Crossfire
Session: 2026-04-15
Crossfire
Session: 2026-04-15
The Macharian Banquet Hall had once been a place of Imperial ceremony, gilded and grand — a space where contracts were sealed over polished platters and the Rogue Trader's favour was currency enough to change a life. Now the furniture had been reduced to barricade material, piled in haste against what was coming. And what was coming wore the faces of people who had once served aboard The Herald Varonius.
The furniture of the Macharian Banquet Hall has been gathered into a makeshift barricade, behind which Emsley Bardotte tries to calm her cadre of Armsmen as they fire in fear, wasting their ammo. Their targets at first glance look like menial crew, but their uniforms are tattered, showing pulsating boils that surge from their rotting skin. One of the mutated crewmembers freezes in place, pus dripping from their ears and eyes as their form begins to swell. Coruscating light and acidic discharge burst from their boils as tentacles and horns sprout from their body.
Marius moved ahead. That was his way — read the ground before the others set foot on it. What he saw through the Banquet Hall gave him everything he needed to know: six mutants, corruption blooming from their flesh, and something larger moving amongst them. Something that had stopped being mortal. He marked it. He would deal with it in time.
Treave Malcon-22 opened the engagement without ceremony. The Melta weapon discharged in a blinding flare of white heat, and three of the mutant cultists ceased to exist in any meaningful sense — reduced to cinders and ruin before they could even register the source of their destruction. "The weakness of the flesh screams the shadows," he pronounced, the words carrying the cold certainty of a prayer to the Omnissiah. For Treave, it was not rhetoric. It was simply accurate.
Sister Dauphine moved with lethal economy, erasing another cultist from the equation with a single devastating blast.
The Possessed Mortal — the largest shape on the field, swollen and reshapen by whatever had taken root inside it — was Somnus's concern. The sanctioned Psyker drew on the winds of the Warp, feeling that familiar terrible current surge through him, and directed a Smite into the creature. It staggered. A cultist, seeing an opportunity, slashed at Treave — but the Skitarius's augmented body absorbed the blow without pause, and the thing that struck him was swiftly reminded that it had made an error. Treave's maul came around in a single arc and caved in its skull.
Marius lined up his shot. The Possessed Mortal was wounded, struggling to retain the shape it had twisted into. The sniper rifle spoke once. A round punched clean through the creature's bulk and it dropped.
"Strength and Honor."
He said it quietly. He meant it completely.
Supplies
In the aftermath, while the Armsmen caught their breath and Lieutenant Bardotte moved among her people, supplies were gathered from the armoury and the fallen — a bloodstained but intact flak coat, two medikits, a round of ammunition for every agent, hands-free lumen units, a respirator rated against airborne toxins for up to two hours, and three doses of stimm. They divided the provisions without discussion. There was no time for anything else.
Then came the smell. Rotting flesh and machine oil, inexplicably intermingled.
... An Armsman screams and snaps off a burst of lasgun fire as horrifying figures emerge from the passageway leading from the food stores. The mass of putrescent Cultists seems endless, crawling over one another like a tide of rot — a horde you cannot hope to defeat. Bardotte and the Armsmen look to you. What do you do?
The Armsmen were beginning to break. Somnus could see it before it happened — the particular quality of fear that turns trained soldiers into liabilities. He turned to Sister Dauphine. "Inspire them." He did not ask.
Sister Dauphine did not require asking. She drew herself to her full height, her voice carrying the authority of years of service and the weight of Saint Bertahl's name, and she addressed the soldiers behind the barricade with the kind of certainty that only genuine faith produces. Their fire steadied. Their hands steadied. It would not hold forever. But it would hold long enough.
The decision was the Prestige Arena. A tactical retreat — chaotic, contested, punctuated by shots fired backwards into the advancing tide — through corridors thick with the smell of corruption. The blast doors sealed behind them with a resonant, final boom.
You enter an impressive vaulted arena with raised rows of seating coiled around a central stage. Servitors limp under sickly lumen light, appearing to be half necrotic flesh, half corroded steel. Their bodies are grotesquely altered masses of metal and mortal matter. A muscular man with old scars and hive gang tattoos is struck by the rusted saw blade of a Combat Servitor that appears to have multiple mutilated limbs either sutured onto, or bursting from, its torso. As the man falls, his wounds begin to overflow with maggots, which form a writhing mass that spreads around him.
The horde was behind them. The blast doors would hold, for now.
What lay ahead would not offer the same mercy. The Prestige Arena waited — vaulted and vast and wrong — and its welcome had already begun.