The few days took me out on sorties toward the tip of the ship and after the fourth day, I was finally satisfied with my gene colle. The waste disposal parts of the ship and the rather decayed ses bore the most fruit outside of the Drive's close proximity. Groups of mutants that called themselves Waste Nomads developed tough, scarred skin aened resistao toxins while the Rustborne as they called themselves had near immunity to acids and corrosive agents and both groups could live off of deg matter, now I could just go around ping down on rusty pipes and I could gain some energy out of it, just like with nuclear waste. I couldn't live off of radiatio but this was already much better than having to rely on only anic matter, There was still the option of learning how to grow flesh with Biomancy, ( I learhat it's called Biomanot Biokinesis but whatever ) and while nibbling on my fihen regrowing them was somewhat grotesque I'd do it. My other mind...parts? cores? sub-minds? Cores it is. Let's stay with the CPU analogy if I started out with it. So, my other mind cores were w on splig and mixing my collected genes and muy delight, a few hours earlier they mao work out an enhaempte that would give my skin the properties of most of these mutants. The gee was clear and with my eldritstincts, I kly how it'd work and roperties it had. It was useful in debugging too as I learned as I just knew if a DNA sequence was faulty. Bay new skin, the hardest part was keeping it both looking and feeling as silky smooth as it was before and that was managed by making it reactive. It used a miniaturized version of the Patriarch's psychic field o sense when something would touch the skin and then it'd activate, making it stiffer, tougher and overall much harder to pierce or damage either by acid, corrosion or anything really. The iing part was that this was barely noticeable if someone wasn't toug me exactly where my skin toughed up so it let me keep my 'biomancy' as low-profile as possible. The radiation blog and deg matter absorption were also implemented obviously but I couldn't test those until I went closer to the Drive. I arrived back to the floors housing the officer's quarters with a spring in my steps, the eternally aware and ready spec ops guys were just a touch stiffer than before I entered, I took to calling them Shadows and it fit quite well with how silent they were and how they followed Selene and Orion around like silent shadows. I stopped mid-step as I felt the dimming soul of the Astropath brighten for a fleeting moment before exploding in a radiant supernova of golden energy. It swept across the ship, banishing the building-up taint from humans and mutants alike. It passed through me without doing anything but I felt it, a presence, a slight sliver of a fragment but it was unmistakable. Majestid overbearing. Were I a human I'd have dropped to my knees and started praying but I was not, I walked through the gaggle of fused officers and other crewmembers as they shook each other out of their dazes. I felt a slight illusion of this presence before when I dove into the soul of the Astropath Transdent for a bit, if her soul felt like a shard of a star was stabbed into it like a spear and that spear exuded this same sensation of majesty. I reached the dead woman's room and threw open the doors with a frown on my face but only a sihought was going through the numerous threads of my mind, Why, why did he intervene? Why did he do that? It was imperative that you wasted her your foor your energy when you were a deg corpse with a soul fragmented into millions of tiny shards. "Inquisitor?" Selene's crag voice broke me out of my staring test with the peacefully 'sleeping' corpse. "Yes, that's me," I strode closer to the corpse, not a single sign of injury or death yet, "Tell me, did something happely one minute and 48 seds ago?" "What?" the woman asked with a voice that was somewhere between a tremble and rising indignation. "Her soul detonated like a supernova at that exact time without any outside interferehat I could notice," aside from the Big E but let's n that up. I sat down on a nearby chair a Selene e to terms with the situation, I noticed she had a signifit e with the te Astropath, dare I say she might have even loved her so her rather shaken state was self-expnatory. "S-She seemed like she had a nightmare before and around the time you s- said she calmed down," she closed her eyes and covered them with a palm, "I thought she was finally getting a peaceful sleep ... gettier." I held back the 'So nothing then' respohat came from my apathetic side and iook on a morose expression. "I'm sorry for your loss," I shook my head softly. She took a deep breath, "Thank you," she took away her palm, revealing bloodshot eyes, "do you know what happeo her?" Ah, fuck me sideways, what do you wao tell you, woman? "There are far worse ways to pass than in a bed, peacefully," I stared into her eyes, impl her with my look not to ask the question anymore but it seemed like the woman didn't care about social graces at the moment. "Tell me," said Selene in a voice so grating and malicious that it'd make a Drukhari blush. "I don't know for sure," I averted my eyes, "but it seemed like 'damage trol' to me." "Damage trol?" I couldn't tell whether she was livid uhe surface or deathly calm, her face was like a stone mask. "She was dying already, Selene," I shook my head softly, "I could sense her soul getting tainted bit by bit, she was losing the fight against corruption." "That's impossible," She shook her head vehemently, "She was a Transdent, she was soul-bound." I didn't say anything, I didn't know what exactly happened or why, all I knew was that the big man decided to detonate her soul while he yanked his soul fragment away from her. For some reason this event in time was important enough for him to exert himself, intervention was few and far between but for all I khis was just a normal thing that happened when a soul-bound psyker was getting corrupted by the . It could be a sort of automatic scorched earth tactic. The soul-fragmehe psyker in line and the overreag hands of demons away from the psyker but if said psyker were to die et corrupted forcefully then the demons would be deheir feast without too much of a loss on his side. Another possibility wormed its way into my mind, it was an alieo me but I could see a Psyker that got indoated at the Scho going through with it. What if His presence wasn't so evident to me because he himself acted but just because the protective shell that was the Astropath's soul got blown to bits? What if it wasn't He who detohe soul but the Astropath herself? I g the remains of the woman, she slept eternally with a peaceful smile on her lips and now that I looked at it carefully it might have been a smile of relief. If she lost her soul to the , let it corrupt her body and soul that would have left her free for demons to use either as a vessel ate. Which would have been the prelude to a gruesome end for the people on this ship. A selfless sacrifice for the good of others. The idea felt alien to my eldritstincts, still, I found myself admiring the dead woman. That was much more likely than the big man handing out divierventions like cookies. I stood and Selene's gaze refocused on me, snapping up from the floor. "If her soul got forcefully corrupted her fate would have been far worse than mere oblivion," I said, having watched one or twht stars go out as dark maws stricted around them in the . The faster oblivion came, the better in this gaxy. Eldar's got their souls tortured for who knows how long before She who Thirsts ate them bit by bit, drawing out their torturous existence as far as possible. "The Emperor Protects," I said as my palm came to rest on her shoulder and I felt her stiffen u, I stared intrey eyes deeply before letting go of her and leaving the room without another word. Magos Dominus Zedev This was the fifth day since he came to the p, Folx IV was a retively important world with a major Hive city and several smaller cities spreading around its surfabsp;Zedev didn't care about either of those, his mind was buried deeply into the mess that was the meical record of the happenings on the pens of tubes and wires ected him to the rge maery that was located he top of this spire and he was finally making headway in his searbsp;Locations, dires, coordinates, shipments, registers, and missing ons all coalesced in a grand tapestry that needed solving and Zedev was more than ready to do so. He has done so more times than he could t, or well, he could t it but the data was insequential and as such a waste of preemory spabsp;He'd worked on several ways to edit his own memory, keeping only relevant data stored as his mauries of life have accumuted in such a colle of useless memories that his human mind was getting overwhelmed. The flesh is weak. Resets, partitions, encryptions, formattiried it all, and all of them were failing. His mind drifted as several species came to mind who could live for thousands of years without such problems, our flesh is weak. He termihat line of thought and formatted the entire partition of his mind it appeared on. Such heretical thoughts were popping up more and more in his head as his iable end drew nearer but by now he determihat all of his partitions were somewhat corrupted by it. He learo live with it. The worst was that he k wasn't wroher, if only he could substitute his human brain for an Eldar one, he would be perfect. A blend of mae and man just like the Omnissiah envisiohe future of humanity. His meical eye shone as the plex set of calcutions finished and a finished report was delivered to his main mind partition, it tained a list. A List of Locations. If Zedev still had lips he would have grinned, as he did not, and a moment ter his emotional dampeners kicked in and his feelings of satisfa vanished. He had to notify the Inquisitor. There were Xenos to terminate on the p.Maybe a few of their remains would go mysteriously missing. P3t1

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