Enemies-to-Enemies

Evshkera Goredrinker, Utility Aximizer Prime of the Taruoduron Scholars, nearly shattered her teeth from how hard she bit her dataslate stylus in rage at the sight of her most hated nemesis, Mashḱer Slaughterfiend. The plastic of the pen's shaft actually shattered under her bite, shards carving glorious tracts of flesh out of the top of her mouth. Her sacred fury felt only more focused when she tasted the influx of Khorne's blood that resulted. She spat it out on the ground, directly between Slaughterfiend's feet.

"What in the name of Khorne's own skull are you doing here?" she growled out from between her teeth, bits of blood-soaked stylus sent flying by the force of her words.

"The Office sent me," he said, face contorted in a rage she would admire for its piety if not for the fact the look of him made her blood boil. "You're to stop your tinkering with those unholy First Impediment spawning pits you call a 'breeding program'. They cause so many five-thirteens that productivity among the logisticians has dropped unacceptably."

Mashḱer opened his mouth again to say something else, but Evshkera's fist already caught him square on the jaw. She wasn't wearing the proscribed Brazen Knuckles for maximum piety, but Evshkera saw his teeth slam shut around the tip of his tongue, sending it flying in a spurt of blood. She hoped Khorne would accept that bloodshed as adequate compensation.

To her surprise and outrage, Mashḱer did not engage her in righteous violence where she stood, instead producing a document. Her keen bureaucrat's eye immediately recognized it as the 6L-00D-5H3(D) - the requisition form for an unilateral declaration of a duel with an high-ranking official of the Sanguinary Uthnapishm, signed and bloodied by Zinam Gal himself. Her anger flared, bristling at the idea that he would go behind her back for this like some Third Impediment coward, though it mixed with a grudging glimmer of respect for his martial honour in showing her his hand before he dealt it.

She did not have to wait long before he dealt his hand though - it came with great force, right across her face, the force of his contemptuous open-handed slap, knocking her back over her chair and sending her sprawling on the ground. Evskera spat out a tooth as Mashḱer, growling in a most pious barely-coherent fury, leapt over her desk to pounce on her, teeth bared, chaindagger raised in his hand.

The Office was in ruins. Fresh blood splattered over the walls - not the tasteful, deliberate bloodletting of the decorators, but the wanton sprays of arteries nicked and veins opened in glorious combat. Evshkera's chainaxe was embedded in the ground, the remains of the bookshelf it split right in half on either side of it. Mashḱer's chaindagger was buried in her thigh.

She rested her head on his incredibly muscular chest, watching the pleasant stream of blood from where she'd bitten his nipple clean off. She felt a similar trickle of fluid herself, though not of the sacred sanguine, and not in the same place.

Mashḱer looked at her with blasphemously-restrained fury, dipping his Lho-stick in the mixed pool of both his and her blood that had formed beneath them.

"This changes nothing between us, wretch," he spat after a long drag. "I still loathe the mewling pacifism of your bureaucratic little pet projects."

Evshkera's seething hatred did not abate, but it changed - from the explosive rage Khorne's humble servants favoured on the battlefield, to the cold, calculated fury of His logisticians and planners. She slapped a form of her own onto his bare chest, the blood of his many injuries making it stick.

"It changes everything," she said, voice like a phase sword.

She glanced at the corner that still smelled of blessed sulphur, where Khorne's blessed servant had stood, before she and Mashḱer had brutalized it as one in glorious slaughter.

"I just filled out our 5-3-X; this is the first time I've heard of procreation summoning anything other than a Daemonette."