Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

143 – Crack

While my decoy was doing its damndest to distract the Custodian while also making him show off the limits of his zappy toy, the dragon sort of drew me into its fight with Ka’Bandha who seemed to have all but forgotten about me.

The Greater Daemon was laughing and roaring in equal measure, its mouth filled with serrated teeth locked in a preternatural grin of savage joy.

The dragon wasn’t looking too good, and the eventual victor of their fight seemed to be already decided. Not that the overgrown fire breathing reptile was going to go down without a fight, not by a long shot.

It circled the daemon, one of its four horns broken off and favouring its left limbs as it walked. The growl it made held wary hate, its eyes held the same measure of apprehension, that doubt about its chances at winning melting together with its clear revulsion at the mere idea of not slaughtering the Greater Daemon before it.

So how did it inadvertently draw me into the fight? Well, let’s just say I got a bit distracted by manually controlling the copy decoy at the same time as Selene did something even more- ehm, distracting to my other avatar.

So I sort of didn’t notice it ambling towards my hiding place and it sort of stepped on me.

Which, as you might have guessed, I didn’t particularly appreciate so I sort of burrowed through its feet and ate its hind right leg. 

I would have gone further, ate the whole damned beast in one go but it didn’t live to this age because it was easy to kill or dumb.

It didn’t even hesitate to tear into its own leg while I was busy digesting its unnaturally tough shinbone and before I knew it the leg with me in it was flying through the air and plopped right into the biggest magma lake in the cavern.

Unfortunately for the beast, that was one of the last things it did before Ka’Bandha’s axe crashed into its skull like a landslide. I practically felt the shock of the ungodly weapon sundering the ancient beast’s skull in my bones even as I crawled out of the magma dip I’d inadvertently taken.

The daemon roared again, announcing its victory to the world as the dragon fell limp and collapsed into a heap. He reached to tear off the unicorn-like ruby horn and only then did I remember why I was there in the first place.

I glanced towards Trazyn, saw him palming a set of Tesseracts with reluctance oozing off of him. I suppressed a sigh, then dipped into my soul energy reserves and let it rip through my skeleton and flow into my staff.

The bio-blade grafted onto it fell off, flaking away and turning into dust before it touched the ground and the white greatstaff practically shone with impossible colours.

Space tore before me, and a telekinetic force surged through. In an instant, it ripped the ruby horn off, dragged it back through the spatial tear, slapped Ka’Bandha over the chest with enough force to make him stagger, then closed the tear.

I threw the whole thing over to the Necron and levelled an uncertain gaze at the rather miffed Greater Darmon. 

“THIEF! Cowardly thief! Come out, let me rip your spine out and drink your blood!”

He followed the shout up with a flick of his wrist, sending his whip flashing out and only my supernatural instincts and premonition saved me from getting bisected by it.

I remembered him being more well spoken in the books. Did he get nerfed in the brain department or is he just not bothering to use his brain for my sake?

Sure enough, this was probably the equivalent of a fun vacation for the greater daemon so he might not have felt the need to put too much effort into thinking. 

Anyway, with Trazyn instantly grabbing the horn out of the air and throwing up his concealment thingy, the daemon didn’t notice him. Instead, it charged right where it supposedly felt the spatial rip open, which was also where I was so I decided to skedaddle before he chopped me up.

I was counting today as another win at this point. I got all the dragons, got Trazyn his new toy and didn’t get kidnapped. Now, all I had to do was escape together with the resident kleptomaniac and perhaps punch a hole through that Custodian’s face to teach him some manners.

That last one was optional, but a girl could dream. Though with a very angry and very loud Greater Daemon coming right at me with murder not only on its mind, but radiating off of its body I was thinking the surviving and escaping bit might get … tricky.

So far, I’d managed to keep well away from Ka’Bandha and for good reason. If something could throw hands with Sanguinius and come out of it intact enough to talk as much shit as this daemon had, I didn’t want it anywhere near me.

Not for another decade at least, not until I had an avatar twice as strong as this one and pools of energies hundreds of times deeper than the tiny puddles I had to manage with currently.

The daemon clearly wasn’t satisfied with that outcome though, and at my clear lack of willingness to ‘come out and fight honourably’ as he called bashing my head in with its oversized axe it bristled visibly. It’s form, already fraying at the edges and fluctuating, fading in and out of existence became increasingly severe.

It looked to be moments away from blinking out of reality entirely, but in return for dragging its expiration date hours closer its ruinous power soared.

“Shit,” I said, feeling its thick and heavy aura tasting of blood and malice wash over me. The recognition in it was clear, it found me without doubt.

My instincts tingled, and I Blinked away without hesitation. Still, I was left with both of my legs scorched down a size and now ending in a smouldering stump at the knees.

A thunderous crack reverberated through the cavern, the daemon having slashed a new ravine into the ground where I stood a moment before.

It flickered dangerously, its snarling face rounding on me even before its axe crashed down. Its aura was filling the cavern, seeping into every little crevice and leaving me no room to hide in.

I felt that energy push into me, trying to corrupt my flesh and hijack its connection to my soul to twist that too and drag it down to the churning waters of the Warp below.

“Trazyn, are you ready to leave?” I asked, having little doubt that the Necron Overlord had good enough auditory sensors to hear me wherever he might be. 

I Blinked again, reacting an instant quicker than before and escaping the flaming whip’s wrathful swipe.

Ka’Bandha roared, the flickers of Khorne’s corrosive energy in my still smouldering stumps I’d almost finished purging, gaining a second wind in response. Even the air felt thick with the stuff, and I felt it constricting around me, making every movement feel like I was pushing through molasses. 

“I am at the exit,” Trazyn’s voice whispered into my ear, and I noticed one of those little mechanical scarabs he had perched on my shoulder as I asked for the source. “Staying is becoming increasingly perilous. I will await you for another minute. Then I’ll depart for my ship. If you wish to accompany me, be there and preferably without that apparition following behind you.”

“Roger, roger,” I said, having to lean on Atiesh’s amplifying power to speed up my Blinks enough to escape the increasingly frenzied attempts of the Greater Daemon. “I’ll be there.”

That was about when my decoy finally expired, having puffed into smoke as its bio-energy reserves ran out. I didn’t see the Custodian’s expression, but I imagined his victorious grin at having my decoy’s neck clutched in his hand morphing into a stupefied look as the copy melted into dust.

Not that I had overly long to be amused at him, as the momentary distraction cost me a good forth of my torso along with my right arm. Along with the arm went Atiesh, which slowed my next Blink enough to get a close up look of Ka’Bandha’s closed fist.

Why didn’t I just Blink out of the cavern, you might ask? Well, the damned daemon was making that impossible.

The Warp was unstable, a miniature Warp Storm having descended around the cavern. Reality was faltering, the veil fraying and wobbling like a toddler taking its first steps.

It was only through my own psychic strength, colossal mental power and — compared to human psykers — titanic reserves of energy that I could still work my Teleportation magic with some measure of reliability.

If I forced it through the Storm though, I couldn’t be sure my body wasn’t going to end up scattered across the Sector, or worse, end up getting dragged into the Warp.

Atiesh, ever the loyal semi-sentient staff, came soaring back into my last intact limb. Now, how does one escape from a berserking Bloodthirster out to get their skull at all cost?

I’ve got to exhaust him somehow. It isn’t long for the world, soon enough he’ll get ejected back into the Warp with the way things are going. I could just keep running for a while and hope he expired before I did … but then Trazyn will leave me here.

Furthermore, I could see the Custodian skulking about, waiting for a chance to pounce on me. 

I checked my soul energy stores, and calculated that I could at most spend another two thirds of what remained if I wanted to keep my slowly blooming Realm from an early introduction to oblivion.

With Selene’s soul being stored in the core of that Realm, I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea.

If I run to Trazyn, I won’t be able to outrun this lunatic. It is both physically faster and stronger than my avatar. 

That was the problem, and the solution was quite simple. I had to use some of my sacrificable soul energy to either banish or just disable the daemon for long enough for me to escape.

I still had 46 seconds until Trazyn’s deadline.

A possible solution drifted into my mind, a way to enhance my power enough to possibly wound the daemon as much as needed. It would be dangerous, but … 

Fuck it. Let’s do it. Everyone already knows of me it seems so might as well.

*****

Octavian

Over the last couple of minutes, Octavian realised how nebulous his chances of actually accomplishing his goals had been in the first place.

He had thought his trump card of sorts would do the job, the thing had been stored together with the body the creature called ‘Echidna’ now inhabited and was made for it by the Emperor himself.

The device was supposed to ‘reset’ any haywire piece of the bio-shaper artefact back to its base properties but without harming its stored data in the process, unlike how starvation would have done.

It didn't work. 

Well, it did, but not to the extent he had hoped for. Even just her lesser flesh-crafted horrors had somehow resisted the ‘reset’ artefact. 

Then there was the problem of actually hitting the main body — if it even was the main body — which Octavian was at the moment observing one of the most powerful Greater Daemons known to mankind fail at repeatedly.

Since the first two lucky shots it had gotten in, it only ever missed and the woman was slowly but surely recovering her strength.

“Fuck this.”

Octavian stilled as he heard the woman’s curse, not for any prudish shock at the crass words, but because of the intense tingle in his palms. 

He retreated, taking cover behind a pillar. Trusting his Emperor-given instincts above all else.

The Greater Daemon roared once more, gleeful that its target stopped running and looking to be enjoying the staredown that followed immensely.

The creature was freakishly powerful, Octavian knew and wouldn’t have wanted to try his luck fighting it. He’d read the archives, studied history. That daemon had bested Sanguinius, the greatest of the Emperor’s sons time and again. 

Compared to the great angel, Octavian was nothing. He knew that to be true. As clearly as he knew that Echidna was only marginally more powerful than himself.

He’d watched her fight, watched her wield her sorcery and he’d felt her immense but limited power. 

His instincts told him she was lesser than a Primarch, lesser than many things in many aspects. Her knowledge, skill and physical form were all some amateurishly stitched-together abomination that paled in comparison to the real thing.

That was what he thought, and yet there had always been a smidge of doubt. A barely perceptible veil of uncertainty covering that conclusion that his instincts never had with anyone else before.

He had dismissed it, that smidge of doubt. Why wouldn’t he? His instincts had never been wrong before, not with any Astartes, Tyranids, Necrons or even a Primarch. Why would they be so with a strange alien who managed to merge with an ancient artefact?

For the first time in his life, his instincts faltered. The vague feeling of uncertainty grew rapidly as the alien woman floated before the Greater Daemon.

Her flesh flaked away, torn apart by the immense torrentuous power forced into her body. Octavian’s eyes widened, the small flicker of silvery light he’d seen her as blossomed into a towering pillar.

For a moment, a brief, treasonous moment, he compared it to the godlike presence of the Emperor. The colossal golden pillar his own presence showed itself as.

Compared to that, the silvery soul of Echidna was a mere stick. Still, when everyone else had always been just flickers of dust in comparison … 

But she was different, strange and alien even in the qualities of the soul. Where the Emperor was a firm pillar, a steady foundation holding the whole of Mankind on his shoulders like a titanic Ark, Echidna was … slippery. He failed to put a hand on her soul, always trying to and managing to slip out of his grasp.

Where the Emperor boldly proclaimed his own power, challenging anything and everything to say otherwise, this woman hid. Not only that, she didn’t challenge anything, her soul feeling like a peaceful breeze compared to the tumultuous wrathful presence of even the Emperor.

She promised … peace. Safety. Tranquillity. Balance. 

Octavian blinked, his vision returning to him as he felt like he only now descended back down to the earth from a trip through a cloudy orbit.

His head swam like never before and if possible, he’d have gasped in shock at the sight that greeted him.

The Greater Damon kneeled, a knee broken, an arm hanging limp and with a gleeful grin on its face. 

“Victory for our first bout goes to you, white child of stars unseen.” The Daemon proclaimed, its form fragmenting as reality pushed him back to where he belonged. “And thus another anathema joins the Great Game. The future holds great promise, I might not die of boredom yet.”

Then it was gone, reality rebounding and expelling every leftover Lesser Damon along with him.

Octavian stood there, the closest equivalent of utter astonishment a Custodian could feel rolling through him.

“Ana-thema?” He asked, his voice holding a measure of wonder unbefitting of a Custodian. 

He stared at the spot of air the white woman once hovered in, his gaze turning distant and thoughtful. She was gone of course, without a trace too, but his memory was perfect, he could easily replay every nanosecond of the engagement again and again as many times as he wanted.

As many times as it took for him to come to terms with what he learned here today.