Victor cut and slashes his way through the hall beside his battlebrothers, his shield took the blows meant for his comrades backs even as his sword cut into anything foolish enough to assail him. His pistol had run out of ammo some time ago and now hung at his hip for later when reloading the thing could be done without risk of injury to himself or the team he was trying to protect. Their progress was steady as the Mandrakes wisely retreated from the onslaught laid bare before them. Every step gained was a victory for the empire and the Deathwatch alike.
Theirs was the call of glory few others would see.
This was why they had been chosen!

This ship would forever mark Victors first step to a beautiful death.

The room was swept clean and the kill-team quickly progressed through the pens until the shadowy voice promised them suffering, but like the others, all Victor heard was a dead mans plea for mercy. The squelching of his boots upon the flesh heap carpet was an obvious deal breaker.
As if the Grotesques weren't.

Victor lunged with stormshield leading, a heavy gauntlet of toxic spray struck him full but the Marine barely budged as he braced against the weight. Like before in the other room, the jets on his pack flared to life for a brief moment to add force to his ramming shield. Unable to withstand the sudden pushback, the Grotesques arm was flung away with enough force to cause the thing to lose its balance. The powersword hewed into the side of its hideously swollen knee to drop the creature onto its back for the others to finish.
Wordlessly, the knowledge of veterans at work, Aldaric and Sorrow, Kurt in the back putting down shot after shot into the brutes ruthlessly.

Victor alternated between slashing at the beasts joints and goading the lumbering creatures blows, catching them every time on his shield as he braced against the things weight. He would not fail and he would not fall.

@Zelosse@Wraithblade6@Andreyich

From the lowest depths to the highest decks they fought, this team of transhuman warriors, clad in the strongest armour and possessing the most ferocious will gifted to them by the Emperor of Mankind – slave chambers, troop quarters, each room was cleared one-by-one until the Deathwatch Kill-team reached the bridge of the Torture-class Cruiser and the central hub of Archon S'rath himself.

“My lord,” came a hiss from a nearby console, “the Mon'Keigh are here.”

S'rath let out a crooning cackle of laughter and looked toward the door of the bridge, quite surprised that they had simply come straight to him without disabling his crafts shadow-field generators first.

“You are prepared?”

The slender and horned figure beside his throne gave a nod of its head, several other members of its shrine now gripping their klaives in elongated fingers and looking toward the doorway; it was unlocked, and as soon as the Astartes entered they may well wish they had not.

Keeping his stalker bolter at shoulder height Kurt followed his battle brothers though he kept his distance behind them as the most vulnerable. He was already aiming down his sights as they went within over the heads of the Astartes knowing that the time it took to aim if he was relaxed could be the difference between making the enemy dead or being in fact himself dead. Eventually, they came upon a particularly menacing room and he grunted a little. "Emperor, Guide my hand." he mutter under his breath before taking a heavy breath.

As they went past the door that was rather suspiciously unlocked he made a questioning "hmmm" noise as they began to go in. Too late did the squad realize that they were going to someplace that was likely to be their doom when all was said an done. Luckily for him, he was at the back of the squad which lead to four actions by him. First he threw all of his frag grenades forward so that the enemy would likely be caught in the blast radius or at least in the range of considerable shrapnel damage. Then he did something between a hop and backwards step to leave the room and have the doorway as his safe point.

Now of course came an extension of his self-defence policy; he dropped all of his krak grenades to the floor except two which he threw at either end of the door. He however, did not remove the pins preferring to instead have them to shoot should the enemy try to come at him through the doorway; while krak grenades did have a small radius there was enough of them to make a nice blast for any inferiority trying to end him. Finally, he took aim as best he could against the extraordinarily fast opponents and shot a few bolts. Realizing how ineffective this was due to their speed and familiarity as well as control of the locale he instead decided to just shoot wherever his allies were not providing considerable suppression and soon they would realize what he was doing thus hopefully taking advantage forcing the eldar to go into his line of fire.

What was the point of it all? Aberrant thoughts began to take over as Aldaric Felbane of the Deathwatch passed into the final room. Explosions and bolterfire were all around him, as they always were. Blood and blades and flashes of grotesque xeno faces surrounded him in every direction, and they were always there. This was his life. He was a machine, a construct, and this was all he had to look forward to forevermore, until his certain death. Sheer battle, one after another. They were no different from each other. And he would be used like this, his life itself meaningless, forgotten by the species he served to protect. Had he ever been human? Was he valued now any more than a bolter or stormshield? No. It didn't even matter that he had a name. He was no one, and there was no point in continuing, no reason to fight endlessly... but probability demanded that an end would eventually come. So why not now? Death was the solution to pointlessness. Death meant that all of this would finally be over. The only true freedom was in letting go of the false hope that now guided his blade.

Arcs devoid of emotion, devoid of fear, and feeling nothing of pain. Mentally numb, Aldaric swung his powersword over and over. He didn't even know why he was bothering, for all willpower had been sapped from him. It was mindless training alone that function in the shell of his body... all that was left. Maybe, just maybe, there was some reason, some reward for victory here this day, or ever any day. Aldaric could no longer hear his allies. All was silence as he fought with boring repetitive strikes. No chaplain's voice, no recognition from him squadmates. Nothing was exciting, or worth it anymore, and his deepest most primal instinct to survive was giving out.

Aldaric stopped swinging.

@Zelosse@Wraithblade6@Andreyich

Aldaric stopped swinging, and with it may have realised that at the end of his blade was the quickly stiffening corpse of what had once been a Dark Eldar Dracon.

Sirren Gadex had been the first to die, his own blood-lust – leant to him by Sanguinius and his Chapter's past – taking him into and onto the flashing blades of the Incubi nearly as soon as the door had been breached.

Next were Chaplain Zaphiel and Brother Corbite, all the litanies and technological alterations in the Milky Way being unable to save them from the elite of the Dark Eldar forces.

“Sorrow” was last, his black-armoured form slashed from head to toe and crumpled at the foot of the Dracon's chair with a dozen splinter shots through his head.

Only three battle-brothers remained, and it was as Aldaric ceased his swinging that something in their helmet clicked, a signal in fact...full of static, but there.

“Kill-T...Epsilon...do you copy? This is Ca- Roa....the Arcadius is badly damaged, but we are intact, praise the Emperor. Our missi- still aw-, return to the Assault Ram as swiftly as possible and back for extraction and debriefing. Roa out.”

It took another half-day to return to the Lunar-class vessel, damaged and in need of desperate repair but still active, Brothers Inri, Ironmarch and Felbane reunited with their mentors and fully accepted as the nucleus of a future Kill-team themselves. There was much mourning, however, at the deaths of so many raw recruits, as well as two of their mentors, and the appropriate time was taken to make sure their gene-seed was extracted and the Dark Eldar fully broken before the Imperial ships moved on.

There was a change of plan – they would be making for a little know Watch Station to await reinforcements, before going onward and into battle with their original foe.