My relative ti slowed to a sudden and imdiate crawl, and I plunged into the imnse library of data held within my own mind. A human brain could hold incredible amounts of data, and my mind was far from human. I had long used my mind-cores and various reconstruction models to dig up all my mories from my past life and build them from the ground up with perfect clarity.
The human mind rembered only generalities, so strange bits and pieces that were imprinted deeper upon the psyche. I used those tidbits to remake everything. I rebuilt the entire Warhamr wiki, all the official Black Library books I’ve read, and hundreds of hours of lore videos I’ve watched over my life. My brain might not have rembered them, not in perfect detail, but what did that matter?
My brain was hardly the sa one I'd had in my past life, which ant my soul was the one that rembered. The soul did not forget. The human mind was fragile and forgetful, but the soul was not, and so I willed those mories back into existence and refined them until they sat in my mind with the sa absolute clarity as the mories I’ve made since my rebirth in this galaxy.
It took a nanosecond to find a pri suspect for my current location: the Ghostwind. A Necron sub-dinsion primarily used by the Flayed Ones to travel across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds. It was empty, a dark void untouched by matter, physics and reality itself. Only Necron supertech could let you leave this place, and even with that, it was a lengthy, complicated affair. Besides them, there were also the Flayed Ones, but the less I so much as thought about them, the better.
Next, I identified the cause of my being here: the Canoptek Wraith that phased its blades into my body, ignoring all of my physical and psychic protections by sheer force of bullshit sci-fi super technology.
One of the optional weapons that players could mount on a Canoptek Wraith in the tabletop ga was a Transdinsional Bear, a Necron weapon originally designed as a convenient thod of banishing unwanted debris, machinery and failed experints from Tomb Worlds and battlefields into a pocket dinsion outside of the normal space-ti continuum. However, a Transdinsional Bear could be used just as easily to exile and banish foes to a long and horrifying death from starvation in the sa extra-dinsional space.
The fucker had used that to dump in the sub-spatial dinsion where the horrors that haunted the Necrons’ nightmares dwelled. Alternatively, whatever Cryptek was currently in the process of cutting up my Selene had likely used that very sa weapon to transport her to its lab. She’d been immobile, crushed into the floor by those weird gravitational weapons-
Gravity Pulses, my mind-cores pinged helpfully, identifying the weapon based on what I’d seen and experienced, pulling up its wiki page in my mind. They were Anti-Air weapons designed to bring aircraft down.
Considering the swiftness with which Selene had been displaced, they must have used a Transdinsional Bear on her as well, just aiming it at another sub-spatial dinsion. But one that had a Cryptek’s lab in it … so a Cryptek Dinsional Sanctum, most likely. Transdinsional Bears were transliminal weapons; they weren’t teleporters, so she had to be in a sub-dinsion or pocket space. Troubleso, but not a problem without many possible solutions. Worst-case scenario: I yanked her soul free of her body and made her a new one. With her soul being held in my Realm, I could do that with a flex of my will.
But still. Maybe it was my need for vengeance burning bright and hot as the core of a star, or just sentintality not wanting to leave Selene’s soulless corpse in the hands of a creepy Cryptek, but I wanted to give a try to rescuing her first, body and soul both. What was all this power I had at my disposal good for if I was still forced to be satisfied with solutions that were rely ‘good enough’?
Saving Selene within the next second or two was the bare fucking minimum, but I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had the remains of that accursed Cryptek that tried to take her from crushed into a heap of scrap.
To do that, I needed to force my way into his supposedly secure Cryptek Dinsional Sanctum. The Necrons were the masters of material technology, and as such were more than capable of creating their own personalised pocket dinsions and subspaces for exclusive use. While not part of the Warp, these pocket dinsions lie outside of realspace and were connected to Tomb Worlds via Reality-Tethers. They could have strongholds built within them, and the dinsions could be designed so that only their owners or serving minions could enter or exit them.
So, usually, my only option would have been to attempt to latch onto the undoubtedly well-concealed Reality-Tether connecting the subspace to the Hollow Sun. Considering Necrons had been fighting a race of super psykers for millennia and won, I doubted it would be particularly easy or quick to do. I didn’t know how I asured up to an Old One in pure psychic might, but I was sure they had beat in skill and expertise by an imnsely wide margin. They’d made the Webway, created the Aeldari, the Krorks and the Warp-Gates that connected the two ends of the galaxy together.
Fortunately for — and unfortunately for the Cryptek I was about to et — I could cheat. I didn’t need to follow the Reality-Tether when I had a much more substantial link to Selene, who happened to be inside that subspace.
I’d have worried about that strange anti-teleportation counterasure acting up again and getting in my way, but I was like … 70% sure it wouldn’t be able to reach . I was in the Ghostwind, already outside the normal spaceti continuum, and I was travelling to another pocket space likewise disconnected from what I myself called ‘realspace’. Essentially, the Necrons posted speedcams all the way across the highway, but I was taking the smaller country roads. Or rather, I was about to launch myself from a cannon on one island to another, instead of taking the bridge full of cops. Yeah, that was a much better taphor. There were no roads to take between pocket dinsions, just sheer non-existence and the Warp.
The primary and greatest problem was the lack of space as a concept. It wasn’t rely fluctuating and unstable; it straight up didn’t exist between the two pocket dinsions, which ant it wouldn’t even be enough to figure out where it was. I had to follow that thread and yank myself across.
I humd under my breath, my vocal cords shifting to perfectly replicate the haunting tunes of the Crotalids’ song. Inside my Realm, my soul vibrated, echoing the sa song. In a blink, my Avatar slipped through the fabric of this lesser dinsion and dipped below it, subrging itself into the ever-present Immaterium. The mont it erged inside my Realm, my soul latched onto Selene’s soul-tether and practically booted my Avatar through it, montarily willing that thread to beco a spatial tunnel.
How many laws of physics and reality I just broke with that one single action, I couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered. My soul far eclipsed the sheer psychic might my Avatar was able to bring to bear, and I could make use of that might for this little trick, if only to an extent.
A tear in space spat out, and I centred myself in an instant, my senses unfurling like a tidal wave as I surveyed my new surroundings. I was once more far from my Realm and firmly outside the bounds of realspace as well. Though this pocket dinsion felt lesser in a way. The Ghostwind had been a true dinsion, infinite and eternal. It wasn’t made; it just was a part of existence.
The pocket space I’d found myself in was different. Limited, small, and clearly artificial. I could feel the absolute nothingness surrounding this single fortress, barely larger than a dieval castle back ho.
My gaze snapped to Selene, my beautiful, ferocious little minx, who was held up in thin air, her limbs stretched like a starfish by bands of eerie green energy. The Cryptek wasn’t one for half asures, that was for sure, because that thing looked exactly like the apparatus Trazyn had put in, proudly proclaiming it to be able to imprison even a Star God. For good asure, there was also a collection of Blackstone Pylons arranged around the room in an intricate array I was unfamiliar with, but was probably responsible for the fact that Selene hadn’t crushed the Cryptek into a pancake of scrap tal despite the tallic twat trying to peel off her armour with what looked like a hyperphase … scalpel.
I flexed my will, and a telekinetic backhand swatted the Cryptek into the wall fifty tres away with a sound akin to a thundercrack echoing in the cavernous laboratory. In an instant, I was standing in his place before Selene, a hand raised and teasing out the boundary of the strange force field surrounding her and what must have been a Tesseract Labyrinth in its half-open state.
He must have altered the settings to allow himself to move unimpeded through the forcefield. Furthermore, he must have made it so that it still kept Selene’s psychic power bound or unreachable. Did this thing have a whitelist type function? It must have been a modified Tesseract Labyrinth built for this exact purpose. The bound Aeldari I could see, so in the characteristic robes of Warlocks, also supported that theory. The entire lab was full of bound prisoners, or rather, test subjects. So were still alive, if barely, but most were corpses held in stasis.
I pushed, the forcefield reeled against with a surprising amount of resistance, my hand barely moving. It didn’t matter. Atiesh shimred into existence in my grasp, and I pushed it forward, psychic energy surging into the staff, condensing and intensifying, then fueling the reality-warping effect shrouding its tip. I willed the forcefield to split, to open up a door for to step through, and my trusty stave forced it to obey.
That was the problem with technology like this. They still had to obey the laws of physics in so form or work through manipulating and bending those laws. But with sufficient psychic power, I could just tell physics to kindly sod off and fuck itself. Which is exactly what I did there, gently pouring energy through the forcefield and using it to conjure a film of energy between Selene’s skin and the Tesseract's effects, trying to stifle her attempts to free herself.
Those effects went deep, pervading every cell of her body and rejecting all her attempts to summon her psychic energies or soul energy from my Realm. I cut that off, separating her from the effect even if she remained montarily bound. Once that was done, I could feel her body surge with power, and I took that as my cue to take the next step. The film of energy hardened, becoming an inviolable barrier as a massive force tore into the Tesseract around her. Like most prisons, it was much more vulnerable against soone trying to break in from the outside than to its prisoners trying to break out.
It held for a mont, then another and another as I felt a cascade of alarms and warnings blare all across the laboratory as so sort of energy source deep beneath my feet roared to life, funnelling an imnse amount of energy to reinforce the Tesseract’s grip. I wasn’t using most of my power, not yet. Bruteforcing it would end up with Selene’s pulped remains covering in a shower of gore, even if I did manage to tear her free of the Tesseract’s grip.
The problem was, if that reinforcing energy reached the damned thing, I’d get locked into a tug of war over Selene’s body, which wouldn’t be any more enjoyable for her than ending up as a pulverised mist of blood and gore.
“This is going to hurt,” I said, then pulled just before the Tesseract could lock up. Right. Ergency shutdown, it was trying to engage its full lockdown procedures, which would include locking the prisoner in a stasis field and then shoving them into a pocket space inside the fist-sized Tesseract.
I was as gentle as I could manage without sacrificing speed, and Selene just gritted her teeth, radiating acceptance and acknowledgent as her own soul energy infused her body, quickly joined by the bio-energy in her armour that I had made to reinforce her physical form.
The machine scread, energy of a kind I couldn’t na writhing out of control as I tore Selene through the gap and out of the Tesseract’s grasp. Her limbs were bent the wrong way, and half her internal organs were little more than mulch, the other half having been turned to dust when a snapping tendril of energy atomised the side of her torso.
She landed in my arms with a gasp, and just in ti too, as the towering machinery that used to be the Tesseract Labyrinth slamd together into an ever-shifting cube the size of my fist, floating idly in front of , arcs of green energy crackling wildly around it. My barriers slamd into place, warding off the seeking tendrils of green energy and the violent discharge from the Tesseract as it slamd shut. It washed over the do of psychic power, finding no purchase while I focused on flooding Selene's broken body with bio-energy. From her perspective, it all happened so fast that she wouldn’t even have had ti to register the pain of it all before she was once more fully hale and healthy … had I not improved her reaction ti and nervous system.
As it was, the roughly thirty milliseconds she spent torn apart might as well have been full seconds from her perspective. Half a minute of indescribable pain that would have sent a lesser person into shock. I hugged her close, a shudder running through as sympathetic ripples of agony spread through my own body. Sotis, having a telepathic bond was beautiful; other tis, you got to feel the agony your partner went through in excruciating detail.
“That hurt,” Selene mumbled, sounding relieved, but her voice was still a bit hoarse. “I’m fine, you can let go now. Where is that tallic fucker anyway?”
“You’re fine?” I asked, pulling back a bit and looking her over with all my senses again.
“I went through worse,” Selene said wryly, rolling her eyes before peering over my shoulder to pan her gaze across the lab. Right, she’s not so fragile 21st-century wallflower who never experienced worse pain than her period cramps. “Well, it looks like he did a runner. I guess we should make ourselves scarce as well. Where are we anyway?”
“A pocket dinsion,” I said, grunting in annoyance as I swept my senses across the pocket space. Yep, the Necron I had backhanded into the wall was gone, having sohow survived the impact and remained intact enough to teleport himself out of here. Wonderful. “A Cryptek Dinsional Sanctum, if I had to guess.”
Right on ti, gateways opened up all across the walls and swallowed up the test subjects along with rows of strange machinery that were scattered around the lab. But those were not protected by anything nearly as annoying as a Tesseract Labyrinth, and with the Cryptek gone, I was feeling a bit petty. With but a thought, telekinetic forces tore into the machines and yanked the bound, caged and stasis-locked lab rats free of their bonds. If nothing else, I could count this as my good deed of the week. None of them was conscious, doped up on so Necron anaesthetic or other type of drug that kept them from doing anything other than groaning as I hauled them up into a pile.
“Okay, leaving now,” I humd under my breath, but instead of repeating a reverse of my previous trick, I found the Reality-Tether anchoring this pocket dinsion to the Hollow Sun. From this side, it was easy to find, even its subtle energies appearing bright and blatantly obvious against the backdrop of sheer nothingness that otherwise surrounded the pocket space. Space split into a gaping rift before , and I felt so alien force trying to co-opt it, but failed when I tied the portal’s spatial tunnel to the Reality-Tether, forcing it to stay on target. When it failed to overwhelm my control, it switched gears and tried to tear the spatial working apart, which was much harder to resist, given how finicky spatial manipulations could be. A slight destabilisation of the fabric of space inside the tunnel could cause fragile little humans to fall apart.
Atiesh thrumd in my grasp, almost purring like a pleased predatory cat as I fed it more of my essence as fuel to counteract the alien force. I stepped through in a hurry, Selene still held in a one-handed princess carry, and I dragged my rescued pile of lab rats behind myself, letting the rift slam shut the mont the last of them floated through.
Just in ti, too, as I’d felt an absolutely massive energy buildup in the lab right before a gigantic turret dropped out of the ceiling and took us within its sights. In just a few more monts or a second at most, it would have fire, and that weapon made my danger sense tingle in a way not even the Particle Whips could manage. Worse, I knew too little to accurately identify just what that weapon might have been.
We erged right beside a titanic green crystal in the shape of an upside-down obelisk, hovering a few tres off the floor. Pulses of energy thrumd through it, making the fabric of space quiver and fold neatly around it into strange, fractal shapes. The process repeated endlessly, folding and unfolding, back and forth.
I shook my head, averted my gaze from the strangely hypnotic sight, and took a firr look at our surroundings. Based on the curvature of spaceti, I could feel underpinning the star system I found myself in, I quickly confird that we were back on the Hollow Sun and without much ti having passed in the interim. That was good. Warhamr 40k was infamous for temporal inconsistencies and ti travel shenanigans, and yeeting yourself outside the bounds of regular spaceti was a good way to end up as an unintentional ti traveller. Though regular Warp travel was still the most surefire way to cast yourself adrift upon the river of ti. The thing that was a constant about Warp travel was that it was reliably unreliable.
I also didn’t sense anything or anyone nearby. No Necrons or Canoptek constructs as far as I could sense, just rooms upon rooms filled with alien, cold machinery slowly whirling, clanking and thrumming.
“Well, I think a temporary retreat might be in order,” I mused aloud. I’d thought we’d be fine if we were careful, but I was still underestimating the Necrons, plus I had a bunch of drugged-out-of-their-minds ex-lab-rats on my hands, too, who I had to do sothing with, or they were all going to get atomised in the first firefight we got into.
Hell, without Selene’s soul thread to follow out of the Ghostwind, then the Reality-Tether to ride back into realspace on, I would have had to either just wing the teleportation back into the main spaceti continuum, or I’d have had to abandon the fight by using Valenith’s soul thread as a guide back into the Materium.
Which would have ended up with back on Vallia, months of regular FTL flight away from the Hollow Sun. So not optimal, to say the least.
Preferably, I would have an anchor, a retreat point nearby. Hopefully, Selene was spooked enough about nearly getting dissected to not be too pouty about my plans to dump her on a nearby planet and continue on my rampage through the Hollow Sun by my loneso. I certainly was spooked by it … but she was an Imperial born and raised, and a Rogue Trader at that, so she was quite a bit more ntally resilient than my 21st-century Earth common sense would suggest any regular woman could be. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d bounced back from the experience in a few hours, if not less.
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