"I'll hunt with you guys," you say.


"Terrific," Fay says.


"I'll get you a gun," Olive says.


You set a tree alight with a flick of your wrist, as the Warpfire quickly runs up, multicolored flames licking the sky as the tree is quickly burnt down to ash.


"Do you think I need one?" you ask.


"Fair point," Olive says.


"Let's get going!" Castus says, twirling his sword. "I wanna stab something!"


Elizabeth transfers over a short amount of data onto Olive's datapad about the Behemoths. Then, the group moves forward through the wilderness, as Olive begins to flick through the information.


"So Hayes, you were a Guardsman, then?" Olive asks. "From what I heard, they give you a flashlight and a t-shirt and send you to fight serious foes."


Hayes sucks on his cigarette, thinking.


"Yeah, all command gave us was jack and shit. I remember my first deployment. We were in the jungle, and I mean a serious fucking jungle. Seemed like the whole jungle was sentient and wanted to fucking kill us. Snare vines strangled every single one of us. The ground would just give way. You'd be on patrol, and the mud would suck up an entire tank. You'd blink and it'd be gone. Then there was the greenskins. You'd give 'em a few sticks with the bayonet, and they'd laugh and call you a grot."


"Greenskins. They used to be the biggest threats back home. When I was a kid, they took out my tribe. I remember being surrounded by a green tide, roaring, screaming and terrifying me. By the moon, I think I ended up pissing myself," Fay says.


"How the hell did it kill your tribe? Who are the Tribals, then?" Castus says. 


"I ended up getting rescued by the Uwais tribe. They adopted me."


"Really? Was it the tribe that saved your ass and blew up a bunch of heads?" you say.


"Fine, Karth saved me with his weird Shaman powers," Fay says.


"So, I'll just come out and ask. Olive, there's a rumor going around that you and your brother are fucking."


"Holy shit!" Olive says, as Castus breaks into laughter. "No! No! Just no!"


"You fight Orks, gladiators?" you say, quickly changing to a less incest-related topic.


"Occasionally they got Orks in, but it was rare," Olive says. "Usually we fought each other, or mutants."


"Mutants were easy. You just had to kill them," Castus says. "Other gladiators were hard. You had to hit them in just the right place. It needed to be bloody, but you couldn't kill a fellow gladiator, you know? Sometimes in the heat of battle, you took a bad swing, slashed open a throat, did something else. Those were the bad days."


Castus goes quiet, seemingly deep in thought.


"Yeah," Olive says, finally. "We fought Orks sometimes."


You walk on in silence, before Fay stops, dropping low. Massive footprints cut directly across the trail. Fay traces the footprint with her pinky, pressing her hand against the mud.


"It's relatively fresh. Tracks break away in undergrowth. Could've gone along the river. Could've gone straight along the underbrush, or twisted off through the trees."


"I'll go along the river," Castus says.


"I'll take the underbrush, then," Fay says.


"Trees," Olive says, simply.


Captain Hayes looks at you, raising an eyebrow.


"I'll give you first pick, Karth," he says.

You take the tree path with Olive

"I'll go with Olive, then," you say.


"I got the psyker genius, then. Terrific," Olive smiles, twirling her rifle around in her hands.


"Let's go," you say, heading down towards the twisting path of trees.


You head down the path for a few minutes, before something occurs to you.


"Why would a big monster go down this path? The trees would give it like zero mobility."


"I don't know," Olive says with a shrug. "It could've been scratching itself off the trees. Is that something predators do?"


"Maybe, you shrug, wlaking along th epath.


"So, you see any tracks?" Olive asks.


"How would I know? I'm not a hunter."


"You're a feral… I mean, tribal. Whatever the fuck you guys like being called. Surely you learned how to track and hunt?" 


"Have you seen my skinny arms? I couldn't throw a spear, let alone kill something with it. No one taught me to hunt. I was a shaman. You're a warrior? Surely you were taught to hunt?"


"I'm a gladiator. I know how to fight duels, and I've learnt over time how to apply that to larger fights. I sure as hell don't know how to hunt."


"Didn't you hunt as a kid?"    


"No," Olive says. "I was born a slave."


"Oh," you say. "Sorry to hear that."


"That's life," Olive says. "You can fly, maybe try levitate up above the trees, see if you can see anything." 


You nod, floating into the air. The shackles of gravity attempt to pull you downward, but with a pulse of psychic energy you escape them and float to the tree tops, staring around. Surrounding you is a seemingly endless green of leaves and moss. You must admit, it's quite a beautiful sight.


Suddenly, you hear the rumble of the ground. From the bursts of the earth, a massive creature covered in thick, stone-like grey skin bursts forward. Its red, spider-like eyes peer at you, perhaps confused by the addition of you to its environment, before turning to focus on Olive, who's babbling into her radio.


"Got a sight on it! Fuck, it's a big one!" Olive says into the comms, as you drop down to face the beast, now seeing it clearly. 


It stands twice the height of even a space marine, and easily six times as wide, on four clawed legs. It's skin is grey, seemingly covered in scales that remind you more of the stones themselves rather than the hide of a beast. Its head is like that of a spider's, hissing at you as it raises its massive, stony clawed arms to swipe at you. You hover back, feeling electricity coarse through you as you prepare for a fight.