With a bit of force, the bounty hunter’s slender skull burst into a sloppy mess of viscera and bone-grit, seeping between Drigur’s plated fingers in gelatinous chunks. For all their arrogance, Drukhari died with the same ignobility as any other creature at its end.

As the Dark Eldar’s death spasms reached their pathetic climax, its own clawed digits fell limply from the Night Lord’s exposed bicep and left beading, scarlet trails; such unworthy prey hardly deserved flaying.

The recent batch of Drigur’s would-be assassins now decorated the dilapidated megastructure's rooftop in gory frescoes of splayed limbs and still-steaming mounds of sizzling entrails; it was the haphazard desecration such untested dredges deserved for such a poorly executed ambush.

Drigur loathed the adrenal fear-stench of vat-grown Drukhari, even more so than the acrid fear-funk of human terror that the Night Lord had grown all too accustomed to in former life. If that was the best his former captors felt inclined to dispatch then perhaps they would soon give up their chase altogether. After all, the arenas of the Wych cults overflowed with enslaved contenders as it was. What was one feral Mon’keigh?

Drigur allowed the headless corpse to slump against a chipped obsidian parapet before deciding to grant the last of assassins a ‘less’ disrespectful defilement and flung it into the roiling sea of corrosive ooze below; the acidic mire glimmered pale emerald, casting upward an eerie glow that served as the sinking city’s only source of light. It reminded Drigur of home.

Port Seraphim was one of Commorragh’s lesser starports, ravaged by the unknowable passage of centuries and an untold number of skirmishes between the lesser kabals that battled for nothing more than the right to die last. Seraphim had been abandoned long before the Night Lord had ever arrived to Commorragh, and now, poisoned by centuries of disrepair and pollution, was melting into a great deluge of sulphuric sludge. Surprisingly, it had not been the worst of the Night Lord’s hideaways in the Dark City.

Drigur had been aptly — and in true Nostroman fashion — mockingly titled, ‘The Hunter’ by his erstwhile brothers. “A predator amongst predators”, “More beast than man”; or so they chided. It was a title he’d worn with pride, long ago. Now, it inspired Drigur with bestial drive to fulfill his namesake as something indistinguishable from a ravenous animal.

He prowled on all fours like the ancient predators of primordial Terra, ceramite talons clicking and scratching along twisted spines of dull crystal while scaling from spire to disintegrating spire. Drigur’s patchwork panoply of sundered power armor groaned with each awkward leap, servos crying out for the quench of sacramented oils and an artificer’s touch. They'd whimper awhile longer, as the slums of Commoragh were a far cry from the armories of the VIIIth. Sacrifices had to be made. All nonessential segments of the azure war plate had been repurposed or discarded for both mobility and in a desperate attempt to stave off further disrepair.

Of course, The Hunter was a son of Curze; a trio of half-shattered skulls clattered at his hip, bobbing from blood-rusted chains before occasionally resting on a tabard of desiccated flesh.

Drigur stalked along the edge of a twisting, corroded pylon with the labored gait of a Nostroman crag cougar. He caught his shattered reflection in a wall of dull obsidian and gave pause as he seldom stopped to check his equipment, let alone his appearance. Cracked, crimson lens peered back with disdain, framed by a mask of flecked, yellowing bone and unfurling vermillion wings. Beneath the ghoulish visage, a madman cackled quietly to himself, amused at what he’d become.

Despite the desolated state of the urban wasteland, there were those that dared call Seraphim their home. Rival halfborn pain-gangs raced their Reaver jetbikes through great mazes of ravaged skyscrapers, butchering each other and anything else unlucky enough to cross them. Perhaps that's why Drigur had initially ignored the opening notes of a sweet scream-song that reverberated from the depths of ruined tower cluster. It was a sonorous symphony of bloodcurdling howls and murderous laugher.

He wouldn't get involved, not at first, for there were much worse things that prowled the bowels of Commorragh than suffering-starved Drukhari and a mad astartes; Drigur would play the role of carrion.

By boot and claw, The Hunter slinked from shadow to shadow while sampling the sadistic melody of slaughter. This scuff seemed particularly brutal by the sounds of it, and in rare form, the Night Lord found himself smiling. His raptorine claws raked at the crumbling walls of an ancient edifice before shakily finding purchase on a spiked perch; a grotesque gargoyle

There was a scent in the air, an intoxicating perfume that danced upon the briny winds of Seraphim, rising from the bloody harvest below; vivisected corpses shredded to gory ribbons of flesh and rended armor, stiffened cadavers turned to pincushions by hails of glass shuriken.

Drigur had been late to the battle but just in time for the feast. He sidled from his roost and stalked amongst the aftermath of grisly battle royal, senses aflame with smoldering adrenal bloodlust and the promise of inflicting pain. There was an unshakable sense of omen, Drigur felt, and upon further inspection the aftermath told an uncanny tale.

Too many half-born, starved of suffering with rudimentary needlerifles wearing armored overcoats fashioned from ugly scraps of beast-leather. They were the usual vermin that infested the abandoned sprawls — Drigur often preyed on these lesser Drukhari in whatever slum of Commorragh his hunt had taken him — No, it was the bodies of a few elite, kabalite warriors that caused the fallen astarte’s twin hearts to beat in alarming tempo.

Their cruel, razor-edged wargear glimmered a polished carmine and sported the trophies of their victims with macabre zeal; barbed hooks dangling from spiked chains, tabards and accoutrements of freshly flayed flesh; they’d have been be kin in another life.

Drigur approached the corpse of a fallen kabalite and flipped the slain bastard over with caution, lest his rigor-stricken figures be limply hanging around a stasis grenade. More puncture wounds from sadistic needle-pistols and bubbling venoms. It had been a bastard's miracle that the lesser equipped gutter trash had managed to kill three of the mercenaries. The only odd in their favor had been sheer number alone, sacrificing no less than six of their own for each of the seasoned abalites. There were only 3 of the well-equipped enforcers, spread out from the fizzling wreckage of crashed xenos transport. Drigur sniffed the stagnant air like a mange-ridden beast, eager yet wholly apprehensive. The flesh here was ripe, and though he'd little experience in handling Drukhari weaponry, a bounty of alien armaments lie unclaimed at his serrated fingertips.

He'd hardly a moment to take inventory of the loot before the whine of metal scraping against metal and grunts of exhaustion caught his attention. It stirred from the belly of the crashed transport. A survivor, perhaps? Some unlucky soul who had survived the onslaught only to be picked apart by carrion. Twin talons, rippling with a nascent current of angry lightning, slid from the astartes' wrist gauntlet with a rusty screech. Drigur rose to full height to meet the challenger though such theatrics would not be necessary.

She was hardly a pubescent, the little whelp-girl emerging from the smoldering ruins of the bladed transport with little more than a few bleeding scrapes. A potent mixture of annoyance, fear and confusion played upon the Drukhari child's unblemished, caramel features. Drigur's battle-tensed muscles did not soften in her presence - Drukhari children were hardly innocent, even if they did not share the refined fear-palate of their adult counterparts - yet the sharp, adrenal throbs of his twin hearts had begun to slow.

Drigur would've been frightening to the offspring of any other sentient species, but not to a daughter of Commoragh.

"A mon'keigh," the girl shook away the confusion of a 'somewhat' abrupt landing and wasted no time denigrating the brutish man-thing before her, "my 'protection' failed to kill a..." Her nose ruffled, crimson orbs squinting in disgusted disbelief, "human." Her low gothic was broken, resembling the slurring hiss of Nostroman dialect when it attempted the less eloquent language. She spoke in Drigur's language not out of a desire to better communicate with the midnight-clad terror, rather, to better mock him. "I'd ask you to kill me, did you not reek of piss and..." She searched for the word, "shit." To the knife-eared runt, this entire sordid affair was little more than a detour to an unfortunate final destination; she had accepted her death the moment the transport had sustained major damage.

Usually, Drigur's prey were much more resistant to the prospect of an imminent, gory death. He parted his lips to speak but nothing came forth, the Night Lord mulling over what exactly to say, he hadn't spoken in anything but a mocking curse or ear-rupturing wail in months if not years.

"Even better, it can't speak. I stoop to the depths of even addressing you in this rotten tongue and you can't understand me..."