The slaughter began.
This was not a battle, but a harvest.
Corax flitted like a restless shadow of death through narrow shipboard corridors, cabins, and even prayer halls steeped in blasphemy.
The frenzy and close-combat skills the Khorne cultists took such pride in were mere children's games before the Raven Lord's speed, which defied physical laws, and the terrifying power he drew from the deepest reaches of the Warp.
All they saw was a vast shadow, shaped like a distorted raven, flickering around them.
Whirring chainaxes and bolter rounds passed uselessly through the darkness.
Every sweep of a raven's claw or thrust of its sharp beak came with the sounds of tearing flesh and shattering bone.
Something seemed to have gone wrong with the ships' alarms. No matter how they operated them, they produced only noise, and many aboard had no idea an enemy had boarded.
No one could organize any meaningful resistance.
War cries to Khorne were strangled in their throats, leaving only dying gurgles and the dull thuds of headless bodies hitting the deck.
The thick reek of blood was nothing unusual aboard the Khorne warband's ships.
Death spread from bow to stern, from cruisers to destroyers.
Then Corax vanished from the Khorne warband's ships.
The same shadow of death engulfed the Ecstatic Shriek's uncanny flagship.
The Slaanesh cultists' nerves, devoted to the pursuit of the ultimate sensations, were now utterly consumed by unimaginable terror.
Their carefully prepared traps were absurd before the Raven Lord's absolute power.
Soul-shaking shrieks, bewildering illusions of light and shadow, and lethal neurotoxins were no more than a passing breeze to Corax.
He appeared unerringly beside every Slaanesh cultist, whether they hid in lavish cabins or spike-lined torture chambers.
Death came so purely and so swiftly that, in the final instant before their