I reached the damp hall without a problem, my form was made to be an infiltrator. It was fed, tested, and refed for millions of years in wars all over the universe. It was the epitome of forced and guided evolution, not many things could get better than this form. I wasn't delusional enough to think it was the best, I could already add things that would make it better, giving it more versatility or power. The hivemind didn't want it to be the best it could be, it wanted an eical tool that could fulfill its purpose to a satisfactory level and that was the Lictor. It was a baseline, a baween cost aurn at the most primal level. The hall had around a hundred of the lesser geealers walking or crawling around, each had a task and a mission at hand, and none of them ambled around pointlessly. I'd thought about removing the chaff before striking but that'd take away the element of surprise, I couldn't kill them quickly enough and telepathically knog them out would be more than enough to alert the patriarch. The only optio was to distract them, not that I was overly worried about them interfering. From what I saw they barely had any ons capable of hurting my armored shell and avoiding a melta wasn't too much trouble if I stayed alert and didn't let any of them sneak up on me. My distra had to look like it was natural, I shouldn't let them know they were utatil their leader is dead. Tendrils of soul energy extended from my body, questing through tunnels as my mind searched for easy-to-colpse parts. I'd practiced this for a bit, making sure the energy threads didn't get tangled up in the web of energy was challenging. A challehat I weled wholeheartedly as it was a great way to train my trol. Three of them found what they were searg for, that'd have to do. I pulled back the rest of the tethers as the lucky three got to work. The ferrocrete was archaic, I didn't know how they made the stuff but I was sure it was older than most nations ba Earth and that it still gave me a bit of trouble when I tried to burn through it with pyrokinesis and pull it apart with telekinesis spoke of the genius of the old humans. If I remembered right ferrocrete was a material based on a damaged STC like many of the teologies in the imperium that were actually useful. Humans from the Dark Age of Teology as they called it were geniuses and mastered sce to levels unimagio me even now. I suspected Chaos fuckery in the uprising of their AIs if I'm being ho, people that could quer most of the gaxy had to have innumerable safeguards and trrams in their AIs. Sky and stuff like that didn't happen when even a single programmer involved knew what they were doing. Things like the Destroyer Virus which was somehow a mix of a biological pgue and a puter virus existed and I couldn't even begin to figure out how. The was weird and fucked with my on sense and the ws of the universe I learned of. Three tunnels colpsed oer the other, heads snapped into their dires, and with the patriarch having to move a fihey went out to iigate. Alert and careful but not suspeg an attack yet. Only half left, the rest from the outside would probably handle most of the clearing work, it wouldn't get much better than this no matter how much I waited. Psychic attacks were off the table for the ambush, I didn't know how good it was at sensing or defending against those, and so was a brute force attack, the thing was bulky and I k was strohan me. The scythe-like limbs on my arm were ready, coiled like a spring and awaiting release. I leapt soundlessly, s through the air and in a fra of a sed I was desding oriarch. I sensed something, I didn't know how but it looked around, alert and its gaze searched the dark hall without finding anything. I let the limbs go and they flew through the air faster than a bullet, o into its torso where its armor parted between it and its upper right arm while the other aimed to decapacitate it. The scythe cut deeply into its neck, tearing into its flesh uhe thick chitinous shell but the patriarch barely reacted to the pain. Four cwed arms moved, elbows bending like no human elbow could, to strike at me as I stood behind it. I used my two arms, simir to its four to deflect the attacks as my scythes still buried deep into its body burst into a brilliant white fire, finally making the creature screech out in pain as its ans and flesh were ied. Tyranids were made of harder stuff than humans though, I could only protect myself for a few short moments before orike caught me on the chest, crag my shell and ung me back a few meters. My jagged scythes ravaged its body on their way out and it was still burning as it turo gre at me hatefully. The hall flickered like the burning patriarch was the dle bringing light into the dark room. My shell meself even before I nded and I reactivated my camoufge soon after, the patriarch stared around warily and I felt it move around a sort of psychic field. So that's how it noticed me. Unlike me, it didn't use tethers but it dispersed energy into its surroundings. It wasn't ected to it all at o was beautiful in a way, it stood at the ter and I now noticed infinitesimal bursts of energy go off wherever the field touched something. It was like a brain, with neurons firing and the bio-electricity leapiween the cells to reach its final destination. In this case, the patriarbsp;Let's see how fast it is, an Eldritch Bst snapped out of my cwed finger, bsting straight through the field and scrapping one of its limbs as it tur tried to pull its bulky body out of the way. Its cws raked through the air and ferrocrete a dozeers away from its previous position but I was gone by then. It growled and I felt psychic messages shoot through the web of the brood mind, I tapped into one of the nearby geealers and heard the message. *Gather and assist* I'd have liked to py with it, test and revise until one of my attacks got good enough to tear right through its shell but that wasn't to be, I didn't fear the chaff too much but getting dogpiled would be a pain. I bsted Eldritch Bsts at the patriarch, putting it on the back foot for a brief moment as it defeself. I used that brief window of opportunity to bst in with twin beams of white-hot fmes, its field burned as the being was coated in a cloak of fire ah. I depended on its sight to be taken for the moment as I dashed behind it and shed out with all four of my arms as signifit amounts of soul energy bled into keeping the brutish monstrosity i couldn't dodge, I didn't know if it was the Bsts, the Fmes, or the Telekinesis but my scythe tore into it. g broke and my scythe chipped as the thick shell was forced open by my brute strength, cwed fingers dug into its limb sockets and tore the joints apart while my st scythe smashed into the back of its head. Its bulbous brain-like head didn't have the armor the rest of its body had and my scythe brutalized it beynition. The body slumped and fell onto the ground with a thud. The geealers screeched and for the first time my miered them, my hyper-foy enemy gone and the non-threat chaff once again had my attention. An errant thought stream merged with the main one and I knew five of them had melta guns and three had melta grenades, each being far away from me at the moment as even if I wasn't fully scious of it mid-fight I knew where they were and avoided them. Pying with food is bad, I thought with a sense of dark amusement as my Lictor form exploded into a mass of tentacles, I flowed through the room, my flesh filling it up as I turned biomatter into energy, ung whether it was dead or alive. Three explosio off and a few bursts of psma smashed into me, all they did was e some energy. Energy, that was more than recovered when I reached the ohat were behind the annoying attacks. I was like the sea at first, flowing over the floor in a mass of twisting white tentacles but a few of them started crawling onto the walls and running into the tunnels. How cute, they thought if there were more of the it'd make a differenbsp;Previously I flowed slowly like a tsunami but now I exploded for real, my energy stores burned but held as my hundreds of limbs traveled through the many tunnels like a shockwave. The inanic matter got eaten through and spat out to make way for the anieath it as ead every geealer met its end. When I sehe st die I stopped, my now more than a thousand tendrils stopping like time was frozen, then like the clock was tig backwards they retreated. Now, slowly, eically. All the energy that could be had was already absorbed, o waste energy to make moving faster. Still, it only took fifteen seds for all the tendrils to return and coalesto my human form once again. The expended energy was more than worth it, informatioic temptes and more than enough energy has been assimited to make all that trouble worth it. My senses searched for the oh-so-slowly closing in steltion of souls. Around three or four more days.P3t1

  Edit: Turns out, AI and nanic beings 't have souls. Oops.