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The blood Skorrax licks from his lips will sustain him until his next kill. He does not wait long. Spinning, his momentum carries his chainaxe through screaming meat. Titanium teeth rend spine and throat and a skull plummets to offal-choked mud.
The Butcher's Nails bite harder. A single kill no longer causes pleasure. Neither did the previous millions. The foul machinery can no longer be pleased. It demands ever more. Skorrax's groan slips between broken teeth. But he obliges. He always does.
The next kill is uphill. The shaft of his weapon drives into a ribcage. The man - or woman? - dies as broken ribs puncture lungs and heart. Skorrax steps past, the kill already forgotten and only the next in mind. They run for - from? - him. Irrelevant. A headbutt implodes a face, a backhanded blow breaks a hundred bones. The incline is getting steeper.
Skorrax advances. He can no longer see clearly, the blood vessels in his eyes having exploded and coagulated weeks ago. Gore cakes his face, clotting in his nose and ears. Neither sight, nor smell, nor sound guides him. His rage is so pure it brings him to his victims without his senses.
A planet's worth of murder is past him and the final stronghold lies ahead. Skorrax doesn't know this, but he feels it. Each life is a blip on his consciousness, waiting to be extinguished. Perhaps it's the Butcher's Nails guiding him. Perhaps it's a force beyond reckoning. Skorrax cares not from whence the sensation comes. Only that it does.
Skorrax is beyond reason. Not even thoughts penetrate the roaring pyre of rage that consumes his soul. Death at his hands is inevitable. He is a force of nature, a herald of entropy. There is no stopping a mile high tsunami. There's no arguing with an asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere.
The going is harder. Loose rocks and patches of ice make each step treacherous. Yet Skorrax climbs higher, murdering with each footfall. Limbs are torn from sockets, then used to bludgeon the next victim. A cut bisects a commissar along his sash of office. They scream and beg and roar. Then die. They all die when Skorrax reaches them. And eventually, he reaches them all.
Higher and higher Skorrax climbs. The biting cold doesn't register. Even the pain of the Nails becomes irrelevant. There is no more pressure to continue but he does not stop. Can not stop. The rage and pain achieve fusion, creating a self-sustaining force far superior to its components. A synergy of carnage. A supernova of massacre. A black hole of demise.
His gauntleted fingers grab the edge of a plateau. It is the mountain's pinnacle, a blasted wasteland of freezing gales. Skorrax pulls himself up, screaming incoherently. The final bastion is ahead, the last flickers of life waiting to be extinguished. Running full tilt, he hefts his chainaxe and revs its chugging engine for the final push. Utter annihilation is a hair's breadth away.
But there is no bastion to storm. No fortress for the defenders' final stand. The plateau stands empty, a frozen plane where the land meets the sky.
Skorrax blinks. No gore stunts his senses. No Nail-pain lances into his brain. No fatigue wracks his muscles. There is but a single emotion that courses through him.
Rage.
Refined to utter purity, it does not burn. Not like it used to. It is a chill suffusing his very essence. An enormous icicle driven through his soul.
And with the cold comes clarity. Freedom; from the Butcher's Nails, the insatiable hunger, the never-ending torment.
Atop the world, Skorrax is finally alone. The first independent thoughts form in his bruised and battered mind after a millennia of bloodshed.
'Why?'
It is not a request or a demand, but a plea. A desperate, anguished plea.
'WHY?'
He is left without sustenance, his soul hollow and his body spent.
'Why?'
Skorrax has achieved the very pinnacle of rage. There is nothing ahead. No matter how many he would kill, he would never surpass this point. At the zenith of murder-make, the Butcher's Nails can't demand more.
Suddenly, he's not alone any more. There is a presence behind him. It had always been there. Always out of reach, out of mind.
'Behold my eternal glory!'
The speaker, a solitary figure, sits on His throne on the plateau, overlooking all creation. Every heartbeat, a billion skulls are dedicated to Him. Oceans of frozen blood spilt in His name lap at His feet. The Lord of Murder does not move, for He can not. He is indistinguishable from His throne, as each new skull piled into his lap weighs Him down.
'Join me on my throne! We shall rule together until we swallow all creation!'
Skorrax does not hesitate. He turns and runs. Not out of fear. Not out of fear of Him. But of what would come if Skorrax accepted the offer.
Reaching the edge of the plateau, Skorrax casts himself into the yawning void. As he plummets, pain, anger, fatigue all come rushing back. He welcomes them like lost lovers.
Anything was better than His solitude atop the plateau.