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Getting Warhammered - [Chapter 28]
🕑 Added 2023-08-24 00:07:56 +0000 UTCThe next few days took me out on sorties toward the tip of the ship and after the fourth day, I was finally satisfied with my gene collection. The waste disposal parts of the ship and the rather decayed sections bore the most fruit outside of the Warp Drive's close proximity.
Groups of mutants that called themselves Waste Nomads developed tough, scarred skin and heightened resistance to toxins while the Rustborne as they called themselves had near immunity to acids and corrosive agents and both groups could live off of decaying matter, now I could just go around chomping down on rusty pipes and I could gain some energy out of it, just like with nuclear waste.
I couldn't live off of radiation yet but this was already much better than having to rely on only organic matter, There was still the option of learning how to grow flesh with Biomancy, ( I learned that it's called Biomancy not Biokinesis but whatever ) and while nibbling on my fingers then regrowing them was somewhat grotesque I'd do it.
My other mind...parts? cores? sub-minds? Cores it is. Let's stay with the CPU analogy if I started out with it. So, my other mind cores were working on splicing and mixing my collected genes and much to my delight, a few hours earlier they managed to work out an enhanced template that would give my skin the properties of most of these mutants.
The gene template was clear and with my eldritch instincts, I knew exactly how it'd work and what properties it had. It was useful in debugging too as I learned as I just knew if a DNA sequence was faulty. Back to my new skin, the hardest part was keeping it both looking and feeling as silky smooth as it was before and that was managed by making it reactive.
It used a miniaturized version of the Patriarch's psychic field nerves to sense when something would touch the skin and then it'd activate, making it stiffer, tougher and overall much harder to pierce or damage either by acid, corrosion or anything really.
The interesting part was that this was barely noticeable if someone wasn't teaching me exactly where my skin toughed up so it let me keep my 'biomancy' as low-profile as possible. The radiation blocking and decaying matter absorption were also implemented obviously but I couldn't test those until I went closer to the Warp Drive.
I arrived back to the floors housing the officer's quarters with a spring in my steps, the eternally aware and ready spec ops guys were just a touch stiffer than before I entered, I took to calling them Shadows and it fit quite well with how silent they were and how they followed Selene and Orion around like silent shadows.
I stopped mid-step as I felt the dimming soul of the Astropath brighten for a fleeting moment before exploding in a radiant supernova of golden Warp energy. It swept across the ship, banishing the building-up warp taint from humans and mutants alike.
It passed through me without doing anything but I felt it, a presence, a slight sliver of a fragment but it was unmistakable. Majestic and overbearing. Were I a human I'd have dropped to my knees and started praying but I was not, I walked through the gaggle of confused officers and other crewmembers as they shook each other out of their dazes.
I felt a slight illusion of this presence once before when I dove into the soul of the Astropath Transcendent for a bit, if her soul was a planet it felt like a shard of a star was stabbed into it like a spear and that spear exuded this same sensation of majesty.
I reached the dead woman's room and threw open the doors with a frown on my face but only a single thought was going through the numerous threads of my mind, Why, why did he intervene? Why did he do that?
It was imperative that you wasted neither your focus nor your energy when you were a decaying corpse with a soul fragmented into millions of tiny shards.
"Inquisitor?" Selene's cracking voice broke me out of my staring contest with the peacefully 'sleeping' corpse.
"Yes, that's me," I strode closer to the corpse, not a single sign of injury or death yet, "Tell me, did something happen exactly one minute and 48 seconds ago?"
"What?" the woman asked with a voice that was somewhere between a tremble and rising indignation.
"Her soul detonated like a supernova at that exact time without any outside interference that I could notice," aside from the Big E but let's not bring that up.
I sat down on a nearby chair and let Selene come to terms with the situation, I noticed she had a significant connection with the late Astropath, dare I say she might have even loved her so her rather shaken state was self-explanatory.
"S-She seemed like she had a nightmare before and around the time you s- said she calmed down," she closed her eyes and covered them with a palm, "I thought she was finally getting a peaceful sleep ... getting better."
I held back the 'So nothing then' response that came from my apathetic side and instead took on a morose expression.
"I'm sorry for your loss," I shook my head softly.
She took a deep breath, "Thank you," she took away her palm, revealing bloodshot eyes, "do you know what happened to her?"
Ah, fuck me sideways, what do you want me to tell you, woman?
"There are far worse ways to pass than in a bed, peacefully," I stared into her eyes, imploring her with my look not to ask the question anymore but it seemed like the woman didn't care about social graces at the moment.
"Tell me," said Selene in a voice so grating and malicious that it'd make a Drukhari blush.
"I don't know for sure," I averted my eyes, "but it seemed like 'damage control' to me."
"Damage control?" I couldn't tell whether she was livid under the surface or deathly calm, her face was like a stone mask.
"She was dying already, Selene," I shook my head softly, "I could sense her soul getting tainted bit by bit, she was losing the fight against corruption."
"That's impossible," She shook her head vehemently, "She was a Transcendent, she was soul-bound."
I didn't say anything, I didn't know what exactly happened or why, all I knew was that the big man decided to detonate her soul while he yanked his soul fragment away from her.
For some reason this event in time was important enough for him to exert himself, intervention was few and far between but for all I knew this was just a normal thing that happened when a soul-bound psyker was getting corrupted by the Warp.
It could be a sort of automatic scorched earth tactic. The soul-fragment kept the psyker in line and the overreaching hands of demons away from the psyker but if said psyker were to die or get corrupted forcefully then the demons would be denied their feast without too much of a loss on his side.
Another possibility wormed its way into my mind, it was an alien idea to me but I could see a Psyker that got indoctrinated at the Schola going through with it. What if His presence wasn't so evident to me because he himself acted but just because the protective shell that was the Astropath's soul got blown to bits? What if it wasn't He who detonated the soul but the Astropath herself?
I glanced at the remains of the woman, she slept eternally with a peaceful smile on her lips and now that I looked at it carefully it might have been a smile of relief. If she lost her soul to the Warp, let it corrupt her body and soul which would have left her free for demons to use either as a vessel or a gate.
Which would have been the prelude to a gruesome end for the people on this ship.
A selfless sacrifice for the good of others. The idea felt alien to my eldritch instincts, still, I found myself admiring the dead woman. That was much more likely than the big man handing out divine interventions like cookies.
I stood and Selene's gaze refocused on me, snapping up from the floor.
"If her soul got forcefully corrupted her fate would have been far worse than mere oblivion," I said, having watched one or two bright stars go out as dark maws constricted around them in the Warp. The faster oblivion came, the better in this galaxy. Eldar's got their souls tortured for who knows how long before She who Thirsts ate them bit by bit, drawing out their torturous existence as far as possible.
"The Emperor Protects," I said as my palm came to rest on her shoulder and I felt her stiffen under it, I stared into her grey eyes deeply before letting go of her and leaving the room without another word.
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Magos Dominus Zedev
This was the fifth day since he came to the planet, Follax IV was a relatively important world with a major Hive city and several smaller cities spreading around its surface.
Zedev didn't care about either of those, his mind was buried deeply into the mess that was the mechanical record of the happenings on the planet. Tens of tubes and wires connected him to the large machinery that was located near the top of this spire and he was finally making headway in his search.
Locations, directions, coordinates, shipments, registers, and missing weapons all coalesced in a grand tapestry that needed solving and Zedev was more than ready to do so. He has done so more times than he could count, or well, he could count it but the data was inconsequential and as such a waste of precious memory space.
He'd worked on several ways to edit his own memory, keeping only relevant data stored as his many centuries of life have accumulated in such a collection of useless memories that his human mind was getting overwhelmed.
The flesh is weak.
Resets, partitions, encryptions, formatting he tried it all, and all of them were failing. His mind drifted as several species came to mind who could live for thousands of years without such problems, our flesh is weak.
He terminated that line of thought and formatted the entire partition of his mind it appeared on. Such heretical thoughts were popping up more and more in his head as his inevitable end drew nearer but by now he determined that all of his partitions were somewhat corrupted by it.
He learned to live with it.
The worst was that he knew it wasn't wrong either, if only he could substitute his human brain for an Eldar one, he would be perfect. A blend of machine and man just like the Omnissiah envisioned the future of humanity.
His mechanical eye shone as the complex set of calculations finished and a finished report was delivered to his main mind partition, it contained a list. A List of Locations.
If Zedev still had lips he would have grinned, alas he did not, and a moment later his emotional dampeners kicked in and his feelings of satisfaction vanished.
He had to notify the Inquisitor. There were Xenos to terminate on the planet.
Once that was done, maybe a few of their remains could go mysteriously missing.
