[Hider=Harkin]The surface was always a little too bright for his tastes. The air was too fresh, and the sounds too....normal. The men and women of the lower levels milling about and going about their lives, miserable and dark as they may have been. The surface was an alien thing to Harkin, and that above all things made his blood boil and his fists ache.

The mutant was an intruder on his own homeworld, cursed to resign in the lowest of places in the Hive City. And for what? Because he had been cursed by the toxins filling the air in the factories? The radiation and byproducts he and so many others had warned their masters of? That had twisted their bodies into the hideous abominations they were today, all because the Astra Militarum needed their guns and their bombs and their tanks, and damn the men who worked in those chemworks?

He looked down at his hand, growling as he took in the cost the Imperium's greed in his flesh. His body was little more than a skeleton with sickly green skin covering it, causing most on the surface to think him one of Grandfather Nurgle's zombies. His left eye was long gone, rotted away like so much of his body before the mutations had finally settled, and now half of his vision was dominated by the cheap cybernetics he had stolen years ago. His face, the skull with stretched skin as it was, one chunk of scalp missing at the left half of his head to reveal the white bone beneth, caused even some of his fellows in the shithole he lived in to cringe. He snarled with pent-up rage, resentment, and blood-thirst. 

He had promised Harkin freedom. Promised him a life where he would no longer be forced to sleep on filthy rags in the sewers, permited to leave only long enough to complete his shift in the chemworks before he would be driven back into the filth and the stink. Where he would know the favor of the gods.

He looked around at his fellows; degenerate, tenebrous beasts like him, flesh mutiliated, twisted and regrown. Twenty of them were here in the cellar of the estate, crude blades and autoguns in hand. Harkin gripped his rifle with all the strength he had as the largest among them prepared to breach the door into the dining room.

Their work would be bloody. There were always guards posted here in the banquettes this house hosted. Khorne would be pleased when their throats and bellies were laid open. Slaanesh would be pleased when they took their trophies from the safes, and their satisfaction from the women. Grandfather Nurgle when they dragged the corpses of those slain back down to the shrine for the ritual. And Tzeentch, for he was always pleased by change.

Slowly, for the first time he could remember in years, Harkin felt his non-existant lips pull into a smile. 

Ten seconds later, the door exploded wide open, and they began their work.[/hider]