21 – Patriarch

21 – PatriarchI reached the damp hall without a problem, my form was made to be an infiltrator. It was forged, tested, and reforged for millions of years in wars all over the universe. It was the epitome of forced and guided evolution, not many things could get better than this form. I wasn't delusional enough to think it was the best, I could already add things that would make it better, giving it more versatility or power. The hivemind didn't want it to be the best it could be, it wanted an economical tool that could fulfill its purpose to a satisfactory level and that was the Lictor. It was a baseline, a balance between cost and return at the most primal level. The hall had around a hundred of the lesser gene stealers walking or crawling around, each had a task and a mission at hand, and none of them ambled around pointlessly. I'd thought about removing the chaff before striking but that'd take away the element of surprise, I couldn't kill them quickly enough and telepathically knocking them out would be more than enough to alert the patriarch. The only option left was to distract them, not that I was overly worried about them interfering. From what I saw they barely had any weapons capable of hurting my armored shell and avoiding a melta wasn't too much trouble if I stayed alert and didn't let any of them sneak up on me. My distraction had to look like it was natural, I shouldn't let them know they were under attack until their leader is dead. Tendrils of soul energy extended from my body, questing through tunnels as my mind searched for easy-to-collapse parts. I'd practiced this for a bit, making sure the energy threads didn't get tangled up in the web of warp energy was challenging. A challenge that I welcomed wholeheartedly as it was a great way to train my control. Three of them found what they were searching for, that'd have to do. I pulled back the rest of the tethers as the lucky three got to work. The ferrocrete was archaic, I didn't know how they made the stuff but I was sure it was older than most nations back on Earth and that it still gave me a bit of trouble when I tried to burn through it with pyrokinesis and pull it apart with telekinesis spoke of the genius of the old humans. If I remembered right ferrocrete was a material based on a damaged STC like many of the technologies in the imperium that were actually useful. Humans from the Dark Age of Technology as they called it were geniuses and mastered science to levels unimaginable to me even now. I suspected Chaos fuckery in the uprising of their AIs if I'm being honest, people that could conquer most of the galaxy had to have innumerable safeguards and control programs in their AIs. Skynet and stuff like that didn't happen when even a single programmer involved knew what they were doing. Things like the Destroyer Virus which was somehow a mix of a biological plague and a computer virus existed and I couldn't even begin to figure out how. The Warp was weird and fucked with my common sense and the laws of the universe I learned of. Three tunnels collapsed one after the other, heads snapped into their directions, and with the patriarch having to move a finger they went out to investigate. Alert and careful but not suspecting an attack yet. Only half left, the rest from the outside would probably handle most of the clearing work, it wouldn't get much better than this no matter how much I waited. Psychic attacks were off the table for the ambush, I didn't know how good it was at sensing or defending against those, and so was a brute force attack, the thing was bulky and I knew it was stronger than me. The scythe-like limbs on my arm were ready, coiled like a spring and awaiting release. I leapt soundlessly, soaring through the air and in a fraction of a second I was descending on the patriarch. I sensed something, I didn't know how but it looked around, alert and its gaze searched the dark hall without finding anything. I let the limbs go and they flew through the air faster than a bullet, one cut into its torso where its armor parted between it and its upper right arm while the other aimed to decapacitate it. The scythe cut deeply into its neck, tearing into its flesh under the thick chitinous shell but the patriarch barely reacted to the pain. Four clawed arms moved, elbows bending like no human elbow could, to strike at me as I stood behind it. I used my two arms, similar to its four to deflect the attacks as my scythes still buried deep into its body burst into a brilliant white fire, finally making the creature screech out in pain as its organs and flesh were incinerated. Tyranids were made of harder stuff than humans though, I could only protect myself for a few short moments before one strike caught me on the chest, cracking my shell and launching me back a few meters. My jagged scythes ravaged its body on their way out and it was still burning as it turned to glare at me hatefully. The hall flickered like the burning patriarch was the candle bringing light into the dark room. My shell mended itself even before I landed and I reactivated my camouflage soon after, the patriarch stared around warily and I felt it move around a sort of psychic field. So that's how it noticed me. Unlike me, it didn't use tethers but it dispersed Warp energy into its surroundings. It wasn't connected to it all at once, it was beautiful in a way, it stood at the center and I now noticed infinitesimal bursts of energy go off wherever the field touched something. It was like a brain, with neurons firing and the bio-electricity leaping between the cells to reach its final destination. In this case, the patriarch. Let's see how fast it is, an Eldritch Blast snapped out of my clawed finger, blasting straight through the field and scrapping one of its limbs as it turned it tried to pull its bulky body out of the way. Its claws raked through the air and ferrocrete a dozen meters away from its previous position but I was gone by then. It growled and I felt psychic messages shoot through the web of the brood mind, I tapped into one of the nearby genestealers and heard the message. *Gather and assist* I'd have liked to play with it, test and revise until one of my attacks got good enough to tear right through its shell but that wasn't to be, I didn't fear the chaff too much but getting dogpiled would be a pain. I blasted Eldritch Blasts at the patriarch, putting it on the back foot for a brief moment as it defended itself. I used that brief window of opportunity to blast in with twin beams of white-hot flames, its field burned as the being was coated in a cloak of fire and death. I depended on its sight to be taken for the moment as I dashed behind it and lashed out with all four of my arms as significant amounts of soul energy bled into keeping the brutish monstrosity in place. It couldn't dodge, I didn't know if it was the Blasts, the Flames, or the Telekinesis but my scythe tore into it. Citing broke and my scythe chipped as the thick shell was forced open by my brute strength, clawed fingers dug into its limb sockets and tore the joints apart while my last scythe smashed into the back of its head. Its bulbous brain-like head didn't have the armor the rest of its body had and my scythe brutalized it beyond recognition. The body slumped and fell onto the ground with a thud. The gene-stealers screeched and for the first time my mind registered them, my hyper-focus on my enemy gone and the non-threat chaff once again had my attention. An errant thought stream merged with the main one and I knew five of them had melta guns and three had melta grenades, each being far away from me at the moment as even if I wasn't fully conscious of it mid-fight I knew where they were and avoided them. Playing with food is bad, I thought with a sense of dark amusement as my Lictor form exploded into a mass of tentacles, I flowed through the room, my flesh filling it up as I turned biomatter into energy, uncaring whether it was dead or alive. Three explosions went off and a few bursts of plasma smashed into me, all they did was cost me some energy. Energy, that was more than recovered when I reached the ones that were behind the annoying attacks. I was like the sea at first, flowing over the floor in a mass of twisting white tentacles but a few of them started crawling onto the walls and running into the tunnels. How cute, they thought if there were more of the it'd make a difference. Previously I flowed slowly like a tsunami but now I exploded for real, my energy stores burned but held as my hundreds of limbs traveled through the many tunnels like a shockwave. The inorganic matter got eaten through and spat out to make way for the organic beneath it as each and every genestealer met its end. When I sensed the last die I stopped, my now more than a thousand tendrils stopping like time was frozen, then like the clock was ticking backwards they retreated. Now, slowly, economically. All the energy that could be had was already absorbed, no need to waste energy to make moving faster. Still, it only took fifteen seconds for all the tendrils to return and coalesce into my human form once again. The expended energy was more than worth it, information, genetic templates and more than enough energy has been assimilated to make all that trouble worth it. My senses searched for the oh-so-slowly closing in constellation of souls. Around three or four more days.