Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

I watched the newcomers surge into the massive chamber, the swarm of Canoptek Spyders, Scarabs, Tomb Stalkers and Tomb Sentinels all scuttling over the walls while the Wraiths flocked around the five floating Crypteks hovering high above the battlefield, carried by small anti-grav platforms. An energy field extending from the shrouded balcony they’d just leapt off of covered them, shielding them from immediate retaliation by my artillery bioforms. 

My curiosity got the better of me, and I watched as the lead Cryptek, the one whom I immediately identified as the one I’d slapped into a wall, waved the oversized staff in his hand. A beam of iridescent light that shone in colours I couldn’t name lashed out from its tip, slamming into the head of a Neurothrope with no less power than what a Devastator Cannon could unleash. Expectably, the Neurothrope’s shields only held for an instant before they faltered and the creature that was little more than a floating, oversized brain in an armoured casing burst apart into a shower of gore. 

I swiftly altered the network linking every synapse creature into my own off-brand version of a Broodmind, and tightly controlled the rippling web of energy linking my Neurothropes into a single weave of psychic power. The floating twat had instantly identified a crucial node to uphold the rest of the psychic network, and had I not been ready to fix the issue as it came up, the harmonised channelling might have come undone from that single attack. 

Exocrines and Biovores across the field switched targets, half opening fire at the floating Crypteks to test their protective force field and the rest targeting either the new swarm of Canoptek constructs, prioritising Wraiths and Sentinels, or laying into the section of the seemingly innocent wall I had seen the Crypteks come from, and from where I could still sense the energy powering the forcefield around the Crypteks to be coming from. Each impact created a crater the size of a hab-block, and the artillery fire didn’t abate for seconds, tearing chunk after chunk of the dark material making up the architecture without pause. 

The first sign that I was on the right track came when the Necrons — aside from the Destroyers — all switched gears, swapping targets. My infantry and shock troops went largely ignored as a hail of unliving green beams rained down on my artillery bioforms, swiftly joined by the swarm of Canoptek constructs falling upon them. Too bad for them, I’d channelled my own psychic power to reinforce the Neurothropes’ psychic shielding for just long enough for them to finish casting their overcharged Warp Lance, powered by their combined psychic might. 

The Immaterial lance of otherworldly energy lunged forward, powered not just by the soul energy I was willing to give it, but also from the Neurothropes draining all my other drones of a substantial amount of their bio-energy. 

A Lokhust Heavy Destroyer was all but vaporised as the Warp Lanced went through it without slowing, but it was only the first of many caught in the blast before it slammed into the already present crater on the bulkhead. The wounded gate had just started the slow process of mending itself, but the Warp Lance burrowed into it deeply, vaporising the material making it up for meters upon meters. I felt it peter out less than two metres before fully breaking through to the other side. 

Note to self: expand my options and devote a shitload of processing power to developing a modular organic augmenter that would empower psychic attacks by syphoning bio-energy. Better yet, develop a bio-energy-to-soul-energy converter based on how Neurothropes work, if at all possible. Class 1 priority on the latter, Class 2 on the former. Put it on the to-do list.

‘[Acknowledged]’ my primary mind-core responded, and I put that issue out of my mind for the moment. 

As expected, the Crypteks lost their shit, despite having all but erased all my artillery bioforms from the battlefield. From their perspective, they had been too slow, and they could not allow any more of them to take to the field if they wanted to give the bulkhead time to do its necrodermis magic and mend itself. 

Unfortunately for them, my shock troops and regular combat drones had spent the time they wasted on targeting my artillery units, tearing apart weapon emplacements, automatic turrets, and a pair of faux-Carnifexes, even managed to yank a focusing crystal off the top of a Monolith, leaving only a single Particle Whip in operation. On top of tearing through the distracted mass of Immortals, of course, they might have been the least dangerous of my enemy’s troops, but their Gauss weapons could still one-shot most of my drones if they got lucky and actually hit them. That would have made them an easy counter to the sluggish artillery bioforms, but I’d made sure all those had swarms of small flying drones surrounding them as chaff to eat up the green beams seeking to unmake them. On top of that, all my bigger drones had ablative armour ready to shed their surface layers one after another when struck by Gauss weapons, so even without the swarms, they could tank one or two shots before they became lethal.

Half the Canoptek Wraiths disappeared, fading out of existence like a bunch of heat mirages. It was only through me devoting an inordinate amount of processing power to workshopping new prototype spacetime sensors for catching beings lingering just halfway phased-out of realspace that I had the faintest of ideas about where they were going. I could have guessed, in retrospect. They were coming to murder the shit out of me in my little bunker.

I was curious what they’d do, so I let them, sending a batch of my most promising stealth drones to crawl up the walls and hang above the Crypteks, ready to drop down on their heads while a score of them also crawled up to the now revealed and demolished balcony. If I were lucky, they’d be able to take out whatever was generating that energy shield, and then the Crypteks would have to deal with a sudden downpour of Lictors and my personally designed assassin drones. 

The lead Cryptek released a pulse of exotic energy from his stave, and the four other ones behind him did the same with their weird, obsidian-tipped staffs. The ground, dozens of metres down, quaked, then a ripple ran through it as if the reinforced floor were the surface of a disturbed lake. Then a wave came, crashing through the chamber from end to end and throwing every combatant with their feet on the ground, the air, tumbling ass over teakette, which unfortunately made them easy targets for the skulking Deathmarks, and even the Immortals got in a few dozen lucky shots at the temporarily immobilised drones. 

A moment later, a set of eight obsidian pylons — notably not of the Blackstone kind — rose across the chamber, rocky material tearing free of the walls, floor, pillars, statues and other architectural elements to form the floating obelisks. They crackled with green arcs of energy cascading over their surfaces, and I sensed them syphoning some exotic energy from their surroundings, which they funnelled up to the Crypteks floating above. 

Obelisk Nodes. I thought the name popped into my mind a moment after I’d first laid eyes on them. They were the tools of Geomancers, the Crypteks specialising in the techno-arcane field of study, the Imperium dubbed ‘Alchemy’. My plans shifted to account for the fact that all Crypteks I was seeing had just identified their specialisation, thereby narrowing the list of tricks I had to worry about.

The Canoptek Wraiths phased into existence inside my bunker, annoyingly bypassing my wards, barriers and psychically infused chitinous armour. It was fine, I would just keep altering them, optimising, returning, reworking. My sensors had detected the dimensional disturbance of a phased-out Wraith’s presence, and if it was possible to sense them, I did see why it wouldn’t be possible to stop them from phasing through my stuff. I just needed to work on it.

Their scythes, bladed limbs and long, serpentine tails ending in mono-molecular blades lashed out, tearing through the soft insides of the decoy clones of myself I’d left out and about. 

The decoys all acted appropriately shocked and outraged at the ambush, and they exploded into action as one. Beads of Eldritch flesh in their ribcages came alive, and tendrils tore free of the clones’ bodies, not my smooth, ivory white ones but miniature versions of the tendrils Tyranid bioships had on them. Some Wraiths were quick enough to phase out and escape; most were not. Tendrils curled around them, and the metallic spines of the Canoptec Wraiths crunched like the pieces of scrap they were. Some activated Transdimensional Beamers, sending a clone or two into an extra-dimensional vacation, while others fired wildly with much less effective weapons. 

These things were made to maintain the Tomb Worlds while the Necrons slumbered; their limbs and phase tech were meant to be used in fixing machinery without having to take it apart. It was no surprise they weren’t exactly designed for combat or hit-and-run tactics. It must have been somewhat embarrassing for the Necrons that their next best assassin units after Deathmarks were literal maintenance robots. 

Then I made all my clones fall over, feigning death once their chest-burster alien tendrils came alive, which too grew slack after making all remaining Wraiths in the dome inoperable. Okay then, it was showtime. I had gathered enough data on the effectiveness of previous stealth drone designs to construct a new prototype that would become the final piece I needed to go through with the plan I’d concocted. Of course, there was the chance of whatever trap — because there was sure to be one — was waiting for me on the other side of the bulkhead would blow my plan to smithereens, but what could I do but gamble and trust myself to get through it when the alternative was giving up?

My little dome bunker collapsed inward, reforming into my Avatar while the thick necrodermis dome surrounding it remained in place. I strode out through the opening, then leapt into action, drawing attention to myself by spawning a dozen new Draugr and faux-Tyranid drones with each step. I moved faster than Immortals could track, swifter than the searching beams could follow, and even the Deathmarks couldn’t quite hit me. The beams their weapons shot might have been terribly fast, but I was just as fast when I pushed myself, not that I needed to when I could dodge even before they pulled the triggers. Through my aura, I saw it all, and even if I didn’t have a proper Divination or Warp-based danger sense, it certainly looked like I did from the outside. 

I leapt up, kicking off the ground and cratering it behind me as I shot off like a missile, inwardly grinning as I commanded my dutiful little stealth drones to go ham on that energy field generator they’d managed to dig out of the wall. The shield covering the Crypteks vanished just as I reached it, and then I was upon them, weaving past the iridescent beam coming from the lead Cryptek and lashing out with a vicious backhand powerful enough to pulverise his head even if it was made of pure fucking titanium. 

He vanished, like the slippery eel he was, reappearing a dozen metres away with his stave already aimed my way. A single note of an ethereal song rang out, and something rippled through space, expanding from one of the other Crypteks who held a strange object. It reached my Avatar the instant it sounded out, and I felt … something. I stretched the next nanosecond into a relative minute, running an in-depth analysis and diagnostics. The fucker had somehow compromised the structural integrity of every single cell in my body; the tougher it used to be, the softer it was now. My carapace armour might as well have been made of playdough for all it was worth after that ‘debuff’ hit me. 

Not that I cared, appearing next to the asshole who tried to dissect Selene again, even faster than before, soul and bio-energy burning through my body as Eldretch flesh rebuilt my form from the ground up. One of my hands came down on the hand holding the Tremorstave, shifting into a bonesword that tore right through his metallic wrist. The other one snapped out, aiming to cut off his head. 

He disappeared again, though notably, his hand didn’t regrow, nor was he able to recover his stave before it was snatched up by a gargoyle that promptly swallowed it, together with the hand still gripping it. I turned around, hand shifting into a massive bio-plasma cannon thrice as large as the rest of my body combined — sourced from the Exocrine template — and unleashed a point-blank pocket sun on the cunt trying to use his Harp of Dissonance on me again. My Avatar wasn’t cheap to make, and his earlier stunt cost me a whole bunch of bio-energy, so it filled me with glee to watch the Necron be reduced to a pile of molten slag raining down on my troops down below. 

Down on the ground, the floor quaked under the control of two of the Crypteks that’d retreated from my fight, but that didn’t stop my newly made artillery drones from finishing what their predecessors started and blowing apart the last of what remained of the bulkhead. I’d thought of slipping through the moment the path was open, but I was glad I didn’t, as a Gauss beam nearly half a metre thick tore through the tunnel bored through the bulkhead and vaporised anything standing in its path, then an energy shield came down on the other side of the bulkhead. 

Annoying, but not as much as the last standing Monolith was when it finally fired, unleashing its Particle Whip at full force and tearing through the chamber with such force that by the time the beam of antimatter cut off, there was a chasm stretching across the chamber’s floor. Of course, it erased a good bit of my drones as well in the process, and limited the paths my groundbound troops could take to get to the bulkhead, forcing them through a small remaining section of the floor right in front of the Monolith.

A moment later, the massive Eternity Gate embedded into the Monolith’s face came alive, but instead of spitting out a new horde of Necrons for me to deal with, it sucked in anything and everything within a few dozen metres of it like a colossal vacuum cleaner. Some of my drones resisted, claws digging into the floor or latching onto pillars to resist the supernatural pull of what I only then recognised as a Portal of Exile … essentially a Transdimensional Beamer, turned into a portal with the suction force of a miniature black hole. Super neat, but really goddamned annoying.

I spawned a dozen gargoyle-drones, throwing a few at each of the Crypteks while I focused on their leader. I kicked off a hardened platform of air, flying at him like a missile while sharpening my senses, catching the moment his annoying emergency teleporter activated. There was a brief surge of exotic energy in a small device fixed to his metallic spine, hidden halfway by his ribcage. I kicked off a telekinetic platform again and flew at him, and without any visible hand motions, I reached out, my telekinetic grasp gripping that tool until it turned into scrap. 

The Cryptek barely had time to put his stave between me and his body when he noticed his sudden lack of a failsafe, and even then, he was sent flying off like a metallic rocket, crashing into a pillar, bouncing off of it and spinning through the air wildly before he hit the floor, skipping across it like a rubber ball to bleed off momentum. 

I slammed into the floor where he landed not a moment later, and before he could reorient himself, my arm once more shifted into a bio-plasma cannon. The floor surged up to form a shield above his prone, broken body and met the discharged plasma, but it wasn’t enough. Some of it splattered across its surface, sent flying off in every direction in thick rivulets, but some bored through the geomantic shield and fell upon the Cryptek. He didn’t scream; Necrons didn’t do that, but the parts of his body struck by the plasma grew white hot, turning into molten slag. 

The Destroyer Lord, flanked by a dozen of his maddened kin, was charging at me, and I was forced to dodge around, which was made even worse when the head Cryptek’s one working arm was suddenly gripping a small pistol aimed my way. 

I made the snap decision then and there to go through with my plan, and a dozen new Draugr exploded from my Avatar, leaping at the Destroyers. Among them was a single stealth drone, the newest prototype design created based on my previous testing, using all the cloaking techniques that the data proved worked best against Necrons’ sensors. Inside it was my soulbone skeleton, and in a blink, I made it my new Avatar, turning the previous body I’d just departed into a decoy. 

The Cryptek’s pistol fired, a beam of familiar antimatter particles leaping forth from its barrel and tearing into the space where my ‘avatar’ used to be. My decoy drone leapt at him, all but tackling the Cryptek as it struggled. The anti-matter pistol fired again, blowing a basketball-sized hole through my Avatar’s flank, and a moment later, a beam of green energy slammed into its back, which was when I activated the self-destruction command on the decoy. 

A cataclysmic explosion shook the chamber, erasing the head Cryptek, the Destroyer Lord and two Heavy Destroyers along with numerous other lesser Necrons. Pillars collapsed, the walls quaked, and the shockwave made even the bulkhead shudder. When the energy shield at the end of the tunnel I’d made through it split open for a moment, the massive Gauss weapon waiting just for that fired as expected, erasing a dozen Neurothropes and Lictors from existence, but it was too slow to catch a single invisible, untraceable creature from slipping through. 

A quick telepathic order swept through the psudo-Broodmind as my new Avatar disappeared into a dark tunnel, and a moment later, a deep rumble ran through this section of the Hollow Sun. In the chamber I’d just escaped from, every single remaining drone of mine ignited every last lick of their bio-energy, devouring their own biomass to boost the power of the explosion caused by their self-destruction countermeasures, activating all at once. If any sensor might have caught even a whiff of me slipping away, I was sure the explosion would have taken care of that problem neatly. 

Alrighty then, one target down, two more to go … then I’ll have to figure out how to actually subvert this oversized space-station masquerading as a sun for myself.