Step into the thrilling world of Warhammer Age of Sigmar as the Harbingers traverse the Mortal Realms, rallying their forces for a grand showdown. In this captivating installment of fiction, the spotlight falls on Braggit, a mischievous Rabble-rowza, as he stirs up a tribe of Moonclan grots, setting the stage for an epic tale of chaos and adventure.
With a great deal of huffing and panting, Braggit Big-Talka hauled himself out of the sea of grots and up onto a jutting rock. The passageway through which his army now surged would do nicely for some big yellin’, with a high ceiling and lots of space for echoes. He took a deep breath and let loose.
‘CAM ON YOU ZOGGIN’ SLACKAS! GET MOVIN’!’
The command shot up and down the passageway with the force of a rabid Mangler Squig. With each word that punched its way past the eardrums of the pathetic layabouts around him, he felt a wild rush of power jolting around his brainpan and heightening his frenzy ever further. Some of the grots running nearest to him tripped and fell at the sheer volume of his words, only to be crushed underfoot by the ones behind them.
‘DO YOU WANT THEM TROGGS CRUNCHIN’ UP YER ANKLES?’ he howled, green face framed by the wicked teeth of his squig-skull armour. Despite the surge of complaining, no one dared to slow down. Every so often, a squig would bounce past the gibbering horde, and Braggit offered them a shout or two of encouragement to make them extra-boingy and enthusiastic.
From the far end of the passage came a series of yelps. They rippled through the horde and Braggit skidded to a halt just in time to see waves of grots slamming into the backs of those in front. A clamour of groans and complaints broke out until Braggit’s piercing screech cut through it again.
‘WOTCHA DOIN’, YOU GITHEADS? KEEP ON RUNNIN’!’
A smudge of red wove through the crowd as Snozznab Squigtamer yanked his excited mount to a stop in front of his glorious leader.
‘Oi, Brag—uh, boss!’ Snozznab said, correcting himself before Braggit’s scowl, ‘the scouts are back, an’ dey found another one of dem ’orrible humie lairs. This one’s mega shiny and blockin’ the entire way forward. Da ladz reckon you should take a look.’
‘Again?’ Braggit bubbled with fury as they began to clear a path through the dazed runners. ‘This is gettin’ ridiculous!’
With a lot of sproinging, shouting, and filthy insults, the pair cleared the army and followed the scouts up the rest of the passageway, taking to the shadows this time. At the lip of the passage, two dead humies were slumped where the scouts had sneakily offed them. They wore lurid orange fabric and armour so shiny that it made Braggit’s eyes hurt. But the true surprise lay past them as he squinted into the light.
A great set of glass steps ahead of them descended into a sweltering cavern beyond. Pillars of twisted glass stretched from floor to twinkling ceiling. Each one was carved with images of strange surface creatures. Huts had been built down the sides of the walls, all structured around a central plaza displaying dozens of glass warrior sculptures – some stunties and pointy-ears, but mostly shiny humies with their zig-zags and hammers. All were lit magically from within by flickery fire magic. People milled about below, basking in the orange light and going about their daily business.
It was all so eye-searingly pretty.
Braggit fumed all the way back to where the army waited, muttering a steady stream of obscenities that had even his underlings keeping their distance. By the time he reached the waiting sea of expectant faces, he had worked himself up into a proper strop. Fuelled by his headache and rage, and vibrating with the promise of so much destruction to be wrought, his voice was unleashed in a volcanic boom.
‘I’VE BLEEDIN’ HAD IT WITH YOU LOT! IF YOU DON’T GET DOWN DERE AND SMASH EVERY SINGLE SHINY GLASS CHUNK, I’LL LET DA TROGGS CATCH UP AND GOBBLE UP DA LOT OF YOUZ!’
The war cry that went up from the army, of equal parts fear and enthusiasm, was so loud that Braggit was sure every humie would be stopped dead in their tracks. As the tide surged down the passageway once again, he pictured Sigmar’s boys paling in fear at the bubbling uproar approaching their lair. Statues shaking and tinkling with distant stomping. The desperate scramble for weapons, not knowing how hopelessly outnumbered they were. Oh, he was going to enjoy this.
The mob spilled from the top passage so fast that many of them simply missed the stairs, pouring down the walls, many dying on impact but countless more swarming past to take their place. Braggit ran at the head of it all, panting hard, suddenly conscious of how easy it would be to get crushed under a stampede of his own creation. Screaming was already belting out from below. The arcane embers glinted across a gathering sea of swords and spears as guards hurried into the square, but anyone with eyes in their head could tell that it wouldn’t be enough.
Braggit pointed his crescent sickle, calling forth his bat squigs and whooping, as Snozznab drove his squig straight through the first glass pillar. Many squig riders followed suit, getting their mounts all stuck up with glass shards and turning them into spiky wrecking-balls. Waves of grots collided with the pathetic humie defence force, and in the time taken to skewer one git, three more were leaping onto each guard’s back to stab them to death. Braggit struggled up the side of one of the warrior statues just as a Mangler Squig sent it flying. He rode the toppling statue, cackling all the while, relishing in the reverberation of his own voice as it empowered every greenskin within earshot.
He leapt from the glowing glass monument just in time to watch it smash into a group of fleeing civilians. One straggler managed to miss the impact and changed direction, but Braggit reached out with his sickle and caught him by the neck, tearing his head clean away. Where each droplet of blood fell, a fresh mushroom pushed its way from the earth with unnatural speed to replace Aqshy’s brilliance with a dank green glow.
All around the cackling grot, the tinkling of shattered glass erupted in a disharmonic symphony. He hurled sets of crystal cups at his own lads to spur them to work faster, screeching with glee every time he hit a bullseye on one of their heads. One of his men stacked boxes of ornaments into a great tower before another swung their giant flail into the side, creating a shrill smash followed by a fountain of shards.
Nearby, one of his shamans had stuck his staff into a crack in the main stairs and was pumping them full of spores. The glass groaned and creaked as it filled up with more and more gaseous green fog. Braggit covered his ears just in time for them to explode outwards with a deafening boom, pieces of stairway shrapnel raining down upon the entire settlement as the air curled with toxic smoke.
A group of gitz emerged from a nearby ruined hut, their hands stuffed full of glass baubles – glimmerfly orbs, small animal sculptures and other strangely shaped items that Braggit didn’t recognise.
‘Hey, boss! Can we take these wiv us?’ asked one, waving a piece of orange glass under Braggit’s nose. The cantankerous grot reached for his underling’s loot as if to inspect it before smacking it all from his arms. It fell to the rocky ground in a shimmer of exploding shards.
‘No, zog-brain! Are you stupid? It’ll waste our—’
Braggit stopped short as his eyes fell upon the others’ loot. One of them was clutching a small box of glass bottles.
‘How’d ya get so many of those?’ he asked, kicking aside the first whining grot and giving the bottle-bearer his full attention. Brewing their fungal elixirs was all well and good, but without something to lug them around in, they slopped out pretty fast. Bottles would be a fine prize indeed.
‘Dere were loadz of ’em, boss,’ Bottle-grot grinned. ‘Dey were in boxes like this at the start of da next tunnel. Think they’re bound for dat humie city, Hammery Aksha. It’s full of glass near the realmgate.’
The last of the glass sculptures shattered and winked out into total darkness. Slowly, hazily, the cave filled with smothering green loonlight. It illuminated Braggit’s face once more, his face shaded by the lunatic gurning of his squig-skull helmet.
‘Ya know what, boyz? I just had da greatest idea of where we can go next.’
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