292 – Quiet Moment
I watched the half-molten scrap of a ship that used to be a Battle Barge float through the massive portal I’d opened and sink into the surface of the local Sun on the other side. Once it was fully submerged, I closed the portal and patted myself on the shoulder for a job well done.
I’d like to see that disgusting ship come back from that. Heh. As powerful as I was, there was nothing quite like showing someone what it felt like to take a dip in the Sun. Hell, opening a portal into the molten core of the nearest star would make all of my Pyromancy spells look like parlour tricks.
“On that note,” I murmured to myself, a devious smile growing on my lips as I turned towards the other ships of the Chaos war-band. They were beating a hasty retreat towards the nearest Mandeville point, like the absolute cowards they were, but they were slow as shit, and I didn’t even need to teleport to catch up to them. “Woe, Sun be upon thee.”
I cackled like a mad witch as I decided to put my earlier whimsical idea into practice. My palms rose u,p and a wide-brimmed witch hat with a gloriously pointy top formed on my head. It doubled my spell’s damage. Why? How? Stop asking silly questions. It just did. Shut up.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I was not, in fact, an idiot. So I didn’t instantly open a portal to the core of the Sun, but only to its crust, and a very small portal at that. It was barely wider than I was tall.
Radiation and heat blasted forth first, racing in the trail of the intense light blooming into existence. Behind it, the jet of superheated plasma blasted forth in a rapidly expanding plume.
The Void Shield of the nearest ship buzzed to life, fending off the heat and radiation easily, but the plasma? It was the exact type of attack that Void Shields absolutely despised. It was continuous, had physical substance, and hit almost across the entire surface of the Shield with how wide the plume was. My portal was a stellar sandblaster rather than a plasma cannon, but it worked. The shield barely lasted ten minutes before it flickered and died, not that I expected anything more from a barely maintained pirate ship.
The outer hull all but evaporated on contact; the atmosphere boiled inside the metal coffin as the plasma ate through the ship, burning through it layer by layer, and I just watched. That is, until the plasma reached the Warp Drive, which was already going critical because the idiot commanding the ship tried to take a Warp Jump.
My eyes widened as the engine exploded, tearing a hole right into the Warp that was wider than a small planet. The yawning chasm with literal Hell on the other side swallowed up the hapless ships, and I could see thousands upon thousands of curious, ravenous eyes peering through the temporary gateway.
So I did the only smart thing available to me in that situation. I widened my portal, pushed the other end of it halfway into the Sun, and aimed the exit valve right at the temporary Warp Rift. Let’s see how they like The Sun. The first order was free, came with free delivery, and I wasn’t taking any refunds either. I just hoped they would appreciate my magnanimous gift.
The Rift snapped shut, and I grinned freely. I’d felt something there, at the end, like someone closing the shutters with a slam because the abundance of sunlight coming in through the window was annoying them. But before they could, I was pretty sure I’d managed to barbecue at least a few thousand Daemons.
My grin faded a little along with the Rift, my mental fingertips running along the fabric of Reality where it had been. Well, that stunt sure messed up the local landscape. The Veil felt mangled, like someone tore it to pieces and then had an utter amateur stitch it back together.
It was like a frozen lake. Reality was the water underneath; the ice on the surface was the Veil of Reality, and the idiot stomping on it was Chaos. The ice had been broken up into smaller chunks here, then allowed to refreeze. It was whole, but far from the cohesive, solid surface it had been initially. It was uneven, weaker in places than it should have been, and more prone to breaking again in the future.
I suppose I’m going to have to plop down a few Blackstone Pylons on Castobel before I bounce. I mused, banishing the frown marring my face. Stupid Daemons, they just couldn’t help but shit in my soup every chance they got. Couldn’t they at least not rip up the fabric of spacetime on their way out? It was incredibly rude.
My gaze eventually turned towards the bioships, the large ones once home to the Norn Queens, the smaller escorts, the myriad of even smaller fighters, and the two Narwhals. They were whole still, even if my sneaky drones were causing some havoc inside the larger ones. It was a whole buffet, crippled by the death of the Norn Queens, and I just so happened to be starving. Bon appétit, or … why isn’t there a word for that in English? Stupid patchwork mess of a language. I have to resort to using French, of all things, to voice my thoughts.
I teleported over to one of the Narwhals, letting that microscopic patch of Eldritch Flesh I always kept in the core of my body expand outwards. It devoured my Avatar, exploding into a storm of questing tendrils, small and large. They latched onto the hull of the Narwhal, then plunged in, not even slowed as it transformed biomass into bio-energy in an instant.
I felt the energy pour into me as I burrowed into the massive ship, letting my tendrils grow and expand without limit. Devour, absorb, grow, expand, repeat. The Narwhal was nearly a kilometre long, wide as a skyscraper, and tall, filled to the brim with the highest-quality biomass in the Galaxy. I devour it all, along with the few unlucky Tyranid fighters buzzing around it like flies, many of them falling victim to random tendrils lashing out and slurping them up like the tiny snacks they were.
In less than half a minute, nothing of the Narwhal remained, and only I was left, in my current form as an Eldritch tentacle monster out of some horny Japanese author’s wet dream.
I reeled my tendrils back in, transforming most of them into pure bio-energy, then launched myself like a missile, kicking off a plane of telekinetic force. I probably looked like one of those jumping snakes, curling up a dozen large tendrils like a spring to launch myself,
A few tendrils snapped out as I flew, absorbing unlucky smaller Tyranids, then I slammed into the next Narwhal and repeated my previous actions. And then they were well and truly stuck, the entire Tyranid fleet robbed of any means of faster-than-light travel, even if the Hive Mind managed to reassert control. I wasn’t sure how long I had till then, but it was better safe than sorry.
I set my gaze upon the rest of the Tyranids, which have become well and truly helpless before their natural predator. Then, I begin my feast, bouncing between the bioships like a demented eldritch ping-pong ball, devouring ship after ship, millions of Tyranids dying helplessly to satiate my unending hunger.
Eventually, I ran out of ships to eat and reform my Avatar with some reluctance. Bio-energy. No matter how much of it I have, it’s never enough. I could spend every last drop of it without wasting a single one, but I held back. I needed to have reserves for when — not if — shit hit the fan. Again. I couldn’t just spend it all on building fancy new orbital defences and starships, or even a new friend for Jeff to play with, no matter how tempting it was. So yeah, all of this energy was going right into deep storage. Part of it, I was going to transform into Eldritch packs filled with bio-energy to store inside my Realm, in case I ever needed a quick pick-me-up. I already had some stored there, of course, but the more I had, the better.
“I suppose it’s time to see how my minions are doing,” I muttered to myself with a grin, holding off on delving into the information packages my mind-cores prepared for me. A single thought, and I would have had the summary of everything of interest that had happened beneath the aegis of my aura flowing into my mind. But that was boring; I wanted to see for myself instead! If there were any problems, an alert would have punched through the filter and made me aware of them the instant they happened.
So the extent of my knowledge was that all my minions were alive and probably safe. Mostly. Selene being in lethal danger was a maximum priority event, which would have seen a mind-core poking me in the brain with express urgency had it happened.
I located Selene’s bright presence in a blink, plotting a path and then yanking myself through space. The moment I appeared, a wickedly sharp blade made of psychoactive bone screamed through the air, arcing towards my neck as arcs of wild psychic energy hissed along its length.
Curiosity stopped me from blocking it, from so much as deploying my Barriers or reinforcing my body.
The sword stopped, but I felt the sting of it on my neck, digging into my skin. A pair of storm-grey eyes stared back at me, pupils dilated still from the battle high. Selene was breathing deeply, almost panting, but then forced herself to relax. She pulled the sword away last, giving me a mock glare and a huff, probably thinking I deserved the pain for surprising her. Joke's on her, the wound healed the moment she pulled the edge away, and I’d dumped the pain into an empty corner of my mind with well-practised ease.
“So!” I said, clapping my hands cheerfully. “How is my favourite and most beautiful minion doing?”
Selene smiled, a small, contented thing that warmed my heart, and stepped back, gesturing at the space behind her.
We were outside the Hive City on some godforsaken wasteland, and the ground was covered in the broken bodies of Tyranids for as far as the eye could see. I spotted a Carnifex, some Zoanthropes, even a Hive Tyrant and more than a few of those larger artillery bioforms.
“Seems like you’ve been busy,” I said.
“Yes,” Selene said, stepping beside me and wrapping a possessive arm around my waist while laying her head on my shoulder. “Thank you, it was fun.”
“Anything for you,” I murmured, smiling happily. “Wanna continue, or did you have your fill?”
“I’m fine for now,” Selene said, radiating contentment. “You’re done with your thing, right! I don’t want to hold us up just to beat up a few more of these … chaff.”
“I am,” I said. “Took care of the voidships. All that remains is the cleanup and putting down some pylons so daemons don’t make a mess of things. I may have accidentally detonated one of the ships’ warp drives.”
“It happens,” Selene said, shrugging her shoulders slightly. “Well, you know I don’t mind just … spending time with you like this, but maybe in some place that smells a bit better?”
“This isn’t the most romantic spot for a date, is it?” I hummed, wrapping my arms around her from behind and resting my chin on her shoulder.
“No, it really isn’t,” the girl in my arms said in apparent amusement. “Hive Cities are … a mess. This entire planet is a mess.”
“And yet it is the most populated and most economically powerful planet in the Sector.”
“Meh,” she said. “Still a mess, as all Hive Worlds are. Never liked staying on one for long, the desperation and misery in the air cling to your soul. Even if you never even leave the highest spires where the pompous ponces live.”
I idly ran my fingers through her hair, using a bit of soul energy to return her ebony locks to their silky lustre. She’d worked up a proper sweat and caked herself in grime, which I was also gently removing from her body.
“Wasn’t your home world a Hive World?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head slightly, leaning into my touch like a needy kitten. “The planet I grew up on was an Agri World, though there was, of course, the Forge World in the same system, but I never went there. Even my grandmother hated that dreary place, despite it being our primary claim to fame and a major source of our political power. Those tech magi always said Voss Prime was second only to Mars itself.”
“Don’t they say that about all major Forge Worlds?” I asked with a raised eyebrow, not that she could see it with her back pressed up against me.
“Maybe.” She snorted. “As much as tech priests like to claim they have eliminated all human emotion from ‘clouding their thought processes’, the high-ranking ones tend to be just as arrogant as high-ranking nobles. Some are just better at hiding it, like Zedev. I’m pretty sure even that old pile of scrap metal thinks he is the Machine God’s gift to Mankind.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, then with a quick move leaned down and gathered my adorable little murder machine into a princess carry. “I’m going to leave a cleanup crew here, and we can go see how my other minions are doing?”
Selene just giggled, wrapping her arms around my neck as a slight dusting of pink appeared on her cheeks.
“Like this?” She asked, smiling with a hint of shyness, but made no move to get out of my arms.
“Do you object?” I asked, tilting my head. She knew I wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want me to.
“Meh, no, just … I suppose I’m still getting used to fully letting go of all my etiquette lessons, grandmother would have had me writing an essay about noble etiquette and the importance of demanding respect with your noble bearing or whatnot if I so much as thought about appearing before anyone of importance like this.” She grinned, leaning her head on my shoulder while idly kicking her legs. “Have at it, you vile xeno witch. Kidnap this helpless noble maiden and do with her as you wish.”
I raised my eyebrows at her, then smirked. “So that’s how it is, I see. Well, I suppose we have nothing pressing to do. The planet will survive a few … hours without us.”