I reformed the sheet of Pariah-matter I had used as a makeshift barrier and made a spike out of it, then chucked it at the daemon at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.

  The whole daemon twitched as the spike went through its incorporeal form — that was becoming frustrating and fast — without slowing even a bit.

  I warded off the errant attacks from the Tyranids with ease, especially since the majority of them were crude, psychic attacks. Against the Lord of Change’s insidious tricks and mastery of telepathy, I had trouble, but against a crude, brutish attack? Not so much. I had brute psychic power in spades. Their attacks didn’t so much as scratch my mental shields or silvery armour.

  The daemon, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be faring any worse, even with the supposed ‘wounds’ I had just dealt it. Visible attacks bounced off its form ineffectually, and zy swings of its staff decimated nearby Tyranids, be they tiny crawlies or powerful Neurotyrants.

  Still, a distraction was a distraction, and it couldn’t destroy them fast enough to weaken the Shadow. The Sovereign could easily make more than the daemon destroyed, though it would have to start cannibalising itself to fuel that rate of production if this fight went on for longer than another minute.

  Considering it had been less than ten seconds since it started — though it felt like much more with how fast everything was happening — that would be plenty of time.

  The Daemon watched me, I could feel its burning, hateful gaze on me even with my eyes currently erased. Power gathered in it, and I prepared myself, circuting that silvery energy infused with Smite through my body, just to make sure it couldn’t bypass my silvery armour the same way as it did my barriers.

  This attack was almost brutish in comparison to the sheer insidiousness of the first one. It was fire and lightning and pure, unadulterated Change given form. Telekinesis was of no use against such a purely Warp-based attack with little physical substance, so I did the creative thing and bsted a beam of argent power through the attack’s centre, hoping to disrupt it.

  Dodging still wasn’t an option; the attack’s trajectory was clearly calcuted to strike the Sovereign if I didn’t stop it, and who knew what that Change-infused attack would do to my poor fgship and the people inside it? The Tyranid horde between me and its source also proved no more than a minor speed bump.

  My attack did little to halt it, and before I knew it, the attack smmed into my defences, throwing me back like a rag-doll through the Swarm.

  I had focused on empowering my armour through Atiesh at the st moment before the attack struck, so I was reasonably sure I would be safe. The attack ate at my silvery armour, corroding it in pces, burning in others, but more often than not, washing over it ineffectually. Atiesh’s slight reality-warping power might have been doing most of the heavy lifting, or maybe my silver regalia was just sufficient to protect me through the sheer psychic power I had infused into it.

  I arrested my momentum, coming to a sudden, jarring stop and then reversed course. I reached out, ethereal silvery hands grasping at the lingering traces of the attack before crushing them in their grips.

  Maybe Kairos had not been sandbagging his power, because now that I was struck by a direct attack … it wasn’t anything to write home about. Sheer psychic power was my speciality — even if Selene cimed it was just the ck of any real speciality — and not even Greater Daemons could seemingly overpower me easily.

  I redoubled my assault, deciding that not giving the fucker room to breathe might be the only way to victory. A true victory at that, not just a false one that'd come from chasing it back into the Warp and letting it plot my downfall from there uninterrupted. No, if it was weakened enough … then maybe, maybe I could make a gamble to end its immortal existence here and now.

  I gathered all the Pariah-material I had on hand, extracting them from the pre-made bullets and grenades I’d made, and turned them into smaller spikes. I grabbed them all firmly with my telekinesis and surged my psychic power once more. My Avatar was just barely holding on, skin cracking in pces, blood vessels bursting, bones fracturing. But all that was healed in less time than it took for my pain receptors to register them.

  A spike went flying, and the Daemon’s hazy form convulsed again, like how a regur human might if you ran high-voltage electricity through them. I then started battering it with pure Smite bsts, sending another Null-spike flying every time it started to gather itself. I was practically stun-locking it, which seemed to infuriate the overgrown chicken.

  Its form, for the first time since the beginning of our battle, turned fully corporeal after the fifth spike went through its body. It shrieked in rage, a feathered arm backhanding the next spike away with a disdainful gesture, but its arm nonetheless twitched outside its control.

  I let myself smirk. I could practically taste its unadulterated hatred and anger spike to new heights, which had to mean I was doing something right. The next Eldritch Bst I sent its way was one of the rgest ones yet, equalling the first one that bored right through the Daemon.

  The Lord of Change twisted, the beam of destructive energy hitting it on the shoulder instead … and took out a chunk of flesh rge enough that its arm hung on by a thread, barely connected to its torso. Now that was an obvious wound. My smirk stretched into a grin, and I redoubled my assault. Crackling silver lightning arced around us, webbing between the Tyranids nearby to box in the daemon and strike at it from all sides, while I sent an unceasing barrage at it from the front.

  Its staff swung around freely, deflecting arcs of purifying lightning, banishing silver fmes, or sending beams of energy curving away from it. My goal had been to not let it breathe, to not even give it enough breathing room to so much as consider some sneaky plot or insidious trap. That was only half-successful, as I felt an incessant crawling sensation around my mind even as I unleashed my fury on the daemon. It could multitask, not much of a surprise, in retrospect.

  Chunks of feathered flesh were scorched to ash, pulverised, obliterated. It was missing an ankle on one leg, its lower beak was just straight up gone, and it had holes across its chest the size of bowling balls. It moved with the same acrity as ever, but its presence kept dimming, even if the assault on my mind became more and more … desperate? Frantic? Furious?

  It didn’t matter. It was weaker; I was winning. Each bst against it erased a part of its power, a part of the Warp-stuff making up its form and spirit. I was hurting it, killing it. Slowly but surely. Would it de-evolve into a Herald, or even a Lesser Daemon if I ripped away enough of its hard-earned power?

  It attempted to fool me again, illusory sounds, fake sensations and the like; it even managed to somehow slip past my mental defences again, but it was met by my juiced-up mind-cores primed and ready to rip apart its tricks. Every incoming stimulus was cross-checked with every other sense and preceptor I had in my body, and I had a lot of rather exotic ones even this daemon didn’t seem to know how to fool.

  Soul energy and bio-energy flowed through my mindscape, both enhancing and empowering my mind in their own way. Now that I’d learned of its tricks and pushed my defences above and beyond what I’d considered ‘the maximum’ at the start of the battle, it had little hope of succeeding with that angle.

  Which must have sucked, because its occasional frontal attacks weren’t doing anything to me, washing over my armoured form harmlessly.

  It tried to twist the Tyranids around it with Warp-fyre, make them into vessels for the hordes of daemons waiting just beneath the Veil for a shot at taking a bite out of me. But the Hive Mind didn’t let it, pressing down heavily with the Shadow and executing any bioform that looked to be gaining any undue mutations, even if they were little more than mild discolourations of their chitin.

  That stunt also earned the Daemon the lion’s share of the Tyranid’s murderous attention, and suddenly, I only had maybe a fourth of the Swarm to contend with as the rest descended upon the Lord of Change.

  Daemonic roars of rage and deranged cackles rose and fell in the background, but I ignored them both, even if pushing this fucker to desperation pleased a part of me something fierce.

  Even the Tyranid Zoanthropes' combined attacks started nding after a time, no longer swept aside with disdainful ease. Bolts of psychic energy rained down on the monster, and I could almost feel the weight of the telepathic battering ram the Hive Mind was trying to use to smother the Daemon’s mind into dust. Not that it was working, the daemon’s mind was … strange, to say the least, slippery and morphic in a way that had all mental attacks I unched slide right off harmlessly, like I’d somehow messed up the aim of a telepathic attack, which should have been impossible. I wasn’t too proud to admit that the Daemon outcssed me in telepathy, and it wasn’t just by a bit.

  Which was why I focused on its body, its corporeal form that was built up from its immortal essence.

  If this was a Greater Daemon of any of the other four twats, I would have rushed in to finish it off long ago. I felt I had the power to do so the moment it had been forced to take on a fully corporeal state, but this was a Tzeentchian daemon. Its death throes couldn’t just be weathered; I was sure it had one st trick up its sleeve. Likely, it had hundreds, but it would only be able to pick one.

  It was probably waiting for me to get overconfident, maybe it was even dimming its presence to look more hurt than it was. So I waited, wary and alert, my paranoia rising to new heights as the seconds went by with the daemon getting tossed around like a rag doll by my unceasing Eldritch Bsts and Pyromantic attacks.

  It was not taking them all head on, I could feel it disperse the blows, I could feel it disrupt the beams of power, split the lightning bolts and sap the heat from the fmes. But it was doing just barely enough to keep the attacks from causing serious wounds.

  Come on. Do it. What are you pnning, you dumb chicken?

  I didn’t have to wait long. The bastard waited until my test barrage came to a halt, when I prepared a new spike to shove up its ass and acted. It burst into a storm of feathers and rainbow sparks, which colpsed on itself, winking out of existence.

  A cold, sinking feeling crept into my gut, thinking it went after Selene or Cat as a final fuck-you … then I almost breathed a sigh of relief when I felt the tiniest psychic fluctuation right above me, less than a metre away.

  That gnarled wooden staff swung down, silent and with the weight of a mountain behind it. I felt my mind go ever so slightly hazy, as if I was zoning out, forced into a momentary daze.

  It probably hoped it’d st long enough to hit me with that spell glowing at the tip of its staff, but I shook off the daze in a mere blink. The staff was close, less than ten centimetres away from my face, but that space was plenty.

  I didn’t know what that spell was, but I knew I didn’t want to get hit by it. Tzeentchian curses were fucked up, and that thing stank of Change in a way that promised serious trouble.

  My Avatar colpsed into a small sphere, the silvery regalia I’d fashioned around myself stayed rigidly in pce, though, as a distraction. But only for so long, as I made the helmet burst into nothing as it was about to come in contact with the staff. Who knew whether the spell could ride my connection to the energy it was made of, hopping over at me. I wouldn’t put it past this Daemon.

  The staff passed me by harmlessly, and I reformed my Avatar, then tossed myself at the Daemon. The silvery gauntlet on my right arm formed into a scythe, which I made quick use of, swinging it in a lightning-fast blow to cut off the daemon’s head.

  I felt its eyes on me, the hatred in them a physical weight pressing in on me from all around. The pure vitriol they hid spiked to new heights, then a furious screech smashed against my mental shields like a hammer blow as I watched the daemon turn into a cloud of hazy, rainbow energy once more.

  A tenth of the cloud burned away in silvery fmes, no doubt a severe blow, but not the decapitation I was hoping for.

  Then it rushed me, the rainbow cloud surged forth, not running away to gain space, but coming right at me. I pressed my mind for a moment to think, diluting my perception of time to the limit and I watched the approaching daemon.

  It’s a gamble. I thought, considering the idea I had been swimming around in my head for a while now. But it might just be the only way to kill this feathered twat. I just have to be careful, I know what its energy feels like now.

  I didn’t run, I didn’t even resist as it plunged into my chest, tching onto the thick thread connecting my Avatar to my Realm. I felt it hesitate, arm bells likely ringing in its head at my ck of resistance, but it was already too deep in to back out.

  My energy, my pure soul energy, was like catnip to these Daemons, I’d found. And it seemed not even a Greater Daemon of this calibre could resist the temptation.

  Not that I would have let it. The moment it was closer to my Realm than the Warp, I sprang my trap, even if it was not much of one. The physical world was a neutral battleground, though it could favour either of us a tiny bit more depending on circumstances like how thin the Veil was, or whether there was an oppressive Shadow in the Warp on the battlefield.

  My Realm? That was mine, it was me; it was my domain. It was the only pce where I could use my soul’s ridiculous psychic power to the fullest without fear, and I did just that. The whole dimension, the entire Realm, cmped down on the invader, constricting it until its form broke and it was reduced to nothing but sentient demonic energy.

  I held it firmly, pcing barriers around each of the sub-realms floating around in the wide expanse. The primary risk of doing this was that if I somehow messed this up, I’d be handing over the souls of everyone in my Realm to this Daemon on a silver ptter, along with enough energy to gorge itself into recovering everything it’d lost and more.

  I hauled the daemon up towards my true soul, which floated imperiously at the centre of the Realm like a tiny, silver Sun. The Daemon didn’t resist; if anything, it was trying to jump out of my grasp to rush ahead and wrap itself around my soul like a koa.

  Hunger and Need radiated off the Lord of Change in such intensity that I doubted it was thinking clearly. By the looks of it, the abominable creature was consumed by the singur desire to corrupt and devour my soul.

  I held it close, close enough that I could touch it if I just reached out with a hand, but not close enough for the Daemon to y even a single cw on me. It struggled, writhing like a mad, ravenous beast, but my grip was an iron vice, and there was no escape. Not here, not for a Daemon this weakened and maddened.

  The silvery radiance of my soul was many times more intense than anything I could conjure with my Avatar, and just being this close was eroding the Daemon into nothing as the energy making it up was purified and torn away from it, added back into my Realm.

  I’d spent a lot of soul energy on this fight, and it would take months to recover it all with my previous methods … but this daemon still had enough energy in it to give me a good head start.

  Better yet, there is still a horde of them down on the pnet, and maybe tens of thousands more just beyond the Veil … maybe I could keep the Shadow in pce just a bit more to devour as much of that horde as possible. I have a feeling I’m not going to like the consequences of being dry on soul energy.

  Especially not after I found out that it was the only thing that gave me a fighting chance against the more insidious Greater Daemons.

  I kept myself at high alert, watching the daemon like a hawk as its struggles grew weaker and its energies were torn away from it. I watched to make sure none of its energies slipped away to mess with my Realm. I wouldn’t have put it past a Tzenntchian daemon to fake this delirious madness to pull a quick one and detonate Selene’s soul out of spite, or for the ughs.

  I saw nothing of the sort, but I only breathed a sigh of relief once the st ember of Warp energy was purified from my Realm, and I had triple checked everything for sabotage.

  There was nothing. I have won. The fight had taken all of twenty-one seconds, rounded up, from start to finish. I even had some of my ‘enriched’ Pariah-material left over.

  Now I just had a Tyranid swarm, an army of cultists and daemons, and a horde of other daemons to deal with.

  Yeah, and a bunch of Tau who probably watched the whole fight. They were going to have a fit, I just knew it.

  More work for Aun’Saal. He’s gotta earn his keep somehow.

  P3t1