Another week, another chapter in the tale of the Techpriestess! Today, we conclude last weekend's introduction of a would-be antagonist to everyone's favorite heretek, continued from >>96489280

>Inquisitor Dominic Corsini spent the next thirty years of his life pursuing Salafié, reclaiming one machine-ravaged world after another, yet always one step behind his prey. On Penatares IV, he saw a once-verdant agriworld reduced to an ashen desert scoured by mountain-sized automated refineries that crept across lifeless plains beneath a smog-choked sky. On Fulkengrad, he witnessed thousands upon thousands of innocent Imperial citizens entombed in a vault deep beneath the planet's surface, victims of a truly blasphemous experiment. There they lay, alive but not alive, dead but not dead, their minds and very souls drawn out of their pallid forms by arcane neural circuitry, forever lost in a synthetic "afterlife" of the Priestess' design.

>Here and on countless other worlds, the works of Salafié had familiarized Inquisitor Corsini with all the myriad horrors technology can visit upon mankind. And with each year, the Inquisitor's hatred grew, reaching such a terrible frenzy that merely to escape from the depredations of the Priestess was to become a suspect. In those days, the fate of many who survived her atrocities was almost worse than those who perished in her grasp.

>Once, the Inquisitor had even seen Salafié from afar: Pursuing her to the peak of a spire high above a burning city, Inquisitor Corsini burst out into the tempest-wracked night and witnessed a crimson specter ascending the ramp of a dropship across a landing pad slick with rain and crowded with loathsome, shambling automata. Yet she did not even turn to look at him as he opened fire, and as the mechanical horde pressed in around him, the Inquisitor could only watch as the dropship boosted into orbit where some unknown ship doubtless waited to whisk the Priestess away beyond his grasp...