The following couple of days turned out to be surprisingly calm. OR boring, depending on who you asked.

I spent the large majority of it attempting to beat Valenith black and blue while limiting my power output to the same level he was at. Emphasis on ‘attempting’.

The newly ‘ascended’ Eldar might have some of his screws a bit looser than before, but he was by no means worse for it. Maybe a bit of madness was what pushed him to even greater heights.

I admit I’d thought he was a bit of a one-trick pony throwing devastating lightning bolts out of the sky like some budget store Zeus, but he showed me during our first spar that he could do far more than that. He just preferred the lightning because it was long-range, blindingly fast, and absolutely devastating.

He unveiled more and more tricks as I pushed him further and further. Whenever I came up with a counter to one of his tricks, he pulled a new one out of his ass and beat me into the dirt with it.

Case in point: Right fucking now.

“Another miss,” he intoned gleefully, his voice echoing in the wasteland for a hundred mouths curving into a smirk. “Where am I? Find me! Find me!”

There were hundreds of him, each damned clone a tangible illusion that somehow radiated the exact same aura as all the rest. If I didn’t know only one was real, I would have thought he’d split his soul among them.

They had the same scent, same pattern of movement, same weight, same everything.

He was teaching me, in his own weird way. I’d told him I sort of messed up my infiltration because my Illusions couldn’t hold up to the scrutiny of the Imperium’s elite. Ever since then, he’d been using more and more elaborate illusions in our spars and making me figure out what he was doing.

The back of my neck tingled and my arm snapped out before my mind could catch up with it. Power coated it and my palm slapped away a bolt of devastation, sending it out into the distance where it carved a twenty metre long gash into the ground.

That was one of his ‘quick bolts’ as he called them. Low power, maximum speed. Not that even an Astartes could walk one of these off if it caught them in the chest. Every miss on my part would result in him trying to zap me with one of those bad boys.

Now, if I didn’t limit myself to only using the same amount of power as him, I would probably send a blast of energy in all directions and see what happened. Or split myself into a hundred drones and bet each one up one on one.

There were other options too, especially since Guilliman thankfully kept up his part of the bargain and I had another fifty exotic templates in my arsenal. Some were still being ‘digested’, but there was a frog thing from Catachan that tended to explode when scared with enough power to make nuclear warheads blush. That one was the first I rushed to complete. So I had nukes now.

Doing any of that would be admitting defeat though, showing I was incapable of outsmarting Valenith. Nope. I’d rather spend the next day here getting zapped while my mind cores worked on a solution.

That was another problem I only recently found out. The mind cores tended to be rather uncreative, leaving the innovation part of most things to me. They could take scraps of ideas and turn them into diamonds, but I had to provide the scraps. That was both comforting to know and an annoying limitation.

So, how does one find the single real slippery Eldar in a crowd of fakes?

“Time is ticking, Mistress.” He was basically purring now, what the hell? And who are you calling Mistress? … though it has a nice chime to it … hmmm.

A tiny mental zap from the mind core dedicated to keeping my wandering thoughts aimed at my goal rushed through my brain. Right. Focus.

Every clone made the same sounds as they moved, each breathed in the same pattern, each had the same heartbeat, same scent, same fucking everything. Even opening my third eye proved useless since Val’s immaterial soul was locked in space inside my forest realm.

Out in realspace though? It was as if his soul was really split into a hundred equal parts, even though I knew that should be impossible. Well, not impossible, but doing so tended to fracture the psyche irreparably and was the worst form of torturous agony imaginable.

So he was faking it, somehow. That was what I had to figure out, there had to be a tell, some inconsistency between the fakes and the real deal.

He probably only split the soul energy held in his body among the clones, not his actual soul. Hmmm, the split energy would be then used up to maintain both the illusions and the fake aura thing.

I slapped away another impatient bolt and ignored the grumbling space elf.

That would mean, with time, the clone’s aura should diminish as the imbued energy is used up. Shouldn’t it? So why isn’t that happening? We had been at it for two hours now and I refused to believe the spell he used was so damned efficient that I couldn’t feel the dimming soul energy in them.

He had to be maintaining them, continuously, channelling power to the clones constantly to keep their auras level. How though? I felt no threads of energy crisscrossing the air, no web of power connecting all the clones. They all felt like entirely separate, autonomous constructs.

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With a flick of my hand, I had one of the clones tumbling towards me and my fingers clamped down around its dainty neck as it reached me. I squinted at it. Where are you getting energy from?

The clone grinned, my Danger Sense screamed, and I only had a moment to pull a shield up between me and the construct before it exploded into a tiny thunderstorm. Arcs of lightning crawled on my shield, finding purchase, digging in while some others rushed around it.

I jumped back and pulled up another while sending a wave of what Val called ‘dispersing energy’. As the wave met the annoying arcs of lightning, parts of both annihilated each other.

The wave stopped, spreading into a tiny cloud as it ate up the remaining lightning, losing parts of its density with each absorption.

So he wasn’t going to let me dissect a clone. Annoying, but predictable. That was exactly what I would have done, what I had done with my own clones and drones. Though mine was more of a normal explosion, not whatever this thundercloud thing he had going on was.

Was I overthinking things? Even with the power I was limiting myself to, with Val’s power being spread equally between the clones and none of them making actual moves aside from counterattacking when I hit them, I should be capable of destroying a large number of them.

Would he remake some clones? That would give me a better chance to catch how he channels his power so stealthily. Or he would just up and stop playing, channelling the freed-up energy into the rest of the clones before making them swarm me.

Plus, that would sort of be like I’m admitting defeat. Or that I’m a brutish muscle head, the horror. Nope, we can’t have that. I’m a space wizard now.

Targeting another clone, I sent a bolt of lightning its way. The clone only gave a token effort of dodging and putting up a shield, but the lightning arced through the air, zig-zagging around the shield and twisting towards the clone’s new position before hitting home.

The clone froze up with no apparent damage as the lightning seeped into it. Follow the energy. That was my command to it, and that was what it did. Swimming against the current of soul energy in the construct.

Come on, come on. I focused on guiding the arcs of energy. This spell was a weird mix of just willing lightning into being and shoving a bunch of commands into it. It was half will-cast warp bullshit and half practical commands not too dissimilar from lines of code.

It was a new way of using my psychic power, though only to me. Val treated it as a matter of fact that this was the most efficient way of doing it. One part made sure the result wouldn’t be constrained by realspace too much and the other gave it direction and versatility beyond ‘go that way and explode’.

Anyway, it was working, sort of. It found some sort of energy current in the clone, but I could tell Val was slowly getting control back over the paralyzed clone. Sending another bolt would disrupt the previous one and diverting energy from following the currents would be counterproductive.

Instead, I let loose another dozen bolts into random clones. Divide and conquer, was it? Well, the only thing I was dividing here would be Val’s focus, and I had no intention of doing any conquering of Val. Selene would have been unhappy with that, I think.

It worked, kinda. His attention was now spread between the dozen clones, but he still focused on the first one the most since I assumed the spell was already getting close to reaching his secret. Plus, he was much faster in the other clones, probably because all the spells acted the same and he already devised the perfect counter to it.

Alright, let’s mix it up then. I added some randomisation into the code so every bolt from now on would act a bit differently. These things cost quite some energy so I would only have enough power to shoot off another fifty — without breaking the rules of this training.

I went with twenty for now, aimed at clones all around, and Val’s focus noticeably vaned, his resistance faltering in the previous clones. Though the first one managed to self-destruct. Need to make the paralyzation a bit stronger.

That would make the spells even more costly.

I waited for a minute, tracking how deep my spells were penetrating and making modifications to the last batch I could shoot off. They would be the last and if they didn’t hit Val, the real Val, I would officially lose this bout.

After another minute, I sent off the last ten bolts, made even more expensive by the modifications I’d made, and sat back. I’d be a bit exhausted were this really my limit, but I felt nothing as I crossed my legs and followed the many arcs of electricity burrow into the clones.

Either way, psychic powers were quite unlike any sort of magic described in most stories back on Earth. My body didn’t store the energy, it was just a conduit and the only limiting factor on how much energy I could bring to bear.

If I was connected to the near infinite Warp that is and not a tiny puddle, not that I would change anything. I rather liked my mind un-molested by demons and my soul un-possessed.

Eating up the entirety of my little puddle in a fight would be disastrous, possibly sending all the souls I held in my realm falling back into the Warp. I wanted to be done with this Baal excursion in the near future. It was well pastime I found myself a real place to settle down and expand from.

I needed that damned farm that would replenish the bio-energy I needed and I also had to find a way to replenish my soul energy without opening a damned gateway between literal hell and my soul — that can’t be healthy.

With four psykers constantly draining my puddle, it was noticeably dimming. It would hold for a few years at the pace it was losing density, but I wanted it as robust as possible.

Finally, finally, one spell struck home. It found the end of the current and … disappeared from my senses. Hmmmm.

I squinted. I held a faint connection to it even after it disappeared for a few moments. Then it was gone for good. What sort of tomfoolery is this?

Another one dimmed, but this time I latched onto the connection and strengthened the spell with as much energy as I should be reasonably able to draw on after two minutes of resting.

It held for three seconds this time. Not a total waste, though. I had an idea of what he was doing. Damned cheat. That’s why I couldn’t find his main body among the horde of clones: It wasn’t even here.

I don’t know if he somehow made a tiny pocket space or is just on the other side of the planet … I frowned. My third eye popped open, and I let it take in Baal. Guilliman, Mephiston, Dante, and the Farseer were hard to miss, and Val should have been the same, but there was no trace of his soul.

Pocket space it was.

The problem was, I couldn’t make them and had only the faintest idea of how they worked. It was ancient Aeldari bullshit and Val said it needed a delicate touch and a clear mind. By which he clearly meant I should ‘get good’ before asking for that sort of stuff again.

How do I crack open that dimensional egg he probably hid himself in? And where is it even? Shouldn’t a damned spatial distortion be apparent in my aura when I felt even the ripples a Warp-Jump made?

There were no easy answers forthcoming. My aura was spread over all the clones, but there was no sign of as much as a ripple in space, not even a tiny bump. Obviously, he wouldn’t place his hidey hole in the place where he knew we would be fighting.

If our roles were switched, I would be commanding those clones from one of the damned moons. With my aura reaching a kilometre in radius when I pushed it to the limit, I had no hope of finding him without tracking the energy back to him.

Time ticked. Spell after spell disappeared and I tried to follow them to no avail. He was using some sort of microscopic portals to channel his energy anchored to the clones I assumed, though they were so stable and flawless that I couldn’t sense them with my aura.

Another shortfall that would need to be fixed. The damned list was ever-growing.

Then the last active spell disappeared, and a moment later, my connection to it snapped. Based on the rules, I was out of energy. With all my spells gone … I had lost. Again. Damn it.

A portal opened up before me, and the annoying Eldar strode out of it.

“That was great progress, Mistress.” He grinned easily, no sign of his usual unbearably arrogant smirk. “I believe you might win our next bout.”

“How did you do that?” I asked with a frown. “The thing where the clones mimicked your aura?”

The mystery of why I couldn’t feel his real soul beneath seemed to be that it just wasn’t here, but the aura mimicry could be handy.

“It is a complicated technique,” he shrugged. “Though one needs to perfectly understand their own aura and sink into its depths to even have a chance of doing so. This takes centuries of targeted meditation for the Aeldari to accomplish, though I’m certain you will manage in a few decades.”

“Right,” I sighed. “Well, I guess that’s it for today.”

“It indeed is,” he nodded. “Same time tomorrow?”

“I suppose,” I said. “Good night, Val.”

“To you too, Mistress.”