Two days after the incident with the Ecclesiarchy delegates, we were finally done with a sizable test batch of people. All that was left to do was to wait for the relevant authorities to verify the results.
It was lunchtime, and I was reading instead of eating. In my old life I was a creature of habit, holding onto the same job longer than my contemporaries would advise, and content on eating the same food in predictable cycles.
Just like in my previous life, I began adopting new habits in this new world. For now, the main routine I established was to skip lunch and use that time to flip through books in the monastery library, hastily building my knowledge of this world.
Abusing my recently discovered ability to process parallel thoughts, I pondered on the recent events even as another part of my mind simultaneously absorbed information from the flipping pages.
On the first day things had gone smoothly after the three disgraced guests were taken away. We proceeded to conduct the cleansing procedure until we ran out of people who were stuck in vegetative state.
We then went on to process candidates who were still conscious and functional. Things got a bit messy as many new procedures were adjusted or created on the fly to let my cleansing halo go through the rotating crowd safely and smoothly.
In between each cleansing session, I was being dragged around to meet and have small talks with the visiting Ecclesiarchy big shots. Most of the time it was Welminah who handled the interactions, with Maylin acting as intermediary as I talked as little as possible.
In contrast to my poker face game, the other parties usually could hardly conceal their awe, it was awkward and suffocating for a not so social person like me. Fortunately from what I was able to glimpse from their mind, most of them bought my semi-divine status.
I had expected the Church to be more cautious about their contact with me after what happened, but instead on the second day the new batch of Ecclesiarchy delegation almost doubled in number, as if the incident on the previous day did not happen at all.
In a short span of time I had seen enough people reacting to my halo in various unique ways to last a lifetime. Judging from the observed details, I highly suspected the reaction of each individual was directly proportional to their beliefs and devotion to the Emperor. In short, the halo might only be good for unnerving people who believed in the God-Emperor’s divinity. So in theory if an Ork charged towards me, blasting my halo should do little to stop the alien since it never gave a flying fuck about humanity’s biggest boss in the first place.
We also took the chance to disclose my “amnesia” to the attending dignitaries of the Church. The disclosure genuinely shocked most people and garnered a lot of sympathy points for myself. It also provided the perfect cover for my eccentricity, an aspect which was unavoidable during my interaction with the dignitaries since I was not from this universe in the first place.
Meanwhile, progress on the vault excavation was steady but slower than expected as Kryptorer ran into more complications. I could almost feel the frustration in the archmagos’ voice despite his totally flat tone while reporting his status.
Outside the monastery, even with a supposed gag order in place, news of my activities seemed to have been leaked. Rumours about the awakened saint candidate having started performing miracles inside the Sororitas monastery was going around and was even discussed in the mainstream news networks. Since neither the Inquisition nor the Church seemed to kick up a fuss over it, I assumed that the leak was done on purpose, part of the imperial propaganda campaign.
In other news, Canoness Diadinah and her strike force were finally scheduled to return later today after an extended period of heretic hunting. Silently, I hoped that the return of many battle sisters could disperse the ever increasing amount of pilgrims gathering at the monastery gate.
That was how the two days went by in a blur with zero progress in my martial training goal.
As for now, back in the library, Solace had temporarily joined the cherubs on their eternal air patrol while I continued my quest on devouring knowledge. Exploiting my transhuman ability, I was going through the books with astonishing speed, reading one after another like clockwork. Every time I was almost done with my current book, I would mentally order a random cherub to fetch the next predetermined tome as a replacement to continue the flow.
People were watching. To the curious onlookers, I must have looked the part of a supernatural scholar, flipping through one book after another while the cherubs kept bringing over new copies and placing back the finished ones. In truth I was playing catch up, gathering information as fast as possible, hastily building my knowledge reservoir of this world and beyond to face the many challenges ahead.
I was enjoying the serenity of the moment when sounds of a rumbling stomach shattered my peace. I peeled my eyes from the pages and looked to the source of hunger: Welminah, who was sitting across from me, her face a deep shade of red. She had been shadowing me for the past days, even forgoing her own lunch just to stay by my side, but she was clearly reaching her limit.
‘You should go eat.’ I suggested.
‘But…’
‘There is no point in torturing yourself. Besides…’ I whispered, ‘you know that I am different.’
Welminah did not refute my point, yet she stubbornly refused to move and was beginning to look every bit like a child in a not-eating-her-vegetables rebellion.
I almost heaved a sigh at her silliness when the faint echoes of a pair of heavy boots marching across the marble floor tugged at my mind. My attention shifted, super human level senses automatically filtering out all the miscellaneous sounds to focus on the incoming footsteps. They were familiar to me, stern and purposeful, repeated at almost precise intervals. Even by the rhythm alone I knew who was coming.
‘Welminah.’ I said with a neutral tone, ‘Inquisitor Thorn will be here soon, go have your lunch.’
The sister scholar flinched before she bolted upright from her chair and started to turn around, just in time to catch the sight of Thaberus entering from the far end of the library. Flanked by Herlindya and Niandra, the inquisitor with his signature trench coat continued his stride without slowing, making a beeline towards my position.
‘Go, or he might invoke insufficient clearance to get you going anyway,’ I pushed. For a moment Welminah wanted to say something, but eventually she gave me a deep bow before leaving. Right on cue, as soon as the sister turned a corner, the inquisitor arrived with Herlindya. No sign of Niandra, she had slipped into the shadow somewhere.
‘Syrine.’
‘Inquisitor.’
‘Sorry to interrupt your reading session, you are looking mighty casual today.’ The usually stern Thaberus dropped an unusual comment before walking over and sat down on the chair Welminah had vacated a moment earlier.
Casual? For a split second I wondered whether he was referring to my attire or activity.
I was in my default white robe again since there were no more Church people to impress today. The look had been growing on me. I appreciated its simple yet timeless appeal, plus it suited my laziness of not needing to think about what to wear everyday.
If this was back in the twenty-first century, casual wear probably implied a tank top and hot pants. Wait, wait, wait… I could never live with that. It was a line my inner guy soul simply would not cross.
Hold on, what am I doing? An inquisitor is waiting for me!
Not wanting to keep Thaberus waiting any longer, I quickly flipped through the last few pages of my book before passing it to a waiting cherub nearby.
The cyborg baby received the book respectfully before bowing and took off, carrying the hefty tome with an exaggerated struggle towards its designated shelf space. Thaberus watched the cherub go before reaching into his trench coat and took out a scroll, without a word he passed it to me.
I used to think the omnipresence and usage of mediaeval-looking scrolls were a ridiculous notion in a futuristic galactic empire. Not any more. Unlike data-slates, these things required no batteries, were totally unhackable and more often than not, made of durable materials that would survive most rough handling.
I received the space age parchment while examining Thaberus’ expression for any clues of his unusual action. As always, beside the slight hint of amusement at how serious I must have looked, he was mostly inscrutable and his mind remained an impenetrable fortress.
I gingerly opened the scroll and quickly saw that it was a report. A very serious report. The document was prefaced by an Inquisitorial logo with all its disclaimers, starting with huge letters stating FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. I glimpsed through its contents and was updated on some of the events that were going behind the scenes.
Firstly, preliminary results of my halo cleansing were excellent with all the candidates passing their purity inspection tests. While detecting minute warp taint was not an exact science mastered by the Imperium, it was reported for the first time in a long while not one test candidate woke up screaming during their sleep after receiving my cleansing light.
Huh, some good news.
Technically that would push my public miracles count to three and fully qualify me for the title of living saint.
Next, fresh off the press on a very recent report, about an hour ago, a huge Church congress attended by the many important religious figures from around the globe was concluded. Quite possibly why Maylin was not around today.
Stolen story; please report.
Sources indicated a sizable number of Church representatives wanted to immediately formalise my sainthood in their eagerness to boost the Church’s local reputation. But that notion was opposed by the major faction belonging to the cardinal, citing that such an important declaration should only be made by the cardinal himself.
After fierce debates were held and some punches were thrown, in the end the motion was successfully delayed, and they would wait for the cardinal’s return. Besides, the main bulk of the 20,000 troopers were still waiting for the cleansing procedure.
Following that, the Inquisition had concluded their initial investigations of the three suspicious individuals from two days ago. Apparently the three of them were known proxies of the cardinal and had been providing specialised whitewashing services to cover the Church’s shady activities for many years.
As for their reactions that day, I suspected it was due to them being affected more than the rest by my misfired power due to, hopefully, a sense of guilt. The Inquisition was now moving onto interrogating the three individuals to dig up more dirt on the local Church.
The next point in the report stated that the cardinal had been sending many astropathic messages to his subordinates while en route to Nusquam. These contain encrypted instructions.
Since the only available official astropath on the planet was still under the direct access of the inquisition, they helped themselves with the suspicious messages and had since cracked the hidden code.
It seemed like in anticipation of formalising my status as living saint, the cardinal had ordered his underlings to kick-start and promote multiple cults in my name. Thaberus’ people had theorised that the fellow might have planned to use these cults to gather more political power for himself.
My guess was that he would be claiming my emergence as a sign of more incoming apocalyptic events and that the only hope for salvation was to obey the Church, aka himself, or face the typical damnation and eternal suffering, blah blah. I would not be surprised if his end game was to convert Nusquam into a shrine world that rivalled, if not outright surpassed, Sanctitas Primus as the primary religious hub of the sub sector with him as its first pope.
This shrewd fellow is already counting on cashing me in.
The final point, and to me the most surprising part, of the report stated that the people at the sub sector’s capital world had managed the titanic feat of rerouting most of the warp travelling in the region. Using the psychic beacon I lit up as a fixed reference point in warp space, they had mobilised an untold amount of resources and successfully created a workable system for the imperial starships in the region to navigate the local warp space.
Most of the starships that were heading towards Nusquam had since been redirected to their original destinations or other more developed imperial worlds nearby. Being a relatively backwater world, Nusquam had neither the infrastructure nor the capacity to handle the influx of starships, so it was for the best. A few starships did end up here and the Nusquamese, with the help of the Inquisition, had been trying to recruit offworld astropaths. While this was done to remedy our desperate lack of such specialists, whether such recruitment process was done voluntarily or otherwise I had no idea.
On the appendix, it was mentioned that talks were underway to mobilise resources from nearby forgeworlds to urgently upgrade Nusquam’s dingy starport and related facilities.
Done with the scroll, I took my eyes off it and asked the inquisitor, ‘your reason for showing me this?’
‘I heard about your incredible reading ability,’ he said. ‘Rather than spending so much time briefing you verbally this would be more efficient.’
No arguing with that.
I pointed to the word “cardinal” on the scroll. ‘Any update on his investigation?’
‘We found something,’ he nodded, ‘and thanks to you, we managed to dig out more from the three. However, they were mostly typical cases of corruption, embezzlement, exploitation of the faithful, manipulation of religious texts, cults creation plus many rumours of …deplorable vices. Terrible as it seems, there was nothing nefarious enough to be on the level of damnation yet.’
‘Deplorable vices?’ I asked, noting his pause before the statement.
He shrugged and replied simply, ‘bad stuff. But since these are mostly unsubstantiated at this point, I will elaborate no further.’
The more I heard about this cardinal, the more it felt like he was a cookie cutter type of bad guy. To make matters worse, his appearance did not help either. From all the pictures I could find of him, the cardinal looked every bit like a comically overweight villain. He even mirrored Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from the Dune movie in body size, just not as muscular. Could such a caricature exist in real life?
While lost in thought, I was suddenly hit by a peculiar sensation of unexplainable unease. Something was in the air, something that felt wrong.
My transhuman heart rate quickened ever so slightly while my fingertips vibrated with micro shivers even though I was positive about sensing no immediate threats around me. It felt as though the fabric of reality itself had been disturbed, like the placid surface of a still lake rippling by flying sand.
Without warning I saw flashes of people who I did not recognise suffering, their flickering faces laced with desperation and I felt their pain almost physically. The episode felt like the glimpses of inner thoughts I read from random people around me, but a lot more intense.
Totally new to this, I struggled to pinpoint the source of this unknown upheaval, but it eluded me. All I could be certain of was that it originated from the direction somewhere behind Thaberus. Unaware of my experience, the inquisitor started speaking again. ‘That said, recently there is another more disturbing rumour going around…’
Receiving no response, he looked at me and quickly picked up that something had gone awry. ‘What?’ He asked, his tone turning serious.
‘I am not sure. I felt a disturbance… a distance away.’ I pointed past him in an approximate direction, after forcing myself not to utter the famous phrase to avoid a cliche no one here would even know about.
Thaberus took my words seriously. ‘Can you elaborate?’ Before he even finished his sentence, a beep sounded from the inquisitor’s ear piece at the same time a notification ping chimed from Herlindya’s data-slate.
I watched as both Thaberus listened to a report and Herlindya consulted her data-slate with serious expressions and knew that this was no coincidence. Something big must have happened.
‘Understood, Thaberus out.’ After a while the inquisitor finally ended his conversation with an unknown party, by now going into his full serious mode.
‘Sir, the Scholastica Psykana-’ Herlindya said urgently but was interrupted by Thaberus with a wave of his hand.
‘I know, under attack by armed cultists as we speak.’
Scholastica Psykana? Psyker school?
‘What do we have for quick response assets?’ Thaberus demanded with a low and dangerous voice.
Herlindya referred to data she conjured on her slate and replied without skipping a bit. ‘Arbites and local law enforcement units are en route, but they might be outgunned. Currently there are no idle flyers available for immediate aerial insertions except for Flameraven. Estimated time for any units from here to reach the Scholastica via roads is about forty-five minutes, if traffic conditions are ideal.’
‘Zaki is at that place, talk about bad timing,’ said Niandra who appeared like a manifesting ghost. Her sudden appearance did not surprise me for a part of my mind had been tracking her whereabouts since she got close, but her words shocked me.
‘Zaki is at the Scholastica Psykana at this moment?’ I asked, not bothering to conceal my concern.
‘Probably just plain bad luck, he was there to retrofit his null dampener. Speaking of which, the Scholastica is roughly where you pointed just now,’ Thaberus said while looking behind him, revealing his remarkable sense of direction. He then said grimly, ‘forty-five minutes is too slow. To think they would strike at a time like this, just when most of our flyers were out to retrieve Diadinah’s forces… this timing couldn’t be a coincidence.’
‘Sir, I just logged into the security system of the Scholastica,’ said Herlindya as she passed over a data-slate to Thaberus. The inquisitor viewed it with a stern expression before putting it down on the table for all to see. On the slate’s screen were many split displays showing what I assumed was live footage from the security cameras of the facility.
On some of the tiny divided screens, panicked people could be seen running for their lives. On other displays, armed assailants were giving chase, their assault weapons blazing. Many bodies, of both adults and children alike, could be seen lying bleeding and motionless on the floor. As the gunmen pushed forward, they shot and destroyed all the security cameras they encountered. One by one the pict-feeds were killed off, leaving most of the mini split screens in blazing static.
I watched, petrified as the atrocity unfolded. A numbed sense of incongruity took hold as the carnage before me overlapped with my memory of meeting Zaki, the little null boy with the cutest smile. Now he is somewhere inside there, in that place where this is happening.
At this point, Thaberus had contacted the active palatine on duty and started discussing sending an elite strike force into the fray with Flameraven.
I remained seated and mentally stunned while listening to the inquisitor putting up a plan, but soon felt my own anger rising. It was strange, the truth was I didn’t get to know Zaki well as we only met briefly once. That brief moment we had together was short but sweet, our joyful encounter a distinct contrast from most of the grotesque and horrible things crawling in this world.
And now that kid was in mortal danger, it felt like what little I had cherished was being ruthlessly trampled and stepped over.
Slowly at first but like a flame sparked on a dried grassy field, the anger within me took over. As my fury grew, another part of my mind was coldly calculating the odds. From the brief glimpses I counted, no less than thirty armed cultists present in the assault.
What if it was myself there facing these people?
I was sure we all did something like this before, imagining ourselves as the people who were caught in terrible events that appeared on a news flash, and wondered if we could beat the odds in their shoes. Only this time I was not looking at the situation as a human, but from the perspective of a semi-awakened godling.
Working with thought acceleration, I took my transhuman baseline together with my pseudo invisibility into the equation and quickly ran some combat simulations. I wanted to see how far I could push my advantage when it came to mortal combat with this crowd.
Before long, I believed, no, I KNEW I could do it.
By going all out and using the environment with zero reservations in the application of lethal force - not as if any of those bastards deserved mercy in the first place - even with my current limited capabilities and combat experience, I was confident in taking down the entire chaos strike team by myself. All of them. Every single one of those heretical terrorist scums.
After all, they were just… humans with assault rifles.
Between my impressive strength and reflexes, projectile protection from a reinforced refractor field and having an apex level transhuman physiology for being a discount primarch, nothing short of serious anti-tank weaponry would pose a real threat to my life and wellbeing.
Even so, realistically speaking between the inquisition and the sisters, I imagined no one would ever allow me to charge in like a Khorne berserker. I was simply too precious for the establishments to take risks like that. At any rate, I was not going to stand idle in the face of such atrocities.
My mind was made up.
I stood up, immediately becoming the focal point of everyone around as I firmly declared my intention to Thaberus.
‘I am coming along.’
The inquisitor was about to rebuke me until he saw the look in my eyes. He quickly wrapped up his conversation with another party on his comm bead and turned to me.
‘Palatine Alicya is gathering twenty battle sisters as we speak, the strike force is leaving in five minutes. You have two minutes to convince me why I should let you tag along.’