Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

Trying to prevent another teleportation mishap, I attempted to repeat the trick I’d used to get inside the Dimensional Sanctum, and it worked surprisingly well. The rift tore open before me, the spatial tunnel curling around the soul-thread leading far away from here towards Valenith on distant Vallia. Again, I felt the Hollow Sun’s automatic countermeasures attempt to mess with it, but having that guiding thread and, more importantly, knowing to expect the interference in advance made all the difference. 

I jumped through again, a worryingly subdued Selene still clinging to me as I did, with my pile of freed lab rats floating behind me. At the exact moment we travelled beyond the Hollow Sun’s reach, and I felt its anti-teleportation countermeasures lose their grip on the spatial tunnel, I altered the destination. Instead of following the soul-thread halfway across the Jericho Reach, I routed it back into realspace. 

As expected, we were thrown into deep interstellar space, but with a quick survey of the fabric of spacetime, I managed to narrow down our current location. I had memorised the properties of all the stars in the Reach, and once I was close enough to them, I also added the more accurate feel of their gravity wells. Knowing that, it wasn’t hard to place myself on the map once I reached out to the nearest stellar body with my gravitational senses and matched its properties to my memorised list of stars. 

“I’m going to drop you off somewhere safe. I’m sorry, but it seems like this excursion turned out to be more dangerous than I’d thought.” I messaged Selene telepathically, mentally lining up my reasons and plotting out an argument to convince her to accept it. Preferably, without being sulky about it. 

“Yeah,” Selene replied, gently resting her head on my shoulder as we floated there in deep space, my psychic power maintaining a bubble of breathable air so we could be reasonably comfortable and so my pile of prisoners wouldn’t die. “I knew Necrons were dangerous, but I suppose they were giving minimum effort in the battles I’ve read reports about. Sorry, I got in the way.”

“Hey, it’s fine,” I said, squeezing her reassuringly, which put a soft smile on her face that made my heart stutter. “They caught me off guard as well. I didn’t think that Wraith would be able to so easily bypass my defences.”

Hyperphase technology was so fucking busted. I could face-tank a slash from a Grey Knight wielding Nemesis Force Weapons or the Swarmlord trying to dice me up. But that stupid blade went right. Through me. I needed to upgrade my wards and defences again, though I’d need to grab a few hyperphase weapons to experiment with for that. 

“What happened to you?” Selene asked curiously.

“A Canoptec Wraith popped into existence behind me, two of its blades already phased into me so they were lodged in my spine and skull; it was a bit distracting,” I said with a grimace. That had been stupid. I should have been able to react fast enough to blast the Wraith away, or at least to throw up some chaff before its beam struck. Hell, I could have cut my body in half and transferred my consciousness into my cut-off feet to avoid getting thrown into the Ghostwind like a bag of garbage. There were downsides to maintaining my pain receptors and keeping my consciousness primarily in my Avatar instead of tugging it around like a puppet. “Then I got hit by the same beam you did, except it threw me into a dark void instead of a lab.”

“Oh,” Selene said, switching back to boring old vocal communication. “What was that thing he had me locked up in anyway? I couldn’t- … My body and my psyker energy just refused to obey me.”

“A Tesseract Labyrinth, if I had to guess,” I said, shrugging lightly. “Don’t feel too bad about it. Those things can perfectly imprison Greater Daemons and even Transcendent C’tan Shards. Even I couldn’t escape it when Trazyn fully locked my previous Avatar in one of them. Necrons are pretty bullshit when they put their minds to it.”

“Huh,” Selene mumbled. “Well, I suppose I learned that trying to take on a Necron Crownworld alone is still beyond my capabilities. That’s … good.”

“You’re fine, that’s all that matters,” I said, subconsciously tightening my hold on her body. She was tougher than a regular Custodian, and yet she still felt oh so fragile and small when I held her. 

Selene frowned for a moment, and I could easily decipher that she didn’t feel all too happy about feeling … well, vulnerable. Weak. Or like she was my weakness. Then her shoulders slumped with a small sigh, just closing her eyes as she leaned up and placed a gentle kiss on my cheek. 

“Thank you,” she said softly. “Stay like this for another minute, then you can drop me off somewhere while you go tear a new asshole to the Necrons. Just be careful. I doubt we saw every trick they have up their sleeves.”

“I will be,” I promised sincerely, smiling as we just floated there and watched the stars, enjoying each other’s warmth and closeness. 

*****

I arrived back in the system the Hollow Sun was located in nearly an hour later. Cuddling with a sad Selene until she was back to her usual spirits was more important, bite me. I’d have stayed longer, but she’d metaphorically kicked me out of the small base I’d thrown together for her in a neighbouring system, telling me she was not some fragile wallflower in need of pampering. I only left once she managed to say that without it sounding like a lie. 

She’d be fine for a few hours. The small base, attached to the side of a dwarf planet, had artificial gravity and breathable air, along with a small but furnished room. I left some novels and books I’d managed to reconstruct from my previous life for her, but she said she’d just meditate, so maybe they’d see no use. 

Either way, I had a task at hand. It was time for round two of my Hollow Sun run. The Necrons would find out just how annoying it could be to fight a foe who refused to die and could respawn nearby no matter what they did. As far as I was concerned, I was willing to treat this entire conquest as a roguelike game and tease out the best way to take the Crownworld down, even if it took me dozens of tries. I’d have to always start from near the same spot, too, considering that I had no guiding light to follow this time around, so I had little hope in entirely avoiding the anti-teleportation countermeasures. They’d drag me to the prepared killzone again, but I’d be ready, and I would be fighting dirty.

Alright, first go the chaff and the distraction. Without much thought, I created half-assed clones of myself. They looked the same as me when fully armoured up, and they even had the capabilities of a standard combat drone. One after the other, I threw them at different sections of the Hollow Sun with quick teleports. I could just barely catch the Crownworld’s strange pull latch onto the teleportation right at the tail end of it, well after I’d let go of it. 

I sensed their deaths come in quick bursts in the following moments, sending little signals into the Warp that I was on the lookout for. That little trick was a byproduct of my attempt to create artificial souls to saturate my Pariah clones with. In the end, it was only good for this: glowing like a tiny star in the Warp when the soulless drone I anchored the glob of soul energy onto was slain. I counted them, and it took 1 second for 80% of my drones to die, with three-quarters of what remained lived for another second, and the last few persisted for a whole three seconds. 

That wasn’t promising. What the hell did the Necrons stick into that prepared kill zone? I mean, sure, those drones weren’t anything to write home about, but they could have easily taken an Astartes if two of them ganged up on a Marine.

The cost in bio-energy was negligible, not even a minor rounding error, so I kept throwing in drones, though this time I tried to maintain control over the teleportation and reel against the pull that latched onto them at the end. There was no noticeable difference for the first twenty, but by the time I reached the thirtieth drone, they were taking nearly ten seconds to die. Which, I assumed, meant I’d managed to throw them into some secondary peripheral zone with fewer weapons. 

I tried to send the next batch of twenty drones all at once, scattering them at the last moment … but I fucked it up somehow, because they all died the moment they landed. I wasn’t splitting my focus and willpower properly. I tried again, then again and again. The cost was still miles away from being even a rounding error, so I didn’t feel any reservation about throwing a hundred drones into the grinder, then another hundred, because I was starting to get better at it. My timing improved, narrowing down to the fraction-of-a-nanosecond it needed to be for maximum efficiency. By the 220th dead clone, my drones were surviving for minutes. By the 250th, none of them was dying on landing, which I took to mean that I had finally managed to scatter them all … or that I was finally not teleporting them into walls, or into separate chunks. Could be either way. 

I sent in three more batches of ten clones. In the fourth batch, one of the clones was replaced by me. At the very last moment, timed as perfectly as I could manage, I scattered the ten of us, throwing myself and two clones even further than ever before. It wasn’t that much, just a few hundred metres, but based on my calculations and assessment, it should have thrown me beyond the second ‘wall’ surrounding the kill zone. The last time, the Canoptek Wraith had ambushed me when passing through the same wall, cutting my way through the bulkhead that was likely the only path through.

I reached out to every drone still within range of my somewhat suppressed telepathy and activated the implanted bio-energy inside them, causing the five nearest ones to start … multiplying. In five seconds flat, those five drones became fifty as the tiny beads of Eldritch Flesh inside them exhausted their tiny stores of bio-energy. Then I let them loose, acting like I was none of them, creating forty-nine drones of my own before handing over control of my body to a replica of the algorithm driving those drones, though I kept carefully nudging them all in the direction I wanted. They spread out, mapped the rooms, the hallways, the tunnels, looking for the path leading out of here and into the greater Hollow Sun. Sooner or later, I’d find it, and I’d fight dirty this time. No one did wars of attrition quite like I did, and from what I knew, that kind of battle would place the Regent of the Suhbekhar Dynasty in the toughest spot out of all my options. 

The drones outside my telepathic reach started dropping one after the other over the course of the following handful of minutes, but it was only when one I did have a link to fell that I finally saw just what kind of enemy I’d have to face here. 

A massive insectoid warmachine shaped like a centipede that could eat Jeeps for breakfast, made of living metal. It burst through the floor and, in moments, ripped the drone apart with scythe-like limbs. But that wasn’t the problem, nor was the fact that the creature left behind no obvious borehole once it burst out of the ground. No, the problem was that my telepathic link started wavering even before the thing showed itself. Once it appeared? I had to pour energy and willpower into the link to keep it alive, and even then, it felt like trying to protect a tiny burning matchstick in a raging storm. 

That was a Canoptek Tomb Stalker, if I wasn’t mistaken, and like Spyders, they could be equipped with Gloom Prisms, which could generate energy fields which created zones that were shrouded and shielded from Warp-spawned powers, such as that of psykers. Unfortunately, my powers were included in this, unlike the Tyranid Shadow in the Warp. After all, the energy field worked on the real-space end of things, not by filling the nearby Warp with shadowy darkness. 

Wonderful, but at least it can’t go fully out of phase like a Wraith to go invisible. I mused, which was true. The thing could only move through inert matter, and it also couldn’t go effectively invisible like Wraiths. On the other hand, some more advanced versions of them — Canoptek Tomb Sentinels — could be equipped with Exile Cannons, which were the less effective little brothers of the Transdimensional Beamer that sent me on a non-negotiable vacation to the Ghostwind, so I’d have to be careful if I saw any of them wearing a massive cannon in place of an insectoid head.

But the simple Tomb Stalkers wouldn’t be a problem, not even to my drones now that I knew what to expect when my telepathic link started wavering. Although they would be annoying to face in the narrower corridors. They were large enough to treat tanks like chew toys, after all. 

Another drone in the opposite direction came upon a patrolling squad of three Lokhust Destroyers, which set upon it with the murderous fervour Destroyer Cults were known for, though even their nasty four-barreled Gauss Cannons couldn’t quite deal with the drone in a wide open space the size of a football stadium when it started bouncing around like a demented pinball. It was so nice of the Necrons that their architecture favoured cavernous halls so large you could barely see the ceiling, because that was the environment my swift and agile drones thrived in, especially when facing foes that they had to dodge the weapons of. 

Two more Lokhust Destroyer squads floated in, rushing towards other drones on their strange hover-pads. Then a group of three Canoptek Spyders, accompanied by twice as many Wraiths shifting in and out of phase, came within range of my aura. More and more small groups of Necrons just kept on appearing in my range, one after the other. I felt my more distant drones start dying one by one as well, until only the ones I was mentally nudging this way and that myself remained alive. 

I’d keep up the charade, even if it was starting to fail, until I found the next bulkhead. Then I’d have to opt for stealth once I was out into the Crownworld proper. I wouldn’t want either the Regent nor the Cryptek I came back to murder the shit out of to have cause to even consider escape. Eternity Gates could connect to other Tomb Worlds, and if they were desperate enough to abandon their Crownworld, I might never find them.

And that was unacceptable.