Chapter 94 – (D)
I invested almost all of my brain power into controlling the Drone, only leaving a fragment of my consciousness behind in my Avatar through which I could feel Selene’s hold tighten around my hand.
The Drone became me, even if my soul-thread remained in the avatar. Its instincts, senses, and movements went directly into my mind without any buffer as I twisted its body out of the spear's way and sent a clawed strike at his chest.
He was maybe the slightest bit slower than me, but he started dodging at the first sign of a counterattack, so he was more than out of my range by the time the attack would have connected.
He dodged though. That should mean he wasn’t confident in his armour just tanking the attack while he speared my ass.
A blink later he was back at me, spear flashing out faster than mortal eyes could have caught. I dodged, counterattacked, threw Eldritch blasts and waves of fire, but our dance continued without any attack landing or doing anything worthwhile.
He didn’t bother dodging the flamewall for example, he just stepped through it even as the flames tried to latch onto him and feast on his vital energy. They were all stopped by a thin film of energy coating his armour protectively as the pentagram-like sigils glowed in response.
We were going toe to toe, but I was worryingly aware that he didn’t even fire his spear-gun once, and neither did he use either of the two objects hanging on his waist. In comparison, my ace in the hole was not dying if I lost. I wasn’t putting much hope into outright beating him with this Drone, I was just trying to bait out his tricks. Something I continued failing to do.
My instincts and superior speed warred with his vastly superior skill, which was only made worse by that spear. Whenever it almost connected to even my carapace that could withstand the Swarmlord’s attacks, my Danger Sense went apeshit and tore my body out of my control to evade.
As the battle went on, it became clear that this Drone was far too weak to do any substantial damage to him. Even if he seemed to be only dodging my attacks by hair-thin margins, he never once got hit.
Let’s play dirty then. I could feel a grin spread on both my avatar and the drone’s bestial face, exposing lines of serrated teeth. The Shadowkeeper couldn’t see either though, as an Illusion overlaid itself on my Drone and went about acting like I had before.
He struck out to the right while I struck to the left. He dodged right into my strike and my claw dug into his power armour while the scythe snapping out over my shoulder was deflected by his helmet twisting so that it would strike his pauldrons instead of burying itself deep into his neck.
I jumped back, evading the spear, snapping out at me while my claws were stuck in his body. I let the arm go, tearing it off at the elbow and leaving the limb stuck in him. The neurotoxin lacing the claws probably wouldn’t do much to him, but I hoped the pain would be annoying.
He grunted, the first sign of either emotion or that he wasn’t a mindless automaton over all the time I’ve been observing him. Then he tore out my discarded arm and chucked it to the side as a bit of blood seeped through the cracks formed in his armour, but it clotted up in a few seconds.
I didn’t doubt that whatever tiny flesh wound I caused would also be healed underneath in a few more seconds. My strike only grazed his flesh and most of its power went into penetrating the stupidly tough armour.
I wasn’t just standing still like an idiot while he healed of course, despite making it look like that. Where his armour cracked, the carefully crafted sigils were now flickering and one even went dull.
Power armour also worked for resisting some psychic attacks, but those sigils of his were what made up for about 90% of his defences in that regard, and they were non-existent at that moment.
When I was satisfied with my creation, I sent out the invisible Spell and it slipped through that crack. The result wasn’t immediate. Hopefully, he wouldn’t even feel its effects for a while.
It wouldn’t help in this fight, but I was playing the long game here.
That single Spell would probably do quite well on the Geneva Convention’s bingo list. It was the meanest, nastiest plague combined with the most vicious slow-acting toxin I had in my arsenal and to finish that off I added in a personal spice to it.
Super cancer. Not the fast-acting tumour explosion I used on the Orks, but a slow one that would sit hidden in his body, just draining as much of his energy as it could while his immune system fought against the toxins and the plague.
He looked none the wiser as he grunted again, taking something out of a satchel hanging next to the silver orb and sticking it right into the cracked part of his armour.
I felt his psychic shielding mend itself. It wasn’t as strong as the rest of it, but was more than strong enough to hold out against any minor sorcery the Drone could throw at it.
Not even bothering to try, I used every energy left over from running Danger Sense and the Psychic Shield at full power to cast more Illusions as we once again pounced on each other.
He was deceptively quick, if not fast. He was always where I least wanted him to be, his spear always coming at me just so I couldn’t leave more than a hissing graze at his ceramite armour.
It was infuriating in a way, but it showed me how much I relied on instincts where I lacked skills altogether. ‘If Tyranids could do it, why can’t I?’ was how I thought, but that entirely ignored how much more powerful I could have been if I actually knew how to fight.
I needed to put that memory-eating project back on the rail rather soon.
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With time, my illusions started losing their effectiveness as he outright ignored all illusory clones of myself and only pursued me. He still sometimes fell for feints I made with illusory limbs, but even those were quickly losing effectiveness.
I had to have had a tick, a tell maybe that he could use to decide which attack was real and which was not. My illusions just weren’t up to par. I regretted only focusing on attack spells as he ignored another illusory strike coming at his neck as he deflected the real one.
Then my Danger Sense flared up in furious alarm. My reflexes went into overdrive to get me out of whatever he was about to do, but it was all too late. The energy on his spear exploded outwards in crackling arcs of lightning as a blinding beam of energy shot out of the spear’s tip.
I watched in near slow motion as the beam turned on my shoulder and then overlapped with it. For a moment I saw both my body, whole as it was, and the bloody remains of what once was a quarter of my torso. My pain receptors instantly turned off, but the agony the weapon induced was more than physical.
The attack didn’t have quite the same metaphysical force behind it as it had physical, but my mind was still sent reeling as the energy electrified every thinking node in the body and burned through the nervous system.
I felt the telepathic channel fray as the energy was deteriorating it. Then the beam cut off, fizzling out like it was barely held back from destroying anything and everything that existed.
I gritted my teeth, and felt Selene’s fingers tighten around my hand, so much so that I’d have some broken fingers already if I were a human.
Fuck you then. As bio-energy rushed to remake the lost part of my Drone, a makeshift rifle launched a spike filled with the energy right at the Shadowkeeper still recovering from his attack.
He probably thought himself safe from the spike, or was just sure of my drone being down for good, and took the attack as a last desperate attack.
The spike burrowed into his chest plate, not too deeply, but just deep enough to touch the skin. Then it exploded. Bio-energy condensed into the spike, sending fragments of it burrowing deeper into him as the energy itself spread under his armour and scorched into his skin and flesh.
I stumbled to my feet, mind once again back in the Drone, and pounced on him without waiting another moment.
Just as I was a moment away from sinking two dozen jagged claws into his flesh, his hand snapped to his waist. It wasn’t the silver orb he touched, but the blackened skull.
I felt an echo of an alarm from my Danger Sense before it died, just as the telepathic channel was utterly obliterated. I lost all sense of the Drone, remembering only a brief dark light flashing from the skull.
I was sent reeling, gasping as I clutched onto the couch under me. I was whole, as whole as I could be, and yet I felt like something was torn away from me. A part of my mind that was wounded in a way it never had been before.
“What the fuck was that?”
With a thought, a dozen bird-drones with no eldritch flesh flew closer to the site of the battle. Some descended from the clouds while others crested over the towering walls of the valley while I opened up my third eye for good measure as I stared in the direction I last felt my Drone.
There was a sphere of nothingness, both in realspace and in the warp that my psychic vision couldn’t sense.
Then the first birds laid eyes on the place, finding something that weirded me out. My Combat Drone was there, fit as a fiddle, but fallen over lifelessly as the Shadowkeeper climbed to his feet.
As the birds circled him from above like a flock of ravenous scavengers, he stood atop my fallen Drone and struck down with his spear. The crackling energy once again exploded outwards, pulverising the Drone cell-by-cell and leaving nothing, not even carbon ash.
An illusory afterimage lingered where the Drone once laid and then the beam died off, taking with it the eerie illusion.
He activated it a few more times for good measure until not even dust remained from the Drone. Only then did he tap the black skull again.
The sphere of nothingness dimmed and shrunk, pulling back into the depths of the skull like a furious bear heading back into hibernation after it dealt with the creature that dared rouse it.
“What happened?” Selene asked, and I whirled on her. Right, despite how weird that experience was, I was alright. I squeezed her hand, just to be sure. “Echidna?”
“Yes,” I shook my head, snapping out of it. “Yes, I’m alright!”
“What happened?” she asked. “The hologram you kept up disappeared, and you looked like someone slapped you in the face.”
“I don’t really know …” My mind turned, and a metaphorical lightbulb lit up in my head. “A Blank? But how?”
“A blank?”
“Yes,“ I said. “He has one strapped onto his waist, or at least the skull of one, which somehow still has the same effect as a living one.”
I thought for a moment, pulling up everything I remembered about Blanks, Psychic Nulls, Pariahs, whatever you wanted to call them, and let my mind-cores rush over them and make sure I wasn’t missing something important.
“This is bullshit.” That was the conclusion I came to. “He has a fucking Culexus strapped to his waist like a fucking flashlight?”
I considered myself a strong Psyker, not the best, far from it, but I reasoned my pure power usually made up for my lack of experience and skill in using it. I managed to make one of the strongest Greater Daemons retreat, for God's sake.
A weakling null-field shouldn’t have obliterated my telepathic channel that easily. I should have been able to hold on to it at least.
“What’s an Culexus?” Selene asked, looking like her worry was mounting by the second as I babbled on.
I took a breath, eye twitching as I felt one of my bait drones once again flicker and die. He is already back at it. What a relentless asshole.
“So, let me give you a quick rundown on Blanks and how the Imperium of Man makes use of them … “
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LUIS DANTE
Dante sat in his command chair. The defence was going eerily well. The Tyranids had fewer Synapse units as of late and no smaller bio-forms to make up for it with pure numbers.
That made it so his presence in the command room was much more beneficial to the overall war effort than him going out to the wall for extended periods. Even the baseline humans could down the creatures rushing at the fortress with a few well-aimed shots, so there was no need for him to go out and risk his life taking down elite units.
A regrettable course of events for which he knew just exactly the Xeno to blame.
He leaned back, reports coming in and going out every second with him only needing to approve of the most important ones and be there in case of an emergency to direct a quick response.
Aside from that, he also had to worry about dealing with whatever monstrosity scared their weird ally. He’d sent some elite men to scout out the ravines and found the exact same thing the woman had shown him.
He didn’t send anyone down into the caverns yet, resolving to take her advice and wait.
Still, every second he spent waiting and overlooking a battle, he was growing increasingly … anxious. The guardsmen were already talking about victory being only a matter of time and he knew some of his men started to feel the same way.
Hope was creeping back into their hearts, but Dante knew better.
Mephiston reported shadows gathering again. The Shadow was slowly, carefully, and much more importantly, stealthily re-converging and spreading over Baal.
Something was out there still that could hold the Swarm together, a Synapse creature that had enough sway to hold back the high-tier bio-forms.
Any moment, any second that flowed by, could be the last before the inevitable storm finally arrived. He could feel it in his bones, in the beat of his heart. He was sure. Now he was waiting for the inevitable report that crushed all hope.
“Commander Dante,” a lifeless voice sounded out, the mechanical vox echoing in the command room and effortlessly silencing everyone. “We are receiving a long-range transmission request.”
Dante didn’t know why, but the Magos called Zedev integrated himself into the command about a day ago. He took over almost all communication and technology, radars, voxes, combat vehicles, and anything that had to do with his Order, which he now was in command of.
Dante didn’t like it. He was doubtful of the Magos’ allegiance, but just as with the Xeno, he let him be. All help had to be used, all avenues exhausted and his personal views and values disregarded. All in favour of taking as much from the Tyranids as possible before death claimed them all.
“What?” He asked, his voice coming out as a croak. Was there perhaps another hold-out of his men on one of the moons? Anything closer wouldn’t be coming through the long-range vox. “From where? Who is it?”
“Authentication codes have been verified, the sender has been confirmed as the Gloriana-Class Battleship ‘Macragge’s Honor’.”
The world seemed to crawl to a halt as that single second lengthened into eternity. All the while, the word replayed again and again in Dante’s mind as doubt and hope warred in the ancient man’s heart.
Then it was over, and time flowed again. Having had an eternity to think, Dante only had a single thing to say:
“WHAT?”