Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

118 – Liching Hour

Roboute Guilliman

The reborn Primarch had some atrocious days, this one not even being close to the worst handful. Alas, it had still proven to be a miserable experience.

He knew the Tyranids were one of the primary threats to the Imperium, but he never thought they would have anything that could hope to beat him. 

Staring at the monster that towered even above himself, he had to reconsider. It had a missing arm, its head was scorched and its body had more scabs than armour on it, but he could feel the danger it represented deep down in his bones.

If it weren’t for his father’s sword, he wouldn’t have a chance. 

In the momentary standoff, he cast a glance at the two people that he fought the beast with just before it knocked him out. Dante was sprayed against a wall, attempting to stand before he collapsed back down.

Echidna, that strange alien, was nowhere to be seen. For a moment, he thought she fled when his previous plan backfired so atrociously. Then his gaze landed on a pile of translucent bones.

So it was up to him, the fate of this mission, the planet, and quite possibly the Imperium as well. Again. 

He held down a sigh as power, unlike anything he had felt before flooded through his body. It was one part terrifying and one part relieving.

His father stood behind him. Or what was left of him did so, anyway. The memory of meeting him still weighed on his mind and would continue to do so until the day he died.

He felt a tiny fraction of that brilliant golden light suffuse his body, sink into his sword, and make the flames coating it flare up.

He took a step. He was before the beast, almost too fast to comprehend even for him. It didn’t matter, his arm was already swinging the sword and just a moment later it cut into the beast.

His body moved faster than his mind, but the light and thousands of years of experience guided it where his mind could not.

He dodged a strike and struck out. An arm fell limp. He struck thin air and felt psychic power dissolve around him.

He squinted, tracking dozens of barely visible bolts of power rushing at him.

His power flared for an instant, gone before even his eyes saw more than a mirage. Along with it went the psychic barrage.

He launched himself at the beast. He could feel his body straining from the power surging through it, he only had seconds, a minute at most before it failed him.

The beast had to die by then.

*****

If I had an eyebrow still, it would have twitched in annoyance as I watched Guilliman battle the Emissary.

The beast held out, for now. I doubted it would survive the next minute if things continued as they were.

Well, fuck you too fate. I grumbled internally. Guilliman stole any chance of this fight being interesting.

I turned my attention toward the towering psychic shield, though I might as well call it a fortress. An idea formed in my mind. If he stole my fight, I’ll steal his spotlight.

While we are at it … I thought about regenerating my body … but it would be more fun this way.

Psychic power wrapped around my bones, flowing through the translucent matter and linking them back together piece by piece.

Then I stood. Arcs of energy took the place of muscles and telekinesis filled in the gaps. I took a step, then another. My third step in my new bony form almost looked fluid, while by the tenth step, I could strut.

Few saw me, but the few who did were staring. Who wouldn’t? It’s not like you saw a skeleton get up and start walking around every day, even in this galaxy filled with all sorts of bullshit.

Do I count as a Lich? … No, my soul isn’t anchored to a phylactery or anything. I’m still just an eldritch puppeteer. Oh well, they don’t know that … but they don’t know what a Lich is either. 

With how absorbed I was in getting stronger and staying alive so far, the distinct lack of good old entertainment hadn’t touched home yet. There were so many shows, movies, and books saved to be watched/read later on that I never got around to. It really was a shame.

Mephiston didn’t quite gawk, like the trio of Librarians who swung around and aimed various foci at me. Before he could stop them — if he was even going to do that — a trio of basic Smite lightning bolts rushed at me.

I didn’t even raise a hand, just flaring up the energy flowing through my bones. All three touched a translucent barrier just inches away from my bones and exploded against it without doing much. I kept walking; they didn’t even make me stumble.

“Stop that,” I used my trusty Illusion spell to project my voice at them. “It’s annoying.”

I think I saw one of them gulp. Then they collectively glanced at Mephiston, asking for guidance. The man himself merely frowned. Feeling his aura brushing up against mine, I allowed it to linger for a second before brushing it off..

“Get back to work,” he whispered, turning back to the wall. “Will you help us?”

“That is why I’m here,” I huffed, striding up to the wall and placing a palm on it.

The Hive-Mind was unquestionably a master of the biological form, though I would much rather call what it did ‘controlled chaos’ than engineered perfection. The end result was very similar, but I could tell from all the Tyranid templates I had that none of them were really a model made from a blueprint.

It was really a ‘throw shit at walls and see what sticks’ method, cranked up to a thousand and on loop. Each loop optimizing the result just a bit more, which added up to produce spectacular results over the aeons.

Its application of psychic powers was much the same. It was efficient, streamlined, and powerful. Still, it tasted of brute force and little to no creativity behind it. It was ‘good enough’ perfected, weird as that was.

Which meant the entire thing before me was uniform. Every single psychic bio-form that was linked together to create this barrier was using the exact same tried-and-true barrier. It was something impossible for humans. I doubted I could cast the same barrier twice, and I had quite the control over my energy.

That, of course, didn’t mean the barrier was easy to break. I poked and prodded as my aura spread over it and my energy pierced into its weave wherever the tiniest gap was found.

It fluctuated, making it impossible to make out any weak spots, since while I was sure there were some, they popped up and disappeared in nanoseconds before new ones took their place. No human would have noticed them, and I doubted even the most powerful psykers would have been quick enough to do anything, even if they did.

I wasn’t most psykers. A hundred mind-cores watched with rapt attention for any signs of weakness as my aura wrapped around the entirety of the barrier. One second. That’s all it took to find one.

A nail of psychic power pierced before even my enhanced mind could react. The barrier held though it weakened at that segment for a brief instant. Still, I grinned internally as two dozen larger Tyranids shrieked and collapsed into bloody heaps and new ones rushed to take their place.

They probably would have taken up the slack in under a second. I could already feel the new power surging to reinforce the part I just weakened. Unfortunately for them, they were in for a ride.

Over the next ten seconds, another twenty nails pierced into vulnerable gaps, another fifty just a moment too slow to do any damage. Still, twenty made it. Then thirty, then a hundred.

I was honestly floored by how well the Hive-Mind was counteracting my attack, shifting the energy around and doing its best to keep the entire thing running. It wasn’t enough though; it was far from enough.

When the thing was sufficiently weakened and my Librarian peanut gallery was suitably impressed, I let my power flow without holding back. If I still had flesh and skin, the amount of energy surging through my bones would have ripped them to shreds at this moment. 

There were positives to having a body made entirely out of soulbone. Even if the downsides made it impossible to sustain it most of the time. It took an exorbitant quantity of energy to sustain the body and control it. Doing so was only possible without exhausting my reserves much faster than I would have liked because I was currently syphoning even more energy from the Warp than I was spending.

Still, as I opened the floodgates, I dipped into the negatives. Heavily. It was so worth it though.

I didn’t bother with fancy coating, leaving the energy pure as it was and not turning it into flames or lightning. I didn’t use any spells, just letting it flow and blast into the barrier. My old and trusty Eldritch Blast didn’t disappoint.

The barrier cracked with a sound I felt more in my soul than through my ears the moment the burst of power touched its surface. Then the beam continued on and crashed into the densely arranged waves of Tyranids.

It left nothing in its wake as I swung my hand from left to right. Matter, be it organic or not, a simple piece of rock or an apex Tyranid, evaporated. 

I cut off the beam, not willing to feed it more power than needed. I still wanted to have more energy coming out of this fight than I came in with, furthermore, I couldn’t get templates and bio-energy from the carbon dust my Eldritch Blast left in its wake.

I stepped through the widening crack, quickly followed by a bolt of lightning laughing like a maniac and an armour-covered Selene, who fell into step behind me. The swarm was in disarray, only a few of the psychic beasts survived, the backlash of the barrier shattering and their desperate attempts to meld what remained of it would only hold back the rabble for a few more minutes.

I could feel Mephiston follow behind me, his power crashing into the crack and easily overpowering the few beasts. He held it open as his men flooded in, and then he pushed and widened the crack.

Not that I gave him much of my attention. The Norn Queen had the dubious honour of being a target of my focus. With the way Guilliman was demolishing the Emissary, not even ash would remain of that thing once he was done with it.

I had mostly written the Emissary off as a lost cause. I couldn’t even damage the damned thing. Unless I could get my tendrils on the entire corpse or some broken parts … didn’t Guilliman cut off an arm?

A fraction of my mind split off to search for the thing and found it without fuss. What remained of it, at least? A black scorch mark on the grey stone ground. Stellar. Damned stupid overpowered flaming sword. Whatever. I didn’t even want it.

This one won’t get so lucky, though. I grinned at the Norn Queen, hastily shuffling away even as its broken body failed it. I only touched it a tiny bit with the beam, and it was damaged goods even then. It was truly and utterly fucked.

I didn’t give it a chance to do much, if anything. A blink brought me up behind the beast, a blast of telekinesis sent everything other than my target flying, most of them in more chunks than they were a moment before. 

For the sake of dramatics, I opened my skeletal jaw just as a tendril of eldritch flesh phased through my skull and shot out of my mouth like a horrific mockery of a tongue. I could tell the Queen wanted to do something, and while I doubted it would work, I just … sent one of those mental blasts right into the Shadow down in the Warp.

The alien monstrosity shuddered, all of its minions falling into a mindless frenzy as I disrupted their connection to the Hive-Mind. Then my tendril split into a hundred hair-thin threads that wrapped around the towering Norn Queen.

It would have taken minutes, if not hours, to break through its armour and flesh, had it been in top condition. As it was, the white cocoon I wrapped it up in shrunk just a second later, my ‘tongue’ pulling back into my mouth and disappearing into my skull.

I turned around.

Carnage, utter carnage filled the cavern. Alien screeches, mad cackles, and much more echoed in the hall. The Tyranids were broken, their node creatures mostly dead, and with a large contingent of very angry gold and blue marines bearing down on them.

I let my normal Psyker Form rebuild itself around my skeleton as I watched the battle. The barrier was all but gone, mostly a faint mirage that couldn’t hold up against even the weakest of marines crashing into it.

Beyond it, I saw the other battle had come to an end too. Guilliman stared at me, into my empty eye-sockets as he stood above a giant blackened mark with his sword still glowing.

As skin flowed over my newly made muscles and my set of emerald eyes finally popped back into their place, I quirked a smirk. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I won somehow. 

I watched his grip tighten around his sword for a moment, his gaze steely as he stared at me amidst the carnage taking place. Then his sword sputtered. Its light went dim and the flames all but disappeared.

He stared down at his weapon, a measure of shock clear on his face, and my grin widened.

[Notification: A chip of the Emissary’s sword has been collected by one of the insect-drones.]

I let out a giggle at that.

Take that fate. I don’t need a whimsy bitch like you to win, to succeed and to matter.