OGNW 4

Kratos was not a man that was often surprised. Few things in the last few centuries could claim to have surprised him. This was one of them.

Grimvolf was dead, or should’ve been. It was a pity his body seemed oblivious to that truth. His decapitated head’s jaw unhinged as he let out a final roar. “For the Hound!” That same war cry. A prayer, a plea, and a call all in one. Unlike the previous times, this time there was an answer.

There were a multitude of things, random coincidental occurrences that led to the blood god turning his attention to this specific moment and at this specific point in time. The first was that it was a field of blood. A war ground. Despite how pitiful the blood offerings were, it was still enough to fulfill a minor criteria. The second was the indiscriminate act of slaughter that had occurred. Once again, an act that was a dime a dozen, yet they piled up. The third was the champion’s presence. However errant the champion was, he was still a man that had been blessed and mutated by the blood god’s touch.

The fourth was the means by which the chaos champion had died. A decapitation strike, the beheading of another being, a symbolic act of taking the skull, an act that if you squinted hard enough could be seen as a veneration of Khorne. The fifth was a vague interest in a bloodstained child. A child that, even though he lacked the gift of sorcery like the raven did, he could tell. A child that would leave a trail of blood in her worship of him in the future.

However, the sixth and most important reason was the most unexpected. Khorne had simply turned his head on his massive throne of bone, brass, and the skulls of a thousand and thousand beings. Elves, humans, dragons, dwarves, gods.

All these coincidences built up upon one another, and Khorne was greeted to the boring sight of one of his countless champions getting beheaded by a man born god. His attention drifted off again. Already, he could feel the raven plot something… A man born god! Khorne's head snapped back to the scene so fast there was a crack of sound that forced his whole realm to shake. His immense arms held his seat so hard the brass armrest deformed.

Was it happening once again? Rare was such an occurrence, but the blurry sight of the massive bearded being ignited his interest like few others. Already, he could see the being leave an impression on the immaterial. A paradoxical being. Young but old. Strong but weak. The impression was blurry, yet already it was too powerful for just any Neverborn. A powerful presence that seemed to be slowly growing stronger in the Warp, yet Khorne leaned back into his massive throne.

Many of such beings died before they became worth the effort to monitor. Only two had ever grown powerful enough that when they died, their physical shell crumbled and metamorphosed into a complete immaterial entity. Till then, he was a physical being bound to the physical realm. The only sign of his godhood was the massive immaterial presence that still seemed to grow.

Khorne frowned in concentration, till at the edge of his vision he sighted a raven drift past, and the strange begrudging god was discarded as he refocused on his fellow Warp entities’ machinations. The newborn man god was still too young, but Khorne was not one to simply discard such curiosity. A wave of his hand sent a smidgen of a smidgen of his essence down the link that connected the champion to him. If nothing else, he was going to bless the champion for such an entertaining sight, however brief it was.

Khorne focused back on keeping his guard up against the machination of his brother, ignorant to just how fast the strange man god’s presence in the Warp seemed to grow, paradoxically fast and slow, young yet old.

x

“Do you feel that, brother?” Mimir asked, his voice subdued.

“For a second, we were being watched,” Kratos replied as he stared upward. It was a sensation he knew vividly, having been on both sides of the equation. He had been the one asking a god for help and he had also been the one of whom aid was requested. A war god. That was who this… Hound was.

And for a fraction of a second his attention had been on them, then just as fast it was gone. Kratos was forced back to the physical realm by a scream.

A soul-tearing, animalistic wail that clawed at the nerves, a sound of a man being devoured from the inside out.

Grimvolf’s body spasmed violently, his back arching, spine jutting against flesh as though something inside was trying to claw its way free. His skin stretched, and his veins bulged out black and swollen.

Blood wept from his eyes, his mouth, his ears. He clawed at the ground, discarding chunks of flesh as well as his fingernails behind as he dug into the ground. The giant brute convulsed, his body twitching, limbs jerking as though electrified. His back erupted in a shower of gore, skin splitting like overripe fruit. Then a forest of writhing tendrils burst forth, each one glistening with slick, black ichor.

They whipped and thrashed, tearing free from his spine, each tendril ending in a slathering maw filled with jagged teeth. His eyes bulged, veins bursting, blood pouring from every orifice as his body stretched and twisted into something inhuman.

The ground beneath Grimvolf’s twitching body blackened, a puddle of festering darkness spreading outward like a wound in the earth. The stench of diseased blood, rotting meat, and sulfur choked the air, thick and cloying, as if the land itself was recoiling from the abomination taking shape. The brute’s mouth unhinged, stretching impossibly wide as a chorus of voices poured from his throat, each one a babbling, deranged hymn to unmentionable gods.

What remained of Grimvolf’s flesh bubbled and swelled, bones snapping like kindling as his frame expanded, his limbs elongating into grotesque, misshapen appendages. His skull cracked and split, a second maw forcing its way through the skin of his throat, gnashing and slobbering like a starving animal. More tentacles erupted from his back, eyes opened in places no eyes should be, mouths yawned open, gnashing rows of broken, blackened teeth.

Grimvolf rose up once more, but gone was the horned yet very human brute that he had killed barely seconds ago, and in its place was a monstrosity. An abomination whose very presence tainted the world. Hot black ichor dropped from its skin, each drop of the putrid blood dissolved ice and snow.

“Gods, a Great Chaos Spawn.” Someone whispered from behind him, the horror as clear as the wind that suddenly decided to blow the smell of the diseased abomination into Kratos's nose. He endured the putrid stink with a grunt, but Mimir wasn’t quite as… understanding.

“Aye. Is it too much to ask that you don’t just look like something not even a mother would love, you have to smell like it too?”

The Chaos Spawn roared in response to Mimir’s words. A roar that made it clear that it didn’t understand the barest words that the decapitated horned head had spoken. The abomination before him was simply a mindless, slavering beast, and the ground shook beneath its lurching, unnatural charge as it began to move. Its target: Kratos.

Kratos gripped the Draupnir Spear tighter, teeth bared. Whatever humanity the brute had once possessed was gone, swallowed by the transformation. Now, only an abomination remained in its place. “Scatter,” he called out as the gigantic monstrosity barreled its way towards him and the villagers behind him. They let out terrified screams of fear as they dispersed into the wind, leaving Kratos alone to face the abomination.

Kratos held his ground as the Chaos Spawn thundered forward, a monstrous amalgamation of Grimvolf’s once-mighty frame and a writhing mass of eldritch flesh. It crashed forward, limbs flailing, tentacles snapping at the air like whips made of raw sinew and jagged teeth. The ground quaked with every step, each thundering impact sending chunks of frozen earth flying.

Kratos hurled a Draupnir Spear, and it struck the Chaos Spawn’s bloated torso with a sickening squelch. Black ichor sprayed from the wound, sizzling as it hit the ground, melting snow and grass alike. But the beast didn’t even slow. A copy found itself in Kratos’s arms once more and he hurled another spear into the beast, then a third. That was all he managed before it got into range.

It lunged at Kratos. Its appendages were a tangle of limbs and tentacles converging on him. Kratos sidestepped, slashing with another spear, severing a tentacle that flopped to the ground, wriggling like a disembodied worm. The Spawn howled, a guttural, wet bellow that vibrated through the air like the roar of a drowning leviathan.

He ducked beneath another flailing limb laced with spikes that looked suitable for flensing skin from bone, then he buried the spear into the base of the appendage before darting back in a smooth roll. But he had underestimated the reach of the multitude of eldritch limbs.

Kratos grunted as a tentacle shot forward, vastly longer than he expected, and wrapped itself around his waist. Then it squeezed, tight and hard enough to bend armor and with enough force to break ribs. If Kratos was a man, that is. But Kratos had never been a mundane man. The world spun as he was lifted, dangling like a ragdoll. The Chaos Spawn brought him closer, a slathering maw snapping at his face, rancid breath reeking of rot and death.

The closer he got, the more the maw stretched wider, the skin around it splitting and tearing, revealing another set of gnashing, mismatched fangs beneath the first.

Kratos’s teeth clenched, and with a furious roar, he drove the spear straight through the monster’s eye, feeling the shaft grind against bone and squelching brain matter. The Chaos Spawn shrieked, its grip loosening. Kratos fell, landing hard on one knee, just in time to roll away once more as the Spawn’s massive fist slammed into the ground where he’d been.

“Not so quick to die, are you?” Mimir muttered, his voice tense. “It’s still Grimvolf in there, in a way. Whatever’s left of him.”

“There is nothing left,” Kratos snarled, rising to his feet as the Spawn reared back, flailing, a mass of teeth and muscle and tentacles. But the abomination was cautious. Despite its flailing and roars, it didn’t take another step toward Kratos. It had learned its lesson. Mimir had been right in some way—Grimvolf was gone—yet there was a sense of cunning clear in its multitude of revolting eyes.

Their clashes had been brief, but it was enough to make it clear. The abomination was not a match for Kratos, so it did what any coward would do. It lunged, but not at him. One of the fleeing villagers had stopped, heedless of Kratos’s warnings. The fool stood there spellbound as he watched them fight. Which meant that when the abomination made a sudden dive toward him, he was completely caught off guard.

The foolish man froze. His legs locked up, his arms trembled. He watched a creature that they had all heard about but few had seen or fought and lived to tell of it, even in the frigid north, and he could do nothing but tremble in its presence, devoid of the bravery that had rooted him to the ground earlier.

Luckily for the fool, and before Kratos could complete his turn and make an attempt to stop it, someone else interposed between the Chaos Spawn and the man. The waif of a girl. She raised a ramshackle shield up in defense. With her sword discarded, she had picked up a spear and, in a picture-perfect thrust, she shot it forward.

The iron tip of the mundane spear pierced the eye of the abomination, and it let out a howl as a tentacle shot forward to impale the child. The shield she held up only lasted for a split second before it pierced through and buried itself into the girl’s midsection.

Kratos saw red.

With a roar of rage, the Draupnir Spear reformed in his hand and he slammed the butt of the weapon into the ground with such force, there was an explosion of snow. Then the detonations came. All the spears he had buried into the beast detonated at once, and the abomination once more let out a chittering wail, simultaneously crying, laughing, yelling, and screaming in pain as whole chunks of its immense frame exploded and buckets full of blood erupted from its injuries like a macabre waterfall. Kratos was not done. Already he could see the blood flow stop. Soon the injuries would begin to heal again. Draupnir didn’t seem to be the perfect weapon to counter the abomination.

He shot forward, cracking the earth beneath his feet. With his arms empty, he grabbed onto one of the flailing and trailing tentacles of the abomination and pulled. The abomination’s pain resistance was useless in comparison to his furious strength. He lifted the abomination over his head and flung it down with enough force to completely shatter what was left of the already cracked ground. Then he moved, quickly and hurriedly, while the abomination was dazed.

He rapidly summoned copies of Draupnir and buried them into the confused and still flailing tentacles, pinning the Chaos Spawn to the ground. Then he moved on to the limbs—or at least what remained of the grotesque appendages—and did the same. Only then did he take a pause as he took in a breath. Then he mounted the Chaos Spawn, and his fist lashed out in a thunderous blow that buried the head of the beast into the earth.

The second blow came faster than the first, and harder. Then the third. Then the fourth. After that, it was a blur of motion, rote repetition as Kratos hurled his limbs in a continuous movement like a beating drum, slamming them into the Chaos Spawn again and again and again, until only blood filled his vision. Until his fist kissed the ground, as the upper part of the abomination had been used to repaint the surroundings. Only then did he stop, as a low voice called out.

“It is dead, brother. It is dead and gone. It won’t be troubling anyone anymore.”

Kratos let out shuddering breaths as he regained control over his limbs, stilling them. Then he slowly opened and closed them. His voice came like a growl, low in tone and all bass. “And the girl?” He didn’t turn back to look at her discarded form behind him. Instead, he mastered himself once more. Expending rage on such a paltry foe was a waste.

“Aye, she lives. For now at least. If we can’t get her some proper treatment soon, I doubt she’ll see the morn.”

That was when Kratos allowed himself to rise and dismount the Chaos Spawn. He turned to the child, where she lay gasping for breath, her body held by the foolish man she had saved, while he looked down at the girl who had saved his life, wide-eyed. He ignored the man and focused on her. Despite her pallid complexion and unfocused eyes, she smiled up at him. “D- Did I do good, old man?”

“Yes, you did.” Her smile increased, then dimmed slightly.

“I suppose I’m going to die now.” The realization sent a lance of anger through Kratos, but he schooled his features.

“Not if I can help it. What’s your name, child?”

She grinned up at him with bloodstained teeth. “Valkia Merrocdottir.”

A/N; I hope you're familiar with your Whfb Lore.