This... this is a very Good place, he realized, and smiled despite himself as he looked around at the white stone, gentle carvings, signs and sigils as old as humanity, but with none of the rigid air and authoritarian power of the Empire’s heraldry.

Older, kinder, gentler... and able to do things the Empire’s kind of folk could not because of it.

He turned to the nearest Rantha, who was cursing at her diagnostic equipment as her glowing golden hands were dancing around the insides of an armored suit.

The Briggs behind the suit rent and tore, and a hundred-pound reactor was torn off the suit faster than it could be unfitted. The Ancient heaved the core away, it was caught by a man in power armor another fifty feet away, who plopped it down on a teleporter pad. The capapsitor there flared, a half-dozen more psions there to power it up, and the power core was gone.

“How bad?” the Briggs growled, as sparks and fuses flared, and she cut and tore and ripped at some rather vital internal systems of the armor.

“There’s necro-viruses, dimensional worms, anima infections, and some pan-dimensional rewiring designed to open uncontrolled Warp Portals if this thing ever got out of their control, just by rearranging some circuits. It’s like they’ve done this shit to this kind of armor before!” Cooter Rantha growled, her hands a blur of motion, her Vajra pressing into the circuits inside, while outside Bo Briggs did the same with his big hands on the external surfaces.

There were cracks and tearing sounds coming from all over. Not all the power cores had to go, but a lot of them did. Some were teleported away, some were simply disintegrated in groups, and out of spite, one of the Ranthas cut open another Portal to a shadowy alcove in a gloomy city, twenty cores were pitched through, and the Portal was closed.

What happened on the other side was doubtless going to be quite satisfying.

“Can the armor be salvaged?” Captain Donnal had to ask, wincing at the damage she was doing to it. She was not leaving a square millimeter unchecked, and simply adjusted her balance as Bo levered the half-ton of metal and crystal over to inspect the soles... and by the way his finger punched in, found six different things there, growling a warning that spread to everyone, judging by how quickly the suits were being shoved over by teams of inspectors.

“Yes. The most important part of the armor is the psychic circuitry that attunes it to the Emperor’s Bloodline. It’s also the easiest to purge, even if it is infected, and can be repaired easily. All the extra tech is high quality but standard, and can be ripped out and replaced. Mithar, look what they did to the lubricants, those crazy bastards... bomb another city!” she shouted out.

A minute later another Portal shut quietly, and all the power cores were gone. That didn’t stop the mindclaws and psions from ripping, tearing, frying, and fusing non-stop, their curses accompanying every exhumation of a trick or trap lying in wait.

When they were sure they got everything, they’d switch armors and do it again. Five times, before they were satisfied, and more, if they still found something on the fifth pass, until it passed two sweeps by a Ten with full Ranks looking for shit, AND a Rantha, if it came to that.

Aural scans were being undertaken on the Choral Lions kneeling in the pool, shaking and trembling as they fought for their lives there, and coming back promising. The Lions aspired on average to be one of the nobler Legions, and the Chorals came from a tropical world, where dark-skinned men fought battles against alien fauna under a hot sun, as they had for millennia. They had a glorious martial tradition, and if they lived, would be a fine addition to a new corps of the Emperor’s Sons.

There was a shuddering and a shout, and a healer stepped back, black ooze pouring out her orifices. The trooper in front of her was shuddering, his black skin writhing and bulging dangerously-

There was a flash of starfire, flowing up over him, and for just a second he was frozen, face relaxing in the middle of the horror that was eating him...

The glittering waters fell smoothly away, back into the quicksilver that had purified him away, nothing left behind of him or the abomination erupting within him.

Captain Donnal’s gauntleted fist clenched. The healer staggered back, falling into the water, and did not try to get up as starlight gathered on her, and bubbled in her mouth, eyes, nose, and ears.

There were some supremely nasty things going on in there, Captain Donnal realized, surprised even though he knew it was dangerous. To be expected of the drow, nothing ever got away from them cleanly. The Ranthas had not been overreacting when they mobilized all this stuff here.

Did the drow know the Ranthas were mapping out their precious Gloom? He had the clearance to look at what was there on The Map, where they had gone, what they had seen. The legendary underweb of the galaxy, from which drow and elvar could emerge to strike where and when they pleased, moving from place to place faster than any other force could.

The Hags had designs upon it. Escaped human slaves, long mutated by shadowy powers into shades and darklings, were present there, as well as the amazingly unmutated hyn, whose every tribe had generated a Void Brother, simply an unbelievable fact. The Ranthas had recruited millions of humans by now, and still only found three...

At some point, the Hags were going to have words with the drow, and the Dark Elvar would probably not like what they were going to say. It would probably be in anti-quarks and Warp Events on an Omega Sanction scale...

The Gloom might not like it, but it was supposedly a transorganic, living structure. It would get over it...

---------

“You need to go.”

Only an Octal and a Hex were left, but they had relentlessly and tirelessly hunted down every single creature of the Warp here, and said creatures had turned upon them in preference to merely living creatures fighting them. Said living were giving the cracked, scorched, and alien entities all the room they could want... which wouldn’t be enough.

The diamond head seemed to spin and circle, orienting on me. The girls were backing me, totally unafraid, and if it had any memory at all, it knew why, given how much shit we’d killed... and how utterly unmarked of it we looked, while it had ground through five incarnations killing everything here.

Still, it wasn’t expecting me to speak Axiom, although it could probably understand any language that existed simply by analyzing it for a breath.

“You are in Gloomheart, the heart of drow power. Your proper next target should be them. If you do so, they will capture you, and they have the power to do so. They will harness you and enslave you, and they have the skill to do that, too. You need to leave, bring your knowledge of what happened here back to your kind, and take solace that you have won a great victory here... and might just do so in the future.”

The two powerful Axiomites regarded me and the girls, and the gladiators blooded and savaged behind us, down to less than two-thirds of their starting numbers. On one side of us, a bunch of reptoid warriors like intelligent saurials were switching their tails nervously, while a bunch of umbvars were standing over there, wondering who to attack next, and a bunch of gene-keyed wolfen were slinking around, trying to work out who to fall upon next.

“HoW tO lEaVe?” it asked, not unreasonably, after considering all its options. Most notably, it didn’t want to burn in Shadowfire. If so, its energy would be permanently lost to its people, not a thing that should happen.

Chalice sang out a single note of Nullity as I crouched. “Know me by my Sword!” I said, and charged forwards.

The Hexagonal looked at the sensation of crushing reality around my Sword, and folded its four arms as I cut into it, through it, and the Reality of the Gloom followed Chalice and ejected it from this space as the alien thing it was, the air even popping loudly as it slammed together in a spray of shadowfire to eject it.

The Octahedral also drew its arms in, awaiting the Banishment Strike of a Null. I gave it no more words, neither of us really wanted to talk, and with a ripping of space, plume of shadowfire, and clap of onrushing air, it too was gone.

There was a rather terrible silence. I straightened up, looked at the other forces gathered here, the closest of whom all took a step back when my eyes fell upon them.

“Kill the weak!” I ordered grimly, pointing at the wolfen who had no reason to keep living, once-humans pumped full of killing genetics, alien alchemy, and thirst for blood.

With a roar, the fighting re-commenced, but the looks in the eyes of those facing us definitely indicated that right about now, they’d rather be anywhere else than facing us.

-------------

The slaughter went on. Warbands of sentients and beasts of all sizes and descriptions fought and died. I saw a thunder scorpion from Janus III ripping into a group of goblins who were swarming in; they hacked off its legs, and eventually got spears into places where they could do some work.

There was a pack of T-Rex types wearing armor running around, covered in blood and gore until a bunch of bird-like Kreen hamstrung them and brought them down with a skill that said they’d done this before.

The murder-cyborgs from Marquis de Krov ended up going against an elite corps of drow, and the two forces mulched one another nicely. Then a shoggoth came rolling over in a wave of flesh and ooze, spewing out lesser macrocellular organisms as it digested the uncounted numbers of dead, adding yet another hazard of eternally hungry slimes, puddings, jellies, and suchlike to the battlefield.

Celestia cut off two of its massive tentacles and chased it away with a glare. Its mindless spawn had to be dealt with as they came, but at least they weren’t very fast and generally really obvious... and just because we couldn’t use ranged attacks didn’t mean we didn’t have access to energy attacks, if needed.

The lines of sight on the battlefield gradually grew longer and longer, bringing all the different forces closer and closer together by subtle manipulations.

“It’s coming!” Jensa announced to all and sundry, watching a certain board way up there that was counting living beings left on the field... not including robots.

All the swarms had basically been disposed of, because they were the fastest way to see the numbers go up and down. So, yeah, people had been chain-murdering the mindless masses of goo in all colors trying to eat all of us. We’d lost a few fellows who were unlucky, tired, or careless, but the forces left in the arena cleaned up the true swarms pretty fast.

That didn’t mean all of them were dead. The Kundi Queen was alive, as were a couple of the cellulocust mothertrees, although they were missing a lot of explosive fruits now. Drow outnumbered any other race on the field, and I didn’t see any humans, other than those who were surviving in another band of gladiators, avoiding us tacitly.

The weak were getting butchered, as were the wounded. Ten thousand was almost upon us, and the sense of anticipation, and the calls of the crowd were starting to rise.

“They come,” I told everyone, as an umbvar barbarian spitted himself on my sword, his humming Spear losing its spark and going silent. Conflicts nearby began to die as the gladiators finished up their fights and disengaged if they could.

Only a third of our crew were left now, pretty much all of them wounded and out of any alchemical healing now. We could have kept a lot of them in fighting trim by healing them by wound transfer, but that wasn’t our job, or why we were here.

Lithe black forms began to appear on many ramps and openings as the master gladiators of the drow made their entries. Screens were blinking all over the place, showcasing the popular, the loathed, the lauded, the beautiful, and the ugly, to cheers and boos and whatever sufficed as they began to move down towards the arena floor.