Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

139 – Big Bad Daemon

“Don’t fault a girl for having a hobby.”

“My problem is that your ‘hobby’ is putting my quest into unnecessary danger by it meaning you are not going about your fights with all the caution they are due,” Trazyn said calmly, not one to rise to anger without due cause.

“If you don’t enjoy whatever you do, you’ll live a sad life Trazyn,” I said unrepentantly. “I just so happen to enjoy annoying people who annoy me. Furthermore, I gave the ‘fight’ all the seriousness it deserved, which was about none.”

“That was a Custodes,” Trazyn provided ever so helpfully, like he was doubting these fleshy orbs I had for visual perception were faulty.

“It was,” I allowed, nodding magnanimously. It also didn’t have a chance at doing anything to me once I was in the air. Custodes didn’t fly, though that bounce he did once I left him there came close.

“Have I entered the ranks of those you wish to annoy to death?”

“Not yet.”

He let out a static gurgle I took for a gruff grunt.

“As long as it doesn’t endanger my quest,” he said after a few more seconds of me dragging his metallic butt through the air. “I can live with your peculiarities.”

“Thank you.” I nodded at the eccentric kleptomaniac, willing myself not to let the dozen remarks at the tip of my tongue actually leave it. I liked Trazyn, after all. I could live with him being a bit of a stick in the mud at times.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked, changing the topic with the grace of a runaway train. “Or rather, wait till our green friends find their way down here?”

“Let’s head to the bottom of the stairs,” he said. “That also just happens to be suitably far away from the Custodes you seemed to have just pissed off.”

“Great idea!” I exclaimed, turning us in the right direction. 

*****

While my other avatar was extremely busy by staring at rocks and watching magma slumber by, the avatar back on the voidship was actually getting some work done. Zedev got his upgrade, which he greeted with a vague note of ‘adequate’.

I rolled my eyes at the memory. The upgraded bits were leagues ahead of the previous one, outfitted with several sub-brains to enhance the cognitive capabilities of his fleshy bits and made to keep itself in the state I’d made it in. Its genes wouldn’t deteriorate, a small cell-factory would slowly work to replace every single bit of his biological bits regularly enough that he’d stop aging entirely, and I even added some general upgrades like greater resistance to fatigue and better eyesight.

It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but Zedev didn’t want groundbreaking. He wanted ‘adequate’ and that’s what I gave him. He was still in love with his own prototype eldar-human hybrid thingy, almost as much as with his mechanical parts and with his dear Omnissiah.

With that done though, I dumped a sample of the bio-matter my mind-cores came up with for the construction of my eventual base on his table and told him to come up with ways to improve upon it. He looked to be a bit upset at the sample, and a quick glimpse into his mind answered why.

In short, he thought I was an idiot. Well, not me, but my mind-cores. He instantly recognised how much finesse I actually had when it came to gene-editing and such and almost burst a blood-vessel in his newly made grey matter at how badly I was apparently utilising it.

Oh, well. He seemed to have come to the conclusion that, since I was so inept, he had to give me the right blueprints to make me utilise my capabilities to their limit. He seemed thrilled at the idea of getting to play with a gene-editor of such high quality.

I’ve been downgraded to a fancy 3d printer in his head. I was miffed by that thought, but alas, he was to be extremely useful if he could actually pull off what he wholeheartedly believed he could. Toaster-loving pile of scrap that he is, he does know his stuff. My mind-cores can only work off of data and knowledge I have, while he probably has centuries more of both to work with.

I had to remind myself I was only technically a few months old.

Next project!

I dumped a bunch of experimental drones down among the Orks. A lot of them got slaughtered before my drones went down and they fucking loved every second of it. So I continued dropping new stuff atop their heads occasionally from then on to keep them on their toes and, more importantly, to keep them entertained. 

Why? Because a bored Ork was just as bad as a bored hyperactive husky locked inside a house. Example: The pillars holding up the floors separating my ship were near indestructible for Orks, which they took as a challenge and threw together a mini gargant to tear it apart. 

Said mini gargant was now beating a whole lot of Orks to mush at the moment, using the torn off pillar as a cudgel.

Anyway, I repaired the pillar and added another asteroid to a nearby system’s outer belt in the form of a spaced mini gargant. I also spent a few hours mind-diving the pair of mek boys who actually built the gargant and realised that their knowledge was still absolutely useless to me.

They threw shit together because it ‘felt right’ or whatnot and when I repeated the motions, all I ended up with was a horrendously silly looking bolter replica that I wouldn’t have been able to sell even as a toy gun. It was held together by glue and hope. 

Which is why I went back to Zedev shortly thereafter.

“So, can you do it?” I asked, arms crossed and one foot tapping on the metal floor.

“Affirmative.” Zedev said, not even glancing at me. “I’ll require the replacement of the ‘sub-brain’ in question.”

“That’s given,” I said. “So?”

“Done.” He said, and a thin white tendril pierced into the fleshy part of his cranium, not a moment later. I very gently examined the sub-brain in question. Watched the neurons firing and then dove right into it through a thin telepathic link I established after I isolated it from the rest of Zedev’s mind.

Inside, I found the most boring thing I could have ever imagined. A library, but the most dreary, soul-killing kind with those old metallic drawers from the 80s filled with files. The shelves reached up to the sky and there were thousands of them.

Okay. Fuck this. I thought after looking at it all for all but a second. Mind-core unit, this is a job for you. Get to copy-pasting. Don’t hurt the rest of his mind under any circumstances.

Soon, white spectres appeared around me by the hundreds. They had my vague shape, the contour was the same, but they were all pure white and faintly translucent with robotic movements and a disturbing lack of anything that could be called a face.

They flickered all over the place, rifling through thousands of pages of recorded knowledge in a second. Nodding to myself in satisfaction, I pulled my main consciousness back into my avatar.

It only took a minute for them to be finished, and I gently disentangled my mind from Zedevs before letting the rest of his mind-reestablish contact with the sub-brain I abused. It only needed a little healing since I’d been careful, but it still suffered maybe a dozen aneurysms and a tiny stroke while I was in there.

“Done, healthy as ever,” I said. “Thanks, see you around.”

Zedev just waved a hand my way, buzzing lightly as his mind no-doubt reviewed the sub-brain, double- or maybe triple checking it for anything wrong that I might have missed. It was rude, but this was Zedev we were talking about. Rudeness was his last remaining personality trait besides his obsessions.

Now go through all that and remove all the fluff for me. I don’t give a shit about ‘proper rituals’ and their dogma. Give me the pure knowledge. I ordered, pushing the priority of that task up to the top. Making a halfway decent biomaterial for my voidships could wait, especially since I was planning to dump that task on Zedev too once he was done with his current one. And once he does them all, I’ll be able to infer some stuff from the results. He might be better at that than me now, but I’m a quick learner, if nothing else.

I was cheating in the ‘learning’ department, of course, but everyone that wasn’t cheating somehow in this galaxy was deader than Horus. As a smart man once said: Always be cheating.

Words to live by, truly.

I was humming, hopping back towards my room with Selene to get back to watching over my other avatar when my instincts screamed at me. I was back in the other avatar with my full focus in an instant, leaving ship-avatar to face-plant in the hallway.

Looking up, I felt an unconscious shiver run down my spine, which almost made me scoff. My body was still far too human to be having instinctual reactions like this. Primal fear and trembling hands were a bit much, weren’t they? I mean, sure, a big fuckoff tear in reality was forming right above me, but come on. Have some spine, fleshy body of mine.

“This complicates things,” Trazyn observed, having taken a few steps back to watch the swirling rupture. I wasn’t sure how much his unliving visual sensors could perceive, nor could I infer much. He could have been either unbothered by it because he knew the danger of it and didn’t care, or because all he saw was a mildly trembling gravitational vortex.

“That it does,” I murmured, using a smidge of bio-energy to forcefully shut down my panic-stricken body’s natural responses to a fucking Greater Deamon trying to materialise atop it. “I don’t think I am paid enough to fight that thing.”

“You can infer its strength just from the distortion?” Trazyn asked, sounding mildly surprised.

“I can see the ugly fuck tearing into the veil from the other side,” I said, a third eye opening up on the middle of my forehead. It was pure white, with neither a pupil nor an iris. “It’s a big one. Whatever’s hiding down here must be pretty important … hmmm, this guy looks a touch familiar.”

“What grade is it?” Trazyn asked, a hand reaching into his robes and flicking through the tesseracts held there.

“It’s a Bloodthirster,” I said, squinting at the thing as it roared and slashed forward. A single clawed fist tore through the veil and grasped the edge of the forming portal. I took it as my cue to step out from underneath the portal lest I got stomped on by the daemon. “Greater Daemon of Khorne, and a pretty nasty looking one. Hmmmm. Where did I see this guy before? Damn it, why do they all have to look so similar?”

“It just so happens that I have something just for this occasion,” Trazyn said, clicking his fingers on a tesseract he held up to eye level. “No need for you to exhaust yourself just yet. Their loss will be painful, but they are just the backup for one of my exhibits.”

“Which one, if I may ask?” I asked, settling in next to the invisible Necron with a thin cloak of concealment of my own forming around me. 

“I officially call it ‘The First War of Armageddon’,” Trazyn said. “Though, the more apt name would be ‘The Death of Angron’ I believe.”

With that said, the tesseract glowed, and I cast a brief glance up at the Salamanders streaming down the wall. They were hurrying now, throwing down ropes and starting to grapple down the last stretch of the way as they quickly set up formations and readied weapons.

The tesseract glowed one last time, and then the light escaped it, bursting forth towards the ground beneath the portal. Three dozen forms a head higher and significantly bulkier than the Salamanders materialised.

They wore unique and massive grey power armour, with runes and various runic Wards glowing across their silvery grey their armaments. Confusion only lasted a few seconds, as the largest one of them looked up and stared at the portal for a single second before shouting.

“DAEMONIC INCURSION IMBOUND. SET UP THE FORMATION!”

The orders continued, and just as the demon’s other hand tore through the veil, a formation was already drawn up on the ground and the bunch were busying themselves by spraying some sort of a holy water on each other.

Grey Knights? I hummed, tilting my head curiously. There were only a little under thirty of them, and while I didn’t doubt their effectiveness against most daemons, this was a Greater Daemon, and a big one at that. I guess I’ll take a bite before they are all eventually annihilated. It’d be a shame to lose out on Emps’ personal geneseed.

I didn’t even fully finish that thought in my head when my golden friend crashed onto the edge of the little island we were on. He took a second to collect himself before he shot off towards the Grey Knights and stopped next to the largest one.

It seemed the big guy wasn’t laser focused on only finding me. Maybe with his help, the gathered group could actually send the Daemon back into the Warp without much trouble even without our help.

“I will provide you some assistance,” said the Custodian. “Afterwards, I will be needing your services for my own mission. Is that agreeable?”

“Yes, honourable custodian,” said the large Grey Knight in a gruff tone. “Might I ask what mission?”

“Capturing and subduing a Xeno Psycher,” the Custodian said, and I had to roll my eyes. “Alive. His Majesty wants her.”

“Understood,” the leader of the Grey Knight squad nodded briskly. “After we banish this daemon, we will be at your service.”

“Maybe I should help the daemon instead,” I mused aloud to Trazyn. My eyes glaring into the Custodian’s skull. He twitched, his helmet swinging around, but being unable to find me by the looks of it.

He probably could have, if I wasn’t standing hundreds of metres away. Those instincts the golden boys had coded and trained into them were something else.

“Mutual annihilation of both sides aside from the Salamanders would be the optimal outcome.” Trazyn nodded, his hands once again flicking through his collection of tesseracts. “We’ll see how the fight goes first, but I agree with assisting the side that would seem to be on the back foot.”

“You could just give me a few Tyranids and I’d solve that issue for you.”

“Not yet,” he huffed. “I only have a single tesseract with Tyranids in it and I’d really rather keep it if it's at all possible. Last resort, as I’d said.”

“Fine.”

“AAAAAAAAAAARGGHHHHH!!!!!” With a mighty roar, the two clawed crimson hands tore at the fabric of reality like it was made of common cloth. Reality gave way before the might of the daemon, a tremble running through it as smaller fissures formed all around the room and vicious, roaring crimson daemons swarmed out from each. Bloodletters and other daemons of Khorne surged forward, their primal fury driving them on as their eyes landed on the gathered marines and the Custodian. “Tremble little men, tremble at his hate and curse your Corpse God for I, Ka’Bandha have come to claim your pathetic skulls!”

The gigantic demon stepped through the gaping wound on reality, obsidian horns, blood red skin, thousands of sharp teeth and a pair of eyes filled with malice and hatred. He towered over even the custodian easily, wielding a titanic axe in one hand while the other sent out a flaming whip towards the Custodian without further ado.

The Custodian stepped aside, then charged, and the Daemon laughed.

“This might be worth making an exhibit out of.” Trazyn noted, and I couldn’t help but agree. The fight that broke out looked quite epic. 

They are so fucked. I thought, watching on curiously as Ka’Bandha sent the custodian rolling through the rocky grounds with a simple kick. Only by piercing his guardian spear into the ground did he manage to stop himself from taking an impromptu magma bath. So that’s where I remembered the daemon from. He was on the first moon of Baal. He was the daemon hellbent on making the sons of Sanguinius suffer at his hand and he was also the daemon who could go toe to toe with the angelic Primarch.

They are so fucked.