Home › Weapons & Vehicles › Tyranids › Deathspitter, Devourer & Fleshborer
1 / 4 · Click to enlargeLore & history
To face a Tyranid swarm at range is to learn that the Hive Mind's projectiles are every bit as alive and hungry as the beasts that fire them. A Tyranid ranged weapon—whether the compact Fleshborer fused to a Termagant's forearms, the writhing Devourer cone of a Gargoyle or Carnifex, or the muscular Deathspitter carried by Tyranid Warriors—is a multi-organism symbiotic colony. One organism serves as the muscular firing tube and incubator sac, while the 'ammunition' inside is a brood of ravenous, bio-engineered insectoid larvae, worms or beetles.
When a Deathspitter contracts in a violent peristaltic spasm, it hurls a Blind-Maggot beetle downrange at supersonic speed. Upon striking a Space Marine's ceramite plate or an Imperial bunker wall, the beetle's chitinous shell shatters and detonates in a pressurized spray of hyper-corrosive digestive acid that melts metal, bone and flesh into steaming slurry.
Unlike mechanical guns that can run out of ammunition crates or jam in the mud of an attrition war, a Tyranid warrior-beast's Deathspitter or Devourer is nourished continuously by the creature's own voracious metabolism. As long as the swarm feeds on biomass—even pausing mid-battle to gulp down torn flesh and spilled blood—the weapon-symbiote's brood-chambers continue to spawn fresh Blind-Maggots, Fleshworms and Borer Beetles.
Design, mechanism & battlefield effect
Fused directly into the host creature's arteries and nerve trunks, a Deathspitter, Devourer or Fleshborer draws oxygen and nutrient-rich blood from its carrier to gestate and sustain its brood of living ammunition. When the host sends a neural firing impulse—or when a bio-electric shock prods the symbiote—powerful sphincter-muscles and gas-bladders contract to expel the ammunition organism at lethal velocity.
A Fleshborer fires hard-shelled Borer Beetles that chew through flak armour and lay eggs inside the victim; a Devourer unleashes showers of blind, squirming Fleshworms that burrow along the victim's nerves straight to the brain; and a Venom Cannon fires supersonic crystals of solidified electrostatic poison that shatter battle tanks.
Patterns, variants & doctrine
Beyond the Termagant's Fleshborer, the neural-shredding Devourer and the acid-explosive Deathspitter, heavy Tyranid bio-artillery includes the anti-tank Heavy Venom Cannon, the barbed-seed Stranglethorn Cannon, and the living Spore Mine launchers of Biovores.
Notable patterns & relic examples
- Deathspitter with Slimer Maggots: Heavy bio-cannon symbiote carried by Tyranid Warriors and Carnifexes, firing exploding acid-filled larvae.
- Devourer & Brainleech Worms: Cone-shaped bio-weapon firing clouds of ravenous worms that eat their way through a victim's nervous system to the brain.
- Fleshborer & Borer Beetles: The ubiquitous living rifle of Termagant broods, firing razor-mandibled beetles that burrow through armour and bone.
- Heavy Venom Cannon & Biovore Spore Launcher: Long-range Tyranid bio-artillery capable of knocking out battle tanks and seeding living minefields.
Wielded & Fielded By
Characters (3)
The Swarmlord · Blade of the Hive Mind
Old One Eye · The Beast of Calth
Deathleaper · Terror of Leviathan
