AN: I accidentally set the chapter release to 6 AM instead of 6 PM. Oh well. Have an early chapter, I guess.
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I launched about a dozen decoy ships, just gravity engines stuck into the least expensive shell I could make, and then sent them off on random courses through the stars. I was pretty sure the Necrons used the gravitational ripples caused by my FTL engines upon the fabric of spacetime to track me, because I had cloaked every other form of energy radiation or exhaust.
This wasn’t a solution, but it was a good stopgap measure that would obstruct their attempts to track me. Just to be safe, I would make the final stretch back to my own holdings with a teleport to leave no traceable trail behind. The last thing I wanted was for the Necrons to figure out where to attack, so as to truly hurt me. They were certainly petty enough to glass Vallia and its moons into lifeless chunks of rock for what I’d done to them.
A part of me wanted to go ‘fuck it’ and club the Hollow Sun out of existence with my pocket planet, but what if that teleporting Cryptek that shot me could escape the Crownworld before it gets destroyed? Then I would have a vengeful Necron Cryptek on the loose, with enough firepower to kill me, the ability to teleport around somehow, and chronomancy on top of everything. That time-slowing effect I got hit with could have been nothing else.
Fucking chronomancy, that’s how he knew. I fumed inwardly, Necron Cryptek disciplines were such dirty cheats. Didn’t those egotistical tin cans know only I was allowed to cheat? Humph. It should be unreliable. I remember Orikan bitching and moaning about his astromantic predictions getting all messed up by Warp interference. I should be resistant to attempts to divine me through Necron chronomancy or astromancy. Resistant, but not borderline immune like I am to Warp-based divination. Bummer.
I was running. No, it was a retreat, a tactical one at that … though hardly a perfect one considering I’d fucked up my primary objective before doing so. The Suhbekhar should have been thrown into chaos, devolving into chaos as lesser Overlords fought over the succession for the worthless Regent title. Instead, I had a pissed-off and extremely vengeful Regent who was supported by some super Cryptek that popped out of the Devil’s asshole or something. Seriously, chronomancy, teleportation and that huge entropic cannon? What the fuck. How was that fair? If that fucker had a tabletop model, nerds all over the world would be rioting about the tabletop game’s balance being fucked.
I had to wait. I’d managed to fool them once, but I doubted I’d find the Regent with his pants down like that ever again, and that chronomancer was sure to be preparing to prevent another assassination attempt.
Actually, the Regent might just throw a paranoid fit and keep the chronomancer from acting freely, instead keeping him close at hand, acting as a bodyguard. It wouldn’t surprise me, based on what I knew of Necrons. But I couldn’t rely on that assumption. I had to assume the Cryptek would try to hunt me down sooner, rather than later.
That was a troubling thought. I had to set up sensors everywhere and attempt to tune them to whatever exotic energy Necrons use to teleport around-
Actually, could he even teleport around freely? What the heck was that rift he came through, even? Was it limited to the Crownworld? Maybe it was some version of the Dimensional Destabilisation Matrix Deathmarks used? Fuck me, I didn’t know.
Which was super annoying because the lack of data meant that any combat simulations I could run in the back of my mind to better prepare would end up unreliable and an utter waste of my processing power. Same with simulations, trying to come up with countermeasures to that fucking cannon. I knew too little. I needed to analyse everything I knew first, and even then, having seen it twice and having seen it fire only once, I doubted that any conclusion or predictive model I made would be worth anything. What could I do then? I wasn’t going to just twiddle my thumbs and wait for the Necrons to bend me over and fuck me in the ass. Metaphorically. Only Selene was allowed to do that.
I’m going to flood every world I control with cheap stealth drones and remake them into spy and surveillance drones. I also need to build in countermeasures against mind-shackle scarabs for my cuties on Vallia Prime. It wouldn’t do for any of my daughters to get mind-controlled and made to spill all my secrets to that metallic twat.
For a moment, I considered trying to game the system and making use of Cain’s plot armour. Would my assassination attempt have succeeded if I had him tag along as a good luck charm? I still haven’t gotten around to truly testing plot armour. I had Cain around, but I didn’t want to kill him just to see whether something supremely improbable saved his life. He was my guest, and I kinda-sorta didn’t hate him, so he was firmly on the no-kill list.
I wish I had Erebus on hand, that fucker has the thickest fucking plot armour out of anyone in the Horus Heresy series and for no goddamn reason! The Chaos Gods don’t even like him that much, so it’s not their fat fingers pushing down on the scales of Fate either.
It didn’t matter. Considering his luck, Erebus was probably on the other side of the Galaxy or hiding away in the depths of the Eye. The nearest plot armour wearing twat to me was Titus, but Guilliman would probably be cross with me if I murderized his favourite blueberry just to test a theory that probably seemed like lunacy to anyone but me. Hmmm.
So yeah. Back to the topic. Going nuclear and turning the Hollow Sun into a proper sun by fucking it up somehow was out of the question. At least this way, I knew where to find my enemies. If they went to ground, hiding in some slumbering Tomb World and staging assassination attempts on me every so often while they gathered information about me, learning how to exact revenge on me … yeah. It was better to leave the Hollow Sun intact. Doubly so because I still wanted it, and triply so because Trazyn was already off to Gheden trying to convince them to ally with me. He was using the Hollow Sun as the lure, the massive carrot to get the greedy Necrons’ greed working for us.
If I fucked that up? What then? ‘Teehee, I blew up the super-duper Crownworld we wanted to conquer. Oopsie, sovvie?’
Yeah, I’d just add another Dynasty to the list of enemies wanting to murder the shit out of me.
I tapped the Warp as we travelled, keeping the soul-tendrils slurping up energy to purify and absorb to replenish my reserves, thin and few in number. Daemons still tried to invade through them, but the tunnels were tighter, the connection thinner, and when more than one Greater Daemon tried to barge through the tendrils, all but shattered by themselves when I stopped infusing them with my will. It was a minimum effort endeavour that was supposed to maximise ‘profit’ over a longer timespan, and it certainly worked, though an enterprising Lord of Change almost managed to use the tendril to teleport straight into my Realm. He got swatted out of existence a moment later; home turf advantage was a bitch like that, but yeah, it wasn’t entirely risk-free. Still, I needed soul energy.
I even stumbled upon three Splinter Fleets I’d missed on my way towards the Slinnar Drift, which proved to be a nice snack. With that, what bio-energy I’d spent on my invasion of the Crownworld was back again, and then some. On that note, Neurothropes were wonderful. They could suck up life force to fill themselves with warp energy, and then I could slurp that up from them. It was a much slower process than even my minimum effort Warp-tap, but I could theoretically do it with thousands of Neurothropes at once.
I couldn’t yet; I had to stand there and stick my hand into the Neurothrope to grab hold of the psychic energy they had primed and ready to throw at someone. It was annoying, but I knew I could figure it out in time … maybe I could give myself an organ that could siphon life force over a wide area around my body? I had to somehow miniaturise a Neurothrope, a floating brain about ten times the mass of my Avatar. It wouldn’t be easy; the Tyranids optimised their builds pretty well, but I could do it. I would do it.
Maybe wings? Could I put on a pair of neat black-feathered fallen angel wings and stuff the extra organs inside? Make the whites of my eyes black, and the theme would be complete. Hmmm. I like it. Maybe.
“Selene!” I shouted, making my beautiful lover look up from the book she was reading on a datapad. With a flick of my fingers, a quick-and-dirty illusion of what I would look like once I was done with the ‘fallen angel’ makeover covered my body. I, of course, kept the Eldar ears. I knew she loved them, or more specifically — I suspected — loved hearing the noises I made when she was licking them. “Yay or nay?”
She licked her lips, narrowed her eyes, then gave me a decisive nod before promptly returning her attention to her datapad. Well, that's decided! Even if it turned out to be suboptimal, I was giving a ‘fallen angel’ makeover to my Avatar. The feathers on the wings could be something neat, too, maybe Whitestone? Hmm. The extra soulbone in the wings would also be good for the soul energy throughput of my Avatar. Improvements all around!
While a part of me was brainstorming about that, and a bunch of my mind-cores were assisting that primary thoughtstream with their processing power, I also had to practice. The way I was controlling my Avatar was suboptimal, and I needed to get better. When that chronomancer hit me with the basic bitch ‘Slow’ spell, even the electric signals in my nervous system slowed to a crawl; heck, even my neurons fired slower. I already had an idea: self-Biomancy. I would learn to puppeteer my body directly with my soul, not through simple possession or whatever, but through direct micro-level control of my Avatar’s biology.
Only when needed, because it was straining as shit, but I needed to be able to do it. By default, my consciousness kinda-sorta anchored itself to the Avatar’s brain and acted as if my mind was its mind. Its grey matter boosted my mental processing power, and the body reacted to my thoughts and intentions as if it truly was my own. It would have been much better if I had had a chronomancer on hand to train with, but Trazyn had already left Solemnace, and I doubted he would have pulled one out of the freezer just because I asked nicely. The two giving me lectures were part of a deal, after all.
When we reached the Vanir and Freya systems, two ex-Imperial systems that had been razed by the Tyranid advance, I left behind an array of sensor buoys and a pair of cloaked, FTL-capable courier ships. If the sensors detected anything suspicious, the courier ships would set off towards the Iron Halo to notify me.
Then came Castobel, after a series of smaller teleports to confuse any Necron sensors that might have traced a single jump. The Hive World, this fiercely loyalist Imperial world forced to bend the knee to my authority, was the first bulwark against a renewed Tyranid advance, or perhaps even against a Necron counterattack. I wouldn’t have put it beyond a vengeful Regent to order the nearest populated human worlds glassed just because.
They had no reason to think I was human; I had always kept my helmet on, and so had Selene, which had made both of us look Tyranid-esque distinctly. But if they took the time to grab some humans to interrogate them, most of them in the Reach would probably be able to point them in my direction. A lot of people had seen my drones.
On Castobel, I deployed my new surveillance drones. I had a handful of different designs ready for field testing, and what better world was there to put them to work on than the one likely teeming with futile conspiracy theories to murder me? Most of them were just little watchers, looking like flies, spiders, invisible reptiles with ridiculously good sight and hearing, things like that. All of them would periodically return to central cogitators placed inside every Hive City to upload their findings, and those cogitators would be connected to another slew of cloaked ports I’d made in the asteroid fields, filled with small, sneaky but fast courier ships. I would get the occasional report from them, but they could also send up alert flares into the Warp in an emergency.
None of them would act on any information they gathered. They would just watch and tell me everything they saw. The biggest problem was somehow connecting the planetbound cogitators to the hidden spacebound spacestations. I considered making autonomous telepathic networks based on Genestealer Broodminds … but those would be in the warp, and not powered by my argent soul energy. Going with that plan was practically asking for a Daemon to mess with it and subvert the entire thing.
No, it was annoying, but in the end, I had to go with the much lazier option of making a new brand of flyer drones based on Gargoyles. They were the size of crows and were covered in a scaled hide that would spoof all forms of imperial auspex technology I knew about. Courier birds. I was using literal space pigeons to carry messages. At least the Tyranids had many flyer organisms that could operate both in and out of the atmosphere, so I could just steal the basis from those designs for myself and save myself a lot of work.
That also meant I had to go back and put the signal-flare option into the central cogitators, acting like the HQs for my little spies, instead of showing the required additions into my sneaky space stations. Oh well, nobody was going to be looking through the true depths of the Underhives anyway, so it wasn’t like another house-sized mass of pulsating eldritch flesh was going to be noticed anytime soon. After all, what was the point of an early warning system if it relied on a slow-ass courier pigeon? I couldn’t stuff FTL tech into those tiny things, so they’d have to use sublight propulsion and the tiniest ones at that. Reaching even the closest of my sneaky space stations would take weeks for them.
Maybe once I had time to work out a way to build autonomous telepathic networks that still used my anti-Warp soul energy, I could come back and rework the system entirely. I already had ideas on that front that used Whitestone to anchor, maintain and power the thing, but I didn’t want to waste too much time here. I was just passing through.