DEATH GUARD: POXWROUGHT VECTOR
"Decay is the true form of eternity."
Among the festering ranks of the Death Guard, where bloated warriors and disease-ridden engines spread Nurgle’s gifts across the galaxy, there exists a nightmarish harbinger known as the Poxwrought Vector.
A being utterly remade by the Plague God’s perverse blessings, the Poxwrought Vector is the living embodiment of rot and entropy. Once a mortal, perhaps once even a proud warrior of the Imperium, the Poxwrought has long since transcended such meager origins. Now, it is little more than a walking vessel of pestilence — a shambling monstrosity swollen with foul gases, necrotic contagions, and ceaseless, gurgling vitality.
Where the Poxwrought Vector treads, decay follows like a tide. Entire worlds have fallen to ruin in its wake, their cities crumbling into disease-choked ruins without a shot being fired.
Appearance and Nature
The Poxwrought Vector is grotesque even by Death Guard standards. Its flesh is a bloated patchwork of weeping sores, hardened cysts, and mechanical augmentations welded directly into necrotic tissue. Strange vats, pipes, and nozzles jut from its back and arms, constantly venting vile, toxic mists into the air. These clouds are thick with spores, bacteria, and virulent nano-plagues engineered through dark and forbidden means.
Its armor, originally an ancient mark of Adeptus Astartes plate, has been fused with organic corruption, pitted and swollen with growths. Great, rusted syringes, pathogen injectors, and plague-infused weaponry sprout from its limbs, turning its very body into an arsenal of biological horror.
Role in Battle
The Poxwrought Vector is a force multiplier of death among Death Guard forces. Acting as a living vector for Nurgle's plagues, it saps the strength of enemy forces simply by its presence. The miasma that spills from its body weakens enemy armor, rots flesh, jams weapons, and gnaws at the very soul.
In combat, the Poxwrought Vector strides implacably forward, shrugging off wounds that would fell even other Plague Marines. Enemies who attempt to strike it find their weapons corroded or their flesh dissolving from splashes of infectious bile. Should the Vector reach enemy lines, it unleashes a catastrophic eruption of disease, ripping apart squads with unnatural strength and overwhelming them with waves of noxious filth.
Often deployed at the heart of Death Guard advance formations, the Poxwrought Vector is especially feared in close-quarters combat zones, where its plagues can spread quickly and devastatingly among confined enemy forces.
Wargear
Infected Gauntlets and Bile-Injectors: Weapons fused directly into the Poxwrought’s body, capable of tearing armor apart and injecting necrotizing agents into any surviving flesh.
Toxic Vent Systems: Back-mounted emitters constantly spray clouds of spore-laden gas, reducing visibility and causing debilitating biological effects on any non-Nurgle forces nearby.
Plague-Mortis Engine: An internal reactor of disease that can be unleashed in desperate moments, causing an explosion of contaminated bile and plague spores that can annihilate anything within close proximity.
Special Abilities
Aura of Entropic Decay: Enemy units within close range suffer penalties to their armor resilience and are more susceptible to mortal wounds as their flesh and wargear crumble away.
Unholy Resilience: Like all of Nurgle’s favored, the Poxwrought Vector is brutally hard to kill, able to ignore wounds that would lay low lesser beings.
Poxburst Cataclysm: When slain (if slain), the Poxwrought Vector detonates in a foul explosion of rot and disease, spreading contagions that linger long after its corpse has slumped to the ground.
Legends and Infamy
Throughout Imperial records — often redacted and classified — there are chilling accounts of worlds lost not to open invasion, but to unseen plagues that began with a single figure sighted in the mist. Survivors, when they exist, speak of a hulking shape coughing and gurgling through city streets as people fell dying around it.
Among the Death Guard themselves, the Poxwrought is seen not merely as a weapon, but as a saint of disease — a sacred vessel of Nurgle’s endless creativity in rot.
Some whisper that particularly "gifted" Poxwrought Vectors are granted the honor of becoming lesser Daemon Princes, their bloated forms transcending into true daemonic status.
"Why fight the inevitable? Embrace decay, and in rotting death, find endless life."
— The Poxwrought Vector