I dashed to the side, letting the giant Mawloc — an overly-large worm with far too many teeth and a far too wide mouth — sail past me as it burst out of the ground I stood on just a moment ago.

My sword vibrated with energy as I slashed at its body, a sharp force field a dozen meters longer than the sword itself slashing right through anything but the spine of the beast.

I sent my body flying further away as the large beast came back down with an enraged screech of pain, smashing down on one of the approaching hive Tyrants.

A Telekinetic wave diverted two other of the Tyrants coming at me from behind, sending them smashing into each other instead of me. It didn’t do any damage to the hardy monsters, but the sight of it was worth it.

The third Tyrant, I smashed my knee into as I turned, ignoring as its claws and scythe-like limbs scratched my armour.

I didn’t have the weight, mass or whatever to really kick a Hive Tyrant weighing tonnes away with a single kick, but the speed I was moving at made up for the mass I was lacking.

The Tyranid didn’t appear too wounded, but it still went rolling head over heels away from me before it managed to stop itself by stabbing its scythes into the ground.

I touched down, soul energy rushing out of my feet to turn the already hard ground under my feet into stone as dense as the Fortress’ walls, which another stupid worm smashed into and learned why you don’t do that.

I held my footing in place with my Telekinesis even as the worm-thing smashed its skull open on the under-side of it, then I stomped down. Sending the plate of rock through the length of the beast.

The first worm still struggled to move, but the Tyrant it buried underneath it cutting its way through it with little consideration for its wounded comrade finally pushed the beast through the doors of death.

The four Hive Tyrants converged on me, circling me like predators would a prey.

The Serpents at the perimeter turned dark, all of them disregarding biomass preservation in favour of letting nothing else through to intrude on my playtime with my new friends.

I eyed them as I thought over which of my weapons should I test on these four. If I’d gotten any better, all four should be little effort to beat into the dirt.

Sword, Body, TK, and something.

My body flickered away, leaving behind only an afterimage as bio-energy surged through every cell of my being. I appeared next to one of the Tyrants and my sword pierced through its armour before it ever realized I wasn’t where it was looking.

The sword wasn’t really up for the task, piercing through the carapace only with effort, but I made up for it by pure force. With my enhanced strength behind the piercing attack, the sword plunged into the Hive Tyrant’s body, cracking its carapace as it did so.

Just as the beast was about to turn and rip my sword out of my hand, I ripped the sword not back out, but to the side. The bio-sword protested but with my strength behind the slash, it came out of the beast's body, leaving its torso only half attached to the rest of its body.

I smashed my fist into it and sent it flying with a frown down at my sword as it quickly repaired itself; it was bent, scraped and more than a bit fucked in all the ways it mattered. I really need that bio-sword upgrade from the Swarmlord. Focus on decoding that first.

[Acknowledged. Task Priority updated.]

The sword dissolved in my hand, the bio-energy making it up seeping into my body.

I saw a bit of my overcharged body’s capabilities just now, but let’s see how much damage I can do with no weapons.

I flickered again, appearing above the wounded Tyrant as the other three were rushing at my previous position and smashed my boot into its skull. It didn’t get pulverized as I hoped it would, but I tore the skull off of its neck with the force of my well-angled kick.

I snorted to myself, not pulverizing one of the strongest Tyranid bio-forms with a single kick was making me disappointed.

Soul energy joined bio-energy in my body, pushing it further beyond what was possible. Bio-energy was a miraculous thing, but it was an energy of realspace, a part of the physical universe and it worked inside its rules even if those rules were rather bendy in this weird galaxy.

Soul Energy didn’t care. My mind sped up, my vision cleared and time seemed to slow down. With bio-energy, my mind could barely keep up with the speed at which my body was moving, so I had to rely on my instincts to work faster than my mind when I truly pushed my body to the limit.

Now it all seemed slow in comparison. I could already slow my perception down to a thousandth of what a normal Human could have, but now I could probably put even the fastest Eldar to shame.

Onlythe extreme detail with which I saw the world around me now told me that time didn’t just stop for me. The Tyrants were moving, but they might as well not be.

I walked up to one and smashed my fist into its chest with only a moderate force behind it.

My armour fractured and broke and I could feel much more break under it, but I ignored it. The Tyrant didn’t move as my fist sank into its carapace. The hardy armour that I somewhat struggled to break through gave no more resistance than the surrounding air.

I cut back on the soul energy rushing into my body and time sped up again.

The Hive Tyrant burst apart like a mosquito on a windshield, its torso pulverized just as I hoped the previous one’s head would have been with its ravaged limbs and head flying away so fast they broke through the sound barrier.

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I shook my poor hand with a grimace, bio-energy regenerated both my body and the broken gauntlet with only a thought, but that didn’t really change the fact that my hand was turned into a grotesque flower with bloody petals of flesh hanging limply in all the wrong directions. My fingers and most of the gauntlet was just as much gone as the Tyranids torso.

“I’ll need to hold back with that until I can make a stronger armour.” I murmured to myself, turning my gaze on the remaining two Hive Tyrants crouched like cats waiting to pounce on their prey.

And just like with cats, me ‘noticing’ them had them jumping at me.

More out of reflex than anything, Atiesh appeared in my hand and I cast an overcharged Eldritch Blast like the one I made Kairos — that feathery fuck — eat right into one of them.

The weirdly overpowered staff protected me from the debilitating effects of the spell beyond my current form’s capacity to channel, but I still felt like instead of a truck, a whole void-ship smashed into me.

I threw the staff at the last Tyrant and it went sailing at it like a tracking missile, stopping right before it and wrapping the beast up in a slew of psychic threads that didn’t let it as much as twitch.

Meanwhile, I closed my eyes and slowly circulated my twin energies through my body to rebuild my damaged psychic channels and heal whatever else my little panic Spell damaged.

With Atiesh eating up most of the damage, I was back in tip-top shape in only half a minute, during which my serpents sizzled out. I looked around, watching the piles of carbon ash left behind by all the Tyranids throwing themselves mindlessly into the abyssal flames and the next wave of them bursting through those ashes already.

I hopped over to the bound Hive Tyrant with a single floaty leap and wrapped my fingers around Atiesh, the staff vibrating in what I felt was happiness under my touch.

The Hive Tyrant snarled and struggled, its jaws snapping only ten centimetres away from my face.

I smirked up at it and smashed it into the ground. The beast stayed tied at around two meters away from the tip of my staff so as I twirled my staff around; the Tyranid was smashed into the dirt left and right like some plush toy.

It didn’t damage it much, but after a dozen or so of these, I managed to shake off the sour taste of these trashy aliens making me panic left in my mouth.

With that out of the way, I tightened my hold on the Tyranid. The psychic ropes tied themselves around its limbs and neck, and then I pulled. The beast screeched, bones and carapace built to withstand bolter fire and artillery not breaking so easily.

The swarm started collapsing on me without the serpents to hold them back, but the chaff wouldn’t need much of my attention to keep away. Stray thoughts sent weak psychic shockwaves blasting out of my body, but that was more than enough to send gaunts and rippers barrelling through the air and take dozens of their kin with them as they smashed into them.

Numbers truly don’t mean much in the face of true power. I smiled, then giggled. That was a thought I wouldn’t have imagined myself ever thinking not long ago. I thought myself weak, in the grand scale of things, and I still did. If I am weak though … they are nothing.

The Tyranids didn’t relent, trying to swarm me and when that failed, pincer me, but without any heavy hitters like the poor Hive Tyrant whose limbs just gave out, they had no hope of even scratching me.

The first to give way was the carapace, cracking with a sickening crunch before muscles and tendons too gave way with a wet tearing sound accompanied by the beast’s dying howl. Then it was dead, its neck tearing off without too much effort.

I huffed, pulling the corpse in and letting a slew of white tendrils burrow into it. Only a few seconds later, not a drop of its blood remained. That took some effort, though not too much. With the Soulbone skeleton, I should be able to tear hive Tyrants apart as easily as I do Rippers now.

I hopped up into the air and caught myself with a bit of TK, sending myself dashing through the air like a bird. I wanted to see how endless this swarm was in reality; I knew Baal was already cut off from the rest of the Hive Fleet, so reinforcements wouldn’t be raining from the sky for these bugs.

Val and Selene were going wild, both enjoying the lack of Demons trying to worm themselves into their souls. One much more than the other, my ears could pick up the Eldar’s maniacal laughter even when he was barely a flickering dot in the distance.

‘Are you alright?’ I sent to Selene, just to be sure. I could tell she wasn’t injured or anything, but it couldn’t hurt to check in.

‘Yes, what is it?’ She sent back.

‘I’m going to look around for a bit,’ I said. ‘I want to see how many of these bugs there are, if there is anything I’ll be back in a blink.’

‘Be safe.’ She sent, and I couldn’t help, but smile. Sure, she was trying to tell me to shut up and let her focus on the combat, but I could feel the care in those words too.

‘You too.’ With that, I let the telepathic link dim and pushed it into the back of my mind for a mind core to monitor.

I sent out an order to my swarm of diligent little butterflies still fluttering between the horde of alien monsters to collect as much bio-energy as possible before hiding somewhere.

If I keep this up until the fleet arrives, I should have more than enough bio-energy for the foreseeable future … unless I want to pop out an army of clones or something. Bio-energy production was a problem I’d been ruminating over for a while, but I decided that until I settled down somewhere for any substantial amount of time, absorbing biomass was the way to go.

I could build a swarm of satellites around a sun, or farm Orks, but all that would need time and a lot of free space without prying eyes to be worth it. Calculations showed that a full Dyson Sphere would net me the equivalent of a single Carnifex consumed each day on average.

Bio energy was more about genetic potential energy than any sort of real physical quality biomass had. Sure, I could convert some from sunlight, but eating a Hive Tyrant would always be more worth it in the time and effort department.

I was also considering building some sort of stationary neural center that I could connect to telepathically, but as with a Dyson Sphere or Swarm, Baal wasn’t the place for it. I only had a week at most here before I had to either make a hasty exit before they torpedoed my ass, or just move on.

I knew I had what the big blue man wanted, but there was a doubt in me about my ability to convince him of that. Primarchs are supposedly all instinctual master tacticians and geniuses … supposedly. You couldn’t tell that based on how they acted, though I guess high IQ doesn’t mean they can’t be an idiot. *cough* Magnus.

Soaring just a dozen meters above the ravenous horde with jaws and claws trying to rip into me every, I scanned the Tyranids. I could feel some of the stronger bio-forms already rushing towards me, but I was faster, they wouldn’t catch up.

I crested over dunes, slapping away any unlucky little bugger with a mental wave as I spread my senses towards the horizon teeming with aliens. The ground was barely visible and the sky was dotted by the flying counterparts of the little monsters.

I considered going invisible for my scouting run, but I promised a lot of dead aliens to Dante, so murder it was. I lamented the fact that despite being the perfect infiltrator — with me being able to take on the face of anyone while also being quite good at using illusions — I was only ever killing and destroying things outright.

Next time. I promised to myself.

Psiflames burst to life, covering my whole body before spreading to both of my sides like a pair of huge wings that let fire and death rain down on the unfortunate Tyranids below. With a thought, I formed the flames into the image of a gigantic bird made entirely of flames with me at the center. I hope they are watching. Doing this when nobody sees me would be … pretentious.

My senses picked up faraway explosions in several directions, the Astartes were still going on regular excursions to take down anything that could threaten their fortress it seemed, but most of them seemed to be pulling back. So they are watching me, us? Good.

I needed them to understand our power, I needed to plant a seed of fear and respect into them. Xenophobia was hard-wired into these damned Space Marines, negotiations with Xenos only ever happened when killing them would not be worth the effort.

I wasn’t delusional enough to think I could take down the incoming fleet alone, maybe if I spent months infiltrating each ship and planting explosives, but even that wouldn’t ensure I could actually win. Space Marines were some of the best warriors in the galaxy, and the fleet was led by a blood and flesh Primarch, in all his fate-bending glory. I didn’t want to fight them, I probably couldn’t, no matter how smart, sneaky or powerful I was.

That only left negotiation, deception and maybe a bit of respect. I knew Guilliman respected Dante, and I saved him, hopefully that would lend me some respect too. Even if he is no less Xenophobic than the rest of the Imperium, he at least knows when an alliance or trade is more beneficial than a battle to the death.

I slowed to a stop, paying little attention to the inferno left in my wake. As I flew, Psifames fell in burning droplets that sent infernos spreading through the mindless hordes.

A smirk spread on my lips. So that’s how they are doing it.

The landscape changed a fair bit from the barren sandy dunes, morphing into a maze of sandstone mesas with steep little gorges separating them, some of which even had the smallest streams flowing in them.

That wasn’t the object of my curiosity though, it was the hundreds of cave openings hidden in the deepest parts of the valleys and gorges. They opened up like gaping black maws spewing out rows of screeching aliens non-stop, each of them sporting not even a scratch on their shiny carapace. Newborns.

Curious … let’s explore a bit.