The air on Helios Prime was a tangible thing. It was a thick, soupy haze of green and brown that tasted of rot and despair, and it carried the incessant, buzzing drone of a billion corpse-flies. Before the small band of seven warriors on the assault ramp, the ground itself seemed to writhe, a carpet of fleshy, pulsating moss and quivering fungi.
And the horde was coming.
At first, it was a distant, moaning wave on the horizon. Then, the wave crested a diseased hillock and became a tide. Thousands, then tens of thousands of them. The Plague Zombies of Helios Prime. They were the former populace of this world, their bodies bloated and twisted by Nurgle's blessings, their skin split with weeping sores and unnatural growths. They shambled forward with a relentless, single-minded purpose, their heads lolling on their necks, their mouths agape in a silent chorus of eternal misery.
"Contact imminent," Captain Arken's voice was a slab of granite in the buzzing air. "Kill Team, firing line. Executioner protocol. Conserve ammunition. Let them feel the Emperor's fury."
The five Deathwatch veterans formed a perfect semi-circle around the base of the ramp, their black armor a stark line of order against the world's decay. They raised their bolters, the red targeting lenses of their helmets cutting through the gloom. They were a living fortress, an island of Imperial defiance in an ocean of filth.
The horde shambled into range.
"Engage," Arken commanded.
The storm bolters roared to life, not in a panicked spray, but in a disciplined, rhythmic series of controlled bursts. Each explosive shell found its mark, detonating a zombie's head or blowing a torso apart in a spray of gore and diseased fluid. The front rank of the horde was annihilated, but the tide did not stop. The bodies behind simply shambled over the fallen, their numbers seemingly infinite.
It was a grim, grinding, and utterly merciless battle. The Deathwatch were perfection in motion. They fired, reloaded, and fired again, each action precise and economical. When a few of the faster zombies broke through the firing line, a power sword would flash or a combat knife would strike, severing a head or a limb. They were holding the line, but it was a line against the ocean itself. For every ten they killed, a hundred more took their place.
Rimuru stood at the top of the ramp, watching the scene with a calm, analytical eye. He did not intervene at first. He observed the Astartes, respecting their martial prowess and their unwavering courage in the face of such a hopeless, disgusting foe. But he also saw the futility of it.
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"They're killing the puppets," Rimuru murmured to himself. "Not the puppet master."
He saw a bolter shell obliterate a zombie, only for its severed, crawling torso to continue dragging itself forward, its guts spilling onto the pulsating moss. He saw the sheer, grinding fatigue that would inevitably set in. This was Nurgle's way of war: not a glorious charge, but a slow, inevitable drowning in filth and despair.
He decided the lesson was over.
He walked down the ramp, his new sword, Soulcleaver, held loosely in one hand. The Deathwatch, seeing him move, did not question him. They simply adjusted their firing lines to give him space.
Rimuru stopped at the very edge of the battle, the moaning tide of the damned just meters away from him. He took a breath, not of the foul air, but of the clean, orderly energy within himself. He raised Soulcleaver, its silvery-white blade seeming to drink in the sickly green light of the sky, remaining utterly pure and unstained.
He did not swing. He simply channeled his will into the blade. A wave of pure, silver-white light, silent and gentle, erupted from the sword. It was not an explosion; it was a release. It passed through the first rank of zombies, then the next, and the next, spreading through the entire horde with the speed of thought.
The effect was not violent. It was profoundly, eerily silent.
The incessant, groaning moan of the horde ceased instantly.
The shambling, relentless advance stopped. Every single Plague Zombie, from the ones about to be struck by a chainsword to those still cresting the hills a kilometer away, simply… collapsed. Like marionettes whose strings had all been simultaneously cut, they fell limp to the ground, their bodies slumping into inert, lifeless piles of rotting flesh.
Rimuru's single, conceptual attack had not harmed their bodies. It had simply severed the daemonic link, the Warp-energy that gave them their unholy life. He had performed a planetary-scale exorcism with a single pulse of his sword.
The Deathwatch marines slowly lowered their bolters, the sudden silence more shocking than the previous din of battle. They stared out at the field of tens of thousands of collapsed, now-truly-dead corpses. The endless, grinding tide had been stopped in a single, silent moment.
"All hostile life-signs… neutralized," one of the Astartes stammered over the vox, his awe palpable.
Suddenly, the corrupted ground began to tremble. A deep, wet, gurgling laughter echoed from a nearby river of sludge, a sound so full of joyous foulness that it made the very air curdle. The riverbed churned and swelled, and from its depths, a truly monstrous being began to rise.
It was a mountain of bloated, diseased flesh, a being of immense corpulence and power. Its skin was a patchwork of greens and browns, split with weeping sores from which lesser daemons, the Nurglings, giggled and spilled forth. It had a single, cyclopean eye brimming with a disgusting, fatherly affection, and a great, grinning mouth. In one massive, rotting hand, it dragged a rusted, plague-encrusted cleaver the size of a tank.
It was a Great Unclean One, a Greater Daemon of Nurgle, a fragment of the Plague God himself.
The daemon's gaze swept over the field of inert corpses, a look of mild disappointment on its face. Then, its single, massive eye fixed on the small, clean figure standing before them all, the source of the intolerable purity.
The Great Unclean One's grin widened, a terrible, joyous sight. Its voice boomed across the battlefield, a wet, gargling sound that was somehow both threatening and cheerful.
"A tiny, clean thing! Oh, what a wondrous new specimen!" the daemon chortled, taking a lumbering step forward that shook the very ground. "So bright and shiny! Grandfather Nurgle has sent you to me! A new friend to bless with his most bountiful gifts! Come, little one! Let Papa G'hul'gor give you a nice, warm, pustulent hug!"