Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

Night Lords. They were all assholes of the highest order, though a scant few of them were lovable assholes, which made them fun to read about. Most weren’t.

They were a fractured Legion, as most of the Traitor Legions were, but they had their quirks. Some of them abhorred Chaos and viewed submitting to it as weakness; some served Chaos Undivided, eking out some meagre amount of false freedom that way, while others were slaves to a single Chaos God.

All of them had an unhealthy fascination with flaying innocent people alive, even the ones who claimed to be agents of righteous judgment. Of course, they thought they were the only ones who could judge who deserved their wrath.

Those were the ones most similar to the original ideology followed by their Primarch, Konrad Curze. Those belonging to that group had a few moments where they shone, and I was pretty sure those scant few moments were the reason the Legion had any fans at all.

There was that story where Jago Sevatarion was imprisoned aboard a ship and learned that an Astropath overseer was abusing a young psychic girl. He, of course, broke out, flayed the man, then went back to his cell.

But men like him were one in a million among the Night Lords, and after some time spent looking through the ones on the battlefield, I found none. Worse, I felt the distinctly repulsive touch of Slaanesh on all of these Traitor Astartes. Which made them the worst kind of Night Lord: the weaklings who gave in to the tempting whispers.

In practice, they were irredeemable, sadistic assholes, so I wasted no time in teleporting from target to target, taking only a moment each time to divorce a Night Lord’s head from his shoulders before I teleported to the next one. I cleaned up the immediate vicinity of where Selene and co. were fighting first, then continued in an expanding spiral. All the while, the Sovereign swam closer and closer to the Chaos War fleet, laying into them with abandon and making use of all of my fancy, newest plasma cannons and exotic missiles. My flagship easily had the range advantage, and its primary plasma cannon sitting at its prow didn’t lose out even to a Nova Cannon in firepower. Considering the Chaos Fleet only had a single proper warship built for the purpose, while the rest looked like raiding vessels thrown together by deranged pirates? They had little hope.

Less than twenty seconds later, I was done delivering all due violence upon the last Night Lord within the city we’d teleported into. So I teleported to the next one, then the one after that and so on until all … roughly two hundred Night Lords down on the planet’s surface were in suitably numerous pieces.

I turned my gaze up on the Battle Barge, and feeling the repulsive power of the Ruinous Powers seep into its Void Shields to reinforce it against my impending invasion, I only smirked. Silvery flames coated my body, flowing into my Storm Ward and infusing my Barriers with their powers. A Blink sent me skipping across the Veil, spitting me back out within spitting distance of the Void Shield. I could feel it thrumming with power, the Empyrean energy making it visibly crackle as they forced all the power they could spare into overcharging it. Cute.

My oversized Witchblade appeared in my hand in all its glory, already crackling with power as I established the energy feedback loop. It wasn’t like Atiesh that it could just appear at my side whenever and wherever I wished it, so I’d made a small spatial fold for it, which I attached to my Avatar. Without hesitation, I swung the blade in a lazy horizontal swing.

The Battle Barge was massive, a gargantuan ship over six kilometres in length from prow to tail. It could carry and deploy three companies of Astartes, and was practically the equivalent of a Battle Cruiser? I think? I wasn’t too sure about ship classifications, but if I remembered correctly, it had about the same armaments and dimensions.

So in comparison, I looked like an ant next to it, or maybe not even that. A speck of dust would have been more accurate. So much so that I could feel them try to lock onto me with targeting algorithms, since their Sorcerers felt my arrival — I wasn’t hiding my presence after all — but they all slid right off of me.

Their auspex — sensor arrays — couldn’t lock onto me; it was like casting out a net with holes too large to catch a tiny fish. At first, I thought it was due to my size. I mean, why would you fine-tune your sensors to pick up human-sized things in a Void battle? Then I remembered missiles. It’d be stupid if their auspex couldn’t lock onto missiles. Their point defence stuff would be worthless if that were the case.

Could it be that I’m entirely organic and don’t show up on their infrared sensors due to having no exhaust plume? I do recall that the Imperium always had a lot of trouble tracking Tyranid bioships, or even splinter fleets, and those things were massive compared to me.

Still, most things were manual in this Galaxy, and it wasn’t long before weapons batteries opened fire in my vague direction, splitting plasma and las-fire that either missed me or splattered across my Barriers. They were already opening the nearest ship bay to release a flock of fighter strike craft to take care of me, but by then, my Witchblade completed its arc and rent a man-sized hole into the Void Shield.

I stepped through, grinning as I saw the shield writhe around me as my silvery flames spread and cannibalised the Warp energy infusing the Void Shield to fuel themselves. With the Witchblade in my hand, each of my blows struck with the full might of my psychic potential, and large as this ship was, it couldn’t withstand it. The generators already struggling to maintain the Void Shields in their current state imploded one after the other as the force of my blow reverberated across the Shields and reached them in rapid succession, leaving the Battle Barge undefended … except for the point-defence turrets, but they didn’t even tickle.

I could have done many things then. Teleported inside, used my telekinesis to rip apart the ship, burn it to scrap, blast it to pieces, unleash my Orks inside, or any of my little pet monsters. Instead, I walked up to the hull and swung my sword again, infusing it with enough power so that an ethereal sword overlaid itself on top of it. The copy extended in length halfway through the swing, its tip lunging into the reinforced metal and continuing its arc alongside my real blade, tearing through the hull. I swung three more times and then tore out the piece of the hull that I’d separated from the rest with a telekinetic tug, sending it floating off into space.

I stepped through the newly made gap, ignoring the handful of unlucky chaos-tainted humans that got launched off into the void by the sudden vacuum.

Maybe I wanted to give my Witchblade a proper test run, maybe I wanted to give the Night Lords here time to recognise how utterly fucked they were, maybe I wanted them to feel like prey for once and … maybe seeing them wear skin-capes that used up more than a handful of children as ‘ingredients’ pissed me off far worse than I’d initially thought. It was still there, a seething, simmering rage deep as the abyss.

Inside, I could see crimson lights blinking around the room I emerged in, but more importantly, I felt the repulsive presence of the Chaos-tainted ship press down on me. Or at least attempt to do so. Whatever sorcerous protections it had, they burned away the moment they tried to touch me, and it felt like the ship itself reeled back. I don’t think the warped Machine Spirit housed in it liked me, but the feeling was mutual, so it could get fucked.

The bulkheads slammed down, sealing off this section of the ship while the remaining artificial atmosphere slipped away. I walked up to the closest one, nudging floating corpses and soon-to-be corpses aside to reach it. I swung my blade again, three times, carving a triangular opening into the bulkhead, which I kicked in.

It struck the next bulkhead a hundred metres away a moment later, squishing a number of hapless voidsmen who happened to be stuck in the hallway.

Hmmm. Honestly, it was actually a surprise that the air-locked bulkheads still worked as well as they did, considering the ship was a Chaos-warped monstrosity.

I sent a large surge of energy into my blade as I closed in on the next bulkhead, sensing the writhing presence of something more powerful than mere voidsmen and serfs on the other side. Black flames spread down the length of my Witchblade, and I swung it lazily, sending the oily flames hissing through the air. The crescent-shaped abyssal fire struck the thick slab of metal and burrowed into it, devouring the energy held within the matter's molecular bonds to fuel itself.

A flick of my will extinguished it once it’d gnawed out a wide enough hole for me to pass through, and then I did just that with a grin that remained unmoving even as a ball of Warp Fire smacked into me, exploding into a cloud of flames that washed over my Barriers ineffectually.

“I can do that too,” I hummed, making eye contact with the heavily mutated psyker. This was no Chaos Sorcerer; those were mostly in control of themselves. Or at least they appeared to be. Regular, undisciplined psykers employed by Chaos warbands were raving lunatics who were ticking time bombs. Like this guy.

He seemed to like Pyromancy, so I decided to reply in kind. There were some fun spells in that Discipline, and one in particular stood out.

Soul energy gathered in my throat, compressing into a tight ball which burst into flames the moment I opened my mouth. Silvery flames leapt out in a steady stream, lunging at the mutated psyker and latching onto him.

He’d been screaming about something ever since I stepped into the room, but now his voice went up a pitch as my flames burned away the touch of Chaos. It was unfortunate that the psyker was barely held together as he was by that very same corruption; my flames burnt out. Well, sucks to be him.

His charred corpse fell to the ground a moment later, crumbling to ash on impact. Not even bones remained. It’s been a long time since a random, crazed Psyker who let the Four Wackoos take the wheel could be a threat to me.

That still left roughly a hundred … cultists? Chaos Guardsmen? Eh, whatever. They stank of Slaanesh’s touch, covered in scars and cuts all over their bodies, and had pallid, grey skin that never once saw the sun. Oh, they were probably the masochistic pain-junky type Slaanesh worshippers.

It would have been a bother to cut them down one by one, so I instead decided to play with Pyromancy a bit more. Dragon Breath was a gun ability, but far from the only interesting one. I usually just threw my silvery flames around, but I had some ideas after delving into a handful of psykers’ heads.

I focused on them, ignoring their screams, the las-fire flying my way, and the idiots who tried to poke me with their pocket shivs. My aura pressed down on them, and I tugged on my disgust, my visceral hatred for their very existence and … I ignited it with a touch of soul energy. Just like I’d seen that one psyker do in his memories.

I felt it when an ember of hateful, silvery flame bloomed into existence in the hearts of every last human within my line of sight. Some clutched their chests, some screamed, some collapsed and curled up. Then that ember burst into an inferno, burning through their bodies in an instant. In but a moment, I was surrounded by nothing more than wafting clouds of ash.

Combustion. It was a neat trick. Practically undodgable, and it partially used my emotions as fuel, so it could hit beyond its pay grade quite well.

I passed through several branching hallways, tunnels, storage rooms, and whatnot. It took a while, but I kept going upwards, testing my psychic tricks on my unwilling test subjects.

I had a storm of writhing silvery fire curling around me, a leashed and empowered version of the Fire Storm spell I nabbed from another Psyker. Tongues of flame flowed into openings, burrowing into walls and slipping through air vents. Wherever I went, the ship burned in my wake.

And I still hadn’t met a single Night Lord. That cowardly cunt leading them called them all back, and was in the process of setting up an ambush while preparing the escape pods. If I had to guess, the twat was going to try to run while his men ‘held me off’.

Well, Night Lords were never known to commit to fights where they didn’t hold the advantage. If you wanted to be crude about it, they were cowards who preyed on those weaker than them.

Too bad that I had no intention of letting even a single one of them escape. They didn’t know yet, but I’d been working my telekinesis from afar, messing with the hatches that would release the escape pods, and while I was at it, I mangled the Machine Spirits inside each. They were stuck, though they didn’t know it yet.

I wonder how long that will last.