“Nice trick," I said conversationally. “Got any more up your sleeve?”
“What manner of creature are you?” phet’ran mused, ignoring my question. “A last 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 for ages to co. Co, Child, resistance is futile.”
Why does everyone I et either want to eat my soul or kill ? I thought dryly, leaning away from another beam of antimatter that ca to spear through. I had considered teleporting, but with each second, space seed to be growing tighter and tighter. It was as if the re 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 layer between the Immaterium and the Materium, slipping through where space wasn’t so firm.
phet’ran was turning that cloudy layer into a fortress wall. I’d need to rely on speed to dodge.
The Deceiver gave a lazy gesture, swinging his hand horizontally and only because my sense of danger blared a sudden alarm did I manage to kick off the ground in ti. One mont, 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 ca, 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 latest design, I would only have enough energy left over to remake a limb or two a handful of tis. Worse, that attack had just eaten my soulbone bones, and those were even more difficult to remake. I had to replace them with regular 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 seed 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, flas black as the abyss blood across its clawed fingers.
At that exact mont, a pillar of pitch-black flas 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 ti and leapt to the side. My fragile ankle joints shattered from the force, making 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 place 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 Flayers, 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 so sort of ntal attack equivalent, and I had to suppress the montary 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 seed to turn blurry as it undulated, and faint outlines of two replicas fizzled into being. A mont later, 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 assud 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 containnt 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 re fact that it was whole would have made a qualitative difference to its might … and phter’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 platforms. 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 with much joy, so I lashed out with a massive blast of telekinetic force at the fleeing Deceiver. The other two retaliated as one, unleashing twin pairs of jagged black lightning that scread across the fabric of space with the sa 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 black lightning, but they stopped the attacks before they could reach well enough. The third Deceiver Shard failed to dodge, and watching it get blasted 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 tallic head out of his ass and started working on sothing. Hopefully, that sothing included finally getting so 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 ocular sensor peer at 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 you’ve brought an army, Trazyn.”
“You underestimate , 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 dinsional-cabinet-thingy filled with rows upon rows of Tesseract Labyrinths filling the shelves. “I’ve brought five.”
So nice of him to pre-package a nice quick pick--up al. Just what I needed. Instead of stepping into the dinsional rift that housed his cupboard, Trazyn stepped out of it, then another followed that one and then more Overlords ca one after the other, all wielding curved blades glowing with green edges. They lined up around the original in two lines.
“I certainly had this nightmare before,” Orikan noted. “Nurous tis, in fact.”
“I thought I might need a surrogate for this,” Trazyn replied idly. “Brought ten instead, ford from Lychguard, so there is no ti 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 rely be reconstituted back on his Tomb World of Solemnace.
Well, usually he would be. Not from here. Even I could sense the insulation around this cavern that barred the transmission of all kinds of data, and I recalled the sa being ntioned 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 playing Nesor 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 ti, 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 tallic chassis. “Fair winds.”
I guess I know why so people call the Infinite and the Divine a homoerotic romantic cody 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 extrely advanced artificial intelligences, even if sowhat 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 t so far. Not , 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 to outsource processing power. Shaless 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 regular suite of bio-energy and soul energy enhancents.
I was keeping the bio-energy enhancents to a minimum for now so as not exhaust my stores, but I had enough for one trick.
Jagged black lightning curled through the air towards , and Atiesh ca 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 , and I surged forward, suppressing my emotions while watching as the Deceiver shard I was rushing sent a dismissive sneer. It was moving already, shifting to evade my strike before I even made it.
I suppose my body language and combat style were easy to read for a being as old as him. It seed like it would just barely be out of my humming energy blade’s tip when I had my remaining bio-energy surge through my body. My speed doubled, then tripled, and the energy blade tore through one leg at the thigh and the other at the knee as the Deceiver lunged away from , its face shifting into a rictus of rage.
“Trazyn, stop holding out on ,” I said, now in a fighting retreat as all three Shards focused their combined rage on . The one I’d struck took only monts 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 so snacks right about now. You left all high and dry after our last excursion.”
“I might have sothing,” the Trazyn next to the dinsional cupboard said after a mont, 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 so of the subverted Necron Immortals started sending crackling green beams at , seeking to unmake on the molecular level, layer by layer. “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 .
For two, I was not about to expend my ergency reserves on a mission for Trazyn. Not if there were other alternatives, like making him expend so of his ergency Pokémon to achieve the sa 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 blast him with a concentrated telekinetic blow right in the jaw.
anwhile, 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 ti. Co to mommy, you nasty bug freaks.
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