MEPHISTON
Few fights have made the Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels as frustrated as this one. Fewer still made him feel so … useless. Powerless, even.
Try as he might, none of his attacks as much as scratched the armour of the titanic beast currently in the process of trying to beat the Lord Regent into a bloody paste.
Only the Primarch’s flaming sword and Commander Dante’s axe could boast of that feat. Which left him as support, and as the primary attacker for the secondary battle.
Back in the furthest reaches of the cavern, he could almost taste the malicious presence of the Norn Queen, hidden behind an unending tide of Tyranids and protected by a psychic shield Mephiston was relentlessly trying to break through.
If any of them had been wondering where all the psychic variants of the emperor-cursed aliens were, they got their answer the moment they stepped foot into this hall.
Hundreds, if not thousands of the blasted things were working in perfect synchrony to hold the unbreaking shield while the tide threatened to consume them all, if the Emissary left enough of them to even be consumed.
They were in a stalemate. Lord Gulliman fought valiantly, going toe to toe with the xeno beast, though he was getting pushed back as time went on.
The rest of them … were also there.
Dante took every opportunity to strike, slowly, but steadily increasing the insignificant scratches on the Emissary’s armour.
Mephiston redoubled his efforts, pulling deeply on the warp’s treacherous power as strike after strike bore into the shield. His men would keep the tide off of him while he worked, but they weren’t powerful enough to help him. Not nearly powerful enough, and the Shadow only worked to weaken them even further despite his attempts to disperse it as much as possible.
He watched with a faint satisfaction as another zoanthrope collapsed into a bloody heap, followed by two dozen lesser bioforms.
His attacks were working … If only he could overtake the rate at which the fallen were replaced, he would be certain of victory. Alas.
A shiver rushed down his spine, his whole mind tingling for just a moment. He stiffened. He knew that sensation; he knew it well even if he felt it only once every decade at most.
Or every damned week when around Echidna. She was close. And she was drawing on the Warp so deeply he could feel it through the Shadow.
They were truly blessed that the woman hadn’t been trained. The amount of power she was so casually drawing into herself would have been enough to devastate a planet in the hands of a Librarian.
He almost scowled when he realised he felt relieved. She was coming; she was close. They would have a chance.
He hated himself for thinking it, but he felt the battle was tilting the wrong way without the strange alien on their side.
Just a minute after he first felt that tingle, the woman exploded into the room, followed closely by another white form and two golden ones.
Mephiston didn’t know what to think of the latter and that went even less so for the former so he decided to not even bother.
Of course, the woman crashed right into the Emissary without a second thought. The enormous beast stumbled.
None of the other fighters let the opportunity go to waste. The Emperor’s Sword seared a deep wound across what counted for the beast's thigh while Dante’s axe smashed into its face, keeping it off balance for a moment longer.
A moment, which earned it another burning wound across the torso.
He heard a gleeful laugh, and then the fight descended into a chaotic dance. What Echidna lacked in skill, experience or size, she more than made up for in speed and power.
How such power was held in such a small body, he couldn’t know.
Mephiston put such things out of his mind, his focus turning entirely to the Norn Queen’s vague silhouette. He had a shield to break.
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Well, this thing will be hard to crack. I mused to myself as I tried, and failed, to pierce through the wound the blue man created.
The damned scab on the wound was strong enough to deflect my flimsy bio-sword if I didn’t overcharge it to shit and went at it with a straight piercing strike.
Slashes just … bounced off. Shitty sword.
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I eyed Guilliman’s flaming sword for a moment, before I remembered what made that thing so special. It had a shard of the Emperor’s soul in it.
Yeah nope. Not even if they gave it to me as a gift. I’d really rather not.
I danced around the thirty-foot-tall beast, my baseline human size working in my favour as it tried to swat me away with its overly large limbs.
With an angry ultra-ultramarine, it barely had time to even do that much. If it gave an opening, it got a nasty wound.
I could have just kept providing enough openings until it eventually died … but that would have been lame.
The one thing working to my advantage was the Emissary’s laser-like focus being on Guilliman. They even mentioned in the debriefing that this thing was some sort of a targeted ‘assassin’ bioform. When I didn’t bother it, it went back to trying to chomp down on the Primarch.
Selene went to relieve the pressure on Mephiston’s group while Val was out there … somewhere.
The crazy Eldar was zipping all over the place, cosplaying a lightning bolt.
I watched for just a few seconds as one guardian spear wielded by my purple-cloaked protector scraped against the Tyranid’s side. It left a tiny mark, but barely a tenth of the depth of what would be needed to strike flesh.
Just as I was wondering how to amp up the fight a bit, the Emissary seemed to have come to the same conclusion as I. If the current fight continued as it was, it would lose and its Queen would get butchered soon after.
There was a minute shift in its stance, the way it swung its claws and the way its body moved. It was barely noticeable, but I was sure Guilliman caught it as well.
That might have been the only reason both of us managed to react when it let out a psychic screech. I was ready, my mind already coated in layers of shields, but it gave the Primarch that moment of pause the monster needed to lunge at its new target: Dante.
I didn’t allow myself to hesitate. The tempting thought of letting the rude Commander get butchered was crushed even before it could form. The only reason my bones didn’t shatter under the strain of far too much energy flooding my body was that they were made of soulbone.
Faster than even the Emissary. My armoured body crashed into Dante’s and sent him flying. I think I might have felt a minute glee from the colossal Tyranid, it went for the weak link, but the annoying tiny enemy running circles around it — that being me, if you couldn’t guess — decided to jump into its attack.
Each of its clawed fingers was the size of my thigh, with edges mere molecules thick and vibrating with immense psychic power.
My armour and body underneath didn’t stand a chance. Only the skeleton held, where muscles and organs were crushed into paste and torn away.
It didn’t relent, another attack following the first, then a stomp and then a vicious strike with its shoulder scythes.
It must have had memories of how I healed against other Tyranids. Otherwise, it would have thought me dead already. I let it, unwilling to show the Imperials just how little the destruction of my body meant to me.
Then it screamed, Guilliman’s sword having taken an arm coming to tear into my skull. Finally.
I let the bio-energy flow, repairing my ravaged body in just under a second. By the end, I was already lunging at the monster with a snarl.
If Guilliman was surprised, he didn’t show it. Though Octavian felt like he would have had a heart attack if such a thing was possible for a Custodes.
He was next to me the instant the attacks landed, but got swept away by a casual punch from the Emissary.
I decided to go through my repertoire of psychic spells, just in case. Telekinesis failed to move the thing, be it because of some inherent resistance it had or because it was just too fat to be moved. Biomancy was utterly incapable of latching onto its body while bolts of lightning didn't even leave marks on its armour, and the same went for most of my flames.
The green life-eating flames and the black ones feasting on molecular bonds held. If barely. Its armour was ridiculous and saturated with so much warp energy that even those were just an inconvenience.
I cut both off when it started using its flame-clad fists to burn nearby marines to ash. At least they had the decency to be burned, unlike the damned bug.
I considered cheating, giving a meaningful glance to the psychic barrier Mephiston was bashing his head against. I could probably blast through it … in a minute or two.
Would the Emissary really just drop dead if we killed the queen though? I wondered, weaving between the vicious monster’s strike and landing enhanced punches at its shin and ankles to throw its balance off while it tried to stomp on me.
I tried to look for any significant bond linking the two, something beyond the regular web of the Hive Mind. It was almost impossible, with the Warp being all murky, but I stood right under the beast.
There was something. A much stronger psychic bond reached out from the emissary … it didn’t stretch towards the Queen, but right into Guilliman.
I gave the Primarch a dubious look. Was he infected with something? Did genestealers of all things, get the blue demigod?
Nah. That’s ridiculous.
I sent an experimental psychic blast at it, half expecting it to just bounce off of the link. What I didn’t expect, was for it to dissolve into a dark fog and for the Emissary to go into a wild frenzy for the moment it took for the link to reform.
“What did you do?” Guilliman asked, rolling his shoulder which now sported a new scar on it.
“Does it matter?” I asked back.
“Can you do it again?” He asked between deflecting strikes.
“Yes.”
“Do it on my mark then.”
I shrugged, giving him a nod.
The loss of an arm didn’t suddenly make our victory a sure thing. It still had another clawed hand and two limbs ending in long scythes. Though when Dante jumped back into the fray a minute later, the pressure lessened on the Primiarch significantly.
“Now,” Guilliman shouted, just as the monster went to block one of Dante’s strikes.
It sized up for the briefest instants as I blasted its mental link, then went wild. Controlled swings suddenly became feral swipes and where each attack was measured before, now it struck with such force that its muscles were tearing under the strain.
I didn’t know what Guilliman’s plan was, but I somewhat suspected getting a fist into the chest and smashing into the wall a hundred metres away was not it.
Dante redoubled his efforts, landing blows as he flitted around his foe midair, his jump pack burning its skin as he passed. I did my part too, making the Emissary stumble when I smashed into its leg with a charge.
Then the link came back, and its mind cleared. With that, it swatted Dante out of the air like a fly and bounded after the Guilliman-shaped hole in the distant wall.
That’s not good. I doubted the blue man was anywhere close to dead, but unconscious? Maybe. Injured? Perhaps. What I did know was that he wasn’t back yet and that if he didn’t hold the Emissary’s attention, it would probably spend the rest of eternity beating me into a bloody paste.
A swarm of tiny butterflies loaded with as much bio-energy as possible shot out of my skin and rushed after the Emissary, burning energy to catch up with it.
When they reached it, they bombarded its eyes, its mouth, its ears and wherever they could find any soft tissue on its armoured body. The faint surge of psychic energy in the area was the only warning I got before a massive blast of psychic power ground into my shields and sent my body flying.
My mental shields held, but the physical ones did not. The blast flayed my body of skin and flesh the moment my protections failed and crushed whatever else remained inside my skeleton into dust.
Well, that happened. I mused, now reduced to a single white glob of flesh sheltering inside my skull and a translucent pile of bones.
With a mental nudge, I set my skull upright and stared after the Emissary. It stood still, head raised and mouth open in a roar I couldn’t hear, but felt as my bones rattled. Then came a flash of light and the monster was burning, a wrathful giant clad in cracked blue armour wielding a flaming sword stepping out of the debris.
That was the moment I realised I might not be the ‘main character’ of this galaxy, despite all I’ve got going for me. I might have godly psychic power on my side, as well as eldritch bioengineering, but Guilliman? He had fate. He had to.
Nothing else would make sense. I fucking hate fate.