The Prestige Arena
Session: 2026-04-22
The Prestige Arena
Session: 2026-04-22
The blast doors groaned shut behind them, sealing whatever horror had driven them through the Banquet Hall. The Prestige Arena received them with indifferent grandeur.
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 warp's corruption had reached even here. What had once been dutiful machine-servants now lurched through the arena floor, their augmetics blooming with sutured extra limbs, their purpose replaced by something far older and far hungrier. In the raised stands, figures watched. In the cages along the far wall, humans screamed.
Treave Malcon-22, whose devotion to the Omnissiah was matched only by his technical precision, failed to account for the arena's open sight lines. He blundered into the light, and the Servitors turned.
There was no time for a better plan. Marius drew his chainsword and went to work.
The first Servitor fell in a single blow — a cut from groin to shoulder that split the creature into two ragged, suppurating halves. The second lurched at Marius and missed entirely, its corrupted targeting subroutines a mockery of the machine intelligence they had once been. Treave waded into the third with his maul. "You have abandoned the machine spirits," he declared, his voice flat as a death-rite. "I will shepherd you home." The blow connected solidly, cracking the Servitor open — and jarring Treave's own hands badly enough to slow his follow-through.
Somnus did not close the distance. He reached instead with the invisible hand of his gift, found the Servitor harrying Treave, and pushed. The creature's sutured scars sizzled. Its brain melted and leaked from its own seams. Marius opened the last one across the belly; necrotic flesh and rusted components spilled across the arena floor in a putrid cascade.
Sister Dauphine had not moved from the blast doors. She and Somnus took stock of the rear, probing the seals — the doors would hold, for now. But neither was under any illusion that they were going back through them.
The stands had fallen quiet. The watching figures — cultists, or what remained of them — had been shaken by the agents' efficiency and retreated. The caged humans were still screaming, though the tenor had shifted from terror to hope.
The group advanced toward the cages, stepping past the wreckage. Then Somnus heard it: a low, wet chuckle from among the fallen Servitors. Not mechanical. Not residual. One of the bodies was still animated — not by corrupted programming, but by the warp itself. Somnus cut the connection with a focused exertion of will, and the thing dropped.
As Treave and Marius stepped past the body, they noticed the key.
Treave found the lock. The cage opened. The survivors within collapsed in relief and gratitude, invoking the God-Emperor with the particular fervour of people who had not expected to leave this room alive. The agents moved through them with blades sheathed and medicae applied, treating infections that were dangerous but, in this company, almost mundane.
Almost. Treave's eyes read the crowd with cold clinical attention. Those with augmetics were worse — more degraded, their machine components flickering, their flesh at war with itself. The Gellerpox fed on the bridge between organic and mechanical. He said nothing, but his course of action was already decided.
Somnus gave voice to the question hanging over the group: should the infected even be let out?
One of the prisoners answered the question before anyone else could. The man was already turning — the bloom of corruption visible in the tremor of his limbs, the wrongness behind his eyes. Treave's response was swift and without ceremony. One snap. The mood in the cage changed like a blade turning in a wound. Those with augmetics separated themselves quietly, some still half-claiming they had time. None of them believed it. Somnus locked the cages behind them.
From among those who remained, a man stepped forward. Jerhan Astoff, he said — one of Lord Meldrake's favoured attendants. He had a case chained to his wrist, and both Marius and Somnus noted it immediately. The case was for Meldrake, Astoff explained, his voice carrying the confusion of a man whose map of the world had ceased to match its terrain. He could not go back to Meldrake. He would have to move forward. Toward the chapel.
He helped them piece together what had happened aboard the ship. The cultists who had been watching from the arena stands had not stayed to fight. They had almost certainly fallen back to the chapel.
There was, as it happened, nowhere else to go.
Faith is of the utmost importance to most denizens of the Imperium, for all know that only the God-Emperor could have preserved humanity for so long amidst such a hostile galaxy. Thus, chapels are a common sight in the 41st Millennium, and The Chapel of Saints is a striking example of worshipful architecture.
Sister Dauphine led with quiet authority as they crossed the threshold. Marius walked with a steadiness he had not quite carried before — he had fought an entire engagement in melee, as he had set out to do. He had shed blood and drawn none of his own. The Wrath of the Emperor moved through him like heat.
The Chapel of Saints is an imposing vaulted room with a diamond-chequered floor and pillars stretching up towards a ceiling wreathed in shadows. Sound is unnaturally deadened here, yet your footfalls seem to ring out. Five shrines to saints ring the chapel, and a kneeling figure rocks back and forth before each one, mumbling incomprehensible words. Their hoods hide their faces, but their forms are visible in the light of the thousands of candles spluttering around each shrine.
... the kneeling figures. It is clear that something is terribly wrong with them. Their hoods hide a melding of machine and pallid flesh far more unnatural than that of even the most ambitious Tech-priest. They are connected by trails of rotting musculature and wire to the statues, apparently attempting to meld with the cool and unyielding stone depictions of the saints. Sister Dauphine knows instinctively what is happening — these unnatural, tainted beings seek to desecrate the chapel. Just then, the previously looming figure of a Nightmare Hulk charges at the Agents.
Somnus glanced sideways at Treave as the Nightmare Hulk's footfalls cracked the diamond-chequered floor. "Your God's been feeding on our God it seems."
The chapel offered no shelter from what was coming.