They had arrived halfway down the valley that the base overlooked, and ventured deeper into the woods where the lost outpost once stood. While the path was clear enough for foot travel, the cragged crest and precarious screes were unnavigable for the UTVs.

  The ATV squad reported their findings. Two of them had circled the perimeter of the outpost to analyze the attack. A stampede had trampled over the forest floor and through the meager barricades. The band was large and left a trail of hoof treads, ruinous foraging, and their own dead.

  The ATVs would follow the trail for the origin of the band while the outpost was investigated more closely.

  Sparse as it was, the beasts crammed as much desecration as they could into it. Corpses of man and beast littered the ground, mangled and rotting, buzzing with blowflies and infested with maggots, dry blood and shriveled entrails spilled out, limbs twisted and broken. Knives were jabbed into the moldering beastmen, and the auspex wand detected no life signatures besides the carrion insects. The dead soldiers had been issued flak armor and carbines, both now stolen, and had been befouled as lavoratories for liquid stool that revealed all too much of the attacker’s diet. While that equipment was enough to swat away the occasional kine, when an attack like this overwhelmed, they would not leave with too precious gear to use.

  The food stores and munitions were similarly looted and polluted. The vox station and shrine to Him were ransacked for metals, defaced with heretical runes, and stained by layers of urine. Yoon found beastmen’s love for excrement more juvenile than disturbing, and thanked Him for her rebreather’s filtration. Simple it may be, but it was effective enough for spreading contamination.

  There was more that could have been pillaged. The tents and cots, the scrap metal, abandoned weapons, even the corpses should have been taken to be cannibalized. It was a large band, perhaps they ranged too far for too long and hurried back to their encampment to avoid overextending or to maintain cohesion, Allegra theorized.

  Unbeknownst to them, a mydas fly in a tree nestled within a pine cone like a swollen, malignant seed. The vision caught in its compound eyes was relayed to brewed blood within a clay cauldron. The bray-shamaness looming over the cauldron monitored the investigators. She took up a clay bowl and drank its contents of pureed beetles, mushroom powders, and brackish pus. She swished and gargled the concoction, swallowed, let it stew in her polypsed intestines and corrupted liver, and belched out a flatulence directly into the cauldron.

  The gas descended around the Imperials like a blanket. Filtration kept stench at bay, but green clouded vision and pus droplets condensed in the crooks of armor. Allegra drew her bolt pistol, the auxilia raised their carbines, and Yoon unbridled her chainsword, a trigger pull setting its teeth spinning and roaring for blood. Yoon could hardly see her outstretched hand, reminiscent of that daemonic darkness in the sewers, that claustrophobic cavern that the daemon tried to drown her in.

  Yoon followed Allegra in hymnal. It refocused her on the situation at hand. Her vision was clouded; she did not need her mind clouded as well. The auxilia with an auspex wand scanned the area to upload their outlines to their visors. What it did not detect were maggots speeding through pupation to emerge as flies and corpses that lurched to life, scrambling to stand on thrushed and laminitised hooves once more.

  They noticed the insectile buzzing become a droning dirge before swarms of flies surged forth. The sisters' holy radiance burnt up some flies that came for them, but the auxilia’s flamers were needed to eradicate the full business.

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  As the flamers were being unslung, the pestigors lunged at their targets. One gangerous limb swung a corroded axe at Yoon's head. She weaved out of the way and brought her chainsword down into the bony forearm that appeared from the mist. The spinning teeth tore through the forearm and mulched into a decayed snout. More than blood sprayed out: worms, parasites, and other foulties that nested in the beast’s veins were launched onto her armor, including her lenses. Most of them were warpspawn that relied on their host for existence, surely burnt away upon the armor of the righteous, but there were still many tangible protozoans, helminths, and ectoparasites that were naturally attracted to the unclean and now wriggled for purchase upon her.

  She pulled her chainsword out of the side and wiped what effluvia she could from her lenses. She’s gonna need a phosphex bath after this.

  An auxilian—number 2-21 according to her HUD glyph—had been dragged to the ground by another pestigor, carbine pinned to 21’s chest as the pestigor vomited acidic bile from its half-hinged jaw onto his helmet. Yoon punted it off and jammed the chainsword in its distended belly, allowing 21 to remove his helmet.

  The rank stench wafting into 21’s lungs made him wretch, but he was on his feet. If not for the sister’s radiance, he would be emptying his guts and loosening his bowels. Thanks to the light she shone on him, he was able to let out a riff of bullets upon another pestigor approaching with a filth-caked hatchet. The slime-sodden beast was staggered, but the bullets sank into his sickly hide, and he lumbered forth. Yoon pulled her sword and swung round to cleave the beast in twain.

  The light of flame burning away fly swarms gave shadow to the forms in the cloud. From that, Allegra was able to aim with her bolt pistol, dismembering the silhouettes with every shot. Positioned opposite of where the beastmen had broken into the outpost, she called her auxilia and sister to her, this moshpit being the enemy’s preference. Yoon carved a path for the most far-flung auxilia to follow. Enough of them together now, Allegra stowed her pistol and took her multi-melta into both hands.

  The ‘corpses’ from the initial breach now shambled in, adding to the pestigors numbers. Yoon revved her sword, but the auxilia were not firing. Hobbled as they were, the pesitgors galloped forward, splashing upon blood and pus-slick dirt. One leapt forward to ram Allegra with blackened horns.

  They evaporated. The pestigors. The flies. The green cloud was punctured with an unrecoverable wound and forced to recede. It was so quick that Yoon had to retrace what happened to truly perceive it.

  First, a snap that made the air hiss and sizzle from sudden heat. At the apex of that heat, an oily rainbow was emitted from the multi-melta. The leaping pestigor crackled harshly as he burnt to char that flaked to ash that came apart and blew away. The oil went forth in a widening column that cremated all in its path, the bipedal bovids crackling to smouldering flakes, and the flies and gas particles vaporising to nothingness. When the ash fell, and the sickly cloud dispersed, all that remained was broiled earth, singed air, and the hiss of heated barrels.

  The auxilia, already familiar with the devastation of melta weapons, was moving to clean away the remaining filth. The leftover pestigors were gunned down, and the corpses of man and beast were purified by flamers. The oxygen-greedy flames further aridized the humidity. Smoke and lingering heat haze took up the landscape.

  Yoon came up on Allegra’s flank, who was grooming the multi-melta for a job as well done as the beef.

  “Why couldn’t the auspex pick these ones up?” asked Yoon. Allegra did not turn her attention away from her weapon.

  “Because they were not alive, not in any way we would recognize. Even for mutants, pestigors are bastard spawn of warp-tainted seed, animated by malignant humors more than blood. Makes them tougher, stronger, and more contaminating than the rest of their already revolting kin. If they are out here, then yes, it is worse than we thought.”

  “Is this occurrence still unexceptional?” asked Yoon.

  “The size of the band? Exceptional. The witch with them? Exceptional. The half-dead pestigors? Exceptional. The difference?” She hefted her big gun. “Negligible. Victory? Inevitable. This day does not end without the rest of these beasts eradicated.”