I don’t let the daemon close in fully, not willing to let it touch my Avatar after what I’d seen. Who knew what a daemon this powerful could do when a juiced-up feral psyker could warp Selene’s armour?

  So I started with a simple frontal attack to test the creature. An Eldritch Bst — just pure, violent energy — infused with anti-Warp Smite snapped forth from my hand, blooming into existence in the form of a crackling beam of silvery energy connecting me to the incorporeal daemon’s ‘torso’.

  The bst of energy struck it, some of it going straight through its barely cohesive body, but about a third arced out on impact, webbing across its form like questing snakes seeking to devour it bit by bit.

  It didn’t entirely arrest its momentum, but it did go from ‘retivistic speeds’ down to something that could be just barely tracked by the human eye. It let out a roar of rage that reverberated through the fabric of space. Its voice was like nails on a chalkboard, like metal tearing and bending. I watched it impassively, then hit it with another bst, less focused this time. This one didn’t go through, but that was by design, as it finally threw back the demonic cloud of energy by a good few kilometres.

  Bio-energy flowed freely through my body, mending rips and tears inside left in the wake of the wild currents of soul energy I was channelling. I couldn’t half-ass this, not with Selene and Cat behind me, relying on me for protection, so I spared no expense on those strikes and wasn’t afraid to push my Avatar to its limit, knowing I could hold it together by sheer will and by abusing my colossal reserves of bio-energy.

  The fact that the daemonic being was still … existing after those two attacks put it firmly within the Greater Daemon category, and probably into the upper strata of even that lofty designation. Sure, Ka’Bandha could have face-tanked all that with only some trouble, but he was a manifested Bloodthirster, one of the strongest of his lot in existence and they were known for being tough as nails and rgely resistant to ‘icky magic’ besides.

  This … thing practically embodied Change. It was Tzeentchian, for sure, which was another reason why I was being so careful. Fucking Tzeentch.

  Sensing my rising levels of wariness, or maybe the danger my foe represented, a sudden weight appeared in my hand. My fingers wrapped around the staff, my thumb tracing familiar grooves on its body. Maybe if I’d use it in the initial strike, the daemon would have had more of a reaction, but I was, as always, an idiot with the memory of a goldfish, and I’d utterly forgotten about Atiesh until it smmed into my grasp.

  “Annnnathemmma.” The daemon’s voice was a scream and a whisper, each sylble heavy with meaning and yet barely perceptible at the edges of my hearing. The pretentious prick could probably speak normally, but he wanted to make this theatrical? Two can py that game.

  “Parasite.” My own words nded like a hammer-blow against the fabric of space, reverberating with the power of my soul. The daemon twitched when the bst hit it, some of its energy sizzling away into nothingness.

  Its form shifted again, one of its limbs stretching to the side and becoming more and more distinct until I could make out a gangly, feathered arm ending in a cwed hand. That hand was empty one moment, then grasping a gnarly wooden staff the next.

  A pair of slitted eyes burned with intense hatred on its head, and a beak opened wide in a screech as power surged through the staff.

  With Selene and the Sovereign behind me, and the tter still vulnerable to whatever Warp-fuckery this dude was cooking, I stood my ground. Barriers of pure silvery energy snapped into pce before me, the energy within starting to flow into distinct shapes. Hexagrammatic seals. Then, because why not, I used some of my reserve Pariah-flesh — the soul-empowered kind that had some actual effect — and added it in between the st two yers.

  All that happened within a single second, if even that.

  What the staff spat out was … hard to describe. One moment it was a beam of rainbow energy, then curdling fire, then a missile of light, then a shrieking harpy, a pig, a flock of ravens, a pair of twisting serpents, the sun, the moon, the night sky, the forest, the smell of rain, an itch, a lingering touch.

  Between one moment and the next, I was burning, a raging fire consuming me and an insidious power trying to press inwards. I blinked, then jerked in arm at the sudden change, and if you were wondering, ‘what the fuck just happened?’ you weren’t alone; I was thinking the same damned thing myself.

  My soul, deep within the centre of my Realm, pulsed with power, beating back the infernal influence creeping up towards it through the link my Avatar had to my realm. I gritted my teeth and let the energy curling in my body explode outwards and banish the fmes.

  My eyes were on the intact barriers that should have stopped the attack, then went to search for the Daemon, but I couldn’t see it anywhere. My eyes snapped to the lingering fmes that I’d bsted off of myself. They refused to wink out, and as if feeling my attention, they snapped back together into the vague silhouette of a Lord of Change.

  ‘Psychic Breach Detected.’ My mind-core reported, its dispassionate, static voice ringing in my ears. I split my focus and turned my mind’s eye inwards while keeping my eyes on the Daemon, reforming the barriers to once again stand between us. Even if they hadn’t done shit, they made me feel safer … though much less so than before.

  “Bright … Brilliant … Radiant … Little Star.”

  The words were whispered at the edge of my perception, seeping in through the cracks of my mental barriers. There shouldn’t have been any cracks.

  ‘Avoid Eye Contact.’ My mind-core piped up again. ‘Breach happened while maintaining eye contact with the Lord of Change. Possible vector to bypass defences.’

  Soul energy flooded my mind, empowered by Atiesh’s power, sending quakes through my mind space as it was scoured of all alien influence I could find with brutal efficiency. It didn’t touch my primary thought process; that would have been too obvious, and it wasn’t able to affect my mind-cores since they had several yers of fail-safes built into their processes.

  However, I found some lingering taint in old memories, and I recognised a pattern even as I wiped them all, erasing them from my mind. Those were the ‘good’ memories I had. Pying video games with friends, my mom pushing me on a swing as a little girl, one of my only good dates in high school and many more.

  I glowered at the daemon, though my eyes remained shut. Better yet, I erased them entirely, relying solely on my auric perception to guide me. The bastard predicted what I’d do, knew I’d never leave it up to chance and that I’d erase those memories wholesale.

  What it probably didn’t know was that I had all those memories backed up. I had initially come up with the idea of memory bck boxes for my daughters, in case any of them got themselves killed, but I had one of my own, since redundancy never hurt anyone. It barely took a thought to repce those memories with copies.

  The cracks in my mind were sewn shut, then the entire barrier infused with soul-energy, and now circuted through Atiesh first to amplify the result. I made sure to also weave the shapes of hexagrammatic wards into the flow of energy, hoping that would help resist another attempt at poking at my thoughts by the daemon.

  Seemingly uncaring, the Daemon spoke again, three voices, one young, one old and one its own. All three voices spoke at once, over each other, unbothered that they were doing so.

  “Naive, Innocent Little Star.”

  “You Know Not How The Game Is Pyed.”

  “You Know Not Your Own Powers.”

  Then the three became a hundred, speaking from all around. Some screaming, some roaring, some whispering.

  “Hopeless.”

  “Lost.”

  “Ignorant.”

  “Weak.”

  Then they melded back into one powerful voice that had the fabric of reality quaking.

  “You Are Nothing Before The Gods. Your Light a Candle in the Wind. A Dying Ember. Nothing. You Are Nothing.” It said, its voice echoing strangely in my ears. “Nothing.” “Nothing.” “nothing.”

  The st ‘nothing’ sounded right next to my ears, and only then did I notice that the Daemon was gone. I exploded with silver fmes, bsting the origin of the voice with as much as I could.

  It cackled, it screamed, it growled.

  Fine then. No holding back. I thought, a seething anger bubbling in my chest as I realised how much Kairos Fateweaver must have been sandbagging me, and how much his half-manifested state must have weakened Ka’Bandha. I thought I won those fights, or at least got a draw, but then this fucker was here, making a fool of me. That’s probably why Kairos did it, to make me overconfident, comfortable in my power.

  A mass of chitinous forms, all teeth and cws and hunger, exploded out of me in all directions. Tyranids in their hundreds, thousands flowing out of me like I was a loose faucet. They were all fully free, perfect clones not under my control, and I could feel the Hive Mind taking notice, connecting to them and descending.

  The Shadow rose in the Warp, firming reality and making space and the Warp alike into a mire for Darmons and regur Psykers. It was heavy, weighing even on my shoulders, as it should be since I hadn’t skimped out on synapse creatures. Neurotyrants floated in space by the hundreds, each a special node purpose-made to strengthen the Shadow. The rest were simir, psychic bio-forms like Neurogaunts, Zoanthropes and the like.

  I purposefully avoided making bioships, or any bio-forms which could quickly make one. I was sure if I left them to their devices, a good fraction of this horde would meld together to create bioships, Narwhals and whatever else they needed to create more of themselves.

  Not that I cared. Even if I gave them a year of prep time, they wouldn’t become nearly as much of a threat to- … to those I loved, as the Daemon before me.

  Said daemon was not having so much fun anymore, though it still cackled, its form pulsing with each ugh like a balloon infting itself, only to shrink again with the next breath. But its ugh was slightly strained, and its body was almost slouching. The vague cloud of energy making up its form was pressed together tighter and tighter with every new Tyranid I disgorged.

  That should make its teleporting trick, or whatever the hell it is, a bit more bothersome at least. I thought, my brows furrowed into a frown as I watched the creature like a hawk through my auric perception. I had felt no disturbances in the fabric of space, and I’d gotten pretty good at that over the course of my spars with the slippery Valenith, so I assumed the daemon was doing something different.

  Maybe it was fooling my senses, somehow. Making my attention wane, or something, then zipping about quick enough to close the distance. Perhaps it was doing some stranger warp-fuckery instead?

  Far behind me, the Sovereign too was following my example, and under my direction, it was rapidly expending its bio-energy reserves to grow the Tyranid horde. In contrast, I stopped doing so after I had a firm enough Shadow up around us and instead covered myself in a second yer of armour, this one conjured from pure soul energy and infused with Smite, the very essence of my soul’s purifying properties. Head to toe, I was covered in slee,k silvery armour that left no gaps, and just to be extra — and because fuck this daemon — I added eborate, hexagrammatic motifs onto it too.

  Against Daemons, I was of the mind that my eldritch, flesh-warping capabilities would be of little direct use. Sure, my pocket Shadow in the Warp was handy, and my Avatar was a fruit of that ability, but I doubted the Daemon would be more than irritated if I tried cutting it up with a bonesword, exploding it with a missile or bsting it apart with a psma cannon.

  I had to rely on my psychic powers to do the heavy lifting in this fight. Did my Smite-enhanced Eldritch Bst hurt it? Well, I assumed so, but it was time to start testing what exactly worked and what didn’t.

  “Cunning. Irritating. Gnat.” The daemon spoke, but now its voice held some strain, and a current of gleeful anger. It cackled, swinging its staff again, which suddenly materialised in its outstretched hand once more.

  “Such praise,” I murmured, my lips pulling into a sneer. “Being an annoyance to evil twats is one of my life goals.”

  “An Annoyance. An Itch. A Nail.”

  “You’ll be scratched, hammered down, erased.”

  “You Will Be Nothing.”

  “So I graduated from being ‘nothing’?” I mused, then sent forth a salvo of Eldritch Bsts before the bastard could open its beak again. Energy flowed through me, flooding into Atiesh, where it was further compressed, amplified and concentrated. My trusty staff’s head lit up like the surface of the Sun, and the energy held within snapped forth in a near-continuous beam of devastating psychic power.

  The daemon was sent reeling, its body consumed by the crackling power, bsted away into the darkness of the void.

  The Tyranid swarm around us wasn’t idle either. With the bio-forms not being under my control, the Hive Mind directed them into attacking us. Surprisingly, I found its focus almost evenly split between me and the daemon.

  The Neurotyrants were not really direct combat units, more like dedicated floating command centres and nodes for the Shadow. They organised bioforms near them, and they pressed harder on the Warp in their surroundings. Their only direct offensive attacks were in the form of the tendrils they had, which ended in wicked spikes, their terror and agony-inducing aura, and mental manipution. Neurotyrants were among the very few Tyranids known to understand human behaviour, and they were known to give false visions to enemies, sometimes driving a devoted Emperor-worshipper to betray their comrades with a well-pced vision.

  In contrast, Zoanthropes were the Psyker-equivalent units of the Swarm, cobbled together from Eldar DNA. Which was why I made far fewer of them, even if they had a simir aptitude for empowering the surrounding Shadow, just like Neurotyrants.

  I let up with my Eldritch Bst salvo after a few seconds, having id enough of a beating on the creature to level a mountain. I watched the daemon carefully, seeing its vague, cloud-like form dite and almost … convulse? Or was it just tricking me? Or was it really hurt?

  Fucking Tzeentch and his never-sufficiently damned Daemons. Give me Bloodthirsters any day of the week. I’ll take two, even, if it meant I never have to deal with fuckers like this again.

  I focused on how the daemon felt, how intense its presence was, how much power it radiated. All those, I suspected, the daemon could cloak or alter at will, so they weren’t the end-all, be-all, but it was a sign.

  Its aura was dimmer. Reasonably so, though less than I’d hoped. Its incorporeal state was likely protecting it from much of the damage my attack would have otherwise caused, or it would not be using it. If this were a Nurglite or Saneshi Greater Daemon, I’d have been astonished that it’d even survived that cataclysmic bst without getting at the very least banished.

  A trap or the truth? Annoying as I was, I had to assume the first, even if it was truly hurt. Until I knew for sure, which I never would with a Tzeentchian daemon, I had to assume everything was a trap, a scheme, a plot. So I decided that the turnabout was only fair, and thus, to annoy it as much as possible.

  It wasn’t like it could try to kill me any harder.

  P3t1