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Unfortunately for Octolys, his perplexity only grew even more pronounced when his scout ship reached its destination. Although it remained mysteriously incapable of independent movement, his mental link with the servitor craft remained completely intact, allowing him to gaze through its ocular nodes to find that it had landed in an area that was mostly free of the hoards of recently escaped inmates that seemed to be in the midst of a chaotic free-for-all throughout the rest of the massive prison. The artifact the mysterious voice had spoken of was nowhere to be seen, although a glow emanating from within the depths of a large pile of confinement cases hinted at its possible location. Yet, further investigation would have to be postponed for the time being as a more immediate threat soon presented itself…

The shattering of glass and a glimpse of movement drew Octolys’s attention to where, a short distance down his confinement block, a small army of green-skinned creatures was climbing up to his topmost level. It only took a second for the Domiarch of the 94837568th Negaprism to identify them. They were Orks, with a “k”, not a “c”, a rather unique kind of green-skinned, fungoid race from a particularly unpleasant universe, indeed. They were good for dumb muscle, Octolys had mused upon first learning of them, but little else, their hypothesized ability to warp reality itself to their crude beliefs brushed off as the superstitions of races with intellects far below the 8[sup]15[/sup]th level of mentalic ascendancy, such as his own. Yet, these Orks possessed a particular peculiarity that Octolys found most disconcerting. Their feet seemed to be attached to circular plastic “bases”, for lack of a better identifier. This prevented them from using their feet to aid in climbing, or from moving in more than short hops, but, to their credit, they still managed to ascend to the top level and then begin moving towards where Octolys sat with commendable alacrity. 

Thus, the dark-matter Domiarch knew that he would need to take swift and decisive action in order to curtail the mounting threat the rapidly approaching green tide posed. With a mighty sweep of a titanic tendril, he sent several dozen tightly packed Orks flying off the the wide lane upon which they traveled to plummet to their certain doom far below. Simultaneously, he disgorged a chitinous cannon crawler, its hunched from lowering to the ground and aiming its cosmic cross-continua hyper-quantum singularity coil cannon at what had to be the Orks’ leader, the so-called “Warboss”. While fearless in large numbers and under the direct command of a strong leader, in small numbers, and bereft of a Warboss’s commanding presence, it was all-too-easy to cause Orks to succumb to a panicked rout, and this was precisely what Octolys’s strategy was intended to induce.  

Yet, even as this battle played out, Octolys was still cognizant of events unfolding before the optical nodes of his scout craft. Not only had a strangely garbed woman appeared in the vicinity, but from the pile of confinement cases had emerged a gargantuan gestalt of over two dozen assorted entities, now fused into a singular, titanic abomination, at the heart of which was the glowing artifact he was seeking. This revelation seemed to indicate quite clearly that the knowledge he’d been given was indeed nothing more than a trap, although seeing the sword-wielding young woman engage the amorphous amalgamation in battle promised to provide copious insights into both combatant’s abilities...