Symphony of Chaos part 2

In which the all-powerful Supreme Overlord makes shocking discoveries, and is nearly lost to space-time anomalies...

Story: Symphony of Chaos part 2

Author: WalkingMaelstrom

So there I was, enjoying a good game of Strip-Dawn Blade Hold with the twin jetbiker sisters Aeolith and Myrnanras, pondering the matter of this next reading while I distractedly won the blade-brassières of the girls, when I (the all-knowing Archon of the Kabal of the Black Heart) came to an epiphany that shook my understanding of Rivals Til Death.

I then killed Myrnanras for accepting favors from Dracon Korask and had my way with Aeolith. Seeing her sibling dead excited the girl greatly, I think.

The gorgeous Aeolith is currently hooked from my ceiling, dripping her bodily fluids down on me as I write this, but enough about that sweet little morsel.

You see, I took a peek at this chapter as I got my new toe installed (Rakarth refused the tooth, the poor fool, so after his last cadaver stopped bleeding he agreed to just grow me a new toe of my own) and the first paragraph made me realize something.

Note every physical characteristic of Cailean as shown here. He is, most obviously, a filthy little psyker (and by nature apparently a very powerful one), he can use his power to kill things, although he rarely ever does this, and is instead only ever depicted using his fists and various weapons. He is also capable of a Dragonball Z-style "power-up" technique that consists of looking constipated and screaming at the top of one's lungs.

He also has blonde hair and blue eyes, like the cute superior race-spawn that he is.

Pay mind to this image WalkingMaelstrom also commissioned of (brace yourselves) a Naruto/Warhammer crossover.

In the grim darkness, there is only bad premise.

Ewgh. I feel violated.

Well, not the best example, I suppose, because apparently Naruto's eyes are able to change to red. Look at this one instead:

A HIGHLY ACCURATE DEPICTION.

You'll notice the blue eyes and blonde hair. Naruto is also able use magical abilities (and is apparently naturally great at it), but does not use them particularly as often as he should. He is, like Cailean, capable of shit-taking power-up squats and is very short-sighted and easily angered as well. He is also the target of several people who he has angered in the past.

It may seem like a stretch at the moment, but in time, I suspect you'll come to appreciate just as I do that Cailean is (intentionally or not) Naruto Uzumaki infiltrating Warhammer 40,000.

Now, this also does wonders to explain various other things in the story. Torturer's "To think I wasn't going to use them!" quote is, I am told, practically straight from Naruto's fight with a supervillain who also calls on the support of others to pointlessly draw out a fight for another 40 pages. His insistence that a person can jump twenty feet into the air is a rip straight from Kishimoto's stain of a manga.

Even his insistence on idiotic inner monologues to point out the obvious is lifted straight from Naruto.

Key to the series, however, is the fact that this easily explains his blatant, mindless sexism. I doubt he's ever met a girl in his life, because he thinks a woman - scarred countless times by battle - who has murdered alien horrors aboard a clump of warp-spat space wrecks should be frightened over a Space Marine, or a lost hand, or a couple of cultists. The women in his stories, by and large, are worthless, moody, and taken to revering his beefcake characters.

One might think Inquisitor Tina to be a contradiction, what with how she literally leapt into the fray, but as you're about to find out, she is most certainly not.

In fact, she actually belongs to the most obnoxious of all tropes in existence, sharing a spot with every damned fictional princess that ever existed.

I must warn you as we reach the precipice of this part: this is the very worst chapter yet.

WalkingMaelstrom starts us off with, again, more restatement of the blatantly obvious, because he seems to think he needs to remind of us what happened in the last segment.

Cailean shook with anger.  Not only has he failed to kill this heretic, but doing so cost him one of his dear friends and several other loyal Imperial citizens.  Every wasted moment meant more would die.  He couldn't take it.  Nulli Secundum crackled wildly, the rage adding to his power.  "HERETIC!  I WILL KILL YOU!"

It's all very humorous and cute to make fun of him for telling us what we already know, but the problem is that he's doing this to pad this series so densely that I keep each part away from the other for fear of them altogether producing a gravitational singularity.

And this does not help the writing at all. As I said in the review of The Vessel of His Wrath, WalkingMaelstrom lacks any feasible grasp of word economy. I should also comment that he probably does not know what "economy" means: Lelith pointed out to me over dinner that he uses awkward words such as "impetus" and "chagrin" in close proximity to one another. The man is humping a thesaurus as he writes!

Back on track.

Cailean apparently immediately breaks out into a charge in his sheer rage, moving with "blinding speed" over whatever distance it is he needs to cover, which suggests he has activated the Quickening again.

 Inquisitor Tina apparently also can sense disturbances in the ground by kicking others.

Tina, blocking a blow from Zekkel, kicked him away only to feel the ground shake beneath her feet, the power of Cailean clearly visible to her and Moerchen. 

She then comments aloud, in spite of her intense fight with the possessed marine,

"Such power…Cailean…" 

Again, because she is a woman and therefore must gape in awe at anything some man does.

But in spite of the incoming one-ton mass of MAN, Torturer just doesn't give a fuck, and at this juncture I must once more question the distance between these two opposing parties. Torturer acts like Cailean is running at him from across a large field, casually turning to idly jest and to give orders to his out-of-nowhere daemonettes, before he promptly just flies away.

And for a man enraged by the death of his bestest best friend, Cailean is very talkative.

"YOU DON'T RUN FROM ME, COWARD!"

    "For a psyker, you aren't very smart when it comes to understanding what I meant by pressing matters.  I'll leave you in the company of my retinue.  Ta." 

And for a man standing in the heat of battle with a pain-train coming at him, Torturer speaks in such an unwieldy, disjointed manner that it defies even the text bubble nature of the shitty Japanese comics WalkingMaelstrom learned to write from.

So Torturer flies away in apparently the exact moment that Cailean is reaching out to put him in a chokehold, which once again begs the question of proximity. If Cailean was so close he "could get a grasp" on Torturer, that implies he could have grabbed his leg and dragged him back to earth or something... if Cailean wasn't utterly incompetent.

Lelith and I (great Supreme Overlord that I am) have already commented extensively on the fact that WalkingMaelstrom doesn't understand the difference between a jump pack and a jet pack, but we'll suffice it to say Torturer goes flying across the indeterminable expanse of the battlefield to go pester Apothecary Malexis, who is, despite the aggregate incompetence of the rest of his team, holding off against a group of Adeptus Mechanicus magi and the Apothecary Haruch.

On the way, Torturer recognizes that Zekkel is apparently getting his ass handed to him by Inquisitor Tina Fey, and a remark is made from his perspective:

It was a larger concern that Zekkel had gone it alone against the Inquisitor.  He wasn't meant to be the melee type, more a motivational member.

That's right. A possessed former Word Bearer dark apostle is getting his ass handed to him by a mortal woman, whose neck he could easily just break with a nice backhand like Cailean demonstrated in The Vessel of His Wrath. More amusingly, WalkingMaelstrom also classifies his characters like they have fucking stat-lines and ability ratings.

But Torturer crosses the field and bothers Malexis, and so begins possibly the most fucking retarded three-page spread of senselessness that has yet come from Rivals.

     "MALEXIS!  IT'S TIME!  PREPARE VIAL X!"

"Ooooooh!  Vial X?  Ekstase?  Coming right up, my Lord!" The equipment on his back whirred insanely, multi-colored liquids merging into some sickly purple and red vial.  A clean needle emerged from another mechadendrite and pulled all of the contents into its massive container.  With an insane smile, he looked up to the sky and yelled.  "MY LORD!  YOU ARE READY TO RECEIVE!"

The air whistled as Torturer descended head first, like a human comet, only to flip himself at the last moment and land right next to Malexis, the tremor throwing Lamontes and Haruch down to the ground.  The injector stabbed Torturer directly into the spine, with inhuman precision that made Haruch's stomach churn that such a foul heretic could be so well-versed in the art of combat drugs, a hideous counter to his healing arts.  

Torturer's muscles apparently begin to bulge in spite of his layers of armor. If the effects were so drastic that we need to be informed of it (how it works is beyond me) then that would imply his armor is falling off him as he shatters his exoskeleton.

Interestingly, nobody bothers to shoot this pile of warp stained cunt-discharge, and instead listens as he begins ranting and "raving on and on".

"YESSSSSS…YESSSSSSS!  OH THE RUSH…I FEEL IT AGAIN!  GET INTO EVERY BLOOD CELL, EVERY ORGAN, EVERY PART OF ME!  MAKE ME FEEL WHAT I'VE BEEN MISSING!"

Inquisitor Tina can apparently hear this, which indicates that they are close enough to be within earshot over the sounds of fighting (presumably gunfire, shouting, jet jump pack ignition at the least) so they must be fairly close. If this drug Torturer just took is enhanced by the warp, wouldn't the null standing here be enough to wreck his shit and the shit of these daemons that have supposedly been inhabiting his armor the entire time?

Maelstrom's comprehension of phyical laws and their relation to the space-time continuum comes in once again as Moerchen apparently shouts "GNNNNAHHH!", whatever that word means, to the Lady as Torturer fires a random blastmaster, I think.

"End of the line for you…heretic.  Let me make this quick." With Hope held high, she readied herself for the thrust into his chest.  Before she could, a powerful sound blast came screaming at her.

"MY LADY!" Moerchen shoved her to the side and took the blast.  "GNNNNAHHH!"  He flew twenty feet back before landing on his back.

"MOERCHEN!" Tina cried out.

At first I was surprised to find Moerchen had somehow covered the distance between himself and Razorwire and the inquisitor's fight with Zekkel, but it seems they up and stopped fighting offscreen and so Inquisitor Tina and Moerchen were together at the start of the chapter (which supposedly takes place immediately after Symphony of Chaos part 1).

But more importantly, this is the sort of space-time continuity problems I have with this. WalkingMaelstrom has Moerchen do this because he thought it would be badass for the chaplain to take the hit, but logic indicates that the Lady apparently heard this onrushing sound first, then Moerchen shouted at her, then he jumped, and then he got hit. What, is the atmosphere of this planet ridiculously thin or something? Are sonic weapons this debilitatingly slow here? If we even begin to start pulling at the loose threads of logic here, the entire thing just comes apart.

What comes next makes no sense and each time I begin to press upon it, my mind begins to pulse with the precursors of a very potent migraine. But let me give you the run-down.

Apparently Chaplain Moerchen has had a daemon in his body the entire time and was never either exorcised or killed for it, despite being an enormous threat to the security and integrity of his chapter. Torturer somehow gets the better of Moerchen and coaxes the daemon to possess the chaplain, resulting in a scene that was clearly never proof-read with things like "bulged muscled" and an extreme repetition of the word "helmet".

Lovely though this picture is, I fear it does not effectively illustrate this scene.

So now that Moerchen's deep dark secret is out, everyone suddenly stops fighting and has a nice talk about it. Ignis, enormous wapanese twit that he is, mentions to Seo,

"We knew of that chaplain and his secret.  Lord Torturer told us so.  It was all part of his plan.  Rather perfect, would you not agree?"

Yes, he knew about the chaplain and his secret but forgot to mention Inquisitor Tina is a null. Nice job.

So, after Torturer implies Inquisitor Tina is not actually a "Lady",

"YOU BEAST!  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIM?!?"

"Oh…something long overdue, my 'Lady.'"

It is revealed to us that this fight has occurred over the span of an hour.

How?

How could this have possibly taken an hour?

Fuck-nothing has happened at all in the last two parts, and by the time that we are informed that there was little progress between Ashur and the Noise Marines, five minutes had passed since the start of the battle. Have these people just been shooting and swinging into the air the entire time, because it is impossible to go so long with so little death.

So while everyone is gawking at possessed Moerchen, Torturer decides to kidnap Inquisitor Tina in yet another fine example of zero proofreading:

Torturer signaled Zekkel as he grabbed Tina and with a quick injection of tranquilizer to the side of her neck that rendered her unconscious. 

And in a flurry of caps-locked boisterous exclamations, he calls down a random Thunderhawk to get them out of there, rather than teleporting away again.

BUT JUST THEN!  Epistolary Cailean jumps onto the Thunderhawk as it flies off!

"This fucking Librarian…"

 My thoughts precisely, dear Torturer! Needless to say, it doesn't go so well, and Cailean apparently falls to his death is entirely unharmed by his drop from a high-speed aircraft.

Torturer then kills the last of the noise marines sent to him by Eleaxus, because the guy was trying to extort him. He then finds out this mysterious box the noise marines were carrying contains an extremely powerful bomb.

Well, taking cues from me now, are we, o Flawless One?

But regardless, Eleaxus's ineptitude in trying to kill Torturer's band means that now the Sick Six are free of him and all other influence.

Back on the ground.

In the time Moerchen's daemon has had control of his body, it has done absolutely nothing at all despite possessed creatures having a track-record of immediately going on mass-slaughter sprees. Cailean, seeing this thing, finishes off by vowing to kill it. In spite of his previous friction with the chaplain, Cailean ends the part, saying,

"My brother…forgive me."

---~~~---

Precisely what do we get out of this part?

I think it's a little different for everyone. For me, it was a most tragic case of diarrhea.

But in all seriousness, this part left me feeling severely ill. I need to go lead a raid or something before I dry up like one of the river-pickers.
And I also need to get Aeolith's body down from the ceiling before it rots...

Busy busy, so very busy! Stay sane, my subjects!

- V.