The Brood Lord

"Open fire! Don't let it escape!"

Rovi raised his Bolt Pistol and fired twice at the shadow.

The bolts exploded against the concrete by the monster's feet.

Shrapnel tore through its carapace, and yellow-green fluid seeped out.

The monster let out a piercing shriek.

It didn't sound like it came from vibrating vocal cords.

It was more like a psychic scream that drilled straight into their minds.

At the sound, pairs of icy eyes lit up in the shadows among the pipes all around them.

"There's more than one!"

Buck roared as the Heavy Boltgun in his hands finally unleashed its fury.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

The heavy bolts thundered like a storm.

A weapon of this caliber was meant to take on light vehicles.

A single hit was enough to blow a Genestealer to pieces.

One monster tried to ambush them from the flank, only to take a bolt round to the chest.

Its entire upper body erupted into a cloud of blood mist.

"Suppressing fire! Keep it up!" Rovi shouted orders as he rushed toward Priest Alpha, who was operating the oil pump. "How much longer?"

"The third truck is filling. The flow rate is at its limit!" Priest Alpha's mechanical voice sounded anxious. "The Machine Spirit is screaming. The pump housing is overheating!"

"Let it scream. We can fix it when we get back!"

The battle instantly reached a fever pitch.

The Genestealers clearly hadn't expected their "prey" to be armed with such devastating firepower.

The two Heavy Boltguns formed a deadly crossfire, tearing apart any monster that dared show its head.

After their initial panic, the recruits began to pull their weight under Buck's furious shouting and the threat of death.

Dozens of lasguns lacked the power to do much damage on their own, but their concentrated volleys formed a blazing wall of light.

Even the Genestealers' hard carapaces couldn't withstand sustained bursts of high-energy fire.

One monster tried to force its way through and was hit by a dozen las-beams at once.

Its carapace was burned through in an instant. It let out a reeking, scorched stench and fell to the ground with a howl.

"The fourth truck!"

"The fifth!"

Just as the last truck's tank was about to fill,

Rovi felt the ground beneath his feet suddenly begin to shake.

"Kais, what's happening?"

"The signal source below us is moving at high speed," Kais reported urgently. "It's... the Brood Lord. We've angered it!"

Rovi's expression changed.

They could just about handle ordinary Genestealers.

But if it was the Brood Lord—

This was a monstrous leader with powerful psychic abilities and terrifying strength in close combat. It could stand against a Space Marine in one-on-one combat, and even kill one.

A force made up of recruits would collapse instantly if they had to face it head-on.

Rovi had planned to use this mission to train a batch of recruits, not send them to their deaths for nothing.

"Disconnect the hoses! We're pulling out!"

Rovi made the call at once, without even waiting for the oil left in the hoses to drain.

"But it's not full yet..." One of the recruits handling the refueling hesitated.

"Bang!"

Rovi shot through the coupling lock. Black promethium gushed out, drenching the recruit.

"If you want to die, stay here and be dessert!"

The convoy roared to life and lurched into motion.

Just as the last truck pulled away from the pumping station, the ground exploded.

A gigantic monster, over three meters tall, burst up from underground.

Its carapace was thicker, a deep, dark purple.

Six arms waved in the air, radiating psychic energy.

It let out an enraged roar and slammed a claw into the fuel tank's still-leaking connection.

"Boom!"

A spark ignited the spilled promethium.

A blazing fireball bloomed like a poisonous red lotus.

In the narrow rectangular view of the rearview mirror, it burst into flower, swallowing the entire pumping station in an instant.

Even through the heavy armor and hundreds of meters of rain,

the heat, hot enough to melt steel, made the Chimera's windows grow faintly warm.

From the heart of the churning black-and-red flames came a faint, utterly bloodcurdling shriek.

The Brood Lord's scream.

A pulse laden with Warp energy stabbed viciously into the cerebral cortex of every living thing nearby.

Rovi sat in the jolting command seat, gripping the handrail tightly. Only after the intense dizziness and headache passed did he slowly let out a breath.

He glanced once more at the inferno still raging in the rearview mirror and murmured:

"Praise the Emperor—and all highly unstable, highly flammable substances."

Was the monster dead?

Rovi didn't know, and didn't intend to find out.

The Genestealer Brood Lord was a nightmare of biological evolution, an apex predator lurking in the shadows.

It possessed physical strength comparable to an Astartes, along with a bizarre psychic shield.

Maybe the explosion had burned it to a crisp.

Or maybe it had only singed its hide, and it was dragging its ruined body underground, its venomous compound eyes fixed on the retreating convoy.

Either way, Rovi would never turn back to check.

Curiosity was the cat's epitaph.

And in the Warhammer universe, checking a corpse was often how a horror story began.

"Kais." Rovi pressed the communicator at his throat, his voice cool and composed.

"Package and encrypt the biological signal data we just recorded, the nest's coordinates, and the explosion assessment report. Send them to the Governor's Mansion."

A threat of this magnitude

was beyond Granary Seven's capacity to handle.

Rather than take a few glorified fire sticks and risk their lives fighting a psychic monster, he'd rather toss this hot potato to someone better equipped.

He was sure Governor Alicia would be more eager than anyone to mobilize the elite forces of the planetary Defense Force once she saw the words "Genestealer."

After all, compared with Nurgle's slow and obvious rot,

these silent insects, capable of toppling a regime without a sound, were the rulers' deepest nightmare.

After giving Kais his instructions, Rovi wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and glanced down at his pocket watch.

From arrival to withdrawal, twenty-three minutes.

Five trucks. Four full, one eighty percent loaded.

Three recruits lost. Two full loads of bolts expended.

And in exchange, they'd secured enough fuel to last the entire Granary six months.

That was one hell of a bargain!

"Advisor," Buck said, his voice trembling. He was clearly still shaken. "What were those monsters?"

"Another kind of death," Rovi said, leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes wearily. "More greedy and hungry than the Lord of Pestilence."

"Once we're back, increase surveillance of the underground pipelines. If those things are here, that doesn't mean the ground beneath us is clean, either."

The return journey was quieter than the trip out.

Gray-black acid rain tapped against the Chimera Personnel Carrier's armor, making an irritating racket.

The recruits were packed into the cramped troop compartment. Nobody spoke.

A few hours ago, they'd been refugees who could do nothing but line up for Green Soup.

Now, they clutched lasguns they'd used to kill the enemy and stared blankly at the muddy floor.

The "adrenaline" was wearing off, leaving them drained and shaken.

In the passenger seat, Rovi held a hard, dry Compressed Biscuit, but had no appetite.

Through the observation window, he watched the Chimera's "Wall of Gluttony" armor.

Something unsettling was happening to the armor.

The Nurgle Metal Plate, which had previously only devoured corpses and secreted digestive fluid, now displayed an almost frenzied "appetite."

During the earlier collision, a severed Genestealer arm had become lodged against it. Purple-red tendrils of flesh were now wrapped tightly around the limb.

Under normal circumstances, the Wall of Gluttony could digest a Walking Dead in seconds, like a hot knife through butter.

But this time, it had met resistance.

The Genestealer's carapace was unbelievably hard.

It also seemed to possess a natural resistance.

Rovi could clearly see the fleshy tendrils recoil violently as if scalded whenever they touched the pale purple carapace.

Then, driven by their greedy instincts, they surged forward again.

Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle.

Thin wisps of white smoke rose.

Nurgle's corrosive power—a force of Chaos embodying twisted vitality and endless cycles—was locked in a microscopic struggle with the biomass of the Terran Xenos, which represented ultimate evolution and absolute adaptation.

No Warp lightning.

No psychic storms.

Only the most primitive devouring and counter-devouring, on a cellular level.

"Fascinating, isn't it?"

Priest Alpha's calm electronic voice came through the headset.

Rovi simply replied, "If you mean the sound of our front end melting, then yes, it's fascinating."

"Advisor, I mean the data. That Xenos specimen... its cellular structure is attempting to 'understand' the corrosive effect even as it resists it. It's changing its molecular arrangement."

"You're saying it's evolving?" Rovi frowned.

"Perhaps I should say it's being assimilated," Priest corrected. "Two extreme biological principles are searching for a point of balance. If we can control the process..."

"Stop right there." Rovi cut him off coldly. "First, get the vehicle back. Heretical research can wait until we're home."

"For now, I just want to make sure this thing doesn't suddenly grow a mouth and eat our driver."

The convoy churned across the muddy wasteland, its tracks kicking up black ash.

On the distant horizon,

the enormous, foreboding silhouette of Granary Seven slowly emerged.

For this exhausted convoy,

the fortress-like Granary, reeking of corpses and fermentation,

somehow looked strangely welcoming.