men were torn apart.
Before the corpses had even hit the ground, Jaeger whipped him around again, this time through a cluster of beastmen.
The impact burst them like overripe fruit, tusks and horns scattering into the snow.
—
The whispers screamed in Kochav's skull—a dozen voices layered over one another, complain, command.
"Weak!"
"Explosion!"
"You'll die here."
"Shield"
—
Kochav grit his teeth, blood dripping from his lips. His vision blurred red and violet, rage surging against the pull of voices clawing through his mind.
"Fucking backseaters" he snarled aloud, voice raw, eyes burning.
"Either fight with me… or shut your damn mouths.'"
—
The voices faltered, hissing with amusement.
Kochav's body struck the tundra in a storm of splintered ice, but a faint shimmer of his psychic shield blunted the worst of it.
WHAM!
A tree toppled with the next throw, its trunk split in two as Kochav's body plowed through it.
CRASH!
Another slam against frozen rock, the shield flaring brighter but weaker each time.
THUM!
Again. Again. Each impact echoed across the battlefield, his barrier groaning with strain, cracking like glass under a hammer.
"You....A weapon...Refusing a hand." The Daemon whispered.
—
Kochav's ribs screamed, his barrier flaring weakly. He forced a grin through the blood.
"Yes, quite Literally."
—
By the fifth slam, the shield flickered out altogether, gone, extinguished.
Jaeger did not stop. He slammed Kochav into the ice a few more times, for certainty, each impact thunderous, cratering the ground deeper.
Finally,
he yanked him up by the tail's grip, dragging him close until their faces nearly touched.
Jaeger's breath steamed in the frozen air, hot and metallic, stinking of blood. His crimson flesh steamed in the cold, veins crawling like molten iron beneath skin.
He tilted his head, lips peeling back in a grin that was half-man, half-daemon.
"Now," he rumbled, voice shaking with the daemon's echo,
"let's see what breaks first, the puppet… or his chains."
—
Kochav spat blood, his head lolling before he slowly lifted it again.
His face was a crimson mask, one eye swollen shut, the other pulsing with a furious blue light.
"That…" he rasped, grinning despite the blood running down his chin,
"…was the worst roller-coaster I've ever ridden."
The grin widened as his cursed hand twitched, sparks of blue and violet flaring.
From between the gaps of Jaeger's bone-tail, light pierced through—a frantic, flickering radiance, humming like a chorus of blades being drawn.
"Boom..." Kochav mouthed.
—
Before Jaeger could react—
BOOM!
The coil around him detonated—bone turned to shrapnel by pressure and disdain.
But it didn't stop there. One by one, vertebrae along the tail ruptured in a chain reaction, each blast louder, brighter, tearing its way back toward the source.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The final explosion ripped through Jaeger's back. Flesh, muscle, and bone burst apart in a thunderclap, Jaeger came apart along that line.
He hit face-down with a grunt, a spray of red steam haloing his head. The back of him lacked a thing backs need, 'Spine'.
Blood made small lakes that froze at the edges as they breathed.
Kochav rose, blood steaming on his skin in the freezing air. He wiped his mouth, then straightened, each step forward leaving melted pits in the snow.
He lifted his left arm, it writhed with light.
The revolver phased into his palm as if hand and gun had reconsidered their boundaries.
Above it,
bone remembered a different lesson and formed a barrel, a smooth, obscene extrusion seated along the bridge of his scaled knuckle.
Two muzzles—one steel, one warped-flesh.
Two pulses—one disciplined blue, one sullen violet.
They coiled around each other like snakes trapped in a jar, fighting, amplifying, forcing the air to crumple and sag around their argument.
—
The tundra itself seemed to bow. Pebbles lifted and spun. Blood from corpses nearby ran in thin streams toward his feet, sizzling as it touched the aura.
Kochav's eyes pulsed to match, blue and violet flashing in rhythm.
His facial expression was flat and exhausted.
The voices surged again, laughing.
"Yes. Kill him. Show him fate. Show them what you are!"
—
Kochav's hand trembled, blue and violet light twisting together.
"I have done all the works, you are not getting a single credit."
—
He leveled both at Jaeger. The air warped as the charge built—snow melted to water, then hissed into steam.
"Now, drop dead, motherf—"
But before he could pull the triggers, movement flickered.
Jaeger had rolled half onto one hip and his hand had found a string of intestine that looped away into a torso no longer consultable.
He yanked it like a bell rope, connecting thing to thing.
"Aw, come on," Kochav said, exasperation slicing into the chant, and then the world went white.
VOOMPH...VINZZZ.
The blast blossomed from Jaeger in a crown—every scrap of fresh blood in radius flared and turned into shock and noise.
The wave got under Kochav and picked him up clean.
For one ridiculous moment he had the sense of being a leaf. The ground rose to disagree.
—
He would have slid a long way if someone had not been there to steal his momentum and hand it to the earth.
It was Mira, her shoulder hit his ribs with a sound his ribs complained about. She let the force run through her and into the snow with the economy of a master. The beastmen around them clapped axes together and shouted, the sound a wall against the wave.
Heat and powder hazed the air. Blood steamed into red mist. Snow became paste.
—
Through the veil, two lights hung like eyes, a matched pair of coals glowing in a furnace that had learned how to stare.
Then the symbol bled into focus behind the silhouette of a man that had been unmade and remade.
an eight-pointed wound, the mark of a god that did not care.
The Khornate rune burned like an answer written in someone else's blood.