Slater stepped unhurriedly over the splintered threshold and out into the open.
He was already surrounded. Dozens of figures, drawn by the commotion, had poured out from the surrounding ruins. There were easily fifty or sixty of them—men and women, their faces set in grim determination.
They clutched a patchwork arsenal of makeshift weapons: iron pipes, scavenged machetes, and even a few barely functioning autoguns. Their eyes were filled with fear and wariness, but beneath that, there was a desperate kind of madness.
This was the Underhive. They had seen more than their fair share of crazy shit. But right now, looking at this blood-drenched juggernaut revving a chainaxe... their hearts couldn't help but skip a collective, heavy beat.
Slater slowly raised his head.
In the dim gloom, his eyes glowed with a sinister, crimson light. He hoisted the dripping chainaxe, its teeth still spinning in a violent blur, emitting an ear-splitting shriek.
His lips parted, spitting out that ancient, bloody, and completely unhinged prayer:
"Blood for the Blood God."
"Skulls for the Skull Throne."
The next second, Slater smashed into the crowd like a human meat grinder.
There was nothing fancy about his movements. He didn't dodge, he didn't block, and he sure as hell didn't bother with tactics. He wanted the head-on collision. He wanted them to look their executioner dead in the eye as he reaped them.
He just swung his axe forward, took another step, and swung again.
His steel armor gleamed with a cold, silver-gray light in the dark. The iron pipes and machetes hacking at him did nothing but leave shallow white scratches before glancing off the contoured plating.
The hands wielding those weapons, however, lost their owners a split second later. The roaring teeth of the chainaxe tore through the mob, ripping apart anyone foolish enough to stand in the path of the spinning metal.
Squelch!!
A middle-aged man was cleaved cleanly in half at the waist. The light quickly faded from his eyes, though he didn't die instantly. His mouth opened and closed like a beached fish as he tried to scream, but he didn't have the lungs to make a sound. Slater didn't even spare him a glance as he kept pushing forward.
The scavengers swarming him were seeing red. None of them chose to run.
That actually surprised Slater a little. In this garbage dump of a world, in a slop-bucket Underhive that made Necromunda look like a resort, these people had probably fought to the death more times than they could count just to see another day.
Fear? That emotion had been beaten out of them the day they took their first breath.
Faced with this blood-soaked demon who had dropped out of nowhere, their eyes only held madness. The kind of rabid, suicidal frenzy where they knew they were going to die, but they were determined to bite off a chunk of flesh before they went out.
"Raaargh!"
A gray-haired man lunged from the flank, gripping a sharpened, rusted steel pipe, and viciously drove it toward Slater's neck. He was aiming for the armor joint—the absolute weakest link in the suit's defense.
Slater didn't bother dodging.
The exact second the pipe scraped the joint, his left hand clamped around the man's throat, lifting him completely off the ground. The guy kicked wildly in the air, frantically jabbing the steel pipe at Slater's neck, but he couldn't get the angle right to actually wedge it into the narrow gap.
"Nice angle," Slater said, staring right at him. A twisted glint of appreciation flickered in his increasingly crimson eyes. "Too bad you hit like a bitch."
His fingers clamped down.
Crack.
The man's neck snapped like a twig. Slater casually tossed the corpse into the encroaching crowd, bowling over two young guys who were rushing him. The chainaxe swung out again, and the two of them were dead before they hit the dirt.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Gunfire barked from the side. Slater turned his head to see three relatively well-dressed men ducking behind a half-collapsed wall, gripping crudely manufactured autoguns.
Underhive gangers. Basically just local thugs who had managed to scavenge a few more trash-tier weapons than the average drifter.
The bullets sparked against his steel armor, leaving behind nothing but a few shallow dents.
"That all you got?" Slater grinned. Framed by a face smeared with gore, the smile was absolutely demonic.
He started walking straight toward the low wall.
The three gangers frantically squeezed their triggers, clumsily fumbling for fresh mags the second their guns clicked empty. But their garbage-tier ballistic weapons couldn't even scratch his steel plates. An 8,000 Imperial Coin set from the system store—even the basic model—was practically a cheat code against this Underhive scrap.
Slater stepped up to the wall, looming over them. Their guns were still going off, but their eyes were completely hollowed out by despair.
"Done shooting?"
Slater raised the chainaxe.
First swing. The guy on the far left and the autogun in his hands were cleaved perfectly in two.
Second swing. The man in the middle died on the spot.
Third swing. The last ganger was bifurcated.
Slater pulled back the chainaxe, letting the residual gore drip from the teeth onto the ground.
With every kill, Slater's eyes bled a little redder. It wasn't bloodshot; it was a literal fire igniting from the depths of his pupils. Microscopic wisps of crimson energy continuously drifted up from the fresh corpses, sinking into his skin.
His movements were getting faster. His swings were getting more savage. His eyes burned an even deeper crimson, the glowing red easily visible in the pitch-black.
More people were pouring in from all directions. This settlement only had about five hundred residents, but a massacre this loud had woken up the entire block.
Men, women, even half-grown kids. They were spilling out of the dilapidated buildings gripping anything that could vaguely double as a weapon, all converging on Slater.
Leading the charge at the front of the pack were a dozen men packing auto-rifles. This was the settlement's actual muscle—the local enforcers of the Tepo Gang.
Their guns were military-grade hardware sourced from some unknown channel, kept in decent condition. Right now, they were lined up in a row, all barrels pointed straight at Slater.
"Fire!" the lead man barked, and over a dozen auto-rifles roared to life simultaneously.
Bullets rained down like a torrential downpour, pinging and clattering against Slater's steel armor. The sheer density of the barrage actually forced him back a couple of steps. This level of firepower was definitely a step up from those trash handguns earlier.
But that was about it.
The surface of his steel armor was peppered with impact marks, and hairline fractures appeared in a few spots, but the overall structure held up just fine.
And those stray bullets? They didn't give a damn about who was friend or foe.
Agonized screams rang out from behind Slater. The scavengers who had just been charging forward were mowed down in droves by the indiscriminate spray. Some twitched in pools of their own blood; others died before they even hit the ground.
"Fuck! You motherf—" An old man with a stray round blown through his chest couldn't even finish his curse before he dropped dead.
The faces of the dozen gunmen paled, but their fingers never left the triggers.
Friendly fire in the Underhive? That was just collateral damage. As long as they could put down the demon standing in front of them, any body count was worth it.
Watching this unfold, Slater suddenly laughed.
The laughter grew louder and more unhinged, piercing right through the deafening gunfire and shrieks of pain.
"Hahahahaha..."
He bolted forward.