Even though I was presumably alone on this planet for several days by now I still found it unnerving.

It wasn't totally silent as one would imagine a ghost city, the wild blowing between the buildings in the straight, kilometres-long alleys made a ghostly, shrieking sound that I couldn't quite get used to.

The smell of mould, stale air and dried blood combined with the occasional gory remains of what was once a person don't make it any better. Glancing at one of the latter, I can't help but grimace and turn my head away as tendrils extend from my fingers to make use of whatever was still salvageable of it.

I've seen a bunch of these by now, I think whoever killed these people didn't quite care too much about preserving the corpses for the ritual and just went about slaughtering them however they wished. Afterwards, it proved to be too much of a pain to collect these parts too so they were left laying around here.

Lucky me?

Not that it was too nutritious or numerous enough for me to give a considerable amount of energy but beggars can't be choosers.

I was now on the last floor I resolved myself to explore before continuing my travel for the central spire.

It was tedious getting here after the initial excitement of finding human remains and possible clues about my situation. Along the way, I found several other stuff that only reinforced the validity of this being the Warhammer universe or I was in an extremely well-made Warhammer museum or something.

Now that I was looking for it I noticed the skulls, the Aquilas and other iconography I knew of before.

I didn't find another library or anything like that but I doubted I'd see one until I reached one of the important government buildings. There should be an Administratum building here, along with an Arbites and an Echlesiarchical at the very least, any one of those should have useful stuff but the Governor's palace should still be the best for me.

However I tried to still doubt the reality of my situation my mind defaulted back onto my Warhammer knowledge to make assumptions, I guess my subconscious desperately wanted to cling to this illusion of knowledge and more importantly control. If I knew the past, along with forgotten and well-kept secrets of the main powers of the galaxy, combined with my short-term knowledge of the near future I could gain a form of control over my future.

I sighed heavily and kicked in a surprisingly intact door.

It didn't fly off its hinges like the rest did when I did the same but it did smash against the wall next to me as I entered the room.

The resulting loud thud got lost in the sound of howling wind and I narrowed my eyes at the large section of missing wall on the right side of the room. It was a considerably large one, maybe a hundred meters in length and fifty in width.

The large hole wasn't blown but broken through, with little to no rubble next to it. From the inside then.

I frowned as I strode into the room but kept my distance from the large hole lest the wind caught onto me and dragged me through. The rest of the room proved no less interesting even if it wasn't the first room covered in gore like this.

What was different was that a bunch of corpses were still here, uncollected.

I barely smelled the stench of death thanks to the brutalized wall but I still grimaced at the state of the corpses. They were ripped apart, some had their entire torsos torn into chunks and spread across the room while others had more normal wounds looking like the results of small explosions.

They all wore some sort of shitty military uniforms if I had to guess about the few mostly intact ones. I think that was the insignia of the Arbites, an organization mostly like the police of Earth dealing with most civil problems that don't need fuck loads of Imperial Guards to solve.

Those guys weren't too good at solving problems that went beyond shooting said problem.

As I knelt next to one of the corpses with a mostly whole upper body I noticed its head was messed up. It had a few smaller and two wrist-width holes in it.

I don't know what got into me but I glanced through one of the holes and barely caught myself before I gasped.

It was empty, the brain was mostly gone. I only found a bit of it smashed into a mushy goop that dripped out of the hole on the side of the head facing the floor.

I decided to check out the rest of the corpses as these wounds tickled at my mind in alarm, but only two of the others had similar wounds.

With that done I got to quickly absorbing them while I thought about where I heard about wounds like this.

By now the practice made the process somewhat instinctive. To spare myself the nausea I didn't transform my whole body just extended my hands and morphed the end of those into tens of tendrils that branched out into many more like some sort of horrid tree.

The small tendrils went about piercing through the skin and expanding inside the body of the corpses.

I could use the energy I had to expand the tendrils wherever I wanted, I didn't need to make more mass inside my body and make it travel through the larger tendrils to the tip of the small ones. The energy raced through the whole network in a blink and got to transforming into biomass at the end, just where I wanted it to.

This was what gave me some interesting possibilities, like when I was back jumping rooftops I could launch a single tendril over the gaping depth between the buildings and reabsorb my mass on one side which only left the small tendril that I launched before. Afterwards, I could quickly remake my body on the other side.

I was thinking about other similar tricks to add to my repertoire when a glass-shattering screech blew into me, clearly audible even over the howling wind.

I nearly stumbled from the sheer pressure of the scream but I steadied myself a moment later, the biomass already absorbed and the small tendrils along with them.

I cautiously swept my gaze around the room, searching for the source of the sound, my nerves early calm in the process. My mind already making multiple predictions.

Following my first idea, most of my head transformed into a white dome, getting rid of my blind spot at the back of my head and also making sure that nothing leapt onto me from above without my knowledge. It was also much better at detecting sounds and smells than my human organs.

I kept steady and lowered myself into a more mobile position, ready to leap out of the way should I sense anything. Alas, only the annoyingly loud wind and the now clear smell of blood and leftover gore were noticeable.

For a moment I thought it was a bust, maybe something metallic got torn apart by the shitty building collapsing from the centuries of abuse and neglect. I could have maybe mistaken that for a screech.

Such a thought instantly got wiped from my mind as a sound like nails on a chalkboard but thousands of times louder reached me.

My head instinctively snapped in the direction even if I didn't need to do so to see it.

On the metallic concrete wall that I swore was mostly untouched before was a large tear. Uneven and savage, it made an unwelcome addition to the 'ferrocrete' wall in all of its three-meter-long glory. The name of the stupid material the Imperium used in nearly all of its buildings just now popped into my mind.

Another shriek resounded in the room, sending a shiver through my body and making me feel a bit weird. I felt like I'm losing one of my senses but I couldn't tell which just that I suddenly felt blinded even though my sight has never been clearer.

My mind spun furiously and my eyes would have widened if I had one as I realized which of my senses got blinded.

My soul sense The great dark sea below my soul was darker than ever, it was murky and still like no natural water could be.

This should be the warp, the ever-present stars and monsters swimming through it were nowhere to be seen, I could barely make out what was immediately under me.

As my mind tried to make sense of all of this my whole body suddenly stiffened as I suddenly saw something.

It faded into existence like some sort of sickening ghost but now it was far too real to be that. It stood hunched and still reached four meters high as it towered above me, Its sickly white carapace shone in the weak light and I noticed it stood still in front of me like a statue.

Its lower pair of two arms held at the ready near my throat to rip it apart with its ten clawed fingers while its two upper appendages which sported serrated chitinous scythes as long as I was tall were held back, ready to strike at me faster than I could react.

The worst was by far its head and 'face'. Two beady black eyes stared at me full of malice, hunger and maybe a bit of interest but I've had to imagine that. At where its nose should be its face turned into a mass of writhing tentacles covering its jaws like a beard.

All in all, it had a head that would make Cthulhu blush.

In that moment I finally realized what those wounds reminded me of and this monster just proved that I was right with its ugly face.

A Lictor.