Tiphrates III was surprisingly green for a Hive World. That is to say, the near-lethal atmosphere hadn't choked out [i]all[/i] of its flora beyond the limits of the Hives themselves, but rather had encouraged some of the plants to develop ever more efficient ways of filtering carbon dioxide and other pollutants from the planet, in turn compensating for the relatively low light the planet received through the atmospheric smog. It helped that occasionally, a few people would abandon the Hives to live in these green areas, tending parts of them like their own personal gardens and ensuring they continued to thrive after the tender's inevitable death.

Lucius' memory of the green patch he'd spent time in was still quite clear. He recalled it being rather beautiful, actually. Sadly, the galaxy hates beautiful things, so to correct the error, the city and everything in its vicinity was going to be utterly destroyed in mere minutes.

[hr]

The tale of how he'd come to learn that was short in substance, but quite rich in detail. As it happened, he'd been chasing up hints of a supposed cult in the Hive city of Calam for a little while, and had focused his efforts on a rich company owner called Jeremiah Albrecht, who he'd discovered had a tendency to wander down to the lower levels of the Hive despite lacking any obvious reason to do so. Hiring the services of one of his younger contacts, a pickpocket who was surprisingly good at his job, he'd consequently managed to acquire some important details: a card denoting VIP membership to "The Gentlemen's Boutique of Intriguing Antiques", and a small, opalescent stone, glistening as though it were covered in oil, that when moved near the card briefly revealed an eight-pointed star surrounding a wheel. An unfamiliar symbol, funnily enough, but there was no mistaking its association.

That said, Lucius had his address. After just the slightest bit of additional investigation, it transpired that the name covered a number of shops throughout the city, rather than just a single location, including one that was surprisingly deep in the Hive's lower regions. An enterprising location to rob, one would have thought, until one entered and realised that it essentially stocked overpriced trinkets. Perhaps the more luxurious shops further up held correspondingly more valuable goods. Either way, it hardly mattered, as the moment Lucius made his way in, he espied the seemingly armour-plated door covered in alternating strings of green, blue, purple, and red beads, watched over by a very muscular bouncer with folded arms and an autogun in one hand. For propriety's sake, he browsed some of the goods as though he were planning to buy, steadily making his way to the guard and the doorway, glancing a few times before the guard's interjection about it being "VIPs only".

Suffice to say, despite the obviously-stolen identification, the guard allowed Lucius into the corridor beyond, taking him through a few twists and turns, and two additional locked doors, until they reached a final doorway, beyond which came a riot of sound. The source, it turned out, was an abnormally large room not unlike some form of club, if said club was a self-contained orgy of depravity sitting opposite a small bar, as well as what appeared to be a number of fighting pits. As he moved out of this section, and taking a look around, it seemed to Lucius that the entire place was organised into a few sections: two sections reserved for extreme orgies, two fighting pits (complete with doors dropping people straight into them), two areas riddled with filth (he reminded himself to avoid these areas at all costs), and two sections apparently designed for the use of various psychic abilities. And at the bar itself, various objects far more intriguing than any of the antiques in the shopfront he'd entered from, alongside substances of all sorts: alcohol, virulent toxins, drugs to inflict pleasure and pain, or to improve combat abilities or psychic prowess, and he was sure many of them mixed and matched freely. All in all, an extraordinarily heretical place, the likes of which he'd never laid eyes upon before, so far as his memory was concerned.

It hardly phased him as he sat at the bar, telling the many-armed bartender to serve him a normal, but extremely alcoholic drink. He was promptly handed a bottle of something or other worth a couple of hundred Thrones, yet hardly had the time to open it before an exceptionally attractive woman dressed in little more than strips of purple and pink silk took a seat next to him, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him on the cheek. His body processed whatever substance had been on her lips, registering it faintly before wiping it from his system as some form of potent aphrodisiac, enough to incapacitate a normal man with arousal.

'It's generally polite to introduce yourself before making physical contact,' he'd said with a glare, subtly stretching his arms to force the person off of him. She'd pouted, then introduced herself, in a tone somewhere between whore and madame, as the owner of the Gentleman's Boutique brand, one Suzerain Marcelle, who had been quite interested in the man's size, his origins as it were... and the fact that he'd been snooping where he shouldn't, oh what a [i]naughty[/i] boy he was. He hadn't appreciated the jab, but the bigger issue lay with how much she knew about him and his actions. When asked, she simply tapped her nose. Apparently, she was fearless and stupid in equal measure. How dare she mock an Astartes, he'd thought to himself. She ought to be bowing to him. At this point, he reminded himself that his pride, growing as it had been over time, was utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things, slave as he was to the Gods of Chaos, as all of Chaos' minions were willing or not.

With the mental turmoil out of the way, he'd taken a leap of faith and assumed she was a follower of Slaanesh out loud. She'd confirmed the guess, then begun leading him around the place by the arm, as though he couldn't tear hers off with a well-timed jerk. The bias was obvious, as she barely touched upon the area dedicated to Khorne, dismissing it as "a place of brutal violence not suited for a man of your obvious good taste", whilst spending an extensive amount of time going over all of the possible pleasures that the locations dedicated to Slaanesh might offer him, ranging from razored sex toys to drugs that, she guaranteed, would have him orgasming for a week at a time. He deliberately had them avoid Nurgle's section of the Boutique - he would pick a God to follow when he was good and ready, and not because some shit-covered bastard gave him Nurgle's Rot and forced him to accept his Ever-So-Gracious Father against the Space Marine's will - which left just an examination of what Tzeentch's parts of the club might offer him.

Here, he learned, there were actually stairs leading to higher and lower levels of the club. How many, he'd asked? Enough, she'd replied, before promptly gagging just enough for Lucius to step out of the way before she threw up several liters of blood and vomit without pause, as well as expelling the same mixture from various other orifices of hers. At an estimate, when the event was over and she'd collapsed in the puddle afterwards, there were probably twelve pints of fluid on the ground, most of it red, and fortunately none of it on his shoes. Those were difficult to clean off.

Somewhat more surprising - though in hindsight, it ought not to have been - was her promptly standing up as though nothing happened, and in fact grinning like a maniac despite most of her body being covered in her own insides. Though she was apparently sound of body, she was surely a lunatic, as evidenced by her promptly doing her best to grip Lucius around the shoulders, still covered in vomit and blood, and marching him to the bar. Or rather, he let her seem like she was moving him, and she had him jump over the top of the bar before following herself, the spider-like bartender stepping aside at their approach to reveal an inconspicuous set of elevator buttons against the wall.

Frankly speaking, Suzerain was giving Lucius few reasons to like her at this point. She had approached him from out of nowhere, invaded his personal space repeatedly, covered him in blood and vomit, and generally made him want to twist her head off her neck like the cap on a bottle of wine. He relented only because she owned the establishment (her death would probably mean a lot of work killing everybody angry about her demise as well), and because he was curious to see where she was taking him. As it happened, the answer to that question was "to the top". And it was a very long was up. Five minutes passed before she and Lucius reached that point, looking for all the world like a perfectly normal CEO's office at this height, and the deep windows that had by then revealed themselves showed the planet below in its full curvature, smoke-darkened as the view was. Here, she finally let go of him, and as he examined his clothing to see what would need washing later on, strolled over to a screen and pressed a button that, it seemed, activated a camera of some sort.

And there, she began her speech. A speech proclaiming that, as of Lucius' arrival, the next twist of the knife would be planted in the stomachs of the corpse-worshippers of this planet. That this man, this man who was more than a man, this Scion of Chaos, had coincided with the signal that she and her closest allies had had portents of for thirty years and more, bringing them together to build an almighty weapon, a device that would PLUNGE Calam into the Warp itself, sacrificing all and sundry within it to the Chaos Gods and their Holy Daemons, sending Tiphrates III into chaos and Chaos alike, and assuring that the TRULY loyal would pass into Eternity as true worshippers one and all, made immortal by the Gods for completing their Great Project at long last! And so on and so forth.

It occurred to Lucius, as he was ushered forward to give a word of encouragement, as he raised a fist and uttered 'May the Warp take them,' in a way that only the perceptive would realise was rather half-hearted of him, that this was perhaps the Chaos Gods' way of ensuring he continued to work what minimal affinity he had with them to their appropriate ends. He felt it'd have been rather preferable that they simply leave him down on the planet to die with everyone else.

[hr]

And so, the moment was upon them. Suzerain had positioned them both at the window of what it turned out was in fact a starship, had at some point slipped her hand into his heedless of his own desire to crush that hand into pulp, was squealing with delight at the proposition of murdering countless innocent souls, and how they'd apparently feed her apotheosis, and that of others in the ship who really deserved it, into a being worthy of the respect she warranted all along, but those who didn't deserve that would instead be left alone, unless they REALLY annoyed the Gods, at which point they'd turn into murderous mutated things that'd attack the unaffected on the ship. And she was [i]still[/i] covered in her own blood and vomit, Warp damn it.

The idea, at the end of the day, was simple enough: activate a Gellar field around the ship proper, by now automatically welded shut on all doors, then trigger its entry into the Warp, taking energy from the planet's own core to vastly amplify the entry point to cover the entire city and the surrounding area, creating a rift in reality like a miniature Eye of Terror to drop that section of the Hive World into the Warp like a hammer, and in turn smashing down the walls between reality and unreality in a way that would ensure the rest of the planet would suffer for years, if not decades to come. If that was successful, the idea could be upscaled to induce the effect upon entire planets, thus giving very reasonable ways to kill entire worlds in an instant in the name of the Gods. Incidentally, his very presence here apparently warranted the flash of recalled information about the Eye of Terror's existence and nature being dripped into his brain, perhaps to tease him about what came next.

Finally, the entire ship jolted as the Gellar field generator came online. Then, a second later, reality crumpled. The window showed a rush of something in every colour of the rainbow, and many that didn't exist, couldn't, or else had yet to come into being, charging upward like a wave of madness, before it finally reached them both and-

...the effect was less pronounced than Lucius had been led to believe it would be. A slight shudder, and little else. Admittedly, that at least meant the Gellar field was doing its job. Outside the window, the sky, space itself, had turned into a mess of impossible colours and shapes that hurt to look at. The city below, though still smog shrouded, was surely already being eaten alive by the daemons waiting for this moment to come, any psykers on the planet boiling inside their skins or twisting inside out or any number of deadly options, whilst their non-psychic brethren were to be subjected to far worse fates than that. All those green spaces, gone. At least the ones closest to Calam, but given how dramatic the effects of Chaos were, he doubted the rest would last that much longer.

And next to him, Suzerain had yet to start mutating. Despite an additional rumble that signified the ship breaking away from the planet’s surface and the city surrounding it, despite the supposed passage of time, she seemed to just be... standing still. Eyes wide, staring out into the void of the Etherium and at her hands, until she finally spoke: 'It's so beautiful... just like me...'

And [i]then[/i] she started mutating. Taking the tactful option, Lucius let go of her hand and stepped back to allow the mutation to run its course. If she turned into a Chaos Spaw- oh, THAT was what she was referring to by "murderous mutated things"... he had two perfectly good weapons to kill it with. If not... well, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it. Speaking of which, Suzerain was apparently having the time of her life, despite her flesh bubbling like a vat of oil. And multiple arms sprouting out of her back, horns jutting from her skull, two of the arms turning into wings and various pronounced bulges emanating from under her clothing... more arms in less regular places, tentacles and tendrils, a malformed leg akin to a fish’s fin… it seemed she was going to turn into a Chaos Spawn after all, then. So much for the respect she warranted, then, and oh look at that, now Lucius had an excuse to kill her. He drew both his weapons as the entity before him continued to mutate, becoming less and less human with every second, and began to hack it to pieces before it could lash out at him.

Eventually, the mass of flesh disintegrated into nothing, save another puddle of blood and vomit where it had once existed, and Lucius cleaned his blades off on the desk that the woman had once stood at before sheathing them. Shame he couldn’t do the same with his ruined clothing… that’d need repatching as soon as possible. For now, though, he was left to his own devices. More specifically, figuring out how to get down from this location, as it looked like there weren’t really stairs down, and the elevator buttons were now nowhere to be found. That might be an interesting problem to resolve. Still, it wasn’t like he didn’t have time to do so. After all, who knew how long this ship would be in transit?