“Nice trick," I said conversationally. “Got any more up your sleeve?”

  “What manner of creature are you?” Mephet’ran mused, ignoring my question. “A st desperate weapon made by a spiteful Old One clinging to life? A failed attempt at creating a new Star God? An Avatar of one of those pesky Aeldari Gods? No matter. Your soul will make for a mighty feast. It will nourish me for ages to come. Come, Child, resistance is futile.”

  Why does everyone I meet either want to eat my soul or kill me? I thought dryly, leaning away from another beam of antimatter that came to spear me through. I had considered teleporting, but with each second, space seemed to be growing tighter and tighter. It was as if the mere presence of a Star God was reinforcing its fabric, and for all I could tell, that might have been exactly it. My Blinks worked by using the fuzzy yer between the Immaterium and the Materium, slipping through where space wasn’t so firm.

  Mephet’ran was turning that cloudy yer into a fortress wall. I’d need to rely on speed to dodge.

  The Deceiver gave a zy gesture, swinging his hand horizontally and only because my sense of danger bred a sudden arm did I manage to kick off the ground in time. One moment, there was nothing; then, the next, a yawning tear in space, full of hungry darkness, appeared in the shape of a wide crescent. It was just there. The edge of the crescent caught my foot near the knee, and erased anything from that point down before I could so much as blink. It was gone as quickly as it came, disappearing without leaving any sign of its passage.

  My feet regrew from the abundance of bio-energy I had stored within my body in another millisecond, but I grew more serious still. This was an older version of my Avatar, and it only had a fraction of the bio-energy stores my other, new Avatar had. If I rebuilt it according to my test design, I would only have enough energy left over to remake a limb or two a handful of times. Worse, that attack had just eaten my soulbone bones, and those were even more difficult to remake. I had to repce them with regur Aeldari bone for now.

  And this is just a Lesser Shard of the Deceiver, not even a Transcendent Shard, and infinitely weaker than the original entity. I thought wryly, gaining a newfound respect for the Necrons who had shattered an entire race of Star Gods and then kept using them as batteries. That was a level of badassery and pettiness I found both inspiring and impressive.

  My body moved even while my thoughts were wandering, retaliating instantly against the C’tan with a dozen curving beams of condensed Soul energy. The Deceiver moved, moving through the air with an elegance that seemed eerie as it dodged the energy beams, weaving between them until the opportunity presented itself to swing its arm horizontally. At the end of the gesture, fmes bck as the abyss bloomed across its cwed fingers.

  At that exact moment, a pilr of pitch-bck fmes as thick as a battle tank descended from the sky. I made use of my nifty new trick, sheathing myself within a bubble of warped time and leapt to the side. My fragile ankle joints shattered from the force, making me swiftly remake them from a tougher Tyranid-sourced bone-like material instead.

  Our high-stakes back and forth continued for a minute, feeling like an hour as I had to evade antimatter beams and crescents of unreality that would have erased my Avatar both in a blink, if they hit. In return, I had the Star God flitting about like a butterfly on a sugar high, and it was driving it all sorts of mad.

  It was vibrating in pce by the end, its amber eyes glowing bright and bleeding energy into the surroundings, corrupting more and more Necron warriors’ neural cortexes. Despite my earlier destruction of all Fyers, there were more than a hundred of them tearing into the loyal Necron again, and the infection was spreading further, seeping into more and more of the ancient machine warriors.

  Trazyn and his friend were both shaking off some sort of mental attack equivalent, and I had to suppress the momentary urge to smack the kleptomaniac upside the head. He had a Tesseract Labyrinth grasped in his hand, but he hadn't actually gotten to the part where he let out whatever it held.

  I never turned my gaze away from my primary foe, whose form now seemed to turn blurry as it unduted, and faint outlines of two replicas fizzled into being. A moment ter, they looked as real as the primary creature, and then they were. My eyes narrowed, the energy signature of the primary Shard was down to half its power, and the other two shared the half that the original had lost.

  “It’s fracturing itself,” said Trazyn’s friend, who I assumed would have to be the legendary astromancer: Orikan the Diviner. “It wants to divide our fire, make it easier to spread its system corruption.”

  “It can do that?” Trazyn asked, sounding a bit dazed.

  “Theoretically,” Orikan responded. “It is unbound, an energy being barely contained within the necrodermis shell. It’s split into three shards, and it can be split into as many more shards as it’s made up of. The original shard likely had five or six, by power readouts. Cryptek containment procedures dictate that no more than two shards be kept together. We are in uncharted catacombs here.”

  Six lesser shards, that made this a Greater Shard — before it’d fractured itself, that is — I think. Transcendent Shards ranged in being made up of a dozen to upwards of a hundred lesser Shards. How many did the original Deceiver have? A few hundred? A thousand? I had the feeling it wouldn’t have been a linear increase in power up to that point either, just the mere fact that it was whole would have made a qualitative difference to its might … and Mephter’ran had been known as the weakest of the C’tan.

  One of the three Deceivers split off and flew towards what had to be Doomsday Arks, which were massive Necron mobile weapons ptforms. Essentially, they were the equivalents of Imperial Ordinatus Engines, the things that were lovingly referred to as Titan Killers. The thought of getting hit by that did not fill me with much joy, so I shed out with a massive bst of telekinetic force at the fleeing Deceiver. The other two retaliated as one, unleashing twin pairs of jagged bck lightning that screamed across the fabric of space with the same sense of unreality that the foot-eating abyssal crescent had.

  My off-hand spat out two balls of Eldritch flesh that morphed mid-air into a pair of Tyranid Carnifexes. Both only lived for a brief instant before they were devoured by the jagged bck lightning, but they stopped the attacks before they could reach me well enough. The third Deceiver Shard failed to dodge, and watching it get bsted across the room and into a wall with thunderous force was rather satisfying after failing to hit the bastard even once up until then.

  While I was doing that, Trazyn finally got his metallic head out of his ass and started working on something. Hopefully, that something included finally getting me some help because if those three Shards started going wild, I doubted I’d be able to keep my favourite kleptomaniac in one piece.

  “That creature you have unleashed seems potent enough,” Orikan said, and I felt his single ocur sensor peer at me from a distance. “But I hope you have more tricks up your sleeve. No single creature will be able to contest three Shards, much less six. We need an army, please tell me you’ve brought an army, Trazyn.”

  “You underestimate me, dear colleague," Trazyn said in that smug voice of his, even shifting his death mask into a smirk. He gestured at the air before him like a conductor standing before the orchestra, and space parted for him with a hiss, revealing an entire dimensional-cabinet-thingy filled with rows upon rows of Tesseract Labyrinths filling the shelves. “I’ve brought five.”

  So nice of him to pre-package me a nice quick pick-me-up meal. Just what I needed. Instead of stepping into the dimensional rift that housed his cupboard, Trazyn stepped out of it, then another followed that one and then more Overlords came one after the other, all wielding curved bdes glowing with green edges. They lined up around the original in two lines.

  “I certainly had this nightmare before,” Orikan noted. “Numerous times, in fact.”

  “I thought I might need a surrogate for this,” Trazyn replied idly. “Brought ten instead, formed from Lychguard, so there is no time lost from structural reconfiguration. Better be over-prepared, eh?”

  Right, Trazyn really embodied the Lich trope more than any other Necron. The fucker could jump into new bodies once killed; he had as many lives to expend as there were Necron bodies around to be turned into surrogates for him. Even if all those fell, he would merely be reconstituted back on his Tomb World of Solemnace.

  Well, usually he would be. Not from here. Even I could sense the insution around this cavern that barred the transmission of all kinds of data, and I recalled the same being mentioned in the book too. If he was killed here, it would be the end for him.

  “Three of you, defend Master Orikan,” Trazyn ordered his reconfigured Lychguard. “The rest of you, disperse across the battlefield. I want to be able to jump wherever I’m needed.”

  “Are you going in?” Orikan asked.

  “I might as well, while you keep your hands busy pying Nemesor back here,” Trazyn said. “I’ll keep a sliver of myself here to deploy the Labyrinths as needed to plug in gaps or to counterattack. If released at the wrong time, the Deceiver would just corrupt them too.”

  Trazyn tapped his fancy weapon, the Empathetic Obliterator, on the ground. “Besides, the usual weaponry is not working. Perhaps an unusual one might.”

  “Trazyn,” Orikan said, visibly hesitating, which was quite a thing to see on his metallic chassis. “Fair winds.”

  I guess I know why some people call the Infinite and the Divine a homoerotic romantic comedy featuring space skeletons. I mused, watching with a flicker of my attention as Trazyn gave a nod and then departed his primary body.

  I wasn’t idle, and to be fair to the two Necrons, they hadn’t either. They were extremely advanced artificial intelligences, even if somewhat constrained by the fact that their minds were still constrained by the structure they’d held when alive before Biotransference. All that is to say, they could multitask on a level beyond anyone I’d met so far. Not me, but I was cheating with a massive horde of neural processors holding mind-cores just sitting in my Realm. I had the equivalent of an organic supercomputer in my skull, and then I was further connected to a massive server farm, allowing me to outsource processing power. Shameless cheating, the best kind.

  I couldn’t see why the Deceiver had split itself. Sure, having three of them around was annoying, but each was noticeably weaker, too. In turn, I was only getting faster as I worked out the kinks in my Warp Speed and got used to using it in tandem with my regur suite of bio-energy and soul energy enhancements.

  I was keeping the bio-energy enhancements to a minimum for now so as not exhaust my stores, but I had enough for one trick.

  Jagged bck lightning curled through the air towards me, and Atiesh came about to smack it in the side like a club, the energy empowering it, making sure it achieved the effect too. The antimatter Smite-thing arced away from me, and I surged forward, suppressing my emotions while watching as the Deceiver shard I was rushing sent me a dismissive sneer. It was moving already, shifting to evade my strike before I even made it.

  I suppose my body nguage and combat style were easy to read for a being as old as him. It seemed like it would just barely be out of my humming energy bde’s tip when I had my remaining bio-energy surge through my body. My speed doubled, then tripled, and the energy bde tore through one leg at the thigh and the other at the knee as the Deceiver lunged away from me, its face shifting into a rictus of rage.

  “Trazyn, stop holding out on me,” I said, now in a fighting retreat as all three Shards focused their combined rage on me. The one I’d struck took only moments to reattach its cut-off legs, but the energy coursing through it felt distinctly more brittle for it. My attack hadn’t been without effect, even if the Shard made every effort to project an image to the contrary. “Do you have tyranids? I could use some snacks right about now. You left me all high and dry after our st excursion.”

  “I might have something,” the Trazyn next to the dimensional cupboard said after a moment, reaching into the tear in space to pull out a Tesseract Labyrinth. “Are Genestealers or perhaps Hive Fleet Behemoth more to your taste?”

  “Proper tyranids, not the knockoffs!” I shouted, a bit harried as even some of the subverted Necron Immortals started sending crackling green beams at me, seeking to unmake me on the molecur level, yer by yer. “Quickly.”

  I had a stash of Eldritch flesh balls filled to the brim with bio-energy in my Realm for exactly situations like this, but there were a few problems with that. For one, I couldn’t just open a portal to my Realm all willy-nilly; I needed to set up a whole choir and sing that stupid Crotalid song in perfect sync. Which would prove rather challenging with three C’tan shards trying to murder the shit out of me.

  For two, I was not about to expend my emergency reserves on a mission for Trazyn. Not if there were other alternatives, like making him expend some of his emergency Pokémon to achieve the same effect.

  He grabbed one of the Tesseracts off the top shelf, and it started to glow in that eerie, unliving green light all Necron technology had. One Shard’s head snapped onto Trazyn, but I took that microscopic distraction to bst him with a concentrated telekinetic blow right in the jaw.

  Meanwhile, the Tesseract Labyrinth finished releasing a good-sized Tyranid swarm. It even had a pair of Carnifexes and a Hive Tyrant, along with three Neurotyrants.

  Alright, dinner time. Come to mommy, you nasty bug freaks.

  P3t1