Haemonculus and Chronos Parasite Engine's

Kadderah Tole was loving this.
She had begun to tire of the high-altitude combat against the Emperor’s little machine-drones. True enough that their pain at seeing their clumsy experiments rent and destroyed provided a certain distraction, but that juice was far too easy to squeeze. And studying their poor attempts to fuse flesh and machine did little to further her own surgical endeavours.
	After all, one did not rise in the haemonculi order by mimicking the crude fleshworks of the dead Emperor’s little machine-men.
But this. This she enjoyed.
Her experiments, fitted with anti-grav engines that bulged beneath their purpling skin, had always been used to swimming through air. And the high altitude of the Rubrik Spine Range had persuaded her to fit them with pressurised masks – the seals were not perfect, of course. For what was the fun if they did not choke a bit on the thin air?
Or the water, now, as the case might be.
She herself was elated to finally use the gills she’d vat-grown for herself two centuries back. Their lack of use had become the subject of a few sharp jests at a party she’d thrown. Everyone had quite a laugh at her expense.
Speaking of which…
	Her Cronos reached the bladed things on the ceiling, lashing out with the bristled tendrils that she’d fleshworked from its arms, wrapping the cleaver-armed necron in a revolting embrace. She watched as the bristles of needle-thin spikes in the tendrils ignited, their power fields spiking the metal monstrosity in three hundred different places and injecting acid directly into its system.
Both Cronos flesh-construct and bladed berserker shivered together, like lovers consummating a night of passion, and she knew the Cronos was in as much pain – if not more – than its victim.
Teaches you to make fun of my gills, Xanther, she thought with a lopsided grin, as the being that was once her old drinking companion let go of the victim and reached for another. One of his tendrils had fallen victim to a necron blade, and drifted past, still wriggling around the ailing Destroyer.
	Tole kicked her way to the still form and looked into its eyes, supping on the anger that burned there. She flicked through her implant toolkit and drew out a necrodermis needle – fortunate she had one, for they were uncommon – and plunged the spike into the necron’s primary fluid secretor.
The reactor bile filling the crystal vial was such a lovely shade of yellow.
Extremely rare, this substance. Terribly toxic. Unsubtle, true, but effective in the extreme. And you know the necrons – it was so bothersome to harvest it before they phased. A pure sample was hard to come by. But these metal ruffians didn’t seem to be phasing at all.
	In fact, she got a closer look at this Destroyer than she’d ever had before, and felt a certain kinship. Clearly this being had once been one of its standardised kin, yet the genius of creation had come upon it, and like her it had decided to make itself a work of violent art. Each bladed limb, each protruding pneumatic chest-spear and bristling weapon had been fused to its frame. Tole patted its dead cheek with her grafted third arm, and pushed off him with the extended spine-tail that made her move so gracefully in the water.
Another Destroyer floated past her, and she looked up. More constructs were laying into the bladed monsters, flagella-like tentacles lashing and wrapping. Bladed spider limbs of the necron body-artisans meeting the whips and flesh hooks of her own work.
	Dear friends, she thought, mentally greeting the rest of her party guests. Meet your ancient and feared foe, the necrons.
Do try not to laugh.
Orikan speared his staff through a tracked construct – nothing so much as a brain-dead corpse wired into a small tank, its skin sallow and pumped with embalming fluid. Even in his lightform, one that only existed partially in the physical plane, he did not want to touch it.
Trazyn. Only Trazyn would be perverse enough to collect such creatures.