“Radblight Covenant”

Underhive legend or cursed truth—it depends how long you survive the telling.

No one remembers the exact moment when U-238 unsealed his suit, but everyone in Sector Cindercoil remembers the fallout.

They were once a Van Saar cell like any other: precise, isolated, secretive. Engineers of the dark, whispering to plasma cores and welding truths into coils older than the Imperium itself. But as the Guilders demanded more. As Helmawr’s edicts grew more ruthless. As the Tithe bled them dry, the Radblight Covenant watched friends and kin collapse in spasms of glowing sickness. Their STC fragment—miraculous, powerful—had no failsafes. Just pressure. Just production.

The suits were supposed to save them. The exo-thermic life-sustainers. But the suits didn’t save anyone—just slowed the rot. Like bandaging a lasgun wound with paper.

Then U-238 made the Covenant.

He tore off the mask. Not out of madness—but purpose. Let the poison flow. Let it burn. He told the others: they had served Necromunda. Now they would curse it. One by one, they followed. Radium-226 was the first to answer, rigging his rad-beam so hot it left after-images on the stone. Cesium-137 wired his lungs into his rifle barrel. Polonium, Strontium, Americium, even grim little Iodine-131—they each cast off their names and their future.

Now they walk unmasked. The Radblight Covenant. They don’t sneak. They glow. Walls blister as they pass. Vermin die in their wake. And the unlucky who breathe their trail begin to cough… and bleed… and then scream.

They don’t want mercy. They don’t want a cure. They want the Hive to remember what it made them do.

And when the plasma burns white-hot and the Geiger counter screams, that’s not the weapon. That’s laughter.