Skrull's voice cut through the air like a jagged blade—sharp, commanding, mad.
"Double all patrols! Deploy the packmasters with rat-rat wolves! Reinforce every outpost! Every hole, every tunnel, every stone!"
He barked orders like a warlord drunk on blood and power.
"Now, fool-fool," he growled, "I heard how the other two Skaven ran—ran like death itself gnawed at their heels!"
The sound echoed, fading. Then—quiet.
And in that silence, his tone changed.
No longer the roar of a beast.
Now, a whisper.
Soft. Fragile. Desperate.
"I make better Skaven... stronger Skaven. I crush-crush, bite-bite, claw-scratch them all. Yes-yes... I see it. I see it..."
His words felt like a prayer to madness, offered to a god that answered only in screams.
Then—I heard it. A scrape. Metal on stone. He picked something up.
I didn't have time to flinch.
Pain exploded in my side like fire given form. A white-hot lance that tore through muscle and reason.
A sound burst from my throat—wrong, broken. No human could make such a sound.
And that's when I knew.
I wasn't human anymore.
Whatever I had been… it was gone.
The agony made it clear—bone shifted beneath my skin, bending, snapping, reshaping. My body twisted itself into something other. Something new. Something monstrous.
It felt like insects beneath my flesh. Thousands. Crawling, writhing, digging.
I was paralyzed. Time itself seemed to freeze, trapping me in a single, endless moment of torment. A second stretched into eternity.
Then the knife returned.
But it wasn't cutting. No. It was sculpting. Flesh was molded like wet clay. A brush on a canvas of screaming nerves.
The pain wrapped around me—tight, suffocating. An embrace of pure torment.
My only thought, my only wish, my only hope—
Let me go back.
Back to the void. Back to the silence.
Anything was better than this.