Chapter 93 - D
“You are making that face,” Selene said.
“What face?” I asked, putting on an innocent expression.
She squinted at me, I just smiled and blinked at her. I was the epitome of level-headedness and pragmatism, there was no way I was thinking about jumping a Shadowkeeper just because I wanted to throw fists with it. Nope, not this girl.
I’m still going to do it though.
Selene poked me in the rib.
“You are thinking about something stupid,” she said. “I can feel it.”
“Not sure what you are talking about,” I tilted my head. “Does it have something to do with me wanting to see whether I can beat up that mean custodian?”
“Why?” She just asked, deflating.
“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to beat one up if you thought you could?” I felt a grin tug on my lips. “This man is supposed to be one of the greatest fighters humanity ever produced.”
“It’s stupid,” she said. Not that she could tear her gaze away from the Shadowkeeper’s frozen image. Selene loved fighting just as much as I did, maybe even more so. I could feel it through our bond how she revelled in crushing Tyranids that could wipe cities by themselves under her boot. “You wouldn’t even get anything from it, right? You already have a body superior to a Custodian.”
“Variety has its own uses,” I countered. “I can’t use Tyranid templates for everything, and Custodians are supposed to be biological works of art. Each and every one of them is a unique sculpture of infinite value.”
“And you want to eat one.”
“And I want to eat one.”
We stared at each other. She knew she wouldn’t be able to dissuade me for at least trying and I knew the greatest thing holding her back from joining me in jumping the Shadowkeeper was her lacking power to survive the battle if she did so.
“You already kicked up a shitstorm, but if you by some miracle manage to kill a custodian, you will have crusade fleets and custodian kill teams sent after you.”
I nodded at that after a second of consideration; she was right, but I just wanted a bite and to beat the fuckhead killing my drones into the dirt. My win condition here was surviving and managing either of those two goals would be the icing on the cake.
Maybe I was overestimating the Shadowkeeper, and he’d fold after a punch, or I was underestimating him, and attacking him face-to-face would be the last thing I did. He had the confidence to hunt me so brazenly; he had to have something he was confident in killing me with and if not that, weaken me.
He had to know something about me, there had to be a reason one of the mighty Shadowkeepers dragged his lazy ass out into the other side of the galaxy. He came here for a reason, and with a device — presumably — that could track my eldritch body.
It didn’t take a genius to put the pieces together when one was even vaguely familiar with the Shadowkeeper’s lore. He was here for me, or at least for the body I’d been shoved into. There was no other explanation for why he had a device made just to track the eldritch flesh.
My eyes narrowed at the frozen image. I’m not giving it back. Finders keepers, fuckwit.
I doubted the guy would be understanding enough to let me keep the body; I doubted he wouldn’t just try to wipe my entire personality from it to return it into a soulless tool. Was that why my body was so receptive to psychic control? It was made to be a tool used by psykers to engineer life with bio-matter?
Why wouldn’t they just possess it like I did? I tapped my chin in thought, then shrugged. It was probably fear, one way or another. Fear of not being themselves in a new body, and fear of any single person having the power I had now.
If I was in a better world, I might have considered sharing. I could just give him a single tendril to take back home and he would essentially have the exact same thing they had lost.
This wasn’t a better world, this was the grimdark future of the 41st millennium.
I think I’ll offer sharing, just so I can say I tried it. I was about 99% certain he’d tell me to shove a hedgehog up to where the sun doesn’t shine. Or just ignore my offer and attempt to kill me. Custodians weren’t known for their humour.
Whatever. I needed to plan. If I wanted to get a nibble out of him before bolting, I needed a plan that went further than ‘throw stuff at it and figure something out if that doesn’t work’ — despite that exact plan having been my go-to so far.
“Let’s plan,” I said, kicking my legs up on a quickly conjured coffee table. “How does one go about taking a bite out of a Custodian?”
“One usually doesn’t want to take a bite out of a Custodian,” Sel said. I could tell she was reluctant, a touch jealous about me getting to fight a Custodian, but overall just worried that I would kill myself by being stupid. Adorable.
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“I am special like that.”
“Oh, you are special, for sure,” she rolled her eyes. Did she just-? “You need to bait out as many of his tricks as possible before facing him, and make a clone right now that you can hop into if he manages to destroy this one.”
“Understood ma’am,” I grinned, hand snapping to my forehead in a lazy salute. “I’ll do as you command.”
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SELENE VOSS
If she was an artist, Selene would have surely made a painting out of Echidna at that moment, just so she could keep it forever, just as it was. Leaning back on the couch with a lazy grace she never thought possible, a silly grin on her sculpted face and emerald eyes twinkling in mischief as she saluted.
It was just enthralling. Selene found herself gazing at the woman for a second too long as the grin slowly slipped off and the alien tilted her head curiously.
“You alright?” She asked. She dared to ask. With those stupidly kissable lips of hers.
“Of course,” she shook the childish lust off, she was a woman closing in on thirty, not a teenager. Still … No. “What could he have that could be legitimately dangerous for you?”
“Honestly?” Echidna said. “If I take ‘dangerous’ to mean anything that could kill me thoroughly enough for me to stay dead, not much. He’d have to somehow destroy my soul by using this body as a conduit.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Selene was dubious of that, at best. She might have seen the girl Echidna once was and who she still was in part, but her soul was unquestionably that of a goddess. A part of Selene wasn’t sure whether Echidna was even human at one point. Sure, she lived like one, but was she really human?
“Maybe,” Echidna shrugged. “They had like twenty thousand years. I refuse to believe they didn’t think of this scenario before. We’ll have to assume he has a weapon he believes is capable of killing me for good, imprisoning me, or just straight severing the connection between my body and soul.”
Selene wanted to refute, but despite being a Rogue Trader and part of the high nobility since birth, she knew alarmingly little about the inner workings of the Adeptus Custodes. There were snippets of knowledge to be learned, but never much and never anything substantial.
Echidna knew them better, even if she’d only been in this galaxy for a month at most.
If she said they had weapons that could kill her, Selene will assume they did and plan accordingly. The fact that Echidna even bothered planning was a sign of how seriously she took the Shadowkeeper.
Selene just saw this very same woman jump straight into battle with the most dangerous bio-form the Tyranids had to offer.
Selene just wanted to leave, run, and be sure that she and her lover survived. Maybe if she was stronger … much stronger, she’d want to stay and fight. Fighting as she was would be stupid.
“You need to prod it with something it can’t slap to death,” Selene said.
“Fair enough.”
There it was again, the mad depthless hunger shining in her green eyes. Even as the woman sent out orders through her telepathic network, she stared at the most recent images and recordings of the Shadowkeeper like he was the first piece of food she saw after a month of starvation.
Selene let her mind wander for a moment. She imagined that hunger being turned on her, the woman she came to love staring at her like a piece of meat to be consumed.
Whether the shudder that rushed down her spine and the beat of her heart picking up pace was a result of utter dread or arousal, she didn’t know.
Echidna turned her head and Selene held her breath, her heart skipping a beat.
That insatiable hunger was gone, only those enchanting emerald eyes looking at her with a touch of worried confusion remained. Selene snapped herself out of it.
“Yeah?”
“I said I have the new drones ready,” Echidna said with a glance at the hologram. “Should we get some snacks before we get to work?”
“I just ate and you don’t need to eat,” Selene retorted as she propped herself up into a sitting position and slid up next to Echidna.
“Let’s start then.”
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Despite being some sort of eldritch horror, I couldn’t quite manage to get used to controlling two bodies at once. Or three for that matter.
I usually went with ‘throw a mind-core at the problem’ solution in cases like this, but I wanted to do it myself in this case. Plus, it was just a single Combat Drone and my own Avatar. Plus a perfect copy of myself sleeping lifelessly in the bed behind me, which was weird as fuck, but Selene made me do it just in case.
If this body got destroyed in the fight to come, I’d hop into that back-up and we’d bolt. If we had time, I’d take the other two with us, but if not, me and Selly would just teleport off planet.
Back onto the Combat Drone. After sending some bird-drones at the Shadowkeeper, even some psychically juiced up ones, we realised that we’d need to throw something much more serious at him for him to take it even a bit more seriously.
He just kept ignoring anything the smaller drones did and didn’t even take his spear out.
His power armour easily deflected the minor Spells I could throw at him through the drones. Stupid bandwidth requirements. I could barely manifest a fraction of my Avatar’s psychic power through the tiny drones since not only were they horrendously bad as psychic conduits, but they only got their source of soul energy second-hand.
If my Soul was the internet provider and the soul-thread the optical cable going to my house, then my Avatar was the router. Comparably, the tiny drones were the smartphones connected to said router through a shitty wifi connection.
Not a perfect analogy, but it worked somewhat. Plus, one also had to take into account that the difficulty of sending soul energy through a telepathic channel increased exponentially based on the distance, so with my Combat Drone being a continent away, it was only about a tenth as strong as I was when I fought the Lord of Change, maybe even less so.
It could run its Danger Sense and Psychic Shield at full power, but it only had a small bit of energy left over to use for boosting its physical capabilities or throwing Spells around. Still, it should be enough to make the damned Shadowkeeper show us some of his tricks.
The Drone stood in a barren sandstone valley, staring out into nothing as its Danger Sense worked on maximum power constantly. It only had the tiniest eldritch tendril in its body, the exact same I’d have left in a bird drone to hopefully fool the Shadowkeeper into attacking it. We couldn’t take chances.
‘What if he isn’t coming here because he can tell this is where the largest signal is coming from? He could be ignoring where your main body is to hunt down all of your smaller drones first so you can’t escape into them.’ Or so Selene said, which I reasoned was a possibility. He was cutting down what he thought were my only avenues of escape and once he was done, he’d come for the main body.
So many uncertainties, it was annoying. I liked knowing things; I relied on my lore knowledge to manoeuvre more often than not so far, so knowing so little about the Shadowkeepers and their arsenal of heretical weapons was creeping me out.
The man diligently followed the trail of drones I left for him, always attacking the one I moved so it would be closest to his last known position. I didn’t know whether he was aware of being led around by the nose and just didn’t care or remained in the dark, but I didn’t care.
The Drone’s Danger Sense bristled as reality cracked only a hundred metres in front of it revealing a void of darkness within.
Out of the crack stepped a dark armoured form, almost three metres tall and clad in thick power armour interlaced with slightly glowing sigils. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I felt his gaze on the Drone all the same, heavy and overbearing.
If he was surprised by finding not the regular birds, he didn’t show it.
The crack snapped shut behind him as I ran a calculating gaze over his form. He had the spear on his back, though it felt off somehow. Two outwardly suspicious things hung from his waist, one blackened skull that gave me goosebumps even on my Avatar and a platinum orb I recognised at first glance.
It was the same orb I found at the place I first awoke in this galaxy. The same thing that probably held my body before I came to inhabit it.
I glanced up again, and the Shadowkeeper already had his spear in hand and it was crackling with energy that my Danger Sense wasn’t liking one bit. It felt dangerous, destructive in a way few other things did.
It reminded me of the acidic bile in the worm that could eat through any material and the sickly green beam of the Necron Flayer.
Then he moved, and the spear was upon me.