When the Order of the Righteous Symphony ignited their Cleansing, the cultists and daemons had collapsed into a depravity that left them divided and vulnerable to the loyalist crusade. Those who were forcefully converted to the heretic faith from having their minds and will shattered did not have the lucidity to put up a fight. The jealous rival gods sent their daemons to this world with focus on preventing the Fly God’s victory over ensuring the Emperor’s defeat. While the faithful celebrated victory after victory in reclaiming Incheo, Kim Min-Ji knew the form of their true challenge long before they met their first defeat. While the craven and the slothful could be swept aside, it would be the true believers of the Fly God, the dedicated faithful in heresy, that would organize a united front.
So it was that the Symphony’s first disastrous defeat was under the ambush of corrupted tanks that drowned scores of proud sisters and militiamen in bile. Combat with ramshackle gangs and disparate cults were no preparation for the coordinated soldiers that recalled the training of their past. The Cleansing had grown ahead of any leadership to take a life of its own. While the righteous tide washed over the continent, they split around the Sinui mountain range where the renegade army had retreated to as any who tried to breach it was cut down. Neither the Cannoness nor Kim Min-Ji could gather the forces required to smother the renegades in their infancy. The rest of the continent was retaken, but the Sinui mountains remained the festering wound on a planet yet to be purified. Their pus-rains barely contained their mountains, the drizzle that reached over to poison the land around them a constant reminder of their presence.
Sometimes, when the Thunderhawks were deployed to the Sinui mountains, so too did Kim Min-Ji wake to begin her sprint across hills and fields toward the battlefield. Sometimes, when the Flamewings descended upon the enemy encampments, Kim Min-Ji had already pierced deep into the outer rim of the heretical civilization. The flamewing strikes obfuscated the source of the real danger, the Sinui High Command forced to scramble their forces against a dozen bludgeonings while a molten needle punctured their softened hide.
When Kim Min-Ji neared, the song of the righteous played by the beat of one’s heart. For these base heretics that had given themselves to the Fly God, this internal contradiction would send their minds into catatonia and see their bodies combust into ash. These citizens and conscripts had only been ‘blessed’ by their patron with an intestinal tract full of worms or a nest of flies in their breast, more of a brand than anything that could protect them. Whole apartment blocks and nested hills were punished by her mere passing.
Those who were swollen with purulence and deafened by the whispers of the neverborn could bear the brunt of the song’s wrath but left vulnerable enough for a single bolt to finish them. The last thing a dedicated soldier or heretical cleric would see was the barrel trained on them shortly before they were splattered on their surroundings. So it was that she was able to clear swathes of heretical bases and villages with ease as she carved her way to her true targets.
On her path was a town built around a tank factorum. The Sinui measured the might of their nation by their armor, each and any more valuable than any individual soldier or civilian. Usually, lumberous heavy tanks were too clumsy for the mountains of Incheo, and light tanks, while good for crushing ill-equiped dissidents, were sitting ducks against a sophisticated opponent.
However, the Fly God could manifest on machines as well as it could on flesh, and the Sinui poured the fruits of their worship upon their armor above all else. What appeared to be mere rusted scrap metal boxes on treads were internally padded with pustules that could absorb the shock of ordinance and supported by hives of gnats that could repair the vehicle, intercept attacks, or swarm opponents, including digging into the claustrophobic interiors of opposing tanks to devour the crew or sweeping through buildings and foliage where rocketeers may use the coverage to attack from. Their barrels delivered chemical agents rather than explosives: they bombarded from a distance with shells of noxious gas that filled streets and soil or they drove into the fray where they spewed acidic bile that melted power armor, rockrete, and plastele as easily as flesh and bone.
Worse still were the unholy fusion of daemon and machine: the daemon engines. When a daemon is fused with these tanks, the armor warps to the whim of its wearer. Some secrete a sticky underbelly, leaving a trail of deathly slime and crawling along surfaces on unthinkable angles. Others sprout jointed legs to sprint and leap over conventional lines of mechanized warfare. Few reports indicated tanks that regenerated damage from a missile before the smoke had cleared. All of them could wreak havoc in the field under the coverage of organized tank battalions.
Even without such blessings, a tank or mobile flak cannon could do damage. Destroying factorums and depots was the most effective way to delay or weaken the mortal members of the next Epidemic that spewed from this mountain range. Every bit of metal ruined here would be prevented from reeking terribleness upon the rest of Incheo.
The alarm was rung when the workers, on the factory line and sleeping in tunnels underneath, began to combust, fire clawing out from their orifices. The heretical preachers rose to rally the survivors against the song only to be blown apart in front of the flock, throwing them further into panic. The flak vests of the guards fared no better to bolter fire than did the rags and rusted plate of conscripts. Their bullets seemed to curve around her no matter how steady their aim so that they could not even have the satisfaction of chipping the enamel off her armor or tarnishing her cloth. Some climbed into the half ready tanks, either to hide or to try and turn the cannon onto their assailant, though against a fast and flying target, the panicked gunners only managed to damage the facility for her. In between bouts of slaughter, Kim Min-Ji planted demolition charges on munitions dumps vehicle depots.
The only pause she had in her work was to the poster of the Sinui Supreme Leader Yun. The Sinui worshiped the Supreme Leader second only to the Fly God. All knew Yun as the anointed leader that has maintained Sinui against attempts to destroy it, but Kim Min-Ji knew him by a different name: brother. She had never seen her brother after she joined the convent as a novitiate, and thought him lost when cataclysm fell upon the world. She missed her family but her desire to repay the God-Emperor for uplifting their world was more important. She longed for the day she could meet her brother again—so that she could tear out his rib cage with the ease she tore down his poster. The stench of his heresy upon her family name was the reason the Emperor empowered her and her soul would know no rest until he and his cult were eradicated.
She could carry few charges on her person, the rest she would take from their stock. With dual detonators activated, dozens of explosions perforated the town to render the factorum and its products unusable. Those that remained hiding in the tanks and tunnels would suffocate before any relief could find them. It would take time to clear the wreckage and rebuild just to make it functional again let alone thrum at full capacity.
This was the last place of normalcy she would have before she fell off the cliff of reality into the maw of madness.
The outer rim—for all its choking smog, corroded rockrete, and wilting brown foliage—was all built within the possibility of men’s hands with material formed by replicable techniques and natural processes. Put some robes on the diseased masses and you could hardly tell the difference from many chem planets, industrial worlds, and hive spires in the greater Imperium.
The interior circle, safe from any conventional assault or flamewing strike, was developed according to the whims of the Fly God. If the Fly God demanded his servants to tear down their homes, use the remains to build a monolith, and pray while maggots eat them alive, they would do so without complaint and leave behind the praying skeletons for Kim Min-Ji to topple over alongside the monolith. If the Fly God decided that a factorum should be replaced with a lake of mucus or a mire of grease, the workers would have no notice before they drowned under a flood of phlegm.
This was unholy design to be grateful for, yes, yet highly inconvenient, which was why most practical infrastructure was moved to the outer rim. What remained of the interior was a garden for the fly ground to shape, one grand sacred ground for ritual and devotion. The worship that pooled here thinned the barrier between reality and the chaosrealm. The dilapidated stone chapels were entangled with fleshy, drooling vines. Cllouds of flies, gnats, locusts and mosquitoes blackened the sky. Necrotic fungi covered dirt and tile alike and were picked as nourishment by the pockmarked husks that called themselves monks.
Within moments of setting foot in this place, a sane, mortal man would suffer an excrutiating death where their mind is torn apart as they bleed from their eyes and defecate from their genitals. The plague monks, however, long bound their body and souls to the Fly God, and prepared this place to host its spawn: the neverborn, the daemon. The ultimate purpose of all heretical rituals was to bring forth the daemon. Each was a portion of their god’s vileness made manifest and needed corruption and worship to sustain themselves in the realm of mortals.
While many of the faithful could not tell one impossible abomination apart from another, or even from some of the more excessively mutated cultists, those with the misfortune of experience in facing the daemon could sift through the chaos to make general classifications. Kim Min-Ji had the misfortune of unwillingly learning from the dark tongues who spoke to her as she slew them.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The most beloved by the Fly God were the Nurglings, mischievous balls of filth that assist mortal cultists with labor and merriment; they were only considered adorable by an utterly addled mind—the sane only saw a rotten mockery of childish innocence. Standing upright to the height of a man to take up the boring matters of leadership and management were the Plaguebearers who guided cultists to better serve the Fly God, took account of the contagions spread, and chronicled the results for successors to learn from and celebrate. They rode Mullouscoids to leisurely survey the flock and land or Rot Flies when they needed to be ferried with haste.
The Fly God had innumerable more descendants, from endless variants of microscopic viruses and parasites to twisted ecosystems of feculent gnarlmaws and plague toads, but taking count of them all would be maddening and monotonous in equal measure, and they would all be put to sword and flame regardless.
Kim Min-Ji was called to one Charnel Mound in particular. Within these mounds were the most heinous of rituals. Fuelled with the torture and sacrifice of the faithful and the damned alike, these rituals would sow corruption into the fabric of rest of the world to bring forth the next Epidemic. The Sinui were outnumbered by population and out produced in industry, but daemonic hordes, warp borne mutation, and weaponized pestilence bolstered them into a threat that could conquer the world if not checked.
She maglocked her bolt pistols and drew her blade at last, the Neverborn just as eager to greet her as she was to slaughter them. Their gurgled whispers gripped her long before their hands could try.
+Welcome home, sister!+
+He misses you!+
+Do you know what you are?+
+Embrace the love of grandfather!+
A horde of nurglings rushed forth, tripping and climbing over the environment and each other in their excitement to reach her. Swarms of flies poured down from the sky in black masses. Surrounded in every direction, she wrapped herself in her wings, then unfurled with a gust of embers that conflagrated when they fell upon taint. The black masses of flies burnt up to the heavens as if a mountain had erupted. The nurglings pressed forth even as the flame consumed them and their brethren were reduced to slurry that they splashed under their stampede. She slashed apart the filth that lunged at her, their dismemberment disintegrating in the air to shower ash. No matter how swift her blade, some still made it through the gaps and had to be bashed away by gauntlet or punted by sabaton.
+All can be forgiven.+
No end to them, Kim Min-Ji leapt to jab her blade into the thorax of a greedy rot fly that swooped down to devour her. The fire filled its belly and she wrangled its thrashing to take her over the horde to crash on top of the mound.
She plunged the blade down and poured her hate into the innards. The intestines of the mound, wherewithin the plague monks committed their dark work, were treated with an incandescent enema that consumed the heretics in agonizing retribution and freed the kidnapped faithful with merciful death. The furnace shown through the writhing flesh of the mound in glowing veins and heated the base such that the nurgling horde melted on contact. Left to intervene were the plaguebearers around the moundtop and rot flies in the skies above.
She took up her pistols again. Bolt detonations were easily smothered by the sodden bodies of the plaguebearers, but she need only slow them by blowing out their knees. What crawled or hopped towards her were easily crushed under heel. Unable to get within arm’s length of her, they hurled rusted shards they called swords, as well as any filth they could pull from the ground and their stomach’s, all of which had to be incinerated by her wings.
+Stay. Play. For eternity.+
She rolled to avoid the sprays of acid and spits of bile from the rot flies. Their carapace gave little purchase to the diamantine-tipped bolts but their softer mouths could be mangled to prevent anymore projectile vomit. Muffled to only drooling now, the enraged flies dove down to stab with their legs. She maneuvered around the initial stabs, which slammed into the ground she stood upon a blink ago, but was immediately under relentless flurry of appendages. She maglocked her pistols to free her hands to rip the legs off the fly and shank them with their own stingers. Her wing held down one fleeing fly, burning it as she ripped another apart from the proboscis down. On to the next, she plunged her fist into the abdomen to maul its guts, churning up its stomach as it sputtered blood and vomit through its ruined maw.
The charnel mound was gurgling and boiling and shriveling and rumbling, the death throes of that which should have never lived. Turned toward the approaching army of plaguebearers gathered around the Mulluscoid-riding leaders, Kim Min-Ji gripped her sword once more. She pulled it forward from the mound, rupturing it with a tear that unleashed the furnace within in a wave immolation that washed over a column of the army.
Kim Min-Ji flew into the scorched opening to begin her dash out. All the fire that burnt away taint came from her strength. Every fly reduced to ash, every spray of gore boiled off her armor, sapped at her reserves. She could be pinned down. Whether she was ensared by tongues or buried under rubble or swarmed by bodies or slowed by mucus. For all her blessings, she could be overwhelmed, alone in the heart of enemy territory. With her target eliminated, she followed the wisdom of her sisters and fled with the haste of a tiger.
She barreled through flimsy stone walls and cut openings in gangerous tentacles that blocked her path. The flutter of her wings let her make bounds over the hills and rivers. Back into the outer rim, she sheathed her blade in favor of her pistols. With her musical aura a faint whisper, she used the last of her ammunition to pop what poor saps crossed her vision on her way out, the sods catching a blur of her at best before they exploded.
At an encampment raided by a flamewing, a conscript just finished stacking crates and turned his head when a gauntlet brained him. None of them could react before she burst out from the edge of Sinui civilization into contentious wilds. She climbed up the southern mountainside stained by the smog and wilted from plague rain. She came down the other side that was still sickly but not stained. She had clear vision over the hills that were poisoned by the drizzles that made it out of the mountains and tainted rivers that seeped into the waterbed. The further she went, the less poisened the land was.
She finally stepped upon verdant fields under clear skies as she kept on her sprint. She darted past hunters, shacks, and ramshackle villages that lay within the precarious boundary between the heretics and the faithful. She sprinted through the militarized zone, past Incheo Defense Force gates and trenches and Ecclesiarichal parishes and airfields. She raced off the side of the road past vehicles both civilian and military. She leapt in flutters over the suburbs and barracks that housed loyal citizens and soldiers. She did not slow for miles until she reached the walls of her destination.
Gyeo. The sole hive city of Incheo, Gyeo was a region urbanized in totality to house a billion people. This was the node from which the Imperium uplifted the rest of the world. The militarized zone existed to safeguard the capital from Sinui attacks.
The crust had been excavated near to the mantle for the sewage system necessary to process the waste of people and industry. Those people lived in hab blocks, apartments that housed whole neighborhoods, layered on top of each other as bricks create the metal hills that made up most of the hive city. Agri-factorums produced the nourishment needed to feed the city even if it was under siege.
Then there were the spires, super structures that rivalled mountains, meant to seat planetary government, nobility, and clergy. After the cataclysm, one spire became the new convent for the Order of the Righteous Symphony. Should even the rest of the city and world fall, this spire would hold for as long as it took to reclaim Incheo, just as it was in the cataclysm.
No matter the level of the hive, laud hailers filled the air with holy song. On every street corner, in every assembly line, every hallway, every clinic, every restaurant, every data slate game, every day and night and nook and cranny was drenched with music to fill the mind with holiness, for an idle mind might wander in dark places.
The music within could be heard even beyond the walls, and proximity to such faithfulness restored some of Kim Min-Ji’s strength. She launched into the air above the wall and hab block hills and factorums. Her flight overhead made the masses millions fall to their knees in prayer, prayer to the Emperor and his angels as their saviors. Even if they dropped glass or acidic liquids, the faithful knelt with their shins bloodied to throw their hands up and exult His name and his champion as their saviors.
She flew to the height of the convent spire where an open hangar bay welcomed her. Awaiting her adorned in golden robes were the Zephyrim—the elite and unshakebly pious veterans of the order. They knelt to her, both in reverence and in the hope that a droplet of His blessing and attention would trickle onto them. Their bodies ran along a path that led from the hangar to the sanctum.
Canoness Bae Doona, commander of the Righteous Symphony, knelt to Kim Min-Ji like any other follower. When Kim-Min Ji passed, Bae Doona rose to trail her. A fleet of cherubim corralled a dozen choristers to follow the mistresses.
Kim Min-Ji headed straight for her chamber at the top of the spire. The room had long been scorched black from the heat of her extended presence. The previous batch of choristers laid strewn across the room. Her wings dissipated and she took her seat where she would remain immobile as a statute. The cherubim pulled away the corpses to make room for a new batch of choristers. It was only the voices of the choristers that could rekindle the fire within Kim Min-Ji and so it was that they would be sealed into the chamber with her to sing even as their vocal tubes fried and their eyes melted. To have one's son chosen to be a chorister, then chosen once more to serve a saint of the Emperor, was an honor amongst honors, and the burnt out husk would be preserved and delivered to the family to be cherished as martyrs.
The story of Incheo was merely one example of the salvation that the God-Emperor of Mankind has delivered to millions of worlds and all of humanity.
+You will never escape. You will never be free.+
Praise be His name.
