68 – Enlightenment

68 – Enlightenment

Life had a way of making seemingly easy tasks much harder than they should be.

In this universe, that was especially true. Fate, destiny or whatever, liked to fuck you over.

Even if I didn't know this before, it would have become perfectly clear when the Swarmlord sprung back into action and swung his one remaining scythe arm at me as I was strutting over to make a meal out of it.

I clicked my tongue, but a playful grin slowly spread across my lips.

An easy meal was appealing to the more human part of me. Of course, it did. Who didn't like free food? At the same time, as I dodged to the side and slashed upwards to meet a claw strike midway, I felt a sudden thrill rise in my chest.

The flavour of victory made the meal even more enjoyable.

Jumping back and twisting around, it dislodged the still roaring poweraxe with a slight groan. The weapon left behind a brutalized wound of gaping flesh but the beast was unperturbed by it.

Just to make sure of my previous idea, I shot that flesh-morphing spell into the wound as I flickered to its other side and lashed out at its armoured thigh.

The back of my neck tingled in alarm and I quickly jumped back, just in time so a Bonesword encased in an alien bluish aura raked the ground where I stood. My Spell fizzled out, having done fuck all as the Swarmlord's DNA was far too stable for my basic tumour growth biomancy to affect it, just like all other Tyranids.

I could feel the power and energy surge through its armoured carapace just like it did in its sword, it was powerful, tyrannical. But so was I.

My sword vibrated as I launched forward like a bullet, cutting the very air apart as I went. Bluish veins spread over my sword and an aura not unlike the Swarmlord's spread over it.

The beast roared, and the air trembled. Waves of furious psychic energy crashed into my mental shields and made them quake.

I grimaced as I felt my outermost mental shield give way, and then the next, but by then I was in front of the beast. My sword shot out, its tip cracking the shimmering carapace of the monster just enough so when I sent a surge of condensed bio-energy through its power-field wasn't strong enough to stop it.

My body twisted to the side, spine contorting as it did, and I gritted my teeth from the burning pain spreading from my back as it sent me flying with a clawed kick.

This thing is fast.

I am a genius of observations; I know.

Even my supernatural reflexes combined with my near precognitive danger-sense combined weren't enough to save me from getting nicked in the back. Well, better than the 'getting torn apart' that would have awaited me had I not added those enhancements to my body.

As my back snapped back into place, the grin on my face widened even further. My armour withstood the attack. What my senses did, was making me go along with the force of its kick, and negate the majority of the damage.

My gaze snapped back to the Swarmlord just as the condensed bio-energy detonated right under its carapace. The beast trembled for a moment as its whole body shook, it stumbled back.

I shot off again, flickering to its side, and lanced my sword into the open wound Dante left on it. Then Psyflame surged off of my palms and spread over the wound, eating at its vitality and fanning the necrotic flames further with it.

My Psyker powers were disgustingly versatile. If I couldn't make tumours with biomancy, why not fuel the sapped Vitality into Psychic flames?

Blood clotted and burned along its wound as the beast lashed out, swinging wildly as the flames tried to spread over its intact armour but failed miserably. Still, the wound burned and soon its insides would, too.

Still, I was a bit stifled as I glanced at Dante's poweraxe. What did it have that my bio-sword lacked? Mine only nicked the beast's armour while the axed slashed it open like it was made of paper.

'The Axe Mortalis' famed artifact of the Blood Angels, forged right after the Heresy ten millennia ago and said to carry the death curse of Sanguinius, it is capable of cutting through ceramite and plasteel like a knife through silk.

Thank you, Dante, for your contribution, I thought as I slipped out of his mind once I had the answers I wanted.

His mind was strong and stable as a fortress, but I found it surprisingly easy to slip inside and just look for some knowledge. Telepathy, very handy when you aren't around weird people.

Turns out a Magos who can hide his thoughts from me was not normal if I could invade the mind of a legend like Dante so effortlessly ... but maybe he just had his defences lowered as he seems to be a bit out of it at the moment.

A tick echoed in my mind, signifying that the first second since I started the fight had passed. Enhanced cognition and superhuman speed made my sense of time a bit wobbly, which wasn't helped by my soul continually providing the wrong answer, as it had an entirely unique sense of the passing of time.

What is it then? Is my sword shit? Or does it not having the 'esoteric' aspect matter that much?

It was probably a combination of both, my sword was an amateurishly miniaturized Bonesword taken from a Hive Tyrant. I was essentially using a weapon it already optimized its armour against over aeons of evolution if I was guessing right.

I let go of the sword and wrapped my fingers around Atiesh. Was it childish to want to fight a giant monster with a sword and space magic? Yes! Did I regret it? No!

Still, it was time to take this a bit more seriously.

TK grabbed hold of the falling sword and I had it zipping through the air.

I flickered left and the sword flew right, angling so the beast had to look out for it, impaling itself into its injury.

The Swarmlord was fast, but I could be much faster. Soul energy and bio-energy surged through my body. Even my Aeldari eyes and senses started going slightly wobbly at my new speed, but once I let a trickle of the two energies into those too, they caught up.

I could feel my bones radiate with power and in my arms I could see their glow through my skin, just like Atiesh as it too glowed a brilliant white but a moment later its form got lost, light getting refracted off of its aura even before it touched the staff itself. Maybe I look like that too?

That was it.

My knowledge, which would give me a substantial edge in the near future, would come to an end in at most two hundred years.

I needed a foundation, something more than having big and mean fists by then to back me up. My childish plan to make a sci-fi empire became all the more appealing.

"I need to milk all opportunities I can first," I frowned. "I need samples, it'd take me thousands of years to collect every useful thing around the galaxy."

"I also need allies..." I grimaced at the word, this was a wide galaxy with trillions of people in it but if I had to guess 99.99% of them would tried to kill me on sight if they knew what I was. Be it arrogance, fear, xenophobia, threat removal or something similar. Every faction was a flavour of evil degenerate and I was so damn lucky to stumble upon a diamond in the rough like Selene.

Xenophobia was the norm with humans, those who even talked to Xenos would be considered Radical if they were high-ranking officials and heretics if they were not.

Eldar were just ... idiotic, obnoxiously arrogant, stubborn, annoying, dumb.

Orks were Orks.

The chaos guys were out on the principle of being stinky Warp fuckers.

Tyranids....yeah.

That left the Necrons and the Tau out of the major factions.

No matter how much I could just spread my drones and just make life, it wasn't viable. I'd need to eat star systems to come even close to producing the population of even a smaller faction.

I needed somewhere to start.

The Tau were the obvious choice; they were already close to my ideal faction and they were very weak to Psychic manipulation and other esoteric tricks.

Necrons ... A shiver ran down my spine as I remembered how getting ripped apart — atom-by-atom — felt. I might have developed a slight phobia.

Those considerations should only matter in the future.

A part of me still felt weirded out that I was planning centuries ahead and a rational part of me noted that I barely survived a few months so planning years ahead was a waste of resources when I could die tomorrow if I wasn't careful or even if I was.

Death.

Could I even truly die?

Nothing ever so much as scratched my soul and it wasn't dissipating like every other soul did after death. Their souls were much different from mine, they had their souls at the centre of their mindscapes like a black-box, halfway between realspace and the Warp, leaving only an imprint in the true Immaterium but I had my entire soul in it.

I wasn't human anymore. I wasn't even a mortal.

Perpetual, Immortal, a Spirit maybe? The last one sounded the best, to be honest, and the least obnoxious.

I wasn't Immortal and Perpetuals died all the damned time. I knew that if someone destroyed my soul, I would die. But could anyone actually accomplish that? Separated from the Warp as it was? Would it last even? What if it could regenerate like my body now? I knew so very little about what I actually was that it was maddening.

My soul was stronger, but this was beyond strong. It was different. But why? How?

And then came my biggest concern; Was Fate real here? Was Destiny something I could change or was it something written already by authors back on MY Earth? Was that all even real? Was my previous life just a delusion and a sign of my mind fracturing from the madness of this universe?

Do I matter at all?

'[Ping] — Get off of the sample.'

I was snapped out of my brooding by a mental ping coming from one of my Mind-Cores. I began organizing them into hierarchies, and this one was in charge of the 'Eldritch section' that handled everything related to my unusual white tendrils, from creating and modifying Templates to absorbing and assimilating, just like it was doing at the moment.

I jumped off of the arm and after a second; it caved inwards and disappeared into a snake-like tendril which crawled over to me and slipped through my skin, dissolving into bio-energy as it passed on all the carrier information.

' [Ping] — Estimated time for full Template reconstruction: 67days (at current computation capabilities)'

I ignored their whining for more brainpower. All of them were doing it and I was already at the maximum I could physically shove into my body.

I might need to resort to Psychic enhancement at this rate, maybe even making parallel minds with Telepathy ... but I don't want to make another me. Far too many novels had their protagonist do something stupid like that.

My Mind-Cores were biological computers and not replicas of my mind. They had all my knowledge and information, but they were static, predictable, and controllable.

In contrast, Telepathy — and anything to do with the Immaterium really — was unpredictable and uncontrollable, it largely followed what I wanted it to do but who knew whether it'd decide to fuck with me when it came to it. My mind was the most important part of my being, the centre of it. And my biggest weakness.

My chest expanded as I took a deep, calming breath.

"I am making a change," I reaffirmed to myself.

"I can change it. I am going to matter."