Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

123 – Experimenting away the Boredom

Deep space was boring, and empty. Even emptier than regular space.

The Necrons hounded us for a bit, but they quickly stopped when we closed in on the fringes of the galaxy. I wasn’t sure how their ships worked, hell, I wasn’t sure how Imperial ships or even a toaster worked, so I couldn’t guess whether they were just happy to have chased us away and let us be, or if they couldn’t actually chase us.

I leant towards the first one, honestly. Though I guessed they would be grumpy enough to chase us for a while still. Oh well, whatever. This left me to twiddle my thumbs while the ship swam through the emptiness.

With extreme reluctance, I added an extra week of thumb-twiddling as we closed in on the Rift. That thing gave me the ick on a thousand different levels and I didn’t want to be within a galactic rock throw of it if I could help myself.

When I stared deeply into the rift with my third eye opened, I found savage grins looking back at me. So no, I was not putting a single toe into that galactic cesspit. There is being confident in my power, and then there is going through that rift. I might as well gift-wrap myself and hop onto Khorne’s lap by that point.

Anyway, that left me with just about nothing to do … The two newcomers were busy acting like they didn’t exist and Val took to drilling Selene on psyker stuff until she dropped from exhaustion. I didn’t even think she could be exhausted in her new body, but that sadistic space elf knew what he was doing.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t even join in since what they were talking about was not a problem for me: channelling energy from my realm. 

To me, that was instinctual and effortless. The energy jumped to fulfil my every wish. Hell, most of the time I had to hold it back instead of worrying about it not moving or acting fast enough. After a few hours of practice, Val decided the best training for me would be fighting, some more fighting, and maybe some combat to spice things up. He also offered up all sorts of restrictions to put on myself to make even regular combat with regular little humans somewhat challenging.

We will see how right he is I guess … I can’t go in and hand wave all the bullshit I’m doing as Psyker stuff in front of the Tau who don’t even know such a thing exists. I’ll have to do things on the down low at the start.

Did I really though? Honestly, no, but being stealthy and acting like a regular human with secret magic powers appealed to the childish part of me … which was a considerably large part.

My Blink certainly increased a bunch more from my own R&D than my training with him, but I couldn’t really have even cast it in the first place without his help, so I wasn’t convinced yet. I’d have to make sure I milked that Eldar dry of all of his Psyker knowledge.

In the end, I decided to play with my space magic. It wasn’t a hard decision. As for which part of it specifically? Well, I still had to make my new Hrud sample usable. As it was now, it blasted everything around me with an intense decay aura, including me. Which was a problem, since counteracting that with my bio-energy took more of it than face-tanking a bolter round and healing my bits back up after it.

The only problem was that the ship was tiny, and I could very easily accidentally decay poor Bob or Zedev into a pile of ash if I wasn’t careful. 

I had some options: expand the ship, make a drone and send it flying away into space to do the experiments, or shelve the experiments until I could do it safely and on a planet.

Could I even do option 2? We were going … fast. Well beyond the speed of light, how long could I keep my connection up with a drone if I left it behind? I could experiment on a second ship, but it would be such a colossal waste of energy if it got turned to ash.

Annoying. What to do? Do I have anything else to play with? 

Actually, I do. There are hundreds of new samples I got from Guilliman and even a few curious ones I nabbed on Baal … like that stupid piece of mummifying moss.

What a vicious little cunt that moss was. Though it wasn’t even really a moss. It looked just like water, but when it felt someone touching it, it pounced and sucked them dry of any moisture. Vicious little thing.

To my delight, Guilliman even had some Catachan flora and fauna samples stowed away on his ship. They were awesome, too. A plant that shot spikes that could mutate struck targets into a new specimen of that plant and an honest to god roper from DnD.

Okay, maybe not exactly, as its tendrils were laced with paralytic toxins and the plant wanted to eat you in the not-fun way. But still. It was a nasty little fucker, and it looked just like some ground-hugging shrub when it was dormant. Perfect for some traps.

There was more stuff, but these two stuck out on my first cursory look through the list.

Fiiiineeee. I’ll play with something else. The Hrud sample can wait.

That brought me back to my two newest toys, namely the Death Ray and the chunk of necrodermis that came with it.

The first would take a lot of time to get to work … but the second. It was a happy little accident that I even managed to get it, but it turned out to be a great consolation prize when I found out it would be a while till I could be shooting particle beams at people.

The chunk of living metal was the size of a human torso, which was both a lot and far too little at the same time.

It was much easier to get to work thankfully. My eldritch instincts took over the wheel the moment I absorbed the first finger-sized bit, and I felt my awareness spread over it instantly.

In that moment I also understood two very important things about it: one, that my bio-energy worked eerily well as a power source for the metal and two, that while I could control the material as if it was my own flesh, I could never replicate it with my powers.

It might be called living metal, but in the end, it was inorganic. I could let my tendrils fiddle with it and gobble them up, but the piece of metal just swam around inside my eldritch gullet without dissolving or being in any way absorbed. In that sense, it was like any other metal.

That torso-sized chunk was all the necrodermis I’d have to experiment with for the foreseeable future.

The Hrud sample forgotten, I delved deeply into exploring the capabilities of the living metal. My extremely lacking understanding of what the material really was probably stunted my efforts, but I still managed to make some fun stuff out of it.

For one, I had enough of the stuff to make a full bodysuit out of it, plus some change. Considering we were going to probably be playing as human mercenaries for the Tau, having a source of strength that they could somewhat understand — a power suit — might be helpful.

Even if I covered my whole body in a five-centimetre thick body armour from the toes to the top of my head, I still had a quarter of the stuff remaining.

Actually, let’s see how much I can improve on a baseline human with just this chunk of necrodermis.

I plopped my soulbone skeleton into a corner and reabsorbed my current avatar into the eldritch mass at its centre before building myself back up, but into a simple human body.

Then I went to work. With my mind-cores taking care of navigation and controlling the gravity engine of the ship, I could fully devote myself to the exercise.

Could I lace my bones with the metal? Change just the skin? Interweave strands of it in between my weak human muscles? Change the skin out for the metal? 

My questions were many and the list only grew the more time I spent thinking about it. Time to answer some of those questions.

First of all, I made a thin sheet-like wall between me and the rest of the ship. I wasn’t too worried about Selene seeing me disassembling and reassembling myself for weeks on end, but it’d be annoying to keep myself clothed during the experiments, and the rest of them didn’t deserve to see me nude.

With that done, I jumped right into the first experiment. Project Bodysuit was on. 

Making the living metal flow over my skin and cover me was done in a matter of seconds. Making the metal move and bend along with my body naturally and without my constant manual manipulation of it was not. It was like I encased myself in a diamond-hard mould. 

Connecting the material up with my nerves proved to be an effort of frustration. It was just incompatible with the human body it seemed, entirely disregarding any bio-electric charges I tried to throw at it.

But bio-energy worked, even if I used just the tiniest amount of it. The necrodermis didn’t need to be controlled on the cellular level, it only had to receive commands in a way it could understand and decipher.

That was the first stump and as the hours flew by and turned into days, I worked on it. Two days later, I had a workable start. I’d managed to compartmentalise the chunk of necrodermis into separate parts that did separate things based on incoming bio-energy.

They were basically mechanical muscles really, as the best I managed was mimicking biological flesh with the living metal and using bio-energy for the bio-electric charge. At least it was almost free. The bio-energy I got from absorbing a single human cell was enough to control a mechanical muscle for a minute.

How the fuck did Ferrus just dunk his arm into this stuff and walked away with two perfectly functional necrodermis arms? Stupid Primarch cheats.

Another day of fiddling later, I had a rudimentary body armour. Every inch of my skin was covered in my newly designed metal muscles, which made me look like someone skinned me, and it might have given Bob a tiny heart attack when I poked my head out.

Anyway! It was just the start. If I could make this prototype suit into something that could withstand some damage, it would be worth it to use it even over my Psyker Form. Why? Because while healing my organic armour took eye-watering amounts of bio-energy, necrodermis re-knit itself for free.

Re-knit, not repair, though. That was important. A slash that cut it in half? Gone in a second, without a trace. A hole blown into it that melted some of the metal into scrap? That’s a problem. Especially since I had such a limited supply of the stuff.

Well, if the stuff was good enough for Necron Overlords, it would be good enough for my cover. Can’t be too greedy.

Another two days went by with me streamlining the muscles, making them more compact and connecting them seamlessly together into a single mesh that looked no different from a bodysuit. That gave me back two-thirds of the metal I used for the initial armour and I went about making use of the leftover.

Coating my bones in the stuff turned out to be easy and barely used up any of the reserves as I made the coating a millimetre thick. Next, I made some extra muscles now under my skin out of the metal, making use of my prior experiments to make them efficient and small.

Even if my bodysuit mostly moved itself, I didn’t want the human body underneath to be too weak. Ligaments and tendons went next, all of them thrown out and replaced by the living metal.

An entire week went by until I was satisfied with the final configuration of my newly empowered muscles and replaced ligaments/tendons. I could still tell there were places to improve upon, but I’d get to those once I had much more mind cores to throw at the problem. 

I’d been doing my R&D mostly with only my main consciousness, though I boosted its speed and multitasking by absorbing a few mind cores into it for the extra processing power.

Getting every single question mechanically answered with perfect precision instantaneously was fun at times, but figuring things out by myself and at my own pace had a charm of its own. Though I would have to keep that sort of thing for when I wasn’t pressed for time.

Now, do I stop here … or, go all in, balls to the wall? I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. Metallic fingers clinked against my metal-covered chin. I probably looked like one of those dress-up dolls in clothing shops if they made them out of gleaming steel. It wasn’t the best look, but it beat the horror-inducing skinned corpse the first prototype had. Not even a question. I still have like three whole damned weeks to kill. I don’t even know what I’d be doing once I’m done with this. Let’s do it.

As for what was the last step? Well, it was quite simple, actually. I wanted to make the bodysuit into subdermal armour. Basically, instead of covering my skin, my skin would cover it.

Just thinking about how to do that without changing my body shape and making myself look like an ogre was sending my mind spinning in circles. It was a challenge that would for sure occupy me until we were back in galactic space, maybe even beyond that.

I got back to work, food, sleep, water, cleaning and every other human need I still did out of habit went right out the window as I worked twenty-four hours a day. The task turned out to be just as challenging as I expected.

Even with all my shrinking and streamlining, the bodysuit was still almost an entire centimetre thick and if that went under my skin, especially on my face … well, I tried and to say it was nightmare fuel would be underselling it.

So most of my time, from then on, was spent making the suit slimmer, thinner and sleeker without giving up any of its strength and durability. Weeks flew by with me barely moving, calculations and ideas warring in my head as I tested out iteration after iteration of the now subdermal armour.

The armour steadily grew thinner as I found more and more effective ways to weave threads of the metal together. I dove into my memories, digging up every memory I had of material physics and sci-fi books using them. 

I shaped the metal into tubes, rolled them up into thicker threads, made crystalline meshes and just about every configuration I could come up with one after the other.

One day, when I opened up my eyes and stared down at my bare skin with a scrutinising gaze, I couldn’t find any bit of my body out of place. Even when I conjured up a mirror and stared at my face like an artist at its creation, searching for any mistakes or spots that gave away a fuckup, I found nothing. 

The body was a perfect replica of the one I designed for my Psyker Form, and yet, I could feel the living metal mesh shifting just under my skin as I moved my arm.

I didn’t celebrate yet. This wasn’t the first time I managed to make an iteration of the subdermal invisible blend in perfectly with my body. The faults of those were quickly made apparent when I actually tested them.

I launched into a well-practised routine. Stretches at first, then a bit of yoga and some bodyweight exercises. Usually, every previous iteration failed to hold up at the first one. Maybe it didn’t let me bend my arm, maybe it fixated my spine in place, or maybe it just restricted my range of movement in some other way.

Which meant I had to be thorough. I bent my body in every conceivable way, so much so that maybe even a contortionist would have grimaced at some of the poses I managed to twist myself into.

When nothing went tits up through all that, I went to the second phase of testing I called ‘does it actually work?’. I mean, if it doesn’t actually empower my now human avatar any or if the subdermal doesn’t actually stop bullets and blaster rounds, what was the point of it all?

To my surprise, it held up to most tests, only faltering when I shot a plasma-bolt right through it.

I hissed in pain, my silly human body insisting that ‘oh-my-god-I’m-so-going-to-die’. I rolled my eyes as the bio-energy surged and repaired the steaming finger-sized hole that’d been blasted right through my heart. Leaving it, and my lungs considerably more roasted and airy than it was healthy.

Silly human body, it’s just a heart.