Getting Warhammered - [ 153 ]

Note: Damn, I barely managed to finish this thing in time. Hope it still came out alright. Anyway, soonish we are getting into some more kingdombuilding. This is my first try at that, so please have mercy on me.

*****

Mara woke up with a start, jerking awake with her heart thundering in her chest. She swept her gaze around, wide-open eyes jumping across the small wooden room she found herself in.

This wasn’t her room, the bed she sat on was also far too bouncy and the sheets too soft. It looked exactly like the shack she’d grown up in though … no, the shack she lived in. Mara was just a girl, after all, barely into her teens. Even now, a tiny part of her just wanted to go back to sleep and let herself enjoy the silky smoothness and warmth.

Maybe in a bed like that, the horrors would leave her alone for a night.

It was tempting, and that was how Mara knew it was a lie, an attempt at tricking her into sleeping and letting the horrors defile her mind again. The purple-eyed witch must have placed a spell on the bed. But Mara found it out, she was smart like that … but what if that just meant her torment would begin sooner? Without even the daze of dreams to muddle them?

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Mara slowly and with the utmost stealth she could manage, slid off of the bed. As her bare feet touched the wooden floor, she bent her knees to dampen the sound, but grimaced as the whole floor gave off a tortured creak.

Her heartbeat thundered in her chest, she heard it in her ears, felt it pulse in her throat. Mara took a shallow breath, trying to centre herself and hold off on panicking.

She didn’t remember why, or who … but she just knew someone evil was out there, lurking just beyond the shoddy walls of her little shack. So she strained her ears, twitching at every rustling leaf or chirping bird.

They had to be out there; he had to be out there … 

Mara stared at the door of the shack, biting her lips as she thought and thought. What to do? Stay inside, or peek outside? 

The door creaked, and with a startled yelp of utter horror, Mara scampered into the furthest corner of the shack. She didn’t dare take her eyes off of the door, staring at the handle and dreading the moment it would move and he would come in to desecrate her final safe place, her final stronghold.

Except, was this even her home, with the weirdly silky and fluffy bed? She couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t ever be sure of anything. Not with evil witches and even more vile things skulking about in the woods around the shack.

Five seconds went by with the door remaining firmly shut, even as wind swept by and made it rattle ominously. Then ten seconds went by and the door remained as it was. 

Mara held back a whimper, the suspense was killing her.

When a full minute passed without anything happening, small birds continuing to sing outside in blissful ignorance of what lived in the forest among them, Mara started to slowly calm down.

Well, as much as getting tired of being on full alert for a minute, bordering on hysteria could be called ‘calming down’.

Over the course of the next half an hour, she slowly inched closer and closer to the door, creeping up to it like the evil witch or the horror in human form that commanded her would jump out from behind it at any moment.

Despite knowing better, Mara’s heart betrayed her and a hint of treacherous hope began to blossom and corrupt her like a spreading infection.

With that, came dread and the knowledge that it would be crushed like every single time before.

Then defiance and a soul deep fury. She would not give up her last tiny embers of hope. She would not allow herself to be broken so thoroughly. She was Mara the … the …

She couldn’t remember, but she knew she was not one that gave up easily, if ever and so she threw the door open. Hinges barely holding and screeching in metallic agony, the door flew wide open and the vibrant green scenery of a deep forest opened up before Mara’s eyes.

Suspicion lined Mara’s face as she cast her narrowed gaze about the primal forest surrounding her from all sides. It was only due to her intense scrutiny that she’d noticed the oddities that made little sense.

One was the lack of most sounds. Sure, the leaves rustled in the wind and birds sang unseen, but there was no loud chattering of a hundred and one different insects.

Second, despite the forest looking exactly like the jungle that had once housed her shack, the blast of humid air so dense it made it hard to breathe was just straight up non-existent when she stepped outside.

Mara took a deep breath, taking in a lungful of refreshingly crisp air she would have expected only on a mountaintop.

Curiosity came, beating back her dread as she chewed on her lower lip in thought. 

She wanted to investigate. There was just something deeply odd about the world around her that she had to unveil, for better or for worse.

*****

A small fragment of my attention kept following Mara’s adventures as she wandered through the tiny forest realm in my own now-ocean of soul energy. The woman- or girl, rather, was in a surprisingly healthy mental state considering her mind is merely a tiny little fragment of the woman she had once been, a repeatedly beaten and broken final part of it that nonetheless kept resisting fully shattering and retreated into the deepest depths of her own mind.

She had forgotten the vast majority of what had happened to her, but some vague memories lingered from the few surface thoughts that were strong enough that I could feel them with only my passive empathy and telepathy turned her way. 

I didn’t know how to help her heal, or how to put her mind back together without breaking it even more thoroughly than it already was, so this was a weight off of my chest at least. 

Sure, I could have just winged it, but that would have more than likely ended up with her very dead. Alternatively, I could have used the currently comatose mind of my pocket Inquisitor, but likewise, he would have died from that, as would have the next couple hundred or thousand test subjects I would have needed to perfect my methods.

The mind was a fragile thing, and a mortal human’s mind who didn’t even have their souls and telepathic powers to defend it, was even more so. I could just send an errant mental cough the wrong way and obliterate the minds of every single human in a smaller city with practically no effort.

Anyway, while Mara would take some time to handle, Zara was looking like a surprisingly lucky find. So much so that I had to use my more active telepathic and empathic abilities to ensure she wasn’t lying through her teeth … then had to take an even deeper look to make sure she wasn’t making herself telepathically believe she was telling the truth, while lying through her teeth.

That had been a plot point I remembered from one of the books I’d read in my life as a human. I was curious about the measure of truth to it, but I wagered I’d only find out once I had the chance to visit the Imperial Palace on Holy Terra.

The wards on that place, after all, were supposedly able to ascertain the intent of the one entering and the Alpha Legion had only been able to slip through them by some very resourceful trickery during the early days of the planet’s siege during the Heresy.

After I’d managed to get it out of Zara why exactly she was so amenable to the idea of serving me, it made sense. I was just surprised she was powerful enough to catch true glimpses of the Warp and remain as sane as she was. The girl had been watching every single one of her comrade’s souls be ripped apart by either the currents of the warp or ravenous daemons, after all. That was less than conductive to one’s mental wellbeing.

Still, I would not be granting her wish just yet. She was going to remain connected to the true Warp for a while more while I got to make sure her soul’s inclusion to my domain wouldn’t bring with it other problems. 

Mara’s inclusion had been a bit of a rush job, and a spur-of-the-moment thing, but the girl couldn’t cause many problems with her not even knowing about her own psychic nature in the degraded state she was in. 

That wouldn’t be true for the Warp, but my little slice of the Immaterium was much less treacherous and dangerous to wield. At worst, she would accidentally tear the tiny realm she was in at the moment to shreds, but no daemon would try to tear its way through her soul and materialise in realspace or whatnot.

Anyway, onto more lighthearted topics, Coldstone finally fucked off of my new planet after I handed over to him some of the goodies I’d gotten from the Inquisitor’s vault that were of Tau make. He had been particularly livid when I handed him the fancy Ethereal Honour Blade, which quickly transformed to appreciation when he put the puzzle pieces together and came to the rightful conclusion that I had taken the prop from the Inquisitor and was handing it back to him as a show of good faith.

Hopefully, his fellow Ethereals would take it, and my show of force in my last battle, as a good thing and be more amenable to my continued existence. Not that they could do much about it at this point, but they could try and that would be a pain. 

At least most of my short-term projects for my new planet had been completed while I was away on my excursion, and the planet now sported a suitably whole ecosystem with an entirely breathable atmosphere. Even my fortress was finished, as was the basic road system around it and the beginnings of the towering walls that would be surrounding it from all sides, protecting it from some of the nastier beasties I’dd let loose on the world.

The rest of the buildings in the eventual city would come in time, but now the foundations were set. All that remained was to wait and see when or if anyone would even want to settle. I didn’t care all that much either way, to be honest and was much more interested in getting into further building out my secret energy infrastructure.

Already, the spikes of Ambull carapace driven into the molten blood of the planet were proving their use, more than covering the cost of my maintained web of tendrils connecting my to almost every bit of flora on the planet and the deep caverns now spread through the crust of the planet.

The Tyranids let loose in the tunnel system underneath were trying their best to break out, but with all of their synapse creatures encased in unbreakable bedrock like living statues, the lesser bio-forms had little hope of breaking out. Thanks to them, I could practically feel the claws and teeth on the Warp-currents around the planet, signifying the presence of the Shadow of the Hive-Mind.

I suspected that sooner or later, that stunt would get a Hive Fleet to come knocking, but I wouldn’t complain about the Hive Mind delivering my means right onto my doorstep. Anything short of a massive Hive Fleet with a Norn Emissary was just free bio-energy to me at this point and I would be teaching that to the Tyranids that dared to enter my System.

It was a touch risky, as I could easily see the Hive Mind wanting me gone enough to send a Norn Emissary sooner or later, but it was worth it. Even now, I had a dozen smaller tendrils syphoning warp energy to be purified in my realm with impunity while the few lesser daemons still around could only watch. The few that tried to be annoying, quickly got obliterated with little fuss.

Other than that, in some other caverns I could see thousands of Orks setting up their primitive settlements as their raiding teams headed out through my web of tunnels to hunt Drakes and Dragons. Whenever any of either creatures fell, a tendril was there to drink up their corpses.

The surface was much more normal in comparison, only the few wildlife and fauna imported from death worlds making it interesting, but I couldn’t actually earn any new energy out of those, as the surface was much easier to keep under surveillance and I had little doubt the few satellites in the moon’s orbit that Coldstone had left behind were doing just that.

I could have removed them, but that would have sent the message that I had something to hide — which I did, but they didn’t know that for certain — and that wasn’t conductive to establishing diplomatic relations.

In time, I’d get to set up a Shadow covering the entire System and set up a Dyson Swarm around the star while setting up similar heat saps on every planet. Perhaps, I could even turn the entirety of Vallia into a bio-energy farm. It would be pretty easy to facilitate and endless war on the planet happening between the local wildlife, some of my experimental bio-forms and a bunch of Orks.

Hell, if I got a good enough war going, some more Orks might even deliver themselves into my lap and serve themselves up as another source of free bio-energy. Those green muscle heads had some sixth sense for any war epic enough happening anywhere around the galaxy.

Yes, that could work.

But first, I had a new ‘house’ to furnish appropriately with my girlfriend and a new underling to help settle in.