The other Sisters, I decided to just put to sleep like the Marines. Killing that st group felt like … bullying. Bullying a group of supremely irritating and murderous rodents, yes, but bullying nonetheless. A particur video of one of those stupid lemmings trying to scare off a hiker had popped into my head, and then I felt bad about continuing. My anger petered out, and it left me feeling numb and annoyed. I just wanted the problem dealt with and forgotten already.

  Their purity seals and minor wards did nothing when my psychic presence swept out like a kraken with an infinite number of mental tentacles, each plunging into an awake mind and shutting it down.

  I will test out the other disciplines on Orks, or something. I’m sure a more patable group of victims will volunteer themselves in no time.

  And so the world of Spite was mine, leaving the way open through the so-called Iron Colr, the circle of Fortress Worlds surrounding the Jericho-Maw Warp Gate and the Well of Night surrounding that, which Spite was a part of. We needed to hurry, even if the Imperial force did as Octavian commanded and retreated back through the Warp Gate in an orderly manner, that meant they had removed themselves from the other two Fronts in the Reach, opening the way for the forces of Chaos in the Acheros Salient, entrenched in the central region of the Reach and for Hive Fleet Dagon in the Orpheus Salient further out Riftward.

  Or rather, that’s what I would have believed without the handy information packet Octavian had handed over to me. According to it, the Great Rift had torn its way into the Jericho Reach through the Chaos-infested portions of it, curling towards the center of the system and devouring the Hadex Anomaly that had existed there since the Imperium first discovered the sector. Not that such a thing was all good, since while that nicely destroyed every Chaos stronghold and Daemon world near the Hadex Anomaly when it expanded to devour them, it also pced the Great Rift at the core of the Reach like a repugnant tumour while also very nearly cutting it in half.

  According to Octivian’s information, it was regurly spitting out Chaos warbands, disgorged hordes of Daemons, and even Greater Daemons had poked their heads out every so often to cause trouble for whoever wandered too close. If it worked like the Eye of Terror, then those Daemon Worlds hadn’t been destroyed either, merely transported into the Warp.

  Thankfully, the Orpheus Salient that was being ravaged by Tyranids was on the opposite side of the Hadex Anomaly, which was apparently at the tip of a bulbous protrusion from the Great Rift itself as it curved around the Jericho Reach. A good third of the Reach was thus utterly fucked, to put it mildly.

  I needed to take the Iron Colr and reinforce it myself. Make sure it could hold out against whatever the Great Rift spat out and threw my way. Also, I’d need to fortify the Canis Salient that would be linking the Iron Colr, and thereby the Warp Gate, to Vallia, and the Tau Velk’Han Sept beyond it. Worse the Hive Fleet assaulting the Orpheus Salient was Dagon, not Naga the one specialising in hunting Daemons. What did Dagon specialise in again? Toxicity? Poisons? It didn’t matter, at least they would occupy attention of some Chaos warbands. Would it be too much to ask for some Hive Fleet Naga Tyranids to eat?

  Shit. I’m either going to have to replicate my pocket Shadow of the Hive-Mind across the entirety of my new holdings, maybe the Tau Sept too, or shake Trazyn until he coughs up the method for making Bckstone Pylons.

  The eccentric Necron Overlord might not know himself, but I doubted it was entirely beyond his abilities to get his grabby metallic hands on the method from either Illuminor Szeras or the Silent King himself. They are supposed to be in the middle of their Pariah Nexus project right about now, which involves plopping down those Pylons by the hundreds, if not thousands, across an entire Sector. It can’t be that they’ve had that many of the damned things just gathering dust in storage, right? They have to know how to make more.

  I squinted up at the sky, peering at the repugnant wound upon the fabric of reality stretching across it. A rge part of the night sky, as it was visible from the world of Spite, was taken up by a bulbous, almost pulsating tendril of that wound. It cast an eerie crimson glow as it pulsed faintly, like a corrupted, grotesque heart. That must have been the Hadex Anomaly, according to Octavian’s information. It was technically one of the endpoints of the Great Rift, but another tendril of it curved around the Reach and plunged further into the Eastern Fringes beyond it, making circumventing it impossible for any voidship using regur Warp-Drives for transportation. It extended as far as the traversable parts of the Warp did, petering out only once it reached intergactic space.

  Before I could lose myself in my thoughts again, I teleported back to the Sovereign. I needed a pn to swiftly make this pnet compliant. With the primary instigators of the resistance captured, and with a Custodian and an Inquisitor to give my rule some authenticity, I had a head start … but it would be troublesome. I’d felt how hateful and defiant the popution had been, and it was much harder to convince humans that they’d been fooled than to fool them in the first pce. They’d be more likely to believe the now-gone Space Marines’ words than anything I said.

  Still, I was on a time limit. So I summoned Amberley and Cain, then decided to put them to task on working out how to quickly make the popution more compliant. They knew their own people better than I did.

  The Tau fleets were already on the way, taking their time as they themselves also made sure every Imperial system they passed was compliant, and not holding a sneaky Imperial fleet trying to strike us from behind.

  While my two newest minions were working on a pn, I got busy breaking into what few cogitators the Mechanicus left behind. They’d really taken everything that wasn’t nailed down, and they could manage to fit on … a Mechanicus Ark? There was a damned Mechanicus Ark in the Reach? Why?

  Doesn’t matter. What matters is that these assholes packed up everything crucial and left … which I suppose is as much as I could have asked for. At least they hadn’t deployed a Virus Bomb on their way out.

  The Noosphere was in tatters and much diminished, but I could still use it to locate the most important cogitators left behind that they’d failed to destroy. I spent the next two hours hunting down every one of those data banks to compile a more comprehensive idea of what I had to work with and fiddling with the Psilencer in my off-time, managing to make a respectable upgrade to my simplest Psyker powers of Smite and Eldritch Bst. Instead of appearing like a crackling bst of condensed lightning, both now looked more like beams of pure psychic energy. My mind-cores put the efficiency increase in the ballpark of three to four times the original, and the power at nearly double for the same soul energy investment.

  The first thing that was immediately apparent once I was done scouring the world for lingering data was that there had been a whole bunch of juicy warships and even three Star Fortresses in the system … and they decided to tow them all away when they left. Great. At least they hadn’t been able to uproot the pnetary orbital defences; that was something at least.

  I had a lot of work ahead of me if I wanted things to go well, so of course, Fate decided to remind me that she hated my guts. There was a brief moment of suspension where I felt the world tilt, and then the ephemeral thread connecting my soul to my other Avatar sprang alive. Energy flowed, and then there were two of me, separated by a few thousand light-years and yet operated by the same mind. I blinked with four eyes, then split my primary thought-stream between the two Avatars and let the one back on Spite continue the boring task ahead.

  I gathered my bearings in less time than it took humans to blink, and my senses swept out of me like a tide. To my right stood a pair of Necrons, one of whom I recognised as Trazyn and dismissed the other. Ahead of me was a legion of living metal, bearing down at something further ahead with a hail of unliving green beams of annihition. Smoke and dust hung thickly in the air, concealing what they were firing upon, but behind it, I saw the silhouette of a gargantuan pyramid of bck stone. Is that just bck stone, or Bckstone? Did I just hit the jackpot? Just what I will need to make the Reach suck a bit less. Dibs on that thing.

  We were in a cavern of titanic proportions, rge enough to fit a smaller town, and by the hundreds of little carvings and paintings I could see … it was predictably a Necron tomb. They did love their tombs.

  My aura and more esoteric senses stretched across the distance, seeking to pierce the dust cloud.

  “Kill it!” Trazyn hissed next to me with a worrying level of hate and desperation in his synthetic voice. I hissed back, snapping my eyes shut as a sun bloomed into existence, searing my eyeballs.

  The damage to my retinas was repaired in an instant, and my mind-cores used that time to analyse the brief glimpse I’d gotten. There was a thing there, in the shape of a man, floating zily as it burned with the energy of a star. My mind-cores helpfully informed me that the thing was radiating more energy per second just by existing than the fucking Sun, only for that energy to then curl back around into its form, reabsorbed to sustain the endlessly repeating loop.

  When my aura washed over it, that was confirmed again, though I noted a distinct ck of any disturbance in the Immaterium. No, it was more than that. The Warp and the Empyrean felt distant here, almost subdued.

  I connected the dots quickly, then had it confirmed when I ran the Necron glyphs etched into the walls through a transtor.

  ‘[Here lies Nephreth the Untouched, st Phaeron of the Ammunos Dynasty, st of the Necrontyr]’

  The Infinite and the Divine was my favourite Warhammer book, like the absolute normie I was, and even without having read that, there weren’t many things that fit the description of my foe.

  That was a C’Tan, a Star God, no questions about it. Or at least a shard of one.

  Atiesh smmed into my outstretched palm, appearing at my prompting out of the aether, ready to serve. Soul energy zipped through my Avatar, cascaded down to Atiesh and bloomed into a thick beam of silvery energy at its tip that nced towards the Star in the shape of a Man.

  If I recall correctly, Psyker powers were the sole weakness of the C’tan. They couldn’t comprehend the unnatural nature of the Immaterium. They were gods of the Materium, and the powers of the Warp were antithetical to them … but that didn’t mean they hadn’t learned to work around it. They had warred for a million years against the Old Ones, the ancient Aeldari and the Krorks.

  Reality shuddered as a tear opened up on its skin, revealing a dark void that swallowed up my fancy, improved Psychic beam.

  “What is this?” The voice came like the roll of thunder, reverberating upon the fabric of reality. The words were spoken in an ancient, archaic tongue I’d never learned and yet understood all the same.

  The dust-cloud parted as the Star God floated forward, unconcerned with the hail of green beams spat upon him by Gauss Fyers and Tes Guns. The body it wore looked human enough, if you ignored that it was made of living metal sculpted into the shape of a man. His skull was long, and from its sides grew two pairs of long, curved horns. His lips were peeled back in a mocking grin to reveal sharp teeth. Our gazes met halfway. His eyes were bck as the abyss, dancing with mirth, and yet they were colder than the void of space, holding an unmistakable edge of malice that sent a shiver down my spine.

  I recognised him. Mephet’ran, the Deceiver. One of the most reviled of the C’tan, the one who tricked the ancient Necrontyr to submit themselves to Biotransference and sacrifice their souls to the C’tan while slipping on the chains of eternal servitude in one go. He was the weakest, as far as C’tan went, but he was the most insidious of them all, having arguably done the most damage out of them all. Even the fall of the ascendant Infinite Empire of the Necrons could be id at his feet, for inciting the C’tan civil war that paved the way for their eventual fall when the Silent King revolted against them.

  “No, brothers,” he said, almost distractedly, as he waved a hand and the hundreds of Necron warriors froze as one. I felt something ripple through their ranks, the green light of their eyes blinking out before reigniting. They turned, facing a specific direction, and stilled again. “You bring me the best of gifts, Child Trazyn. What a succulent feast. Go, brothers, sughter my unwitting puppets, you soulless wretches yet may still be whole once more if only you rend their flesh from their bones.”

  A quarter of them shuddered, hunching forward as another ripple of energy swept through only them. Metallic fingers lengthened into cws as erratic twitches wrecked their bodies, and the green glow of their eyes shifted to amber. The indomitable martial immortals were gone, reduced to maddened primitive beasts. Fyers, as they were called. What a nasty trick!

  “This should be interesting,” I mused aloud, my own words coming out in the same tongue the Star God spoke in. It was subconscious, and I didn’t even notice it. “I know you have more tricks up your sleeve, Trazyn; you should use them. I’ve never fought a C’tan before, so all the help would be welcome.”

  The Deceiver opened his mouth and made a sound that wasn’t a sound. The newly made Fyers reacted instantly, making metallic shrieks as they pounced on the nearest untainted warriors. They sshed, ripped and kicked. Taloned fingers hooked under armour, shearing through ribcages, tearing apart wiring and crucial internal systems. Their static masks of living metal moved for the first time in sixty-five million years to form fangs and jaws to bite with.

  “Wonderful,” I huffed again, swinging Atiesh down in a zy vertical arc. Energy leapt through it, growing more focused and condensed by the time it reached its tip. The telekinetic attack curved through the air, invisible to anyone not a Psyker, and then it smmed down on the Fyers like the hand of God, crushing them into the Bckstone floor until not even scrap remained.

  An inky bck line of energy leapt from the Deceiver's fingers and lunged towards me, and my senses yelped in arm at the mere touch of it.

  Deciding not to risk it, I Blinked a dozen metres to the side before smming a beam of pure psychic power into the jagged bckness shearing through reality, causing the tter to hiss and explode.

  That … did this fucker just shoot a beam of straight-up antimatter at me? I mused in amazement, staring at the floating form of the Deceiver with slightly widened eyes. Then I gave it a manic grin. That’s awesome. Let’s see what else he’s got!

  P3t1