109 – Training

109 – Training

The following couple of days turned out to be surprisingly calm. OR boring, depending on who you asked.

I spent the large majority of it attempting to beat Valenith black and blue while limiting my power output to the same level he was at. Emphasis on ‘attempting’.

The newly ‘ascended’ Eldar might have some of his screws a bit looser than before, but he was by no means worse for it. Maybe a bit of madness was what pushed him to even greater heights.

I admit I’d thought he was a bit of a one-trick pony throwing devastating lightning bolts out of the sky like some budget store Zeus, but he showed me during our first spar that he could do far more than that. He just preferred the lightning because it was long-range, blindingly fast, and absolutely devastating.

He unveiled more and more tricks as I pushed him further and further. Whenever I came up with a counter to one of his tricks, he pulled a new one out of his ass and beat me into the dirt with it.

Case in point: Right fucking now.

“Another miss,” he intoned gleefully, his voice echoing in the wasteland for a hundred mouths curving into a smirk. “Where am I? Find me! Find me!”

There were hundreds of him, each damned clone a tangible illusion that somehow radiated the exact same aura as all the rest. If I didn’t know only one was real, I would have thought he’d split his soul among them.

They had the same scent, same pattern of movement, same weight, same everything.

He was teaching me, in his own weird way. I’d told him I sort of messed up my infiltration because my Illusions couldn’t hold up to the scrutiny of the Imperium’s elite. Ever since then, he’d been using more and more elaborate illusions in our spars and making me figure out what he was doing.

The back of my neck tingled and my arm snapped out before my mind could catch up with it. Power coated it and my palm slapped away a bolt of devastation, sending it out into the distance where it carved a twenty metre long gash into the ground.

That was one of his ‘quick bolts’ as he called them. Low power, maximum speed. Not that even an Astartes could walk one of these off if it caught them in the chest. Every miss on my part would result in him trying to zap me with one of those bad boys.

Now, if I didn’t limit myself to only using the same amount of power as him, I would probably send a blast of energy in all directions and see what happened. Or split myself into a hundred drones and bet each one up one on one.

There were other options too, especially since Guilliman thankfully kept up his part of the bargain and I had another fifty exotic templates in my arsenal. Some were still being ‘digested’, but there was a frog thing from Catachan that tended to explode when scared with enough power to make nuclear warheads blush. That one was the first I rushed to complete. So I had nukes now.

Doing any of that would be admitting defeat though, showing I was incapable of outsmarting Valenith. Nope. I’d rather spend the next day here getting zapped while my mind cores worked on a solution.

That was another problem I only recently found out. The mind cores tended to be rather uncreative, leaving the innovation part of most things to me. They could take scraps of ideas and turn them into diamonds, but I had to provide the scraps. That was both comforting to know and an annoying limitation.

So, how does one find the single real slippery Eldar in a crowd of fakes?

“Time is ticking, Mistress.” He was basically purring now, what the hell? And who are you calling Mistress? ... though it has a nice chime to it ... hmmm.

A tiny mental zap from the mind core dedicated to keeping my wandering thoughts aimed at my goal rushed through my brain. Right. Focus.

Every clone made the same sounds as they moved, each breathed in the same pattern, each had the same heartbeat, same scent, same fucking everything. Even opening my third eye proved useless since Val’s immaterial soul was locked in space inside my forest realm.

Out in realspace though? It was as if his soul was really split into a hundred equal parts, even though I knew that should be impossible. Well, not impossible, but doing so tended to fracture the psyche irreparably and was the worst form of torturous agony imaginable.

So he was faking it, somehow. That was what I had to figure out, there had to be a tell, some inconsistency between the fakes and the real deal.

He probably only split the soul energy held in his body among the clones, not his actual soul. Hmmm, the split energy would be then used up to maintain both the illusions and the fake aura thing.

I slapped away another impatient bolt and ignored the grumbling space elf.

I needed that damned farm that would replenish the bio-energy I needed and I also had to find a way to replenish my soul energy without opening a damned gateway between literal hell and my soul — that can’t be healthy.

With four psykers constantly draining my puddle, it was noticeably dimming. It would hold for a few years at the pace it was losing density, but I wanted it as robust as possible.

Finally, finally, one spell struck home. It found the end of the current and ... disappeared from my senses. Hmmmm.

I squinted. I held a faint connection to it even after it disappeared for a few moments. Then it was gone for good. What sort of tomfoolery is this?

Another one dimmed, but this time I latched onto the connection and strengthened the spell with as much energy as I should be reasonably able to draw on after two minutes of resting.

It held for three seconds this time. Not a total waste, though. I had an idea of what he was doing. Damned cheat. That’s why I couldn’t find his main body among the horde of clones: It wasn’t even here.

I don’t know if he somehow made a tiny pocket space or is just on the other side of the planet ... I frowned. My third eye popped open, and I let it take in Baal. Guilliman, Mephiston, Dante, and the Farseer were hard to miss, and Val should have been the same, but there was no trace of his soul.

Pocket space it was.

The problem was, I couldn’t make them and had only the faintest idea of how they worked. It was ancient Aeldari bullshit and Val said it needed a delicate touch and a clear mind. By which he clearly meant I should ‘get good’ before asking for that sort of stuff again.

How do I crack open that dimensional egg he probably hid himself in? And where is it even? Shouldn’t a damned spatial distortion be apparent in my aura when I felt even the ripples a Warp-Jump made?

There were no easy answers forthcoming. My aura was spread over all the clones, but there was no sign of as much as a ripple in space, not even a tiny bump. Obviously, he wouldn’t place his hidey hole in the place where he knew we would be fighting.

If our roles were switched, I would be commanding those clones from one of the damned moons. With my aura reaching a kilometre in radius when I pushed it to the limit, I had no hope of finding him without tracking the energy back to him.

Time ticked. Spell after spell disappeared and I tried to follow them to no avail. He was using some sort of microscopic portals to channel his energy anchored to the clones I assumed, though they were so stable and flawless that I couldn’t sense them with my aura.

Another shortfall that would need to be fixed. The damned list was ever-growing.

Then the last active spell disappeared, and a moment later, my connection to it snapped. Based on the rules, I was out of energy. With all my spells gone ... I had lost. Again. Damn it.

A portal opened up before me, and the annoying Eldar strode out of it.

“That was great progress, Mistress.” He grinned easily, no sign of his usual unbearably arrogant smirk. “I believe you might win our next bout.”

“How did you do that?” I asked with a frown. “The thing where the clones mimicked your aura?”

The mystery of why I couldn’t feel his real soul beneath seemed to be that it just wasn’t here, but the aura mimicry could be handy.

“It is a complicated technique,” he shrugged. “Though one needs to perfectly understand their own aura and sink into its depths to even have a chance of doing so. This takes centuries of targeted meditation for the Aeldari to accomplish, though I’m certain you will manage in a few decades.”

“Right,” I sighed. “Well, I guess that’s it for today.”

“It indeed is,” he nodded. “Same time tomorrow?”

“I suppose,” I said. “Good night, Val.”

“To you too, Mistress.”