151 – Excursion: Over

151 – Excursion: Over

“Nope,” I said with feeling, appearing before the other Psyker girl and flicking her forehead. Bio-energy surged into her body, tearing apart whatever sludge had been pumped into her bloodstream before my psychic grasp slipped in between the girl’s mind and the weird metallic hood thingy she had around her head.

That’s some nasty archeotech ... a Psychic Hood. Aren’t those supposed to help the Psyker and protect them from mental attacks?

Well, this one was clearly custom made for doing the polar opposite. I had a ... less than a kind impression of this violet-eyed Psyker thanks to Mara’s fragmented memories that I’d viewed, but now that I took a moment to really look at her ... she really was just another victim.

I can figure out how willing of a victim she was. I decided, but knowing the Imperium fed any psyker who wasn’t receptive to their indoctrination and brainwashing to the Golden Throne, I didn’t hold out much hope. Still, the girl needs to be both alive and not brain dead for me to do that.

Why did I give this girl a second chance that I’d denied the stormtroopers, you ask? Well, she hadn’t attacked me yet, and even if she was going to do so had I not intervened, it was very clearly not of her own free will.

Now, if she — mind-fucked and likely brainwashed as she was — did the same while I was fighting someone like Mephiston, Guilliman or Ka’Bandha, I would have blasted her into smithereens without a second thought. There would have been no time for even a heartbeat of hesitation in fights like those, but the good Inquisitor frozen mid-air was about as much of a danger to me as an ant.

Meaning, I had enough leeway to be merciful.

Slowly, ever so gently so as not to crack open the girl’s mind like an egg, I pried the weird Psychic Hood off of her head while I protected her fragile mind in the interim from any blowback.

Once I had it off, I smashed up the scrap metal into a ball with a Telekinetic grasp and then chucked it over my shoulder, making it bounce off of the Inquisitor’s head.

My Orkish peanut gallery burst out in cackles at that, but I shushed them with a wave as I watched the Psyker girl come back to herself.

“Hmmmm,” I rubbed my chin thoughtfully as I leaned down to be eye-level with the collapsed girl sitting on her butt. She stared at me, dazed violet eyes wide in awe and horror in equal measure. She had really gorgeous eyes like swirling nebulas, those were the kind of eyes I could get lost in for hours ... alas, I was already taken. Still, I could appreciate beauty even then. “Zara, was it? I’m afraid you were only ever referred to as ‘that purple-eyed whore’ in little Mara’s memories.”

“H-how-“ she croaked, then coughed and swallowed to wet her dry and abused throat. “You know my name?”

“Some cursory surface level mind reading,” I said, smiling cheerily and ignoring the pale-faced horror etching itself across her angular features. Telepathy usually didn’t work like that, requiring extreme focus and targeted, heavy-handed mind-probes. The fact I had plucked her name out of her thoughts without much effort or her noticing terrified the little telepath. “Don’t worry, I didn’t look further. I think we can have a nice conversation later to clear everything up, no need for me to dig around in your mind, right?”

“Y-yeah?” Zara asked, not daring to move while held in my gaze and I could feel her fear as a physical sensation washing across my skin.

Unlike with Thrace’s though, I was decidedly not enjoying this rush of feelings surging through my passive Empathy.

“No worries.” I patted her fuzzy head, flicking her loosely braided light brown hair off her shoulder. “If you answer truthfully, and I don’t find you as repulsive as that shitstain in human form behind me, no harm will come to you ... from me anyway. For now sit tight, I have an Inquisitor to ‘fight’.”

Her hands snapped up to her neck, then to her head the moment I took my eyes off of her, and I saw the woman’s stoic countenance crumble to dust as a sob reverberated through her body.

“You have a skill for making women cry, Inquisitor.” I knocked on the back of his power armour and sent a mix of my twin energies into it to wreak havoc. Not a moment later, the power field surrounding it quaked and buckled, then collapsed. The armour itself followed suit a quarter of a second later, molecules breaking apart and the armour returning to its component atoms as a soft breeze blew it off of the man underneath. “You are making me hate you more and more, Inquisitor. That’s not good for your continued good health. Not at all.”

I let him go, his lightning claws and heavy flamer crashing to the ground without the power armour to support them. I watched the man, now dressed only in the ragged remains of his Inquisitorial attire.

He whirled on me, eyes bloodshot and wide in annoyingly little terror and far too much spunk for my liking.

I’d also teleported that Zara girl back to our ship after I made sure she’d stay asleep while I was out looting her erstwhile boss’ stash of goodies.

It calmed my still simmering fury to be looting the asshole blind, especially when I imagined how furious he’d be if he knew a ‘filthy Xeno’ was playing around with his toys.

But I found something surprising when I opened up the vault.

“Well, hello there?” I murmured, and watched as the miniature orangutan glanced up at me for a moment, blinking in surprise. “Whatcha got there?”

It looked down at its hands, one cybernetic just like its right eye and just went back to fiddling with it. By my meagre understanding of the futuristic tech in this galaxy, that thing should be some sort of a mini-laser shooter fitted into the shape of a ring.

It ignored me, seemingly fully absorbed with its tinkering and I didn’t feel the need to interrupt it beyond nabbing a bit of its fur with a hair-thin tendril.

Guess that’s one less thing I have to trade with Trazyn for. I thought, putting assembling a complete template out of that sample as the highest priority task for my mind-cores. Jokaero tech wasn’t inherently superior to human or Tau tech, but the little monkeys had an instinctive knack for taking something in front of them, making it both better and turning it into a miniature version of itself.

Getting the Jokaero’s genetic sample had already put me in a good mood, but that only got better as I looked through the stash of weapons lining the wall. I gleefully absorbed chunks of necrodermis, teleported a score of gauss flayers and even a pair of hyperphase swords and a glaive over to my own vault on my ship. But this stash of goodies just kept on giving.

Dark Eldar agonizers and splint weapons, and even a single Tau Honour Blade. I pocketed them all, making a note to hand in that Honour Blade — a weapon that’s custom-made for every Ethereal — back to Coldstone for brownie points once I finished up with this excursion.

Honestly, Honour Blades weren’t good weapons, not really, they were just spiritually significant, so I lost no sleep over losing it. Even the Inquisitor seemingly only kept it as some sort of trophy if my guess was right. A single hyperphase sword could have cut it in half with little trouble after all, and he had more than one of those.

There were some other stuff I couldn’t name, weird little bits and bobs that I couldn’t even tell the use of and some that I could only guess at. Daggers that had their blades made of plasma, weirdly proportioned guns, melee weapons and who knew what else.

I pocketed them all, only leaving behind the few stuff that felt Chaos-touched and far too icky for my liking. I had necron goodies to loot, why would I look twice at a Khornite battleaxe that was trying to jump out of its shackles — it was chained to the wall, because of course it was — with those around?

There were even a few stuff I just straight up atomised, then burned with every kind of psychic and normal flame I had on hand. Like a damned Slaught parasite. A part of me wanted to sample it, maybe get my hands on its weird, parasitic mind-bending abilities just in case, but my instincts screamed at me not to do it. So I complied and burned it till not even its constituent atoms remained.

What I did try my hand at absorbing was a bit of what was titled the Obliterator Virus. Sadly, like everything else only held together by Chaos infusion and Warp-fuckery, the whole thing came apart at the seams once I managed to purge the taint from it and the physical virus part of the thing just ... didn’t work. It was a mess, jumbled up to hell and back with little rime and reason so I was forced to abandon that avenue.

About an hour later, I received a telepathic message from Val telling me about the remaining Imperial ship’s surrendering and the Tau ordering us too to pull back. I shrugged and told him that we’d be back soon-ish.

“Shouldn’t we deal with those Space Marines you’d felt before?” Selene asked arcing her neck to glance over my shoulder at the plasma piston I’d suspected to be from the Leagues of Votann.

“We can, if you wan-” I started, then stopped as my aura failed to find the ten of the superhuman soldiers on board. I looked again, and found two of their corpses in one hallway ... near the escape pods. “They ran away.”

“Oh,” Selene mumbled, sounding disappointed. “Well, that’s a bummer.”

Saying so, she laid her chin on my shoulder and hugged me across the waist. Making me glance back at her and see the mischievous look in her eyes before she started nibbling on my nape in a way that had shudders running down my spine.

It seemed she was determined to get her blood pumping, one way or another, and I was only too happy to help her.