“Sir, we’ve found something of interest down on the fifth floor.”

Dorval raised an eyebrow at the words of the Umbran Striker. While cooperation between the Order of the Fallen Moon and the Order of the Rising Sun was generally cordial, that didn’t mean they’d just give out information or credit for nothing.

That was especially true in a place as psi-dead as this. Whatever had happened here had put such massive pressure on reality that psi was completely suppressed, to the extent he couldn’t even manifest his mindblade. Effectively neutered and reduced to using a mere sidearm, he wasn’t anywhere near as dangerous as the professional soldier in combat armor and military-grade blaster in front of him.

That hadn’t prevented him and his lance of Knights from coming in, of course... the Knights always went in. They’d been expecting some foul Warpcraft, demons from the Warp, rogue psykers, or even a Warp Sorcerer... and found nothing to fight.

There were six great blades decaying in the main assembly hall, two stuck in the ground, the others laying on the tiles, all of them smoldering and falling apart under the incredible weight of the Null field here, ground down by the cold, hard weight of reinforced reality.

He recognized them as the weapons of a Spiral Dancer, one of the Great Demons of Amourae, unable to bear up in this suppression, disintegrating back to whence they came.

There were empty uniforms scattered all about, no flesh within them, and only the bloody remains of a skinless sacrifice, abdomen burst open, the signs of a Summoning that had brought the Great Demon here.

But all the signs and sigils were marred, cut, and severed by endless amounts of hacking blades. The air wasn’t stinking with the sensuous temptation and rot of the Warp, or the aphrodisiac incenses of Amourae.

Really, the Knights were just standing around and looking impressively useless, which was rather disquieting.

“Sergeant,” Dorval replied forthrightly, “you and your men are far more useful in this place than a Coronal Knight is. What might you be needing us for?”

The Striker’s eyes flickered. He’d been getting some private amusement, as had the others of his team, at the chance to show up the vaunted Knights, and even their own Umbran superiors. Having that attitude acknowledged and even encouraged by this knight’s tone immediately made him think better of the resplendently clad man, despite himself.

“It’s not a question of need, sir,” he said proudly, and the Coronal simply nodded at his words. “It’s of relevance to your Order.”

That did get Dorval’s interest. “Then lead the way, Sergeant. I’ll help if I can.”

“Yes, sir!” The thought that he was providing bodyguard services to a Coronal Knight obviously tickled the Striker’s fancy, and he was quick to lead Dorval away, gesturing to two others of his team to flank the knight as they moved.

Dorval didn’t begrudge them their day in the sun, nor the stories they’d tell about them. Coronal Knights were trained intensely in how to manipulate morale, and standing up there and being seen was their greatest, but not their only tool. Letting men know they were appreciated and their skills were valuable was another.

Of course, to many Knights this was just pretense and words, but Dorval could do nothing about that. The Sapphire had their own way of looking at things, and even in this situation wouldn’t be dropping their arrogance. There was a reason the sergeant had come to Dorval and his silver tabs, instead of his three associates wearing cobalt...

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The smell was his first alert, and he put his hand on his bolter despite himself. The Strikers noticed, and their amplified voices sounded from behind their helms, “The area is secured, sir. But it’s the only area where we found actual signs of combat.”

Dorval nodded, and took his hand away. It was a show of trust; he was putting himself in the hands of these men and their professionalism. Their appreciation promptly spiked another notch.

They came off the stairs, and Dorval was immediately confronted by gashes and gouges in the wall, and held up his hand to pause the group silently. They stopped immediately as he stepped forward, putting his eyes up close to the gashes ripped through the fine paneling and the plascrete hidden behind it. “These are mindblade gashes,” he said in no uncertain terms, which meant that these men’s assessment of the situation was on point and proper, because the Coronals were definitely the experts on mindblades.

“The target is that way?” he asked after a moment, and the sergeant nodded. Dorval moved in the opposite direction, hands tracing the gouges on the walls, and the Strikers followed at a respectful distance.

There was the cloying smell of the Warp everywhere, fading in protest, and he could see alterations in the furnishings where the underlying matter had twisted at the presence of unnatural forces. The cuts had been here and here and here, backing away, a fighting retreat, from THAT room there, whose sliding door had been sliced open through its maglock, levered mostly open by the teams coming down to sweep the area.

The place was daubed in blood and sigils, which looked to have been set alight at some point, and a smear of burned goo and ooze was spread across half the floor, some once-ornate clothing decaying on top of it, and some twisted jewelry scattered within it, a notable amount of it consisting of body piercings. There was a stone altar in the room of surprisingly crude construction, with four crude bindings at its corners that looked to have been hacked through, a depression for catching blood, and an athame dropped over there in the middle of a length of ashes that looked suspiciously like a severed arm.

He didn’t step in, just looking at the scene, noting some of that clothing had been very cleanly cut in two, as well as bunch of the body piercings.

“You have all this recorded, sergeant?”

“It’s all on vid and holding, sir,” the Striker said promptly, meaning the Warp contamination was infecting the vids and tripping the filters, which would dump it immediately. It wasn’t a perfect defense against contamination, but the obscured and burnt Sigils had lost any power he could sense, and there was only a faint residue remaining behind, rising up from looked like the decaying remnants of a Warp Cultist who had been sent to a rather unkindly end to meet his patron. Her patron?

He reached out, turning a couple pieces of clothing together, a few of the piercings, without touching the goo.

“Looks like three cuts... diagonal from left hip to right shoulder, off with the right arm, and then across the throat.” He looked at the split choker, considering. “Fast, clean. Good with a mindblade. Obviously, there were other things in here which spilled out and followed.” He stood up and stepped back, and the Strikers parted to let him, facing him as he backed along the corridor.

It took him a few steps to get the pattern down, but he pictured it in his head. “The gouges there with the curled edges are Warp-heavy sabers chewing at things, the weapons of lesser demons. Long and straight, they’re using thrusts, and not having much success. This disruption is where one of them died,” he mimicked a stabbing cut, chopping into the wall, “losing its head after its lunge went wide.” He not quite touched the oozing gash in the wood.

The men were impressed as he retreated down the corridor, arms working in an invisible butterfly pattern, occasionally flicking out here and there in places where the floor had melted away, fused with the carpeting, or in one case was already sprouting mushrooms. One of the soldiers ignited the torch on his rifle and promptly flamed the stuff to ash, and half an inch of plascrete with it.

Dorval backed around the corner, and shot a glance down towards the end.

Philius was standing in the doorway, waiting for him.

He gestured acknowledgement, the Umbran nodded patiently, and he continued backing up, as gouges and gashes in the walls and ceiling turned themselves into a murderous and lethal defense, impressing him despite himself.

The doorway Philus was standing in really wasn’t anymore, having been chewed apart, melted, warped, and blown back, rubble scattered on the floor, deformed and twisted by unnatural energies. Dorval backed up right to the waiting Umbran, turned and nodded once, and then snapped around to survey the room.

It looked to have been a classroom of sorts, with the remains of tables and chairs strewn all over the place. None of them were intact, some of them were driven into the walls, floor and ceiling; some of them were merged into them, and some of them had fused into them. All the straight lines were gone, now curvy and placid, yet violent, hinting at unreal geometries, and several had sprouted into metallic flowers.

The center of the room was pockmarked with craters of warped plascrete underneath a six-inch slab of the stuff that had fallen from the ceiling, neatly fused yet warping edges peeling back from up above it, revealing the ductwork and cables above.

And there was a survivor.

His eyebrows rose, despite himself. “Well, that’s a find, Philius.”

Philius Marwengora was dark and slender, handsome without being obvious, with generic bronze skin tones that could meld into a crowd, and dark eyes that either flickered with intelligence, or revealed nothing at all. He was a highly skilled and talented young member of the Emperor’s Order of the Fallen Moon, popularly called the Umbrans, or less respectfully, the Emperor’s Throat-Cutters.

The two of them had met in the past. The breezily handsome, golden-haired, green-eyed knight who stood out anywhere next to the Umbran who could slide into a crowd and disappear made for a contrast that wasn’t at all unusual when Umbrans and Coronals stood together.

Four Strikers had their rifles trained on her, but she wasn’t moving. There was blood coming out her eyes, ears, and nose, and trailing from the edge of her mouth. There were shallow wounds all over her, marring the signs and symbols that had been drawn all over her body, cuts and pokes from sharp weapons at once artistic and cruel, going for pain more than the kill... or perhaps she was just lucky.

Of particular interest was the Sword Focus still clenched tightly in her right hand as she lay there on the floor.

The floor for a foot around her was the only place still carpeted in the room.

“Is she smoking?” Dorval asked, squinting at her. Philius nodded shortly, clearly just as intrigued as he was.

She looked like a young woman, early teens, with reddish-brown hair, visible muscle tone that was totally obvious because she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on, other than some iron manacles on her feet with chains still dangling from them. Dorval had stepped across the other two from her wrists on his retreat from the other room, neatly cut by a sharp and angry edge.

She had the distinct cheekbones and pointed ears of a nymphal, although the elegant curve was marred by what looked like a dimly-lit array of runes or psychic circuitry imprinted onto the left side of her face, and running down her neck and onto her shoulder. It was from this that the smoke seemed to be centered on, as the inked symbols nearest to it were slowly burning away from her olive skin.

“Is she a heavy gravity worlder?” he had to wonder, seeing her completely flat chest. A Nymphal High-G... wasn’t that a bit of an oxymoron? High-G’s tended to be very solidly built, with solid muscle without any waste. Which was exactly what he was seeing, but a High-G didn’t have curves like that.

“Looks like it. Have to run a genescan to make sure. Heckuva combo, if true, but it’ll pass.” Philus gestured at her. “While that sword dance you did was impressive, I actually asked you to come down because of the Focus, and those Runes on her face. They look Axiomatic to me, and they’re certainly repelling those offering patterns.”

Dorval frowned, studying the patterns that looked they’d been branded into her skin. The gleam at the edge of them wasn’t from light, it was tickling his Vertex and telling him that it was not just a tattoo.

Still, he was wary. “I concur. However, the color is ominous. Blue-black is usually associated with some sort of geas or curse, operating off some high-end foundations. We’d have to check the database to be certain.”

“So, she’s probably been memory-sealed, or something similar.” Philius glanced back down the hallway, then around the room. “It didn’t seem to have saved whoever did it to her.”

“I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s going to be very hard to track down her origins,” agreed Dorval. “You don’t waste power like that without a very good reason.”

“How would you like to handle it?” Philius asked, with a smirk that said he knew what the answer would be.