Batalla del Templo de Shallya

El trasfondo de esta sección o artículo se basa en la campaña de El Fin de los Tiempos, que ha sustituido la línea argumental de La Tormenta del Caos.

ORIGINAL

As the battlelines closed outside the Temple of Shallya, Louen Leoncoeur arrowed from the skies like a living missile. The warrior’s challenge rang out, causing Ku’gath to turn and face him, the daemon’s hideous face further distorted with rage. Plague drones buzzed erratically through the skies to Ku'gath’s defence, but they were too slow. The Plaguefather barely had time to raise his hand before the High Paladin’s lance struck home. Its blessed tip sank an arm’s length into the daemon’s rotting breast, the hippogryph’s claws slashing in close behind.

With a speed that belied his massive size, Ku’gath Plaguefather grabbed the lance around its shaft and used it as a lever to hurl both man and beast into the Temple of Shallya. Flailing sidelong, the hippogryph and its armoured rider hit the dome with such force they smashed right through it in a shower of ceramic shards. Luminous blood trickled down the sides of what was left of the curved dome, but the king and his mount had disappeared completely from sight. The greater daemon crushed the lance in his grip and tossed it aside, knocking over one of the state troopers jabbing at his hip with a spear. High above, pegasus knights dived in to slash at the wheeling plague drones that sought to defend their charge, the plaguebearers and their rot fly steeds stabbing back at the proud Bretonnians.

Doctor Festus bowled his way through the ruin of the healers’ shantytown toward Ku’gath, slapping his meaty hands together in heartfelt applause as he went. Knowing that any of Father Nurgle’s creatures would struggle to touch a holy site of Shallya, the greater daemon had improvised marvellously.

From the western streets a glut of undead emerged into the courtyards, spilling over the stretchers and stumbling over stools as they closed on the plaguebearer echelons beside Ku’gath. The zombies scrabbled with broken hands and clubbed with improvised weapons at the Nurgle daemons. Usually such feeble attacks would have little effect against the plague-born, but the tallymen were busy counting the beautiful array of skin diseases blossoming across the undead warriors that sought to pull them down. Before long, the front line of the enraptured daemons had fallen. Putrefex Blistertongue honked out a droning command to fight back, and the second rank suddenly came alive as if awakening from a dream, cutting the zombies down rank by rank with their rusted plagueswords.

Yet the zombie attack had served its purpose. With the front lines of the plaguebearer host preoccupied, the real strength of Vlad’s armies fell upon their flanks. Hordes of skeletons in the tattered remnants of Imperial uniforms hacked mechanically at the wall of pimpled daemonflesh, while wights in the ornate raiment of the first Altdorfers slashed apart slavering beasts of Nurgle. Vlad himself led a thin wedge of grave guard out from a side street to cut deep into the neck of the plaguebearer column, the vampire a whirlwind of enchanted steel that hacked down daemons as if they were no more substantial than mist. The wights around him attacked with their own jerky, staccato speed as the dark magic trailing in the vampire’s wake energised them beyond mortal limits.

The bold attack had hit with such sudden force that Vlad cut his way right across the column and out the other side, his escort turning as one and locking their shields to form a blockade of armoured corpses that cut off the plaguebearer host from any more reinforcements. In one daring strike Vlad had isolated his prey and closed in for the kill.

At the temple’s pillared gates Ku’gath loomed over the thin line of state troops and flagellants protecting the white-robed high priestess. Kicking away a half-dozen of the wounded warriors standing in his path, the daemon raised his sword for the kill.

Suddenly Louen Leoncoeur hurtled out of the archway, glowing blade raised. As Ku’gath brought his blunt weapon down in a crushing overhead sweep, the warrior sprang to the side, catching the Shallyan high priestess around the waist with his shield arm and casting her aside onto a stretcher. Flagstones burst into powder where she had been standing a moment before as Ku’gath’s blow fell.

Louen leapt up, boosting off an antique table that had been pressed into service as an operating bench and leaping into the air towards his obese opponent. The old warrior’s blade arced down in a two-handed blow that opened the lance wound in Ku’gath’s chest still further, exposing the greater daemon’s rotten heart.

Bellowing in outrage, the Plaguefather turned his head round in a great scoop, catching Leoncoeur in his antler and tossing him straight upwards into the air. The Bretonnian seemed to hang suspended at the apex of his flight before Ku’gath slammed his metal sword right into the knight’s midsection, sending him flying over the milling daemons below to crash into the statue of Magnus the Pious. More golden liquid trickled from

Louen’s wounds, yet he got to his feet once more, his shield glowing with azure light as he growled a prayer for the Lady to give him strength.

At the back of the daemon battleline, Festus drooled thick spittle as he concluded his favourite rite of abundance. He gestured crookedly at the pegasi riders duelling the plague drones high above him, and the last few of their number swelled, screamed, and burst. The blood of horse and human pattered down like some foul rain. Festus put his hand out like a grocer assessing the weather before licking his palm clean with a malevolent chuckle.

Freed from their aerial duel, the Angels of Decay dived down low, the segmented legs of their rot flies thudding down into the flesh of those flagellants lashing their flails at Ku’gath’s back. The doomsayers screamed like madmen, hurling themselves bodily at the daemons buzzing in their midst, ripping at membranous wings with their broken fingernails, even biting down on the evil-smelling flesh of their assailants. The plague drones, used to fighting foes on the brink of fleeing or at least voiding the contents of their stomachs, were caught off guard, and two of their number fell to the sudden counter-attack, their squishy bodies burst open under the hammering blows of the frantic zealots.

Nearby, Vlad’s wights were holding the plaguebearer tide at bay, for every time one of the armoured cadavers was struck down, the vampire’s spells of resurrection would force it back to its feet to lock shields with its comrades once more. At their heart was the tall figure of Emperor Wilhelm, more resplendent in death than he had ever been in life. The skeletal tyrant was locked in battle against Putrefex Blistertongue, hammering blows against the daemon herald’s blade with a sword that glowed white with killing heat. Murmuring curses that only a plaguebearer could devise, the daemon kicked out at the wight king’s knee, snapping off the revenant’s leg with an audible crack.

The wight king went down, but in the process his relentless attacks cut low, slashing right through the daemon’s hand and fizzing through his sunken chest in a shower of green sparks. As the Emperor Wilhelm rose up once more like a ghost from an opened grave, the daemon herald howled, dwindled, and vanished from sight.

At the temple’s front gate Louen Leoncoeur rushed at Ku’gath once more, liquid light drizzling from his close-cropped beard. This time he took the greater daemon’s arcing blow on his shield, the crushing impact staggering him badly. He turned his sudden change of direction into a tight roll, clattering under the giant sword’s backswing as it smashed an awning to splinters and crushed an unfortunate soldier against the statue’s podium. Leoncoeur cut down the daemons pressing in toward him, his glowing sword flashing bright in the light of the comet above. Ku’gath covered his eyes with a flabby forearm, rearing back as if stung.

Out from the shattered dome of the temple came Louen’s hippogryph, a mass of bloodied muscle and tattered feathers. The beast screeched down, digging its talons into Ku’gath’s rounded shoulders and ripping great chunks of noisome flesh free. As the daemon roared in pain, Festus ran in close and hurled an alembic full of troll’s bile at the hippogryph’s head. His aim was true; it broke open with a satisfying crunch, sending the beast scrabbling frantically at its own beak.

Ku’gath recovered swiftly. His over- arm swipe took the hippogryph from the skies, his blunt sword snapping the beast’s spine against the flagstones outside the temple. The great creature writhed in its death throes, broken pinions battering over priestesses and injured soldiers alike.

All across the poor district, the unnatural stamina of the daemons was matched against the unceasing, unblinking energies of the walking dead. No human qualms moderated the hacking, stabbing violence that boiled wherever the two battle lines touched. But for every daemon that burst into a puff of flatulent vapour, three, five, even ten undead warriors were left in pieces on the cobbles, for the raw invigorating power of Nurgle was thick across the city. The plaguebearers, tenacious foes at the worst of times, were now attacking with such exuberant energy that they were hacking down the dead even faster than Vlad could raise them up. The cordon of grave guard that Vlad had established across the mouth of the widest street was slowly breaking apart, plaguebearers spilling through and around its edges to join the fight outside the temple.

Elector Count von Carstein had problems of his own. A tide of giggling nurglings had poured between the legs of their larger brethren to crawl and climb up the vampire’s legs, boiling over each other in their haste to reach the weak spots of his eyes and throat. Vlad snarled as he slashed at the daemon-mites with his sword, Blood Drinker, some part of him silently grateful that the creatures had no true bloodstreams to trigger the exsanguinatory magics of his blade. Yet, much like the plaguebearers filling the streets, there seemed no end to the number of the nurglings assailing him. By piling atop one another, they were coming closer and closer to his unarmoured neck.

Muttering an ancient Nehekharan spell, Vlad ignited the anger in his gaze so that it burned with black fire. Two beams of dark magic raged out from his eyes, evaporating nurglings by the dozen until they had scoured the daemons from the vampire’s armour and left a moat of molten stone boiling all around him. The vampire sniffed haughtily, cleaning his blade on the end of his cloak.

A gigantic claw slammed into the Count’s back, its piston-driven strength flinging the vampire across the square. Flagstones cracked under giant metal legs as Stemcutter stormed sideways through the fray, pincers snipping wildly. A knot of injured spearmen charged towards it, cries to Sigmar’s glory on their lips, but Stemcutter hoiked a great ball of phlegm and spat it right at them. The repulsive fluids splashed across the state troops, quickly dissolving their flesh until all that was left was a noisome pile of sludge and discoloured cloth.

A great booming cry rang out across the square as Ku’gath staggered backwards, the flagellants hanging from his frame flying through the air as the daemon windmilled his arms and lumbered away from the temple gates. Louen Leoncoeur hung from the hilt of his sword, the entire length of his blade embedded in Ku’gath's throat. The golden blood that was drizzling from the Bretonnian’s many wounds was searing the flesh of the daemon worse than any acid, dissolving his corporeal form like embers cast into a mass of fungus. Worse still, it was trickling down into the gaping wound in the daemon’s festering chest.

Ku'gath bawled and roared and flailed, but it did no good. The former king of Bretonnia hung on grimly as the greater daemon was eaten away by the very fluids he had spilled, sacred lifeblood that bore the blessing of a goddess even more powerful than Shallya. Swinging and casting about, the daemon knocked into the podium bearing Magnus the Pious’ memorial, and the statue of the great war leader came crashing down. As Louen leapt free, the statue’s lumpen metal weight pinned Ku'gath like a wrestler with a winning hold. Second by agonising second, the greater daemon bubbled away into nothingness until all that was left was a simmering stain.

Louen the Lionhearted stood bleeding but proud in place of the former Emperor’s statue, blade pointed right at Festus. As the knight roared his challenge and sprang off the podium towards his foe, the apothecary ripped a long-leech from its suckling-space on his back and flung it at the Bretonnian like a bolas. The segmented thing tangled the wounded knight’s legs, tripping his charge. As dextrous as an elf, he tucked his shoulder and rolled once more, coming up blade-first to plunge his glowing sword deep into the Leechlord’s guts in a blow that would have killed a mortal challenger in a single thrust.

Festus was glutted with the power of Nurgle, however, and pain was an old friend to him. The Leechlord smashed the vial he had palmed a moment before into the Bretonnian’s face, boiling daemonic ichor ruining the knight’s handsome visage forever. Louen reeled back, crying out in rage and pain. Festus yanked a dirty bonesaw from his belt and leapt forward like a pouncing toad, ripping the serrated blade across the reeling knight’s throat. The glowing blood that covered his hands burned worse than any bile, but Festus was still a creature of the material realm, and it did not eat away his flesh as it had Ku’gath’s. The Leechlord sawed and sawed like a maniac butcher, the knight convulsing beneath him as liquid light splashed and spurted in all directions. Then, to the utter horror of the Empire soldiery, Festus grabbed the knight’s ravaged head by the hair and wrenched it from his body in a spray of golden gore.

The Leechlord stood up with a great shout of triumph, and the storm rumbled overhead, the indulgent laughter of a father proud of his son’s antics. Festus was lit from within by a green-white light that poured out of his eyes and mouth, his entire form shaking with the fell energies that were being bestowed upon him. Every daemon around the plaza that was not locked blade to blade with the undead turned and knelt, chanting Festus’ name over and over again.

Vlad struck the Leechlord from the side like a black thunderbolt. Bodily slamming the glowing apothecary into a shattered mass of tables, the vampire drew back his ancestral blade for the kill. Before he could strike, Festus spat a phrase of power and blasted the von Carstein’s flesh to a cloud of ashen mist. The world held its breath for a moment as an empty suit of Sylvanian armour clattered to the cobbles, a large, jewelled ring rolling away to settle under a mass of broken wood.

Festus chuckled and picked himself up, waving away the undead ranks that were shambling towards him. Everywhere he gestured, the unliving warriors collapsed in on themselves, their flesh boiling with fat daemon maggots that ate them away to nothing in the space of seconds.

Bereft of the dark magic of their master, the revenants were failing fast, and even more plaguebearers were spilling into the square.

The Shallyan priestesses had made the most of the time their defenders had bought them. Sisters hurried with urns of blessed water around the inner perimeter of the temple walls, washing away the filth that stained the cobbles and forming a mystical barrier of consecrated ground across which the daemons could not cross. Their circle was almost complete. Festus just sniggered to himself at their attempts to keep him out. A simple gesture from him and the ground itself would heave upwards, tumbling the temple and shattering their precious circle of sanctity in a single burst of glorious power.

Suddenly the mass of broken tables behind the glowing leechlord exploded upwards, and Vlad von Carstein burst out, a jagged spar of wood held in one hand and his ancestral blade in the other. The ring on his hand glowed bright enough to sear the eyes as the vampire darted forward, his motion almost too fast for the eye to follow. Festus held out a fat hand and caught Vlad’s scything blade in a grip as hard as rock, but the wooden stake in the other plunged deep into Festus’ chest.

The vampire’s intuitive gamble quickly proved correct. Filled to the brim with the burgeoning energies of unbridled life, Festus’ body turned the inert wood of the stake into a wild and twisted tree in the space of a single surreal second. Impaled bodily on a majestic Drakwald oak that suddenly sank its great roots into the flagstones and swelled up and up into the skies, the leechlord’s chest was slowly pulled wider and wider until he simply burst in a cloud of grey- green ectoplasm. A wail of frustration echoed around the square as the strange mist was caught up by the tempest raging above and whipped away into the Realm of Chaos.

With the Altdorfers ascendant, the daemon host found themselves unable to penetrate the circle of consecrated ground the Shallyans had established around their temple. The few surviving soldiers that had found their way inside were too exhausted to cry out in victory, but as the seconds slid past, they realised that neither undead nor daemon could harm them.

With the inexplicable intervention of the ancient dead, and the selfless death of the Bretonnian lords that had given their lives to protect the temple, the pearl of purity in the poorest district of Altdorf had been saved - and with it, the city’s soul.

Outside the city’s northern walls, Gutrot Spume’s warshrine was carried into the midst of the Reiksguard atop the back of his mutant servants. Bracing his feet, the Lord of Tentacles brought his axe swinging around again and again, each blow taking a knight from the saddle. Hans Zintler rode his horse through the press, the back ranks of his men making way with consummate horsemanship. The Reikscaptain hacked at the gormless mutants holding the shrine aloft, each sweep of his silversword severing limbs and tentacles. With a ponderous slowness, the whole conveyance toppled over, spilling hot coals and coiled guts into the cavalry below.

Spume leapt from the front of the warshrine, his silhouette outlined •against the gloating orb of Morrslieb for one brief moment before he slammed down into the midst of the Reiksguard. Six tentacles shot out as he landed, each pair yanking a knight from the saddle. The seventh tentacle raised Spume’s greataxe high, and the warlord decapitated the three knights one after another.

Zintler bellowed a Sigmarite oath as he turned in the saddle to slam his sword between Spume’s shoulderblades, its tip bursting out of the Norscan’s chestplate. Pseudopods whipped out to lash around the Reikscaptain’s wrist, and Zintler found himself both pulled from his horse and disarmed in one horrible second as Spume turned around, the blade still embedded in his torso. The warlord laughed wetly, blood drizzling from under his helmet, as one of his / coiling limbs reached over and pulled the ancestral blade from his back.

The Lord of Tentacles slammed a boot ' down on the Reikscaptain’s chest and rested his greataxe against the corpse of a horse as the pseudopod that had disarmed his foe handed the silversword to Spume’s good hand. Zintler struggled, shouting the most terrible of curses, but fell silent as his own sword was rammed through his neck up to the hilt, ending his life.

With the Reiksguard broken by Spume’s counter-attack, the Drakwald beastmen poured up to the north wall and began to scale its timeworn facade. Over to the east of the city, the battle line of state troops was holding fast against the repugnant daemons crashing against it. In the midst of the plaguebearer host was Epidemius, counting the deadly infections that spread out from the front line wherever his minions struck. There were so many beautiful gifts here from Nurgle’s boundless catalogue of contagion that the Tallyman found himself near frantic.

Epidemius scrabbled away with a quill in each hand, his usual fastidious and neat handwriting replaced by a spidery scrawl that he resolved to write up properly once the battle was over. With every scroll he filled, the plaguebearers around him became more energised, and the diseases on their blades more virulent, until the slightest cut or graze caused the victim to fall frothing to the floor.

Nearby, Orghotts Daemonspew and his maggoth riders were charging headlong towards the gun battery that had been wheeled out of the east gate. Despite the sightless beasts having sustained terrible damage, they had made it into the midst of the entrenched artillery. Great cannons rose and fell like improvised clubs as the maggoths took their terrible revenge. Yet there were but three maggoth riders, and several dozen artillery pieces, some of which were pointing directly towards Epidemius.

The ninefold boom of a misfiring Helblaster rang out, and man and daemon alike were torn to shreds as a hail of cannonballs blasted a gory path through the battle. Epidemius looked down at the hole that had cored his torso like a rotten apple, counting the infections that spilled out with a detached interest. Slowly, his quill scrabbled to a halt, and the daemon herald faded from the mortal realm like a bad dream.

Outside the East Gate the plaguebearer host ground their way on, but without their leader, their blows were robbed of vigour. Still, the daemons were not the only allies Orghotts Daemonspew had brought with him from outside Talabheim.

Thundering through the bloody scrum of the battlelines came a bipedal bull of living brass, the dark runes on his axes glowing white hot with ruinous energies. Behind him came a stampede of bellowing minotaurs, muscling through the crowds in a great scrum of horn and blooded meat. The spear-block soldiers in their path gave an involuntary moan of fear as the brass giant charged headlong into them. Stout-hafted polearms snapped and splintered on the monster’s metallic hide, their wielders skidding back in the mud or breaking ranks in fear. The brass bull’s runic axes rose and fell with guillotine force, each blow cutting a man in two.

As more of the horned beasts barrelled in to the ranks of the spearmen, the brazen doombull roared a warcry to the gods above.

It was too much for the Altdorfer soldiers. They broke and ran, scattering past detachments that hesitantly shuffled closer to the breach in the line. The minotaurs left in the fleeing soldiers’ wake lowered their blunt maws and gorged, feasting on the remains of the dead. Several of them even licked at red-brown puddles in their bloodlust.

Less than a hundred metres away, Mundvard the Cruel rose on the battlements, bald and magisterial, and began to chant. To the flank of the minotaurs rose a second wall - not of stone, but of the dead. Skeletal regiments turned as one with a precision that would have made a palace drill sergeant turn green. They lowered their spears and lunged with such uncanny synchronicity that three of the ox-headed beastmen were killed in the space of a heartbeat.

By the city walls, a crowd of rotten cadavers spilled clumsily from the West Gate, trapping the blood-glutted minotaurs from the front. Frantic with necromantic energy, the massing corpses that did not fall upon the last few minotaurs clambered past one another in their haste to mend the breach the beastmen had forced in the battle line, a growing mound of the dead sealing the gap just as a mob of axe-wielding warriors charged in from the north.

The brazen beast slaughtering its way towards the East Gate fought on with even greater fury. A regiment of Talabheim pistoliers came to meet it. Their close-range volley of pistol fire ricocheted from the thick metal skin of the beast without causing so much as a dent. Then the leaping bronze giant was suddenly in their midst, axes slamming through man and steed alike in a spectacular display of brute force. The monstrous beast threw back its head and bellowed praise to the Blood God.

As the bronze-skinned minotaur cast about for its next kill a thick, black-fletched arrow suddenly stuck quivering from the tiny patch of brown skin on its throat. A thin line of amber light could be traced back from the deadly shaft to the topmost point of the East Gate tower, where the Huntsmarshal stood proud against the skyline. The bronze beast gave a gurgling shout, its eyes rolling in metal sockets, and toppled over dead.

A great shout of defiance was raised as the minotaur fell, the veteran Altdorf soldiers on the front line fighting back hard against the Chaos warriors desperately trying to get through. The battle lines pushed forward, back, breaking apart and reforming as more and more units poured into the fray, yet despite it all, the Empire held the line.

At the West Gate, a different story was unfolding. After the unexpected assault from the Bretonnians, the Glottkin had little in the way of patience left. Less than a hundred paces from the gate an explosion of masonry burst from the west gate wall, sending dozens of the dead men on the wall sprawling into the dust. Ghurk barrelled straight through in an avalanche of mortar and shattered bone, his roar of triumph loud enough to deafen a dragon. The giant mutant flattened rank after rank of skeletons with his sweeping tentacle-arm whilst his warlord brother cut the legs from the undead troops on the walls. Ethrac flung deadly curses at those too far away for Otto's scythe to reach. Ancient warriors toppled from the walls, covered from head to toe in acidic saliva. The undead warriors barring their path were little more hindrance to them than insects, for the Glottkin could taste the Garden of Nurgle in the air, and their raptures were just beginning.

As a cadre of handgunners leaned from the West Gate’s upper towers and readied a point-blank volley, Otto raised a dangling length of intestine and clenched his guts, spraying the marksmen with hissing yellow bile. They screamed, clutching at their smoking faces and clawing their eyes. Riding his brother’s heaving mass on the upswing, Otto hooked his scythe’s tip around the shoulder plate of one of the unwounded gunners and yanked him over the wall, catching him by the scruff of his neck as he fell. The warlord shook his captive hard, demanding that the soldier tell him the whereabouts of his lord.

The marksman simply stretched out a quaking arm, gesturing in the rough direction of the Imperial palace. Otto thanked him earnestly, then dashed the handgunner’s brains out against the tower wall.

In the distance, a pair of griffons shot through the heavens towards the centre of the beleaguered city, the plumed helm of the Emperor stark against the skies. Karl Franz had returned at the last.

The Glottkin’s men hacked their way into the city through the breach in the western wall, only to find the streets that led away from the West Gate swarmed with the dead. Each corpse-puppet stumbled with arms outstretched towards the triplets leading the attack.

Flying down into the midst of the undead throng was a bald, bat¬winged figure in ornate armour, his needle fangs protruding close together over his lower lip as his limb-pinions transformed back into human arms. Not Vlad, but Mundvard the Cruel, intent on killing the savages that had ruined his beloved cityport and now sought to take Altdorf. The vampire preferred his revenge served cold, but time was running out for mortal and immortal alike.

As the terrorgheist known as the Suiddock Beast swooped down from the nearby courthouse belfry, twin streams of dark light shot from Mundvard’s eyes. The dark energy struck Ethrac with sizzling force. A second later the necrarch’s pet dived at Ghurk, jaws stretched open to release a scream more terrible than an entire chorus of the damned.

Ghurk reeled backwards, his hideous features further contorted by a silent roar of pain.

More and more corpses boiled out of the alleys and buildings opposite the Glottkin until a sprawling mound of rotten flesh rose up, a composite monstrosity that could only have been raised by a true master of the dead. Tumbling forwards like a cresting wave, the mound buried the triplets beneath its mass.

Ghurk, staggered by the terrorgheist’s scream but far too large to be pinned down by the corpse-heap for long, lashed out with his tentacle. The curling limb caught the Suiddock Beast around the leg as it banked around to attack again. It screeched its hellish shriek once more, and a dozen Altdorfer marksmen that cowered under the shelter of the West Gate tower nearby turned white, slumping dead to the battlements. Mundvard droned out a resurrection chant, and they stood back up a heartbeat later, using their handguns to batter at the Norscans clambering through the nearby breach.

In the streets below, the terrorgheist glowed greenish-white with eldritch energy as Mundvard reached a claw towards its skeletal frame. Slowly at first, but with gathering pace, the bat¬winged monstrosity dragged Ghurk from the melee by his tentacle. The terrorgheist shrieked as it glowed brighter still, the full length of its massive wingspan beating hard. Ghurk bowled after it like an obese child pulled along by a rebellious kite. Otto and Ethrac had no choice but to hold on for dear life as their brother smashed an ancient wyrdwell to dust and caved in half of Blacksmith Row in his lurching rampage.

Otto pushed away the clawing, clubbing mound of dead soldiers that had clambered atop Ghurk after Mundvard’s attack. The warlord spat out a mouthful of dead flesh and yanked his scythe free from the moaning zombies, cutting a corpse in half in the process. A glowing shape descended from the storm clouds overhead, a faint shiver of high- pitched laughter filtering through the patter of milk-white rain.

Beams of dark energy lanced into the top of Otto’s head, burning away his scalp until all three of the Glottkin could smell the telltale tang of burning bone. Above them a trio of white shapes leered down over the sides of their ethereal carriage, pretty female faces swimming in the mist.

Roaring in confusion and rage, Otto brought his scythe round in a great arc and threw it up hard. Its reaper curve spun upwards to clip the head from the foremost female figure that had been peering down to watch him die. A pair of horrified screams rang out, and the floating palanquin above Otto drew up into the skies once more, the ashen remains of the coven’s queen washed away by the oily rain pelting down onto the streets. Otto caught his scythe as it spun back down, disentangling himself from the corpses strewn around him in a pool of his own sticky blood. The warlord got unsteadily back to his feet and gingerly felt the top of his head. To his relief, the burned bone was healing fast.

As the Glottkin passed a high-walled temple, a cascade of dead bodies toppled from the crenulated roof like some macabre mass suicide. Ethrac was swiftly trapped under a mound of rotting flesh that flopped onto Ghurk’s shoulders, buried by the bodies of the Altdorf dead. No matter how the sorcerer clawed and fought, the corpses would not yield, clawing and biting in their turn. He cried and struggled as his brother Otto started to hurl the corpses bodily back into the street.

There was a sudden blaze of sickly green light and the corpse-mound burst apart in a shower of glowing green maggots. A furious Ethrac stood dripping where a dozen corpses had pressed down on him a moment before. Still the undead came on, teeming through the streets to block the Glottkin’s passage towards where they had seen the returned Karl Franz descend from the skies.

Mundvard loomed out from the rooftops, the bat wings that had carried him to the top of a fortified chapel nearby becoming arms once more. Raising his hands, the vampire began an ancient chant to destroy the Glottkin once and for all. Ethrac shook his head and wagged a filthy finger at the vampire before dipping a gnarled hand into a pouch at his side and throwing a handful of black spores onto his magical brazier, smouldering slowly as it jutted from from Ghurk’s broad back.

A stream of black smoke billowed over towards Mundvard just as he was about to complete his spell, consuming the vampire for a moment, then dispersing. The cloud left nothing behind but a darkened skeleton. As Ghurk barrelled past the sorcerer reached out and backhanded Mundvard’s slack-jawed cadaver into pieces, the vampire’s mouldering bones clattering into the cobbled streets below.

With its master’s death, the Suiddock Beast suddenly found itself yanked to a halt by the tentacle around its legs. Ghurk, his wide trail of devastation stretching all the way back to the West Gate, shook his lumpen head in confusion before looking up at the beast flapping and screaming above him. He tensed his tentacle, still wrapped around the terrorgheist’s legs, and smashed the creature into the statue of Sierck that stood in the centre of Playwright Square. The undead thing was still flapping, so Ghurk smashed it into the playhouse instead. Still the thing twitched. Changing tack, the mutant triplet pounded the terrorgheist repeatedly into the flagstones.

Ghurk rumbled happily, the thunderheads above him sharing his mirth. Burning with the thrill of the fight, the Glottkin marched on towards the Imperial Palace and their destiny. Little did they realise that the Empire’s most powerful Elector Count - Vlad himself - lay in wait...

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	Miembro a cargo: Adeptus Hispanus	Fecha de inicio: 27/11/15	Estado: En proceso

Fuentes

• The End Times II - Glottkin.