The throne room was a theater of the profane, and its master, the Daemon Prince Vorlag, had just announced the premiere of his masterwork. With a grand, theatrical gesture, he plunged the femur-ladle into his cauldron and lifted it high. A thick, iridescent slurry of unimaginable filth dripped from it.
"Breathe deep, my children!" his voice boomed with paternal joy. "And receive the Grandfather's newest, most beautiful blessing! The Weeping Blossom!"
He flung the contents of the ladle into the air. The slurry did not fall. It burst into a cloud of shimmering, multi-colored spores that began to drift lazily through the chamber. They were beautiful, like a snowfall of pulverized opals, and they carried a scent of sweet, cloying decay, like flowers rotting in a damp cellar.
"Seal your helms! Purge your air recyclers!" Captain Arken's command was a clipped, urgent roar. "Do not let that foulness touch you!"
The Deathwatch marines' armor systems went into overdrive, their suit-spirits chanting warnings of extreme biological and memetic hazards. But this was no mere physical disease. As the spores drifted closer, a feeling of blissful, euphoric despair began to seep into their minds. It was the desire to simply stop, to lay down their weapons, to feel the gentle, warm embrace of decay, to see the beauty in their own flesh sloughing from their bones.
"It is… beautiful…" one of the Astartes whispered, his bolter lowering slightly.
"Brother, fight it!" Arken snarled, his own will a bastion of iron. "It is a lie of the soul!"
Rimuru watched the spores drift towards him. He could feel the gentle, persuasive psychic song they carried. It was a lullaby of entropy.
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"Insidious, yes," Rimuru murmured. "But not very polite to deploy against guests."
He raised Soulcleaver, not to attack, but holding it before him like a torch in the darkness. He released a gentle, controlled pulse of his own aura through the blade. A wave of invisible, orderly energy radiated outwards, creating a perfect sphere of purity around his team.
As the beautiful, deadly spores drifted into this sphere, their color faded. Their psychic song was silenced. They turned to simple, harmless grey dust and fell inert to the floor.
Vorlag watched, his joyful smile faltering for the first time. His masterpiece, his symphony of sickness, had been rendered mute and inert. "Oh, my," he said, his voice a low, gurgling sound of genuine surprise. "You are not just clean. You are the silence where the music should be. How rude. How utterly fascinating!"
With a speed that defied his immense, bloated form, he rose from his throne and seized his great Manreaper scythe. "If you will not appreciate my art," he chortled, "then you shall become a part of my garden!"
He charged, and the duel for the soul of Helios Prime began.
Vorlag was a surprisingly graceful combatant, his scythe swinging in wide, inexorable arcs that seemed to follow the very currents of fate and decay. Each swing left a trail of corrosion in the air itself. The Deathwatch opened fire, but their bolter shells vanished into the daemon's hide as if swallowed by a swamp, their only effect to make the Nurglings clinging to his flesh giggle with delight.
Rimuru met the charge head-on. Soulcleaver, light and pure, clashed against the massive, filth-encrusted Manreaper. Where the blades met, a sizzle of competing concepts filled the air. Vorlag's blade, a weapon of pure entropy, found its power being negated, its corrupting rust flaking away to reveal clean steel beneath Rimuru's perfect defense.
"Incredible!" Vorlag roared with laughter, even as he was forced back a step. "You do not just resist the Grandfather's gifts, you unmake them! What a wondrous plaything you are!"
He stamped his foot, and the stagnant lake of filth around his throne churned. Great, grasping tentacles of sludge and bone erupted, lashing out at the Deathwatch. Arken and his men moved with perfect discipline, their power weapons cleaving through the tentacles while their bolters kept the swarms of lesser daemons at bay.
The duel at the center was a battle of philosophies. Vorlag's every attack was an attempt to bestow a blessing, to share his joyful decay. Rimuru's every parry was a quiet, firm, and absolute rejection of that gift.
"Why do you struggle so?" the Daemon Prince gurgled, their blades locked. "All things crumble. All flesh fails. All stars die. I am merely the celebration of this great, final truth! Why do you cling so desperately to a temporary state of order?"
"Because that temporary state," Rimuru replied, his golden eyes filled with a cold, hard light, "is what we call 'life'. And it is a king's duty to protect it."
He knew he could not win by defense alone. Vorlag's connection to Nurgle and the corrupted world gave him limitless reserves of power and regeneration. He had to sever that connection.
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Rimuru broke the stalemate, a burst of Black Lightning erupting from his free hand to momentarily stun the Daemon Prince. In that instant of hesitation, Rimuru moved. He blurred past the daemon's guard, his form appearing directly before the Prince's bloated chest.
He thrust Soulcleaver forward.
The blade sank to the hilt, its entry silent and clean.
A look of profound, utter shock crossed Vorlag's face. The laughter died in his throat. He looked down at the pure, silver blade embedded in his being. It did not hurt. It felt… empty.
A light, brilliant and silver-white, erupted from the wound. It was not the light of fire or energy, but the light of purification, of order, of a concept utterly antithetical to his existence.
"The… blessings…" Vorlag stammered, his voice losing its booming confidence. For the first time, he sounded like the man he once was. "They are being… cleansed. The rot… is receding. Grandfather… I… I cannot feel you."
The silver light spread through his veins like a counter-plague. His bloated, diseased form began to wither and shrink. The grotesque horns receded. The corrupted armor flaked away into dust. For a fleeting, tragic moment, the image of a proud, sad-eyed Astartes Captain in the grey armor of the Death Guard appeared, his face a mask of horrified clarity.
"It is… so… quiet…" he whispered, his soul seeing itself for the first time in ten millennia.
Then, with a final, silent sigh, his form, both daemonic and mortal, dissolved completely. He did not explode. He unraveled, his being turned into a cascade of pure, white motes of light that ascended and then vanished, leaving absolutely nothing behind.
A deep, profound silence fell over the throne room. The psychic pressure that had suffocated the planet was gone. The great bell tolled one last, final time, and then cracked, its ringing forever silenced.
Rimuru withdrew his sword, its blade as pristine as the moment it was forged.
As the last echo of the bell faded, a deep, groaning tremor shook the entire citadel. The fleshy walls began to turn grey and crumble to dust. The pillars of bone cracked and collapsed. The stagnant lake of filth evaporated into a foul-smelling steam. The citadel, an extension of the Daemon Prince's will, was dying with its master.
Great chunks of the ceiling began to fall.
"The daemon is dead!" Captain Arken's voice roared, cutting through the awe of his men. "The lair is collapsing! We need to get out of here, now!"