Humans were sometimes so stupid and self-destructive. Had all the regur humans in the world of Spite just all in down, got comfortable and allowed my spore-cloud to lull them to sleep, none of them would have died. But no, they had to be competent enough to be forewarned of the threat, and stupid enough to panic and start a damned stampede eight times out of ten.

  My spores did keep the ones who weren’t too injured alive, as per intended, but the ones who received armoured boots to the face, got trampled underfoot or simply got shanked or shot? They were out of luck.

  Still, only about 3% of the pnetary popution perished. I’d rather not think about the exact numbers or the sheer number of corpses, but it was technically an almost bloodless victory if only taking statistics into account.

  So here I was, standing before the primary instigator of this whole charade. And it was a charade without a doubt, but I was willing to indulge them with a big, cinematic showdown, if only to make my own annoyance known by way of gratuitous violence. Also, I was curious what the ten-man squad of Grey Knights hiding beneath this fortress was pnning. From what I felt from the Storm Wardens, they weren’t aware of their Grey cousins’ presence or pns.

  I had been wondering how I was going to get my cws on some of that juicy-juicy Grey Knight genetic material, especially now that going out of my way to hunt some of them down might be frowned upon by my newest hanger-ons. It was so nice of them to deliver themselves to me and even give me proper cause to eat them.

  Also, with me kinda-sorta allying myself with the Custodian Guard, I felt it would be prudent to make sure that stupid new lore about the Terminus Decree wasn’t canon in this version of the Warhammer universe. Doubly so if I were pnning to go through with my promise of healing up the Emperor. Although maybe they could come in handy if one of his more deranged fragments comes to possess his healed body.

  Contingencies were only prudent, and if the Terminus Decree truly was a command for the Grey Knights to never allow the Emperor to rise from the Golden Throne, then we could either be natural allies or enemies, depending on whether the Emperor’s resurrection goes tits up.

  The Librarians took my dipping a single tendril into the Warp badly, to say the least, though not as bad as that annoying red honey badger of a Bloodthirster. Doombreed was as stubborn as he was stupid. I could feel it, I had spoken his True Name and not only rented the connection he had to Khorne, but bound him to me instead … for now.

  He was weakened, disoriented, and I could give him mental commands whenever he got too annoying, and he’d take a hike until the command faded, and he came back twice as angry.

  So I was pying swat-the-twat with him, and that apparently revealed some of myself to the Psykers nearby. It took the Chief Librarian only a second to deploy a barrier, and what a magnificent barrier it was!

  I almost gasped, my brain tingling as I ran my gaze over the weave of energy. It was what I had been trying to accomplish, but after millennia of refinement done by dozens of successive transhuman masters of their craft. It was a hexagrammic ward woven out of warp energy.

  It was a paradoxical thing. Hexagrammic wards protected those under their aegis from psychic influence, so making them out of warp energy was … yeah. Like trying to make a waterproof cloth out of water. But it worked, or at least it seemed like it did.

  I squinted, ducking under the vicious lunge from the Chapter Master and allowing his momentum to carry him over me. A slight telekinetic swat to his back knocked him off bance, messing up his nding and allowing me to focus on what mattered.

  They had some strange trinkets that the hexagrammic wards seemingly clung to or were supported by. I tilted my head, gaze flickering up to stare into the eyes of a marine through his crimson visor, and through his eyes, into his mind.

  I teased the marine’s mind with my psychic fingers, my eyes widening slightly as I felt how rigid it was, tougher than the minds of the many regur Astartes I’d seen before. There was some faint energy running through it, suffusing it. Must have been the storm amulet. How fascinating.

  I didn’t go rummaging through his memories or go with brute force to break his mind apart and search for an answer to my question among the rubble. With a thought, I projected the image of the trinket hiding inside his pouch into the marine’s mind, making it appear in the centre of his vision, then I focused, I listened. His mind flickered, surface thoughts churning as he instinctively associated the object he saw with a term: Storm Amulet. I even caught some brief context clues from him, fragments of memories the term made him recall. This ‘amulet’ was a fetish or protective charm popur among the primitive warrior culture of their home world.

  The Chapter Master came at me again, swinging his humming power spear horizontally in a savage ssh that would have seen me bisected … had I been wearing regur power armour and allowed it to hit me.

  My own bde hummed to life, crackling with barely contained bio-energy as it snapped out of my hand and interposed itself in the spear’s path. I walked forward, appearing to ignore the Chapter Master like he was an unruly child throwing a tantrum, and pced my hand on the hexagrammic barrier’s surface.

  The other marines stayed back, for now at least. Did they have some silly culture of honour where one-on-one duels were sacred or something? That must have been it. Or maybe the barrier was two-way, and they were locked inside.

  I flexed my will, carving pathways in my mind, and then allowed my soul energy to come flowing into my Avatar. I just barely opened the ‘valve’, allowing a small stream through, but even that raced to fulfil my wishes like an overeager puppy. It filled the pathways as I willed it, roaring into the Materium, and the barrier snapped into being around me. I focused a bit more, trying to just feel the barrier the Librarians had conjured, take a taste of it, get used to its tune, memorise the rhythm. I altered my own barrier as I learned, my mind-cores supplying me with a steady stream of data on its swiftly improving properties.

  [Construct Integrity: +12.6% … +58.9% … +219% … +456.9% … Stabilising at 601% Improvement]

  [Psychic Filtering Efficiency: … Stabilising at +1976% improvement]

  [Absolute Psychic Suppression Grade: Zeta -> Beta]

  Zeta was the 11th rank up from Rho, which represented zero, and was the rank common to humans held on the psychic scale. Beta was the 15th, just three ranks down from the highest ever recorded sane psyker. For comparison, the 19th rank of Gamma Plus was the rank given to the most powerful Greater Daemons in existence, while the 17th Alpha Plus was what the Primarch Magnus the Red had been suspected of being before his demonification.

  By my mind-cores’ estimations, I could now nullify the powers of any Psyker below the 12th Alpha rank. Which was pretty good since anyone born in the 13th rank and up was a statistical anomaly, a one-in-a-billion miracle. Or disaster, depending on whether the Imperium’s Bck Ships or a Daemon got to the poor sod sooner.

  I also felt that having a physical amulet inscribed with hexagrammic wards and anchoring the barrier to that would enhance it even further, though perhaps it would limit the barrier in some other ways. Like maybe I’d only be able to conjure it around my body. I wasn’t sure. I’d have to see about getting one such amulet, or better yet, making one.

  Just for giving me this gift, I will let your Chapter live. I decided, my eyes wandering over to lock with the Chief Librarian’s. His eyes were wide, brimming with erratic power as he channelled the power of a dozen of his fellow Librarians into his barrier. I gave him a manic grin. I could see it in his eyes that he had seen what I had done, saw me take a look at his spellwork and copy it in less than a second.

  I think I saw some horror there, written across his rugged features. My floating bde twisted in the air, flowing like a river as it swung and lunged, keeping the Chapter Master on the back foot. He had tried to ignore it, trusting in his Artificer-grade power armour to withstand it, but the grazing strike aimed at his fk was stopped just short of drawing blood. If I had put some soul energy behind that attack in combination with the bio-energy infusing the bde, I’d have cut the fucker in half. Something he seemed to have sensed, and altered his approach accordingly, becoming more wary and cautious.

  He had tried leveraging his strength against the floating bde, which by all accounts should have been easily knocked aside when he struck it with enough force to knock an Ork on its ass. Unfortunately for him, my bde struck each time with the strength of my will, giving power to each blow.

  “Teleportation disruption, too?” I mused, an eyebrow raised as I felt how fuzzy the space inside the barrier felt. Not that it would stop me, but it was impressive that he wove so many effects into it. Better yet, they weren’t static like the disruption fields used on ships. “Nice.”

  I Blinked inside, appearing up in the Chief Librarian’s face. Weapons immediately homed in on me, but their firearms all malfunctioned as I did the equivalent of poking each of their Machine Spirits in the eye.

  The Librarian let out a bst of pure psychic power in a cone in front of him, something that would have turned my flesh to ash and rent it from my bones. I formed a wedge-shaped barrier before me, deflecting it to either side.

  Just to be dramatic, I formed a thick cloud of my sleeping spores in my mouth, opened my jaws and exhaled. The greenish cloud flowed out of my mouth in a thick stream, going right under the Librarian’s cowl and into his unprotected face.

  I spun on my heels, ignoring the chaos around me as the closest Space Marines all tried to tackle me, or cut me into pieces with combat daggers, but couldn’t even come within two meters of me. Every time one tried, I’d use the absolute minimum amount of telekinesis to mess up their attempt.

  Bdes diverted, mag-locked boots slipping, a poke to the eye, or sometimes to somewhere else, but simirly disorienting. Being economical with my soul energy spending was proving to be rather fun, even if I splurged every so often so as not to be uncool. That Blink had cost me more energy than everything else combined thus far, for example, but I wasn’t about to wait until the Librarian exhausted himself, or deigned to drop the barrier.

  The Chief Librarian fell over behind me with a heavy metallic thud. It took a lot more for my spores to knock him out, but he fell all the same. I’d have to fine-tune the spores for Astartes biology ter; all their extra and redundant organs made them a whole bit tougher to knock out.

  They parted, letting the Chapter Master through again, and I turned to regard him with some curiosity. I could almost taste the respect of his men shining around the man like a golden wreath. Why? Did they realise he had led them to a pointless death? Did he somehow earn enough respect that they were happy to die with him in some foolhardy attempt at killing the Big, Bad, Evil Witch?

  When I teased the hundreds of Astartes' minds around me as they looked upon their Chapter Master, I saw fragments of memories swim to the surface of their minds, poking out just enough that I could just snatch them for myself without any intrusive acts of telepathy.

  I saw a warrior who was grander than life, a leader they could depend on, who pushed everyone to be the best versions of themselves. A man who was unforgiving of weakness, both in himself and others, and who abhorred cowardice. He seemed rger than life … at least in their eyes.

  In mine, it just barely pushed him from ‘that idiot I’m about to sughter’ to ‘minor curiosity’. What would push a man like who the Marines believed their leader to be to sacrifice the entire popution of a world, along with more than half of his entire Chapter, on an impossible goal? Was it pride? Hatred? Revenge?

  I allowed a bit more energy to pour into my body, thrumming in my crystalline bones with eager vigour before surging into the next round of telekinetic strikes. Instead of merely diverting attacks or tripping the marines that came at me, they all bsted away as if each of them took a personal invisible train to the face.

  The Chapter Master roared, that strange energy from its amulet flickering around him as he lunged at me, spear aimed to run me through. I let it, weakening my power armour and the flesh beneath while turning just enough so the spear wouldn’t strike any bones.

  The humming bde sank into my stomach, its tip going right through my body and poking out my back. It hit nothing crucial … or rather, I didn’t have anything crucial in my Avatar that it could have hit. It was a flesh and bone golem run by bio-energy and driven by my mind, in essence.

  My arm snapped out like a striking serpent, fingers sinking into the armour around his neck and lifted him off his feet. I had to levitate myself up a bit for it to work; the fucker was like five heads taller than me, but damn it if I wasn’t about to make this look cool.

  He tried to tear the spear out to the side, rend my torso apart and cut through my spine. I grabbed the haft with my other hand, and I could feel his disbelief when he couldn’t even make it budge.

  I looked into his eyes, peering through the reflective crimson visor like it wasn’t even there, and tilted my head in that bird-like manner that always unnerved people. “Did that make you feel better?”

  “No,” the man grunted, letting go of the spear and grabbing a sidearm from its holster at his waist. I had a barrel pointed at my face, staring into its depths as a newborn sun sprang to life in the darkness. “But killing you will, traitor.”

  “Everyone seems to be calling me that,” I mused, smirking as the psma bolt erupted from the barrel. It burned the faux-skin from my cheeks in a smouldering line, but the yer of armour beneath, thrumming with bio-energy, stopped it dead. “You can’t betray something you’ve never held any loyalty to.”

  He unleashed five more psma bolts in my face, but decided to be rude about it and target my eyes. Having a bolt of super-heated psma turn your eyeballs into steam and then get stuck in the orbital cavity — the hole your eyeball sits in — was rather uncomfortable, let me tell you. So I poked the psma as it was forming in the barrel after that and gave the pistol’s machine spirit a smack. Rather predictably, it exploded in his hand, taking everything up to his elbows in a fiery ball of death.

  A thin barrier woven around myself protected my squishy, superficial surface yer from getting liquefied and gave me a moment to repair the damage.

  By the time the ball of psma faded away, I was back to looking picture perfect, in stark contrast to the Chapter Master still dangling from my hand.

  “Are you quite done?” I asked in a sweet tone, smiling still.

  He wasn’t merely grunting as he smacked his other gauntlet-covered fist into my stomach. I continued smiling at him, entirely unaffected by the blow. Dispersing simple kinetic energy was easy enough with some practice.

  Then I swung him about, unching him out of my hand and into a wall so hard the metal bent around him. The mighty Chapter Master was stuck, embedded in the wall. He was disoriented, nauseous and had to contend with the mother of all concussions. I gave his armour’s machine spirit a smack upside the head, just to be sure, causing it to lock up but not nearly enough to actually harm the tough little fucker.

  While I was busy pying with the Chapter Master, my floating sword had been going around, poking holes in the armour of every nearby Astartes, thereby making them susceptible to my sleepy spores. Which left me with a grand hall filled with sleeping space marines, again.

  “And that leaves me with three hundred more marines, and a whole lot more murderous battle nuns,” I mused aloud to the silent hall. “Better get to work, I guess.”

  P3t1