Necrons really were in a league of their own, I had to admit. The one ti I let myself be hit by those nasty double-barrelled Gauss Blasters, it atomised three layers of my chitinous armour. The sa armour I’ve stress tested against the Swarmlord’s bonesword and the Grey Knights’ Force Weapons. Sure, those cut deeper, but they were exotic relic gear, while there were hundreds of Necrons in the force that ca to slay us ard with Gauss Blasters. The type of weaponry that other species considered top of the line and only ard the best of their elites with, the Necrons gave to their footsoldiers because they had billions upon billions of them sitting in dusty old storage rooms scattered across hundreds of Tomb Worlds.
A well-placed or lucky shot from these could kill a Space Marine, and even when they were being wielded by Necron Warriors, it was inevitable that one would get lucky when hundreds of them fired at once. Not that it was much of a trouble for , as the psychic barrier I put up around us was doing a good job of halting them in their tracks. Sure, there was so interference with so distant Blackstone structure woven through the walls, but not enough to stop from putting up a near impregnable do of psychic energy just a few tres in diater.
“So, how are you going to pry this thing open?” Selene asked, looking up at the monolithic gate standing before us, still shimring slightly from the force-field protecting the tres-thick slab of solid necrodermis.
I held Atiesh out behind , putting it in the path of an annoying beam of green energy that phased through my barrier. Spaced warped around the tip of my staff, deflecting the beam that would have torn Selene’s neural system to shreds had it hit — or maybe it wouldn’t have, but I didn’t want to test it, the Draugr I’d thrown into its path once dropped dead like a puppet with its strings cut. Those Synaptic Disintegrators were annoying, but not insurmountable or impossible to defend against.
I just had to learn their quirks, and then I could tune my barrier to stop them from just phasing through it like it wasn't even there.
“How many of those things are still out there?” Selene asked, looking over her shoulder with a frown and trying to track where the shot ca from. Alas, the Deathmarks had learned to adapt and only stuck the tips of their weapons’ barrels out of their pocket space for just long enough to fire before closing the portal.
Again, super annoying, but not sothing I couldn’t deal with. I was still trying to track down the dinsion — be that an external dinsion, or a spatial dinsion beyond the standard three — they were using to hide in. It was … a work in progress.
“We could just jump through that thing,” I said, hooking a thumb over my shoulder to point at the still very much active Eternity Gate closing off the sole other exit of the room.
“They couldn’t have made the trap more obvious even if they put up a sign,” Selene said wryly, rolling her eyes. “So?”
“I’m thinking,” I said. “I can feel that the material behind the force field is resistant to psychic power. They probably built this thing to stop an elite Aeldari kill team from going through it, and not these pale echoes that exist today, but War in Heaven Aeldari.”
“You could use the sword,” Selene suggested helpfully, and I turned to give her an unimpressed look. Of course, it only made her carefully carved neutral expression shift into a guileless, innocent smile. “It worked on the Tomb Ship, didn’t it?”
“It did,” I grumbled, crossing my arms.
“So?” Selene said, still maintaining her innocent mien. I had to suppress the sudden urge to spank the brattiness out of her, because she knew exactly what she was doing. I could practically feel the amusent radiate off of her in waves. “Stab the door. What’s your issue with the sword anyway?”
“It’s borrowed power,” I said, pursing my lips. “It draws on Aeldari history and their own civilisation’s psychic weight. Feels like a crutch, or a power that I haven’t made my own yet. It annoys . It’s also brutish, I’m sure I can figure out a way to work around this.”
Teleportation was iffy, considering whatever diverted on our journey here could just as easily yank around again if I tried to Blink through this bulkhead.
“There is nothing shaful about being a brute,” Selene humd, helpfully draping herself across my shoulders. Then she spun us around and sent off a concentrated blast of telekinesis behind us, grinning down at as I ended up in her arms. “Hah! Got one of the fuckers!”
Sure enough, the shattered remains of a Deathmark’s head were scattered across the wall far back, having been obliterated the mont it poked its head through the portal by that telekinetic blast.
“So your reasons for being aggravating were purely strategic?” I asked with a quirked eyebrow, in no hurry to extract myself from her arms.
“Yep,” Selene said smugly, then placed a gentle kiss on the tip of my nose, making giggle despite our circumstances. “You’re adorable when you’re annoyed. I love the way your nose scrunches up, and your cheeks puff out.”
I just huffed, seeing no reason to fight down my body’s natural inclination to blush. She’s earned the right to see it if she could make blush. Not that it was especially hard when she used that voice.
“Are you going to play pillow princess all day, or are we going to get through this door before all the Necrons watching us die of boredom?” Selene asked amusedly, all the while hauling back onto my feet.
“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes as I held out a hand, having the Witchblade that had been floating behind slam its hilt into my waiting palm. “I’m going to stab the problem until it stops being a problem, happy now?”
“Inordinately,” Selene said, that mischievous vulpine smirk still tugging at the edge of her lips.
The sword slashed out, the oversized claymore that looked almost comically large in my hands, tearing through the green force-field and then carving a deep ravine into the tallic mass underneath. There was no resistance; there never was when I used this stupid thing. Still, the bulkhead was thick, and a sword wasn’t exactly the best tool to use to carve my way through a solid mass of tal. I should have made a Nesis Force Pickaxe.
I swung the sword again and again and again, slowly shutting away chunks of suprely dense tal that fell to the ground with heavy thuds the mont I stopped holding them in my telekinetic grasp. Each torso-sized chunk must have weighed more than a hundred kilos.
Inch by inch, I carved a tunnel through it and tore through even the fractal lattice of inch-thick Blackstone woven into the material. Everything had a threshold, even Blackstone was no absolute nullifier, and my Witchblade channelling my soul’s total psychic might eclipsed this lattice’s threshold and not by a narrow margin.
Atish swung out once or twice, swatting away errant beams lunging out from Synaptic Disintegrators while Selene played whack-a-mole with the skulking Deathmarks behind . With her focus being on them, the snipers had no chance of hitting her. She was just too fast, and once I showed her how, she quickly picked up on the trick to shed off the Deathmark’s nasake trick with a quick burst of psychic power.
With a final swing, I broke through, and instead of struggling to widen the thin gap where air and light slipped through, I just set my feet and shouldered myself through what remained of the bulkhead.
I burst out to the other side in a shower of dust and falling Necrodermis, my ears catching the sound of a dozen electric thrums. My eyes snapped up, and I grinned, eting the dozens of artillery-grade weaponry currently aid at and preparing to fire. I saw four Lychguard standing at the front, one arm behind their backs while the other held Warscythes and two-handed hyperphase blades aloft, their intelligent burning green eyes staring at in open disdain.
Behind them stood lines of Lokhust Destroyers, headed by a Destroyer Lord and two Lokhust Heavy Destroyers, all of whom practically vibrated with barely contained rage and killing intent as their hateful gazes landed on .
My gaze darted around, noting the four Doomsday Arks already glowing like four tiny suns, ready to unleash hell. Then, to the singular massive Gauss Annihilator protruding from the ceiling, the car-sized crystal nestled inside the crescent-shaped focusing array already crackling with power. Those five weapons had enough firepower to punch through both the Void Shields and armoured plating of Imperial Titans by themselves. I was looking at an arrangent of artillery pieces capable of taking down five Titans in seconds. Then there were the Destroyers and the Lychguards, who could go toe to toe with Imperial Champions — unless they took their helms off, or even worse, were nad in the official lore.
There were also other things I didn’t recognise, a pair of weird weapons mounted on every monolithic pillar and a few moving artillery pieces that were a bit too exotic to be recognisable on sight. All this happened in an instant, not a full millisecond having passed since I burst through the bulkhead. Selene appeared next to at a similar speed, looking deathly serious as she gripped her bonesword and reinforced her psychic shielding, running her own soul energy through the Storm Ward embedded into her power armour’s chest.
My own barriers snapped into place, Atiesh ramming itself into the floor in front of to reinforce them even further and just in ti too, as the Doomsday Cannons fired as one. Four miniature suns blood into existence and spat beams of super-condensed plasma so hot it put the surface of a Star to sha, and so fast I would have had to push myself a little to dodge it.
But it was just plasma, and while my do-shaped barrier shuddered as plasma washed over it and cascaded away in thick streams, it held without much trouble.
It was only through my aura that I felt those strange devices on the pillars power up before gravity slamd into . The tal floor cracked as my feet dug into it, the weight of a mountain suddenly pressing down on my shoulders, and I wasn’t speaking figuratively. Selene slamd into the floor next to , plastered out across the floor and unable to move an inch as the imnse gravity started crushing her organs. My knees wobbled as I gritted my teeth and tapped Atiesh, sending a surge of power through it to hopefully counteract this trick-
It would have been simple. I felt like I was sitting at the bottom of a gravity well as I spread my senses and teased out the shape of spaceti's fabric around . All I needed to do was counteract it. I’d done it before; it wasn’t too hard. I just needed a bit of focus.
Sothing which wasn’t allowed to as a monstrous insectoid creature made of gleaming tal materialised behind . I gasped as I felt two of its sharp scythe-like talons embedded in my body, one through my head and the other through my heart. Stupid phase technology.
It was hardly enough to put down for good, but the surprise of feeling a pair of blades just appear inside my body made freeze for just a mont, and that mont was just long enough for the Canoptek Wraith’s eye to glow and unleash a strange beam of light that went right through my wards.
Between one instant and the next, my surroundings changed. There was no transition period, nothing, just an infinite darkness and nothingness as far as I could perceive in all directions. It was cold; the temperature was hovering near absolute zero, and there was not a single blink of light anywhere. Just darkness. Infinite and all-consuming. I couldn’t even perceive the Veil of Reality, or even the fabric of spaceti. There was nothing. This dinsion was empty, so much so that not even physics, matter, space or ti existed in any solid way.
For a brief instant, a tsunami of raw, primal dread ran through my body even as my internal healed in an instant. Selene wasn’t here. I’d left her behind, and without my barriers, she was left crushed into the floor and exposed to the wrath of four Doomsday Cannons and much worse besides if she sohow survived those.
My Realm felt distant, the thread linking to my soul having grown thin and fragile, as if a strong wind could make it snap. Still, it was still there, and that was all that mattered, because it allowed to spread my awareness through my Realm. I breathed a sigh of relief when I found Selene’s soul still glowing radiantly, held safely within the cocoon my soul made for her. Both her soul and mind seed hale and healthy, so nothing too horrible could have happened.
With a flex of my will, a tenuous telepathic link snapped into place. ‘Selene, are you okay?’
‘If you can call appearing in so creepy Necron’s lab, tied up like it's bondage night while he tries to dissect while I’m still alive "okay", then yeah. I'm perfectly okay.’
I breathed a sigh of relief, ignoring her words for now. Even she wouldn’t be this snarky if there was a real problem, even if I knew snark was one of her coping chanisms for stress, sothing that’d stuck with her since her days in the Imperial Guard.
‘Tries?’ I asked back, managing to sound much less panicked this ti around.
‘With increasing success,’ Selene said, and there was a tinge of pain in her voice, and her words ca out like she was gritting her teeth despite that being impossible in telepathic communication. ‘Help, please, quickly.’
Sothing ugly and dark roiled in my heart as I heard the hint of panic seep into her voice, mixing with the pain she was unable to fully keep from slipping through the link along with her words.
‘I’ll be there in a second.’ I promised, an eerie calmness overtaking as I took a deep breath. There was no air to breathe, but my Eldritch powers converted bio-energy into faux-air, nonetheless. My hand opened, and Atiesh slamd into it in an instant, uncaring for the dinsions separating us. When I called, my trusty staff would always be there.
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