“Alright, gang, the fun's over!” I announced with a cp and a grin, making my voice echo in the ears of my three fellow humanoids. “Time to wrap this up and get to doing what we actually came here for, and of course, by that I mean I’m going to get to work and you get to sit back and rex.”

  With that, I Blinked back to where Amberley and Cain were fighting for their … dignity? Cause those small fry tyranids sure as hell weren’t getting through the armour I gave them, so the only thing they could lose was their dignity.

  As I appeared, a telekinetic shockwave ripped out of me, passing over Selene and the other two harmlessly but bsting away all the tyranids, turning the majority of them into bloody pulp.

  Once that was done, I flexed my will and a spherical barrier of silvery psychic energy smmed into reality, rending through air and the ground alike to encase the four of us in its protective field. The tyranids came roaring back in, the swarm still numbering in the billions, but they found no purchase. Maybe the biotitans’ primary psma cannons would have broken through my halfhearted barrier, but I’d spent the st half an hour sughtering any of the overgrown beasties within a few thousand kilometres of our position.

  Selene walked over to me, her aura a mix of satisfaction and annoyance. When I sent the equivalent of a raised eyebrow her way through our telepathic bond, she just shrugged.

  “It’s about time,” she said. “These mutated variants are interesting, but … none of them are much of a challenge.”

  Hive Tyrants were the toughest bioforms she’d fought, with Carnifexes and Lictors falling just a step behind the Hive Tyrants in power. It made sense; her current body was just about the best I could make for her, though it edged on the side of caution with primarily taking after the Custodian tempte to ward off Warp corruption instead of Tyranid and Aeldari like my own Avatar.

  “It seems like the Hive Mind didn’t want to waste the biomass to send the Swarmlord after us,” I mused, my aura surveying the pnet having found no indication of any of the tyranid eggs of the sort that would indicate a ‘hero unit’ being produced. “The pnet wasn’t that important to it after all.”

  “It should remember that you fought off the Norn Emissary,” Selene said. “It might have written the world off as a lost cause.”

  “I had help back then,” I said, though I didn’t feel like I would need it in my new and improved state. Like I’d told Octavian, I had grown, and still had a hell of a lot of growing to do before I exhausted my potential. “But yes, I suppose whatever it was seeking here wasn’t worth sending a Norn Emissary to chase me off … though maybe it just didn’t have any Norn Queens on hand to make one?”

  Did it even need Norn Queens to make Norn Emissaries? I thought so, but how could I be sure when it came to the Hive Mind? For all I knew about the biological side of what made Tyranids tick, I knew no more than the better-informed Inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos when it came to the true capabilities of the Hive Mind itself and the limits it had to operate under. I understood the puppets, not the puppetmaster.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” I said, shaking my head distractedly. My mind-cores were still running some checks and optimisation, it was distracting when a good 99.99999999% — and a few more dozen 9s — of my mind was occupied with calcutions and simutions on a scale that regur humans would have aneurysms just trying to imagine. “If our guests are ready too, then I’ll begin.”

  I didn’t really need them ready, but I kinda liked them as characters, and a bit as people too, so I found it hard not to want to show off. Errr, I found it harder than usual … not that I tended to resist that urge all that much. What was life worth without some fun? I refused to become one of those dour, broody cunts who ruined the vibe of whatever room they walked into just with their mere presence.

  “Ready for what?” Amberley asked, her voice a bit hoarse but respectably even after thirty minutes of constant fighting.

  “To bear witness and watch as I do what I came here to do,” I said with a grin. “I’d say I’m about to show these bugs what a true eldritch horror from the outer stars looks like … but I know the Hive Mind had no capacity for fear, so it’s kinda meaningless. Anyway! I’m going to commit my own brand of Exterminatus upon this world, and y’all are going to get first-row seats to the spectacle. Feel free to be amazed, and all that. Cpping is optional, but much appreciated. Any questions?”

  I could see through the faceless helmets, but they did much to diminish the moment, so with a mental twitch, I had them retreat, leaving the two humans covered only up to the neck.

  Amberley blinked, shaking off a dazed look with a slight shiver while Cain only blinked once, then his stoic look was back again as he stood at the Inquisitor’s side like a dutiful knight of old.

  “No,” she said a bit absently, and I sensed she was quite weirded out by how the armour’s neural interfacing felt. “None besides whether we’ll survive it? Exterminatus grade weapons aren’t known for being … precise.”

  “Your Exterminatus weapons may not be,” I said, rolling my eyes. Virus bombs and pnet crackers were more of a ‘whomever it may concern, in that vague direction’ type of weapons. “Mine are not. Or rather, what I’m about to do is perfectly safe for those I don’t intend to harm, which you’ll be quite happy to hear includes the two of you. Anything else?”

  They shared an uneasy look, then shook their heads, making me grin. “Well, then! It’s not going to be much of a sight, but whatever. Here goes.”

  With that, thick tendrils of white eldritch flesh exploded out of my body, a dozen in number, each growing and slithering like a living serpent. They burrowed into the earth a few metres away, or slithered across the ground, all moving away from me. By the time the tendrils reached the barrier, they were coated in thick carapace and tyranid flesh, serrated spikes and lesser tendrils ending in wicked hooked spears growing along their length.

  Nail-shooters emerged from beneath the carapace, unching acid-filled hollow projectiles at any synaptic bioform nearby. Then the tendrils split and grew, thickening and splitting again and again. They speared through tyranids, ripped them apart, tore them to shreds. In seconds, the tendrils had created a web crossing hundreds of meters, each tyranid within their reach now dead or dying.

  In the pces they’d passed, eldritch tendrils of sleek white flesh emerged from beneath the carapace and slurped up the corpses before retreating beneath the protective armour. It was probably an unnecessary precaution, but I had nightmares about what the Hive Mind could do if it got its grabby paws on some of my eldritch flesh. Having only a hair-thin thread of the stuff hidden beneath thick tyranid-sourced armour and behind an entire arsenal of weaponry was much safer. It would at least halt any powerful enough bioform that could tear through the armour to vanish the eldritch flesh.

  The vegetation rgely escaped my wrath for now, though any overly nippy piece of flora got added to my growing storage of bioenergy. Only a select few of the more well-armoured combat bioforms put up a fight, though even those didn’t st long as my mind-cores dedicated to the task detected them, and then made the appropriate modifications to the tendrils heading their way. Simple barbed spears turned into boneswords and their edges lit up with crackling bioenergy, bisecting even Tyranid Warriors and chopping up Carnifexes. It was even a net positive; the bioenergy gained from those more evolved organisms recouped the price of powering the bonesword a dozen times over.

  Slowly, the tendrils erupting from all parts of my body thinned until they were mere threads, though the massive webs of them beyond the barrier remained unchanged. It would have been boring to just stand in pce, so I maintained my connection only through those small threads. I cpped, then made a show of dusting off my shoulders as I grinned at the two sck-jawed humans.

  By now, the tendrils reached well beyond the horizon, covering everything within sight in their web as they devoured all hostile biomass and sent it surging back into me. Digestion pits, titanic capilry towers and the massive corpses of biotitans all vanished into thin air, transmuted into pure energy by eldritch tendrils. It was a feast unlike any I’ve had before, rivalled only by the time I devoured an entire splinter fleet and its handful of bioships.

  “Well, that concludes this little spectacle. The rest of it will be rather boring, so I say we get comfortable and rex,” I said, some tendrils rising back out from the earth at my command, forming into my favourite organic couch. I flopped down into it, letting the comfy cushions swallow me with a pleased sigh. Selene sat next to me, far too close to be considered proper in high society, much to my delight.

  The fight hadn’t been all that challenging, but I could feel that it still left her blood running hot. There was a glint in her eye that sent a familiar shiver down my spine, but while I was many things, an exhibitionist wasn’t among them, and we had guests.

  “So! We have a … maybe an hour or two to kill, and I think it’s finally time to get to know the two of you a bit more,” I said with an excited grin as the two humans hesitantly sat down on the couch I’d made for them opposite ours. “We are about to spend quite some time together, after all, and while I could get my hands on the propaganda pieces, I’m sure centuries of service as an Inquisitor and Commissar had left both of you with much more interesting tales than anything the propagandists could come up with.”

  The two shared a look, looking somewhere between hesitant and skittish.

  “What about a trade, if that makes it more patable?” I hummed. “You tell me an interesting story, and I answer a question you may have or show you something interesting in turn. Like … have you ever wondered what Terra looked like in the second millennium? Back when its surface was still two-thirds ocean and its continents still had native flora and fauna? I could show you.”

  “How?” Cain blurted out, shocked disbelief colouring his words, before he paled as he realised he’d just spoken his doubts aloud.

  I merely smiled at him. “I was there. I lived on Terra, or Earth as it was creatively called back then, between 2001 and 2025.”

  “I think we could come up with something,” Amberley said, sending a significant side gnce at her pet Commissar. “What kind of stories interest you?”

  “The juicy kind,” I said. “I’ve read all the little novels you’ve compiled based on Cain’s memoirs. However, I don’t think I ever learned how exactly each of your careers began. Especially for you, Amberley.”

  Cain looked ready to faint, but I just smiled in amusement as our gazes met. Yep, you silly man, the super dangerous and maybe a little crazy super psyker had read all of your ramblings. Also, I thought there was a … short story that described Cain’s early career, but to be perfectly honest, they cost like five fucking bucks and were a handful of pages at best. I’d been a broke college student, and those years left their mark, leaving me with a miserly attitude even once I was out of the hellhole that was the education system.

  “Well, if it truly interests you,” the woman started, settling into a prime pose that had me thinking of silly historical dramas and noble dies. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt to share … “

  She wove an intricate tale of her first few years out of the Scho Progenium, getting assigned to a veteran Inquisitor as an Inquisitorial Agent. She studied under the Inquisitor’s Interrogator, and apparently distinguished herself in her first few deployments with her talent for more subtle forms of information gathering than her superiors tended to employ. Something which came in quite handy, because it meant she was out gathering intel on a Tau sympathiser terrorist cell when the bomb said cell pnted on the Inquisitor’s shuttle obliterated the entire retinue, save for Amberley herself.

  “I didn’t know the Inquisition had automatic field promotions,” I hummed. “So that was it? You fished out his scorched Rosette, and as the st member of his retinue, became his inheritor?”

  “I became the acting-inquisitor on site,” Amberley corrected. “Usually, my authority would have been erased and I’d have had to return the Rosette, and be sent to another Inquisitor’s retinue for further training.”

  “And that’s not what happened, I take it?”

  “No,” Amberley said with a pleased smirk. “Apparently, accomplishing the mission all by myself, even after I was left to my own devices and bereft of the usual support personnel Inquisitors enjoyed, somewhat impressed even the grumpiest members of the Inquisition. I got to keep my Rosette in the end, and had a retinue of my own soon after.”

  Maybe I should have guessed, but Amberley was an excellent orator and an even better storyteller, even if she insisted that the editorialised bits of Cain’s memoirs she’d made were purely educational for her younger Inquisitorial comrades. I didn’t buy it, and apparently, the other Inquisitors felt simir, reading her writings purely for entertainment rather than to get a clearer understanding of how one of the most successful Commissars of the Imperium thought.

  “So!” I grinned once she finished up with the retelling of how exactly she managed to win her one-woman crusade against Tau-backed terrorists in some backwards agri-world more than three centuries ago. Cain looked delightfully faint just from listening to what a much more reckless and bloodthirsty younger Amberley had gotten up to. “Questions, requests, or a story of my own?”

  Amberley looked to be hesitating, then rexed her shoulders and spoke her request. “You said you lived on … Earth, back more than 40,000 years ago. Can you show us? I know you can use illusions, of a sort, so it should be well within your capabilities.”

  I raised an eyebrow; it was an easy request, and it could almost be counted as wasting the question, but maybe Amberly was getting a better handle on me than I thought, because it was the request I had been hoping one of them would make.

  I snapped my fingers, and the world around us changed in a blink. The sound of car horns bring, engines rumbling, and the general hubbub of a rge city filled the air as Times Square and, beyond that, New York City spread out around us. People turned translucent as they walked through us, the illusory ghosts not even acknowledging our existence as they went about their days. I did not remember exact details of course, but I extrapoted and had my mind-cores create as accurate of a simution as I could manage to piece together from what I did remember.

  “New York City,” I said, my tone dry. It was a shithole, and even just visiting once on a vacation cost me half a kidney. Worse yet, anything outside the main squares and the fancy new skyscrapers was barely holding on. “The most populous city in the country I lived in.”

  Another snap and we were floating out above the Lower New York Bay, overlooking the city in all its splendour. From afar, it looked splendid, but I remembered taking the damned tram and fearing whether I’d catch something from the unwashed seats or get shanked by a crackhead first. New York would forever be that feeling to me.

  Another snap sent us up to the peak of a mountain I’d hiked to the top of in the Appachians. It was a nice sight, the rolling hills covered in greenery and thick forests.

  “Some pces I’ll have clearer pictures of, like this one, these are the ones I’ve visited and seen for myself,” I said, and then another snap transported us far to the West, dropping us down on top of a cliff near the Grand Canyon. “Others I’ll have to reconstruct from pictures and recordings I've seen. So, any specific requests? I’ve watched a lot of nature documentaries, so I should be able to reconstruct most of anything.”

  P3t1