TIMOTHY — AKA RANDOM CULTIST A
The day started just like any other, huddling in the dark caverns and hoping against all hope that the great tyrant will grant them enough strength to resist the incoming alien filth.
A part of Timothy even wished that the deplorable servants of the corpse emperor will clear out the alien menace without them having to do anything. That was a weak thought, a thought the tyrant of blood would probably flay him for if the great one ever bothered to concern himself with a weak and insignificant speck like himself.
The Master — the leader of the cult Timothy was a part of — was just as unforgiving. The one saving grace of that was that he wasn't omniscient, even with his blessings. He couldn't read Timothy's thoughts and as such, Timothy’s skin remained attached to his body even if his thoughts strayed.
The caverns were dark, damp and cold. Timothy was less than pleased about having to be there, but he was still just an acolyte. He'd have to prove himself before he could even lay his eyes on the Master's visage.
Oh, how powerful and majestic he must be to be blessed by the Blood God. The Master was a Prophet of the God himself! He was the reason they were called 'The Prophets of the Waking Tyrant'.
Still, unseen majesty was not enough to keep Timothy warm and the incessant whimpering and sobbing of the fortunate fools who were to become the sacrifices to the Tyrant were quickly getting on his straining nerves. He wasn't the only one watching over sacrifices-to-be, but it was still an honorable duty few acolytes received.
Even if it was damned annoying.
"Shut UP!" He glared into the darkness beyond the rusty iron bars, getting muffled sobs in return for his outburst.
"Idiots," he lamented. "Can't you see that you have been selected? Soon you will have the fortune to become sources of power for the Great Tyrant!"
Mothers silenced their children however they could, while fathers and the other men huddled around them protectively.
Timothy snorted and crossed his arms. It didn't matter if they understood how important their sacrifice was. They were privileged! They were blessed!
The Master decided to conduct a Ritual which would empower himself and his followers! Timothy even overheard that he was planning on focusing all the deaths and suffering on Baal into a summoning ritual.
He might just be lucky enough to lay his eyes upon one of the Blood God's children.
He could barely wait. It would be glorious! They would be strong enough to stop hiding in the dirt and finally finish off those sorry excuses for angels.
Which was why his duty was important. These sacrifices had to be kept alive and secured.
He would do his duty to the utmost and soon a bright future would dawn on The Prophets of the Waking Tyrant.
Timothy smiled to himself, daydreaming about tearing apart one of those gold-clad beings most worship as angels on the planet and painting the surface of Baal red with their blood.
There was nothing that could stand in their way! Sacrifices were set! The blood angels were hiding in their monastery and the Master grew stronger by the second!
The cold bony hand of dread grasped Timothy by the spine and froze him stiff.
The ground trembled as distant screams of unbearable anguish echoed down into the dark caverns. He could feel something was very wrong … but the master should handle it. He handled everything before!
"Stay." he glared into the cages behind him. "If I see any of you outside of a cage, I am making you watch me butcher one of your children."
With that done, Timothy forced his body to move. His neck tingled and the unnatural feeling of pure terror was still present at the back of his mind, but fury was overtaking it.
Someone wanted to stop them! Someone dared to stand in the way of HIS WILL!?
Unacceptable.
Despite him not knowing, Timothy was using the single biggest counter to Psychic powers at that moment.
Mindless, overwhelming and ever-burning RAGE.
He rushed up the twisting tunnels, not even bothering to grab a torch, only following his subconscious memories to navigate the caverns until the ground turned into rockcrete under his feet.
He slowed, a part of him realising he was losing himself to rage in the middle of a crowd made up of his brothers and sisters. That was unacceptable.
He calmed himself with great effort, the redness slowly crawling back from his vision.
The central hall's doors laid to the sides, bent and in more parts than they were supposed to be. Standing on his toes, Timothy caught a glance inside and the terror from before came back with a vengeance.
Blood and fragments of what had been a human once coated the hall.
Fractured armor, ragged clothing depicting the cult’s insignia and a sword he knew very well to have belonged to the Master were left all around the hall. The last of which was still grasped by a gauntlet, unfortunately it ended at the elbow in a bloody stump coated in ashen blood.
That was the largest intact part that remained of what was once the Master. The rest was blood and ash.
Then the ground trembled again, several magnitudes stronger than before, and with an anguished screech, the rockcrete ceiling of the hall bent outwards and tore itself out.
Timothy fell backwards as he watched in amazement as the torn apart ceiling, along with tens of meters of the sandstone above it, went flying into the air as if an invisible colossus had grasped it and yanked it out.
Timothy, like many other acolytes around him, stared up into the gaping hole as if the monster that did this would poke its head into it and finally, they could understand even a fraction of what was going on.
The older members, ones that were the inner circle of the Master, started shouting orders to gear up for an incoming attack, but Timothy couldn't care less about that at the moment.
He raised a shaking finger and pointed up into the hole, though his voice failed him as an armoured form plummeted down and smacked into the center of the bloodied hall.
"ATTACK!" "KILL IT!"
What do you mean 'it'? That is a single woman.
That was the last thought that went through Timothy's tired mind before a flesh eating worm made a meal out of his brain.
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I watched on with a small smile as Selene hopped into the hole I made.
Of course, I kept in constant contact with her armour just to make sure I could get there if any naughty demons came forth and presented their asses for a whopping. I would spank them so hard even their demonic daddies could feel it. A part of me even wanted them to come, just so I could send a message.
It was better if the Chaos Gods didn’t go all panicked just yet though. When the Emperor was around and showed off his capability to obliterate demons, they quickly realized that they weren’t so immortal anymore.
That was good and all, but it resulted in them going ‘Alright, time to get serious now!’ as if they were chunny anime protagonists who’d just gotten thrown through a row of trees.
‘Meh … at most that feathery fuck will come back and I get to see whether I can beat its ass already.’
[ ~ding~ likelihood of that happening should the Lord of Change return is designated as: ‘dubious’]
I rolled my eyes, then just for good measure rolled my shoulders too.
With Selly off to feed the dumb cultists to the worms, I could go off on my own mini adventure. I’d be loath to admit, but letting that gigantic worm leave freely after trying to make a meal out of me had prickled my pride.
I rather liked my self-proclaimed apex-predator title and getting eaten — even if unsuccessfully — doesn’t really correlate to that, so the worm had to die.
A third eye opened up on my forehead as I rolled my two natural ones. For some dumb reason, the Navigator eye worked about 20% more efficiently and effectively when it was in the middle of my forehead. Historical and esoteric significance of chakra points or whatever seemingly still affected such things, even if I was using my pool of Soul Energy entirely separate from the Warp.
At least I made the eye vertical and pure white — no pupils or irises at all. It helped calm my aesthetic instincts which were disgusted by how Navigators had the eyes horizontally on their forehead.
Looking into the third eye of a Navigator makes people go crazy because it is a window into the Warp, which is incomprehensible to them. I wonder what would happen if a mortal looked into my eye?
I cast my gaze around, my fancy new eye burning with a white light as it surveyed my surroundings and found no onlookers aside from the soon-to-be-dead cultists down below. Which meant I could test out some of my more eldritch upgrades while I hunted down that larger bestial soul swimming around in the dirt only a few kilometers away from here.
It would have been challenging to find it if all I had to track it was its soul, animalistic souls almost blended together with the regular Warp energy, unlike the shining little flames that were human souls.
Fortunately for me and unfortunately for this overgrown noodle, I had gravity sensors built into my Psyker form that I stole from the Narwhal and with it being as big as it was; it was generating seismic shockwaves as it moved.
There was just one thing I wanted to do before I went after it.
With no curious onlookers who would snitch on me to either Dante or Guiliman when he finally hauled his blue ass over here, I could test out my new Combat Form. I didn’t want to just waste all that time and brainpower I (my mind-cores) have put into it by always using my Psyker Form.
Plus, once the Swarmlord had its DNA deciphered, it’d become redundant, and I’d have to make a new Combat Form.
Even if it was a single test, I wanted to try it out.
My Wrathbone … wait no, I came up with another name for it, Soulbone? I think?
Right. My Soulbone skeleton phased out of my body and into that weird space I had overlaid on my body, which sent my body flopping down bonelessly. Then, before it even touched the ground, my form swelled.
A second later I was standing again, my previous skeleton feeling tiny in comparison as it swam around in my new body. I could fit into my new, enormous arms.
Even if I wasn’t especially fond of the look, there was much to be liked about my Combat Form. It was a copy of a larger Hive Tyrant, clad in psychoactive carapace covering muscles and tendons reinforced by meta materials I couldn’t quite make sense of and similarly interwoven with psychic channels.
This Form had everything my Psyker one had aside from the Soulbone base, that was a static thing and it somehow felt wasteful to make new Soulbone skeletal structures for each of my Forms and their variations.
I needed versatility; I was a damned shapeshifting bundle of tentacles at the core of my being, so even tying my Psyker form to a static skeleton felt … uncomfortable to a part of me. Still, it grounded me in a way that wasn’t entirely detrimental.
Enough thinking, there is a noodle to slaughter.
A Bonesword fitting for my new size formed in my hand, using my trusty staff, Atiesh as its core. Force field generating organs spread around my body, powered up and vibrated with energy as my many neural systems already worked in tandem to predict attacks and calculate probabilities.
There was no way I’d leave such overpowered goodies out of this Form.
I flickered. No, I didn’t use Blink, but I moved with a speed not much worse than had I used the Spell.
My legs crossed hundreds of meters with each step and within the second I left my previous spot, I was already feeling the ground vibrate beneath my feet from the Worm’s movement.
With a mental smirk, I let an ever so tiny drop of Soul Energy drip down into the Warp.
The ground shook, and I kicked myself away from the ground, seismic tremors vibrated the sand as I followed the epicenter of them quickly closing in on my previous position with my gaze.
‘There you are!’
I sent myself swooping back down, sword readied and muscles tightening.
Teeth as large as an average human broke through the cracking ground in a rough circle. The inner part of it already falling down into the gaping maw of the beast, which was sizzling with potent enough acid to dissolve anything it encountered.
Well, anything it encountered before me.
The Psyker form might have been in a tight spot back there, but the combat form would hold out as long as I had Soul Energy to power its defences with. Simple acid couldn’t even touch my body with the force fields being up and going in overdrive.
Teeth snapped together with a disturbing crack, the beast still not knowing that its prey was heading for its head with a giant psychic sword instead of dissolving in its mouth, if that thing could be called a mouth.
It obviously wasn’t the brightest worm under the rock, and neither did it have the best sight. Why would it need to, when it lived mostly underground?
That meant that the first moment it got an inkling of an idea that something was wrong was when my four meter long sword sank into its shell up to the hilt.
The beast let out a low sound that no human could have ever heard, but I felt it might have been a growl. It was deep and powerful … and hurt.
Two new arms popped out of my torso, bursting through my carapace and sank their spear tipped ends into the rough shell of the beast, securing me to it. Then I ripped my sword back out and sent it back down, now filled to the brim with condensed psychic flames, which exploded as I plunged it back down.
The carapace cracked under my feet, and the beast shifted. It probably wanted to shake me off, but until it could use the earth to grind away at me, that wasn’t going to happen.
I think they call this ‘breaching’ right? When dolphins come out of the water and flop back in?
The breaching hadn’t even reached its apex yet, so the beast could only bear with the subsequent psychic explosions digging further and further into its armoured shell.
Sword pierced a layer of armour, explosion cracked it and I tore out the fragmented carapace with Telekinesis or just went back and sent them flying off with a distance with another explosion.
I felt like I was being uncreative. I had all the space magic at the tips of my fingers … claws, and all I was using was flames, TK and explosions. Yeah, I had those Biomancy tricks, but those hardly worked on a Tyranid bioform.
I cycled through basic magical stuff I knew about in my head as I continued blasting through the carapace.
Lightning, that was easy and I could do it already, but that wasn’t too effective for my current problem.
Telepathy was useless too at the moment, and so was precognition and other similar abilities.
I needed something that did pure, unadulterated damage.
Maybe making giant tools out of Psychic energy like Green Lantern could work? Nah, good idea but not for this, hmmmm.
Vitality. I could drain vitality out of living things, couldn’t I?
A try confirmed that yes, I could do that with the Worm, but most of its outer carapace wasn’t quite living. It was like hair or nails for a human and it was dead in a sense. No vitality to be found there.
Then a small part of me that should have died in highschool like it was supposed to, recommend using something darker. Void. Space. Curses.
I wasn’t sure whether Warhammer Psyconics could do either of those, but seeing as Blink existed, space could be manipulated by it and that meant there was a way to weaponise it.
[~ding~ Creating a black hole right where you are is a suboptimal idea. Ripping a hole into reality, being a step worse still! Not recommended!]
Killjoys.
My gaze locked onto my sword, and along with it my senses focused on it as it plunged down into the hardened armour for the up tenth time. If I can’t have Void Magic … this would have to do.
The power field crackling around it with some bluish energy made this sword so powerful. Heh, that’s why they call it a power sword.
These sorts of weapons worked with a molecular disruption field which allowed the sword to cut through any material it touched by weakening the molecular bonds in the unfortunate object.
I want that … but better.
I also had the Gauss Flayer which would outright atomize anything it hit, but I felt that would be a ‘higher-level’ spell if you will. I’d learn molecular disruption from this first and maybe work my way up to disintegrating molecular bonds with a Spell.
Yessss.
Our velocity slowed, and I noted that I’d have another few seconds before the worm buried itself back into the ground, with me sticking to its side like a leach. Not that it’d do much to help it anymore. I dug out quite the little cavern for myself here and I was more ‘inside’ it than ‘on’ it at the moment. Even if I hadn’t touched a single bit of living flesh yet.
If I had to have had an in-depth understanding of exactly how the power field disrupted molecular bonds, I wouldn’t have been even close to replicating it, but Psychic bullshit didn’t work like that. It was enough that I felt how it worked, had the picture of how it worked and knew it could work along with ample willpower and energy to make it all happen.
At least I hoped so. In a galaxy where random Psykers could stop time and turn entire legions to dust, it shouldn’t be much of a stretch.
No. I CAN do this. I WILL do this!
I felt the Soul Energy coursing through my body surge, vibrating with new purpose as it flowed down into my hand grasping the sword and into it.
With a grin on my face, I raised my sword and drove it down again. It sank in deeply and nothing happened for a long second as I held the rapidly growing amount of energies flowing into the sword at bay. Let them condense some more.
Then I let go. Dark abyss black flames exploded outwards without a sound, there was no thundering explosion as instead of shockwaves, the flames just outright ate up any matter they came in contact with.
Molecular bonds dissolved and the dozens of meters of hardened carapace flaked away, dissolving into nothing more than dust.
The beast made another sound, a deep guttural groan as the flames reached its flesh and seared it blood just before running out of energy.
If I had lips and a tongue to lick them with, I would have done so.
It was time for payback.