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The sudden idea of bio-drones derailed my previous testing for a bit as I figured out that I actually could make bio-drones, sort of.
I tried with mosquitos at first, because the last 38 thousand years somehow failed to exterminate the pests and they were still around even on a damned spaceship. The little fuckers zipped around without a care in the world and one of them even tried to suck my blood, ungrateful little shit, it got turned right back into bio-energy.
I couldn't control my little spawns after they separated fully from my body and when I dug through them I found no sign of my white little tendrils running through them. For the next batch, I willed a single thread to remain but I still couldn't control it from afar.
Then came telepathy, it was disturbingly easy to control the tiny thread with it. It seemed receptive to any sort of psychic control and I felt like I was a step closer to figuring out what my body originally was supposed to be.
Still, controlling the insects through telepathic threads when they could just be snapped or noticed by another psyker wasn't the most useful thing, especially since if I did that I could also use soul energy itself to scout and sense stuff.
On the other hand.
For the next batch, I gave predetermined orders to fully natural mosquitos and surprisingly they could do them. This was far from an actual hive mind like scouting drones but I could use them without oversight at least.
Another use for this could be if I didn't want to use the drones for scouting but combat against enemies that couldn't damage my psychic threads. I felt like it'd be a waste of bio-energy though.
I returned my attention to the prone form of the lifeless clone and got to slowly and carefully absorbing it. I already knew the genetic template but it couldn't hurt to check twice.
Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly not a single cell was out of place. I took an unnecessary breath as my forehead morphed along with a section of my brain connected to it before a pure white eye opened up to compliment my two forest green eyes.
The experience of seeing the Warp from two perspectives at once was somewhat staggering, my soul could perceive souls in a much larger scope than my third eye but that was it, it was like looking at space from a planetarium while the third eye saw the warp-like tumultuous ocean it was.
I saw currents, storms, giant waves washing through sections of it, and small tunnels that seemed somewhat calmer than the rest. The overall range of my vision was smaller but I saw more of the Warp than ever before.
The two sights overlapped, despite my soul floating outside of the Warp as far as I knew. My only idea was that I could still be somehow out of phase, I could be away from the Warp in a way my still humanlike mind found hard to comprehend.
I knew about theories of higher dimensions above the usual three but I could barely understand the ramifications if any of those were real, still, I imagined myself to be sort of phased in a fourth dimension on a spatial vector which would put me outside of the view of anything operating on the usual three.
It was confusing and then again my body shouldn't even be visible to others.
Ah, fuck it, later.
My two visions meshed together and the currents and storms appeared on the starry sky that was the Warp before this. It was a roiling darkness that tried to corrupt everything, it was destructive and everything but small pockets of light still remained far away from me. Even this close, despite the gigantic waves in one direction the twinkling soul on the ship still shone brightly against the dark backdrop.
I closed the eye, returning my forehead to a normal human one. It was one thing to be adept at biomancy and another to be capable of stealing the genes of a Navigator House from just a few strands of hair. The stuck-up abhumans guarded their genetic legacy like ferocious dogs, they'd surely kick up a fuss even if I managed to come up with some bullshit reason for why I suddenly had a third eye.
From what little I managed to figure out from mind-hopping into all the people here who couldn't detect me, even most well-learned Biomancy specialists could maybe morph their body into different shapes or regrow limbs but changing their base genetic structure was beyond them. Then again there were no well-learned Psykers among the people here, not anymore.
Selene was still rather sulky which while unbecoming of a Captain, I couldn't fault her for it. The poor Seraphina — As I learned she was called from dubious applications of telepathy — has been rather close with the Captain and there were some rather scandalous rumors going around the crew about the two.
I decided it was time for me to have some fun for once, relaxing fun, not the one that left even my neural pathways degraded from thinking.
Let's see those fighting pits.
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Traversing the lower levels of the ship was a pain and I'd never have found my way back were it not for my eidetic memory combined with the Warp-Drive being a clear north star for my travels with its dystopian amounts of radiation.
Still, it took me no less than two hours to reach the 'most esteemed' fighting pit on the ship. This part was controlled by a community of powerful mutants that called themselves the Scav Boys. By community I mean gang, and by powerful, somewhat above average.
If I heard the name without context I'd have thought it was some knock off Ork band but they turned out to be just humans with insect eyes and big ass claws for a right hand. The appendage was almost as tough and resilient as it was ugly.
"What do ya want?" asked one of the mutants with his buddies standing behind him, trying to appear menacing.
"Heard you have a nice fighting pit around here," my velvet voice contrasted the brash mutant's deep and gruff voice with its melodic intonation. I'd always thought my voice was one of my strongest points and while I tried enhancing it with my powers here, I decided to keep the original. There was something distinctly alien about hearing my own words come out in an unfamiliar voice.
"That wee 'ave," He said, running his gaze over my body with a focus on my curves, "20 Thrones' the price of getting yer self through me."
I found myself staring at this dipshit with a slight sense of awe, here I was, with a damned plasma pistol on my waist and dressed in a rather high-quality bodyglove. I looked entirely out of place in this dump and yet the first thought of the goon was to scam me, well that was his first action, his first thoughts involved far fewer clothes on me and whips.
I glanced around, both with my eyes and senses and when I turned my gaze back on the small group of clawed men I knew there were a bunch of other people in the nearby tunnels and hallways.
"You will let me pass and forget ever seeing me."
The wave of the telepathic attack smashed into their minds and their eyes glassed over for a second before they shook themselves awake, rather confused about all of them being in a daze but I was past them by that point. Telepathy told me that while there was a price for seeing the matches, this moron wasn't the one collecting them.
With a few uses of telepathy, Illusions, and Invisibility I easily got into the spectating crowd currently watching two mutants duke it out. I wasn't sure why exactly I decided that watching two mutated slaves beat each other to death would be a great way to spend my time, I just wanted to do some exploring and just eating mutants was rather boring.
One of them looked like a giant, covered in tough skin and with a deformed head resembling a triangle while his opponent had scales running up his body and one of his arms was a huge clawed leg that wouldn't be out of place on a small dragon.
The place smelled, badly. I was tempted to turn my sense of smell off while I was here but I fought through it instead, I'd killed a Lictor, it wouldn't be the stink of sweat, blood, and piss that brought me down.
As I watched the lizard-man blocked an incoming fist from the giant with his scaled arm. He got pushed back and I saw blood running down his arm where the scales ended and the soft flesh started, the alien appendage was just as much a curse for him as it was the only thing giving him a chance to fight back.
His claws raked across the tough skin of the larger man as he drove to the side, leaving trails of trickling blood behind but not much else as it failed to penetrate deeply. The giant ignored the wounds as they joined the rest dotting his barely clothed body.
Neither of the two was a fighter, the lizardling had some practice but it probably came from beating up others but the giant was a different breed. I could tell he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed and a quick peek into his thoughts reinforced that idea.
*Smash, Lizard, Hit, Stomp, Swing, Kill, Smash*
One was faster and smarter while the other was a knockoff Hulk, I didn't put much hope into the smaller mutant turning the tides but he surprised me when he jumped onto the back of the larger man. He almost slipped as his fingers slid over the giant's sweaty and blood-covered back before he slung his human hand over the other's neck.
The giant was ever so slow to realize that he was on the back foot for once and failed to grab the hand on his neck before the clawed limb snaked before his face and dug into his eye sockets.
"EYESSS, CAN'T SEEEE!," the giant raged and threw himself around, not even realizing his attacker was still on his back with his claws lunged into his thick skull when he threw himself back and onto the ground. The unfortunate lizard-man getting squished into a paste under the weight of the giant.
"GRODD WON ANOTHER ROUND, BUT IT MIGHT BE THE LAST WIN HE SEES IN HIS LIFE."
One of the clawed mutants shouted and the crowd erupted in cheers and deep laughter as the huge man lay in the gory remains of the man that took his sight.
It dawned on me then, I couldn't find even a smidge of pity for the fighters in me. The only thing I felt was curiosity about their genes and an overwhelming greed to get my hands on them.
What is going on with me? This can't be normal.