The Vessel of His Wrath

In which the dearly-beloved Supreme Overlord bites off more than he may be able to chew...

Story: The Vessel of His Wrath
Author: WalkingMaelstrom

Sweet, supplicant courtiers, loyal/disloyal kabalites! TODAY IS A GOOD DAY.
I'll grant you, any day is a good day beneath the meek radiance of the Stolen Suns so long as there are souls to be had.
But still, GOOD FUCKING DAY!

You see, nothing delights me (the mighty Asdrubael Vect, Supreme Overlord of the Dark City) moreso than the existence of someone who might match my depravity. One would think those individuals impossibly rare (I know! I work hard to keep their numbers low) but it is indeed true that they can be found.

And the author of our very first bad piece of fan-prose happens to be just such a specimen! Oo-hoo! I'm so giddy I could just flay those kasrkin I plucked from Cadia!

I would like to introduce you now to the most innocently sick, twisted, vile, blasphemous, prideful and downright-rude mongrel that may well trod the soils of Earth.

This queer little creature refers to itself as WalkingMaelstrom, and let me assure you, he is quite the specimen.

Four years ago, WalkingMaelstrom was a writer of unimpressive Naruto fanfiction over on the infamous FanFiction.Net, where he was responsible for creating peculiar stories that reinvisioned the ninja and his little friends and put them in very adult situations for the benefit of others.

But he was apparently a younger man at this time. Young and horny. Just as we all are.
Now, somewhere along the lines, dear WM became involved with a much stranger crowd.

Among those little skinheaded and half-retarded followers that the bizarre torture-device (more on him at another time) gained through his feats of determined rebellion and artistry was none other than WalkingMaelstrom, who was one of the few with the time to apparently waste on giving long-winded commentary on why a digital sketch is utterly perfect and without any flaw to be found. A friendship blossomed, Maelstrom grew bold and began to love the Dark Millennium through torture-device's constant hard-on for the Ruinous Powers, and the two soon decided to consummate, thereby spawning an unholy creature of incomprehensible deviance.

If what is to come could only take a shape...

Maelstrom saw that torture-device had created a shameless self-insert character as a joke, naming this creature "The Torturer" (or Torturer for short; "The" is too presumptuous, in my opinion as the invincible Supreme Overlord), and decided this will not do. He must create his own!

Which he did. As a joke.

And also as a joke, he and torture-device came together to write a joke story, known to the world as The Vessel of His Wrath.

And now that joke story has expanded into some 30 parts... and at 400 pages (8.5x11 pages, to give you an idea) of poorly-formatted, unedited and un-proof-read writing there is no end in sight.

So surely there's a great demand for all this effort, yes? It seems so, as The Vessel of His Wrath sports a fairly impressive 34 comments.
Though, when you look directly at them, it turns out the comments are largely conversation branches between him and some friends of his.

But what about the DOZENS of fanart-pieces that this has spawned? That has to count for something! You can see them in the devianTART group he made for his "epic saga"!
Well, as it turns out, a lot of them are commissioned, because apparently WalkingMaelstrom has a fat budget to waste on scores of high-quality artwork commissions each month. Others are once more drawn by people Maelstrom is friends with, possibly also by commission. Others still are just concept drawings by his partner-in-crime torture-device.

The point I'm trying to drill home is that this WalkingMaelstrom fellow is a tad too proud of his endeavours. One has to expect his writing to be good.

Which now brings us to our feature presentation. Fair Lords and Ladies of the Dark City, I (the amazing Asdrubael Vect) present you with The Vessel of His Wrath, the very first part in the truly epic saga that is...

Wait, wait, wait. Wait.

You mean to tell me "Till" is perfectly alright? Are you serious?
Ugh. You humans and your flimsy tongue.
Still though, "Rivals Till Death" appears stupid to the eyes of Vect. "Till" can easily be a verb, can it not? Such as "tilling the field"? So from it we glean that rivals apparently till Death-incarnate like a field. Cute imagery for an eldar of Commorragh, but absolutely silly to everyone else. It is a poor choice of series-title. We shall continue to use my own edits when referring to this piece!

---~~~---

So, The Vessel of His Wrath starts out with someone being viciously slapped to death by a disembodied hand:

"The head flew clean off the body with a simple swipe of the gauntleted hand, like a child popping the head of a flower off its stem."

And that plumber will know my name is THE LORD!

But in the second sentence we find the very first thing that irks me (great Supreme Overlord Vect):

"Foul-smelling blood spurted from the neck as the cultist insurgent toppled over and jerked a bit before laying still."

Lying, not laying. Not only is such an elementary grammatical error a beautiful way to start off an epic saga, the sentence it's contained in is filled with improbability and gives us a glimpse of the awkward structure of every sentence to come hereafter. We are left to imagine that the neck that is spilling such aromatic blood belongs to this cultist that topples over afterwards and jerks a bit, leaving me pondering how this gentleman managed through his English class.

This business of failing to identify the owner of the armored pimp-hand of death eventually leads us to a mysterious he who is thinking very loudly, and presumably is not a cultist, and presumably a psyker also, according to this Slaanesh-lover here:

"Slave of the Corpse God!  Filthy psyker!"

Hold the communications crystal. Is that a cultist of the Eater of Souls complaining about a psyker? This makes even less sense given that we later learn these people are employed by a mild psyker, and apparently knowingly too. We're not even a hundred words in and already there's more improbability alerts than my Dais of Destruction can handle! I may need to break out the special souls to get through this work...

"Slamming his staff down, a massive shockwave of psychic energy caused the ground to crater around him.  In seconds, the bodies of the cultists were mashed to pulp, bones broken and organs ruptured.  It was a display of one of the most powerful abilities granted to him, Smite.  The bodies crackled and burned under intense blue fire, so hot not even their souls could escape the wrath of the Emperor."

This has me even even moreso confused. The Space Marines name specific methods of psychic attack with special nouns? More importantly, where did this intense blue fire come from when you just blew them up by pounding the ground? No mention of some wych-flame was made beforehand. Let's not even speak of how terribly one-sided the idea of these souls escaping this Corpse-Emperor of man's when they die. Everyone knows the weak are consumed by She Who Thirsts, after all.

Surely this is all just nitpicking, though. Nitpicking does not a bad story make, this is true. And I need to stop nitpicking if I'm going to make it through this.

 Now, after killing a bunch of Chaos cultists with no apparent effort, this unnamed Librarian is confronted by a Chaos Space Marine who is apparently accompanied by disappearing daemons who lash wildly and moan.
Just my kind of guy.

Then this happens:

"You would do well to leave this place now and crawl back to whatever, filth of Chaos.  Your traitorous kind is not welcome in the Emperor's world." He warned the Chaos Space Marine.

"Oh?  But I just wanted to get to know you.  So sad."

"DO NOT PATRONIZE ME!" He roared which amplified his psychic aura, forcing the traitor marine to take a step back."

Goodness gracious! It appears his foe was forced to take a step back by his sudden burst of all-caps. Rather than spend the time to provide details about how this as of yet unnamed Librarian is shouting louder, the author leaves all sense of decency and starts jamming his shift-key. When I (the unequivocal Supreme Lord Vect) write in all caps, it's for the reader's amusement, as you need not place any suspension of disbelief into my writing, and thereby may laugh at how impromptu my CAPS-LOCK ABUSE IS AT TIMES.

I also like how his "psychic aura" pushes against the daemon-infested marine.

Can't possibly be a reference to anything, can it?

But finally, after over two pages of crammed text, we finally get names out of these two, so that the reader no longer has to be horridly confused by the use of the pronoun "he" for two different people in the same scene. This would have been entirely doable had there been two opposite genders present, but it is a giant mess between two of the same sex.

So hereafter the two begin to fight. And pause at various moments to taunt one-another while fighting.
It should be noted that they use extremely unwieldy language when speaking.

And apparently, Space Marines are capable of making themselves airborne over twice their own height.

"Cailean ran with his staff already alight with blue psychic energy and leapt towards the downed traitor, about twenty feet into the air. "

They must have some very intense leg-training to be able to do that in that bulky, clunky, noisy armor of theirs. I should see to having my dracons instate regimens of leg-working to ensure we are made able to do such things. I will not be outdone by some ugly human!

Worse is the fact that the rest of this story consists of them fighting and going nowhere with it. Hits that should have pulped each combatant apparently only wind them momentarily.

I also cannot make sense of half the action, such as this right here:

"The Space Marine fired a single shot away from Torturer's trajectory, but the Chaos marine did not know as he veered thinking it would go directly into it. "

And that's another huge problem. This guy has the mind of a louse and he is trying to formulate sentences that clearly require a higher investment of EXP into one's Literacy skill. The results are these wonky, malformed sentences where you only understand half of what WalkingMaelstrom is trying to describe to you, for double the number of words you need.

"With his jump pack flaring with sickening purple flames, he rammed full speed ahead into Cailean's back.  The Librarian was propelled into the air prompting Torturer to fly to his flank and grab his arm, slamming him down into the rockcrete below.  With the Librarian felled, he readied his Blastmaster.  "Get ready for that brain of yours to become liquid in the rapturous music that is Chaos!"  He could feel the weapon readying itself to let loose a sonic boom, the cacophony of screams and groans amplified enough to break through the toughest of materials.  He bit his lip in utter anticipation as he sensed the kill to be, but what he didn't see was the bolt pistol aiming at him before he could pull the trigger." 

In my experience (as the greatest of all Archons in Commorragh) duels are generally over in the span of seconds, if not a few minutes. They are vicious affairs that are too quick to compress. The only place I've ever seen a fight scene that lasted longer than ten minutes is in anime, and they milk that for all it's worth.

What we have here, though, is a sour example of an inflated word economy. Maelstrom's words are worthless, so he keeps printing them, but that only drives their base-worth lower. He fills and fills and fills pages with these descriptions that go nowhere, taking up three lines to explain what could have been done in one!

"Readying his Blastmaster and jump pack, he attempted to flank Cailean, firing off a sonic burst screaming all the while.  Cailean fired back with his bolt pistol, his fresh clip loaded with a higher explosive round.  The sound wave and bolt shell collided and sent debris everywhere.  Again Torturer attempted to flank and again Cailean was barely fending off the sound attack with another well-aimed pistol shot."

 Now, I just have to complain here that this is beyond stupid. The explosion of a bolt pistol shell canceled out the shockwave launched by a sonic weapon? Are you kidding me? And they both explode and send debris everywhere? My sslyth have shat out more sense than this. Wouldn't the shell have just gone through the sound wave? How did the sound wave not overtake the Librarian by the time the shell even exploded, anyway?

And then this happens:

"Cailean kept whispering, cursing Torturer and channeling more power to his staff.  He was purposely blocking Torturer out, his enemy unaware that he could no longer communicate with him telepathically, leading him further into deception and eventual frustration.

It seemed to work.  Torturer growled in anger and severed the psychic link he believed still connected to Cailean.  "Answer me, Librarian!  Why will you not answer me?!?"  He fired his Blastmaster at him but missed, the growing rage preventing him from taking proper aim.  "ANSWER ME, WARP DAMN IT!"  Two vials of combat stims injected into Torturer's spine to intensify his fuming towards the loyalist, squirming as they coursed through his black-blooded veins.  He felt his body swell with muscular growth and the miasma of pure Chaos course through him.  "GNNNNNAHHHH!  ANSWER MEEEEEEE!"  Screaming at him again with his damaged jump pack he brought back his arms, ready to strike right into Cailean's heart.  The demons in his armor salivated for the blood of the Astartes loyalist as they let out a cacophony of unholy hisses and moans.  Still, the Epistolary stood there with eyes closed and lips moving with silent prayers.  "I WILL TEAR YOUR HEARTS OUT LIBRARIAN!  NO ONE IGNORES ME!"  

His hand flung itself straight at Cailean's chest again, hell bent on ripping right through the ceramite and playing with his organs.  "NO ONE…IGNORES…MEEEEE!""

 These two idiots stand next to one-another, Cailean casually ignoring this Chaos-whore, and the Chaos-whore's response is to politely wait for him? Never mind everything else wrong here, even the disregard for the Gothic spelling of "daemon", but this right here, a small scene not even halfway into the narrative yet, codifies this story so perfectly.

WalkingMaelstrom brought over a nasty habit from his Naruto days, one which he picked up from reading shitty manga for too long. He has forgotten that people have a little something called common sense that dictates that in the middle of a fight one does not stop fighting until their opponent is beaten. These two hate each other by their very natures, they should have been at it the instant they laid eyes on one another. I'll grant the whole confrontation scene, but the fact that they waste good opportunities to kill is just silly.

 What's worse is that this apparent build-up of power on Cailean's part does not apparently harm Torturer at all. Instead he gets up and begins to think to himself (and we see this quite clearly, apparently):

"Great Slaanesh!  Who is this Librarian?!?  He's….he's unlike the others I've faced!  And to think I wouldn't have had to use them, but it looks like it's come to this."

And then he summons daemonettes from an artifact.

Oh, come, we all know precisely what artifact this thing is.

As worthy of laughter as that is, what comes next is even better.

"The surviving demons in his armor began to lick the bodies of the summoned creatures in places that unleashed a chorus of pleasure-induced groans.  Torturer himself groped the chest of two of them causing them to erupt in whooping.  His hands aggressively moved themselves toward the lower halves of their bodies while they wrapped their tongues around his face.  He shared in their pleasure and he liked it, a brief respite from the fight in service to Slaanesh."

  At some point this turned into delicious smut. Although I wasn't aware that the handmaidens of She Who Thirsts were so easily dominated by some petty mortal. It would be more likely they are trying to steal his soul, but instead they go ahead and fuck him in the middle of a fight.

Meanwhile, Cailean idly stands by and watches.

So the demonettes daemonettes don't work, and Torturer just starts flying around being a fucknut, uselessly pounding on Cailean and causing his mighty ceramite armor to begin to fissure like a stack of saltine crackers.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE RANCH, we are introduced to a pair of onlookers, revealed to be an inquisitor and a chaplain.

Wait, what?

"In the distance, two spectators happened upon the battle, one of which was foaming at the mouth as the grip of his crozius felt the strain of a firmly squeezing gauntlet."

 A rabid chaplain? Oh, this just gets stranger and stranger!

"I don't like this, my Lady.  I don't like this at all.  Why are we not helping him?  He is an ally fighting a dastardly heretic!  Do we allow this heretic to draw air and feed this Librarian to the wolves?  I cannot take this any more.  I'm going to help him and…"

An arm stretched itself outwards directly in front of the giant.  "You will do no such thing, Chaplain."

"B-but…my Lady!"

She was still dismissive.  Of course, being an Inquisitor, she had the liberty to be that way.  "But nothing, Chaplain.  The Librarian can handle himself.  I've run into him before as I have that hideous Torturer."

"Of course, I have heard of your…prickly…relationship with the Imperial Paladin Epistolary." It was no secret that the Inquisitor was a blank, a null, and thus an anathema to most psykers, Cailean included.  Their relationship was tenuous mostly on the grounds that they were both servants of the Emperor.  The Chaplain enjoyed a better relationship, both Astartes and both carrying the same devotion to the Emperor."

Meet the Lady Inquisitor, Tina Fey.

 

 She is of no importance at all in the course of this story, but is revealed in a later part as such a fucking incompetent cunt that she was trying to capture or kill Torturer, only to stand and watch as he fought to a retarded stalemate with another Space Marine.

Back to the two half-wits fighting.

"WRRRAAAAAAAAGH!" 

 Yes, thank you, WalkingMaelstrom. You are one of the first 40K writers who receive "fan art" for writing something that features a verbalized war cry.
Couldn't the same effect have been achieved by writing "He shouted in rage"?

The dialogue continues to degenerate and Cailean begins talking like William Shatner after a jog:

"You think…you think…that after all that, I'll…be bested…by the likes of you?  I'll just…simply give up?  Ha."

Captain's... log... I have been... running... for more than... two minutes...

 
 This just continues on, back-and-forth, pointless, until both sides concede and Torturer apparently flies off into the sky. Using his jump pack.
His jump pack. Not his jet pack. His jump pack. You know, the one that lets them jump real high and then drop like an anvil on their enemies?
Though, he does teleport away shortly after beginning his impromptu flight, but somehow I question whether  or not the author has read what a jump pack even is.

Apparently there was also a Sister of Battle stuck to Torturer's pauldron, who fell off in the middle of this fighting. Cailean spends the end burying her and then swearing that NEXT TIME, he will shove a fucking SMITE up that skinny pale traitor marine's asshole.
Right up until he forgets the Smite part.

---~~~---

 So, The Vessel of His Wrath makes an excellent way to start off this little series with its senseless logic, ridiculously drawn-out anime fighting, canon-rape, and just stark mediocrity. So why is it apparently so popular?

I (the incomparable Supreme Overlord Asdrubael Vect) am not entirely certain yet, but I vow on this day! I vow on this day to... read the rest of... this... series...

Oh, by the Dark Muses... more...

So...

Much...

More...

Someone get me Lelith, please. She can handle this next part. I, however, need a stiff, hard cup of anguish to take the edge off my developing headache.

Toodaloo, sweet little kabalites!

- V.