A Bloodletter rushed at me, hatred in its eyes, a need for blood and murder guiding its steps. It wielded a flesh cleaver, of all things, which it held raised above its head.

  For a moment, I just stared at the simple creature as its steps ate up the distance between us. It came at me in a straight line, its mode of attack obvious to anyone with an eye, it held no capacity for deception or even higher thought, in its mind.

  It was almost … cute. Like a ferocious kitten. An orange kitten, with far too few brain cells, maybe. And one that loved to roll around in its own waste, because damn, Warp-energy never got any less revolting, and this thing was made of the stuff.

  I raised my gun, an old-school revolver I’d thrown together on the flight down to the pnet, made entirely out of organic material. Its rotating cylinder had six chambers, each of which now held one of my Null-bullets.

  That overgrown chicken had gotten in my way, but I’d be damned if I didn’t test my newest pet project on live targets just because it decided to piss all over my pns for the day.

  I aimed the gun, lining up the iron sight to point right at the ugly mug of the Bloodletter and pulled the trigger. The revolver kicked back against my hand, but the minor recoil wasn’t even enough to make my hands twitch. The bullet exploded forth with a loud crack of thunder, and I dited my perception of time to watch its flight.

  It was rotating properly, and it seemed that I hadn’t messed up anything major since the bullethead seemed reasonably intact. That probably meant my initial guess at the proper amount of explosive force needed to unch it had been on point. I wasn’t using something as primitive as gunpowder, but bio-psma instead, and while that meant the bullets themselves didn’t need to have their combustible payload included, I instead had to refine this new process nearly from the ground up.

  Tyranids had projectile weapons, but those used compressed air and usually shot spikes or something of the like, not tiny bullets. Unfortunately, the compressed air version didn’t seem compatible with the revolver form, which was a non-negotiable part of my weapon. I wanted my revolver, damnit!

  I watched the daemon’s face twitch into a grimace a moment before the bullet hit, then watched it tear a hole through its head. The wound was tiny, as one would expect from a bullet wound, but the creature dropped like a sack of bricks. The moment it started tilting forward, the wound started to spread, widening as the daemon’s not-flesh started to discorporate and then it quickly vanished into nothing. By the time its body hit the ground, it was missing its head and neck, and its rough meeting with the ground made what remained of it burst into crimson energy that hissed angrily before seeping through the Veil into the Immaterium.

  Well. So it was an instant-kill, but not the permanent kind, merely banishment … or was it?

  My third eye opened, and I followed the crimson energy as it escaped, flowing back towards the depths of the Warp where I suspected the realms of the Four Twats were. The little Bloodletter was probably returning to daddy Khorne’s gardens to lick its wounds, though I was curious just how substantial those wounds were.

  Did my null-bullet put the little fel out of commission for at least a few decades? Or would the little shit be back to ruin someone’s day somewhere else in the gaxy in a few days’ time? Unfortunately, I couldn’t peer into the Deep Warp from my Realm, and I abhorred the idea of taking a dive to check it out.

  A Lord of Change managed to poke my memories and ugh its way around my mental barriers. I did not want to even think about how much worse meeting its boss could go for me.

  Of course, Bloodletters were never alone. These Lesser Daemons of Khorne were always a horde, summoned forth by incredible bloodshed and death, or a ritual that used such things as a catalyst. So more came, and I felt myself grin. I spun my revolver around a finger, then grabbed it, cocked its hammer and aimed.

  The bullets exploded forth with deafening cracks, each one striking a Bloodletter. I switched up my targets, one bullet through the head, another the chest, a third a thigh and a fourth went through a palm. To my surprise, each daemon got banished, though the ones I hit in a less vital area managed a step or two before they poofed out of existence.

  Neat. I thought, giving my new toy an affectionate pat. There were many more daemons to kill, dozens came every minute from the tear in space just a hundred metres up ahead, per minute. And like it or not, I had a limited amount of null-bullets, so I’d have to handle them and the other ones I found the old-school way. I’ll have to crank up production and look into increasing the potency again, in some reasonably ethical way. I’m going to need all the tricks I can get my hands on if another daemon like that tricky chicken shows up to ruin my day.

  I still had enough morals that I felt utterly revolted at the idea of raising fully aware Pariah children like cattle just to sughter them for their bio-matter once their souls fully matured and saturated their physical forms. Which would have been the easiest solution to my problem.

  In a way, every being I created with an awareness, sapience and sentience, was a child of mine. Jeff, the big space noodle and my daughters were the only ones to date, though the prior was more like a family pet. Maybe because, perhaps subconsciously, I shaped the artificial mind like how I thought a loyal pet dog might think if it gained sentience.

  My bde formed in my hand, a simple bonesword, left unenhanced by my vast psychic power. It wouldn’t take much soul energy to empower it like it was designed to be, but I didn’t even need the sword itself to sughter these pitiful daemons. My body itself was a weapon, and I could punch through their faces easily enough, which tended to banish them all the same. It just so happened that they were disgusting, so I’d much rather dice them up with a sword than use my fists.

  It was part of my effort to be less wasteful with my soul energy. I didn’t need the added power, so I wouldn’t waste the soul energy on it. Perhaps I would keep this habit of efficiency even after I recovered the soul energy I’d lost. It never hurt to have more power in reserve, and my bio-energy usually sufficed for most things. It was worth considering.

  Twenty more Bloodletters came at me as I re-absorbed my revolver and sent the Null-bullets back onto the Sovereign for storage. I flicked the sword in the other hand, a sleek long-sword held in a loose, one-handed grip. Its bance was perfect, the edge reasonably sharp, though not molecur, even if it was a near thing.

  I surged forward, a single flowing dash taking me through the rushing group as my bde shed out in savage arcs faster than the stupid creatures could ever hope to react. I slowed to a walk, trotting up to the tear on top of the small hill, the daemons behind me poofing out of existence.

  Yes, that Lord of Change might have been able to almost entirely negate physical damage, but I was pretty sure that was a unique thing. Most, if not all, daemons could be banished through sufficient application of physical force. Their vessels were what tethered them to the Materium, destroying those sent them back to the Warp. Simple as that.

  Atiesh snapped into my arm, and I reached out, grabbing ahold of the fading daemonic essence before it could flee back into the Warp.

  It flowed into me, sinking into my skin and rushing up the thread of my soul to my Realm, where it was purified into soul energy in less than a nanosecond. It wasn’t much, not even a tenth of a single per cent of the energy that went into a single one of the Eldritch Bsts I had unleashed on the Lord of Change. But it was energy that came without dipping my metaphorical toes into the Warp.

  A smooth rock surface stretched on the hilltop, bare of the swampy trees that infested this pnet. The ones that grew around the clearing were thin and withered, and they all leaned away from the twisted thing at the centre, as if even they were afraid of it.

  My eyes traced the shifting shapes stretching across the surface. Someone had brought rge stone sbs up here, melded them together, then used them to draft the ritual. Perhaps it’d been carved out of stone at first, or maybe painted on in blood. Now it was neither, pure Warp-energy curving and twisting in the shape of a weird circle filled with eldritch shapes that made my eyes itch when I looked at it. There were more in those scribbles than mere ink; they were concepts, dark, bloody concepts of death and war.

  Merely standing on it put the taste of iron on my tongue and made a curdling bloodlust simmer in the edges of my mind, just beyond my barriers.

  I stomped down, shattering the stone foundation and then flicked my hand, using a minuscule amount of soul energy to bst the shards away with a wave of force. The twisted, curdling energy of the Warp hanging over the clearing and flowing out of the tear stuttered, then space itself seemed to hitch. The energy guttered out and reality snapped back into pce, erasing the tear with a vengeance.

  The world was not yet drenched in blood and war nearly enough to allow for a spontaneous manifestation of Khornite daemons, so the rituals were their only way to get here.

  I thought of letting it linger instead and eating up the energy that seeped through, but I decided against it. It wasn’t worth it; a single Bloodletter had as much energy inside it in the form of essence as that tear released in ten minutes. I could go kill hundreds of Bloodletters in ten minutes, or more if I found rger groups. Finding them was the problem, not killing them. If there were an endless horde of them, I could maybe sughter tens of thousands in ten minutes with just my sword and the strength of my body.

  One down, a few more to go. It should be done in an hour. I thought, and that was calcuting with my reduced speed, considering I wouldn’t be wasting soul energy on Blinks, and would instead haul my ass over to the other rituals on foot.

  Or wait! I’m a shapeshifter, kinda, I can just turn into a bird or something and fly there … Wait a second, I have a Dragon tempte! I’m so gonna turn into a Dragon!

  I did just that, hopping into the air and twisting my Avatar to take on the form of my Dragon tempte. Large, leathery wings pushed down on the air and unched me further into the air.

  My enthusiasm dampened somewhat when I instinctively channelled some of my psychic power to flow through the Draconic body. The Dragons were not creatures that should be able to fly; their wings were too small compared to their body weight. So how did they? The answer was, of course, space magic. When in doubt, bme Warp-fuckery.

  A bit regretfully, I twisted my form again and turned into a hawk instead. It was faster than a Dragon in flight anyway, even if it was much less cool. Still, its flight would give me a free and reasonably fast transport option. If I channelled some bio-energy to enhance the avian body, it could fly nearly as fast as a slower commercial aircraft from back home. That’d have to do for now.

  Luckily, the rituals were clumped reasonably close together, spread across the frontline of the battlefield. It probably helped their rituals if they were closer to the site of death and bloodshed. So it only took ten to twenty minutes to fly from one to the other as a juiced-up hawk, which was, by the way, pretty damned cool too. There was something different about flying under my own power, by using my wings and body solely to accomplish the task instead of cheating with Psychic stuff.

  I mean, I loved cheating, but this was cool too.

  On second thought, I think I'm not going to give voice to that sentence. It's far too easy to misunderstand, and I might be sleeping on the couch as it is for the next few days.

  P3t1