The slight scrape of metal on rock was her only warning. Myrmidia dove out of the way but was not fast enough to prevent a warpstone bullet from punching through her side, drawing a growl of pain from her as Veskit of clan Eshin plummeted down towards where she had been standing, shooting at her with twin wrist-mounted warplock guns. Myrmidia grabbed her cloak and flung it towards him to obscure his aim and sprinted towards him, spear in hand. Veskit did not miss a beat, springing off of mechanical legs as his internal generator emitted a high-pitched whirr. From his paws extended twin sets of electrified steel claws, with which he cut through the cloak like it was not even there. Then he was in Myrmidia's range, and the mountains rang with the clash of metal on metal as the war goddess struggled to fend off his vicious assault. He did not fight like any skaven Myrmidia had ever encountered before; there was no overt structure to his movements, no feints, parries or pauses, only a lightning-fast series of swipes and jabs and rending motions that utilized all five of Veskit's limbs, all of which had been weaponized in some way. His arms and legs were fitted with retractable guns of varying calibre and spring-loaded serrated blades that popped out at the touch of a button, his elbows and knees featured retractable spikes tipped with warpstone, and his tail was equipped with the capability to essentially become a prehensile sword or a whip, splitting into segments connected by metallic twine. He was a storm of unmitigated death aimed squarely at Myrmidia, with every tool at his disposal being used to attempt to stab, cut, shoot, smash, and otherwise obliterate the god-queen out of existence.
Myrmidia was put solidly on the backfoot by the bewildering storm of Veskit's assault, struggling to predict and avoid his seemingly random motions that he carried out at a pace that would have left any flesh and blood skaven panting in exhaustion after a short time. A swipe chained into a leaping arc into an attempted footsweep which was followed by a whirling slash from the cyborg's segmented tail, each attack driving Myrmidia back and forcing her to use her spear to block what she could, unable to use its reach in such close quarters. Though she dodged, ducked, and otherwise avoided Veskit's blows to the greatest extent of her supernatural agility, the mechanical assassin's attacks still managed to connect fairly often. A series of jabbing slashes caught her across her upper arms, sending sleeves of blood trickling down to her wrists, and her fingers were quickly cracked and bloodied by errant attempts to wrench her weapon away. The hits began to pile up, and though Myrmidia was able to land a few solid blows on Veskit in return, the cyborg assassin was not slowed by having his throat crushed by the butt of her spear or his arms and legs being slashed at in return. As blood began to drip down into her eyes from an errant cut inflicted by Veskit's tail, she realized that she would have to end the fight quickly, or she would be overwhelmed and killed.
With anyone else, Myrmidia would have been able to read some sort of pattern in their movements, a flow to their style of combat that she could intuitively understand and exploit. Given enough time, everyone would expose a weakness, a flaw, an opening of some sort. But Veskit did not fight like a living being, but more like an abacus or mathematical equation, each move being slotted into place according to arcane machine logic that had nothing to do with economy of movement or any reality of combat. He could not be understood, and as long as she tried to fight him like she would fight anyone else she was doomed to lose. So she did what she would otherwise never do, and deliberately allowed Veskit's claws to latch onto her spear. Seeing an opportunity to get her weapon away, Veskit pulled, and Myrmidia let go. The force he had invested in the pull unbalanced Veskit and he reared back for a brief second, which was enough for Myrmidia to charge into him, sending them both tumbling down a rocky incline, crashing against the ground and each other as their combined momentum flung them downwards. Veskit sank his fangs into Myrmidia's free arm with a death grip, which the war goddess took with a snarl and used to grind his head against the ground, shredding her own flesh but denting Veskit's snout severely and cracking his eye lens. They flipped over and over each other, punching and clawing until Veskit's tail dug into the ground, arresting his momentum with a whiplash-inducing jerk and flinging Myrmidia off him. He leapt back to his feet with whiplike quickness and dashed towards her to finish her off, but was stopped midway by a thrown rock that hit him right in the eye, shattering the already cracked lens. He extended his emplaced guns and fired blindly in her direction, hoping to forestall movement from the goddess while his backup eye activated. But this disruption had finally given Myrmidia the opening she needed, and she bulled into Veskit once more, knocking him over as her weight came down on top of him. Screaming with adrenaline, she hit him in the head with a fist-sized rock, swinging down again and again until Veskit went limp and the light in his eye faded. Breathing heavily and bleeding from a dozen wounds, she stood up wearily and retrieved her spear before standing again over him.
Myrmidia snorted in contempt. "Your kind really are persistent in their malevolence. I never really had an opportunity to appreciate it before, but when the skaven commit to something, they do not relent." She stabbed him underneath the chin, her spear ripping through his flesh but glancing off his metallic spine.
"I suppose some might admire that quality in a twisted sort of way," she continued, stabbing him in the chest, her spear missing his heart for the simple reason that he did not have one anymore. "Greenskins, those touched by the Dark Powers, those individuals utterly lacking any sort of moral code." Her spear butt shattered his eye implant. "Or those detached from the reality of war, analyzing it solely as a set of numbers on spreadsheets, statistics and percentages. They might admire that sort of commitment to destroy your enemies utterly and without relenting." Again her spear flashed down, into his guts, twisting about so as to destroy whatever was left inside his abdominal cavity.
"I might have held it in some respect myself, once," she continued. "But now it only angers me. You discard all regard for common decency in your pursuit of power. You show no mercy to those you subjugate as well as those you fight alongside. You don't fight for the sake of your people, for glory, or even for material gain, really. Each one of you is a coiled-up ball of neurotic hate, seething at the very fact that your power is, by the very definition of the word, limited. It's your twisted ambition that drives you onward, spurring you to atrocities that others would shirk at but you take in stride because the majority of the time the recipient of such pain is not you."
She paced back and forth, sentiment she'd held onto for the entire campaign bubbling to the surface in isolation.
"I don't think you realize how abhorrent that concept is. My people -
so many people - died because your race cannot grasp the meaning of sympathy and compassion! You kill and defile and destroy not because you're incapable of grasping that your actions have negative consequences for others, but because they simply don't matter to you.
You just don't care!"] You're capable of being better than you are, but you choose not to! None of this had to happen! The fact that you choose to continue in spite of this makes it even worse than it already is!"
She was ready to say yet more, but stopped herself. "Your kind are not worthy of words," she spat, and plunged her spear down one last time into Veskit's chest cavity. It did not pierce his primary generator, but the machine had still recieved enough damage that it was at imminent risk of going offline, taking him with it. Veskit had been forced to reboot due to the head trauma inflicted upon him by the goddess, and had reactivated midway during her monologue, waiting for the moment she would expose herself to what she percieved as a vanquished threat. Now that instant had come, and he would exploit it for all it was worth.
The mechanical assassin's arms doubled in length with a great pneumatic hiss, unseen metal shooting outwards. They wrapped around Myrmidia's torso before she could react, pinning her arms to her sides and anchoring themselves in her spine. As she gasped in pain, Veskit's mechanisms reversed themselves, dragging the assassin up the length of her spear to pin his body against hers. He bit deeply into her shoulder in a grotesque parody of a comforting embrace, and as the war goddess staggered backwards the sound of
choking, gurgling laughter issued out of Veskit's throat. He was still laughing when the warpstone bomb embedded in his chest cavity detonated, engulfing both him and the war goddess in a searing cloud of emerald flame.
Veskit was found eventually, most of his body rendered scrap by the blast. It was uncertain if he would even be able to be repaired, and if the result could even be called skaven at all. But Gnawdell would wager many warptokens that Eshin would make the effort nontheless - his utility as a propaganda piece, the skaven who had killed Myrmidia, would make it worth the cost. That the matter had turned out the way it did rankled her still, but she was consoled by the fact that Veskit's actions recieving such attention was solely due to spite. The other Great Clans had attempted to forestall their rise for generations, but the conquest of Estalia had finally proved the tipping point. In a slowly increasing flood, lesser clans were flocking to join the ranks of Mors, or being subjugated under their banner. New leaders popped up all over the map to man the subdisiary parts of Gnawdell's actualized empire, and she felt a grim satisfaction that her lifelong dream had been realized - Mors had become a Great Clan.
As much as Estalia's fall had brought her justly-deserved fame, however, there was one aspect of it she kept under wraps, something known only to her and Eshin (and the Nightlord had been oh so smug at obtaining such prize blackmail). After Veskit's detonation of his suicide device, his handlers had been quick to find him - and only him. His blackened carcass had been quite evident, but Myrmidia's body had been nowhere to be found. Gnawdell had the area thoroughly searched with giant rat packs, and managed to trace a scent trail to a nearby crevasse which led into a system of caverns, upon which it became impossible to tell where the goddess had gone. An unfortunate underling suggested that Myrmidia had surely died from the combination of her injuries, the fall into the caverns, and whatever monstrous creatures resided in that section of the underground. Gnawdell killed him for his impertinence, declaring that until she had seen a corpse in front of her the goddess was to be considered still alive and a priority for the newly ascended Great Clan to find.
There could be no loose ends.
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