WH 40k: Transcendence

Cassian felt it before he saw it.

The air in the manufactorum grew thick, suffocating, like the pressure of the deep void pressing down on his lungs. The smell of blood, thick and cloying, coated his throat. His skin crawled as if a million unseen hands were brushing against him.

They were too late.

The cultists had succeeded.

The Warp had bled into reality.

Ahead, at the heart of the manufactorum, a monstrous tear in reality pulsed like a living wound. A massive rift—a gate, a maw, a curse upon the world. From within, it howled, an endless chorus of laughter, wailing, and screams. Voices of the damned.

Cassian's breath hitched. His vision swam.

It was getting inside his head.

The Warp was speaking to him.

---

"You do not belong here."

The voice was inside him. Cold, cruel, knowing.

Cassian staggered back, gripping his weapon tight.

"You are not like them. You see. You understand."

His hands shook. His vision blurred.

And then—he saw them.

The dead.

Faces he had seen in life, now twisted in agony, staring at him with pleading eyes.

Joran. His throat torn open.

The old man from the scriptorum. Skin peeled from his face.

Derrus. Guts spilling from his stomach, reaching out to him.

"Why didn't you save us, Cassian?"

"You left us to die."

"You could have been more. You could have been powerful."

He gritted his teeth.

"Lies."

The Warp pressed harder.

The walls twisted, melting like wax. The manufactorum flickered between two realities—one of decayed metal and another of raw, screaming flesh.

Cassian's head pounded. The whispers turned to shouts.

"TAKE THE GIFT. EMBRACE IT. BE FREE."

Something inside him—something deep, instinctual, something he had buried since he arrived in this hell—ached.

The promise of power.

He could take it.

He could survive.

Cassian almost—almost—reached out.

But then—

A gunshot.

Derrus.

"CASSIAN!"

Cassian gasped, snapping back to reality.

His fingers had been reaching toward nothing.

He looked around—his team was breaking.

The elite enforcers, hardened warriors of the Imperium, were falling.

---

Twisted Flesh, Broken Minds

One by one, they succumbed.

A woman screamed as her body split down the middle, her ribcage snapping open like a maw, fanged hands sprouting from within.

Another enforcer clawed at his face, ripping his own eyes out, laughing as his skin melted into writhing, tumor-ridden flesh.

Some collapsed in fits of gibbering madness, foaming at the mouth, whispering hymns to gods that should not exist.

The Warp had claimed them.

Cassian could only watch in horror.

"FALL BACK!" Derrus barked, his voice cutting through the chaos.

Cassian and the remaining five men staggered away, barely keeping themselves together.

Behind them, their former allies rose.

They were not men anymore.

They were monsters.

---

The manufactorum erupted.

From the rift, they came.

Daemons. A flood of them.

Horrors of writhing, shifting flesh. Beasts of fangs and hunger. And worse—things that had no true form, only shadows of torment and nightmare.

The thousands of cultists fell to their knees, screaming in ecstasy.

Their gods had answered.

And now, they would kill in their name.

Cassian and his team were surrounded.

Outnumbered.

This was not a battle.

This was annihilation.

Cassian's world shrunk to the battlefield before him.

Thousands of cultists, mutated enforcers, and daemons surged forward, their forms writhing in the sickly glow of the Warp rift. The manufactorum was no longer just a factory of metal and stone—it was a temple of slaughter.

The stench of blood, rot, and burning flesh choked the air. The ground beneath his feet pulsed, as if something massive and alive lurked just beneath the surface.

The situation was impossible.

"We die here," one of the enforcers whispered.

"Not yet," Derrus growled, shoving him forward. "Fight!"

Cassian clenched his teeth, his mind racing.

They had one advantage—the manufactorum's chokepoints.

If they were going to die, they would make these bastards pay for every inch of ground.

---

"Hold the line at the bottleneck!" Cassian barked, pointing to the half-collapsed assembly lines to their left.

Derrus caught on immediately.

"Fall back! Keep them funneled!"

They ran, skirting around the hordes of cultists. They leaped over conveyor belts, pushing past half-melted machinery. Warp-twisted metal howled in agony as they moved.

Behind them, the enemy poured in.

Mutated enforcers, with limbs too long and jaws unhinged, scrambled after them like beasts. Bloodletters roared in mindless hunger, their eyes burning with malice. Cultists chanted in a fevered frenzy, blades raised high.

Cassian and his men slid into position.

A single corridor, choked with debris and broken machines, led to them.

A perfect kill zone.

"Fire!"

Their bolters roared.

Rounds ripped through flesh and bone. The first wave collapsed in sprays of gore. Limbs flew, heads burst, bodies crumpled. But for every cultist that fell, ten more surged forward.

The Bloodletters were relentless.

One of them—a hulking mass of bleeding muscle and burning brass—charged through the gunfire. It swung a massive cleaver of rusted iron, catching an enforcer mid-air and bisecting him in a single swing.

Another enforcer—a veteran of a hundred battles—screamed as the Warp took him. His body split, his own ribcage forming into grasping hands that tore his face apart.

Cassian gritted his teeth.

It was not enough.

They were going to die.

But something inside him refused to accept that.

---

Cassian exhaled, his fingers tightening around his Bolter gun.

Fear was creeping into the eyes of his men. He could see it in the way their hands trembled, how their movements lost efficiency.

It was not the situation that was impossible.

It was their belief that it was.

He had always known this to be true. Emotion could cloud judgment, but only if he allowed it to.

Panic, hesitation, and despair—these were the real enemies.

Cassian forced himself to breathe slow, steady. Control the mind, and the body will follow.

"Focus." His voice cut through the chaos, cold and steady.

Derrus glanced at him. "What?"

"Keep shooting," Cassian murmured, stepping forward. "Let me handle the rest."

Derrus opened his mouth but said nothing. He simply nodded.

And in that moment—something inside Cassian changed.

---

The Warp screamed.

Cassian felt his mind stretch beyond his body.

It was like opening a door that had always been there—one he had never dared touch.

His thoughts were no longer his own.

He could feel them.

The minds of the cultists.

Twisted, broken, fanatical.

Their memories. Their rage. Their delusions.

Cassian seized them.

Thousands of cultists stiffened mid-charge.

Their bodies froze. Their eyes rolled back.

Their minds became nothing.

Vegetables.

The battlefield shifted in an instant.

The charging cultists collapsed mid-step. Bloodletters stumbled, roaring in confusion as their mortal followers fell lifeless to the ground.

Derrus stared at Cassian. "What the fuck—?"

But Cassian wasn't finished.

The Warp noticed him.

And it did not like what he had done.

---

Cassian clutched his head as the voices returned.

"THIEF."

"YOU HAVE TOUCHED WHAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND."

The entire manufactorum trembled. The Warp rift flared.

And suddenly, the voices were inside him.

They screamed, whispered, laughed, wept. A hundred thousand voices, all at once.

His mind threatened to snap.

He fell to one knee, blood leaking from his nose and eyes.

But he refused to break.

This was his mind. His body.

He was not a slave.

Cassian pushed back.

The voices grew louder.

He pushed harder.

The whispers became screams.

He crushed them.

One by one.

Until there was only silence.

Cassian exhaled.

His vision cleared.

He stood, stronger than before.

The Warp had tried to break him.

But all it had done was make him stronger.

Cassian stood amidst the carnage, his breath slow and measured. His mind, once his prison, was now his weapon.

The battlefield had changed.

Where before he had been a soldier in the tides of war, now he was something else entirely.

The cultists stumbled in confusion. Those that had not fallen to his telepathic assault gawked at their unmoving comrades, unable to comprehend why their brothers had collapsed like puppets with their strings cut.

Cassian did not hesitate.

He moved, Bolter gun raised, firing without mercy.

Pshhk!

A cultist's head exploded as a precise lasbolt burned through his skull. Another fell screaming, his chest melted open by sustained fire.

Derrus and the remaining five men followed suit.

"Move!" Derrus roared.

They pushed forward, cutting through the disoriented enemy like a scalpel through rotten flesh.

The Bloodletters, however, were not so easily broken.

They saw Cassian for what he was.

A thief. A trespasser. A mortal who had taken something beyond his station.

A threat.

With unholy roars, they surged forward.

Cassian felt them coming before they moved.

His telepathy stretched out like phantom limbs, sensing the rage, the hunger, the hate.

He did not flinch.

Instead, he embraced the clarity it gave him.

---

The first Bloodletter charged, massive hellblade raised high.

Cassian sidestepped, his body moving with unnatural speed—not because of reflex, but because he saw it before it happened.

The daemon's blade missed by inches.

Cassian responded with a point-blank shot to the skull.

The bullet sizzled against daemonic flesh, but the creature did not die. It snarled, swinging wildly.

Cassian ducked low and drove his combat knife into the daemon's throat.

The warp-tainted flesh fought against the steel, resisting.

Cassian twisted the blade, yanking sideways.

The daemon gurgled, its own unnatural ichor spurting in thick clots.

Then he ripped its throat open.

The daemon collapsed, twitching.

Cassian had no time to revel in the kill.

Another Bloodletter was already upon him.

This time, he did not move.

Instead, he reached into its mind.

The Bloodletter froze mid-stride.

It snarled, body trembling, as if fighting something unseen.

Cassian tightened his mental grip.

He felt the daemon's willpower raging against him—an inferno of hatred, violence, and unshakable loyalty to its dark god.

But Cassian had already crushed stronger minds.

"Kneel."

The Bloodletter roared in defiance.

Cassian pushed harder.

The daemon dropped to one knee, trembling violently.

Its own kind stared in shock.

Cassian shoved the barrel of his gun against its forehead.

Pshhk!

The daemon's skull burst open, black ichor splattering across the metal floor.

Derrus and the others kept moving, cutting down the cultists in their way.

They were so close to an exit.

Then, the Warp screamed again.

---

Cassian staggered as the Warp pressed against him.

The air thickened.

The world around him warped.

He saw things that were not there.

Visions.

Himself, standing above billions, a golden crown upon his brow.

A voice, sweet as honey, whispered in his ear.

"You can be more."

"You are already beyond them. Why suffer?"

Cassian gritted his teeth.

"This power is yours. Take it."

He could feel the promise. To let go. To surrender. To embrace something greater.

He almost wanted to.

But then, he laughed.

A dry, humorless chuckle.

It was pathetic.

The Warp offered him power.

It thought he would bend just because he was on the verge of death?

Cassian crushed the voice in his mind the same way he crushed the cultists.

The vision shattered.

Cassian's mind snapped back to reality.

The Warp recoiled from him.

Cassian grinned.

The enemy had no idea what they had awakened.

---

"Keep moving!" Derrus barked.

One of their remaining enforcers—a grizzled veteran—was too slow.

A Bloodletter's blade cleaved through his midsection.

The man screamed, falling in two halves.

Cassian did not stop.

The next man—a hive scum with more scars than skin—was impaled through the back.

The last three enforcers made it to the outer corridor.

Cassian and Derrus were the last to leave.

Behind them, the manufactorum collapsed in on itself.

Daemons screeched.

Cultists wailed.

The fires of their own madness consumed them.

Cassian stood at the threshold, staring into the inferno.

He felt nothing.

Not victory. Not relief.

Just the cold certainty that this was not the end.

It was only the beginning.

----

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