A month after my fateful meeting with Inquisitor Abraxas and Watch-Commander Mordigael, I was finally reasonably happy with how the Iron Colr’s defences were turning out. I had also finally come to a decision on what to do about that whole thing with Revetion’s letter: nothing; I was going to ignore it.

  That whole letter was a bit of a nothing burger, really. I was already going to do what he asked me to, that is, to shy away from Divinity and worship, and also from resurrecting him when he was actively resisting it. The only useful thing I gained from that letter was a big fancy stick to bonk Custodes and the Lion with if they wanted to get me to go ahead with the resurrection, anyway.

  Aside from that, it also made me realise that while I was highly resistant to having my Fate Divined, I wasn’t immune. Some testing revealed that Valenith’s divination spells could lock onto me when I was connected to the Warp at rge, and that he could also scry actions I’d taken while in that state. Great. I put weaving anti-divination Wards into my new Storm Amulet on my to-do list.

  That round of tests also revealed that my initial worry might have been somewhat overblown. Sure, the Emperor must have foreseen some slivers of the events that brought me into existence, but I doubted that everything had gone perfectly to pn. For one, the Great Rift fucked over divination rather thoroughly, so I doubted even Tzeentch could have perfectly foreseen what would happen during it.

  So his contingencies were likely more akin to throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks than to a millennia-spanning, perfect scheme coming to fruition.

  He probably didn’t foresee me having this body either. He didn’t mention it, only talking about a ‘suitable vessel’. My current body is probably a result of Tzeentch doing a funny.

  Why did that thought fill me with an odd sense of relief? Most people would have likely been incensed at the thought of their existence being the result of some eldritch fucker pulling a prank on the entire gaxy. Then again, I was hardly most people, and the thought of being a puppet dancing on the strings of Fate, fulfilling some destiny pnned out by a puppeteer millennia ago … it infuriated me like nothing else.

  I might have done something, erm, pretty stupid just to spite him, but thankfully I managed to rein in my anger before it could spiral out of control. Thankfully, I had ways to relieve stress, more than one in fact. My spars with Doombreed for one and my rexing evenings with Selene for another.

  But to get back to my previous line of thought, and onto a much nicer development! Back on Solemnace, Trazyn’s two Crypteks finally reached a stage in their awakening process where they were lucid enough to educate me. They started doing that a week ago, and to a clone each, while my Avatar continued the tour of the Infinite Galleries with Trazyn.

  All that meant I’d done the first round of upgrades on my Bckstone Pylon network, marginally improving their potency by adding in the most basic form of resonant fractal arrays I’d been taught.

  The Iron Colr already managed to fend off probing attacks by smaller Chaos raiding fleets on its own. Nothing big, just a handful of shoddy pirate vessels that thought that the ‘abandoned’ Imperial worlds and their poputions would be easy pickings. Even the single, more substantial Chaos war-band that tried their luck got rebuffed without my personal intervention when Jeff went over to chomp down on them.

  It wasn’t perfect, but I was left reasonably sure the Iron Colr wouldn’t colpse at the first serious attack. It just had to hold out long enough for me to get back, which it would do. Especially with the Tau forces now patrolling around to shore up the defences where my autonomous system defence fleets fell short.

  The blueys were stretched thin now that the stretch of space they held dominion over — in theory — expanded more than a hundredfold. Thankfully, my own swiftly erected defences took most of the weight off their shoulders, but they were still spread thin, and a rge, concerted attack at their Sept worlds could turn out badly, to say the least.

  I decided not to do anything about it, not that the Tau would have even wanted me to. My retionship with them has gotten … strange. We were still allies, and Aun’saal was still sticking around as a representative, but I could tell their higher-ups were a bit stumped on how to act around me, or what to do now that they were nominally in control of the Jericho Reach’s more civilised sections.

  They had thought me a tool once, a puppet they could string along and control as they wished until my use ran out and they inevitably had to dispose of me. After one too many shows of power that rocked their worldviews, even the most stubborn, bullheaded, and deluded Ethereals were understandably wary of me, and were in the process of reevaluating their heavy-handed approaches to our ‘alliance’.

  So yeah. From a purely practical standpoint, it wouldn’t have been entirely unwelcome for me if they were knocked down a peg by a third party. Hell, if they had to beg me for help, beg me to save them … Well, that could be the beginning of a change in our alliance. Power shifting over from their side to mine.

  I could have been more proactive about that, but I had better things to worry about. Like reviewing the sensor data from the test returnees in my fleet of stealth ships. I’d sent out thousands of them to explore the Orpheus Salient and bring back actionable intel on the advance of Hive Fleet Dagon.

  The ships were small, outfitted with reasonably good cloaking features and the best sensor suite I could make, along with the test prototype of my attempts to make a miniaturised Gravity Engine. They weren’t as fast as my improved Narwhals, but they got the work done. More importantly, there was not a lick of Eldritch Flesh in them, or anything else I really didn’t want the Tyranids to eat.

  Don’t get me wrong, I put in extensive self-destruct countermeasures, including a small packet of the life-eater virus stored inside every ship, but you never knew. Better safe than sorry. I’d long decided to never let even a single molecule of Eldritch Flesh out of my sight.

  But back to the topic at hand. By my calcutions, it’d still be at least another two weeks until the first of my survey ships would reach the Slinnar Drift and begin scanning every star they came across. It’d then be at least another month until they arrived back at Karck, if all went well.

  The test stealth ship to return came back after reaching only halfway into the Orpheus Salient, and unlike the previous ones, this one brought with it some actual useful info. Namely, the fact that there was a Hive World currently under joint siege by the Tyranids and a Chaos Warband led by a band of Night Lord traitor Astartes of all things. Although, it was less a joint siege and more like the Tyranids doing all the sieging and the Night Lords doing their very best to make it worse without becoming bug food in the process.

  Castobel was the name of the world, the most populous pnet in the entirety of the Jericho Reach. It was an economic powerhouse of a world that also once supplied the Achilus Crusade with generation after generation of loyal Imperial Guards Regiments.

  They’d been promised a relief fleet from the Iron Colr months ago by the dearly departed Lord Militant. You know what? I’m going.

  It wasn’t an especially hard decision to make. That world held billions of innocents, and even if they were Imperial loyalists, they hardly deserved to be bug food, or whatever even worse fate the Night Lords pnned for them. I had the power and time to save them, and so I would. It wouldn’t cost me practically anything.

  On a more practical front, clearing the way for the inevitable assault on the Slinnar Drift, sitting beyond the Orpheus Salient, would be made easier if I had a stretch of fortified, secured worlds on the way there. Supply lines were important, even if their loss wouldn’t be as crippling for me as it would be for any other military commander. So yeah, I couldn’t see any reason not to relieve them and, more or less gently, incorporate Castobel into my ever-growing domain.

  The only downside of all this was that it would push my eventual return to Vallia even further back. I’d popped by for a few days not long ago, expending an unnecessary amount of soul energy to facilitate the teleport, but I was starting to feel really guilty about leaving my daughters behind without visiting. I spent only an hour or so with each, my mind still unable to handle being split too many ways, and the crestfallen looks most of them wore as we said goodbye left my heart in tatters.

  It made me resolve to make this upcoming war — I suppose it could be called a war, though maybe it was a stretch? — go as smoothly and swiftly as possible. I wouldn’t be hasty, but I wouldn’t waste time either. The first step for that was Castobel.

  Beyond that, it wouldn’t hurt to replenish my much diminished bio-energy reserves — the defensive structures across the Iron Colr’s worlds certainly didn’t grow on trees. Those things damned near bankrupted me by the time I reached a level where I was satisfied with them. So yeah, having a Tyranid Hive Fleet between me and my real target was less an annoying obstacle and more like a very welcome springboard to unch my eventual offensive off of.

  So I arrived in the Castobel system in a reasonably good mood aboard the Sovereign, slowing our approach back into subluminal speeds as we entered the asteroid cloud surrounding it. Octavian had stayed back on Karck, opting to assist in ironing out the defences of the Iron Colr as best as he could.

  That still left me with a handful of hangers-on, namely Aun’saal, Amberley, Cain — and his stinky shadow — and of course Selene.

  I let my aura surge, flowing out of me and washing over the entire system before curling tightly around the third pnet from the local sun.

  “It seems like we’ve arrived just in time,” I said after a moment, my focus snapping back into my body. “Castobel will fall in a week without intervention.”

  “What makes you say that?” Amberley asked curiously.

  “They have almost twenty Night Lords terrorising each of the three rgest Hive Cities on the pnet,” I said. “And each of them also has to deal with the steadily rising Genestealer presence in the Underhives, all the while the Chaos war-band and the Tyranid hordes assault them from the outside, and from above, of course. The only thing keeping them in the game is their rge number of well-supplied orbital cannons and a very zealous purging of anyone acting funny.”

  Really, the only reason they were still holding was that the Night Lords were soft-balling and trying to cripple the Genestealer cults. They knew the Tyranids were their real enemies if they wanted to hold the pnet long-term.

  That level of forethought was not something I would have expected of the baby-fyer Legion, but there were always exceptions even in the most messed-up of pces, I supposed.

  The man in question was easy to find, a Night Lord warlord apparently called Veimar the Soul Fyer. Why was he so easy to find — besides the fact that he was lounging on the command deck of the rgest ship in the System — well, you see, he was the only Astartes in the system who wasn’t projecting his every thought and emotion into the ether like an idiot?

  That also answers how I got all my information, too, by the way. The mental defences of the run-of-the-mill Night Lord were apparently lousy as hell. Good for me.

  “May I ask about the numbers our enemies have arrayed against us?” Cain asked warily, like he didn’t even want to know but felt like he had to ask all the same. For propriety’s sake, or something along those lines. Maybe it was an ingrained instinct by now, even though he knew everyone here saw through his humble heroic reputation.

  “The Chaos war-band has ten ships, two Grand Cruisers, five corvettes, two frigates and a destroyer,” I said. “The Tyranids have eight Bioships, two of which are capital ships with a Norn Queen onboard, the rest are smaller escorts roughly the size of Cruisers.”

  Cain paled, and even Aun’saal’s expression went a little stiff. An Imperial naval officer would have called the forces we had to contest an armada, or a proper fleet perhaps, but to me it all seemed … cking. The Tyranids I ignored; they were just free food that might resist a bit before getting eaten. The Chaos twats? They had protections on their ships, powerful sorcerous protections that might have made teleporting onboard tougher than a regur Void Shield would have by itself, but it wouldn’t stop me. My silver fmes loved eating through Warp Sorcery; those protections would fall apart in seconds if I devoted myself to the task.

  So, goals? What was my win condition here? Hmmmm. Probably defeating my enemies with the most humans surviving the battle, and with them suitably impressed with and terrified of my capabilities by the time I'm done.

  If I had any doubt about tracking down all the sneaky Genestealer cults embedded into the shadowy Under-hives or the slippery Night Lords skulking about in the darkness of the Hive Cities, I’d have gone with a stealth approach. Then I’d have methodically uprooted those deeply embedded infiltrators before turning my wrath onto outside threats.

  Unfortunately for them, I wasn’t so limited. My aura was more than detailed enough to detect the gene-strains identifying a human infected with the Genestealer virus. And with it covering the entire pnet, the more obvious Purestrain Genestealers and even more obvious Astartes had nowhere to hide.

  “Who wants to get in on the action?” I asked, gncing back at my … retinue? Were they my retinue? I guess they were.

  Selene grinned, looking eager as ever, and with a mental flex of her will, she donned her battle-gear, the white eldritch flesh flowing over her body to form her armour.

  Cain and Amberley shared a look, then also gave me a nod, and Cain’s stinky shadow was- where did he find that Melta?

  “I’ll have to regretfully decline,” Aun’saal said. “I’m not much of a fighter.”

  Well, compared to us, maybe, but he was still an Ethereal. From what I knew of them in lore, they could be tricky bastards to fight. Their brains and nervous systems were wired differently, making them essentially the mini Astartes equivalent of their own species. But I wouldn’t force him.

  I cpped my hands together with a grin. “Alright! Whoever gets the next most kills after me gets to make a Wish that I’ll fulfil!”

  P3t1