“You are making that face,” Selene said.

  “What face?” I asked, putting on an i expression.

  She squi me, I just smiled and bli her. I was the epitome of level-headedness and pragmatism, there was no way I was thinking about jumping a Shadowkeeper just because I wao throw fists with it. Nope, not this girl.

  I’m still going to do it though.

  Selene poked me in the rib.

  “You are thinking about something stupid,” she said. “I feel it.”

  “Not sure what you are talking about,” I tilted my head. “Does it have something to do with me wanting to see whether I beat up that mean custodian?”

  “Why?” She just asked, defting.

  “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to beat one up if you thought you could?” I felt a grin tug on my lips. “This man is supposed to be one of the greatest fighters humanity ever produced.”

  “It’s stupid,” she said. Not that she could tear her gaze away from the Shadowkeeper’s frozen image. Selene loved fighting just as much as I did, maybe even more so. I could feel it through our bond how she revelled in crushing Tyranids that could wipe cities by themselves under her boot. “You wouldn’t eve anything from it, right? You already have a body superior to a Custodian.”

  “Variety has its own uses,” I tered. “I ’t use Tyranid temptes for everything, and Custodians are supposed to be biological works of art. Ead every one of them is a unique sculpture of infinite value.”

  “And you want to eat one.”

  “And I want to eat one.”

  We stared at each other. She knew she wouldn’t be able to dissuade me for at least trying and I khe greatest thing holding her back from joining me in jumping the Shadowkeeper was her g power to survive the battle if she did so.

  “You already kicked up a shitstorm, but if you by some miracle mao kill a custodian, you will have crusade fleets and custodian kill teams sent after you.”

  I that after a sed of sideration; she was right, but I just wanted a bite and to beat the fuckhead killing my drones into the dirt. My win dition here was surviving and managiher of those two goals would be the ig on the cake.

  Maybe I was overestimating the Shadowkeeper, and he’d fold after a punch, or I was uimating him, and attag him face-to-face would be the st thing I did. He had the fideo hunt me so brazenly; he had to have something he was fident in killih and if not that, weaken me.

  He had to know something about me, there had to be a reason one of the mighty Shadowkeepers dragged his zy ass out into the other side of the gaxy. He came here for a reason, and with a device — presumably — that could track my eldritch body.

  It didn’t take a genius to put the pieces together when one was even vaguely familiar with the Shadowkeeper’s lore. He was here for me, or at least for the body I’d been shoved into. There was no other expnation for why he had a device made just to track the eldritch flesh.

  My eyes narrowed at the frozen image. I’m not giving it back. Finders keepers, fuckwit.

  I doubted the guy would be uanding enough to let me keep the body; I doubted he wouldn’t just try to wipe my entire personality from it to return it into a soulless tool. Was that why my body was so receptive to psychitrol? It was made to be a tool used by psykers to engineer life with bio-matter?

  Why wouldn’t they just possess it like I did? I tapped my in thought, then shrugged. It robably fear, one way or another. Fear of not being themselves in a new body, and fear of any single person having the power I had now.

  If I was in a better world, I might have sidered sharing. I could just give him a siendril to take bae and he would essentially have the exact same thing they had lost.

  This wasn’t a better world, this was the grimdark future of the 41st millennium.

  I think I’ll offer sharing, just so I say I tried it. I was about 99% certaiell me to shove a hedgehog up to where the su shine. Or just ignore my offer and attempt to kill me. Custodians weren’t known for their humour.

  Whatever. I o pn. If I wao get a nibble out of him before bolting, I needed a pn that went further than ‘throw stuff at it and figure something out if that doesn’t work’ — despite that exa having been my go-to so far.

  “Let’s pn,” I said, kig my legs up on a quickly jured coffee table. “How does one go about taking a bite out of a Custodian?”

  “One usually doesn’t want to take a bite out of a Custodian,” Sel said. I could tell she was relut, a touch jealous about me getting to fight a Custodian, but overall just worried that I would kill myself by being stupid. Adorable.

  “I am special like that.”

  “Oh, you are special, for sure,” she rolled her eyes. Did she just-? “You o bait out as many of his tricks as possible before fag him, and make a e right now that you hop into if he mao destroy this one.”

  “Uood ma’am,” I grinned, hand snapping to my forehead in a zy salute. “I’ll do as you and.”

  Selene VossIf she was an artist, Selene would have surely made a painting out of Ea at that moment, just so she could keep it forever, just as it was. Leaning ba the couch with a zy grace she hought possible, a silly grin on her sculpted fad emerald eyes twinkling in mischief as she saluted.

  It was just enthralling. Selene found herself gazing at the woman for a sed too long as the grin slowly slipped off and the alien tilted her head curiously.

  “You alright?” She asked. She dared to ask. With those stupidly kissable lips of hers.

  “Of course,” she shook the childish lust off, she was a woman closing in on thirty, not a teenager. Still … No. “What could he have that could be legitimately dangerous for you?”

  “Holy?” Ea said. “If I take ‘dangerous’ to mean anything that could kill me thhly enough for me to stay dead, not much. He’d have to somehow destroy my soul by using this body as a duit.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?” Selene was dubious of that, at best. She might have seen the girl Ea once was and who she still was in part, but her soul was uionably that of a goddess. A part of Selene wasn’t sure whether Ea was even human at one point. Sure, she lived like one, but was she really human?

  “Maybe,” Ea shrugged. “They had like twenty thousand years. I refuse to believe they didn’t think of this sario before. We’ll have to assume he has a on he believes is capable of killing me food, imprisoning me, or just straight severing the e between my body and soul.”

  Selene wao refute, but despite being a Rogue Trader and part of the high nobility since birth, she knew armingly little about the inner ws of the Adeptus Custodes. There were ss of knowledge to be learned, but never mud never anything substantial.

  Ea khem better, even if she’d only been in this gaxy for a month at most.

  If she said they had ons that could kill her, Selene will assume they did and pn accly. The fact that Ea even bothered pnning was a sign of how seriously she took the Shadowkeeper.

  Selene just saw this very same woman jump straight into battle with the most dangerous bio-form the Tyranids had to offer.

  Selene just wao leave, run, and be sure that she and her lover survived. Maybe if she was stronger … much stronger, she’d want to stay and fight. Fighting as she was would be stupid.

  “You o prod it with something it ’t sp to death,” Selene said.

  “Fair enough.”

  There it was again, the mad depthless hunger shining in her green eyes. Even as the woma out orders through her telepathietwork, she stared at the most ret images and recs of the Shadowkeeper like he was the first piece of food she saw after a month of starvation.

  Sele her mind wander for a moment. She imagihat hunger being turned ohe woman she came to love staring at her like a pieeat to be ed.

  Whether the shudder that rushed down her spine and the beat of her heart pig up pace was a result of utter dread or arousal, she didn’t know.

  Ea turned her head and Selene held her breath, her heart skipping a beat.

  That insatiable hunger was gone, only those enting emerald eyes looking at her with a touch of worried fusion remained. Selene snapped herself out of it.

  “Yeah?”

  “I said I have the new drones ready,” Ea said with a g the hologram. “Should we get some snacks before we get to work?”

  “I just ate and you don’t o eat,” Seleed as she propped herself up into a sitting position and slid up o Ea.

  “Let’s start then.”

  Despite being some sort of eldritch horror, I couldn’t quite mao get used to trolling two bodies at once. Or three for that matter.

  I usually went with ‘throw a mind-core at the problem’ solution in cases like this, but I wao do it myself in this case. Plus, it was just a single bat Drone and my own Avatar. Plus a perfect copy of myself sleeping lifelessly in the bed behind me, which was weird as fuck, but Selene made me do it just in case.

  If this body got destroyed in the fight to e, I’d hop into that back-up and we’d bolt. If we had time, I’d take the other two with us, but if not, me and Selly would just teleport off p.

  Bato the bat Drone. After sending some bird-dro the Shadowkeeper, even some psychically juiced up ones, we realised that we’d o throw something much more serious at him for him to take it even a bit more seriously.

  He just kept ign anything the smaller drones did and didn’t even take his spear out.

  His power armour easily deflected the minor Spells I could throw at him through the drones. Stupid bandwidth requirements. I could barely ma a fra of my Avatar’s psychic power through the tiny drones si only were they horrendously bad as psychiduits, but they only got their source of soul energy sed-hand.

  If my Soul was the i provider and the soul-thread the optical cable going to my house, then my Avatar was the router. parably, the tiny drones were the smartphones ected to said router through a shitty wifi e.

  Not a perfealogy, but it worked somelus, one also had to take into at that the difficulty of sending soul energy through a telepathic el increased expoially based on the distance, so with my bat Drone being a ti away, it was only about a tenth as strong as I was when I fought the Lord of ge, maybe even less so.

  It could run its Danger Sense and Psychic Shield at full power, but it only had a small bit of energy left over to use for boosting its physical capabilities or throwing Spells around. Still, it should be enough to make the damned Shadowkeeper show us some of his tricks.

  The Droood in a barren sandstone valley, staring out into nothing as its Danger Sense worked on maximum power stantly. It only had the ti eldritch tendril in its body, the exact same I’d have left in a bird droo hopefully fool the Shadowkeeper into attag it. We couldn’t take ces.

  ‘What if he isn’t ing here because he tell this is where the rgest signal is ing from? He could be ign where your main body is to hunt down all of your smaller drones first so you ’t escape into them.’ Or so Selene said, which I reasoned ossibility. He was cutting down what he thought were my only avenues of escape and once he was done, he’d e for the main body.

  So many uainties, it was annoying. I liked knowing things; I relied on my lore knowledge to manoeuvre more often than not so far, so knowing so little about the Shadowkeepers and their arsenal of heretical ons was creepi.

  The man diligently followed the trail of drones I left for him, always attag the one I moved so it would be closest to his st known position. I didn’t know whether he was aware of being led around by the nose and just didn’t care or remained in the dark, but I didn’t care.

  The Drone’s Danger Sense bristled as reality cracked only a hundred metres in front of it revealing a void of darkness within.

  Out of the crack stepped a dark armoured form, almost three metres tall and thick power armour interced with slightly glowing sigils. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I felt his gaze on the Drone all the same, heavy and overbearing.

  If he was surprised by finding not the regur birds, he didn’t show it.

  The craapped shut behind him as I ran a calg gaze over his form. He had the spear on his back, though it felt off somehow. Two outwardly suspicious things hung from his waist, one bed skull that gave me goosebumps even on my Avatar and a ptinum orb I reised at first gnce.

  It was the same orb I found at the pce I first awoke in this gaxy. The same thing that probably held my body before I came to inhabit it.

  I gnced up again, and the Shadowkeeper already had his spear in hand and it was crag with energy that my Danger Sense wasn’t liking o. It felt dangerous, destructive in a way few other things did.

  It reminded me of the acidic bile in the worm that could eat through any material and the sickly green beam of the Ne Fyer.

  Then he moved, and the spear on me.

  P3t1