Chapter Text
The last surviving Skitarius on Velchanos Magna stood his ground in the ruined machine temple, surrounded by the corpses of his comrades. Iridescent warp fire from the planet core below danced over his bloodied armour, over his torn scarlet coat, and illuminated the twisted leers of the heretics before him. The traitors of the Iron Warriors legion loomed over the much smaller soldier, each a perversion of sacred technology, their bodies permanently merged with hulking power armour, nests of weaponry and daemonic tendrils erupting from mutant flesh. Chainswords whirred and power claws crackled in anticipation, longing to tear apart his slender form.
Their leader came forward, each thunderous step quaking through the chamber floor. Targeting reticules had earlier identified him as Idriss Krendl, a warsmith of his legion who had conquered stars millenia before the Skitarius was even born. A veteran of a thousand battles whom he had no hope to match.
The unholy being levelled his chainblade, his face twisting into a mocking sneer. “We have slaughtered the rest of you, as easy as grinding insects underfoot. What does a single little tin soldier hope to accomplish?”
To any outsider, the scene would have looked ludicrous- like a lamb challenging a pack of wolves.
But a true servant of the Omnissiah would not show fear. He was Haldron-44 Stroika, the commander of the doomed Skitarii forces on this planet. Even in death, cut from all help and against a foe beyond his understanding, he would not forsake his duty. Soon, one small cog in the great machine will have reached the end of its service, as ordained by the will of the Machine God.
Stroika raised his pistol and charged the hulking monsters arrayed before him. Under his officer’s coat, appendage limbs unfolded with their arc mauls, sparking with energy.
The traitors made their mirth known, their deep laughter mingling with the clash of metal. It was barely a fight- a swing of the warsmith’s blade snapped the Skitarius’ weapon limbs and arm like they were no more than twigs and sent him crashing into the wall.
His helmet display blared warnings and sizzled out. Agony shot through the remaining organic parts of his body. Stroika tried desperately to rise, only for a sudden pressure to close around him like an iron vice.
Krendl lifted him into the air, the mutated power claw almost encapsulating his entire torso. Stroika’s pistol had fallen out of reach so he kicked and tore at the enemy, but his spindly hand barely made a scratch on the traitor’s warplate. A sudden pressure on his skull. With his spare claw, the warsmith pried off the Skitarii commander’s helmet and threw it aside with a clatter.
In the next second, Stroika knew he would lay down his armour and mortal shell, and the pure data of his soul would finally join the Machine God’s embrace.
But the release did not come. Krendl brought Stroika close so they were face to face, intimate enough to study every detail in the traitor’s hideous visage. Krendl’s head was a horror of flesh melting through the wire cage encasing it, mutilated with tubes and data ports, a sneer slashing his lips.
The heretic idly stroked a claw through Stroika’s cropped hair, down the line of his clenched jaw. Despite the extensive combat bionics replacing his arms and lower body, the commander’s face remained relatively untouched, with light scars marring his sculpted features and an augmetic lens set in place of one eye, the same hateful, icy blue as his remaining one. As their gazes met, something in the warsmith’s expression sent a shiver down Stroika’s spine.
“Do you long for death, little soldier?” Krendl’s breath was uncomfortably hot on Stroika’s face, stinking of blood and promethium. “What a pathetic existence, when I can give you so much more.”
The Skitarius snarled back, but the heretic only chuckled. “After all, the most an inferior machine has to offer… is to be a toy for higher beings.” A daemonic claw trailed down to his waist.
Stroika only had a brief moment for confusion before he felt Krendl slice through his belt. His empty holsters and magazines scattered to the floor. The claw made quick work of his bodysuit, undressing the slender captive like a doll. Black cloth parted to reveal gleaming steel beneath, slim mechanical waist and hips, the hydraulics of his thighs. The warsmith let out a small noise of disappointment as he took in the sight, turning Stroika over and presenting him, still struggling helplessly, to his gathered warriors. A piece of meat dangling before ravenous dogs.
“Not much use like this, is it?” A few harsh barks of laughter answered him. “But we can make do with the remaining hole.”
“The Omnissiah protects…” Stroika breathed, his mind flooded with an emotion usually dialled back by tech priest masters to ensure obedience- horror. After so many years in service, of course he knew what was coming. It was not unknown for Skitarii soldiers to act as toys for their overseeing tech priest. Any refusal was overwritten by command protocols and units deemed too disobedient were treated to memory wipes or servitorization. Such was the way of their existence, and he had never questioned it when a Magos called upon him.
He had always been told that it was another way in which he served the Cult Mechanicus, that the Omnissiah willed it to be so. His fellow Skitarii were all too eager to volunteer for service, and even in the quiet barracks away from battle, he had shared brief moments of pleasure with his comrades.
But now, his flesh vulnerable before a crowd of leering heretic scum, he trembled to think of them inside him, polluting the holy workings of his machinery.
A hiss of escaping steam brought him back to reality. A plate in the warsmith’s armour retracted, and Stroika could only watch in dread. The traitor’s member slithered out, a deformed thing befitting the rest of him, pale bunches of pulsating flesh shot through with industrial cables, longer and thicker than a standard human’s forearm.
The Skitarius squirmed in panic as Krendl guided him towards it, his remaining hand prying at the claw that trapped his waist, but could offer no resistance to the Iron Warrior’s superior strength. Any hope that he was wrong- that he only imagined the worst scenario- was instantly dispelled. Thin metal tendrils snaked out from the daemonic member, forcing past Stroika’s lips as he cried in disgust, stiffening to lock his jaw in in an open position. His shouted threats became unintelligible gurgles of terror.
Without preamble, Krendl slammed into the Skitarius’ tight throat, laughing as the soldier screamed and gagged around his girth. Stroika’s teary eyes widened, his prayers to the Omnissiah cut off to leave only agony in its wake. The reek of corrupted machine oil, sweat and blood assaulted his senses and he longed to retch even as Krendl began to push in and out of him in a brutal rhythm, distending his throat until his slender neck was in danger of breaking altogether. The Iron Warrior grunted, forcing his member through the snug, warm sheath in his hand, uncaring for the metal ports and ribbing tearing up the toy’s throat.
“Oh, little soldier, where are your prayers now?” Krendl punctuated the mocking words by impaling Stroika on his entire length, drawing out a new round of spasms from his body. Grinding his hips into the gagged Skitarius, admiring how the delicate mouth was stretched to its limits by the lowly flesh his kind so despised. “A vocalizer failure, perhaps? Your kind does forge such substandard machinery...”
Stroika’s one remaining fist beat against metal and his lithe body writhed in the warsmith’s hand. Rage and shame burned through his core, hotter than the radium weaponry of his brethren. But none of his futile struggles were met with pity- not from these monstrosities- seeing a hardened soldier of the Mechanicus fall into hysterical terror only fuelled Krendl’s glee. Krendl’s warband was never lacking in slaves taken from raids on Imperial worlds, but he had long grown tired of their begging, how easily their feeble mortal bodies were crushed into pulp under the slightest pressure. But this- to take the alpha primus of the Legiones Skitarii who had given him so much trouble, and watch the little machine soldier choke and scream in hate beneath him even as he is violated to near death, this was fresh.
Stroika’s body began to fall limp in Krendl's hand, his remaining eye rolling back in his head, the punches raining down on Krendl's armour growing weaker as he suffocated. His mind drifted, remarking on the absurdity of such a death. But before he could fade into darkness, his body jolted. A sudden, blissful emptiness. Cold air rattling down his tortured throat. The Skitarius took his chance and lunged forward, trying to bite the filthy organ that had tormented him, and missed by a millimeter as the warsmith yanked him away.
The Iron Warrior emitted a low growl as he finally went over the edge, his cock milked by the younger man's tight throat. Thick ropes of cum spilled forth onto Stroika’s hate-twisted face, smearing across his once polished armour, soaking the proud red fabric of his officer’s coat. Bile rose in Stroika’s throat at the salty taste and warm sensation dripping down his cheek. Krendl held him there and let him flail like a small animal, moaning and spluttering in disgust, crying the foulest binharic curses, trying to purge the traitor’s seed from his system.
“Good enough.” The warsmith spat, “for a unit barely above a cleaning servitor.”
With a clang of metal crashing into tile, Krendl threw him at the feet of the nearest Iron Warrior. “This one will come with us. Break its teeth and limbs.”
A shadow fell over his sprawling form. A sharp pain in his scalp as an armoured gauntlet seized his hair and dragged his weak body halfway up off the floor. The traitor above him laughed in sadistic glee, pausing for a second, judging the angle, before driving the Skitarius’ head forward and slamming his jaw into a nearby piece of debris. Agony blasted through his skull and his vision flared into white. The hand dragged him back even as his head lulled, eyes staring into a bloody red and white mess on the rock that he realised were the fragments of his front teeth. Just a punishment for biting.
He didn’t remember screaming, or perhaps it was drowned out by the roar of a chainblade activating above his delirious head. A kick into his ribs rolled Stroika over, the traitor forcing him to watch in dread as the whirring blade came down in a deafening screech, severing his remaining arm at the elbow in a shower of sparks. Another blow, and his body below the waist fell away, little more than a useless lump of warped metal. Stroika had no strength left to resist.
The howls and insults from the Iron Warriors filled his ears instead of the soothing noosphere chatter from his comrades. Every last one of the Omnissiah’s servants on this world lay dead, their bodies strewn across the battlefield like pieces of trash, picked over for spare parts and organs by hereteks. His lover Tiberiax. Deka. Quendix. Countless others. Their names, lives, military accolades and the light of their faith were forever forgotten. And the last of them, their once pure and shining commander who slayed tens of thousands of the Machine God’s foes, lay shattered in a pool of blood, oil and traitor seed. Alone.
Footsteps thundered close. Krendl’s claw delicately brushed aside the Skitarius’ hair, savouring the sight of his eyes, still radiating hatred through a teary mist. The broken mess of his mouth still worked, gurgling with blood bubbles, the words emerging no more than a whisper.
“None may stay our march… Omnissiah, save us… make whole what was sundered…”
Cut off from the love of his Machine God, his once graceful augmented body reduced to a scrap metal torso, he continued to pray. For the lost data-souls of his subordinates, whom he had failed as their leader. For his tech-priest master, whom he had failed as a weapon. For the golden sky and majestic forge-temples of his home world, its wind never again to grace his skin as he stand in proud salute.
"...flesh may wither and fail... but fear not... we will be reborn..."
“Your Machine God isn’t here, my little tin soldier.” Krendl cooed.
Through the agony pulsing through every cell in his body, Stroika felt a claw tip his head back. In the next second, the pulpy warmth of the warsmith’s tongue was on him, pushing past his bloodied lips, all-devouring and cutting off his pitiful attempts at finding peace. The stench of iron and warp matter filled his senses and he sobbed into the kiss, wishing that his unworthy shell could be cast into a furnace and burn until all the corruption had been purged from his soul.
A string of red saliva connected them as they parted. “He has no use for a mere lump of meat. I am your only god now.”