WH 40k: Transcendence

The secondary team moved in silence.

A hundred enforcers, hive scum mercenaries, and ogryn brutes, advancing through the ruined upper levels of the manufactorum. Their orders were simple—cut off the cultists' escape, lock them inside, and slaughter them like animals.

For Enforcer Sergeant Hadrian Voss, this mission was nothing short of hell.

—-

Hadrian had served the Enforcers for twenty years—a lifetime in the underhive. He had fought mutants, gangers, rogue psykers, and even the occasional xenos infestation.

But this?

This was something else entirely.

The Hive was dying.

He felt it in his bones.

First, the disappearances. Entire hab-blocks emptied overnight, with no screams, no struggle—just gone.

Then, the whispers. Priests raving about the Blood God, their sermons growing louder, their eyes too bright, too hungry.

And now—this.

A full-blown Chaos uprising.

Hadrian's grip tightened around his combat shotgun.

They had to end this.

Even if it killed them all.

---

"Move."

The enforcers advanced, boots crunching on rusted catwalks, lascarbines raised. They weren't subtle.

They didn't need to be.

"Cut their throats before they see us," Hadrian had ordered.

And the hive scum followed.

They moved in packs, scavenged weapons gleaming in the dim lumen-strips.

Knives, autopistols, stubbers—dirty, brutal weapons, but effective.

A mutant guard spotted them too late.

A vibro-knife flashed.

The hive scummer drove it into the mutant's throat, twisting.

No scream. No noise. Just death.

They kept moving.

---

The cultists were waiting.

The first barricade was a death trap.

They had welded rusted servitors to the walls, their twisted forms wired into lasgun turrets.

As soon as the enforcers stepped into the open—hell erupted.

Las-fire speared through the darkness, cutting men down instantly.

"COVER!" Hadrian roared.

The hive scum dove for the ground, rolling behind machinery.

A grenade arced through the air.

Boom.

The explosion sent limbs flying, turning cover into splinters.

An ogryn charged forward, ignoring the shrapnel.

"FOR THE EMPRAH!"

The brute lifted a chunk of metal debris, using it as a shield.

Autogun rounds ricocheted off him, barely slowing him down.

Then—he was among them.

The first cultist exploded into paste as the ogryn's fist caved his skull in.

A second was lifted, spine snapping as the brute crushed him in a bear hug.

Blood sprayed.

The hive scum followed, swarming through the opening.

Hadrian moved with them, shotgun barking, blowing a cultist's leg clean off.

The enemy fell, screaming, clawing at the bleeding stump.

Hadrian didn't slow down.

No mercy.

---

They pushed forward, deeper into the heart of the manufactorum's upper levels.

The walls pulsed with corruption.

They could hear it now—chanting.

The cultists weren't breaking.

They were summoning something.

A great metal door loomed ahead.

Scratched into it—a symbol.

A skull, wreathed in fire, with fangs like daggers.

Hadrian had seen it before.

The Crimson Howl.

The last thing he remembered before the doors burst open—

Was the sound of laughter.

And then—they charged.

---

The battle exploded into a brutal melee.

The cultists came screaming, axes and cleavers in hand.

They were not human anymore.

Their bodies twisted, some with extra arms, some with mouths where their stomachs should be.

One had a chainsword fused to his flesh.

Hadrian fired point-blank, blowing his head off.

An ogryn roared, swinging a broken I-beam like a club.

A cultist was sent flying, crashing through the catwalk below.

The hive scum fought dirty—gut shots, throat slits, eye gouges.

But it wasn't enough.

The cultists didn't feel pain.

One of the enforcers screamed as a mutant ripped his arm off and bit into his throat.

Blood painted the walls.

Hadrian gritted his teeth.

They had to hold.

Had to cut the bastards off before they could escape.

"SEAL THE DOORS!" he roared.

A tech-priest, barely alive, slammed his augmetic fist into the control panel.

The gates groaned shut.

The cultists inside the manufactorum were trapped.

But so were they.

And the worst was still coming.

—-

Hadrian had seen slaughter before. He had seen men butcher each other in the streets over scraps of corpse-starch. He had seen gangers flay the living just to wear their skin as trophies. He had seen the aftermath of a rogue psyker's rampage—entire hab-blocks turned inside out, bodies fused to ferrocrete walls, their screams still echoing in the Warp.

But this?

This was something else entirely.

The manufactorum was a charnel house.

The moment the doors sealed, something inside the cultists snapped.

The chanting turned to howls—not words, just raw, animalistic noise.

And then the killing began.

---

Hadrian fired into the writhing mass of flesh, his shotgun barking as a cultist's chest erupted into pulp.

A hive scummer next to him shrieked, pinned beneath a hulking mutant. The thing had no eyes—just a maw of rotting teeth where its face should be.

It bit down.

Hadrian heard bones crunching.

The man screamed, kicked, thrashed—until he didn't.

The mutant kept chewing.

Hadrian didn't think. He raised his shotgun and blew the thing's head apart.

The body twitched, but the mouth kept chewing.

And then—the others started eating, too.

It wasn't just the mutants.

It was the cultists.

It was his own men.

A wounded enforcer, his guts spilling out, grabbed at a corpse and shoved handfuls of raw meat into his mouth.

A hive scum, blood-crazed, ripped out a dying man's throat with his teeth.

Even the ogryns were tearing at bodies, gnawing on limbs, their eyes glazed over in a mindless hunger.

The air was thick with the stink of blood and excrement.

Hadrian felt something inside him crack.

This wasn't a battle anymore.

This was hell.

---

The enforcers had been trained for war.

They had been trained for order.

But order was gone.

One of his men—**a veteran, a man who had once held the line against an entire underhive gang alone—**let out a strangled sob and tore off his own helmet.

"FOR HIM! FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"

And then he charged into the cultists.

Not to fight.

To join them.

Hadrian watched in horror as his once-loyal comrade hacked into his own squadmates with a rusted machete, laughing, crying, screaming.

And he wasn't alone.

One by one, the enforcers gave in.

They threw down their guns and waded into the blood, hacking, biting, feasting.

Hadrian felt his heart pounding, his hands shaking.

His vision blurred red.

The scent of blood was everywhere.

His stomach twisted.

For a moment, he could almost taste it.

He was hungry.

No—no, he had to fight it.

Hadrian gritted his teeth and kept firing.

He had to hold on.

---

"HADRIAN!"

A voice—distant, echoing.

A hand—grabbing his shoulder, shaking him.

Hadrian turned, shotgun raised.

It was Loran, the last of sane enforcers left.

His face was pale, eyes wide with horror.

"They're all lost! We need to move! NOW!"

Hadrian looked around.

The manufactorum floor was a sea of bodies.

No more sides.

No more loyalty.

Just flesh and hunger.

A cultist, an enforcer, a hive scum—indistinguishable now—wrestled in the gore, biting, tearing, drowning in their own madness.

The walls shuddered, pulsing like living flesh.

Something was coming.

Something was watching.

Hadrian felt its gaze.

It was inside him. Inside all of them.

He let out a shuddering breath.

"Move."

And they ran.

—-

Hadrian's breath was ragged, his vision blurred, his limbs heavy with exhaustion and something worse—something gnawing at the edges of his mind.

The blood was up to his ankles now, pooling thick across the manufactorum floor, sinking into the cracks of the steel. It wasn't just blood anymore. It moved. It pulsed, slow and alive, whispering in voices he didn't recognize—or worse, voices he did.

"Hadrian… Hadrian… why do you run?"

The corpses of his men twitched in the periphery of his vision, their lips curling into mocking grins.

Hadrian clenched his jaw, steadied his stance. He had six men left. Six enforcers, stripped of their armor, covered in the filth of war, barely standing.

Ahead of them, the horde pressed closer. Cultists, mutants, traitors—all screaming the same damn thing.

"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"

"SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!"

It should have been terrifying.

But Hadrian felt nothing.

Nothing but hate.

---

"For the Imperium!" Hadrian roared, and his men followed suit.

They charged.

It wasn't strategy anymore. It wasn't war. It was spite.

Hadrian's shotgun barked, point-blank into a screaming heretic's face. The skull burst apart like rotten fruit, but two more replaced him.

His men fought with desperation, brutality.

One of them—Loran, his second-in-command—was bleeding from half a dozen wounds but still swinging, his baton cracking against bone, shattering teeth.

Another—Dren, the silent one, fought with his bare hands, strangling a mutant even as it gouged out his eye.

They killed.

And they died.

The cultists came in waves, frothing, biting, tearing. It didn't matter how many Hadrian shot down—more took their place.

"It's not enough!" someone screamed. He didn't know who.

Then the Ogryns charged.

Massive, twisted things, their flesh covered in growing brass sigils, their eyes leaking black ichor. One grabbed an enforcer, ripped him in half at the waist.

Loran didn't scream. He just kept fighting.

Hadrian could barely hold his shotgun. His arms felt heavy. His fingers numb. His own heartbeat was too loud, pounding like a war drum inside his skull.

The whispers in the blood grew louder.

"Hadrian… it hurts, doesn't it? Let go. Just let go…"

He gritted his teeth.

"Damn you all."

—-

There were only three left.

Hadrian.

Dren—his stomach torn open, intestines dragging, but still breathing.

Loran—missing an arm, holding a broken baton, his chest rising and falling in short, shallow gasps.

The horde didn't stop.

And something in Hadrian snapped.

His grip on his shotgun loosened. His mind flickered.

For a moment, he wasn't in the manufactorum anymore.

He was home.

The underhive hab he'd grown up in. The stink of mold and oil. The sound of his mother humming a hymn.

He could see her now—standing in the doorway.

"Come home, Hadrian."

No. No, that wasn't real.

He blinked, and the blood-soaked manufactorum returned.

His mother's face melted into a writhing, blood-slick skull.

Hadrian let out a ragged breath.

He turned to Loran.

The man looked at him, eyes dull, but still filled with fire.

"No surrender." Loran rasped, voice barely audible. "No mercy."

Hadrian nodded.

---

They stood together, back to back.

Dren let out a weak, rasping chuckle. "Guess this is it, huh?"

Hadrian didn't answer.

He pulled the last grenade from his belt.

The cultists laughed, jeered, beckoned them forward.

Hadrian didn't hear them anymore.

The only thing he heard was the Emperor's name, whispered in his mind.

"For Him."

Loran knelt, muttering a final prayer.

Dren wiped the blood from his eyes, and grinned.

"For the Imperium," Hadrian said.

And he pulled the pin.

—-

Word count: 1842

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