[center][h2][b]Ilshar Ard’sabekh[/b][/h2][/center]

The wave of qillatu fallout from the animated corpses struck by King reached Ilshar at the worst possible moment - while his organs processed the internal bleed from his own brush with the ether. His armour and membrane were no barrier against the immaterial energy, and as his glands and diffusion organs had calibrated their effort from his conscious awareness of conjuring the pulse sequence, they found themselves momentarily overtaxed by the outside influx. He took a stumbling step backwards, partially blinded as many of his visual organs burned out and more frantically formed out of their absorbed remains.

When his senses found their focus again, it was too late to avoid the giant amalgam that he suddenly found looming over him. The carrion mass had been shredded by the squad’s fire, leaving open what seemed to be a central node in its nonsensical anatomy, but it still had more than enough bulk to be lethally dangerous. Its swinging limb came quickly, and Ilshar, too close to avoid it, could only throw himself down to the ground under its arc.

Not fast enough - the misshapen appendage glanced on his armoured back with an unpleasant squelching smash, and he was thrown down to his side, a patch of neural ganglia crushed under his dented armour. His legs dulled, all he could do was keep a hold of his machine gun while raising himself on his left hand.

[b]“Not right away,”[/b] he replied to Alice in a strained grunt. The voidhanger had the right idea, the disruption wrought by the signal having probably saved him from a second hilling strike from the lumbering horror, but between his recovering qillatu diffusion and the close-quarters struggle he was in no condition to follow through against the hidden mind. [b]“Take down this thing first!”[/b]

The puppeted corpses were more numerous, but weaker and incapacitated for the moment. The fused monster, however, was an immediate danger he had already paid for ignoring. If the glowing hive-sphere was indeed its core, a quick strike could be enough, and while the ulvath was not a precision weapon, it was not the only one he had.

With a quiet prayer for the Nexus’ spore-flow to guide his blow, Ilshar raised his right hand and unfolded the opening to the ether-burrow he had embedded in it. It only took the slightest effort to coax the Seraph-Worm from the gap where it lay coiled, and it burst into matter in a blur of teeth and luminescent flesh. For all his doubts about the symbiote’s creators, Ilshar could only admire the fluid lunge of its ringed body as it poured into being, the circle of its hook-fangs primed to bite into the amalgam’s exposed core.