Jumpers vs. 40k IC1: Worst. Isekai. Ever.

Garden of Nurgle: The Only Thing They Fear...
(The appropriate music for fighting Daemons is always "The Only Thing They Fear Is You" here.)
The beams of light and plasma blast through much of the diseased jungle and thick canopies in front of you, bushes, animals, zombies, daemons, the burning light searing them all away down to obsidian and ash, indeed clearing the way all around them. When the beams clear and only a field of glass in the immediate area.....but as you look into the distance you see....a seemingly infinite number of Daemons of Nurgle in the distance extending to the horizon: Plaguebearers and Nurglings forming the bulk of the force marching as a horde, a green diseased tide, with Great Unclean Ones leading them here and there, these greater daemons true numbers unknown but it said to be a total 7,777,777 in number in accordance with Nurgle's sacred number of seven, each one a gargantuan mound of diseased flesh much like their creator, each one capable of bringing disease to entire worlds and killing millions. In the sky swarms of giant flies such Bloat flies, Rot Flies, Battle Flies fly towards you, the buzzing of their wings filling the air and combining into this great, deep vibrating roar. Sludge-grubs, Cursemites, Eyestinger Swarms march toward you as well, accompanied by walking carnivorous trees with big vertical mouths with rows of teeth known as feculent gnarlmaws with fungus growing off of their branches here and there, while numerous Glitchlings cackle amid the Nurgling ranks waiting to leap upon the technology they see to make it malfunction.

But that is not all. Rising amid this infinite tide of Daemons are giant green worms with great circular maws, as long and big as skyscrapers, swarms of locusts to join in with the flies, zombie bears green with disease with their entrails hanging out acting as extra limbs, Daemon Engines such as plaguereapers taking the form of tanks with diseased fleshy growths on them, flying mechanical blight drones, plague hulks which are basically big fat nurgle daemons with cybernetic scorpion legs, various giant mechs that were once imperial knights now infested with fungal growths all over them with rust everywhere else yet somehow still functional, giant diseased crows and buzzards flying on dread flocks with entropic laser guns attached to them, giant roaches and molluscoids used as mounts or enhanced with vehicular cybernetics like missile launchers and las-cannons, what looks like walking mushrooms marching in unison, and underneath their feet a lower tide of rats scurrying under the entire host, and various other diseased, undying horrors, monstrosities and nightmares big and small each one capable of giving a hypochondriac a heart attack with the mere sight of them, each and every member of Nurgle's forces smiling in joy, thrilled to bring Nurgle's gift of decay and disease to all of you. If there are any Death Guard space marines among the endless horde of Daemons as far as any form of perception allows, you do not see them and they would be a small number compared to the daemonic forces that Nurgle has at his command and would likely be elsewhere anyways.

Beyond all of them, you see The Blighted Mansion of Misery and Mirth, the home of Nurgle in the far distance, the source of the Aeldari signal. The Mansion is slowly trying to get more distance from you. Yes you read that right: the mansion itself. Given your readings.....there are likely just as many Daemons there. Wherever you go, there will be Daemons, swarming you. This is Nurgle's realm, and he is not letting you traipse around without a fight, and will pull out all the stops.

Ensara glares at all this while another Tzeentch-crow appears before her
"Okay, tried to be nice, but: Make a deal with me, I'll help you in lots of ways, including perhaps helping you out with Nurgle here. And if you don't I'll make sure to use my influence with the Warp's timelessness to extend your stay here so that you run out your group's entire personal jumpchain time so that your entire jump here is spent in the Warp while one day or a second passes outside! I'll make sure all your efforts will be for nothing! So take the deal or you'll-"
Ensara punches the crow out of existence, destroying the messenger without even looking at it.
"Shut up Tzeentch, don't need you anymore. Frode! Make sure the time stays synced up no matter what! Tzeentch is angry that I'm not taking his deal, he will screw us all over if he gets the chance."
She then calls out Zinara, focusing the Chaos-Repelling Pattern on her Defining Soul instead of herself. she didn't need the field, she could resist such warping effects herself. She then walks forward, raising her left hand.
"And guys? Don't worry about what I summon next. Everything I summon using mana are nothing but constructs. I'll just summon more if they die."
Mana flows through her hand as utters a spell and a horde of fire elementals suddenly appear, as well as lava elementals, lightning elementals, strange paradoxical elementals called weirds made of combinations of elements, various metal golems and dragons of intricate steampunk and clock-punk like artifice, her own demons of black mana and darkness from imps to bigger devil like ones many of them mixing with red mana to carry weapons of hellfire, even demon dragons flying in the sky, as well as ice elementals, as well as mimics copying the forms of the forces beside them, a force of elementals, demons and intricate magitech artifice forming her own army of monstrosities and terrors in response to Nurgle's fetid horde. She raises the Devil-Devouring Blade to her own army with a grin
"C'mon! You didn't think the fun would end because of a couple blasts did you!? Time for some Daemon slaying! Charge my army! Show them why I'm Esnara, Infernal Exalted, Chosen of the Yozis!"
Her forces and Nurgles then charge at each other, clashing in a chaotic melee. Ensara's forces weren't as big as Nurgle's, but they would help. Ensara for her part is wielding the Devil-Devouring Blade for its exact intended purpose: It chomps through Daemon after daemon, devouring them whole sometimes multiple tongues lashing out from the blade to stick to daemons like a frogs tongue then drag them into it, or using her blades tongue to rip a rusted blade from one daemon to ram it into the skull of another, other times teeth grow on the blades edge and rotate like a chainsaw while her strikes become like a whirlwind of swordmanship as she runs around manic slaughtering them, other times she unleashes demons from the Devil-Devouring Blade, various past demonic victims of the blade flying out in chains to the blade to attack their nurglite foes clawing them or grabbing them to drag them back in to join them as one of the blade's victims and recruits. The blade itself seemed immune to disease no matter how nurgle daemons it devours. Sometimes her fist lights with green flame and punches that burn the daemon to cinders mix in with her crimson-whirlwind slashes sword-swings.

Around her, her army battles Nurgles forces, fire elementals burning everything they touch, lightning elementals speeding around shocking every daemon they run through, dragons both mechanical and demonic blast fire through the swarms of giant flies, weirds of ice-fire, electro-bubbles and watersand do strange things like burn and freeze at the same time or drown them in wet yet dry matter, imps attacking bigger nurgle daemons in packs and taking them down like a gang beating down a lone man, mechanical animals and golems fighting daemon engines, while black mana demons across the multiverse of Magic the Gathering fought Nurgle demons ruthlessly and without emrcy. It was a battle in a kind of hell, for war is hell, and both sides at monsters, but at Ensara's side were YOUR monsters.

But despite all this, there will still be demons attacking you, unleashing plagues, blasts of magical entropy, attacking with rust-swords inflicting poisons and disease, firing maggot-bullets that will try to burrow and eat you, and other such horrors. From the forces gathered and attacking you in such numbers it seems....they fear you quite a lot indeed.

(Do not feel worried or limited to describing only one action to describing how you deal with all this however you want to. This is very much intended for you to go ham here and show off what you can do to these things or what your good at, because this universe isn't running out of them without some serious fixing, and they so very much deserve whatever they get)

Frode huffed an irritated breath, something that he probably shouldn't have been able to do in robot form.

"So, it's going to be one of those days." he sighed.

Releasing a drone to maintain the time field for the others, he stepped a good distance away and relaxed his own timefield, skipping across the temporal currents until he found one that was moving much faster than 'real' time. And then he overclocked his mind.

The sounds of battle droned deeper and flicked into silence as he sped up, relative motion freezing.

With that, he set to work.

First, the framework of portals appeared. Then metal started streaming out of them as they flickered to life, glowing softly in the weird half-light of Nurgle's Garden. Shapes began to form, some humanoid, some not, ranging from slightly bulkier than average quadrotor drones less than a metre across, to a quartet of behemoths standing nearly a kilometre and a half tall, two humanoid, two animalistic, a tyrannosaur and a scorpion. Two squads of tanks appeared as well... if the term 'tank' can really be applied to the aircraft-carrier sized Bolo Mk. XXXIII Planetary Siege Unit. Each one boasted no less than three of the absurd plasma cannon that Frode was wielding, with a host of lesser weapons.

In the air, five battalions of Dalek-shells formed, with an equivalent number of the spherical Mechanoid robots. Squadrons of Seekers and Sweeps formed, energon weapons beginning to glow evilly even as they were coming into being. A quartet of battle TARDISes formed also, their morphic shells beginning to sprout weaponry as their time missiles poked out of their launch silos. Nimrod Sentinels hovered, no less menacing for being pale pink, and their lesser brethren, the standard Sentinels, crashed to the ground in the standard superhero pose before straightening to their full five stories tall. And circling far above, a swarm of silvery flying-saucer drones the size of dinner plates swarmed so thickly that they were impossible to count, blurring away at absurd speeds after a moment.

From the outside, it would have appeared that Frode walked half a kilometre or so away (insofar as such a statement has any meaning in the Warp), blurred, and was suddenly standing at the head of tens of thousands of robots, from smaller than a human, to the size of a small mountain.

Re-synching the timelines, the mechanical army stepped forwards as one, the ground rumbling like an earthquake, and then, bizarrely, began to sing as they marched.

Moving with deceptive speed, the ground forces closed to firing range barely behind the aerial forces. And then space between demon and robot turned white as beams of every conceivable colour blended together, lashing across the daemon forces and evaporating the daemons five ranks deep over an enormous swathe of their front line. The massive robots followed their withering barrage barely a heartbeat later, engaging the larger daemons and mostly ignoring the human-scale ones, except to shake what was left of them off their 'boots' when traction started to become an issue.

Glitchlings, jumping gleefully into this onrushing tide of technology, found themselves abruptly isolated and destroyed as they discovered to their horror that every single chromed body was still firmly in the control of Frode's powers, and would do nothing Frode didn't want them to.

The battle in Frode's area quickly became a melee, with exotic weaponry blazing out of it every so often as a daemon vaporized rather than resisting the beam as long as expected, or a missile rose out to plunge back in with a roar that left brief openings half a kilometre across in the endless tide of daemons. Brief vignettes became visible as the writhing mass of pestilence and chrome heaved and boiled. Here a Great Unclean One is being grabbed by the arms by a squadron of the mighty Sentinels and torn unceremoniously in half. A strafing run by Seekers blasts open another brief window, and an Imperial Knight of Nurgle suddenly finds itself no longer in control of its own limbs as Frode's powers seize it, power sword crashing through a horde of Nurglings. Hundreds of Dalek-shells synchronize fire, lethal beams walking across the battlefield, and through the storm of energy can briefly be seen Trypticon's building-sized claws crashing down on the hapless daemons, crushing them by the hundreds.

And as the last of his gleaming ranks swirled past him, Frode rose into the sky with an oddly amused cant to his posture. Hovering in clear sight of his allies, he slashed his arm downwards, and the sky cracked. In a huge sphere with the Blighted Mansion of Misery and Mirth as the centre, the small silvery saucer-drones linked fields in a monstrous Blank field, a hollow sphere with 'walls' one hundred metres thick cutting off the giant chunk of Nurgle's domain from the greater warp completely.

Frode laughed and picked up the song again, stooping like a hunting falcon into the battle.

Battle

Unlike Frode and Ensara, Edward has no armies. He's just one man, albeit one clad in formidable plate of scale and bone, wielding a potent artefact, and zipping around far more nimbly than someone should. He's an assassin, and uses this to his advantage. Wherever a Great Unclean One or Daemon Prince is directing things with more intelligence than just the unending wave attacks Nurgle favours, that is somewhere that Edward will eventually find, using Blink and Whirlwind Sprint to bypass massed infantry and combat where he can. If it truly blocks his path and there's no way around, then a combination of Windblast, Unrelenting Force and his powerful pistol clear the way. When he's close, he'll blink onto the squishy back of the general, pulling out the dagger at his waist and stabbing. Sometimes, they die from a single injury, Mehrunes Dagon's daedric artefact eager to demonstrate its power on the followers of the plague god. Sometimes, the whimsical energy of the blade fails to work as planned, and Edward instead relies upon the sturdiness of his archaic armour and his new duelling cane of blessed orichalcum to batter the daemon into submission.

Of course, all this is ultimately a distraction. Edward is aware that they are only here to rescue Isha, but unlike Alex, Ensara, and Frode, he has no real way of finding her at such a short distance. He's not burning tin, since the foul stench all around is eye-watering enough without strengthening his sense of smell (and Allomantic tin does not allow one to pick and choose which sense they boost). Although if he caught a whiff of something flowery and nice, he might begin to use that magic, and attempt to follow it. As the only thing in this benighted hell-realm of pestilence and decay that could possibly smell is Isha herself.

Alexandra is hesitant to reach outside the control zone with her telepathy. She has a perk that protects her from being changed against her will, but Chaos doesn't have to change her to mess her up...

This is bad. She's used to blasting but anything big is going to take out her allies and their minions and... Were those sentinels?

Okay, a long talk with Frode was on the docket for later...

There were too many to Melee... Damn, it all.

"Well, gonna have to think of a way to explain why I'm a thirteen-year-old girl to some people..."

Alex breaks away the main beam and starts conjuring miniature stars using the power cosmic which she sends flying toward as many enemies as she can. She fully expects to get engulfed and swarmed. She feels that the group overestimated themselves...

But if she's going to die she's going out fighting.

((Not actually expecting to die, just in character))

Garden of Nurgle:
You are pushing and blasting through his forces, you don't see any Daemon Princes, at least not yet. Fighting through Nurgle's forces feels slow and grindy, his forces moving methodically but with resilience. At times you come across Daemons that had fought one of Ensara's summons that weren't quite dead and needed finishing off, their initial charge gives way to a march, a long term strategy of trying to wear you down, for that is what Nurgle always tries to do: wear you down until you collapse.

Alex finds them burning in the stars explosions before they even get to her, their daemoni-biological forms burning up into ash. seeing this the next daemons keep their distance from her and try to blast her with blasts of pure dark-green entropy from their mouths- these weren't diseases but pure rot and decay itself being fired at her.

Frode's robots and Ensara's summons provide good distractions so he can keep sneaking about and provide good openings, some of her mimics even take his form and do similar things to confuse the armies even further, especially when his Razor fails. Though some die to the larger demons as they attack them thinking they were Edward, dispersing into the mana they were made from.

The giant dome stops the Mansion from moving. In response, Nurgle's voice will rumble once again:
"Do you not see how futile it all is? I am Nurgle, known as the Lord of All. For all things decay, all things die and thus eventually come to my waiting arms in time. Behold:
An image of a random Imperial world appears in the sky, like a window looking upon them
"Here my cultists will soon unleash a plague upon these humans, giving them my gifts. While you fight to get to me, this world as well as many others will be given my joys, for I have cults throughout the Imperium willing to serve. I have no need to lie about such machinations, what use is lying about the inevitable? Is it really worth coming for me when people are in danger? Unlike an Inquisitor your hearts are pure and kind. How can you possibly justify letting them die just to come to kill me? hurhurhurhurhur......
He doesn't wait or care for your reply, as the terrain gradually shifts as you go forward.

Its not fast, but rather a creeping realization that....the ground is getting softer and mushier and more like muck and mud but not as clean, becoming more and more wet and moist, more foul of puddles of something sickly green, which get larger and larger until you are fighting towards this ocean of.......well, "water" would be way too strong of a word for whatever this is, as would be "goo", "sewage" is looking too complimentary right now. Whatever befouled, tainted, impure, disease-ridden, germamaniacal, admixture of unspeakable liquids
"Behold....my Ocean of Rot. Watch, as all those touch it, wither away in its waters.....watch them....all dissolve and scatter away like dust.....to be reborn...."
Some of Ensara's minions fall in into the Ocean of Rot, and just.....rot away, breaking apart and putrefying as they touch it. Upon the sludgy shores of the Ocean of Rot, its clear that swimming wasn't going to be an option. Worse still.....since Frode is already flying? He sees coming next was this.....big endless fog of various toxic gasses and airborne diseases slowly creeping across the ocean next. Nurgle was planning on changing the entire environment to be unlivable above and below. The daemons themselves seem to not mind the gas they were breathing in or the foul waters they waded through. The entire realm was a slow and creeping death.

Ensara in response will say
"Inner World Unleashed!"
She empowers her Chaos-Repelling Pattern, enhancing it to not just hold off warping powers, but morph the world to resemble her own inner world: Within her circle, the ground suddenly turns to silver, waters turns into multicolored paints, and the sky turns into a blank white canvas with strange multicolored clouds, at times a Black Star hanging in the sky that Zinara uses to fire black beams of shadow from at the Daemons around them cause explosions of black mana annhiliation and death energy or killing them with a black bow, Ensara's Defining Soul not content to simply sit back and watch. As Ensara walks over, the world changes and overrides Nurgle's realm, forming a silver mirror bridge upon rainbow-paint waters wherever she walks within the circle but ceasing to exist when outside, Ensara's anima banner flaring a fiery green aura of energy around her with hints of blood red wind within. Daemons who come charge towards her not only find death at her hands but by her command the very environment of her small piece of inner world to morph and change to kill them: silver spikes suddenly shooting out to impale them, pipes forming to suddenly shoot superheated steam to burn them, clouds raining down multicolored droplets of fire and lightning upon them, things like that, as if she were a goddess of her own little realm.

Then she will get an idea, putting the Devil-Devouring Blade back into Elsewhere, she takes out...the Forgotten Blade.
"Lets see if this works."
She raises the Forgotten Blade, a ??? material daiklave. You will remember it being orichalcum after the fact, but the true nature of the Forgotten Blade tends to slide off and be forgotten to anyone who isn't its attuned wielder, or even forgotten entirely at least in Creation where she got this blade from. A Jumper probably has immunities to this effect, but the exact make of the Forgotten Blade is nothing important. Whats important is that its a blade that can cut not just physical things but also cut memories from people's minds, a truly curious thing. She initially had the idea to cut the memory of Edward Sinton from Nurgle's armies so he could sneak past them better but the more she thinks about it....isn't the Warp a realm of the mind and is it not thus, a realm of memory?

Thus, are not all these Daemons, made of memories of the acts that mortals have done cause them to form?

She quickly slices the Forgotten Blade through a passing plaguebearer, and they disappear, not in viridian radioactive flames like others but- vanishes, and the Daemons around it blink and don't remember any Daemon dying. Then she cuts through another one and the other three forget that death and that Daemon's existence to. Two more slashes and only one plaguebearer of the five remain they go
"Wait I forget, did I attack in a group or not? because I'm feel like some-"
She stabs right through him and he is gone as well.
"Interesting, Normally I have to do a specific strike to make a people forget a foe's existence as they die. But here....all is memory, of a sort. Useful to know for later, perhaps."
But for now....to business. She lifts up the blade, making sure none of her fellow jumpers are in the path of this blast and says
"Memory-Excising Wave!"
And brings it down, firing a green fire energy wave from the blade that burns away any memory or any ability to remember Edward Sinton from their minds, it doesn't hit every Daemon but its a lot of them in the direct of the Mansion: they find themselves confused as to Sinton is if they even remember seeing him if they can and can't seem to remember if he is an enemy or not, or if he is human, appearing as this faceless unmemorable being to their minds. That should help a bit.

Frode stared at the oncoming maelstrom, then grunted.

The groundbound mechanical troops shifted a little, and their various wheels and treads vanished as they rose slightly into the air on repulsors and antigravity. Frode's initial portals reappeared, and more material streamed out, at first appearing crystaline and glowing green, before shifting to a more metallic appearance as it coated the various non-cybertronian constructs. Cybertonium, the living metal that birthed the race of Transformers, could go for more than ten million years without the slightest sign of wear. While Nurgle could undoubtedly get through it eventually, it would slow him down some, at least in theory.

With that taken care of, Frode floated a bit clear of the melee and sat cross legged in midair, clearly thinking, though his almost entirely covered robotic face gave no real hints as to what those thoughts might be. Then he muttered "Thank goodness Ororo was bored that one day and let me study her powers some..." and gestured, two large-ish grenades leaping out and away to crash open near the edge of the oncoming death-fog, two huge vortexes forming in the sky as a pair of weirdly-stationary tornadoes spring to life, diverting the gases away from the group temporarily.

"Those won't last for long." Frode announced through the communicators he had built. Hopefully Alexandra could pick up his transmission as well, somehow. "I have at least one more trick I can try as well, before we go in, but if anyone has a way to stabilize the air after a lot of it goes away, it would help."

Then he unfolded himself from his sitting position to strike a dramatic pose in midair, one fist clenched, the other arm outstretched towards Nurgle's Mansion as every metallic element in the onrushing mist of disease and contagion and thickening ocean swirled out, viruses denaturing as vital elements vanished, poisons abruptly going inert as they were radically altered on an atomic level, and the entire mess going oddly sludgy for a moment as Frode's powers worked.

The metals thus stolen swirled like ink in water for a moment before creating a double line of silvery spheres from the edge of where the fog had been, to The Blighted Mansion itself. Nurgle would begin reasserting his control of his domain in minutes or even seconds, but for the moment, Frode's Omega-level powers held the ominously-hovering spheres locked in place like they had been nailed to the sky.

"The best idea I have for clearing a path to the Mansion through all this crap is going to be very, very loud, and might even destabilize the Warp. I'm hoping somebody else' abilities can do a more subtle job of it?" Frode called over comms. "A tiny effort of will, and every one of those spheres is converted directly to energy. I don't know if you've heard of total conversion bombs before, but suffice to say that the end result is... well, let's just say that this army wouldn't be a problem anymore. It's not something I like to do, as it leaves me with a miserable headache, and it solves problems... well, the problems might be gone, but so is everything else in the general vicinity, including the general vicinity. Cracking the planet you're standing on might be a novel way to solve problems, but it typically introduces a whole lot of new problems."

Alex can't counter that. Pure death and entropy...

If they're aiming at her all she an do is eat as much of it as she can to give the others time.

She puts everything she has into the Green Flame of Life, forming layers upon layers of dense shells of armor and walls and shields around herself but... Even enlightened to the ways of Green Light, her Willpower isn't infinite. And the fat, disgusting bastard had a point: Even the Amazons died.

It wouldn't hold forever, each hit eats away at it and she can only reinforce it so much as it does.

Several thoughts fill her mind as she waits for the inevitable.

Fear, for one. She knows what happens when you die on the chain, but that doesn't stop the primitive lizard brain from throwing the fight or flight switch, and... she doesn't know what would happen to her if she gets unmade. Unmade isn't the same as death. Honestly, it's a bit annoying. In this situation, all it's doing is stressing her out.

Compassion for all the people suffering and who are going to suffer, becuase this corpulent pus bag and his siblings dare to exist and becuase she isn't strong enough to kill them.

Love for her companions. The two children who... Might be the creation of her original self. Who she's cared for for the last forty years. What will become of them, if the Unmaking sticks, she wonders.

From love comes Hope. Hope that this will be worth it. Hope that if the worst comes to pass for her that her companions will be taken care of.

Also, a considerable amount of Rage. Rage at this situation. Rage at Nurgle for causing so much pain and suffering in his twisted delusions, rage that there's not more to do... Years of bottled Rage at the Old Gods who abandoned the people of Earth to the plague of hungry corpse men directed at a convenient scapegoat as well.

But... More than anything right now? Even more than the immense will she's putting into resisting the demon hoards attacks? She Wants to live. This isn't fair. This isn't right, she doesn't want this.

Her Will, her Fear, her Compassion, her Love, her Hope, her Rage... All of it is feeding into that single Desire.

The entire emotional spectrum united within her in this instant... And then her mounting stress peaks, something breaks, her powers adapt, something changes down in her very cells... And suddenly she starts drawing on a much deeper well of power.

In the fiery constructs about her flecks of other colors appear mixed into the green while Chaos Magic adapts and changes into something more pure and whole. Soon blazing bands of flames in all the colors of the rainbow give way to an extreme kaleidoscopic band and from there the colors bleed together into the purest White.

Suddenly a massive pillar of the blinding white flame erupts into the sky and clears, revealing Alexandra.

The unstable molecules in her costume have reacted to the change in her power: The armored outfit is now as white as snow, and the Green Flame over her breast has been replaced by a symbol, a triangle under a dome, with seven rays branching off of it, all contained in a circle.

I am Fire! And Life Eternal! Now and Forever, I am... The White Lantern![/COLOR]

No longer fearing that the chaotic nature of magic will lead to its subversion, Alexandra rains down a veritable Hell of constructs made of White Light and Magic Flame. Blade's and Bludeogns of pure Life. True Life, Pure Life. Life Eternal that burns through plague and corruption. That Strikes fear in the hearts of agents of pointless death, that burns away evil with rage at its injustice. That excites unjust hate with compassion.

Garden of Nurgle:
Alex:
The demons of Nurgle do not fear death. They disturbingly, are always happy because they accept its inevitability. As you destroy and burn with the light of Life, most don't realize what your fighting with. They are beings created by Nurgle, only to obey and do what is told even if Nurgle puts on pretensions of being a family of sorts, and die with smiles on their faces. A few, a rare few have inklings that your....something other than death. That look upon you long enough to realize that your something else. something terrifying to them. That perhaps deep down, they are formed from the feelings of cultists who feared life, who looked at all its hardships and decided to give up. To give up maintaining themselves- their hygiene only a small part of it. That to give in to Nurgle, was to let themselves fall apart, to not care what bad things happened to them, to let any relationship they had before him fall away, to let themselves squander their potential as a person, and so on, looking upon with an inkling of fear because deep down they know that Life is more than waiting for death, that its what you make of it, not just what you allow it to be. They feel some fear because the people they once were could've been more, could've been better....and now they never will be. But this doesn't save them from your attacks, from your purifying light.

Ensara:
She will look at the cloud in the distance while continuing to fight.
"Well, there are few things I could probably do..."
She wreathes her hands in green flame to burn away any diseases as plunges her hand in a demon's chest and tears out their diseased heart
"One, I could try turning a large portion of the cloud into something harmless using Blue mana morph magic or pause/freeze it somehow with chronomancy or cryomancy, but I'll have to charge my mana from my lands and thus takes a little bit of time, its a big spell and I've been spending mana to summon my army."
Next she pauses a demon in time and picks them to begin smashing aside other demons with the paused demon until she weaves some red mana into them and throws into more demons, that one demon detonates in that crowd
"Two, we could just stay in my bubble of inner world, it should override and reshape any environmental thing that comes by including the gas. gives us a bit of a limited zone to walk in though."
Third, she exchanges the Forgotten Blade for the Blade of a Thousand Cuts a golden katana with various little lines carved into it as if carved by the wind itself, and with a flick of the blade in their general direction, a countless paper cuts of the wind slice and dice a bunch of plaguebearers to pieces.
"Three, I can try doing some combination of Stunting and Zen-level mastery of Anima martial arts to do something so completely impossible, over the top, fancy audacious and absurd that is so awesome and mythical that the laws of physics just bends or breaks the rules to allow it to happen this one time to solve this because I'm an Exalted, super enlightened and like just that awesome. This might especially work in a realm of thought where physics are a suggestion to non-existent anyways"
As they attack back with various maggot-missiles, disease blasts, entropic lasers, with another swing of the Blade of a Thousand Cuts a circular barrier of red whirlwind surrounds her, reducing all the projectiles coming at her to dust with its endless cuts.
"Four, some of us go straight to the mansion and some of us just sneak around to get there and rescue Isha while the others run a distraction."
She exchanges blades again, to Golden Moon a daikalve with an Orichalcum handle but a moonsilver blade, as she wields the blade, zombie sharks jump out of the putrid waters and the blade morphs into a bunch of sharpened tentacles that pierce the sharks to kill them, then morphs into a silver crab claw to snip a pleaguebearer in half, twisting and reshaping itself into various animal parts to kill the demons around her she swings it.
"Five..... well any options beyond that look increasingly bad. I'm a necromancer and could just control the plague-fog directly but I'm not sure how well that would work on Nurgle magic and daemons. I have ways of using pure force to clear it myself, but not I'm sure of how destructive they are. anything involving Exalted Sorcery, crafting or mana-based artifice would take too long to do in the middle of combat. I have mental magic thats also blue mana but I'm not sure how it works in a realm of thought itself."
She casually blasts some more nurgle daemons with fire from her hand.
"So....we have options."

Edward

"If we need sneaky I'm very good at sneaky. I don't have an army, I'm doing my best, and... I would feel more useful that way." Despite his words, Edward's still Blinking around, scaling a corrupted Knight and using Whirlwind Sprint from its vast pauldron. His target is a Great Unclean One, and Edward's silent as he plummets towards the ground- and the corpulent, decaying form of his target. The daemon doesn't look up, and so Edward manages to catch it by surprise, Mehrunes' Razor entering its ear and spilling pus and maggots from the aperture as Edward straightens up and leaps from the toppling bulk. Dagger away and new cane out, Edward lands amongst a gaggle of plaguebearers, ducking low and sweeping around with the cane to knock them over, jabbing one in the eye with its end before they get up again, and then blinking away, lowering his pistol and firing at the confused daemons before they can figure out where he's gone.

Frode shuddered a little. The whole 'fire and life etc.' bit was kind of creepy when Jean was joking, hearing it seriously just makes it worse somehow. Still, it seems to be working well enough, can't fault it for that.

Then inspiration struck, and he glanced back and up at the four largest 'bots in his forces. The mouth of the tyrannosaur-shaped one, and the main gun of the larger of the two humanoid bots, started to writhe in a disturbingly organic fashion before settling into a new conformation. The two rows of spheres shifted in a similar fashion, then drifted a little further apart, to the very edge of where the plague mists were starting to re-form, and the city-titans followed suit, lining themselves up precisely, before, from open maw and raised cannon, fifty-metre-thick lightning roared out, linking the silvery balls together like an impossible, glowing chain as smaller forks spat out into the fog, charging it.

The two titans maintained fire, and the smaller forks thickened, occasionally crashing to the ground through some luckless daemon, as the plague cloud began to separate as the two equal and identical charges being pumped into it forced it apart, leaving a clear path to Nurgle's mansion.

With that accomplished, Frode turned his attention to Edward's comm device, which buzzed very faintly in response. Then Frode spoke through it, directed solely to Edward's channel this time. "I've boosted the power and density on the nanites in this thing and linked it to a subdimension for mass; they should both be more effective now and be able to create a breathable atmosphere for you if Nurgle decides he wants to be cleverer than he's shown himself to be so far. It's also got a sensor suite built into it now- quite powerful, but limited to a couple hundred kilometres or so, able to see quite a ways up and down in the electromagnetic spectrum, gravity waves and the like, and also psionics. It's got a telepathic user interface, all you have to do is concentrate on what you want to 'see', and it will show you everything it can sense in a way your brain can parse."

On a more general channel, he commented "The sneaky approach sounds good- from what I can see, we can slow our advance against this pile of imbeciles and still seem like we're putting up a credible fight, which would help sell the distraction."

Out loud, he called "Why Nurgle, you speak as though you... fear death?", in a falsely shocked tone, followed by mocking laughter.

And all the while, the Hellbore cannon orbited him slowly, spewing death in white-hot arcs that didn't even leave wisps of greasy smoke where the daemons had been.

Nurgle:
He does not have the expected reaction from your taunt. He is Nurgle, God of Decay. He is a very patient and stoic individual compared to other Chaos Gods. He is not known for being impulsive or having a temper.
"....Son. My archenemy is Tzeentch. The Master of Deception, Illusion and the Architect of Fate and Change, who I've warred with for countless eons. Your going to do have to do a LOT better than that to fool me- one doesn't fight him this long without knowing every trick in the book and how to stay and think ahead. You just tried to taunt me right now. I'm not angry that you tried, just disappointed. But why provoke me aren't you already trying to come and kill me anyways given your power, why try to get my attention? Unless.....my death isn't what your after. But what would four strange clean beings like you want from this....realm...."
There is a moment of realization, but it is not a hard one to make; its not as if his enemies come here for anything else.
"....Aaaaaaaah.....you seek to take away my beloved Isha. She is already safe in her cage, right next to me. I make her a soup of diseases every day from my Cauldron and feed her the meal so that she enjoy my love. You seek to ruin such a perfect relationship? What? Come now, shush Isha, no need to speak up, I'm busy speaking for you and you what I always say, Wives are for kissing not talking! Hehehehahahahaha.....I usually like taking things slow and steady but if your after my love.....I can pick up the pace. No need to take chances after all."
He doesn't seem angry at all by what you said, just more focused and alert now. A few Great Unclean ones suddenly disappear from the horde of infinite demons attacking you, called away to help guard her cage, just in case he needs an extra pair of eyes to watch it. Nurgle will now launch three attacks at all of the Jumpers.

The First Attack consists of the plague-cloud suddenly speeding in on a fell gale-force wind, like a dust storm it blows through, covering the entire battlefield and obscuring normal sight. The plague cloud contains countless diseases and contagions attacking you trying to infect you: every epidemic and pandemic, every virus and bacteria known to humanity and some that existed before them, flanked by countless lesser diseases trying to overwhelm your immune system's defenses to allow the greater ones to kill you, every mundane biological malady that has ever existed maybe ever will coming for you at once- but those aren't even the most dangerous: the Destroyer Plague that consist of plague flies trying to burrow into your every orifice of your body to lay their eggs and burst from you as more plague flies, Bonewrack a disease that tries to make your own bones rip you apart and suffocate you, Doubtworm which consists of worms calling out "The Emperor Isn't Real" through which a memetic mind virus tries to infect you and turn you into a zombie then another big worm, the Fydae Strain which rots everything that isn't a psyker and is sapient, the Obliterator virus which given enough time will start making you absorb and fuse with your own weapons and armor and turn you insane from becoming a fleshmetal monstrosity, Walking Pox spread by zombies moaning and turns you into a zombie, and Nurgle's Rot which just rot you away and when you die a plaguebearer is born from your corpse, and Witch-curse which supercharges a psyker so much they explode, killing everyone nearby. Some diseases try to infect or eat machines with rust, some of them having other dire supernatural effects like magically inducing cancers all over ones body, or replicating the effects of nuclear radiation explore in cell form, fungal spores that try to get inside your body and puppet you, morph plagues that try to turn you into diseased trees or undead bears or more horrific things, diseases that induce hallucinations of your family waiting to hug you with their arms outstretched, diseases that are pure despair to drive you to falling to your knees and do nothing at all, diseases of fear and worry trying to distract and make you focus on other things while the battle rages around you, horrors upon horrors of contagions swarming and surrounding you from all sides.

The Second attack, consists of the Ocean of Rot suddenly rising up in a tidal wave, a great wave of acid, rot and poison extending from horizon to horizon. Not that you'll see it without clearing away the plague-fog however. It will sweep through under the cover the fog provides, its touching rotting away anything it touches much faster than any disease, many of Ensara's army being dispersed or swept away by the flood of filth and foul liquids through the force of the muck rushing at them and rusting or rotting away as it washes over, like a inevitable charging bull as it floods the battlefield. The Ocean of Rot, leaving no stable ground or safe place in his realm to stand.

The third attack when the tidal wave of rot settles, consists of Nurgle ordering his army in the sky:
"All of you that can: Entropy blasts, all at once, kill every single one of them.... Keep it up until only corpses remain.... I want their souls scattered and destroyed to the winds of the Immaterium."
The Nurgle horde unleashes a hail of green-black entropic blasts at the Jumpers, much like a storm of lasers and artillery fire at the Imperial Guard are known for but with pure entropic decay, in blasts large and small as a constant rain of death and destruction. They will not stop for any reason, not until they are absolutely sure your dead. Meanwhile he will start using similar entropic decay magic on the dome around his mansion to try and rust and wear it down, how long it takes it do so depending on how well its built.

Its clear, that Nurgle making a serious effort to kill you Immediately now that he knows why your here and can stop scouting you out with bait. He is not messing around: trying to destroy you from a distance, with overwhelming force with as many things as possible. He didn't last this long against the other three Chaos Gods and the Imperium by taking risks, being honorable or being stupid. Nurgle is a god of stagnancy, of things NOT changing and that breeds a cautious, careful mind wanting to eliminate threats early before they get any bigger, to make sure things stay the same, stay on their cycle- it takes a certain kind of intelligent detailed mind to keep everything going around in the twisted yet stable circle he desires. He is not just trying to quash you because your after his kidnapped abuse victim-though that is undeniably a large part of it- he's doing it because your a threat to the status quo, a threat that needs crushing, and that requires as much force as possible to stamp you all out. To snuff out the light of any hope in this universe by drowning it in an ocean of despair.

Ensara:
She in response to all this will call out
"I see the fog coming fast! My Inner World Unleashed will provide cover, anyone who wants is free to join and be protected!"
Indeed, the Inner World bubble will protect her from two out of the three attacks as both are environmental warpings through magic and thus when they pass through are warped back to fit her personal real as clean air and colorful paint-water, making a bubble of order in an ocean of chaotic filth around her, as she reshapes the whole ground of the bubble to be a silver island amidst the Ocean of Rot. Its the third attack that requires something different. As entropic blasts rain down at her her viridian anima flares as she begins Perfectly Dodging all the blasts, becoming a red wind apparition that either avoids them or the blasts pass right through with no effect, her Exalted alacrity evading even the most dangerous and deadly of attacks except for a big beam of entropic energy fired from a giant worm surging down upon her. In response to that she yells
"Prismatic Arrangement of Creation Style: Spell-Shattering Palm!"
And with specific well-practiced movements, delivers a powerful open palm strike, shattering the big beam of entropy and dispersing it into nothing.
"Well this is a right mess now ain't it? But I do love me a challenge! Lessee.....ocean of rot all around me, endless plague fog cloud above that, countless entropy blasts raining down on me....what do do...."
She thinks: Frode probably doesn't want to set off any bombs even against this attack. So.....she needed to come up with a different way. Something that allows for a path forward. She switches out her current blade for the Sword of Might, also known as the Earth-Shaking Blade, her biggest and yet most simple daiklave with depictions of Isidiros, the Black Boar that Twists the Sky on it,. It didn't do anything fancy or weird like the other ones she had, relatively speaking. It was all power- and sometimes thats exactly what you need, if you can shape it right rather than just blowing up big bombs. She lifts it above her head and yells
"Parting-The-Sea Strike!!!"
And brings it down in a single powerful overhead chop. This momentous chop fires off incredible force from it, an invisible space-warping blast expanding outwards vertically for miles that splits the Ocean of Rot in half, parting the sea into two foul halves and making Nurgle's Mansion of Misery visible again and making a clear path again. Despite the Rot-Ocean's flow, it seems.....unable to flow back into fill the waterfall-canyon gap that Ensara has opened up. As if this blow was a sudden wound in the Garden of Nurgle that will not heal, the sheer power and force alone seemingly enough to change it forever- much like how Isidiros once left a hoofprint climbing an endless mountain that still itself climbs up the mountain to this day even after he decided to go do something else. As demons started jumping out of the two sides of the ocean to fill the ground in the rot-canyon, she dismisses the Sword of Might for the Devil-Devouring Blade as she engages the demons coming at her. It was best not to swing the former blade carelessly- who knows what destruction would be wrought from a single duel!

(OOC: if this too much, let me know)

Aloud, Frode commented "Less taunting, more curiousity at the apparent hypocrisy; if death is such a gift, why do you resist your own with such vigour?"

Via the comms, he buzzed Edward. "Those fat daemons popping out gave me a teleport trace." as he spoke, Edward's comm device vibrated slightly as a thicker mist of nanobots poured out, forming a small portal, barely large enough for Edward to dive through headfirst "This portal will get you inside the palace; just be careful. I've pushed it as far away from them as I dare, but it will still drop you very close to wherever those great fat things went."

Seeing the renewed attack, he huffed another irritated breath. Calculations whirled, and the double line of shining orbs split apart, then the orbs themselves started splitting apart into smaller units, surfaces wriggling in an odd fashion. Moving with blurred speed, they arranged themselves into a vast grid pattern, the same height and length as the tidal wave of skunge.

Frode waited a moment, commenting out loud "Tell me, Nurgle, have you ever heard the phrase 'at-fault divorce'?" And then the spheres detonated with an oddly flat "whack" sound, the forcefields that had been built into them shaping the explosion to go entirely one direction.

The wave vanished in a cloud of spray and steam as nearly five gigatons of energy met it going the opposite direction, any daemons between explosion and wave simply vanishing as they either vaporised or were smashed by the awesome overpressure. Winds that could scour steel howled down the new canyon Ensara had created, diverted skyward at the near end by an angled forcefield, and the death-fog was torn to patchy shreds, although not fully dissipated.

While all this was happening, Frode's forces were returning fire on the daemons, and he sacrificed a few outriders to the entropic barrage. Huh. Something like 10,000 years of aging in a single blast, at least in the larger ones. Impressive, but you'd need at least a thousand hits to overcome the cybertonium shells on my mechs, even if I weren't constantly repairing them. Buuuut...

He reached out into the mutable time of the warp, seeking with esoteric senses until he found what he was looking for, a stream of reversed time. Teasing it out of the larger Warp and pulling it towards him, he guided the flow between the two opposing forces and intensified it, and suddenly the entropic blasts were working backwards, healing and repairing where they struck.

Of the various diseases, the biological ones could be utterly ignored by Frode and his forces. The rust diseases could find no purchase on the cybertonium hides of the various mechs, and the mind-altering diseases were thwarted by a combination of perks and powers. The puppeteer spores were blocked or annihilated by Frode's shields, and any attempts they made to puppet his mecha were summarily ignored as Frode's own powers overruled anything they could do to manipulate the metallic soldiers, right up until the 'bots morphed decontaminators into existence and destroyed the fungal infections. And the Witch-Curse... that had to be handled a little more carefully. Frode rode the surge, then carefully funnelled the extra power into the Eye of Harmony that was his heart, the roaring cascade of energy not even registering as a blip in the limitless flow of the artifact that powered all of Time Lord society.

The sheer bulk of Nurgle's mansion was beginning to dislodge some of the Blank Drones, but his magic would find no purchase against their null field; and even if Nurgle's sheer power could force its way through, he would find that they were very well built indeed.

And through all the chaos and mayhem, Frode's gleaming cohorts soared or glided above the fetid ocean, weapons thundering as daemons were mowed down like wheat. If he was going to be a distraction, he was going to be the kind of distraction that left craters.

"He's not afraid to die, he's afraid to live! He is corruption, he is stagnation, and he has no place in this or any other reality!"

Badwitch and Wavelength allow Alex to draw connections between herself, other objects and people, or both. she forms a connection between their own power and the sword that Ensara created for her, infusing its anti-demon properties with the properties of her own white flames that are anti-thetical to chaos in general and Nurgle in particular

The defenses the others have established are sufficient for her purposes, so she then lands and stabs the blade into the ground and then forms a connection between it and the fabric of the Warp itself so that she may channel the White Light directly into the Warp, augmented by the holy properties of the orichalcum blade, to try and purge Nurgle's influence directly.

Nurgle:
He laughs, jollily at this question. He answers, but that will nto stop his armies from firing down upon you, from demons attacking you with rust-blades, from giant worms trying to eat you.
"Hohohohohohohoho.....Why, so what if I am a hypocrite? Hypocrisy is beautiful, like everything else about life. I love everyone, warts, diseases, hypocrisies and all. After all isn't such flaws just the natural decay of the soul? I never limited myself and my domain to mere physical decay. Thus I love myself, warts and all, thus I am content being hypocritical if you call it that with your meaningless Tzeentch-like word spinning. I don't hate you for doing what you do- I simply disagree with it, simply disappointed like a stern father. Death isn't what I give anyways- it happens regardless of what I do. What I give...is peace. Peace with the inevitability. Comfort with what will happen anyways. Everything is garbage, why worry about it? Everything is horrible, why care? If my followers don't always follow my principles, thats okay. Their hypocrisies make them who they are, no need to change them. Pobody's nerfect, and I'd be a poor Father to not let my children embrace who they are, warts and all. Imperfection is beautiful, that is what life IS, from the time a rose is a seed to when it wilts, it is beautiful. I simply want to help you see how the latter half, the decay, is just as beautiful as the growth! That to only see the beauty of a rose in one moment, in a picture of full bloom, still as a statue, is to ignore the beauty of all that comes before and after.

That and I wouldn't be much of a God of CHAOS if I did things for nice, clean and consistent reasons would I? I am Nurgle, The Lord of All, for all things decay. To fight for your life is natural, if futile in the long run. I am life and death. Growth and Decay. The cycle of nature. I am not just inevitable, but inevitability itself. A single moment does not a man make. Point to any of your worst moments in your life and see if it accurately reflects you in totality. But I forgive people for their worst, even you if you decide to give up the Tzeentchian nonsense you believe, even the Imperium if they decide to stop fighting. I will embrace everyone with my plagues and contagions to show them my love so the universe can be reborn! Then of course, decay all over again someday, to be reborn again then decay again, around and around. As is natural. I have seen my kind die before- it is not as permanent as some. I wonder how Khaine is doing, recovering from his death? So many shards of him here and there, still protecting his little Eldar Craftworlds with pure unadulterated murder I bet. Much like Khorne in that respect, the unadulterated murder thing.....where was I? oh right.

Purity and consistency in actions and soul not only philosophically bad, but impossible. All the Imperium are hypocrites after all, their entire system is rotting from within and without so many political and social diseases: corruption, dogma, disorganization, distrust, so on and so forth...their most competent members are people who realize how much their own system works against them, how much they need to break the very thing they claim to protect in order to succeed. They suffer so much trying, I simply want them to not care, and thus be happy with the stagnation, the brokenness of it all. Me? I'm happy here with Isha, brewing my diseases to spread them to the world, happy spreading my happiness to others, warts and all. Thus why should it change? I'm happy as I am, content, and thus will fight for this. I encompass many things after all, as a being of Chaos I can encompass a small little hypocrisy as well amidst an entire galaxy of them. If I am diseased nonsense, its because deep down everyone is, and I'm more than okay with that! I'm JOYOUS with that! Positively Thrilled at how WONDROUS it is!

Because what I am, is the god that see how things really are and is at peace what the galaxy is, and where its going: Broken. Dilapidated. Decayed. Malfunctional. Rusty. Imperfect. Eroded. Hopeless. No one needs to better themselves after all. The Ambition of Tzeentch only leads people to pridefully try complex schemes that will always fail. The constant pleasure seeking of Slaanesh, only leads to them becoming desensitized and bored as they seek greater pleasures. and while I love my semi-buddy Khorne more than most, he and his berserkers constantly seeking to become stronger and to spill blood and slaughter will only lead to them burning out faster, dying faster. While the Imperium asks all its citizens to sacrifice themselves to preserve what has been falling part for thousands of years, to give themselves up to maintain what cannot be fixed. All roads lead to inevitable collapse anyways, I am just the one god in this galaxy that sees and appreciates it, and teach others how to be at peace with that as well, to not spend their lives on futile efforts and just be happy, imperfect, diseased, to teach everyone Acceptance. Just like right now: to teach you the futility of your struggle, Jumpers- your no different from Tzeentch, in my humble opinion. Always scurrying about, too busy looking towards something better, something just out of reach to see the things right in front of you, pointlessly struggling to build what will someday fall apart, to gather power to reach forever greater heights that will only ever lead to your doom in the end- there is nothing more foolish.

Accept that its all hopeless, and everything will become easy. You won't have to worry about saving an empire that won't thank or appreciate you, or be bothered by that schemer, Tzeentch. You could just let all your worries rot away spreading the joy of my diseases to everyone so they will be at peace. The Universe will never care about your struggle after all. It is your own fault that you struggle and thus cause yourself pain- I'm just here, spreading arms out for a hug with a smile, asking you to stop hurting yourselves."

Ensara will respond to this by saying
"No. Screw off. Your entire philosophy is just the worst parts of Green Mana. I've talked with druids, planeswalkers and others who made better arguments to someone as individualistic as me. If I wanted to be at peace with the universe and part of a family I would've joined the Selesnya Conclave about twenty years ago, they were actually good people for one and a far better deal besides. You are just a messed up version of the Golgari."
"I don't know who those are, and I don't particularly care."
"Also we don't serve Tzeentch, what do you mean by "Tzeentchian Nonsense"?"
"Oh y'know the usual Tzeentch nonsense: Progress. Hope. Change. Endless growth, nonsense about numbers and lines going up forever. Can't ever accept that things end someday. That what goes up, must one day come down..."
He keeps rambling on about this, distracted at explaining his....philosophy which also probably just what he IS? He is an idea, so he probably can't resist explaining what he is to you, because understanding the idea that he is is how he spreads and grows more powerful, like some godlike murder-meme.

So distracted that the white light of Life burns......how many demons? thousands? maybe more than thousands? Whose counting? Many demons who see the light are afraid- afraid of things being BETTER, and run from it. An irrational fear, but fear is rarely if ever rational. The tide of plaguebearer demons marching towards you crash into the tide of plaguebearer demons running away from you, making this big unwieldy confused jumbled mess of some part of the army, also the edge of the Ocean of Rot begins burns away at the fire of life's touch, the fire forming a rough bubble of clarity burning any rot-water flowing into it with its radiation, the plague-fog meanwhile burns much faster, the white fire spreading rapidly throughout the fog burning a big hole in it in the battlefield-but even at its fastest it will still take time to get to all of it, mostly because the fog extends beyond your visible sight, but you probably won't need to worry about that.

Ensara will focus and intone:
"Ars Magnus: Ophiucos: Lord of Infinite Swords"
She lets go of her current blade then many more swords appear all around her, all of them floating in midair, each one a legend in their own right: The Forgotten Blade, twelve daiklaves made of orichalcum she forged herself including swords she has already used, eleven Lawbringers taken from the corpses from High Inquisitors of the Church of the Holy Empire of Abel, Gram the Black Sword of Hell, Caliburn the Sword of Kings, and Cladheim Soluis the sword of light and bringer of justice, numbering 26 in all.
"Infinium: Fluctuation of Space, Ethereal: Infinite Attacks"
She suddenly flash steps in the middle of the confused and afraid plaguebearer demons and her many swords controlling them with her mind alone slaughters them in a whirlwind of death, cutting through them all at incredible speeds, many of them not realizing they have been cutting until a few seconds after she passes them by and fall apart as they watch others be cut to pieces as she flash steps across the battlefield like a teleporting sword-tornado.

All this combined with Frode's weaponry and contstructs efforts and you are clearly advancing towards the mansion faster now, Ensara leading the charge by leaving no demons in her wake through the rot-waterfall canyon. The greater demons, the Great Unclean Ones will start ordering to fall back and start taking up defensive positions as you advance.

Frode, despite his face currently being apparently-immobile metal, managed a sneer. In fact, he sneered with his entire body, which was made especially impressive by him being three stories tall at the moment.

Un-sneering slightly, he shook his head violently. "Granted, Tzeentch is an annoying smug fitte who's not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, Slaanesh is a manual of mental disorders made pseudo-flesh, and Khorne is just psychotic, but you're the worst of the lot, Nurgle."

"You're boring. You're laziness in a fright mask and a bad wig, desperately hoping no-one notices that 'decay' is still change and that you and Tzeentch are just two sides of the same worthless coin. You're a hypocrite and a liar, and you won't hold kjeft! Talk talk talk talk... feh."

Frode gestured broadly, and the smaller quadrotor drones that had been darting in and out, delivering withering blaster-fire, pulled out of the fight, entering a precise formation that looked a bit like the bell of a trumpet, or a wormhole. Blue-white energy lanced out from each drone, creating an interconnected web with energy arcing from one point to another once in a while. A small globe, burning like a newborn star, appeared in its heart, flickering at first before blazing to incandescent life as every drone fed it. Then power roared out, an energy blast half a kilometre wide tracing a path of destruction to dwarf everything that had gone before, except maybe Alexandra's White Light.

Speaking of the White Light, Frode had been studying it with a certain level of fascination, superhuman senses scanning it in every possible physical aspect. Bah. Magic. I don't believe I could copy that properly, at least its most essential properties. he thought with some frustration.

Irritated still further, pettiness reared up, and he started carving his name into Nurgle's armies, letters a dozen kilometres tall in neat cursive being burned into the landscape and through the daemons.

While he was doing that, though, the four titans in his forces were surging forwards, feet larger than city blocks crushing hundreds or thousands of daemons with every step. Hastily-installed energy shields rippled under the fire from Nurgle's armies, preventing the giants from being aged into dust, and their many, many weapons answered in terrifying force.

If nothing prevented the four 1400m giants from getting there, they were going to attempt to grapple... or simply body block... the Blighted Mansion of Misery and Mirth and prevent it from moving.

Edward

Edward does go through the portal- and probably just in time, too. His feruchemy would let him resist the diseases, at least until the healing he had stored away ran out, but drowning is still a problem and he has no defences against time.

Inside the palace at the centre of Nurgle's Garden, Edward drops into a crouch and blinks into some shadows or cover, anywhere that he can hide from the Unclean Ones guarding Isha's cage as he regains his bearings and tries to figure out what he has to work with nearby.

The Mansion:

Spoiler: Nurgle, the Plaguefather

Show

https://1d4chan.org/images/thumb/f/f...0px-Nurgle.jpg

The mansion is....gigantic. Your in a room thats way too large for you. Great Unclean ones are already gargantuan towering mounds of flesh capable of stepping lesser daemons underfoot- whatever lives here. Nurgle, is even larger than that. Its like your a mouse or something in here. It looks like.....a kitchen, a disturbing parody of domestic life with all the ingredients being rotten foul things full of disease, far from being clean this kitchen is filthy, disorganized with pots and pans and other dishes scattered all over the place and you hide behind one of those. Nurgle is not an organized fellow. The mansion itself filled with cracks and such in the walls, as if ready to decay and collapse into ruin at any moment.

Soon you see Nurgle himself: a titanic bloated form, to gaze upon it, this face is to realize that all things must break down, must collapse and congeal, must rot and rust and fall to ruin, that the great works of man will one day vanish from the universe, and the stars themselves must one day die. It is to behold a being made of peoples insecurity, denial, self-delusion and the fear of death and disease, and the response to that fear, to behold one who takes away the pain of their suffering, to find satisfaction and contentment in depression, to degrade one to accept their worst most decayed self as they stop denying. He is Despair and Hopelessness but also the defiance to him. With his eyes are galaxies in decay, and he forever mixes and a cauldron in front of him, a cauldron that gazing upon it, you fear is far larger than what it seems, as if it contains the oceans of all worlds of the galaxy. He was a wallowing swamp of black stars and dying worlds, of rotting galaxies alive with immense, writhing shapes as large as nebulas. Cosmic maggots, gnawing at the roots of infinity. Galactic plagues, eating away at the very flesh of existence, reducing all that was to leprous ruin in their unending hunger. It was a dark mirror of life, corrupted, reduced, strangled. All glory vanished, all hope quashed. A thunder of screams echoed upwards from the cauldron. A million million voices, raised up in anguish and despair. Forever crying out for that which would never come. He was the black heart of cancerous infinity. He was no shape, and all shapes, your mind simplifying him to the appearance you see above. Fat and thin, a plume of smoke, a puddle of oil, spreading ever upwards. There were eyes in the smoke, as round as cold, dead suns, and teeth that stretched in a grin as wide as the horizon. Fingers like comets clutched at the void, as the Lord of All Things stirred with the force to orbit planets. Moons could crumble beneath that impossible bulk, and stars could be snuffed out by his touch.

Besides him is a vast cage just as big as him, black, spikey and strong. Four Great Unclean Ones stand guard, these gigantic monsters looking like children compared to Nurgle. But what focuses your gaze is on whats IN the cage: there is no mistaking who it is, for how can one possibly mistake the appearance, of a Goddess? You see Isha, emitting a lighter more green than Nurgle, the perfect apppearance of a beautiful Eldar woman, with blooming flowers in her hair, wearing a white dress, somehow emitting an aura of purity despite the foulness around her. Yet.... you notice that tears are fallling down her face. You somehow understand just by looking at her that she cares- truly cares for people, unlike Nurgle. Hers is a real Compassion, True Empathy, a goddess of healing, fertility and harvest- and that in a universe like this, it was a curse to be a deity of such things. When Nurgle looks away from her you can see her whispering to people you cannot see about plagues that he is brewing as warnings despite being right next to him. You get the sense as if just by looking at Isha, that she couldn't harm a fly much less a god. As if she was inextricable from the concept of NOT harming people so much that if she harmed anything she would not be Isha anymore.

Nurgle is talking casually and conversationally with Isha.
"Perhaps THIS batch of diseases will make you love me, Isha?"
She sighs, tired and melancholy, laying about, seemingly
"Stop this......please..."
"Hohohoho! There is your despair again! Playing hard to get even after ten thousand years! But I'm resilient and patient as always. Your defiance, your standoffishness, will erode away someday. With determination I will win you over sooner or later."
"By every dead Eldar god, you have such a toxic conception of how love works. I've told you countless times before: stop. Please.....just stop...."
"Oh come now, Isha. Is that any way to talk to the one who rescued you from Slaanesh? You know would what....he? she? it? would do to you. I saved you from that....depraved hedonists clutches."
"Some days I wonder if Slaanesh getting me wouldn't have been better. An instant of being devoured by Them like the rest of my pantheon would at least be quick, rather than surviving to live like this. Why did I survive all when the others died around me?"
"As you have asked countless times before!" Nurgle remarks happily.
"Don't you get tired of this conversation? This constant repetition?"
"Nope! With repetition comes certainty, inevitability. Don't fix what ain't broke I always say. Safer that way. Trying only leads to pain."
"Living this torment every day is pain. What you do to everyone else....is pain."
"None, I take away pain, or at least help you deal with. Pain is a part of life after all, something to be endured."
"And as always you overlook the details."
"Well of course, Isha. The small details will all take of themselves in time. No need to sweat over every single little thing. I'm sure my ocean, plagues and my army will take care of those annoying Jumpers sooner or later. No one can withstand decay forever. I just have to keep doing as I've always done and it'll all work itself out. It worked with The Anathema after all. As for Slaanesh, you can't really think it'd be any better than this? That hedonist tortures people for fun, and I couldn't let anything like that happen to you."
"Then let me out."
"Nope. Your place is with me now. As I've said, countless times before. Someday you will accept that."
"No, please stop....."
"I still have Eternity to change your mind! Hohohoho..."
"Father Nurgle" says one of the Unclean Ones "May we have some of the plague-soup?"
"Hohohoho, not until its ready and only if drink it together."
"Stop this....this is pointless....I'll just cure them all again, even through the pain..."
"Yup! But maybe this time you won't be able to. or choose not to and just be happy being with me finally. Who knows? I have all the time in the world for it to happen after all. Hohohoho...."
He laughs then says
"Besides, I think I forgot where your key for your cage is. I'm sure its somewhere in the clutter."
Nurgle shrugs at this. Its not as if she is going to be willing to get out any time soon anyways, so as its not the key was important now. He's sure it'll all work sooner or later. He continues stirring his Cauldron.

The Battlefield:
Nurgle's voice gurgles back
"Oi. I take offense, I am not boring. I am a perfectly Jolly and Merry Fellow. And while I'm flattered that you think I'm The Worst, I'm starting to think your not being genuine with your compliments. This conversation is over, I believe my children will show you how my Family does things around here."
And with that, he leaves you to fight his many many demons. Ensara will summon more elementals and artifice-golems as you make your way out of the waterfall canyon to more normal diseased jungle terrain, getting closer to the Mansion, pretty much in its.....gardens for the lack of a better term. The daemons were taking up defensive positions between the trees now, in the midst of a thousand natural-born traps of carnivorous plants, puddles of poison and disease and other horrors awaiting you.

While Ensara's fire elementals begin attacking and burning through such defenses however with Frode's robots, a Daemon Prince attacks out of nowhere- she blocks his attack, a flying kick as she gets a look at flips down to land near her: an old master martial artist man, with a long unkempt beard and hair, disheveled robes, and rotten skin and missing teeth.
"and who, are you?"
"I am Decayed Hermit of Rotten Enlightenment."
He takes a martial arts stance.
"Also known as the Hermit. A monk who has seen the beauty of Nurgle's rot and learned techniques to channel his magnificence through my body. Through him, I am one with the universe, with nature! He has gifted me with this greatest enlightenment and immortality- It is only proper I fight to defend him."
"Alright."
Ensara dismisses her blades and takes a martial arts stance as well.
"Show me what you can do."
To her surprise The Hermit moves with expertise and skill and she must dodge his first blows, each filled with diseases to inject into her. Their first strikes were testing as she activates her Eyes of Destiny.
"Your pretty skilled....how long have you been training?"
"Thousand of years in the Warp, meditating and training upon Nurgle's teachings, moving in harmony with nature. You are quite skilled as well how long have you...?"
"About thirty. Kind maybe twenty, I kinda took a break to learn a lot of magic in the Magic the Gathering multiverse for like ten years but I still kept my skills sharp."
"What!? impossible! You can't be this skilled in such a short amount of time!"
"Wanna find out how wrong you are?"
The Hermit attacks in anger and her Eyes of Destiny allow to counter him by predicting his movement and throwing him into a tree by grabbing his wrist. She takes a defensive stance with a smirk and he turns to attack again.

The four giants find four giant worms just as big trying to wrap around them and eat at them.

Oh right the whole "purge Nurgle's influence directly with a sword" thing. That works, its just turns Nurgle-Warp into....regular Warp. Its still a chaotic stormy mess wherever the beam cuts. Not under control of Nurgle specifically but....not ideal either. Hm.

This isn't working This blight, this... monster...

Alexandra knows that Nurgle must die, no matter the cost. The power within her, the embodiment of Life and Light and the sheer Joy of Living screams it at her.

She's a novice at the powers of the White Light compared to ti's component green, but... She's always been a quick study when it comes to use of power, and she has an academic knowledge of the properties of the other colors from her first life...

In particular, in this case, are the White Light's powers of healing and purification, its power to use the properties of its component lights, the Orange Light's ability of "Identity theft, to turn a being into a self-sustaining embodiment of Light subservient to a Lantern in mind, body and soul, the Indigo Light's ability to force compassion and empathy on others and purge tainted and selfish emotions(which it shares to a lesser degree with the Blue light,) and Violet's ability to physically entrap others in physical crystals of pure love which suspends their animation.

In addition to her powers of magic and the Emotional Spectrum, she's also dependent on her ability as a Matriarch, the power to telepathically connect to others and channel her powers through them, and... The same ability that lets her easily master powers, the perk "Power Is Power" also let her easily take more power into herself and integrate it into her being.

The rest of the spectrum will serve to empower the other effects and bind them together into white.

Everyone's compared her vast power to the Emperor... Maybe we'll see how that olds out?

This plan isn't certain... Best case scenario, Nurgle as he currently exists is destroyed, converted into a pure force or life and stability rather than the twisted, perverted mockery he is now, and becomes an extension of her power as she usurps his place in the Warp. Even if that fails, odds are good that the twisted god will be mortally wounded by the attempt, but if it doesn't...

Well, she can't be changed by outside powers.

Alex gives up on purging the Warp and tries to Brute Force a telepathic connection with 'Papa' Nurgle himself in preparation for step two in her plan.

Frode paused in his graffiti-ing of Nurgle's Garden, in the middle of carving the chemical formula for bleach through the Plaguefather's armies.

He made a slightly rueful sound. While the shields were holding for the moment, the City-Titans represented too much of an investment in time and resources to simply remake them after they'd been consumed, at least mid-battle. So a fragment of his concentration went to work.

First, the titans shrank visibly, by a couple of hundred metres. Then they abruptly sprouted so many (relatively) slim spines that they looked like oddly-proportioned sea urchins. As a followup, in case the worms could handle being suddenly turned into colanders, the spines grew a spiral monomolecular blade down their length, and began to spin at incredible speeds. Anything punctured by those spines would be drawn downwards by the drilling motion, into the storm of blades at the base where the spines met, and be reduced to a fine mist. As a final precaution, the spines electrified violently, bolts of lightning earthing themselves all around.

All that accomplished, the titans went back to trying to restrain the mansion, ramming against it with areas that lost their spines on contact, so that the mansion wouldn't get accidentally caved in on Edward and Isha, and Frode resumed vandalizing Nurgle's garden with the DNA diagram for penicillin.

At Ensara:
Her duel with The Hermit goes back and forth, dodging and trading blows in an intricate martial dance. But as she observes the Hermit, the more she feels something is familiar....as if she already seen how he fought before.....or at least something similar.
"Wait a minute....your fighting style.....is Citrine Poxes of Contagion!? Or at least......something very similar to it. The closest this world can get. How did you...?"
"I call it Cycle of Nurgle Style myself. There is more strengths, more things to enlightenment and paths to power in this world than is dreamt of in your philosophy" says the Hermit as he attacks with pressure point strikes "All is connected, even decay to regrowth, purification to putrefaction....meditating upon the nature of Nurgle is what granted me this style, I know nothing of what you speak of. However I wonder....why do you hold back? You clearly can keep up with me yet....you aren't being pushed. What is your true power?"
As Ensara dodges, leaving behind red wind after-images, she ponders this. Even seeing the style, or the closest thing to it, she couldn't learn it, only a Sidereal Exalted could teach her it. It was so angering! One of the strongest martial arts in all of Creation, she recognized it yet somehow she could not grasp the principles to LEARN it, to wield it for herself!
"Ebon shadow Style: Seven Points of Weakness Strike!"
She attacks with a shadowy pressure point strike of her own, piercing through his skin and punching through his bones and flesh, but as she draws her fist back, a green light shines and reknits his body back together.
She frowns. What allowed him to recreate the style or something close to it, when she could not? He was doing it with psychic warp energy even! That wasn't.....Essence.....

Wait a minute.

As she keeps fighting the Hermit she thinks: what if that was the key? She couldn't recreate it with Essence- a Sidereal had....a certain instructive something to their essence that allowed it to work with others- with Essence. But there were more energies, more forces out there than just Essence. She had Ki, from Anima Beyond Fantasy. The limitations of Creation didn't account for recreating what they are with that. She couldn't create the best technique now, but perhaps....she could started Improvising techniques, and one of the principles of Citrine Poxes of Contagion was not just decay....but healing.
"Improvisation: Impurity Purging Flow!"
She strikes the Hermit again with a pressure point strike she remembered her old mentor, Shanari, once did using ki instead of Essence. As it hits, his green diseased skin suddenly.....healed? But The Hermit yelped in pain nonetheless.
"What....what was that? What did you do?"
"I see.....yes your understanding, your spiritual enlightenment....is flawed. You only achieved it because of Nurgle's power and thus tying yourself so closely to a being of Decay that as a Daemon Prince, you are harmed by destroying the decay within you. Citrine Poxes of Contagion is more than that- its healing, a style of doctors and medics. Your version is twisted. My strike rid you of some of the diseases within."
Ensara takes an improvised stance, imitating martial arts she only remembered in mirror-images of her mind of a teacher long dead
"Thus, the more I purge disease from your body....the more you are hurt because your a demon of disease!"
"NO!" the Hermit roars and they begin fighting against more furiously.

At Frode:
The worms are destroyed by the titans efforts, getting ripped to shreds by the spikes, the mansion is held in place.

A daemon coming at you see ones one Penicillin graffiti and hisses at its presence, some steam rising from its form as if burnt like it was some holy cross and keeps away, the other demons also stopping a certain distance away from the idea of the penicillin and bleach.
"What vile....cleanliness."
"Your someone who uses hand sanitizers aren't you!?"
"Hypochondriac!" shouted by a random demon as if an insult at Frode. "what do you have against germs!?"
"Are...are you sterilizing this ground? What is wrong with you?"
But some of the cleverer demons try to throw sludge on the diagrams and such of bleach and penicillin to create openings to attack you with rusty swords, weakening the effect by eroding the symbolism.

At Alex:
You connect to Nurgle's mind.

This.....has a few complications. How are your mental defenses? You'll need them to comprehend what exactly is going on a mind like this and defend yourself.

First of all, the Nonlinearity of a mind of a Chaos God. Unlike a human or other biological mind, Nurgle's mind perceives not a present stored into the past, but rather and constant simultaneous present- with different presents he pays more attention to than others. To him, the time he took Isha from the Fall of the Eldar is just as much the present as the moment right now is. Due to the tides of the Warp, he doesn't always have control over it, at random times he remembers a past event that he will only do in the future, or something he is going to do that has already happened. At times he corrupted people because he gazed upon their present and went back and whispered to them in the past. A normal human could never comprehend the complicated nonlinear mishmash of past present and future spanning out back and forwards in Nurgle's perception and wiggling about so that its far from straight or logical, so how you going to deal with it?

This leads into the second problem with comprehend his mind: the vast amount of information in it. He is a being at least 60 million years old, born when Eldar and Necrontyr unleashed hyper-plague bio-weapons upon each other in the War in Heaven, from billions upon billions of ancient Eldar and Necrontyr crying in despair and hopeless as they saw all their friends and family, their entire world dying in horrific ways, from Necrontyr nanoplagues turning them into robotic zombies, from Eldar plagues conjured from the Warp itself visiting horrors born from imagination upon people. From then he while dormant, he has existed across all those millions of years in the Warp, and exists long after, his nonlinear mind extending into mysterious futures, seemingly no different from this present to him, or accurate, are a "past" of sorts to his personal timeline. There is a lot of information in your mind, happening all at once, how're you going to deal with it without being overloaded?

But of course there is the third problem: corruption. Nurgle notices you poking in and launches a mental attack, trying to corrupt you into being his servant. He is past talking with you, he is just just trying to twist you directly.

Alexandra has a few things going for her.

1: Her own Psyhcic power. the Description comapres it to Dark Firebird—a Composite of Dark Pheonix and Fire—and Ex-Man, a compoite of X-Man and Jericho.

Dark Phoenix and X-Man have psionic powers that transcend conventional physicsl, ncluding the laws of time and space. They are forces of reality in their own right, respectively the cosmic embodiment of the "Destruction" aspect of the cyle of creation and destruction and a living world in his onw right at the apex of his evolution.

Then Alexandra spent 40 years with her powers steadily evolving.

She also has a perk that lets her fully comprehend and master her own powers.

If she can comprehend her own power, then Nurgle's consciousness is nothing new.

2: Alexandra is Enlightened in the ways of the Green Light of Will. Her mind is a steel trap nd her spirit a font of infinite willpower. Additionally,y her Well Adjusted Perk ensures she is always motivated and blocks external attempts to control or change her so Nurgle's corruptive efforts should fall flat.

3: Alexandra has perfect memory which, by necessity, requires an infinite capacity for information. Nurgle could feed her all of his knowledge and experiences and it would only be a drop in the bucket.

So now... onto phase too.

The psychic connection Established and Nurgle doing nothing to combat it directly means that Alexndra can channel the White Light of Life directly into him. She uses Bandwith and Wavelength's ability to establish arcane connections to reinforce her psionic one, just in case.

Given that it is in every way the Anti-Thesis to his very being, she imagines that it will be painful.

She then starts directing the effects of the White Light and the Spectrum of colors and emotions that compose it to do their desired effects.

White purifies disease and routes corruption. Violet crystalizes and places within stasis, Indigo purges spiritual corruptions and soothes unneeded negativity.

And Orange... Orange assimilates.

That perk that lets her understand and master her powers? it also lets her get away with "eating an energy field bigger than her head," so to speak.

She very much doubts that Nurgle as he exists now will survive the process. What's going to happen is that the process of assimilation will transform him into something else, from a being of disease, decay, stagnation, and apathy into a being of life, rebirth, stability, and acceptance who will become an extension of Alex's power as she assimilates him first into the White Light a then Directly into herself.

...Assuming he survives the process at all that is. He may be destroyed utterly or simply converted into raw power.

And that's assuming that a daemon doesn't get a lucky shot and break her concentration though, given that each Daemon is basically a cell in the 'body' of the Chaos God that spawned them, she's pretty secure in the idea that is unlikely.

As she begins the process she begins chanting oaths to herself. Both to empower the White Light and to emphasize how the EMotional Spectrum is Nurgle's antithesis.

Starting from the most primal of emotions?

"With blood and rage of crimson red, torn from a corpse so freshly dead, together with my hellish hate, I'll burn your soul that is your fate!"

Rage is not hatred. It is not antipathy. Rage is the primal reaction, the idea that "this is wrong." It is one half of the primal urge to survive, the drive to fight to correct wrongs. Call it vengeance, call it justice, call t closure. When combined with love, it is the course of grief which is in turn the ultimate source of rage.

"What's mine is mine, is mine is mine, is mine is mine, not yours!"

Avarice gets a bad rap. Sure, it's the source of things like greed and gluttony, but it's also the drive to assert yourself. To place value in yourself. To assert that things have a value becuase you value them. It's what lets you form connections to people, places, and things, to make Compassion an actionable feeling, to turn love from an ethereal concept into something concrete. It's the drove to do something, find something, make something, be something simply because it may bring happiness be it for yourself or those you care for.

"In blackest day, in brightest night. Beware your fears made into light. Let those who'd stop that which is right, burn like my power, Starheart's Might!"

Fear left unchecked causes problems yes, but at its basest level it is simply the awareness of threats and danger and the drive to do something about it. Fear is not the antithesis of bravery, but its source: Bravery is the act of taking control of your fear and using it to empower and motivate yourself rather than letting it control you.

"In brightest day and blackest night no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship Evil's might, beware my power, Starheart's light!"

Willpower. Motivation. The flame that refines fear into courage. The drive that focuses rage and avarice and love. The tool that makes hope and compassion actionable. The instinct to keep going no matter what and see things through to the end instead of giving up or accepting your own powerlessness too early.

“In fearful day, in raging night, With strong hearts full, our souls ignite, When all seems lost in the War of Light, Look to the stars, for hope shines bright!”

Of all the colors, this is the second most antithetical to Nurgle. The desire, the instinct, the fundemental truth that things always can be better, that you don't have to accept things as they are. that all things can change for the better. Each step forward is a revolution.

"In days of sorrow, in miserable nights, I'll extend my hand to set a light. When hope is gone, the end is now, I'll lift you up, this is my vow!"

Compassion is the ability to look at others and feel what they feel. To desire to reach beyond yourself or your in-group, to help. To try and change things for others instead of just yourself. And at the same time, the willingness to compromise.

"For hearts long lost and full of fright, for those alone in the dark of night, accept my love and join my fight, love concurs all with brilliant light!"

Love is understanding. Love is kind. It is not selfish... and Love cannot die. No matter how brokenhearted you may be your ability to love shall never be lost. Your old love will persist and eventually be reborn in the form of new love. Love divided between multiple recipients is not lessened and, in fact, grows, creating more. Even after your death, the love you shared will live on in your bonds with others, having influence well beyond what you started with.

The last Oath is simple. Alexandra smiles as she says it.

Live!

What brings all seven emotions together? Joy. Pure, existential, Joy. The simple fact that one is happy to be alive. The Certainly that no matter how pointless existence is, no matter how much one may suffer in their life, the simple fact that they were alive, that they lived at all, is something to be happy about. That life is inherently worth living.

All of that is being mainlined directly into Nurgle. It i s trying to tear him apart, purify him, rebuild and invert him into his own antithesis in such a way as to make him part of Alexandra's power... Or just destroy him.

Frode allowed himself a moment of amusement at the various daemons' reaction to his graffiti. Sensing through his network that the City-Titans had the Mansion in hand for the moment, he allowed the bulk of his consciousness to move away from them and make certain that things were proceeding apace with the other mechanoids. 'Feeling' a horde of Dalek-shells atomize a flight of Rot Grubs, then sterilize the ground below them so that the Ocean of Rot boiled into putrid steam before the steam was atomized in the plasma stream from one of the giant Bolo tanks.

Overall, his segment of the battlefield seemed to be doing alright, so he decided to give vent to his pettiness once more, casually booting the more venturesome daemons that were attempting to attack his ankles away before rising into the air for a better view. His drone-formation Cornucopia of Death rotated, then, in conjunction with his sanctified Hellbore plasma cannon, started carving various chemical formulae and DNA encodings into the landscape down to five hundred metres deep, bleach, antiseptic, antibacterials, even the encoding for white blood cells becoming vast, yawning chasms as deep as they were wide, every letter twenty kilometres tall.

As he worked, he kept a wary eye on Alexandra. His psionic abilities weren't really on the same wavelength as hers, but the lightshow was a pretty broad hint that something big was going down. Hopefully she let him in on whatever was going on so that he could back her up, if the need arose, or even so he could just be a more effective distraction.

Nurgle's Mansion

So freeing Isha looks tricky, but Nurgle's lost the key, which is useful. Keeping her safe from Slaanesh once she's out might be harder, but that's a problem for the future. Edward glances at his dagger, but... he's reasonably sure if the Razor had the ability to kill something like Nurgle, Mehrunes Dagon wouldn't let a mortal carry it. After all, what's the difference between a Daedric Prince and a Chaos God but cosmology? So he'll try to avoid that, as he instead sneaks around the pots and pans, looking for the key. Once he's got that, freeing Isha is... not easy, but he can start work on finding it. Holding his nose, he burns tin to enhance his senses and looks for anything that might be a key now his eyes are sharper and better at peering through the gloom.

Ensara:
She senses what Alex is doing and turns with surprise. The Hermit tries to exploit the opening to attack but she detects it and says
"Mind Hand Manipulation!"
Telekinetically grabbing him in midair with her infernal essence.
"Wait...you could do this the whole time? Why didn't you-"
"Your not important anymore." she cuts him off and crushes The Hermit in her telekinetic grip his warp energy being burned away by infernal green flames. She turns to glare in Alex's general direction and growl angrily
"Really!? After telling me not to trick Tzeentch into a deal so I can devour him and get his powers, she's pulling THIS? Apparently devouring a chaos god is A-OK as long as SHE'S the one doing it! After I trusted her and discarded my plans to devour all four of them and leave the Warp peaceful and calm for everyone when I would leave as the Last Chaos God at the end of the Jump! What hypocrisy!"
She hears voices in her head. From her souls and her companions from previous Jumps telling her to calm down.
"....Yeah your right. I can be mad about this later. I've gotta contact Edward."

Edward:
Using your tin senses you soon find amid the clutter a giant key the size of yourself, yeah this is probably the key? considering there are no other working doors in this mansion other than the cage, all the door ways are rotted. Meanwhile in the background, you see Nurgle clutching at his head and squirming grunting and crying out in pain, and soon you hear Ensara's telepathizing or communicating to you through Frode's devices, whichever is more convenient:
"Edward, change of plans. For some reason Alex has decided to just go ahead and kill Nurgle out of nowhere. If what Frode has said about killing Chaos Gods causing warp storms is true, be ready for things to get much hotter than they already are. I'm coming in to help, rescuing Isha now needs to happen ASAP."
She will then teleport in and charge out to the four Great Unclean Ones watching Nurgle writhe in concern, Ensara for her part ditches any attempt at subtlety and turns into her Untamed Apocalypse Devil Body, her skin becomin golden brass, growing four new arms to a total of six, her eyes and hair becoming green flame as a powerful radioactive viridian inferno flares around her as she charges at them in fury, now a large but not titanic brass demonic hulk-like asura, savagely ripping off the head of the first one, while the second attacks back only for its plagues to be burned, its arms to be seared by the radiation she's giving off and for Ensara herself to savagely rip through the second Unclean one with her claws, the third to cinders with her fire breather and radioactive inferno aura, then proclaim to the fourth and last, the name of Ars Magnus technique:
"Etherial: Infinite Attacks!!"
Then her six arms becoming a blur of golden meteors trailing with green flame as the Great Unclean one is hit by countless attacks within seconds then leaps away, for a few seconds the Unclean one seemingly okay and confused, but then suddenly a green light glows from within and to the Unclean one's horror, explodes in a show of warp energy, Ensara not even bothering with a Fist of the North Star joke as is traditionally appropriate for that technique, leaving the path open for Edward. She shrinks her radioactive aura down to be a shield of green flames around her and looks up at Isha yelling.
"How do we get you out of here!?"
"Aside from the key? I am a Warp entity, and cannot exist in the Materium for long periods of time. I suggest you get me to somewhere safe that isn't realspace as fast as possible, for I will not survive there. I could possess someone to live there longer but....I will not do so to anyone who does not give consent for that."
She will relay this to Frode using telepathy, suggesting that they go straight to the Black Library when they all get together.

Death of Nurgle:
Okay.

Lets think through this.

What is Nurgle? When you comprehend all the information in his vast mind, you know: he is not the source of despair, but the result. He is an idea, born from people. Across the lengthy time he has existed, most of the energy that comprises him is made up of negative things such as despair, depression and such, he is also comprised to some extent of things like family, contentment and the like, stoic emotions like that but most important the ever-present, eternal fear of mortality. for the vast majority of the time Nurgle existed he was dormant, but these feelings still fed him, like a tiny trickle of energy, especially without many psykers around to produce more energy than normal. Killing him as you are now, is like destroying one of the largest trash mounds in a waste dump or one of the largest oi spills in an ocean: your unquestionably making the world a better place, but that won't stop people from throwing more trash in. Not even Nurgle is entirely sure though what happens when a Chaos God dies like this- there have been cases where Khaine or Tzeentch were shattered and kind of killed but the latter recovered- Nurgle knows, he teamed up with Khorne himself to shatter Tzeentch after he got too powerful during the Age of Technology- Nurgle even remembers conspiring with Khorne to corrupt the Men of Iron against humanity to end their golden age and feed upon the Age of Strife while Tzeentch put himself back together and Slaanesh was yet to be born.

He is of course, struggling actually. Struggling a lot. Your killing him of course but....he is the most resilient of the Chaos Gods, ironically. He will die just....not immediately. Nurgle did always drag things out. He raises a hand in Alex's direction through the agony.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! ....haah.....Hur.....hur.....hur......What a gift you have given me, killing me like this. But....I would be rude not to give a gift in return, would I not? It is only.....hospitable.

Mortality Roar."
Then he fires a powerful wave of pure death energy, blasting through his own walls, his own army just to fire a tidal wave of pure death energy at Alex herself. After that he turns and actually severs his own connection to all his demons saying
"Worry not my children....hurhurhur......as long as you keep my acceptance, my love, your despairs, your fears in your heart.....I will never be truly gone.....as with all things....there is death....and there is rebirth.....keep the faith....and let new decay bloom from the corpses....."
He turns to Isha, his form beginning to unravel and disintegrate to dust as
"Looks like I'm dying Isha. Hurhurhurhur. My only regret is that I have yet to succeed in winning your love"
"You never will......Die, and never come back."
He laughs and speaks of Alex
"Hur, did you expect me to die in some spectacular fashion like some ranting saturday morning cartoon villain as my family suddenly turn upon me or be destroyed along with me thus wiping out all of what I am and this realm forever? Hurhurhurhur.......you know this universe isn't like that, Jumper. In the Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium.....there is no moral lessons, no karma, and no truly happy endings. People will always despair, always feel sadness, always fear death, always feel what I an. None know that more than me. Come to think I do have a second regret......it will be not seeing how you all fail to fix anything despite your incredible power......hurhuhurhurhurhurhurhur....."
Soon he dissolves and is absorbed by Alex laughing all the while, Alex knowing that he doesn't know if he is right or not about his last words, just that is what he believed with all his heart.

assuming you survive his power death blast, now that you absorbed him you have become....Aware of what he fed upon: despair, hopelessness kinship, happiness, struggle, love, tradition, inevitability, mercy and memory, but also insecurity, denial, self-delusion and the living's fear of inevitable death and disease as well as their unconscious response to that fear, which is the "power of life", the motivating power you draw upon. Yet somehow you killed him with it, despite it canonically being a thing he is empowered by? Maybe its the fact that your a different more pure Life from another universe or something about your perks. Anyways, all these emotions and concepts look like food to you now, and all the negative ones are vastly in more abundance than the positive ones in this universe. Also Nurgle's memories tell you all the ways he figured out how to easily exploit the more negative emotions to feed upon them through religion since those are easier to do than positive ones. Like a lot of what he did was find potential for despair and used as minimal energy as possible to engineer getting more of it at a profit. If you continue to insist on making this new god, then know that they'd probably experience much the same with temptation to potentially feed upon the psychic energy you can sense now and will be probably much weaker if they stay above temptation- furthermore, they'd be unable to harm anything. The purity of an idea cannot ever be as strong as a human after all, cannot ever kill while remaining something good, just by sensing Isha you know that she could never harm even a fly, and such a positive deity would be no different- they would be eaten alive by the other daemons. Also you know how to make a lot of diseases, bacteria and so on now.

Also you feel this.....rumbling now that Nurgle's gone, combined with the damage you've done to the realm. Its not being destroyed, all those emotions Nurgle feeds on from humanity are still flowing in and empowering this place and its demons but.....its becoming less stable, the skies and winds are whipping up into a warp storm above from horizon to horizon. Furthermore you see...unaligned demons suddenly appearing here and there from cracks. There were no Daemons looking to you as some new goddess. No Daemons changing sides, for they are mourning the loss of their Plaguefather and becoming enraged that you ate him, while others fight these unaligned demons that are beginning to appear. A power vacuum has formed, and its clear: they will never accept a human as leader, no matter how powerful they are. You can sense that this only the beginning: more Daemons are coming, Slaanesh ones the fastest seeking to claim territory, but Khorne and Tzeentch aren't too far behind. You have started a massive Daemon War, and Isha will be in the middle of it if you don't get her out of here.

Frode:
Meanwhile, a strange thing happens when Nurgle dies. Amidst all the chaos and quaking of that begins to happen one of the many plaguebearers stops, looks straight at Frode, and no longer seems to be harmed by the penicillin or other symbolism. They turn bone-bleach white, its one cyclopean eye turns red, and it says the most nonsensical sentence at you:
"I hate you because your already dead, I will kill you to make sure your alive. Death to Chaos for Chaos."
Also the demon suddenly has two swords, pure black not rusted and move much faster, swinging away at you with both blades, no longer hindered by Nurgle's rules.

Alex can teleport.

It's a simple enough matter to pop behind the blast and dodge the whole thing, appearing in the manor and assisting with the dispatching of demons and the escorting of Isha to safety.

"For the record, I couldn't do that the whole time. Only when my secondary mutation triggered and broke the limits on my power to give me access to the full spectrum. It only worked on Nurgle becuase the White Light is a pure version of what which he is a corrupted representation of and thus his antithesis. It almost certainly would fail against one of the other three and... Well, I can't be corrupted that way, but the best-case scenario is that I die. Worst case scenario the other three are less corrupted representatives of the Spectrum and more embodiments of the far extremes of specific colors. It'd probably just make them stronger."

"Didn't work right, either. Was hoping to properly Identity Theft him and use that as a medium to mass purify an entire Fourth of the Warp but he cut himself off from his derived daemons at the last second and then dissolved into the Light entirely instead of becoming a purified construct-Lantern."

"Lady Isha? I could probably create you a temporary physical vessel. A bit of machinery, of alchemy, a few sparks of light to power it..."

There was a split second of frozen silence after Frode absorbed what Alexandra had just done, and then... well, those who had communicators, and the daemons in the vicinity, were treated to a truly virtuoso performance of swearing in the fundamental language of the universe, so virulent that several small daemons were actually created on the spot, before vanishing in puffs of invective.

While said cursing was happening, Frode's entire army, along with every trace of free metal in the bubble Frode's Blank Drones had created, were fizzing out of existence like badly-tuned television signals from the 50s, metal coalescing into streams that orbited around Frode's giant metal form until it started to look a bit like a chromed-out Sailor Moon transformation sequence, julienning any flying daemons unwise enough to approach.

Then the streamers convulsed, thinned, and millions, tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions, of new Blank Drones roared outwards to reinforce the barrier that Frode had created near the beginning of the fight. If he couldn't prevent Nurgle's death until the Human Webway had been built, removing the need for Warp travel, he'd do his very best to contain the shockwaves from it. Otherwise the Empire in its entirety would probably collapse within a week, and as awful as they were, they were (probably?) better than straight anarchy, trillions starving, and warpstorms everywhere.

The drones didn't care if there were daemons in their way, and many, many daemons got the bug-on-the-windshield treatment as the drones screamed towards their new positions at an appreciable fraction of local lightspeed.

While this was happening, Frode was shifting back into TARDIS form, and when the oddball daemon lunged at him, the strange statement was noted, filed for later reflection, and a tractor beam powerful enough to flick worlds around like marbles grabbed it and swung it in a short, brutal arc that terminated with whatever passed for ground locally hard enough to leave a crater.

Frode was gone before the splash from the impact reached his position, rematerializing near Nurgle's Cauldron with the usual *VWOORP VWOORP VWOORP*.

As soon as he was solid, Frode's doors swung open as he complained "Alexandra, was there some part of 'don't kill Nurgle yet' that was confusing to you? If I cannot contain the... implosion effect... from his death, warp travel may be cut off for centuries. And without warp travel, the death toll in the Empire alone could be in the trillions. The Emperor was a complete kronidiot for setting it up this way!"

He grumbled to a halt, then added "Get in, I'm getting us out of here. And my interior is dimensionally transcendent, it doesn't... or at least doesn't need to... have the same principles as the materium, Isha should be fine in there for the time being."

"...Imagine if you will every last one of those demons out there, that fetid swamp, this manor and everything in it, Nurgle himself, a full fourth of the Warp purified and transmuted into things of Radience whose mere presence soothes corruption and brings stability, who under my control would wage war against the rest of the forces of Chaos, who when destroyed would immediately be reborn from my White Light. Beings who truly represent the cycles that Nurgle was a bastardized version of. That is what would have happened if Nurgle hadn't cut his connection to his realm and derived demons at the last minute."

"As it is, since he cut that connection the disruption to the Warp should be minimal. I could probably have fixed it outright if it wasn't for these... anti-psychic... dealies... You deployed. Sure hope they work as intended..."

"Look, I can probably still fix it once we get out of here... You know how to make a Cerebro? That would really help..."

"Oh, and before I forget... What makes you think you have the right to criticize anyone when you're mass producing ****ing sentinels?"

"Yah, somehow I don't see the Chaos fools being graceful losers. Not surprised that Nurgle pulled a **** move on the way out."

A Cerebro helmet had half-formed in midair by the time Alex had said the second syllable, and, with a sort of audio shrug, Frode finished it and floated it in her direction. "Saw that thing on the daily when Charlie-boy was around. Nice guy, most of the time, but he was developing some real control issues. Can't say I was entirely sorry to get out of there when I did. And sorry about the Blank Drones- it was the best I could do on no notice."

While he didn't have any facial features as a TARDIS, those of Frode's internal lights as could be seen through his open doorway flickered in a way that suggested a bit of agitation.

"As to the Sentinels... making a few assumptions, aren't we? Those were just shells, animated by my powers. It's a powerful design... and even if they had a driving AI, and assuming that I was an idiot and used the old mutant-hunting programming, where exactly were they going to find mutants to kill in the middle of Nurgle's territory, so deep in the Warp that even a TARDIS has a hard time finding their way out?"

Frode gave the sound of taking a deep breath, which was a bit odd, given that he didn't currently have lungs, and finished "We really do need to be getting out of here."

"So, Nurgle's dead, Isha is free, and now we gotta get out of here but Isha can't survive in realspace. I don't suppose any of you guys know if warehouses count as realspace, do you? I've got a door and a key right here, but I've never put a person in my warehouse alone before. Generally I've tried to keep it secret to avoid the awkward questions my friends would ask." An extradimensonal space where he keeps, amongst other things, a box of firearms and a steampunk mechanical walker would have been pretty hard to explain to anyone in Skyrim. Edward holds up the key he's still holding from when he opened Isha's cage. "We can discuss the merits of killing the Chaos gods whilst we're, y'know, not in a fundamentally unstable dimension that's just had one of its legs kicked out from under it."

"Isha will be fine inside my TARDIS form, manifesting life support for psychic beings doesn't even reach the top one thousand of weird things I can do in there. And I'm taking us to the Black Library from here, after a brief stop on the Sabre to pick up that... Eldar... girl?.. that no-one introduced me to- it might help to have someone who at least sort of knows some of us who can talk directly to that crazy clown."

TARDIS-Frode sort of waggled his doors, showing that they were wide open and ready for boarding. "Shall we?"