There were as many different methodologies, approaches and styles in the Holy Orders of the Emperor's Inquisition as there are specific Inquisitors. Still, they could, nonetheless, be slotted into categories, or rather, paradigms. Depending on the Ordo they were parts of, which faction they were in inside that specific Ordo, whether they preferred ‘loud’ or ‘silent’ methods, and so on and so forth.

  In the centuries since she’d first worn her Rosette, Amberley Vail had mastered the niche approach that worked for her and characterised her as an Inquisitor. She worked best when none — perhaps besides a select, trusted few — knew she was an Inquisitor. She liked to blend in, work on the ground level, and get involved while upholding the cover that most suited her purposes. Only once she knew everything she needed to, did she usually ‘go loud’, as they say. When the time came, there would be no doubt, no missing information, only a single surgical strike that was as brutally efficient as it was overwhelming.

  That was how she liked to work, how she’d uprooted hundreds of genestealer cults, dismantled Tau spy-rings or xeno-funded terrorist cells.

  She was not the kind of Inquisitor who got involved in fending off full-on Tyranid assaults, or who led the charge to the heart of a Necron Tomb World. Her work was beneath the front lines, aimed at keeping said front lines stable. She nipped problems in the bud, smothered catastrophes in the crib and exterminated the ‘sick’ parts of the Imperium before they could cause problems for Mankind.

  So, following a possibly at least partially xeno super psyker and her worryingly bloodthirsty partner into battle with a Tyranid horde wasn’t really something she had all that much experience in.

  At least Amberley was experienced in using Power Armour, comfortable in them even, though the bulky things she was used to had dreadfully little in common with the … combat carapace she was currently wearing.

  It was slim, sleek, and ergonomic. It was like she was fighting in the nude with how she felt the breeze upon every st inch of the carapace, and wasn’t that a worrying notion? The armour was connected to her nervous system somehow, and she was having trouble keeping herself from subconsciously thinking of the carapace as a part of her own body. The line between the two was blurry at best when she focused on it, and all but gone when she didn’t. It was terrifying, and yet … It was also extremely effective.

  Faster than Astartes-grade power armour, tougher than Terminator-grade armour and more compact than even the war-gear of the Eldar Howling Banshees. It was fast and agile, boosting not only her speed but also her reflexes and reaction speed. It was tough too, with a dampening system that kept the blunt force of attacks from pulping her fragile body inside its hardened shell. It also packed a punch that could rival Dreadnaughts and perhaps even the smaller Imperial Knights.

  And these are the downgraded versions she made specifically for human use. Amberley thought numbly. She didn’t even need to wonder what the ‘proper’ combat carapace could do when paired with a wearer who could truly make use of it. The example of one such case was right in front of her, pying with a Tyranid Carnifex.

  She remembered all the files she had on Selene Voss. The heir of the Noble House of Voss, the recipient of one of the original Writs of Trade signed by the Emperor’s own hand. They were one of the most powerful noble houses within their home Segmentum. Which wouldn’t be all that special, had that not been Segmentum Sor, the very heart of the Imperium.

  As such, her family had a lot of eyes on it, and it wasn’t all that much trouble for Amberley to get her hands on an extremely detailed report on just about anything reting to the family. Psychoanalysis of all members, skeletons in their closets, family drama, inheritance struggles, and so much else.

  It was why meeting the woman herself had thrown her off so much. The Selene Voss she’d read about was a taciturn woman shaped by her overbearing grandmother — the previous Head of House Voss — and perhaps even more so by her years of service in the Imperial Guard. As a Captain, she was known as stern but fair.

  If it hadn’t been for two different psychoanalysis reports noting that the woman was showing signs of suppressed distaste for Imperial high society and its politics, and warned that she might do something … unwise if she ever came under enough pressure, combined with after-action reports from the woman’s comrades and superior in the Guard about how she seemed to enjoy combat a bit too much, then Amberley might have suspected that the woman she met was nothing more than a mind-bent meat puppet driven around for Echidna’s amusement.

  Hell, she still held suspicions about the extreme change the woman seemingly underwent since her reported disappearance. But then she remembered some of those after-action reports that she’d dismissed as being too wild or a bit too far-fetched; it was normal, after all, for soldiers to give faulty reports of things they’d seen while in combat. Adrenaline, combat stimms, and just the sheer chaos, stress, and terror of a regur combat engagement meant people weren’t in the best state of mind to give accurate, detailed eyewitness accounts.

  A frown could be mistaken for a smile, a grimace for a grin, and anyways, some soldiers ughed when stressed to their limits. It wasn’t all that much of a stretch to say Selene Voss coped with stress by grinning in its face and that she had a tendency to release her stress by ughing.

  Except, the giggles the woman was making now had nothing to do with stress and everything to do with glee. She was pying around with one of the most terrible Tyranid bioforms to exist, and she was giggling like a preteen given a new toy to py with.

  Amberley couldn’t help but wish she could feel even a shred of that carefree, childish glee right about now as she unleashed a hail of organic nails upon the onrushing horde of enemies.

  Echidna had asked whether she preferred ranged or melee, and when Amberley said it was the former, she received a ‘nailgun’. It was a sleek thing about the same size as a sgun, and it shot organic nails the size of a grown man’s index fingers. It also had no magazine, but after the five hundredth round, Amberley had stopped worrying about running out of ammunition.

  The nails also did something to those they struck, which dissolved, or maybe disintegrated them. A single nail could turn a termagant into a red sludge in seconds. A single nail could also punch through the armoured carapace of just about everything she’d shot at thus far, bar the Carnifex.

  Ciaphas was at her side, cutting down any tyranid that got too close with a sword that seemed eerily simir to the Swarmlord’s bde writ small. The silly man was probably terrified out of his mind under all that armour, but even Amberley found herself doubtful of that fact as she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

  He seemed to be in his element, flitting between enemies with his bde never stopping, always flowing from a ssh to a stab to pierce to a lunge. Tyranids fell around him by the dozens, each attack ending a life, if not more and slowly but surely, he was learning to incorporate the enhanced physique the carapace granted him into his fighting style.

  Amberley envied that, even though she herself had been touted as a prodigy of both the sword and firearms in her youth. Getting used to the nailgun in her arms was tiresome and took all her focus. Maybe after a week or month of practice, she would have started incorporating some movements that made better use of the carapace’s agility and speed than her slow, steady steps or economic kicks. Swapping to the fighting style she used while unadorned by a bulky power armour might have been better, but then she’d have had to consciously remind herself that she was, in fact, wearing power armour every time she would have wasted precious seconds dodging things her armour could just withstand.

  Maybe it was silly, but she didn’t like improvising in such a high-intensity combat situation. She had both her combat styles drilled into her bones and muscles to such a level that she didn’t even need to think about what she was doing anymore, and throwing a wrench into that would have been more trouble than it was worth.

  Hopefully, she’d live to learn from this and grow better, because she had to admit, feeling so out of her depth was rather annoying. Without Ciaphas, she would have been buried under a mountain of tyranids by now. Without Selene, the two of them would be Carnifex snacks. Without Echidna …

  A deep rumble rippled through the earth, shaking the towering trees of the surrounding jungle but failing to throw the combatants off bance.

  Amberley gnced up and up at the two gigantic forms rising over the canopy, her mind failing to comprehend what she was seeing, even though it wasn’t the first time she’d id her eyes on the two titans.

  One was a Hierophant biotitan, a hideous creature that towered over the battlefield, bristling with spines, tendrils and symbiote weapons. It stood tall enough to wrestle with an Imperial Titan, and Amberley knew it also had the power to do so; it was far from an overgrown bug that would be felled easily.

  As, it was the other colossal monstrosity that chilled Amberley to the bone. A creature of abaster white that was reminiscent of at least half a dozen different tyranid bioforms, but that was all it was: a faint resembnce. Cws from a Lictor, the body of the Norn Emissary, the head of the Swarmlord and so on, but Amberley knew it was no puppet of the Hive Mind, it was somehow both better than that and so much worse.

  Because the mind behind that sneering facade was human. It had goals, both small and rge; it had the capacity for love and hate and greed. It was not the Hive Mind with its all-consuming, singur focus on devouring everything and anything. All that power … in the hands of a simple human bound neither by faith, duty or devotion. All that power, focused on nothing but the whims of a single person who cared little for anything besides amusing herself. It was a downright miracle that the woman was at all coherent with her level of psychic power — a miracle she was wasting with her whimsical ways and aversion to coming under the banner of the Imperium — the Ruinous Powers should have filled her mind with maddening whispers long ago, bent her thoughts to their will, reshaped her to be their puppet … and yet, Lord Octavian has seen it fit to share one crucial little detail with Amberley.

  The Daemons loathed her; they named her Anathema, the same name they used for the God-Emperor.

  Amberley still didn’t know what to think of that, what it meant or if she should even bother giving herself a headache by trying to figure it out. All she needed to know was that this woman was a natural enemy of the Ruinous Powers, that she was ridiculously powerful in more ways than Amberley could imagine and that she had been human once. All the prerequisites for an alliance of convenience were set; now it was down to her to turn the ‘goodwill’ Lord Octavian sacrificed the Jericho Reach for into something a bit more concrete and long-sting.

  Should be easy, right? … Damn it, maybe she should have taken Ciaphas up on his drunken offer and retired to the countryside with him. Amberley Cain didn’t have a good ring to it … but perhaps … perhaps.

  Amberley shook her head. It was neither the time nor the pce. She was old, not in body, not since Echidna’s rejuvenation treatment granted her another four centuries just when even the Imperium’s best such methods started to reach their natural limits, but she was old where it counted. In her mind. She’d spent centuries in service to the Imperium, so many friends and acquaintances she’d lost to the many threats found across the gaxy, and even more to the slow, inevitable march of time.

  Would it be so wrong of her to want to spend this … this second chance at life, these centuries snatched right out of the hands of Death, not fighting for her life every day of the week? Would it be so wrong of her to yearn to accept silly Ciaphas’ drunken offer? Because growing old again in a small shack, with him at her side, sounded more and more appealing with each passing day. Each day that brought with it a new brand of madness, she yearned all the more for peace. She’d always thought she’d not be allowed to rest until the Emperor took her within his halls, but perhaps … perhaps she could dream of more.

  *****

  I’d never gotten Gundam and Mecha fans. It just seemed so silly and unrealistic to me in most settings they appeared in. Yes, I liked fantasy and even the silliness that was Warhammer 40,000, but those didn’t even try to sell themselves as realistic.

  The only reason the Imperium of Man had ‘Mechas’, Titans or Imperial Knights, if you wanted to use the proper terms, was to … flex on people. Yes, yes, I know. To inspire awe and dread in equal measure into their opponents, so they may see that the Imperium is so mighty and great that they can field war-machines so great and terrible that they shake the ground with each footstep and have a goddamn mobile cathedral on their backs. That was how they said it. I said it was flexing … and I got it.

  I get it. I thought, inwardly grinning like a loon as one of my four arms shes out, its fist closed and flying towards the skull of the overgrown bug screeching in my face. The jungle canopy looked like high grass at the size I was currently at, and the fist I’d sent flying was heavier than a smaller voidship.

  As such, it wasn’t much of a surprise when it pulped the head of the Hierophant Biotitan like an overgrown grape.

  Another arm swung down, a simple vertical ssh delivered with a bde rger than some skyscrapers and tore right through the massive bug, rending it in twain.

  It was awesome. Gundam and other mecha-fighter anime were still stupid, but I finally understood the appeal, that primal need dwelling within every hot-blooded human to drive around a massive robot and beat the absolute crap out of a kajuu.

  It was exhirating in a way that doing the same with a Psychic bst just wasn’t; this was the apex of physical combat. It didn’t get any better than this.

  So I raised my face to the sky and screamed my victory at the heavens, and the deafening roar that tore through my colossal throat shook the world, and I felt the Shadow quiver, like a still pond when a strong wind disturbed it.

  There were a dozen more biotitants scattered across the globe, and I was sure some of them would have interesting mutations. Even as I amused myself by getting into a fistfight with the rgest nd-bound tyranid combat-organism in existence, I had a hundred combat-drones- … Errrr, what name did I come up with for them again?

  ‘Exasperation. Response: Draugr.’

  Thank you, mind-core.

  Right, I had a hundred Draugr running around, murderising tyranids, absorbing their genetic temptes and seeking out interesting specimens. This world was a treasure trove already, just from the fact that I’d gotten my hands on a slew of Dagon-type synapse creatures. Then there were the odd and interesting mutations, and the local wildlife that was only a step below Catachan in nastiness.

  And Selene’s enjoying herself too. Truly, a vacation for the whole family to enjoy … if you ignore the mental screaming coming from a certain ex-Commissar and the super brooding coming from his Inquisitor girlfriend. Oh well, sucks to be them, they are along for the ride now, and this train is not stopping anytime soon!

  P3t1