“You have proof of this?” Inquisitor Hrom pressed.
“You must be out of contact with high command. They received copies of the Mechanist report an hour or three ago. Someone pulled it out of the Mechanists’ Magenta-secure archives and plopped it into their briefings.”
The note in her voice held the suggestion that she knew exactly who had done so. Techmeister Vahix, running only on a backup emergency power cell, couldn’t even berate her for daring to violate the sacred data of the Guild.
“I also have personal scans of eight different factories, analytics of the transportation networks I have used, and records of external changes to every hab, blok, and spire I’ve trundled past, which emphatically back their assessments. I believe the Mekkers were unimpeachably thorough and correct in their judgement.”
The sneer in her voice was impossible to conceal. The Inquiry team all looked at the Techmeister, who undoubtedly had known about this.
Inquisitor Hrom pulled out his plasma pistol, and without blinking shot the Techmeister right in his cerebral cortex. The sun-hot blast blew right through his partially-replaced brain matter and out the back of his warframe. The need for his backup power cell went away.
“Can we get out of here?” the Inquisitor asked, lifting the weapon, which was suitable for purging a demon at close enough range, up to cool.
“They’re going to blast open the east stairway in five seconds.” Heads snapped around at the flicker of a pointing Tail, where a grey and rust-colored light had lit up at nine o’clock from them. “That’s your exit point. Got a Dead Magic round, sniper? Chamber it.”
Bremin barely blinked as he pulled out a glittery black cartridge, and inserted it into the base of his gun. “I’ll fix his position for you, he’ll be using displacement.” Her inhuman, psi-molded arms lifted, pointing two lasers with odd, crossbow-like attachments in that direction with a gunshooter’s poise... all the while her real arms still hadn’t stopped moving, and those burning blades of multi-flaming light were still plunging down into howling black and white energy vortex down below.
There was a soundless roar as a pulse of something violently unclean blew through the rubble blocking the stairs, and simply smeared them out of existence against the wall of reality. None of the dust even survived to hit the ground. It even turned a big chunk of the droning Swarm that had not given up probing them into drops of goo that spattered and cracked down upon the mounds of corpses.
A grossly fat man holding a staff made of flowing, melded bones and skulls levitated into view, fixing them with a baleful glare. His half-revealed body was covered in oozing sores, which at this moment all seemed to be glowing eyes dripping putrescent tears as they stared at everyone.
“Warp Sorcerer,” she said conversationally, still not looking over as her guns opened up. Pulses of spiral-bound violet lasers swirled around the man, sweeping right through his image... and were warded away from an area five feet to his left and higher, promptly painted from all directions by swathes of harmless laser fire.
The punt of Bemrin’s rifle was completely unnatural, and for a second all the psionic energy around them was gone, repelled by the utter nihility that shot out of his rifle’s barrel.
The beam of darkness punched through something invisible, something physical, and out the far side, driving into the wall beyond and instantly soaking the entire glyph-scrawled mess in something black. The Warp energy surging through those sigils blew away from the beam like it was a rock striking water, shattering the conduits for a hundred feet around the impact point as it did so.
The image of the Warp Sorcerer had a new black hole where the rotting remnants of his nose had been. He staggered, his eyes turning down to look at the hole in his face, and then something black boiled up out it, covering his eyes almost instantly, and the hole began to grow as his head began to slough away into black slime.
They watched him fall, the invisible field that had been protected him fading as the corpulent body plopped heavily to the ground.
Violet lasers caressed him, and the corpse virtually exploded into unwhite fire, as did the black spot on the wall.
“There’s your way out. You’d better get started.” She tossed the fusion core, which was now pulsing with a very cold unwhite light, into the air between two of her Tails. “I’ll give you to a sixty count. Go.”
Everybody except Assassin Klisto promptly started running for the entryway a hundred yards away around the concourse, using rockets, grav-boosts, psionic dimension-shifting, and shadow-walking to accelerate their speed to something considerably faster than mere human. If the Swarm wanted to follow them, it was still reeling from the corruptive Warp Sorcery that had assailed it, and didn’t respond in time as the Inquiry Team ran for it. They were more than happy to shoot the Warped cautiously poking their heads up and gaping at the blazing vivic bonfire that was all that remained of their mighty Warp Sorcerer boss.
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Some terrific violence erupted there, cemented by a powerful discharge of psionic lightning from Mentat Kiprugh that tore through the packed Warped and opened a merciless path for them to get out of there.
---
“You don’t seem surprised that I have stayed behind,” Assassin Klistos observed.
“You probably think your time is almost up, and this is as good a way to die as anything, no?”
He studied her with unblinking eyes, and heard a tinking sound echoing up from down below.
Suddenly that Mindsword was between him and her, and his eyes widened as it cleanly severed the swirl of his Helices... and wasn’t ripped apart in passing.
“You are not a threat to me, Brother Firesword,” she stated, turning her head to look at him with possibly the most intimidating set of blue eyes he had ever seen suddenly shining through her Mask... and he’d looked into the eyes of demons.
Her Tail reached out, grabbed the unmoving carcass of the dead Techmeister, and tossed his warframe down the hole she’d bored. Several seconds later, a crushing crash echoed back up.
“Brother Firesword...” he repeated hollowly, looking at the smoke and fire of his Helices, which were trying to touch her and her Sword... and utterly failing.
He couldn’t even affect the blatantly psionic arms and burning wings towering above them!
“You’ve probably been told to kill me, and that’s cool. Your bosses are total power-hungry reactionary idiots, so of course they’d spend you to take me out. But there’s something that’s going to happen here they won’t like at all.”
“And what might that be?” Klistos asked, keeping his hands lowered. Those two arms and three Tails were all pointing at him, and the lasers, at the very least, weren’t psionic at all. They would punch a whole lot of holes in him... and that Sword, that Sword was humming softly in a counter-tune to the droning above that was completely overwhelming it, despite being fifty decibels quieter.
“You are going to live a very long time.”
He blinked, and looked down at the Sword now embedded in his chest. “Good night, Brother Firesword,” she said calmly, as the shock of kinetic energy stilled his heart and slammed through his system faster than his Helices could take it apart.
---
One Tail caught him, the second TK’d his Psychic Knife and sidearm back to their holsters, and Chalice withdrew herself from his chest.
He’d recover quickly, Brothers always did, but there was going to be a difference this time.
Chalice flickered over and around him with two free Tails, cutting and slicing, and the psi-active bodyglove he was wearing was sliced off him precisely and completely.
Fifty-five... I tossed the fusion core into the air behind me, and booked for it, the Phoenix Cloak behind me turning into jet propulsion as I slid over the ground. I was down the stairs at the far end and over the heads of the scattered Warped there with two seconds to go, and putting a whole lot of plascrete between me and the blast of what was to come.
It went off, and the first thing that I felt was a terrible and abrupt silence in the mindscape. An eye-blink later, reality shuddered as something slid sideways, and the Warped all reeled like drunkards.
The shockwave was less than a second after that. A couple kilotons of improvised fusion boom heavily laden with vivic energies went off, and while it couldn’t affect the menhirs, it tore the shit out of the plascrete and durasteel they were resting on. Happily, there was a whole lot of plascrete between us and them, and the easiest way to expand was actually skywards... plus there were hundreds of thousands of necroically-empowered corpses sitting on top of the explosion.
Completely on its own, the chosen menhir slowly and grandly began to fall over, which kind of broke an important circuit.
The airblast of the eruption was still coming up behind me and scooping up everything when all those channeling conduits of corrupt Sigils, Glyphs, Runes, and just plain freaky drawings ignited with unwhite fire, zipping right past me at the speed of detcord going off.
Detcord, because they were definitely on their way to other locations.
Then the menhir room really exploded as the Ritual was completely disrupted, and the vivic fire roared out serenely to Feed the Land.
---
The Warped had been pouring immense amounts of ritual Warp Sorcery into this Ritual, building up the level of power necessary to send an entire planet into the Warp. Now the Ritual had been disrupted, and all that power was let loose.
Normally that would simply have resulted in horrific explosions, lots of property damage, and the brains of the Warped blowing out from immense feedback. But that wasn’t going to happen this time, because the vivus was there to eat all this pure, unadulterated Warp energy and feed it to the Land.
Through underground conduits that linked all the vastly separated cities, the vivic fire spread at hundreds of miles per second, driven by the immense power being released by the fallen menhir rings. There was no way to stop it as it smashed into the two cities it was connected to, lit them up, and ignited their menhir rings as they faltered and began to fall themselves.
A wall of vivic fire a kilometer high blew up around those connecting paths as cities went up in vivic fire. The reeling Warped could only scream as the unwhite fires swept past, and they blew into white dust. Tainted cities corroded, shattered as unclean Symbols burned away, and took their foundation with them.
Each city that ignited only made the cumulative effect even greater, driving the explosions out further and further. Miles, tens of miles, hundreds of miles... thousands of miles, a wall of unwhite merging together and washing across the entire world, feasting on every scrap of released energy and the conduits to the Warp they’d been opening, and which had now been thrown into total disarray.
Don’t just take away their toys. Take their money, hammer their fingers, and mock them as you do it, too!
I laughed and laughed and laughed...