The tunnel fighting was going to be brutal. That much had been clear when Ophidian had laid out her plan to retake massive sweeps of territory and to crush the cultists between the treads of their tanks and the orbital supremacy of the Thedesian Defense Front. The issue, of course, as far as Hatoshi could tell, was that half of the cult didn't
want to even cede the sky to the mortal nobility. Personally, he thought the differneces and squabbling between the two factions was...something for someone else to deal with.
Hatoshi felt a deep, deep sense of dissatisfaction within his chest, where his hearts thumped quietly. When this mighty battle against the Tyrannids had begun, everything had been simple and easy - but then piece by piece, everything he had cared about in this corner of the galaxy had been sliced away from him by fate. His brothers, blown to pieces in the desperate battles overhead, his comrades left to die in the acid gulches, and even the Marines Malevolent had been snipped away. The Interrogator had been kidnapped...and if the Adeptus Mechanicus were to be believed...
Changed.
The world of Thedias had gone from a playground to a prison, so subtly he had barely noticed it until he realized something.
He had no choice. Ophidian's orders were to send him into tunnel systems with Gaius, and for the two of them to completely disarray the cultic forces there, while the genestealer purestrains were still tied down in trying to protect their landcrawler. They were reinforced by maniples of skitarii, and the intelligence they had on the tunnels was outstandingly good. Even so, Ophidian had warned him with stern, fierce lectures about the dangers of psykers and over confidence.
Hatoshi had no confidence left to be over. He had simple grim, resolute focus. Kill, until the killing was done. And hope...
Hope that afterwards, he might return to the plains of Chogoris. He might ride the horned horses that they still kept there, bred to be large enough to be a steed for even such as he. He might feel the wind blowing through his hair, and be able to think of something more than the moment.
He checked his bolter, his thermals, and then nodded to the Skitarii flanking him as they advanced through the tunnel network. He swung his bolter left, and right - and spotted movement immediately, hidden behind a thin sheeting of metal. He fired without slowing, the bolt-shell punching a shiny, cherry red hole in the metal. A bloom of red and black blood exploded behind the panel, and lasgun fire and stubber rounds started to ping off his armor. He moved himself between the incoming weaponry and the skitarii, who immediately set up position and shot past him with their longlas, their shots winging past him so close that they nearly clipped his armor. THe lasguns peppering him slowed as he charged, then threw a grenade into the hardpoint before the cultists within could recover.
That was how it went - room after room, tunnel after tunnel, cleared and breached and smashed through. His gauntlets got blood on them, and his bolt rounds ran low until a Skitarri servant rushed him another set of magazines, which he slapped in with mechanical precision. But there was no joy in it - merely the brute slaughter of people in cloth, armed with scrap weapons.
Hatoshi, despite the muttered comments of his now dead comrades, was no fool. After the first hour, he knew something was wrong.
"We're being fooled with. Gaius, do you read anything unusual in these tunnels?" he asked.
"Mhm..." Gaius remained quiet for a few moments. He was separated from Hatoshi by several walls - but despite the fact that he was also wearing a helmet, Hatoshi swore he could tell that Gaius was pinching his lips together. "Strange readings. This way"
Hatoshi met with his battle brother and the two of them advanced down the tunnel - Hatoshi seeing that the advanced augers that Gaius held. They were warbling and crackling - and Hatoshi frowned. He was a warrior who bled xenos, but every space marine had been in the trenches against psykers long enough to recognize that kind of distortion. "Skitarii, stay back. There are witches this way. Follow up on us once we have engaged."
The binaric trilling responses followed after as the two space marines advanced into a circular chamber.
Gaius hesitated. "Is someone there?" he murmured.
There was. The
someone was a single witch there, one of the wildlings that had flocked to the cult's call when the war had started a month - the tattoos and the markings and the old null-implant scars that had been hastily removed by cultic ripperdocs. She knelt in the center of the room, her head tilted down, just...waiting for him to approach. Hatoshi gestured with one hand to Gaius, who nodded and stepped back, drawing his plasma pistol, readying it at his side while Hatoshi stepped forward, his boots thumping.
"Is this a trap, witch?" Hatoshi asked, his bolter aimed right at her chest. "If so...you've spent remarkably little for it. No purestrains, no mutants, just fodder."
The witch chuckled. She lifted her head and Hatoshi froze. The witch stood, throwing her robes aside, revealing...a woman that he knew. The Lady Yolanda smirked at him, her eyes smoldering and hungry, just as hungry as she had been after he had conquered her, in the carefree days before the Interrogator's...abduction. She stood before him with a confidence and poise that was utterly unlike the prim and proper matroness that he had seduced into bed - her body bare and naked in the warm heat of the tunnels. Her skin glittered with sweat and she brushed her hands through her hair as she stretched herself to her full height - still coming barely to his chest.
"This is a trick," Hatoshi rumbled, focusing - trying to close off his mind from the illusion. "And a poorly chosen one."
Yolanda laughed. Her finger touched his bolter and her eyes glittered.
"You think I'm a witchling's illusion?" she murmured, softly. "No. But this is."
Hatoshi blinked - and his bolter started to turn to sand in his hands, pouring between his fingers. His mouth opened slowly - his brow furrowing as Yolanda stepped closer. Her hand touched his chest and the armor around him sloughed and fell away, skidding and pealing around his muscles and his implant sockets like sand. He turned around.
"Gaius!"
Gaius was standing where he had left him. Moving was like surging through mud, his limbs pushing against the ruined slurry that was his armor. He strained hard - but he didn't know what was illusion anymore. What was real. His fingers broke free of his own gauntlet and he grabbed onto Giaus' collar, shaking the tech-marine. "Strange readings..." Gaius said, his voice sounding very, very far away. The helmet slowly tipped forward as Hatoshi shook him. It fell into Hatoshi's opened palms and sat there as Hatoshi saw that Gaius' armor was empty.
"Strange readings..." The voice echoed.
Then, softly.
"...is someone there?"
His suit spilled through Hatoshi's hands as it turned into sand as well. The whole room stretched and elongated - until Hatoshi was standing in an endlessly long corridor. And standing at the end of it, walking towards him with dreamlike slowness was Yolanda - but her body was impure now. Chitin ran in lines under and above her breasts, and her fingers were tipped with claws. Her flowing hair had turned from bright blond to pale white, and it blew in an etherial wind, revealing the ridges of her forehead. She started to advance on him as Hatoshi turned and started to run, his feet thumping strangely loudly as he realized he was naked and trapped - running down a corridor that never seemed to move.
"It's...painful, I know..."
Her voice was so close to his.
"There are so many layers of hypno-indoctrinated blocks. It's even more than-"
"Me?"
The other voice came close to his ear as he kept running. A clawed hand caressed his chest and the confident, warm voice of Shexia Af-Baru purred in his ear.
"You are a knot of pain, Hatoshi. Let us help you."
He kept running, his hearts hammering. He clung, desperately, to the memories of home - and felt a twisting sensation in his mind. A pair of intellects, focused on him. His hearts slowed, then stopped and he gasped as the Sus-an membrane within his skull throbbed and, in response to signals sent along his nerves that his body was undergoing catastrophic damage kicked him away from even this tenuous grasp on consciousness, then falling deeper, deeper into memories. Into dreams and hazy flashes of war and strife. Into distant memories of a world of green fields and vast plains, of azure seas, and noble steeds.
And the two minds chased after him - hounding him as he fell. They were merciless as often as they were gentle. Clawed hands on the back of his skull, making him watch again, when his scout platoon had led the way into the T'au freehold with two regiments of Imperial Guard for the 'clean up' afterwards. Shexi's voice was soft in his ear. "It hurts. BUt look at them
again. Look at what they are-"
Xenos.
Just xenos.
"That hasn't felt true to you for centuries, has it?" Yolanda whispered in his other ear. A finger caressed along his chest. He tumbled past an endless procession of distractions - feasts, hunting, and claiming the prizes. Reveling in what his brothers saw as nothing but a distraction - the seduction of a beautiful woman or three.
Entertainment.
Just entertainment.
"You can't fill a hole in your soul like that forever," Shexi said, before she chuckled. "Though, I suppose...it's why you lasted longer than I did..."
He was once more on the slab of stone and steel, surrounded by the acolytes. He still ached - and...funny. He could remember the terrifying nature of his ordeal, being chosen after the joust. He could remember it all, like it was right then and there. He was a child again, small and trembling, as the surgical tools were laid out and the solemn incantation of the chapter serfs filled the air. He was to become new...but it was going to hurt. And before the hurting came, Shexi whispered in his ear.
"There's another way."
"A better way."
"You freed us. Your brother's sacrifice freed us."
Yolanda and her's voices were mingling together and breathy. "We are not chained to the hive fleet. We're something new."
"Something...better..." A hand caressed him.
The surgical tools came down.
"N-No...no!" he whispered, flinching away from them.
And the tools whisked away - blown back by a great force. And there, Hatoshi floated in a vast sea of possibilities - a life that could have gone in any direction. He had spent so many centuries
becoming and even more time in
ignoring that the vast, open possibilities of being something other than what he was struck him dumb. He floated there, suspended and empty, for an eternity. Then he saw her. Shexi, in her new glory, standing before him, her naked body glittering in starlight. She crouched down, animal and fierce, and watched him intently. But her upper right hand brushed through red hair - a coquettish, girlish gesture that was utterly at odds with a body of claw and chitin and feminine curves. Hatoshi, in this bodieless state, felt as if anything might come from him.
"...is someone there?" Gaius voice echoed from a great, great distance.
"What do you want?" Shexi whispered.
"...you..." Hatoshi murmured, softly.
Shexi grinned, wickedly. "I mostly prefer women these days."
"N-No, I..." Hatoshi floated - unsure. But he was nothing. His past was nothing and his future was nothing.
So why not ask for the impossible?
"...I want to
be you."
Shexi narrowed those bright eyes of hers. She smiled, showing sharp, sharp teeth.
"This is a dream," she whispered. "Try it."
Hatoshi blinked.
And felt himself lifting up and up and up and up. A great lightness filled him...
***
"Did we do a cruel thing to her?" Shexi murmured, as she drew her hand away from the metal banded helmet that was latched around the space marine's head - placed there shortly after Gaius had been shoved into the makeshift device. The hypno-indoctrination machines had been based on what she remembered from her time working with Space Marines, using some of the stolen intellect from the Adeptus Mechanicus who had become...a part of them. They were crude devices, really, little more than rapidly humming hypersonic generators and flick-screens, with a significant addition of psychadeliatica drawn from the stills and drug dens of the drophabs scummier warrens. That, combined with her and Yolanda, had shaped the dream-state that both Hatoshi and Gaius were locked in now.
Their armor - neatly snipped off and piled up after Yolanda and she had shorted out their perceptions and the Skitarii had been captured or killed - was being examined by a curious collection of maltek gangers and a few rapidily converted lexmechanics, eagerly searching for how they might be used or modified. This left the two space marine's bodies nude, their cocks throbbing as they twitched and whispered in their helmets and restraints.
"Good heavens no!" Yolanda said, chuckling. "They'll make fine butches."
"I..." Shexi paused. "But they're...not human, the arts that we use on humans-"
"Give us some credit...Lena, darling," Yolanda said. "We need to work swiftly - a happy warrior is a good warrior, yes?"
The former magos Lena walked in, her purple robes swishing. "Y-Yes, sorry!" she said, wiping her mouth off while a somewhat dazed Alia followed after her. "I've worked with the Pure on this - they have been infected, yes?"
"Of course!" Shexi said, grinning as she unfurled her tongue, letting it reach down to her belly button. Alia looked almost faint, while Lena's optics flicked.
"...y-yes!" she said, then started to attach the chem-inducers onto their shoulders. The glittering light from under the banded helmets had shifted to a warm purple-pink, and Hatoshi whispered.
"A pretty dress? For me?"
"Maybe futch for her," Shexi murmured, grinning. All reservation was lost as she caressed the bound marine's head through the helmet strapped around her head.
"Will they be ready soon?" Yolanda asked.
"Oh, it should take, with your talents, twenty four hours, maybe less if we hurry it, why?" Lena asked.
The ceiling rumbled - and some dust pattered down onto them. The sound of artillery, distant and muted.
"Oh right," Lena muttered.
---
Okay! The Admech attack has gone from 8d+MD toooo a grand total of 5d! So, you're facing two 5d dice pools on the attack that's coming in right now. You can't use the AdMechs, but your defensive roll is still a base 5d (thanks to mercs) - a good write in gets you bonus dice!
Your next roll, btw, will be at 3d+MD (1d left, +new feminized space marines) against a 3d and 3d pool, so, you just need to make it through this last round and you're GOOD!
[ ] Hold the line, DEFENSIVELY!
[ ] Hold the line, AGRESSIVELY!
Remember, the nice thing about their dice pools being so low is their might is near permanent collapse too :3
THE SISTERHOOD OF THE LEVITHAN
(Cycle 1, Month 5 - the Month of Gnashing Teeth)
MIGHT: 6(2) | TREASURE: 5(3) | INFLUENCE: 4(3) | TERRITORY: 3(1) | SOVEREIGNTY: 6
