Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Everything strange from before finally seemed to make sense — though Vashtorr knew a secret or two of his own.

"Why Dorn? Hadn't he already lost his Warp essence?"

Back during the Horus Heresy, Perturabo and Fulgrim had both joined the rebellion together, but there was no solidarity among traitors.

Fulgrim eventually schemed to seize half of Perturabo's Warp essence, using it as a sacrifice to ascend into daemonhood — and from then on, Perturabo remained an incomplete Primarch.

Perturabo was hardly resigned to this fate, but even as he scrambled to repair himself, he understood he was no match for the daemon-ascended Fulgrim.

So he turned his gaze toward those brothers who had neither ascended to daemonhood nor fully awakened their own Warp essence.

His mortal enemy: Rogal Dorn.

The Battle of the Iron Cage did not break the Imperial Fists, but the Loyalists paid a price beyond the tens of thousands of Astartes lives lost. Dorn's own Warp essence was likewise seized by Perturabo, and from that day he was no longer more than mortal.

A Primarch's body was mighty indeed, but flesh alone was only a vessel — one the Accursed One had shaped to bind their essence and grant them humanity.

Primarchs made of flesh alone had been replicated before. Fabius Bile, a master of that dark art, had cloned Primarchs whose bodies alone captured six or seven parts of the original's presence.

But once they lost what was most essential to them, even the cloned Horus could be run clean through by a single claw-strike from his "devoted son" Abaddon.

Having lost his essence, Rogal Dorn vanished during a boarding action, and nothing was ever heard of him again.

The Dark Gods of the Warp all knew he still lived, but a Primarch without Warp essence no longer held the attention of most of them.

Vashtorr had never expected to encounter Dorn here — still less that a Primarch stripped of even his essence could pilot some bizarre war-machine and beat him back step by step.

What exactly was that machine?

Vashtorr's curiosity flared anew. He realized it must be the machine that had restored Dorn's fighting strength.

But now wasn't the time to indulge his curiosity — Skarbrand had already worked himself into a frenzy.

"Dorn! Dorn!" he roared. "If I can offer him to the Blood God, I'll surely win my way back to the Brass Throne! Vashtorr, tell me where he is!"

"Is a Primarch who's lost his Warp essence really worth all this fuss?"

Vashtorr shot back, only to see contempt flash in Skarbrand's eyes.

"You don't understand us, Vashtorr. What we need are warriors — heroes — not merely a scrap of Warp essence.

Even with his essence intact, Angron was nothing but a killing machine without a shred of glory.

"Dorn is different. He proved himself before the Blood God long ago. Fill him with a core that belongs to the Blood God, and he'll fall under the Blood God's banner — becoming a far finer warrior than those cursed Butcher's Nails ever made!"

It was hard to believe such a lumbering brute could put things so grandly. Vashtorr needed a moment to grasp the gist of it.

Wasn't this just forced corruption by another name?

So when Dorn still had his Warp essence, they couldn't touch him — but now that he'd lost it, they'd simply stuff in a concept belonging to Sadistic Terror, forcing him into their camp the same way they'd forged a Bloodthirster.

Was everyone in Sadistic Terror's camp this shameless?

Vashtorr wanted very much to sneer at him, but he quickly realized this was an opportunity.

He himself was currently tied down by Dorn and his Gundam. If Skarbrand was willing to take Dorn off his hands, then even if Vashtorr couldn't unravel the secrets of Lin's creations, he could at least seize back a good deal of the production lines.

Vashtorr made up his mind. "Dorn is fighting me right now, in Magma City."

"In the Blood God's name, hand him over to me, Vashtorr!"

"And what will you give me in return, Skarbrand?"

In exchange for one future favor rendered free of charge — and without breathing a word that he actually couldn't handle Dorn himself — Vashtorr feigned reluctance and ceded Dorn's head to the Greater Daemon of Sadistic Terror.

"Dorn! Dorn!! DORN!!!"

The Greater Daemon's ecstasy was almost tangible. He beat his tattered, membrane-stripped wings and scrambled toward Magma City like a dog that had found a bone.

Vashtorr, satisfied by Skarbrand's battle-hunger, turned his attention back to Viktor.

The Deputy Forge Director of Cath Maximus — a mechanical forerunner he had personally revived.

By his original plan, Viktor's body and mind, meticulously forged by his own hand, had been his first choice of vessel for descending into the mortal world. Unfortunately circumstances had forced his hand, and he'd had to sacrifice Augustus first to hold the situation together.

That meant Viktor would have to remain behind, presiding over affairs among the Dark Mechanicum cogboys.

But Viktor wasn't an ideal choice. Vashtorr could see the hatred burning in his eyes.

This Magos, who had raced back to Magma City with such fervor, wasn't merely obeying orders — he was driven by a hunger to kill Lin with his own hands.

Vashtorr had no choice but to don the Omnissiah's majesty. "Viktor, your personal vendetta will never outweigh the great work of serving the Omnissiah."

Viktor said nothing. Doubt was spreading through him like weeds run wild.

Was Vashtorr truly the Omnissiah?

He didn't know the answer, and in any case he had no choice. When Vashtorr plucked at the terms of the pact struck earlier, Viktor could only submit to his authority.

"Obey — or be discarded."

"As you will, Omnissiah."

The daemon army, its arrangements settled, pressed into Magma City, where Skarbrand had already taken over the fight against Dorn. Dragging his great axe behind him, he joined the battle, striking from behind while the Gundam was still locked in combat with the Titan.

"Even a stone will learn to bleed today!"

Dorn's reaction was far quicker than his ambush.

The Gundam pivoted lightly, blade raised — from the look of it, the Bloodthirster and his own axe had simply slammed themselves headlong into the beam saber.

As Dorn drove the blow home, the ambushing Skarbrand went hurtling backward like a cannon shell.

The Greater Daemon of Sadistic Terror, rather than angered, was delighted.

"It's the Blood God — he's watching me, he's watching me!"

The instant the beam saber met the brass axe, the sky over all of Magma City went suddenly dark. Amid clouds churning like an open wound, a crimson vortex tore open — a rift into the Warp, a single glance cast down by the Blood God.

Skarbrand, who had gone tens of thousands of years without the Blood God's favor, trembled with excitement from head to foot. His shattered wings began knitting themselves back together, and his body swelled as it basked once more in the Blood God's gaze.

Skarbrand, gravely wounded by a single blow from the Gundam only moments before, was restored to full strength. More than that, under the Blood God's gaze he surged even further, his body swelling until it rivaled the Gundam itself in size.

"Can you feel it? He's watching us!"

He rose from the ground once more, and with a single beat of his newly mended wings, ripples like blood-mist burst through the air.

Dorn tried to evade, but Skarbrand's speed had already begun to match the Gundam's own maneuvers.

He bore down on Dorn with an axe-blade ravenous for blood; countless twisted faces surfaced along its brass edge — the souls sacrificed to the Blood God, screaming and urging him to tear open the Primarch's flesh.

Dorn didn't answer, but he drove his Psycho-Frame to its very limit. His beam saber scraped along the axe-blade and swept upward, its edge slicing open Skarbrand's breastplate.

Skarbrand fought to strike back, but the Gundam's fist had already crashed into his face.

The Greater Daemon's head snapped back at an absurd angle, his neck cracking audibly — only to knit itself whole again in an instant, restored by the Blood God's power.

"Again! Dorn, again! I'll offer you up to the Blood God with my own hands — every drop of your blood will become a jewel beneath his throne!!"

This fight, clearly nowhere near a decisive end, left Vashtorr uneasy.

"What a mad dog."

He muttered the curse under his breath, but didn't hesitate to pull the Titan back. With it freed up, he could finally put the war machine to its original purpose.

"Crush them!"

No one could withstand the wrath beneath an Emperor-class Titan's tread. Its main guns fired, and the defensive line the Exemplary Fists had built was annihilated in an instant.

Losing their line plunged them into a desperate struggle, though thankfully Vashtorr's focus remained on seizing the production lines. Having regained control of the field, he drove the surviving Dark Mechanicum cogboys present into motion.

One production line after another was hauled to the site of the teleportation device. Vashtorr activated it, shipping every last one off to his own domain.

Bolt rounds, ion weapons, meltas, and the occasional novelty — but these were things whose principles could be grasped at a glance, and none of them held any special interest for Vashtorr.

Not until an unfinished production line was brought before him did Vashtorr's movements finally still.

"What's the story with this one?"

The Priests nearby, assuming Vashtorr was furious at being fobbed off with an incomplete line, threw themselves to the ground in terror, begging the Omnissiah's forgiveness.

But when they dared glance up, they found Vashtorr wasn't angry at all.

His face was written over with astonishment and curiosity.

Viktor recognized the line at once. "That's the penetrating shockwave cannon production line Lin left behind in Magma City.

Before fleeing Magma City, one of the conditions the Fabricator General had set for letting Lin remain on Mars was that he build a production line for penetrating shockwave cannons.

Of course such a line could never have been finished, but Lin had at least thrown together a basic framework.

Even Mars couldn't have reverse-engineered the technology's principles from that bare framework. So this line, less than ten percent complete, looked like nothing more than scrap to every Priest who saw it.

But Vashtorr saw something different in it.

"Penetrating shockwave cannons…"

Vashtorr's mechanical tendrils hovered above the production line. Like some devout novice who had just touched the way of the Omnissiah, he handled it with a reverent, careful touch, scanning through its structure.

It was nothing but a crude frame, a heap of half-assembled parts — and yet it filled Vashtorr with an unfamiliarity he'd never felt before.

As a Warp-born demigod who aspired to command the very concept of craft, Vashtorr was confident he could see through the nature of most mechanical creations. Even relics of the Dark Age were, to his eyes, only more elaborate puzzles.

But the line before him was different. What it produced wasn't a product, but a… concept?

Vashtorr wasn't sure how to put it. The line and everything it produced seemed to have been forced into existence by pure "definition" — built from materials this universe already possessed, yet fundamentally at odds with any rule the universe held.

He tried to parse it through the lens of the Warp, only to find that this technology had left no corresponding trace within the Warp at all.

This was no longer just something that seemed to have sprung from nowhere.

This truly was technology that had sprung from nowhere!

Vashtorr's breath quickened. He felt an excitement bordering on fear.

"Lin… what exactly are you?"

Driven by pure curiosity, he began dismantling the line with his own hands. The instant he touched its core concept, a shudder like electric current shot up his mechanical limb, straight into the depths of his mind.

Vashtorr saw — no, not saw, understood — some possibility that transcended malicious artifice. His very essence trembled; the fragments of his Warp-born divinity devoured that sliver of revelation like a starving beast.

He had already sensed something mysterious about Lin across their previous clashes. Now, touching it firsthand, Vashtorr finally understood what that mystery truly meant.

"This feeling…!"

He let out an electronic sound close to a moan.

What tremendous ingenuity — what a pure concept!

It felt like tasting true creation for the first time, rather than some clumsy imitation. Riding that feeling, he soared — for a moment he felt as if he stood among the clouds.

In that moment, he was no longer some scavenger picking through scrap as Master of a Thousand Forges — he stood at a threshold, before a door opening onto a realm even the Four Chaos Gods had never set foot in!

He spun around abruptly, a sickly green light flaring in his electronic eyes. "Take it all — don't leave so much as a single screw behind!"

The Dark Mechanicum cogboys carried out the order in terror. Vashtorr paced back and forth anxiously, racking his mind for where he might get his hands on more of Lin's creations.

He could no longer forget that feeling.

"How are things going inside Magma City?" he suddenly asked.

"It's going smoothly. Skarbrand has that bizarre war-machine tied down, and we've completed the encirclement of the remaining Astartes inside Magma City."

Viktor answered, "More than just reclaiming the production lines — we should be able to make them pay a price too. We might even get Lin killed right here…"

"No!"

His sudden shrieking made everyone flinch, unable to fathom what had set the Omnissiah off.

Realizing he'd lost his composure, Vashtorr forced himself to calm down and reassumed the Omnissiah's dignified bearing.

"Viktor, didn't you want your revenge? I grant it."

Viktor's eyes widened. He couldn't understand why Vashtorr, who had just been reining him in, had suddenly done a complete about-face.

"Don't you want it?"

"No, my lord. It would be my honor."

"Go, then, Viktor. Your actions will pave the way for the Omnissiah's glory."

Control of the ghoul army was handed over to Viktor. Believing his long-held vengeance was finally within reach, Viktor took the words as nothing more than ordinary praise, never noticing the darker meaning laced beneath Vashtorr's tone.

Malicious artifice? Hah…

He would seize this chance and become the true Omnissiah!

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