Aaaaaand that brings back to having to deal with the Sisters again. Great. No more distractions. I sighed. The few remaining locations across the planet with still conscious people shone like stars in my mind. I could … use them for practice. Considering the Sanctic Psyker Discipline apparently works almost just as it was described in the Codex, could I copy the abilities of other Disciplines?
There were the Core 5 Disciplines: Biomancy, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Divination and Pyromancy. Aside from those, there were also the secondary disciplines of Technomancy, Fulmination, Geokinesis and Sanctic Daemonology that I was interested in.
If you squinted really hard, my poking machine spirits to shut down equipnt could be counted as the Technomancy ability: Conjuration chanicum. So that was one ability I could tick off.
There were so things I knew I wouldn’t be able to replicate, bound as I was by the nature of my specific brand of Psyker powers. Or rather, their source. I drew power not from the Warp, but from my own little Sea of Souls, which lacked the inherent destructive, chaotic nature of the Warp that so abilities made use of.
It also made almost entirely unable to use the Discipline of Divination, which also went for everyone who used my Realm as a source for their powers. Valenith had been quite miffed about that, up until we confird that it also ant that we were nearly impossible to divine as a result, and likely just mildly affected by that pesky thing called Fate.
That would change as my Realm grew in power and influence in the Empyrean, but it would be a while until it could ever compare to the infinite mass and depths of the Warp.
The other Disciplines were fair play, though, even if I would avoid attempting any that involved ripping a hole into the fabric and letting the Warp through, for obvious reasons. Those kinds of things might work for Psykers who didn’t have a near-permanent Daemon entourage salivating at the re thought of getting a nibble of their soul.
I also grabbed the Psilencer and the Justicar’s Nesis Force Glaive. Both were attuned to him, but I was sure I could solve that little issue with so effort and a good spanking to the spunky machine spirits dwelling within the two weapons. If I could learn how to better manifest my psychic might in its rawest form from them, it would have made this entire Crusade-thingy worth it all by itself. The Psilencer could teach how to condense and focus my Eldritch Blasts better, and the Force Glaive how to manifest my psychic power in the form of a blade that struck with all the power of my psychic might.
Then I Blinked over to the closest congregation of Sisters of Battle, standing just outside the heavily fortified Gothic church they had decided to take shelter in. There were a good 100 Sisters in there, 86 of whom managed to put on their air-sealed power armour before the spore-cloud got to them. The crazy bitches gave ‘the Emperor’s rcy’ to the 14 who fell asleep.
I decided then and there that I would be starting out with Biomancy as my choice for the first discipline to test. I’d been using so aspects of it naturally, by instinct, whenever I enhanced my body through the use of soul energy. What I usually used was a streamlined mix of The Quickening, Endurance and Iron Arm, all made to work optimally for my Avatar. It was subconscious, natural, and it made it imdiately apparent that the abilities and disciplines were re guidelines ant for lesser psykers than I. They would work wonderfully as inspiration, however.
A massive reinforced gate stood in my way, which sadly had go back on my earlier decision to limit myself to Biomancy for this. There was an ability in the Technomancy discipline called Sunder, which would apparently shear apart tal and machinery along the weakest fault lines. I’ve never felt its use with my aura, so I couldn’t replicate it by feel. I knew only the result I wanted, and that it was possible, along with the absolute certainty that I had both the power and ability to do it.
I focused on it, on the idea of the ability, as I gathered the writhing soul energy within the palm of my hand. I wanted a focused electromagnetic surge to strike the gate, seek out the fault lines and then sunder this pesky obstruction standing in my way.
The silvery energy in my grasp shuddered, twisting and warping as I infused it with purpose. In monts, what I held went from an undulating silvery sphere of raw energy to a mass of crackling electricity that struggled against its leash, eager to accomplish its purpose. I let it go, watching eagerly as it leapt out of my hand and crashed into the gate, sending a swarm of questing arcs of electricity spreading over its surface. A web of lines started lighting up along its surface a mont later, turning white hot as the faux-electricity burrowed into it.
Then the surface layer gave a tortured creak and scrunched, fractured and then peeled away like a layer of dead skin to reveal the one beneath it, shattering into a dozen fragnts as it struck the ground. But Sunder still had power, so it continued, leaping over to the next lay and then the one after that, running out of juice only when it reduced the ter's thick reinforced gate to a tal barely thicker than my calves.
I gathered a condensed sphere of pressurised telekinetic power in my hand, grinning as that one aweso trailer from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic played out before my mind’s eye. I released it, and the telekinetic sphere blasted forth as if spat out by a Graviton Blast Cannon. It struck what remained of the gate like the Fist of God, sending chunks of it exploding inward as shrapnel and striking whoever was stupid enough to linger close by on the other side.
I strode through the wreckage, a simple telekinetic barrier stopping the hail of bolter fire instantly screaming towards . Their explosions rumbled through the air one after the other, deafening to a normal human, but I heard the frantic cries for reinforcents and the defiant war cries coming from the Sisters all the sa.
“The gate is breached!”
“Kill the witch!”
“We need heavier ordinance, bolters have no effect!”
“Slay the heretic!”
“Get a damned lta!”
“FOR THE EMPEROR!”
I decided to be diplomatic, just a bit. I knew they would rather spit in my face than back down. The only use of wasting my breath on them was so I could say I had tried diplomacy once this was all over and done with. It might win so brownie points with the few Imperials whose opinions I sowhat cared about.
My voice was low, bland and should have gotten lost in the chaotic din of the battle. It didn’t; it rang in the ears of every last Sister within the building with absolute clarity. “You are disobeying direct orders from Octavian Gaius of the Adeptus Custodes. Cease this idiocy and lay down your arms. This is your last opportunity to back down; there will not be another.”
“You defile the image of the Emperor’s Custodes with your vile tricks, abhorrent witch!” One of them screeched. “We will not fall for your lies! Die, heretic!”
“Well, I tried,” I mused as my lips pulled down into a disgusted grimace. I could taste their stupid, moronic zealousness. There was not a single original thought in the entire damned room. They were the reason the Imperium was so fucked up, they and other zealous lunatics like them. Everything wrong with the Imperium started with Erebus, Lorgar and Kor Phaeron, another batch of fanatical zealots who couldn’t live without ‘Gods’ telling them what to do. My hand snapped up, electricity already crackling between my spread fingers. A simple Biomantic Smite snapped forth, striking the first Sister and causing her equipnt to hitch as it raced through it and into her body. “Not quite unlimited power, but it’s still cool, I guess.”
Bio-electricity. Not the most potent power, but it was fun, even though it had nothing on the Warp lightning Valenith liked to make use of. It wasn’t even enough to kill the Sister, just temporarily paralyse her with the tiny sliver of soul energy I gave it as fuel.
A substantial fraction of Biomancy made use of sothing called ‘vital spark’ or ‘life-force’, if I recall correctly. It was vitality, in so taphysical energy form. My standing hypothesis was that it was, in essence, an aspect of what I called bio-energy. Or it was bio-energy itself, I wasn’t sure yet, but supposedly Biomancy should be able to drain it out of people at range with an ability called Life Leech.
I condensed my aura, bundling it up in a sphere just a hundred tres across, and I focused on the Sisters, trying to find so epheral energy infusing their organic bits. It was faint, but familiar, which is probably the only reason I recognised it underneath all the other types of energies lding inside a human body. I reached out for it, my soul energy lashing out like a striking serpent, and it drank deep of that vital energy, feeding it back to .
The Sister I struck collapsed, energy fading from her body as a cascade of organ failures wrecked her body and had her dead before she hit the ground. I grimaced. I barely even felt the energy pouring into my body, attempting to rejuvenate . It was a drop in the ocean, if even that. When I reached for the next one the sa way, I was more careful. Instead of tearing out her vitality, I rely sapped it, limiting it to a level where her body grew weak and feeble but not dead yet.
The problem with that turned out to be that the usually tough woman’s muscles and bones turned … fragile. She failed to support the weight of her armour and stumbled, falling over with an agonised shriek as dozens of bones in her body broke under the strain.
Yikes. I grimaced in sympathy, redirecting the energy I’d stolen back to her in a mont of pity. Her bones snapped back into place, torn muscles nded, and skin fused back together as twice the initial amount of vitality she had flowed back into her body. Well, that was Life Leech, Enfeeble and Regeneration. All three are just different aspects of the sa trick. Cool.
I rembered three more I wanted to test, the first of which was Haemorrhage. I gathered a bit of soul energy in my palm again, separating the ball from the rest writhing eagerly in my body. I imbued it with a purpose: seek out the target's circulatory system and rupture it, all of it. Then I threw it at the loudest Sister still screaming at , calling all sorts of nasty nas, which was honestly uncalled for.
The silvery energy had twisted itself into an eerie glob of dark crimson energy, its colours shifting between carmine and obsidian black. I flicked it at the screecher, narrowing my eyes as the globule of energy twisted mid-air until it resembled a nail that plunged into her chest, right above her heart. Her screech went up a pitch as every single blood vessel in her body burst all at once, her heart exploding, arteries rupturing, and even hair-thin veins bursting open. The purity seals on her armour burned away, turning to ash as my attack easily overwheld her protections. They were paper-thin in comparison to the monstrous protections the Grey Knights fielded.
She was dead before her body even hit the ground. That was one nasty spell, holy shit. Though nowhere near as an as the next one I wanted to try: Paroxysm. It was supposed to be a Tyranid-only thing, usable only by the Hive Tyrant and the Neurotyrant. I wasn’t sure whether I could replicate it, but I was hopeful. I found nothing in either Tyranid bioform’s geno that suggested the ability required so specific organ or whatnot. Then again, maybe it was unique to the Hive Mind, so who knew?
What it did was target the victim’s nervous system and induce an ungodly amount of agony directly into it, so much of it in fact that it fried the majority of the nerves in a regular human’s body in an instant, leaving them as a weak, trembling, insensate ss of a human being.
I used an even smaller glob of soul energy to power this one, much less than Haemorrhage, since even that one shouldn’t have exploded the target’s heart, so I suspected that I must have gone a bit overboard.
Well, sothing happened to the silvery energy in my grasp as I was done impressing upon it its purpose, turning into a malevolent ball of black electricity and cloudy darkness. I flicked it at the nearest Sister, one of the less intelligent of their kind, apparently, who decided to try charging at despite the hail of bolter fire raining down on . The dark lightning connected, snapping over to my target in the blink of an eye and bypassing her armour entirely, leaving burning purity seals in its wake. The woman shrieked like a banshee, her body convulsing as she fell on her face, and I flinched at the empathetic feedback. Yes, now that was a nasty spell. I decided to shelve it entirely until I t soone truly abhorrent.
It also earned a barrage of heavy lta-fire to the face, followed up by a lta grenade and washed down by a thick plu of burning prothium. My barrier withstood it all without strain.
That left the last ability: Warp Speed. I wouldn’t have put it in Biomancy if it were up to , but that’s where it was in the codex. Where ‘The Quickening’ was an ability that put the body into overdrive, enhancing tabolism and pushing the body to supernatural heights with the power of the Immaterium, Warp Speed was more along the lines of sheathing yourself in a cloak of warped ti. It was basically the Haste spell from DnD, as I understood it.
For this one, I covered myself in a thick layer of soul energy, a finger-thick layer above my armour and skin, then I imbued it with what I wanted it to do. Loosen ti’s grasp on , speed up the rate of ti’s passage within my small bubble of soul energy. While my enemies experienced one second, I wanted to experience ten. I wanted the energy sheath to wrap around , bind to , and allow to move even once ti’s been ssed with.
The world around slowed to a crawl, and my lips stretched into a grin. A quick calculation confird that the bolters flying towards were going at specifically one-tenth of the speed they had been monts before.
I flexed my muscles, feeling the sheath of frantic energy bend and move along with my shifting skin. Good, it worked. I took a step and felt no trouble, nothing other than the nagging sensation that I had to keep a firm grasp of that epheral thread I now felt connecting to sothing unknowable. Humans were never ant to comprehend Ti on a conceptual, cosmic level, and my mind was very human, fortunately. I knew that just glancing towards what lay at the other end of the thread would give a headache.
I needed a filter, the thing human minds did subconsciously to safeguard their sanity when faced with sothing beyond their comprehension. So I decided that Ti, for , was a river. A great river flowing ever onwards into eternity. I was but a small boat rocking along on its surface, and what my Warp Speed was doing was letting get so distance from the centre of the River of Ti, where it flowed the fastest, where the great ship that was my new universe was rocking along.
It wasn’t a perfect taphor. The rate at which ti flowed in any specific slot in space was influenced by gravity and other forces; after all, it was far from constant. Warp Speed was one of those forces, though highly localised even on the micro-scale. The Warp itself was another.
Still, the taphor was good enough for my purposes. I could already feel my grasp firming on that thread just from applying that ntal filter. When it ca to the conceptual aspects of the Immaterium, the more you understood sothing, the easier it got to manipulate and grab. Which was probably the cause of why Biomancy ca to so easily.
So that thread was my lifeline, which I’d use when I decided to drag myself back into the proper ti-stream, or maybe it would yank back the mont I stopped supplying my energy sheath with power. We’d see.
Atiesh appeared in my hand, and in a blink, the power blade at its head snapped into existence too. For the mont, it wasn’t quite as powerful a weapon when used as a glaive as a sword made out of the Norn Emissary’s blade was, but I was hopeful it would grow to overtake it once I was done studying the Nesis Power Glaive. But for a bunch of Sisters of Battle, it would do. It would also be a much cleaner death than either an AoE Haemorrhage or Life Leach would grant them, and I wasn’t a heartless monster; I didn’t want them to suffer needlessly, even if I wanted them dead and gone.
I sprang into action, moving from my spot for the first ti. They stood nearly motionless as I weaved between the flying bolts, plus of fire and beams of plasma. My Avatar was already as quick as a Custodian by default, rivalling a Primarch when doped up on bio-energy, so with a ten tis increase? They stood little chance. I’d given my ultimatum, and they had rejected . Like I needed tricks and illusions to kill them all. I felt like a bully, but there was no reasoning with so people, and I was feeling thoroughly done with assholes popping out of the woodwork trying to murder . I was so done with it. They should have fucked off when given the chance if they didn’t want to die, and there had been more than one chance to do so.
I had so much shit to deal with. So much to fix. So many problems to solve. But they just have to be in the way. Is this what it feels like to be Guilliman, trying to hold together a shit-heap of an empire full of idiots who resist being saved?
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