Aaaaaand that brings me back to having to deal with the Sisters again. Great. No more distractions. I sighed. The few remaining locations across the pnet with still conscious people shone like stars in my mind. I could … use them for practice. Considering the Sanctic Psyker Discipline apparently works almost just as it was described in the Codex, could I copy the abilities of other Disciplines?

  There were the Core 5 Disciplines: Biomancy, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Divination and Pyromancy. Aside from those, there were also the secondary disciplines of Technomancy, Fulmination, Geokinesis and Sanctic Daemonology that I was interested in.

  If you squinted really hard, my poking machine spirits to shut down equipment could be counted as the Technomancy ability: Conjuration Mechanicum. So that was one ability I could tick off.

  There were some things I knew I wouldn’t be able to replicate, bound as I was by the nature of my specific brand of Psyker powers. Or rather, their source. I drew power not from the Warp, but from my own little Sea of Souls, which cked the inherent destructive, chaotic nature of the Warp that some abilities made use of.

  It also made me almost entirely unable to use the Discipline of Divination, which also went for everyone who used my Realm as a source for their powers. Valenith had been quite miffed about that, up until we confirmed that it also meant that we were nearly impossible to divine as a result, and likely just mildly affected by that pesky thing called Fate.

  That would change as my Realm grew in power and influence in the Empyrean, but it would be a while until it could ever compare to the infinite mass and depths of the Warp.

  The other Disciplines were fair py, though, even if I would avoid attempting any that involved ripping a hole into the fabric and letting the Warp through, for obvious reasons. Those kinds of things might work for Psykers who didn’t have a near-permanent Daemon entourage salivating at the mere thought of getting a nibble of their soul.

  I also grabbed the Psilencer and the Justicar’s Nemesis Force Give. Both were attuned to him, but I was sure I could solve that little issue with some effort and a good spanking to the spunky machine spirits dwelling within the two weapons. If I could learn how to better manifest my psychic might in its rawest form from them, it would have made this entire Crusade-thingy worth it all by itself. The Psilencer could teach me how to condense and focus my Eldritch Bsts better, and the Force Give how to manifest my psychic power in the form of a bde that struck with all the power of my psychic might.

  Then I Blinked over to the closest congregation of Sisters of Battle, standing just outside the heavily fortified Gothic church they had decided to take shelter in. There were a good 100 Sisters in there, 86 of whom managed to put on their air-sealed power armour before the spore-cloud got to them. The crazy bitches gave ‘the Emperor’s Mercy’ to the 14 who fell asleep.

  I decided then and there that I would be starting out with Biomancy as my choice for the first discipline to test. I’d been using some aspects of it naturally, by instinct, whenever I enhanced my body through the use of soul energy. What I usually used was a streamlined mix of The Quickening, Endurance and Iron Arm, all made to work optimally for my Avatar. It was subconscious, natural, and it made it immediately apparent that the abilities and disciplines were mere guidelines meant for lesser psykers than I. They would work wonderfully as inspiration, however.

  A massive reinforced gate stood in my way, which sadly had me go back on my earlier decision to limit myself to Biomancy for this. There was an ability in the Technomancy discipline called Sunder, which would apparently shear apart metal and machinery along the weakest fault lines. I’ve never felt its use with my aura, so I couldn’t replicate it by feel. I knew only the result I wanted, and that it was possible, along with the absolute certainty that I had both the power and ability to do it.

  I focused on it, on the idea of the ability, as I gathered the writhing soul energy within the palm of my hand. I wanted a focused electromagnetic surge to strike the gate, seek out the fault lines and then sunder this pesky obstruction standing in my way.

  The silvery energy in my grasp shuddered, twisting and warping as I infused it with purpose. In moments, what I held went from an unduting silvery sphere of raw energy to a mass of crackling electricity that struggled against its leash, eager to accomplish its purpose. I let it go, watching eagerly as it leapt out of my hand and crashed into the gate, sending a swarm of questing arcs of electricity spreading over its surface. A web of lines started lighting up along its surface a moment ter, turning white hot as the faux-electricity burrowed into it.

  Then the surface yer gave a tortured creak and scrunched, fractured and then peeled away like a yer of dead skin to reveal the one beneath it, shattering into a dozen fragments as it struck the ground. But Sunder still had power, so it continued, leaping over to the next y and then the one after that, running out of juice only when it reduced the meter's thick reinforced gate to a metal barely thicker than my calves.

  I gathered a condensed sphere of pressurised telekinetic power in my hand, grinning as that one awesome trailer from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic pyed out before my mind’s eye. I released it, and the telekinetic sphere bsted forth as if spat out by a Graviton Bst Cannon. It struck what remained of the gate like the Fist of God, sending chunks of it exploding inward as shrapnel and striking whoever was stupid enough to linger close by on the other side.

  I strode through the wreckage, a simple telekinetic barrier stopping the hail of bolter fire instantly screaming towards me. Their explosions rumbled through the air one after the other, deafening to a normal human, but I heard the frantic cries for reinforcements and the defiant war cries coming from the Sisters all the same.

  “The gate is breached!”

  “Kill the witch!”

  “We need heavier ordinance, bolters have no effect!”

  “Sy the heretic!”

  “Get a damned melta!”

  “FOR THE EMPEROR!”

  I decided to be diplomatic, just a bit. I knew they would rather spit in my face than back down. The only use of wasting my breath on them was so I could say I had tried diplomacy once this was all over and done with. It might win me some brownie points with the few Imperials whose opinions I somewhat cared about.

  My voice was low, bnd and should have gotten lost in the chaotic din of the battle. It didn’t; it rang in the ears of every st Sister within the building with absolute crity. “You are disobeying direct orders from Octavian Gaius of the Adeptus Custodes. Cease this idiocy and y down your arms. This is your st opportunity to back down; there will not be another.”

  “You defile the image of the Emperor’s Custodes with your vile tricks, abhorrent witch!” One of them screeched. “We will not fall for your lies! Die, heretic!”

  “Well, I tried,” I mused as my lips pulled down into a disgusted grimace. I could taste their stupid, moronic zealousness. There was not a single original thought in the entire damned room. They were the reason the Imperium was so fucked up, they and other zealous lunatics like them. Everything wrong with the Imperium started with Erebus, Lorgar and Kor Phaeron, another batch of fanatical zealots who couldn’t live without ‘Gods’ telling them what to do. My hand snapped up, electricity already crackling between my spread fingers. A simple Biomantic Smite snapped forth, striking the first Sister and causing her equipment to hitch as it raced through it and into her body. “Not quite unlimited power, but it’s still cool, I guess.”

  Bio-electricity. Not the most potent power, but it was fun, even though it had nothing on the Warp lightning Valenith liked to make use of. It wasn’t even enough to kill the Sister, just temporarily paralyse her with the tiny sliver of soul energy I gave it as fuel.

  A substantial fraction of Biomancy made use of something called ‘vital spark’ or ‘life-force’, if I recall correctly. It was vitality, in some metaphysical energy form. My standing hypothesis was that it was, in essence, an aspect of what I called bio-energy. Or it was bio-energy itself, I wasn’t sure yet, but supposedly Biomancy should be able to drain it out of people at range with an ability called Life Leech.

  I condensed my aura, bundling it up in a sphere just a hundred metres across, and I focused on the Sisters, trying to find some ephemeral energy infusing their organic bits. It was faint, but familiar, which is probably the only reason I recognised it underneath all the other types of energies melding inside a human body. I reached out for it, my soul energy shing out like a striking serpent, and it drank deep of that vital energy, feeding it back to me.

  The Sister I struck colpsed, energy fading from her body as a cascade of organ failures wrecked her body and had her dead before she hit the ground. I grimaced. I barely even felt the energy pouring into my body, attempting to rejuvenate me. It was a drop in the ocean, if even that. When I reached for the next one the same way, I was more careful. Instead of tearing out her vitality, I merely sapped it, limiting it to a level where her body grew weak and feeble but not dead yet.

  The problem with that turned out to be that the usually tough woman’s muscles and bones turned … fragile. She failed to support the weight of her armour and stumbled, falling over with an agonised shriek as dozens of bones in her body broke under the strain.

  Yikes. I grimaced in sympathy, redirecting the energy I’d stolen back to her in a moment of pity. Her bones snapped back into pce, torn muscles mended, and skin fused back together as twice the initial amount of vitality she had flowed back into her body. Well, that was Life Leech, Enfeeble and Regeneration. All three are just different aspects of the same trick. Cool.

  I remembered three more I wanted to test, the first of which was Haemorrhage. I gathered a bit of soul energy in my palm again, separating the ball from the rest writhing eagerly in my body. I imbued it with a purpose: seek out the target's circutory system and rupture it, all of it. Then I threw it at the loudest Sister still screaming at me, calling me all sorts of nasty names, which was honestly uncalled for.

  The silvery energy had twisted itself into an eerie glob of dark crimson energy, its colours shifting between carmine and obsidian bck. I flicked it at the screecher, narrowing my eyes as the globule of energy twisted mid-air until it resembled a nail that plunged into her chest, right above her heart. Her screech went up a pitch as every single blood vessel in her body burst all at once, her heart exploding, arteries rupturing, and even hair-thin veins bursting open. The purity seals on her armour burned away, turning to ash as my attack easily overwhelmed her protections. They were paper-thin in comparison to the monstrous protections the Grey Knights fielded.

  She was dead before her body even hit the ground. That was one nasty spell, holy shit. Though nowhere near as mean as the next one I wanted to try: Paroxysm. It was supposed to be a Tyranid-only thing, usable only by the Hive Tyrant and the Neurotyrant. I wasn’t sure whether I could replicate it, but I was hopeful. I found nothing in either Tyranid bioform’s genome that suggested the ability required some specific organ or whatnot. Then again, maybe it was unique to the Hive Mind, so who knew?

  What it did was target the victim’s nervous system and induce an ungodly amount of agony directly into it, so much of it in fact that it fried the majority of the nerves in a regur human’s body in an instant, leaving them as a weak, trembling, insensate mess of a human being.

  I used an even smaller glob of soul energy to power this one, much less than Haemorrhage, since even that one shouldn’t have exploded the target’s heart, so I suspected that I must have gone a bit overboard.

  Well, something happened to the silvery energy in my grasp as I was done impressing upon it its purpose, turning into a malevolent ball of bck electricity and cloudy darkness. I flicked it at the nearest Sister, one of the less intelligent of their kind, apparently, who decided to try charging at me despite the hail of bolter fire raining down on me. The dark lightning connected, snapping over to my target in the blink of an eye and bypassing her armour entirely, leaving burning purity seals in its wake. The woman shrieked like a banshee, her body convulsing as she fell on her face, and I flinched at the empathetic feedback. Yes, now that was a nasty spell. I decided to shelve it entirely until I met someone truly abhorrent.

  It also earned me a barrage of heavy melta-fire to the face, followed up by a melta grenade and washed down by a thick plume of burning promethium. My barrier withstood it all without strain.

  That left the st ability: Warp Speed. I wouldn’t have put it in Biomancy if it were up to me, but that’s where it was in the codex. Where ‘The Quickening’ was an ability that put the body into overdrive, enhancing metabolism and pushing the body to supernatural heights with the power of the Immaterium, Warp Speed was more along the lines of sheathing yourself in a cloak of warped time. It was basically the Haste spell from DnD, as I understood it.

  For this one, I covered myself in a thick yer of soul energy, a finger-thick yer above my armour and skin, then I imbued it with what I wanted it to do. Loosen time’s grasp on me, speed up the rate of time’s passage within my small bubble of soul energy. While my enemies experienced one second, I wanted to experience ten. I wanted the energy sheath to wrap around me, bind to me, and allow me to move even once time’s been messed with.

  The world around me slowed to a crawl, and my lips stretched into a grin. A quick calcution confirmed that the bolters flying towards me were going at specifically one-tenth of the speed they had been moments before.

  I flexed my muscles, feeling the sheath of frantic energy bend and move along with my shifting skin. Good, it worked. I took a step and felt no trouble, nothing other than the nagging sensation that I had to keep a firm grasp of that ephemeral thread I now felt connecting me to something unknowable. Humans were never meant to comprehend Time on a conceptual, cosmic level, and my mind was very human, fortunately. I knew that just gncing towards what y at the other end of the thread would give me a headache.

  I needed a filter, the thing human minds did subconsciously to safeguard their sanity when faced with something beyond their comprehension. So I decided that Time, for me, was a river. A great river flowing ever onwards into eternity. I was but a small boat rocking along on its surface, and what my Warp Speed was doing was letting me get some distance from the centre of the River of Time, where it flowed the fastest, where the great ship that was my new universe was rocking along.

  It wasn’t a perfect metaphor. The rate at which time flowed in any specific slot in space was influenced by gravity and other forces; after all, it was far from constant. Warp Speed was one of those forces, though highly localised even on the micro-scale. The Warp itself was another.

  Still, the metaphor was good enough for my purposes. I could already feel my grasp firming on that thread just from applying that mental filter. When it came to the conceptual aspects of the Immaterium, the more you understood something, the easier it got to manipute and grab. Which was probably the cause of why Biomancy came to me so easily.

  So that thread was my lifeline, which I’d use when I decided to drag myself back into the proper time-stream, or maybe it would yank me back the moment I stopped supplying my energy sheath with power. We’d see.

  Atiesh appeared in my hand, and in a blink, the power bde at its head snapped into existence too. For the moment, it wasn’t quite as powerful a weapon when used as a give as a sword made out of the Norn Emissary’s bde was, but I was hopeful it would grow to overtake it once I was done studying the Nemesis Power Give. But for a bunch of Sisters of Battle, it would do. It would also be a much cleaner death than either an AoE Haemorrhage or Life Leach would grant them, and I wasn’t a heartless monster; I didn’t want them to suffer needlessly, even if I wanted them dead and gone.

  I sprang into action, moving from my spot for the first time. They stood nearly motionless as I weaved between the flying bolts, plumes of fire and beams of psma. My Avatar was already as quick as a Custodian by default, rivalling a Primarch when doped up on bio-energy, so with a ten times increase? They stood little chance. I’d given my ultimatum, and they had rejected me. Like I needed tricks and illusions to kill them all. I felt like a bully, but there was no reasoning with some people, and I was feeling thoroughly done with assholes popping out of the woodwork trying to murder me. I was so done with it. They should have fucked off when given the chance if they didn’t want to die, and there had been more than one chance to do so.

  I had so much shit to deal with. So much to fix. So many problems to solve. But they just have to be in the way. Is this what it feels like to be Guilliman, trying to hold together a shit-heap of an empire full of idiots who resist being saved?

  P3t1