Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Nurgle is at once the easiest and the hardest of the Chaos faiths to spread.

The Grandfather typically bestows his blessings through large-scale plagues—a method that works quickly and corrupts widely, yet also produces severe mutations of the flesh. On any world where Imperial forces hold dominion, the Chaos worshippers of Nurgle are the easiest to root out.

Because they are so easily identified, they are usually annihilated en masse by the Imperium before they can ever gather any real strength. But even so, the followers of Nurgle—desiring to spread the Grandfather's love to all—remain forever enthusiastic about mass propagation. The very notion of covert development is all but alien to the cult of Nurgle.

And yet here, only the core cultists bore the faintest traces of Nurgle's corruption?

This did not seem like a strategy any Nurglite mind could conceive. Baffled beyond reason, Lin turned his gaze toward the other Astartes watching alongside him—but they too only shook their heads.

It seemed no conclusion could be drawn from the scant information they had. Lin could only refocus his attention on the scene. By now the gang leader had, under his guide's direction, ventured deep into the nest of the Nurgle cultists. The breath of the Dark God saturated the lair, and the surging energy of the Warp made the surroundings grow steadily more grotesque.

A putrid stench drifted in from somewhere unknown, and the gang leader—who had only just eaten—could not help but double over and vomit. But the cultist merely watched him, a low chuckle in his voice.

"An intoxicating sweetness, is it not?"

Having finished retching, the gang leader wanted to retort—but when he saw how the scenery around him had begun to peel away from the material universe, he swallowed his words and dared not make a sound.

The ceiling ran with fluid like weeping sores, glistening oily in the dim glow of the moss. The walls were riddled with ulcerous holes from which black pus oozed slowly. This pus pooled beneath their feet, so that every step forward loosed a sticky, squelching sound.

What in the world are these things?!

The gang leader's eyes went wide with terror, the fear of death circling once more through his heart. He began to regret how carelessly he had agreed to Lin's demands earlier—but when he remembered the melta bomb Lin had implanted in his back, his heart sank into even deeper despair.

Yet the more he despaired, the more the Nurgle cultist was pleased with him.

"The dread of death is the key to your transformation. Hold on to it."

Another cultist approached, gathered up the gang leader's vomit, and then led the two of them together into the cult's most sacred cavern.

In the vast chamber there was only an altar and several cauldrons boiling with unnameable substances. A statue of Nurgle stood at the altar's center, its body formed from countless twisted human faces mingled with expressions of contentment. Its surface was coated in green mould, and every so often it seeped a viscous fluid.

The cultists gathered there fanatically used chalices that had once served the Emperor to hold this gift from the Great Father, licking at the filthy rims, letting the eerie liquid corrode their bodies and souls.

Presiding over it all was the Bishop of the Life Cult.

He stood at the center of the altar, intoning prayers to the Grandfather in a hoarse, broken cadence. With every prayer the reek of rot grew thicker, as though it would swallow the entire space whole.

Sensing that outsiders had entered, the Bishop halted the ritual. He turned his head toward the gang leader and the cultist standing beside him. And so the gang boss was finally able to see his face clearly.

He very much doubted whether that could even be called a face.

The Bishop's entire face was already contorted. When he spoke, the muscles of his face twitched abnormally, the rotting tissue writhing along with them to reveal fresh tissue beneath. The flesh at the edges of the decay curled outward like a deformed flower. The skin around his eyes had suffered vast patches of gangrene, like a sickly mask.

He looked no different from a corpse. Yet when the Bishop faced him, the gang leader could still feel this Bishop scrutinizing him.

"Child of my Father, you have brought a mortal to this place. What is it you seek?"

The gang leader suspected he had gone mad—for he could actually read a kind of mercy in that face!

He did not know what he ought to do, but the cultist at his side had already knelt down in devotion.

"O our guide, this humble follower wishes to borrow your hand, that the Great Father might hear the plea of his child!"

He pointed at the gang leader standing dumbstruck to one side: "This man is a gang chieftain who was recently crushed by the lackeys of the False Emperor. He lay unconscious by the roadside near our camp. I recognized his identity and brought him here. His station and his dread of death will surely become the richest nourishment for our cult, so that my Father's teachings may flourish upon this world!"

Recognized who I am? When?!

The gang boss tensely took a step back, bracing himself to bolt—but that cultist blocked his way. The other pulled off his own hood, letting the gang leader recognize who he was.

"Silco?" The gang leader shook his head in disbelief. "No, no... I didn't mean to send you to investigate the Life Cult. I never meant to send you to your death. Forgive me, forgive me!"

"Death? Forgiveness? How could that be?"

Silco began to laugh, his rotting mouth splitting to the ears to reveal blackened teeth. Fresh pus seeped from his smile, dripping down a chin webbed with black veins. "I ought to thank you. If you hadn't sent me here to investigate, how could I ever have thrown myself into the embrace of the Great Father?"

He raised his hand, pointing to the 'brothers and sisters' beside him: "And not just me—everyone you sent before me is here now... We were once enemies, each carrying grudges from our gangs. But now, we are as close as family!"

The cultists Silco had named sprang into motion, pinning down the gang leader as he tried to flee. These corpse-like "men" possessed monstrous strength; no matter how the gang leader struggled, he was locked to the ground, unable to move.

The Bishop walked unhurriedly to the gang leader's side. He crouched down, lifted the man's chin, and studied carefully the face deformed by fear.

"Such rich, thick dread... you were right. He will surely become a devout follower of my Father."

"No, I don't want to become like this! I don't want to become a bloated, rotting corpse!"

"Even if what you receive is an eternal life with no need to fear death?"

The gang leader froze. He looked at the Bishop, and his dread of death now transformed into doubt. The Bishop gestured for the others to release their grip, and personally lifted the gang leader—who had ceased to struggle—to his feet.

"Look upon our brothers and sisters. Can you not feel, from these beautiful children, the beauty of their life?"

The gang leader looked again at the cultists around him, those bearing Nurgle's power, and found that their faces no longer seemed as loathsome as before. The stench filling the air gradually turned into a strange sweetness. The blasphemous words echoing in his ears now became a hymn praising the merging of life, the unity of all things.

"Join us, and see this world doomed to decay with wholly new eyes!"

The gang leader began to tremble. Within his heart, one final struggle was underway.

But that struggle was futile. When he recalled the God-Emperor whom the state church preached of yet who had never once bestowed a miracle, when he recalled the melta bomb implanted within his body, his will to survive instantly overwhelmed his feeble resistance. The rotting thing before him now became his last straw of salvation, and he collapsed to his knees before the Bishop with a thud.

"Save me, Bishop." He spoke with all the strength in his body: "Free me from enslavement to the False Emperor's lackeys!"

The Bishop gazed with satisfaction upon this moldable talent. The cultist who had earlier gathered the gang leader's vomit poured it into one of the boiling cauldrons. A moment later, he fished out a foul-smelling brew, and reverently presented this lethal draught before the Bishop.

"Drink it down." The Bishop offered this thick broth to the gang leader: "In the dread of death you shall transcend death, and in unchanging decay you shall become my Father's eternal follower!"

The gang leader gulped down the thick broth in great swallows, and the power of Nurgle instantly suffused his whole body. His skin began to burn, his blood vessels writhing like earthworms beneath the surface, forming sickly patterns. He could clearly feel those fluids flowing through his body—they replaced his blood, transforming the wellspring of his life into surging toxin.

The sensation was so exquisite—save for that melta bomb still ticking away inside him.

The gang leader's smile froze upon his face.

He could feel that power, as it remade everything within his body, deliberately avoiding the mechanism Lin had implanted inside him. He did not understand the principle behind it, but he knew his life was about to reach its end.

"No, no, no...!"

The newly minted Nurgle follower shrieked madly: "Save me, Bishop! Save me, Great Father!"

The surrounding cultists were baffled, and the Bishop stepped forward to examine the gang leader's condition. When, through the power of Nurgle, he sensed just what it was inside this gang leader's body, his own expression likewise changed drastically.

"Is this a trap those False Emperor's lackeys planted within you? But why?! The Grandfather's might should be able to rot away any mortal contrivance!"

No one could answer the Bishop's interrogation. Having witnessed the whole affair through his device, Lin too decided to draw the curtain on this fine show.

He detonated the melta buried within the gang leader.

The signal emitted from his own position pierced the veil of the Warp like a sharpened arrow, the command read without error by the device on the gang leader's body. A muffled boom rang out from the gang leader's abdomen, and then the bursting energy shattered the cage of his ribs. The flesh, hardened and strengthened by Nurgle's blessing, scattered before the melta like broken porcelain. Blood mingled with fragments of viscera sprayed in every direction; shattered organ tissue and splinters of bone strewed across the ground, forming a chaotic sea of blood and flesh.

Several nearby Nurgle cultists were caught in the blast as well, and the reek of blood mingled with rot filled the entire altar. Though the Bishop stood unharmed under the protection of the Warp's dark power, his heart went utterly cold.

In this holy place where death was not permitted, such a tragedy—one that had claimed the lives of several followers—had just unfolded!

Not only had he lost a representative who could, once corrupted, be used to sway other gangs into surrender—the Bishop could clearly feel that this gang leader's soul had not entered the Grandfather's embrace. He had died before Nurgle's power could sink deep into his soul, and his soul had been swallowed at once by the tides of the Warp, never to be found again in the slightest.

Such a result would undoubtedly leave the Grandfather disappointed.

The surrounding Nurgle cultists did not care about the death of their "brothers and sisters." They stared in excitement at the Bishop, unscathed by the close-range explosion, and continued to sing the greatness of the Father of Life. But the Bishop could feel the Grandfather's gaze drawing away from this place.

He looked at the dimming statue of Nurgle, and his guilt toward the Grandfather easily transformed into fury at the Imperium. He kicked the gang leader's corpse aside and roared sternly:

"I had meant to bring this world into my Father's embrace with a merciful heart, but since those lackeys of the False Emperor cannot recognize kindness, then we need swallow our grievances no longer! Let us bring death upon them with the poisoned blade of decay, and make them understand just what the price of rejecting my Father truly is!"

"Great Father, Great Father, Great Father!"

The followers loyal to Nurgle sprang into action at once. The Life Cult, which had until now developed in the underhive under a harmless guise, bared its fangs for the very first time.

It was only that these fangs were not terribly sharp.

Lin had no intention of clashing head-on with the Life Cult right now. He ordered the Astartes who had been standing by in support to withdraw at once. Yet watching the mortals whom the Life Cult had roused with food and water to take up arms, he could not help feeling puzzled in his heart.

Where are your plagues? Your viruses? Your all-pervading corruption?

How is it that in the end you still need a mob of mortals to charge into the vanguard for you?

This band of Nurgle cultists had been quite intimidating during their ritual just now—so how is it that the moment it came time to actually fight, they fell flat on their faces?

"I sense a slight flow of psychic energy," Issaga suddenly said.

Everyone turned their gaze toward Issaga. The Librarian kept his eyes tightly shut, straining to feel something: "It's coming out from within those Chaos worshippers' nest—very faint. It's as though this psychic energy of decay is being absorbed by some specific thing..."

He carefully savored the sensation a while longer, but in the end shook his head helplessly: "This energy is too weak. I can't pinpoint through it exactly what is drawing these energies in."

"Then we can try again," Kurande said, clearly understanding the principle that failure is the mother of success.

"A good idea, but first we must figure out just how that decaying psychic energy arises in the first place, before we can attempt to keep tracing it through the psychic energy."

As the only professional psyker present, Issaga did not think such an idea held much feasibility. Lin, however, had grasped the key to it.

He waved his hand and requisitioned a sniper rifle from one of the Astartes scouts. Although this weapon was merely a covert tactical arm issued to the scout company, it was more than enough to deal with a Nurgle cultist bearing only faint corruption.

Lin took aim at a Nurgle cultist who was impassionedly delivering a pre-battle rally to the refugees who had received weapons. The bullet tore through the target's mutated skull, passing through the tumor-riddled brain tissue and dragging out a spray of dark red blood mist.

This speech that incited the refugees in the Father's name came to an abrupt halt, and the aimless attack instantly threw the refugees into panic.

But that was not the crux of it.

Lin turned back to look at Issaga, who—sensing something once more—let out the exclamation Lin had anticipated.

"That psychic energy again... I understand now. This decaying psychic energy originates from the deaths of those Chaos worshippers!"

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