GW - [ 357 ] (Patreon)

Mysterious and impressive. Make it look effortless even if it’s strenuous. I hummed to myself, locking onto the Imperial warships. My psychic presence pulsed and expanded, a single tendril of immense soul energy reaching down from my realm. It split, then split a dozen more times to form branches that plunged through inactive Gellar fields to scour the Imperial machines of their spirits. 

As their systems slipped into chaos, tech priests with enough affinity to sense what’d just happened going wild over the entire fleet, I ever so gently … poked the Warp Drives in a very specific way, also teleporting a pair of my own brand of organic cyclonic torpedoes right next to each engine moments before detonation, just to make sure. My trick worked on the Warp Drives I’d seen and studied before, but roughly half of the ships had unfamiliar variants or designs of them. Those ships, my knock-off — and still annoyingly underperforming — bio-cyclonic torpedoes took care of.

For an instant, it was like a score of new stars were born within the Gheden system, blooming into existence in a quick sequence then they were gone, leaving behind nothing but a mildly roiling Warp. This was a Necron Crown World’s home system after all; anywhere else I’d have worried about the Warp instability detonating Warp Drives would cause, but not here. The Necrons could handle it. 

Silly Imperials. Even their Void Shields had been on ‘cruising’ mode, which was basically the shield generator’s power-saving mode where it only deflected especially dangerous pieces of debris or fast-moving sand grain-sized pieces of cosmic dust. After all, even a piece of dust could do nasty things to your warship if it hit you while you were cruising at speeds that people measured by what percentage of C (lightspeed) it was. 

Too bad for them, I was a bit more dangerous than near-relativistic space dust. This is what the cool kids call a ‘skill issue’. 

“Think that’ll be impressive enough for your fellows?” I said with feigned casualness, and Trazyn nodded shamelessly. Well, it should certainly be impressive enough, do the mystery of it came from the Necrons hopefully being unable to tell just how I managed to destroy the fleet. Because simply destroying a fleet was something they themselves were very much capable of.

Maybe I should have thought of something else.

“It’ll do, though don’t expect much,” he cautioned good-naturedly. I could almost hear the smile in his voice, and sure enough, his death-mask’s lips were curled into a wry smirk. “My ‘fellows’ as you call them are … commonly thought of as having an overinflated sense of their own importance, and an inability to accept the fact that others might even approach their own level of significance, aaand that’s among Necrons. You are, to the best of my knowledge, not a Necron.”

“Yes, I’m a filthy-icky organic monkey. I came here knowing how most of your kind feels about us fleshy creatures,” I said with a roll of my eyes. “Do you suggest beating sense into them, or letting them think what they will? Which would get me what I want with the least amount of problems?”

“You would be willing to ignore decades of unsubtle insults?” He made an effort of raising an eye-ridge:

“Depends on the insult, and what mood I'm in, I guess,” I lied. I was pretty sure I’d last all of a minute before punting the metal skeleton through a wall if they started annoying me. Although, maybe it wasn’t that much of a lie; maybe their insults would be more amusing than irritating if they decided to talk shit about my organic nature. 

“Don’t attack them,” Trazyn said. “Not directly. They will put aside politics and factional rivalries to eliminate you if you attack them. An attack on one would be taken as an attack on all Necrons. Many of them may loathe each other, but even they wouldn’t actually go through with killing another Necron. Even the wasteful spending of Necron Immortals is severely frowned upon, enough to beget one censure. If a ‘lowly organic lifeform’ killed one of them? Well, you can imagine the … offence it would cause, I’m sure.”

“Okay, no killing the locals,” I said, waving him off. I didn’t need another dynasty hating my guts; one was already bad for my health. Necrons were, without a doubt, one of the most dangerous foes in the galaxy for me. Not the normal ones, of course, but once you pissed off a Necron dynasty enough, they started pulling their dusty toys from the depths of their vaults, and they had some pretty nasty toys squirrelled away from the days of the War in Heaven. “Well then, let’s go meet the locals.”

How bad can it really be? Anyone with common sense would want me as an ally, rather than an enemy. 

Necrons were supposedly intelligent, so I was sure things would turn out just fine. 

While I was figuring out how to get back to Gheden without giving away the fact that I had no clue how to get back onto the half-phased planet, I focused some of my attention back on my Avatar. 

Turning my attention back, I glanced at Alex. “And that was a Necron Overlord, though one of the more … eccentric ones. I wouldn’t try to predict the actions of a more normal Necron Noble or above based on Trazyn.”

“Millennia of life tends to make one at least a bit eccentric; it’s no wonder a species that has produced members who’d been alive for millions of years is full of a few strange specimens,” he said. 

“Can’t spend eternity doing nothing; from what I know, the ones with a specific obsession tend to be the saner ones,” I informed him. “Trazyn is a kleptomaniac of the highest order. Illuminor Szerasz is obsessed with figuring out all the secrets of the mortal condition, be that biology, the concept of souls and the mind. Szarekh is determined to return his people to bodies of flesh and blood. Imotekh will not stop until the Necron Empire is unified under him and rules the stars. The ones that just … exist, with no specific goal, no obsession to focus their madness and keep their minds sharp, tend to … slip. The lesser one’s rank is, the easier they slip, though even Phareons aren’t safe from madness, though their minds are more able to withstand the rigours of an eternal life inside an unfeeling metallic body.”

“The most dangerous weapons of mass destruction in the galaxy, in the hands of soulless, xenophobic and variably deranged memory engrams thinking themselves real people.” Alex summarised, finishing it up with a snort that held no actual humour. “Just about what one should expect from this galaxy of ours.”

Things could always, in fact, get worse. The idea that one could hit ‘Rock bottom’ and from there things could only ever get better was just an illusion for the foolish and the naive. 

The very familiar and even more unwelcome sensation of my spine being separated by a hyperphased scythe interrupts my answer, making my response come out as a wet gurgle of utmost annoyance. Had my vocal cords been working properly, they would have produced the sounds associated with ‘not this again’, but alas, a sad, annoyed gurgle was the best they could manage.

I’d been careless, not paying close enough attention to subtle fluctuations in nearby subspace signatures, thereby missing the Tomb Sentinel. 

A backhand caught the half-phased bastard across the side of its spherical head, pulverising its ocular sensor and sending its body crashing through a crowd of dormant Necron Warriors. 

I repaired my spine and other flesh wounds, absorbed the blood that’d filled my throat and lungs, then superfluously cleared my throat.

“Well, it seems like you’ll get your chance to experience fighting Canoptek constructs.”

How did this happen? I should have been notified about an attack, even if I wasn’t paying attention!

‘Response: The likelihood of a Canoptek construct waiting in ambush had been high, but not certain. Thus, no warning was made.’

It nearly cut my head off!

‘Response: Decapitation is not a lethal injury for Subject: Echinda_Avatar_N02. Thus, maintaining the subject's preference for non-interference for minor things, the warning was dismissed as there was no true harm that could be caused even if there turned out to be an enemy lying in wait.’

I rolled my eyes. So I was just a ‘subject’ now? My own mind-cores, literally copies of my own mind, were getting sassy with me? The reasoning behind their decision was logical and made sense in theory, but it wasn’t like I actually enjoyed having my spine severed, and the fuckers knew it, but still remained silent. 

It was to be expected. My mind cores couldn’t actively betray me, wish me harm or actually do anything they suspected had any risk of doing me any actual harm, but this? This they could do, and by ‘this’ I mean of course: annoying me.

Not all of them had copies of my own mind; some were just organic computers, others had artificial personality matrices, while some held artificial copies of minds I’d scanned before, just to make sure I had as many perspectives as possible. It was easy to miss crucial but minor details due to personal bias, even if you had all the time and mental processing power in the world. 

‘Query: Alter preferences?’

Yes.

‘Acknowledged.’

‘Warning: Suspicious subspace signature detected! R56:U05:77m’

‘Warning: Suspicious subspace signature detected! R199:D30:288m’

‘Warning: Suspicious subspace signature detected! L181:U01:5m’

‘Warning: Suspicious subspace signature detected! …’

‘Warning: … ‘

‘Warning: …’

Shut up! I groaned, shutting down the list of alerts that flooded my mind. There had to be hundreds of them-

‘Clarifications: There are 598 warnings at present, all qualified as non-emergency based on earlier preferences of Subject: Echidna and thus, muted.’

Yeah, that. At least the mind-core was using my direction-based system for telling me where the source of the warnings was. The first number was always a number between 1 and 360 describing the horizontal relative direction of my target, the second did the same vertically, and the third was the distance between them and me in meters. 

I absorbed the information in an instant, and my mental map lit up with exactly 598 blinking orange signatures. Most were suspicious fluctuations in subspace sensor readings that, when I cranked the sensors up and ran an active sweep, became definitive skulking Canoptek presences; others were either false positives or some type of arcane Necron machinery. But some warnings stood out, like the one telling me the deepest parts of this Necron Tomb were steadily powering up, and that the World Mind had definitely taken notice of our intrusion by then.

I stepped to the side as my aura thickened in my immediate surroundings, providing another vector of detection for anything that got close enough to bother me. With my active sensors and aura overlapping, I could easily detect the Canoptek Spyder before it emerged from its hidey holes. A careless wave of my hand sent a blast of telekinetic force at the creature, tearing it apart and then continuing on to turn a dozen slumbering Necrons standing in its path into scrap metal.

The next nearest foe was targeting Alex, though, and I decided to let the attack go through. I was curious what he could actually do, how much of his old powers he retained, and how he would perceive an attack coming from outside the standard three dimensions. Warp-based attacks were one thing, but Necrons and their subspace and subdimensional bullshit were another. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alex casually sidestepped the scything claw of a massive Wraith in the very last moment, letting the massive creature fly past him and disappear into the floor. 

Prescience? Maybe divination? Simple superhuman reflexes or danger sense? 

I wasn’t worried about him dying. I could just grab his soul if he did, and that’d give me an excuse to … ‘feel him up’ a bit more thoroughly, and hopefully at a time when he was in no state to pretend. With him, nothing he showed could be trusted fully not to be a facade engineered to manipulate the onlooker. 

Although I very much doubted it would come to that. Diminished as he was, he was still The Emperor. It took all four of the Chaos Gods working together to fill Horus with Chaos mojo to take him down the last time. He wouldn’t die from some murderous tomb maintenance robots. 

Alex swayed between the next three follow-up attacks from the Wraith with the ease of a dancer, and it was visibly unnerving the Canoptek construct because after that it remained phased into the floor, only materialising its claws to nip at Alex, trying to surprise or get a proper measure of him. 

I mirrored him, feeling like I’d be losing some unspoken competition if I counterattacked on my own ambushers before Alex did — the previous ones didn’t count — and so the two of us just … basically played tag with the increasing number of Canoptek constructs. 

That stopped when the Spyders arrived, heralded by a swarm of Canoptek Scarabs and Nanoscarabs pouring into the vast hallway, skittering between the still feet of dormant Necrons to bury us underneath their mass, or disassemble us, molecule by molecule. 

“Well, that’s troublesome,” Alex said conversationally, then sent me a glance while raising his eyebrow. “A little help?”

“This is your show,” I said with a smirk. “You wanted to see what Necrons can do, well, you’re seeing it now. I wouldn’t want to diminish your experience by intervening when it’s clearly not needed.”

I think he rolled his eyes at me, mentally at least, before turning back towards the Canoptek swarm surging towards him from the closest side-passage. He seemed to sigh, then roll his shoulders, or maybe he just did that because I expected him to do those things. 

Urgh. It’s always a game with him … or maybe he isn’t doing anything, and I’m just twisting my mind into knots all on my own. That theory’s worth some consideration.

Then the swarm was upon us, and as Canoptek constructs were known to do, I detected the moment the Spyders linked up with the other Wraiths and Tomb Stalkers/Sentinels into an interconnected network. I’d read about this before, how when there was no commanding Necron around the Canoptek constructs selected a Spyder to act as the leader and the rest suborned their processors to it to grant it superhuman levels of intelligence and data processing capabilities. In a way, it wasn't too dissimilar to how Orks and Tyranids worked, though it was distinctly more sophisticated and obvious, since the disjointed, individual attacks merged into a single, cohesive strategy meant to dissect us piece by piece, metaphorically and literally. 

It’d be interesting to see how Alex dealt with it.