“That C’tan shard he is fighting needs to die,” Trazyn announced in a low tone, gncing at me. “Finish it off, and I’ll … remove some of the restrictions I’ll pce on my Crypteks while they educate you.”
“Make them teach me how to form necrodermis into more useful forms,” I said without thought. The idea had been with me for a while, and now I had the opportunity. “Phase bdes, Gauss fyers, I want to know how they are made.”
“Orikan will probably leave it dead or at death’s door,” Trazyn said. “Nothing more powerful than what regur Immortals wield.”
“Counteroffer,” I said. “Add my payment for the information on the Silent King onto that. I want anything wielded by Lychguards and under.”
“Anything infantry grade below Lychguards,” Trazyn countered. “Including a single construct of your choice from a list of any Canoptek constructs, or even a Doomsday Ark or a Night Scythe. But only the one. You might not even have to do the work this time, and I will need to confirm everything you’ve said, so do not expect these rewards to be delivered instantly.”
I thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Fair. You’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll finish that C’tan off if Orikan leaves it alive.”
Except, C’tan weren’t supposed to die. That had been bugging me ever since I had managed to blow up the first Deceiver Shard. Its energy was gone, its presence vanished, and I couldn’t feel either anywhere within range of my aura.
So what had happened? I knew there was but a single C’tan in lore that the Necron had managed to truly destroy utterly, so I knew that doing so was technically possible. Still, if it were so easy to destroy a Shard, it would have happened before.
I was confused and a bit worried, so I decided to poke Trazyn about it. Which C’tan was it again that got destroyed … Ah, right. I gnced down at the hordes of Fyed Ones, recalling that bit of lore.
Landu’Gor, the Fyer, the Lidless Eye. The Star God, who cursed the Necron with the Fyer virus with its final breath.
“Don’t you worry, it will go the way of the Lidless Eye if I destroy it?” I asked curiously.
“No,” Trazyn said with a robotic snort of derision. “It is but a Shard. Destroying it will merely reroute the energy, making it up to the primary Shard. It is … inadvisable to do this, since it strengthens a possibly loose C’tan shard, but it has been done before. I have weighed the benefits and the drawbacks; I shall not hand another Star God over to that warmongering lunatic. Mandragora is ascendant in Necron politics; it is where the Shard would end up if imprisoned. Right inside the vault of the Stormlord.”
That was fair enough, and I was right. Star Gods were tougher than to be erased piecemeal like that. It made sense why the Necrons imprisoned them instead, especially if the Aeldari were right about how the whole of reality breaks just a little every time a C’tan dies in truth.
This was quite a conundrum. What could I do? Could I somehow … absorb the energy before it got shafted into the prime Shard? Maybe dump it into a hole deep enough that not even a C’tan could get it back? If I could, maybe I would be able to forever bar a Star God from ever being whole again.
But those were just daydreams for now. C’tan weren’t one of my primary concerns, what with the vast majority of them still imprisoned and thus, super not my problem.
Could I eat it, though? That fucker implied he wanted to eat my soul, and turnabout was fair py. Could I make that work in reverse? Eat pure cosmic energy?
I wasn’t sure. The type of energy inside the C’tan and Orikan felt entirely antithetical to soul energy, so any sort of Psychic absorption, as I could do with the Warp and Daemons, was out. It clearly wasn’t organic energy or vitality either, so my other form of energy absorption should have been worthless as well … although, maybe it would work. I had managed to incorporate necrodermis into my body after all, even if absorbing it like I could organic mass was impossible.
But a C’tan shard was just an energy entity inhabiting a necrodermis shell, as Orikan had said. So it was worth a try. Worst-case scenario … the Deceiver takes over this Avatar and turns into an Eldritch abomination out to destroy all life.
Maybe I shouldn’t have tried that in the end. Start smaller, and with energy that isn’t part of a conscious energy entity.
Orikan was leaking some; he was almost like a leaky bucket. Energy was flowing out of him in waves, and as he was starting to weaken, he also began to take the fight seriously, thankfully long before he was weakened to a point where it would be a fair fight.
I waved Atiesh in front of me, projecting an invisible ‘net’ from it with its minor reality-warping capabilities to catch the cosmic energy once I had it isoted from the background noise. By now, that much came easily. I hadn’t been zy in practicing to hone my aura and my extrasensory perception along with it.
I condensed the energy into a small seed, watching as the invisible energy turned misty gold and then fiery orange, then finally just simply really fucking bright and white when it wouldn’t go any further. Either it was at peak density, or I just wasn’t strong enough to press it further.
I raised a hand and ever so gently tapped the floating ball of energy, no rger than a grain of sand.
Humming under my breath, I studied the strange sensation under my fingertip. It was different from vitality or life force, different from organic mass, even. In both of those I could feel the distinct sensation that I could reel them in and they would be absorbed, as if a lost part of myself would rejoin the greater whole without any fuss.
This was different, distinct and alien. Less compatible, resistant to the point of nearly being incompatible … but my Eldritch Flesh was made to store unlimited amounts of bio-energy. It could fit some of this cosmic stuff too, when needed.
I drew it in, now focusing in full. It was like trying to slurp up tar through a straw. Nearly impossible, but if you were stupid enough to keep at it, you might just manage to do it all the same. I grimaced as it entered my body, not losing any of its viscous feel and impossibly heavy weight. Uncomfortable as hell, and a bit concerning. The energy obeyed me, but just barely, sluggishly and didn’t seem to have any intention of converting into good and proper bio-energy.
Well, that’s a bust. I thought and then shoved the icky ball of goo out of my body with a vaguely uncomfortable look upon my face. Outwardly, all Trazyn saw was a faint mist of light leaving my index finger before vanishing. Waste of my time. Guess I’ll need another idea to deal with them … if the non-intelligent energy stayed coherent and resisted me so much, I don’t want to know how hard it would be to deal with the Deceiver if I literally invited him to co-inhabit my body by absorbing a portion of his energy.
Maybe there was a trick to it, but it was not something I could figure out on the fly, especially with the risk this high.
“Oh, they are finishing up,” I noted, perking up just before the st Deceiver shard crashed into the ground a mere hundred metres ahead of me, cratering the surrounding floor.
“Seems so,” Trazyn said grimly, metallic fingers tightening around his Obliterator staff as he stared up at the descending figure of the ascended Orikan.
“Aaaaaaaaand-” I said, drawing out the words and holding up a finger while grinning. Orikan finally ran out of energy after unching a final beam of cosmic energy at the downed Star God. The light infusing him flickered, then died, and the necrodermis shell of Orikan the Diviner nosedived into the floor just a dozen metres away from the C’tan. “That’s my cue. Be right back.”
Mephet’ran was still in one piece, though barely. He had just enough energy remaining to keep himself together. From somewhere deep within, power kept flowing into him, as if he had an infinite energy generator at the core of his being, but it would take a while for him to recover.
“Hi!” I chirped, hopping down next to him. “And goodbye, asshole!”
His one working eye snapped open and gred at me with endless hatred, but I just spun Atiesh around in my hand, materialised the energy bde at its tip and then smmed it down into his chest.
“You don’t get to have any st words,” I said, grinning as his mouth parted, only for me to send a surge of destructive soul energy right into him. His form exploded, scorching the crater around me and trying to burn my body. It didn’t work, obviously. That had been a much smaller boom than the one caused by the first one I put down.
I turned around, seeing Trazyn standing above the downed form of Orikan, his Empathic Obliterator held in hand. With a single twist of his wrist, and the bde that had wounded a Star God would cut the Astromancer in twain. He hadn’t done anything … yet, but he had that thoughtful air about him and kept his death-mask eerily bnk.
“It would be so easy,” Trazyn finally spoke up when I came to stand a bit away from him. He sounded woeful. I get the feeling that he would have sighed if he still had lungs. “And … very unsporting.”
He pointed at two of his transmogified Lychguards. “You two, get over here and carry Master Orikan. Follow behind me while I re-activate the Eternity Gate. We are leaving.”
“Fine by me,” I said, skipping after him while also snatching up a few mangled Necron remains that y in my path. Free Necrodermis, baby.
Not long after, I was stepping through the Eternity Gate and exiting it in — insert suspenseful drumbeat — another underground Necron complex made of Bckstone. However, this one had light, like proper light made by a star, creeping in from where it came to an abrupt end about fifty metres away from me.
A hop and a skip ter, I was peering down into a yawning canyon so deep and dark I couldn't see its end with just my eyes. I jumped off, catching myself with telekinesis as I spun around to stare upward. The surface was kilometres away, and the cliff face just went on, and yers of dirt and history were one above the other.
However, from about a dozen metres up all the way down to the depths of this canyon, everything was Bckstone. My aura penetrated even deeper, and the pnet had no molten core, but instead an artificial machine of obvious Necron make that generated its electromagnetic field. Fascinating stuff, but I was much happier about the absolute fuckloads of Bckstone.
Now then, how do I transport a moon-sized chunk of Warp-resistant rock over to my current pce? I hummed thoughtfully, recalling a bit of information from one of the codexes … or was it a lorebook? Maybe the Cawl book? Anyway, it mentioned a theory made by Belisarius Cawl. What was it again?
‘Mind-Core Prime: Answer Located’
The existence of the Noctilith — which was the name the Imperium gave to Bckstone — Crowns all but proved that theory. Those nightmarish things were used by the forces of Chaos, and what they did was essentially to empower Chaos psykers and overwhelm other users of the Immaterium’s energies. It could even assault non-psykers with nightmarish visions when they got close enough to it.
Then there were the Bckstone Fortresses, whatever those really were. No, they were not, in fact, wrecking balls. Despite that moron Abaddon having used one of them as just that. You have one of the most powerful Star Forts ever built by a race older than Mankind's recorded history ten-million times over, and what do you do with it?
Chuck it at a pnet because it annoys you. Fucking ten-thousand years old baby behaviour, that’s what that was. Not that I would have expected anything else from Abaddon the Despoiler.
So yeah, swapping the pority was certainly possible, though I wasn’t sure whether I could figure it out in the short term. No choice. Either I get it with this Avatar before Trazyn wants to come stuff it back into a Labyrinth, or I’ll have to haul ass all the way over here with the other one.
My pn was simple: drop this entire pnet into my Realm once it is in its psi-amplification state. That way, I could either keep it there and turn it into the base for my first Daemon World equivalent or pull it back out through my other Avatar wherever I wanted to.
I was reasonably sure I could do it. The pnet was small, no rger than Luna, and I didn’t need the regur crust on the surface. If its amplification helped the process along, I wouldn’t even have to push myself to my limits to accomplish it.
“Alright, Trazyn,” I said, floating back to the Necron Overlord as he was taking an elevator up the cliff face, heading to the surface. “I’m going to be experimenting a bit with this stuff. When do you want to leave?”
“As soon as possible,” he said. “But I understand that you would want to … secure this pnet. I have the Eternity Gate’s signature; you can have it all. Don’t have to be careful about the facility we’ve exited either. You can have a week, and then I need to leave this pce, hopefully to never return.”
“Perfect.” I grinned. “I’ll be around then, see you ter!”
P3t1