Getting Warhammered - [ 160 ]

I had a whole slew of nasty things in my arsenal, a fair few of them also being more than ready for some stress testing.

For example, I had fleeced Trazyn out of Hrud, Khrave and of course the Fulgrim samples. The last of which was already perfect, but the previous two had some hiccups along the way.

For one, the Hrud’s genes were decaying and had more holes in them than a swiss cheese. Meanwhile, the Khrave were these fucked up vampiric bats that had insane psychic potential.

The problem lay in that last word. Potential. 

The Khrave grew stronger as they aged and only after eons did they even stand a chance against a regular Eldar Psyker. The one super Khrave that had been giving trouble to the Primarch of the Dark Angels had been alive before the War in Heaven 60 million years ago. 

So, I had these two samples. One from a race that used psychic power to age their enemies to death, while another that grew stronger the longer they had been alive. 

My brilliant idea had been to, of course, age my Khrave drones with some Hrud-based Sorcery. But it didn’t work, just like my Blank experiments.

The reason seemed to be obvious in hindsight, just like with the Blank genes. My drones didn’t have souls. 

Which meant I’d have to put my experiments aside until I got some … test subjects. Some assholes who no one would miss if I just experimented on a bit.

“Why are you grinning?” Selene asked.

“Becauseeee,” I said, spinning her around and pointing at the planet floating below us. “You remember how I had to stop some of my most fun experiments because I didn’t have test subjects? Well, would you look at that! A whole planet full of dumbfuck Chaos worshippers who no one will miss. I am hereby volunteering them for my experiments!”

“Careful there,” Selene said, dousing my excitement with a cold bucketful of her common sense. “You were worried about the few cultists on the ships getting under your mental skin, there is a whole planetful of them here.”

“Actually,” I said, squinting at the planet that ever so faintly reminded me of pictures of earth. Of course the continents were all wrong, and it had three moons instead of one gigantic one, but the colour theme certainly had some resemblance. “I think only about a twentieth of the population is beyond saving … the rest has only some minimal Chaos corruption and the planet is still a long way off from becoming a Daemon planet.”

“Less possible test subjects,” Val mused, then sent me a measuring glance. “If you still hold to your pre-established rules of course. On the other hand, that’s about two billion possible new citizens. If I’m counting them right.”

“You are,” I said, then sent back an admonishing glance. “And I am.”

“Understood, Mistress.” He bowed subserviently, his hands splayed to the side like some actor’s from a renaissance play.

“Think they know we’re here?” Selene mused, and I rolled my eyes as we watched the three large frigates in orbit fire up their Void Shields to full blast and turn to level their broadsides at our tiny ship.

With my Lictors slurping down the brains of every captain they’d found on the ramshackle ships attacking our System, and a good number of what went for officers with Slaaneshi cultists too, backtracking where they came from was effortless.

The sole Tau ship above Vallia hadn't even sensed the new fleet entering the System before we were already heading off to this planet. The downsides of your sensors being forced to obey the laws of physics I guess, luckily, my gravitational sensors and the few buoys I’d left spread out through the asteroid field didn’t suffer from that weakness.

Space magic for the win.

“The Daemon Prince seems to be on the surface still,” Val said, gazing at the three frigates in apparent boredom. “Mistress … would you allow me to occupy her? I would not want her to be an annoyance while you experiment.”

“Think you can handle a Daemon Prince?” I asked.

“A newborn one which is as neglected by their debased God as this one?” Val snarled down at the planet, disgust warping his features. He might have been free of Slaanesh, but his hatred for the Prince of Pleasure remained and would likely stay with him till the end of his days. “Yes, yes I can. Just give me your leave and I will slaughter that debased wench.”

“Well, have at it then,” I said. “But don’t risk allowing her to infiltrate my Realm. If there is even the slightest risk, you come back here and I obliterate the bitch.”

“Understood,” Val said, then at my nod Blinked out of existence. A moment later, I felt his psychic presence appear down on the surface not far away from the Daemon Prince and surge with pulsing power that I could see even from this far up. 

“Well, he is making a mess of things, isn’t he?” I mused, watching an actual thunderstorm forming above the planetary capital with thick ropes of lightning gathering and blasting buildings apart. “Wanna have a fight too? I could teleport you onboard one of the ships.”

“No thanks,” Selene said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to see what they warped those ships into.”

“Okay,” I said softly, giving her a quick shoulder hug that she accepted with a mock-huff of annoyance. “I’ll take care of them.”

Which is exactly what I did. After weeks of farming Orks and syphoning off whatever overflow of bio-energy there was in my geo-thermal energy farm, I had an abundance of the stuff. Not enough to be popping out Custodians by the hundreds, I was faaaaaaar off from that — plus I suspected my Custodians weren’t exactly the ‘real deal’ either — but I could make three temporary, but fully functional Combat Forms and a dozen Lictor drones to accompany each.

Piercing the Void Shields anti-teleportation function was a walk in the park. Those shields weren’t made to prevent teleportation, they just did that as a side effect of how they worked. 

So, that was how my three war hosts, each led by a Combat Form-drone, started their slaughter through the insides of those ships.

To elaborate on why I thought my Custodians were second-rate knockoffs at best, well, the metrics just didn’t add up and I had lore tidbits to give me some ideas of why.

Each Custodian was a unique piece of art, handcrafted to perfection and irreplaceable. I suspected there was a soul aspect of making one that I wasn’t understanding yet. They were made from regular human children after all, and not vat-grown as Custodians. 

Each body had to be fitted for the soul inhabiting it, and I suspected the soul also had to be special in some way. Maybe even further enhanced by indoctrination or some weird bio-sorcery.

My metrics were only about 30-40% off from what I’d expected, so I wasn’t all that upset. Plus to fix it, I’d have to somehow become a biomancer matched only by the Emperor himself.

Comparatively, cloning blanks was something random lunatics with a penchant for worshipping gods from hell could do. So I was putting my efforts towards that goal first.

The first ship’s shields went down, my host of drones inside having been dumped as close to it as I could manage. I probably had a nasty grin on my face as I reached out and twisted space before me, teleporting about three hundred humans into the hangar bay of my ship.

I let my aura sink into them, then with a twist of my wrist, I squeezed a fifth of them into fist-sized balls of flesh and bone. There were just cultists so suffused with their Patron’s power that their souls weren’t usable … or at least I didn’t want to risk touching it. Even if it didn’t open up an avenue of attack for the Chaos God at the other end of it, touching those disgusting things would have been icky and gross. No, thank you.

I Blinked over to the hangar bay and grinned at the confused and horrified mass of people below me. Some stared at the balls that probably used to be their bosses, some laughed, some screamed while some seemed to be in shock and were just looking around in befuddled confusion.

“Hi, hello and welcome!” I said, my voice resonating through the open space and drawing their attention. “Congratulations are in order, with your choice list of horrible decisions, you all have landed yourself a position as my obligatory volunteers for some of my nastier experiments. Isn’t that great? Yes, I know, you’re filled with joy and what not … what’s that?”

“You will face the wrath of the Eternal Queen for this!” one of the idiots answered, looking just about apoplectic as his bloodshot eyes stared at me like I was the lunatic out of the two of us.

“The Eternal Queen,” I mused. “Would that be the baby Daemon Princess you all are serving?”

The man was about to shout at me again, which was pretty rude, all things considered. I hadn’t once raised my voice, had I? What right did this Slannesh-worshipping, second grade human waste of oxygen have to do something I didn’t allow myself to do?

With a small infusion of soul energy that zapped out of my fingers and smacked into the head of the idiot, his mouth disappeared. His jaw worked, pulling at the now sealed mouth where not even lips remained and he gave a horrified moan as his hands snapped up to feel out his face.

I always wanted to do that. I thought to myself, the sadistic part of me relishing in the spreading horror and fear among them. Still no torture. I had promised that, and I was going to keep to it … but I also wasn’t beyond letting these things that were below even the worst of humanity have a taste of their own medicine. 

Meaning, I had absolutely no intention of blocking their sense of pain as I experimented.

“Well, it seems someone wants to go first,” I said aloud and with a flick of my wrist and invisible force, dragged the mouthless man up into the air before me and had him with his limbs spread. He couldn’t move an inch. “My first goal for the day is to figure out how to warp someone’s body in a way to invert their souls. In essence, I am attempting to create Blanks, Pariahs. Creatures with negative souls, or as rumour say, without one. As an aside, if I succeed, this will tear whatever connection you have with your God in an excruciatingly painful way.”

I heard a few giggles of expectation, some among the crowd clearly found the idea of dying an extremely painful death fun. 

Seems like I got the basic cookie-cutter Slaaneshi cultists on this planet. As far as I knew, they could have been more than just basic BDSM enthusiast that pushed the boundaries leagues beyond just ‘far’. Slaanesh was the God of Excess, not BDSM. That included anything from the overwhelming Excess of noise, music, art, tyranny, power, kleptomania, wanderlust and just about anything. Anyone who loved something could fall to Slaanesh’s temptations. Anyone who didn’t know where to stop, who didn’t have self-restraint and temperance. 

Which was also why I was super careful with how close I got to her more dangerous minions. I felt Slaanesh was the God who I was most liable to fall for, if I wasn’t being extremely careful. I already had some problems with self-restraint and controlling myself.

I was doing much better than a few months, or just weeks ago, but it paid to be careful in this galaxy. The moment I let down my guard was the moment I got jumped and mugged by a bunch of Daemons. Possibly, any nearby Inquisitor, Drukhari, Ynari or just about any Imperial sub-faction would also be more than happy to join in on the fun and beat me into oblivion.

Hell, with how powerful my soul supposedly was, I didn’t doubt that the Drukhari would love to just lock my in a cell and torture-farm my agony to power their fucked up society. The Ynari also had a tendency to try to sacrifice anything with a suitably powerful soul to their death god. 

Anyway, with a touch I warped the genetic code of the man suspended mid-air before me into that of the sole Blank whose genes I had on hand. 

I immediately felt something going wrong, there was a reject in his soul and his face tora apart, a new bleeding mouth opening up that gave a primal howl of agony before the body went slack. I stared, wide eyed, as the soul was practically ejected out of the body like a rocket and sent barreling into the warp where a bunch of nasty Slaaneshi daemons lovingly greeted it.

Meaning, they ate it. But that might as well have been what ‘loving’ was for those things.

Anyway, it was safe to say that the first experiment was a bust on account of the newly Blank body rejecting the previous soul. 

What was the trick?

I knew it was possible. I was absolutely sure I remembered that one Blank girl who followed Inquisitor Eisenhorn around in his later books having been cloned with her powers intact.

Cloning usually gave the clone a miniscule soul, but apparently they managed to clone a Blank.

If I remembered anything beyond those facts above, I would have considered hunting down whoever did the cloning to pick their minds about it. Alas, it had been years since I read those books and I couldn’t even recall the girl’s name beyond the fact that she’d been hot enough that people still thirsted after her despite her repulsive Blank aura.

Yep, my mind was a strange place.

Anyhow. Time to get back to experimenting. Maybe it was a numbers thing and only one out of a thousand souls will be compatible with getting turned into a Blank. Or maybe I just had to be slower, gentler.

I let my predatory gaze wash over the crowd of test subjects and I watched them shiver in either terror or delight. No matter. None of them would be walking out of this room alive, and neither would the ones I’d have to nab from the other ships and the surface once this lot perished.