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I broke the rules of our little game first, blinking over to grab the emerging Deathmark by the skull a microsecond before it could get a shot off at Alex. Maybe he would have seen it coming, maybe he would have dodged, maybe he would have pulled some actually offensive Psyker attacks out of his ass to handle the assassin. 

Or maybe not. I didn’t want to take chances. The Deathmarks almost got me the first time I fought one, and Alex was considerably less immortal than me despite his Perpetual nature. Maybe he wouldn’t get better as quickly as I had if he got hit by a Deathmark. 

Sometimes, 99% odds weren’t good enough. Sometimes, only absolute certainty was barely enough. 

The Necron assassin’s metallic skull crumbled into a ball under the crushing telekinetic force I exerted on it, making it look like one of those aluminium foil balls we used to throw at each other back in middle school. 

“What was that?” Alex asked, suddenly appearing alert, whereas before he had an expression of mild interest as he fought the Canoptec constructs. 

“Deathmark,” I replied. “Necron assassin. They are waking up.”

“Interesting,” Alex mused, dancing between the dormant Necron Warriors, which the swarm of constructs were at least somewhat trying to avoid harming. It gave him a lot of breathing room. “I barely sensed it until it emerged.”

“Well, no souls and hiding in a subspace pocket does that,” I commented while expanding my senses to look for any more suspicious fluctuations in spacetime, and also to check what was going on deeper down in the Tomb. “Uh-oh. Destroyers are being re-awoken, and I think the local Lord is also in the process of waking up. He shouldn’t be fully functional for days yet, though.”

“Destroyers?” He inquired. 

“Think robots but with an insatiable bloodlust and adorned with enough heavy weaponry to make smaller Titans blush,” I sighed. “They also ride along on anti-grav repulsors, so they are deadly and fast.”

“Troublesome,” Alex muttered, though he still showed a distinct lack of concern. Maybe it was confidence, maybe it was a facade. I sure as hell couldn’t tell. 

Almost as soon as he finished speaking, I felt a deep thrum reverberate through the section of the Tomb we were in. Power rushed through the hallways and the passages, energy overflowing in the glowing green channels to the point that they went from ambience-dim to near-blindingly bright. Then thousands of unliving, soulless green eyes flared to life within metallic eye sockets as arms that had remained still for sixty million years moved to grasp weapons. In just seconds, the legion of Necron Warriors joined the Canoptek constructs in their assault on us, their Gauss Flayers flaring by the hundreds every second as they tried to eradicate the interlopers upon their tomb. 

I saw Alex speed up just a moment before the first beams landed, his form blurring to the naked eye as he tore a scythe-like limb off a passing Canoptek Wraith. It had to have been telekinesis, or body enhancement, because he barely exerted any visible physical effort to do so. 

A dim golden glow bloomed into existence around his makeshift weapon, and then he tore into the Necrons like a one-man army. My eyes widened when I saw him casually deflect Gauss beams with the stolen weapon, sending them into a mass of Necron Warriors with a flick of his wrist. It was like watching Star Wars again, with Jedi deflecting blaster bolts with the casual ease only accessible to dirty, cheating space wizards. Except only with sickly green instead of cool bright reds and blues. 

Huh. The bastard had been holding out on me. As far as my own protection went, a Warded Barrier bubble took care of most things, and I telekinetically swatted aside what it didn’t, namely the Necron constructs capable of phasing out of reality on a whim. Thankfully, those types of constructs were the least numerous of our enemies by far. 

“Having fun yet?” I asked idly, raising my voice a little.

“A bit too much of it, I’m afraid,” Alex replied, his voice the slightest bit strained. Without any warning, a golden pulse expanded from his body, nearly at the speed of light, reaching all the way to the side walls before it imploded. 

Lights danced within its reach, shapes and forms blending into a kaleidoscope of confusing colours. Even my aura was somewhat thrown off; I had the feeling I could pierce this … fog if I brute-forced my way through it, but I’d much rather just study it. A moment later, as my mind-s kicked in, my head twitched to the side just as Alex’s knuckles landed on my barrier, and nonsensically, the sound of a polite knock resounded inside my bubble.

Quirking an amused smile, I opened a quick gap in the barrier, which he quickly slipped through, and not a moment later that strange warped space he’d left behind faded into nothing, much to my disappointment. Alex slumped against the wall of my bubble, sliding down until he was sitting as he breathed a theatrical sigh and wiped nonexistent sweat from his forehead.

“Well, that was exhausting,” he declared with cheerful enthusiasm just slightly tinged with exhaustion. I snorted, and had a few dozen of my draugr-

‘Notice: the term “draugr” is used in the Imperium to refer to members of the Space Wolves Chapter who did not endure the psycho-memetic obliteration procedure that was enacted to shield them from the horrors of the Great Crusade.’

I cursed inwardly. So I was infringing on Imperium trademarked names now? Stupid mind-cores, should have told me sooner. Whatever. Who cared about the Space Wolves and what they called their feral, lobotomised members anyway? 

So! My draugr formed from a drop of Eldritch Flesh, taking shape according to a variant of my latest combat drone template and fell through small gaps I temporarily opened in the Barrier. They immediately took a good portion of the attention away from us as they rushed into the mass of Necrons and tore into them with wild ferocity that had absolutely no concept of what the term ‘self-preservation’ meant. These ones had layered armour and would automatically shed the surface layers where Gauss Flayers hit them, so they were quite a bit more able to oppose overwhelming amounts of Necrons than my default template. Complete molecular disassembly meant little if they could shed the disassembling layers, ensuring the connection was cut. 

“Had enough fun?” I inquired. 

“Quite,” he replied wryly. “I’d still like to see the ones you spoke of, the ones who retain some semblance of their intellect.”

“Well, Destroyers supposedly retain some parts of themselves, though it should be suffocated by their overwhelming bloodlust and hatred for the living,” I stated. “Ah, and there they come! Aren’t they cute?”

The Lokhust Destroyers looked so goofy, floating along on their hover-thingies and armed to the gills. I tilted my head a little and squinted. They kinda reminded me of those horribly fat humans from the Wall-E movie who moved around on hover-scooters and hover-thrones … except, American. Because, you know, massive guns. That could fire dozens of dangerous rounds per second. I could almost hear the screech of a bald eagle as the Destroyers flowed into the hallway through a side passage and opened fire with their Heavy Gauss Cannons. 

“Cute as an Ogryn, perhaps.”

I rolled my eyes, but got to work. What I’d seen Alex do with his psyker powers was inspiring. If I had to describe it with a single word, it would be ‘efficient’. He did more with less. Tiny actions, fuelled by minuscule slivers of Warp energy, had appreciable effects. Maximum gain for minimum effort. 

Why couldn’t I do the same? It wasn’t like I lacked the fine control and multitasking ability required. Hell, multitasking was the one thing I had that was practically without limit. I wasn’t about to let my mind-cores use soul energy — not that the ones hosted outside my avatars even could — but they could do the calculations and feed me data on where I needed to do what to achieve the results I desired. 

Let’s start with telekinesis. I decided. All at once, the green beams of energy started missing my floating bubble, the Necrons’ aim failing them as small telekinetic nudges yanked the barrels — or whatever went for barrels on a Gauss Flayer — away from the target, sometimes to the point that they hit diving Canoptek constructs in the back. Minimise energy expenditure. Maximise efficiency. 

I unleashed a few mind-cores at the task, some gathering data for feedback and others to use that data to optimise my … I suppose I should call them subroutines and algorithms. That’s basically what they were, even if written on organic neurons instead of electronic bits. Guardsmen and space marines had trained reflexes to duck and cover from enemy shots. I had highly efficient psychic telekinesis to make enemies miss entirely, making dodging entirely unnecessary against most weapons.

The Wraiths were still doing their best to dice me up, which was starting to annoy me. They were distracting me from progress. I reached into my thigh, my arm phasing through the flesh as if it wasn’t even there, to grab the hilt of a little trinket I kept stored there. Grabbing its hilt, I lashed out with it at a passing Wraith. It was already phased-out of reality, but the seemingly ordinary shortsword — ordinary, that is, if you ignored the fact that it was humming and softly glowing in an eerie green colour — didn’t care one bit. The Canoptek Wraith rematerialised a few meters away, its two bisected halves crashing onto the ground and rolling across a few Necrons before they came to a stop.

I knew having a handheld Hyperphase Blade on me would be worth it in the end. I grinned inwardly. I couldn’t make Hyperphase Weapons, since Trazyn was a dirty miser and had refused to trade its knowledge so far, but I’d managed to reconfigure one I’d looted so it looked no different from Orcrist from Lord of the Rings movies. Which, coincidentally, made it much less cumbersome to carry around inside my body than a Warglaive the size of an Astartes in Terminator Armour. 

As for why it worked? Well, that was simple. Hyperphase Weapons vibrated across dimensions, and could cut anything. You couldn’t escape into some sub-dimension from a Hyperphase Blade, since its edge existed in every overlaid dimension. It was a neat toy, worthy of being the go-to weapon of Necron Lords and their Lychguards. You were either capable of dodging the hit the old-fashioned way or not; no dimensional shenanigans allowed. 

A thick beam of green energy splattered across my bubble ineffectively, but I reacted all the same. I aimed a hand at the Lokhust Destroyer that’d forced his Gauss Cannon back on target even as it overloaded whatever Necrons used instead of servos and actuators. The chunk of necrodermis I always kept stored inside my Avatar formed into a Gauss Cannon of my own — one of the few Necron weapons I had gained the blueprints for from Trazyn — its barrel protruding from the middle of my palm and unleashing a beam of vengeful green energy at the naughty Destroyer. In a few seconds, the fearsome Necron war machine was reduced to drifting molecular dust. 

The necrodermis retreated into my body, leaving my palm untouched. It wasn’t very useful, all things considered, but it was fun. I could do anything through truly organic templates that I could at present do with necrodermis, but there was something unique about using technology so advanced it might as well have been magic. Any technology advanced enough was akin to magic, after all. 

I’m going to have to get Trazyn to have his lackeys teach me how to make Hyperphase blades, or maybe C’tan Phaseblades? Oh! A particle caster would be awesome … or an enmetic disintegrator. Hmmmm. What could I give that crazy kleptomaniac, though? Maybe some authentic hair right off of the Emperor’s head? I coincidentally have an Emperor on hand, so might as well make use of it.

I shook off that unproductive line of thought. My other Avatar was currently chatting with the kleptomaniac in question, and I was sure I could bully some compensation out of him for my services in dispatching those Imperial ships. After all, that was distinctly not part of the agreement we had made before and therefore was something he had unilaterally deployed onto me. 

Shit. I could have teleported the voidsmen onboard into this Tomb World. That would have been so good. The Necrons back at Gheden would have found a ghost fleet drifting through space … bummer. What a wasted opportunity.

With immediate concerns dealt with, I pulled up every memory where Alex used one of his tricks, focusing on a single type first. The less esoteric and vague the effect was, the easier it would be to reverse engineer, or so reason dictated. I picked the one where he somehow made beams of entropic energy curve and bend away from him; that was one of the few tricks that used Warp energy directly and in a way that I could easily perceive. 

He wasn’t bending space; that much I could quickly ascertain. I had enough experience with spatial fuckery to sense even minor spatial manipulations. But then, what else could he have been doing? Energy control? In that infinitesimal instant it took for a Gauss beam to hit the target? Those things travelled fast as hell, faster than anything short of light itself. 

Maybe it was a ‘trap card’, of sorts? He prepared the effect in advance, laid it in the path of the beam he knew would come and set it to activate when it did? 

I checked it, and sure enough, the Warp energy fluctuations sprang into existence a millisecond or two before Gauss Flayer beams were fired. That went for all instances of this trick being used, reworking their paths before they fired. 

Made sense. The beams might have been fast as hell, but the Necron Warriors were not, and their aim was horribly predictable, considering they were mindless machines. Their aim was controlled by predictable targeting algorithms. 

“You aren’t going to ask?” Alex spoke up after I spent nearly an entire minute trying to replicate the effect … with negligible results. I could have done it if I whipped out Atiesh and poured in a thousand times the energy he had, but could that even be called a success? The whole point of it was that it was efficient. 

Like, imagine a castle wall. One man found the weakest point, where the dirt beneath could be dug, and through careful digging he had the wall collapse under its own weight. Another man kept headbutting the front gate until it broke. 

Sure, there was something impressive about the second man’s accomplishment, but he’d have to deal with the moniker of a bull-headed brute whose head was only good for breaking apart doors. I didn’t want to be known as a brute. I was beautiful, gorgeous, graceful and elegant. Not. A. Brute. Hmph. 

He is … guiding it somehow, not controlling it or demanding it bends. He is making a path of least resistance that the beam flows into naturally for some reason. But why would it do that? Going straight should be the path of least resistance. 

“Should I?” I snarked back absently, still focusing on the mystery in front of me. 

“Asking questions is how one usually learns,” he declared, then raised an amused eyebrow. “Although, I suppose that’s not quite true. I myself had to learn many things on my own, but there was no one there to teach me.”

The subtext was, of course, that he was right there to teach me. I scowled for a moment, annoyed that despite my ridiculous processing power I failed to figure out how his trick worked. 

I suppose being stupid faster, even if it's impossibly faster, doesn’t help when you need to be a genius to figure out something. Most people wouldn’t have discovered relativity and all the things Einstein had even if they had eternity to ruminate on the mysteries of the universe. More minds working on this could only go so far. 

I shook off that thought. I wasn’t stupid. I could figure it out … but why waste time and energy on that when I could just ask and have the answer given to me in under the span of a second? 

Pride. 

I gave myself a few more seconds to think of anything else, coming up with the possibility that I might discover something else while researching this, and that I would grow more used to my power while experimenting … but the benefits of those were negligible. I’d be wasting processing power better spent elsewhere. Especially for my frankly bigger-scale and mind-intensive experiments. 

I didn’t keep track of the specific improvements, but my mind-cores were doing good work in the background, improving and optimising all my templates and doing biological and material science research non-stop. Just earlier during the fighting, I had managed to invent a bio-tech toaster utilising sensory heat nerves to detect when a piece of toast was ready. 

On the other hand, do I really need to know this trick right now? Can’t it wait? I sure as hell wanted it right now, but that was … well, entitlement. With as much power as I had, I could have most things instantly. No. I don’t need it.

“I’ll figure it out myself,” I grumbled aloud, then glanced back at the battlefield. My drones had taken out a few hundred warriors, and maybe a dozen Destroyers along with scores of Canoptek constructs — not counting the Canoptek scarabs, of course — before finally being taken out. My gaze flickered down the length of the cavernous hallway; it went on and on in a straight line for kilometres, and I saw thousands of glowing red eyes stare back at me. All of them were without thought, without an intellect behind those eyes, but I saw a pair emerge far back from a floating Necron Monolith’s Eternity Gate. “It seems our host has finally arrived. I don’t think he’s happy with our intrusion … or our overall existence.”

Let’s see how Alex handles a Necron Lord in a fight. He should be fine; the Lord should still be an incoherent mess from the hasty awakening.