Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

I repeated the process of setting up my surveillance network on every world we passed through, the designs of my drones improving as iterative optimisation algorithms ran in the background of my mind, permanently. Simulations, upon simulations run beside them, testing hundreds, thousands of varied designs, discarding the words performing ones, keeping the better ones, melding them, perfecting them, testing again, improving again in a hundred different ways, testing, perfecting, repeat. I stuck the cogitators in underground cavern systems I’d carved out on agri worlds, in abandoned parts of old, closed-off sewer systems in less-populated worlds, and I ignored the few Forge Worlds I passed entirely. 

The priesthood of Mars had all left, taking everything they could move with them and leaving behind exploited, ruined planets full of toxic fumes, vast metallic complexes and much else along the same veins. Nothing usable. Some of the abandoned Mechanicus shrines were even primed to blow fusion warheads when someone approached them. Cute. 

But that was only defence, passive defence at that, and I had always been of the firm belief that a good offence was at least part of a good defence, even if it was too much of a gamble to rely solely on your offence to make defence meaningless. I was unwilling to just stay passive, sit on my ass and twiddle my thumbs while waiting for Trazyn to work his magic on his comrades. My main problem with these Necrons was the Webway; they could use it to pop up in random places, and they had ridiculous stealth, phase technology and all that, on top of that gravitational dampener and the super cannon. 

On the topic of that cannon, something was bothering me. Why did it only hit the edge of my soul? It hit me from the side, not dead centre. Why? If it hit my soul right in the middle, would it have torn through the superfluous surface layers to hit something actually important, like my memories or something? So why did it-

That was where my soul-thread had been connected to my soul. The soul-thread, which had come in a straight line from my soul, through my Realm and into my soul. A straight fucking line. Now the question was, did the cannon’s payload hitch a ride or just use the thread to aim? What if the Necrons couldn’t aim that thing? They weren’t supposed to understand Immaterial stuff. 

As a first step to defend against that bullshit, I made my remade soul-thread and the one connected to my first Avatar curl and twist, going through empty parts of my Realm and connecting to my soul at strange angles that would hopefully minimise damage, if not throw off the cannon’s aim entirely. It wasn’t absolute defence, not even close, but it made me feel better about myself. It was a good first step. I was doing something. Something that might just work.

Next, back to the topic of the Webway, I wanted to explore its local parts, learn where its entrances were, and what pathways existed. If I could find which paths were connected to the Necrons’ Dolmen Gates and which ones they had access to through other means, that would be a game-changer. I could even stage an invasion straight into the heart of the Hollow Sun, bypassing that nasty anti-teleportation field.  It was a good thing I had a bunch of prisoners I’d grabbed from Ozkan’s lab, and that many of them were Aeldari, even if most were humans that I just decided to keep in stasis until I could plop them down on Vallia Prime. A bunch of Eldars and some Drukhari that were going to be grateful I’d freed them from being lab rats … hopefully. Eldar were weird, but I crossed my fingers as I finally worked up my mind and pulled the bunch of them out of the metaphorical freezer. 

Worst-case scenario, I could go with the nuclear option and tempt them with the idea of stuffing their souls into my Realm, where they’d be free of Slaanesh. Though I’d probably not make that offer to the Dark Eldar. Those fuckers deserved to die in horrible agony. They were probably the most revolting species currently infesting the stars, and I included the Slaught and Daemons in that. 

“Wakey wakey,” I said cheerfully, flicking my fingers and flicking a jolt of Biomancy into each of them that zapped their doozy bodies into full and immediate awareness. Eyes widened, hearts raced, and they leapt to their feet as one, scattering to every corner of the room and dropping into wary combat forms. The sight reminded me of a bunch of sleeping cats snapped awake by a loud noise. 

They barely wore anything, most of them at least. Some had only a few rags on while their torsos still held trails of blood from where they’d been cut up, stuffed in stasis, then healed by me. But a few of them? Well, a few of them had just been stuffed in storage as they were, and Ozkan apparently hadn’t gotten to prying off their shells. One even had a beautiful Singing Spear with its tip aimed right at my throat. 

That one wore the green and white hues of Biel-Tan, the most martial and aggressive of the Craftworlds, often derided by other ones for uselessly clinging to a past glory that will never come again. They were the only ones who still tried to make an empire for themselves … or had they abandoned that path by the time the Great Rift opened?

The other two, still wearing armour, were yellows. Iyanden, the once-greatest Craftworld, is now reduced to little more than a barely-inhabited shell where the dead outnumber the living ten to one. They were nearby, somewhere on the eastern fringe, if I remembered correctly, having suffered a terrible toll at the repeated assaults from Hive Fleet Kraken over the decades and centuries. The others, I didn’t know, not yet. What was the point in reading their minds when they’d likely sense it and hate me for it? Especially when they’ll tell me all I wanted to know willingly anyway?

“I free you from the clutches of that Cryptek, and the first thing you do is point a weapon at me?” I asked in amusement, my voice shifting into the lilting, sing-song notes of the Aeldari language so naturally that I didn’t even notice it myself. The Eldar did, though, going still, their pupils dilating in faint surprise. They did tend to go on about Mon’keigh butchering their noble language with their offensively horrid attempts at speaking it. Then here I was, speaking it with the same fluency as an Eldar.

I was unbothered by the sharp weapon, channelling all the latent psychic potential of its wielder. I had reforged my soulbone skeleton — again — and made a new Storm Ward, both just a bit more potent than their previous iterations. I didn’t fear an Eldar’s Singing Spear even if the wielder could actually move fast enough to stab me with it … which he could not. 

“Where are we, Mon’keigh?” The Biel-Tan Aspect Warrior demanded harshly, his fingers tightening around the spear after a moment, and I could hear the gritting of his teeth. 

“On my ship,” I said, rolling my eyes. “The next time you- or any of you, for that matter call me Mon’keigh, I’m breaking your jaw, just so we’re clear. Since a broken jaw is not conductive for a constructive conversation, I don-“

Atiesh appeared in my hand and swatted the lunging spear aside, sending its tip piercing through thin air. I stepped forward, my free hand clenched into a fist, and I slammed it into the Eldar’s stomach, the entire set of motions taking barely a microsecond and happening so fast that he could watch me do it, but had no time to react.

His breastplate shattered, and his body folded around my fist like a lawn chair, then shot off like a missile, crashing into the far wall. 

“That was rude,” I said dryly, Atiesh still in my hand but now used as a regular walking staff. I met the remaining Eldars’ eyes one by one, seeing wariness, anger, frowns and glares all. “And incredibly stupid. Does anyone else want to have a go? … No? Wonderful. Seems like you have functional survival instincts. Now onto the topic at hand: do any of you have a map, or familiarity with the Webway in this region? The Imperium calls it the Jericho Reach.”

“No one will reveal the secrets of the Aeldari to you, just as we revealed nothing to that soulless abomination,” one of the female Eldar in the back spat, and considering I’d found her barely alive, with just about everything in her body broken and her nervous system showing signs of damage characteristic of overwhelming agony induced directly into it, I believed her. At least I believed that she wouldn’t break under any form of simple torture I could dish out. 

“Do you even know where I found you?” I asked, tilting my head curiously. “Do you have any idea who you were the prisoners of?”

“A Necron, a soulless abomination,” the same woman spoke again, and it seemed the others were willing to let her speak for them. Was she someone important? Curious. “What does it matter?”

“Maybe you would appreciate being in my care if you did, though I suppose your kind doesn’t really remember the War in Heaven quite as clearly as the Necrons, so maybe not.” I shrugged. “But I can see threats and words won’t work, so let me do this instead.”

A spirit stone appeared in my hand, glimmering with the inner light of a captive soul kept safe and imprisoned inside. Ozkan had a bunch of them lying about, discarded like garbage after the Eldar who wore them perished under his ministrations. The Eldar in the room froze, then snarled nearly as one, tension skyrocketing as they prepared to fight to the death to protect the sanctity of one of their kin’s souls.

“Ah!” I held up a hand, wiggling a finger as my psychic power uncoiled, its tendrils gently curling around their bodies. Not tight, never tight, their touch was light, so much so that their presence was barely even felt right up until the one held within their grasp tried to move or wiggle free. Then it squeezed until such attempts stopped. “You won’t believe me, but I won’t hurt this one. Be silent and watch.”

They weren’t. Silent, that is, they screamed at me, cursed me in a dozen dialects and threatened me in a hundred more ways. I snapped a finger, and their jaws slammed shut with teeth-cracking force. They were quite rude. I’d been pretty lucky. Val was much more sensible than they were when I found him … and so was he. I would have punted his ass into the void if he screeched this much right after I saved his life.

My aura enveloped the soul, studying it, feeling out its shape and base form. I didn’t need much, just a vague idea of what the soul’s self-image looked like to get started on crafting a new body for them. Gender, exact height, muscle definition, muscle memory, eye and hair colour, facial structure, voice, stuff like that. I got it in a blink, self-image was kinda easy to read, even as a dead soul, people tended to retain a rather distinct idea of who they were and what they were supposed to look like. 

Then I made it real, holding out my hand and causing a mass of hair-thin tendrils to surge forth, rapidly taking on a vaguely humanoid form before I got to work. I knew how to make Eldar; I’d done it before quite a few times, and this wasn’t the first time I was resurrecting an Eldar from a spirit stone either. Fae had turned out quite well despite being my first attempt at it, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when I finished forming the body and then easily yanked the soul free of the gem, then stuffed it into the empty shell I’d just made. I was even nice enough to make the man clothes so he wouldn’t wake up from the dead stark naked.

Once his soul settled in properly, I sent a jolt of Biomantic energy coursing through his body, that kickstarted his heart and nervous system, bringing him fully back to the land of the living. He woke up with a gasp, eyes wide as he twisted away from my hand that still lingered on the back of his neck by instinct. 

The surge of baffled astonishment I felt from the other Eldar was delicious, and I took undue pleasure from it. An imperious wave of my hand removed the telekinetic binds keeping their mouths shut, but they didn’t go back to screeching immediately, which I took as a good sign. They stared at the newly resurrected man and me, like our brains were physically incapable of processing the impossible sight they had just witnessed. 

“So, how about that?” I asked conversationally, hands on my hips and a single eyebrow raised. “You tell me everything I want to know, and I will repeat what I have just done to every spirit stone I’ve collected from the dearly departed Ozkan’s laboratory. Of course, if you try to shaft me or betray me, I’m going to personally shove your souls down Slaanesh’s throat, so keep that in mind before you start getting ideas. I’m gonna leave you guys to think, I’ll be back in an hour.”

With my bit said, I disappeared from the sealed room, sitting inside a Blackstone Pylon formation powerful enough to stop anyone short of an Alpha Class psyker equivalent from doing so much as a party trick. Silence reigned for a moment as they were left on their lonesome, their telekinetic binds vanishing fully, and then chaos began anew while I watched through a pict-screen, sitting on my couch and sipping some exotic fruit juice. One way or another, they would be helping me, but willing helpers were much more enthusiastic and willing to go the extra mile to ensure my success, so I would aim for that.