Warp Token 2 Update

2k words

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“Horned Rat’s balls, man-thing is right! I know all of Mors’ weaknesses, ha-ha!” She hurried over to the bulwark, raising a fist at the sea. “Hurry up and catch us, stupid Mors things. Find out why-why they call Skyseeker most deadly breeder in all of Skavendom!”

-xXx-

Kretch Big-Squeak waved his curved sword through the air, shouting to be heard over his crew. Two hundred Skaven scuttled about the upper deck, lugging warpfire fuel containers, bombardier slings, explosive barrels and other volatile ordinances from hatch to hatch, their gleeful cackles rising above the beating of the sailing drums.

“Hurry-Hurry, imbeciles!” Kretch shouted, turning to bonk a passing rat on the head with his sword, even though his order hadn’t been directed to anyone in particular. “Prime the engines, load the cannon-guns, hoist the sails and get me a snack, clawcaptain never goes to fight-battle on empty stomach. Don’t you know that?”

Kretch talked like he was the clawcaptain, but that had only been true for the last two hours. Back then, he’d been just another slave, cleaning up excrement in the bowels of the ship, but that had all changed, oh yes.

The mission had come straight from the Council. He’d steal away on the Clan Skurvy ship, wait until they had located the breeder’s ship, then do away with the clawcaptain and take his place. Of course, the clawcaptain had also been paw-picked by Gnawdwell, just as Kretch was, but the foul Lord did not trust him and Kretch had pledge his tail to Mors. Plans within schemes. Kretch could not begin to comprehend how the Great Lord’s minds worked, and he was just a pawn in this particular plot.

But a very good pawn he was, oh yes. The clawcaptain hadn’t even woken up when he’d run him through in his sleep, and no other rats had gotten in his way. Granted, most of the crew were oblivious to the change in leadership, they simply worked the ship like good little slaves did, but Kretch allowed the power to get to his head.

Kretch watched the distant Imperial ship with his beady eyes, remembering his orders. “The breeder is tucked away on a man-thing ship,” Gnawdwell had said. “It is very well-armed and sturdier than Skurvy ships, but your task is not to destroy it. Force them to land by any means necessary, and Ironsnout’s vermintides will do the rest. Do this, and you shall be rewarded greatly, Kretch.”

But Kretch didn’t want to be rewarded greatly, oh no, he wanted to be rewarded greatly-er. He’d bring the breeder straight to the Lord himself, and get even greater-er rewards. After all, he had two ships and the man-thigns had one, and Kretch had never lost a battle where he had the numerical advantage.

“Clawcaptain?” a voice squeeked, Kretch turning to see one of his crew he vaguely recognised sidle up behind him.

“What is it, Skak?”

“M-My name is Skulk, clawcaptain…”

“Kretch didn’t ask for name, Kretch asked why you interrupt my critical thinking?” He bonked Skulk on the temple with his sword-hilt.

“C-Clawcaptain, our sail cloths, there’s not enough of them left-left!”

Kretch looked up. The giant canvas sheets mounted to the masts were big enough to wrap up a broodmother, or had been in times past. A combination of wear and tear from the winds, and a few accidental warp-fire discharges, had seen them torn to ribbons, gaps in the canvas so big a Skaven could walk through them without touching the sides. The little tattered strips remaining flipped pathetically in the gale.

“And?” Kretch prompted.

“And ship is losing speed,” Skulk explained. “No wind, no speed, no man-thing ship to catch.”

“Ignoramus!” Kretch chided, and bonked him once more. “Skaven has no need for silly wind, when Skaven has power of Horned Rat’s warpfire propulsion.”

Skulk’s eyes bulged out of their sockets. Every Skaven vessel was equipped with state-of-the-art boosters for when ramming maneuvers and ludicrous speeds were needed. Two cones were mounted on the rear of the vessel, and when enough warpstone was burned, jets of green flame would burst from the great nozzles, ruining the ship’s structural integrity and killing a few of the warpstone shovelers below deck, but achieving speeds that even the most violent winds couldn’t hope to match.

Kretch’s ship in particular had done three of these ‘bursts’ since setting sail, and he’d gotten a concussion each time. Any rumours that this had caused him brain damage were completely false, and he’d dealt with the naysayers personally.

“B-But, clawcaptain,” Skulk snivelled. “clanship already has twenty-nine leaks in hull. Any more-more than thirty, and water will be sailing us!”

“Then fix-repair leaks, fool-fool,” Kretch said with another whack across the rat’s face. “Tell engineer’s to prepare for Skaven-boost! Quick-Quick, man-things are getting away!”

Skulk did his namesake and skulked off to do his bidding, spreading the word as he leaped belowdeck. In a few moments, word had spread, and ever clanrat was finding hollering and whooping, finding anything they could to brace themselves with. Packs of rats fought for the sturdier places to hold, knives glinting in the air as violence erupted across the ship. Some rats took to scampering up the masts to perch on the sails, other stuffed themselves in crevices, curlgin their tails around bits of wood for balance.

Kretch wanted to make a statement, standing on top of the steering wheel with his sword bared before him. “Behold us, man-things! Kretch Big-Squeak comes for your tails! Horned Rat, give us your warp-power!”

The already groaning ship suddenly trembled as a mighty force rose from the stern. He heard the engines soar with jet-flames, a high-pitched whine accumulating with warpfire. The terrible racket rose until it stretched out of his hearing range, and then erupted with all the force of the Horned Rat’s paw.

The ship went from slugging along the waves, to taking horizontal flight, lifting above the crashing waves and leaving a great arrow of foam in its wake. Kretch felt his ears crumble as a sonic boom echoed, right before he was flung backwards from the velocity, flipping head over tails before being compressed against a slab of wood.

Gravity pulled at his extremities, as though a giant packrat was sitting on his chest, but his focus was set squarely on the horizon. The man-thing ship was already growing in size, and in only moments he’d have the breeder’s neck in his paws, oh yes.

-xXx-

Skyseeker whooped and taunted the Skaven clanship, hurling various racial slurs across the waters. Her confidence was at an all-time high, she had a company of man-things doing all the work for her, all the fish she could eat, and most of all, a breeding partner she could take whenever she wanted. There really was nothing that could stop her now.

As she turned away from the bulwark, she gave the clanship one last curious glance. Something was off, and not just because Clan Skurvy engineers didn’t know the first thing about making serviceable ships like the man-things did. The pointed nose of the clanship was no longer parallel to the ocean, it had risen into the air at an acute angle, Skyseeker able to glimpse the carpets of barnacles latched to the ship’s underbelly. The tattered sails were bending at the edges, some of the weaker canvas sheets snapping apart at the seams. Such details should be lost on her without the help of her goggles, and those were perched around her neck.

From her spot, she watched the clanship visibly grow, a strange sound causing her ears to flick. The noise was somewhat like the gush of air when a clanrat uses a warpfire-thrower to cook his victims alive, only this one was loud enough to travel across miles of ocean. No, not miles, it was less than that now, the clanship was rapidly picking up speed and closing in.

The realization caused her glans to belch with all the force of a fart, Skyseeker freaking out as the clanship bore down on them.

“Eeeeeek!” she screamed. She whirled around, spotting Von Kessel up on the deck behind and to her left. “KESSEL-MAN! LOOK-LOOK!”

The Captain regarded her as one would regard a dirty toilet, but something in her voice must have urged him to listen. He looked across the ship, and even from here, she could see his eyes double in size.

“Craven! Helmsman, full lock to starboard!”

The man-thing took the wheel into his paws, his arms doing cycles as he brought the wolfship about. Skyseeker heard a tremendous boom, and for a terrible second she thought the clanship had rammed them, but it turned out to be something else. Roderick had told her about thunderstorms before, how the air quaked in response to arcs of lightning, btu she had never experienced one. Looking up at the broiling clouds, it seemed that was about to change.

“Clear the deck!” Von Kessel roared. “I want every cannon we got prepped and ready right now!”

Chaos quickly seized the ship. Man-things hurried back and forth, hauling grapeshot and power charges to the cannon mounts, the great guns squeeking as their wheels rolled across the floorboards. Crew leaders quickly took up the Captain’s words, orders echoing up the length of the ship. On second glance, the sudden rush of activity wasn’t exactly panic-induced, it was more controlled than that. This was what the sailors had been trained to do, and right now the only one squirting fear-musk was Skyseeker.

Roderick seized her paw, guiding her back from the bulwark. “We shouldn’t linger here, lass,” he said.

“Where we going?” she asked. “Wait! We going to man the guns again?! Skaven needs to shoot powder guns, that was so fun-fun.”

“Not this time,” Roderick said. “We need to get clear of this side, those Skaven are coming right for us.”

The clanship was bearing down on them like an angry rat ogre, so Skyseeker reluctantly complied, she and Roderick rushing to get clear. They hurried across the midship, Skyseeker leaping up onto the nearby staircase for a better look at their quarry. The clanship was less than three hundred meters now, Skyseeker able to see jets of green fire gushing from the rear of the vessel. Those must be warp-engines, no wonder the Clans had caught up with the wolfship despite their head start.

The helmsman continued his hard turn, the bulk of the wolfship blocking her view, but only for a moment. The clanship burst through the waves like a battering ram, cleaving right through the water the wolfship had been sailing on. The bulk of the Skaven screamed by, the nose raised so high its bulk stretched diagonally into the sky. Skaven could see a few Skaven clinging to the bulwark, fur rippling in the wind, screams of joy carrying over the short distance. The wolfship had avoided the ram, but it wasn’t a total miss.

The clanship veered at the last moment, trying to adjust for the maneuver. The underbelly slammed into the wolfship somewhere between the midship and the forecastle, not hard enough to plow right through, as no doubt the Skaven intended, but the graze hit them hard. As the momentum of one ship translated to the other, Skyseeker was tossed off her feat, as were several nearby man-things, shards of wood the size of Roderick tossed into the air from the point of impact.

A terrible quake rumbled through the wolfship, quickly chased by the screams of the injured or dying. Most of the crew on the deck had been knocked prone, Skyseeker peering beyond them to see the great wall of the clanship looming above them. It was still raised at an angle, its front half perched on the wolfship for leverage, most of its front have caved in from the impact.

From the dark portcullises of the clanship, furry things began to emerge. Pink tails swiveled for counterbalance as dozens of Skaven poured from gaps in the hull, swords clutched in their mouths. They skittered and leaped into the air, landing in clumsy rolls as they boarded the wolfship, bringing axeheads and polearms and curved blades to bear.

They began to rip into the closest of the sailors, executing the ones who had yet to recover their bearings. Three rats took a man each, blocking him from her sight as they peppered them with stabs from their weapons. Dozens more rats joined the fray each moment, scuttling from the clanship like a veritable tide.

“To me-me, man-things!” Skyseeker shouted in her bravest voice. She drew her weeping blade and raised it aloft. “Send every rat-thing you see back to Skavenblight – except yours truly. For the God-Emperor!”

Roderick added his warcry to hers, drawing his sward from his scabbard. Usually he wielded a great two-handed weapon, but he didn’t’ have to the foresight to have it with him at this moment. Skyseeker shrieked heroically, and joined him in his charge, rushing from one side of the deck to the other. The sailors joined them, whether because they were rallied by her words, or because they realised they were being boarded, she didn’t know, but she liked to think it was the former. She was a pretty popular rat.