Deep within the pyramid.
A colossal brass blood pool.
The rim of the pool was entirely carved with a dense, overlapping layer of blood-drop-shaped runes. Every single one of them was violently pulsing, beating like a living heart.
Eight ancient, withered Dal priests knelt in a circle around the brass basin.
Their carapaces had drained of all color, taking on the pale, chalky hue of a corpse. Their muscles had shriveled up until they looked like sun-dried jerky.
But their eyes...
They were as red as fresh blood, burning with decades of accumulated fanatical devotion.
Behind them stood eight humans.
Men, women... and even a young girl.
They had been stripped completely naked. Their emaciated, skin-and-bones frames were covered in a horrific tapestry of whip scars, their skin possessing the sickly yellow pallor of chronic, severe malnutrition.
Their eyes were dead and hollow. There was no terror, no anger, no hope...
Just the absolute void left behind when someone is bred in captivity as livestock and entirely stripped of their fundamental dignity.
A Dal priest snatched up the first human.
A middle-aged man.
He didn't put up a fight. His expression didn't even twitch, as if it were someone else entirely being dragged to the slaughter.
The priest casually slit his carotid artery.
Bright red blood sprayed out, splattering heavily into the brass pool.
The blasphemous runes etched into the metal flared to life.
Then came the second human.
The third.
The fourth.
When the eighth human...
When the little girl's throat was opened and her tiny, fragile body was tossed into the pool, the brass basin finally boiled over.
An endless ocean of blood vapor was forcefully siphoned from every single corner of the Dal Royal Court.
It was the collective toll of the last six hours of brutal siege warfare...
The green blood of the Dal royal guard.
The green blood of the standard Dal infantry.
And the bright crimson blood of the fallen warriors of Crimson Dawn.
It all twisted and fused in the air above, gathering into a massive, crimson river that stretched across the sky and aggressively poured straight down into the open gates at the base of the pyramid.
The brass blood pool.
Overflowed.
The eight Dal priests simultaneously sliced open their own throats, offering up their rapidly fading lives to the shape coalescing at the center of the pool.
With their absolute final gasp of breath, they chanted that eternal, cursed prayer in the Dark Tongue:
Blood for the Blood God... Skulls for the Skull Throne...
--
The center of the blood pool.
A colossal entity was rising out of the violent vortex of chaotic energy.
The first things to break the surface were three pairs of curving ram horns completely bound in heavy brass rings.
Then came a massive, brutal skull sheathed in dark red chitin and plated with slabs of jagged brass armor.
And then the massive bodies dragged themselves out—twenty-five feet, thirty feet, nearly forty feet tall...
They were grotesque fusions of bulls, rams, and men, yet infinitely more terrifying than all three combined—the sacred, perfect apex forms of absolute slaughter.
The first gripped a colossal, twenty-foot-long chainsword in both hands, every single tooth along the blade having drank the blood of countless foes.
The second hoisted a massive, spiked warhammer over its shoulder, its surface heavily coated in the calcified bone dust of pulverized skulls.
The third dual-wielded double-bladed battle axes, their razor edges permanently wreathed in roaring, blasphemous hellfire.
Their faces had no mouths or noses. There was nothing but tightly clustered masses of compound eyes.
And inside every single eye, the reflection of an active massacre played out on an endless loop.
Battlefield Tyrants.
A highly common, pure incarnation of war among Khorne's Greater Daemons.
They didn't possess the mindless, rabid frenzy of Bloodthirsters.
They had one defining trait and one trait only...
Absolute purity.
Born solely for the act of killing, existing exclusively for the theater of war, and fighting only for the glory of Khorne.
The exact second the three Battlefield Tyrants stepped entirely out of the blood pool and their hooves hit the bedrock of planet Dal...
The eight Dal priests encircling the brass basin let out a collective sigh of profound satisfaction.
And then, their physical forms rapidly disintegrated...
Skin splitting and cracking, muscles dissolving, bones literally turning to dust on the wind.
Their lives had finally run their course the very moment the summoning ritual was completed.
But directly behind them, the five hundred Dal soldiers stationed to guard the ritual and haul in the sacrifices...
Crimson hellfire abruptly ignited deep inside their eye sockets.
Blasphemous, blood-red halos poured out of the seams in their armor. Their muscles horrifically ballooned outward, forcibly pumped full of Khorne's direct will. Their split jaws violently ripped apart all the way to their ear canals, revealing rows of freshly grown, densely packed serrated fangs.
The Dal racial variant of Bloodletters.
Cheap, crude, temporary, mass-produced knock-offs.
But while bathed in the horrific aura radiating off the three Battlefield Tyrants.
The raw strength, speed, and endurance of these degraded Bloodletters was more than enough to rival heavily augmented, elite mortal veterans.
The first Battlefield Tyrant leveled its monstrous chainsword, pointing the heavy tip directly at the golden figure standing far outside the pyramid gates.
All of its compound eyes contracted at once, zeroing in tightly on the one target that triggered its deepest, instinctual disgust.
"Dis..."
"Gust..."
"Ing..."
"Au..."
"Ra..."
Their collective voice echoed with the horrific, sickening vibration of raw Warp energy.
Then, all three Greater Daemons launched themselves into the air.
Propelled by Khorne's dark blessing, their forty-foot frames erupted forward with a blistering speed completely at odds with their massive bulk. Their heavy brass plating shrieked as it tore through the air friction.
They had a single objective.
Paul.
--
Paul didn't even bother turning around to intercept the three Battlefield Tyrants currently dive-bombing straight toward his back.
He just kept his head down, staring at the pathetic ape skull pinned against the bedrock, stubbornly twitching for life.
Charles Darwin's arms were gone, his legs were gone, and his original nearly thirty-foot frame had been whittled down to barely four feet of gory wreckage.
But his crimson pupils still burned, bursting with a level of feverish fanaticism he had never displayed before.
"The Blood God... the Blood God answered my call..."
"Golden bug... you're dead... every last one of you... is going to die right here on this rock..."
"I am King Charles... I am the god of the Dal race... the Blood God has not abandoned his champion..."
Paul looked at the incredibly ugly, wildly babbling ape head stuck under his boot.
A slight, highly amused smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
"So this is your big trump card."
Paul said slowly.
He lifted his foot up, shifting the golden heel of his Aquilon Terminator Armor directly onto the crown of Charles's skull.
He applied just a fraction of pressure.
The bone groaned under the immense weight.
"I'm not going to kill you right now."
Paul leaned forward, locking his dark gold eyes onto Charles's frantically struggling crimson gaze.
"I'm going to make you watch."
"I want you to watch the so-called Blood God you've worshipped for three hundred years, the entity you've sacrificed tens of billions of lives to serve..."
"I'm going to take his Greater Daemons."
"Right in front of your throne."
"Right on top of the rotting corpses of your people."
"And I'm going to..."
Paul stood back up.
He twirled the Watcher's Axe in a flawless 360-degree spin.
The five-colored psychic flames perfectly merged with the deep blue electrical arcing of the disruption field along the massive blade.
"Erase them."
"One by one."
--
Note:
We are doing the special event this week again! For this week only every 100 Powerstones will get 1 Bonus chapter.
Last time we did this event i uploaded more than 30 chapters in a single week!
Lets do more this week!
Bye!