MephistonFew fights have made the Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels as frustrated as this one. Fewer still made him feel so … useless. Powerless, even.

  Try as he might, none of his attacks as much as scratched the armour of the titanic beast currently in the process to beat the Lent into a bloody paste.

  Only the Primarch’s fming sword and ander Dante’s axe could boast of that feat. Which left him as support, and as the primary attacker for the sedary battle.

  Ba the furthest reaches of the cavern, he could almost taste the malicious presence of the Norn Queen, hidden behind an unending tide of Tyranids and protected by a psychic shield Mephiston was relentlessly trying to break through.

  If any of them had been w where all the psychic variants of the emperor-cursed aliens were, they got their ahe moment they stepped foot into this hall.

  Hundreds, if not thousands of the bsted things were w in perfect syny to hold the unbreaking shield while the tide threateo e them all, if the Emissary left enough of them to even be ed.

  They were in a stalemate. Lulliman fought valiantly, going toe to toe with the xe, though he was getting pushed back as time went on.

  The rest of them … were also there.

  Daook every opportunity to strike, slowly, but steadily increasing the insignifit scratches on the Emissary’s armour.

  Mephiston redoubled his efforts, pulling deeply on the ’s treacherous power as strike after strike bore into the shield. His men would keep the tide off of him while he worked, but they weren’t powerful enough to help him. Not nearly powerful enough, and the Shadow only worked to weaken them even further despite his attempts to disperse it as much as possible.

  He watched with a faint satisfa as another zoanthrope colpsed into a bloody heap, followed by two dozen lesser bioforms.

  His attacks were w … If only he could overtake the rate at which the fallen were repced, he would be certain of victory. As.

  A shiver rushed down his spine, his whole mind tingling for just a moment. He stiffened. He khat sensation; he k well even if he felt it only once every decade at most.

  Or every damned week when around Ea. She was close. And she was drawing on the so deeply he could feel it through the Shadow.

  They were truly blessed that the woman hadn’t been traihe amount of power she was so casually drawing into herself would have been enough to devastate a p in the hands of a Librarian.

  He almost scowled when he realised he felt relieved. She was ing; she was close. They would have a ce.

  He hated himself for thinking it, but he felt the battle was tilting the wrong way without the strange alien on their side.

  Just a mier he first felt that tihe woman exploded into the room, followed closely by another white form and two golden ones.

  Mephiston didn’t know what to think of the tter and that went even less so for the former so he decided to not even bother.

  Of course, the woman crashed right into the Emissary without a sed thought. The enormous beast stumbled.

  None of the hters let the opportunity go to waste. The Emperor’s Sword seared a deep wound across what ted for the beast's thigh while Dante’s axe smashed into its face, keeping it off bance for a moment longer.

  A moment, which ear another burning wound across the torso.

  He heard a gleeful ugh, and then the fight desded into a chaotice. What Ea cked in skill, experience or size, she more than made up for in speed and power.

  How such power was held in such a small body, he couldn’t know.

  Mephiston put such things out of his mind, his focus turniirely to the Norn Queen’s vague silhouette. He had a shield to break.

  Well, this thing will be hard to crabsp;I mused to myself as I tried, and failed, to pierce through the wound the blue maed.

  The damned sbsp;on the wound was strong enough to deflect my flimsy bio-sword if I didn’t overcharge it to shit a at it with a straight pierg strike.

  Sshes just … bounced off. Shitty sword.

  I eyed Guilliman’s fming sword for a moment, before I remembered what made that thing so special. It had a shard of the Emperor’s soul in it.

  Yeah nope. Not even if they gave it to me as a gift. I’d really rather not.

  I danced around the thirty-foot-tall beast, my baseline human size w in my favour as it tried to swat me away with its overly rge limbs.

  With an angry ultra-ultramari barely had time to even do that much. If it gave an opening, it got a nasty wound.

  I could have just kept providing enough openings until it eventually died … but that would have been me.

  The ohing w to my advantage was the Emissary’s ser-like focus being on Guilliman. They eveioned in the debriefing that this thing was some sort of a targeted ‘assassin’ bioform. When I didn’t bother it, it went back t to p down on the Primarch.

  Seleo relieve the pressure on Mephiston’s group while Val was out there … somewhere.

  The crazy Eldar was zipping all over the pce, cospying a lightning bolt.

  I watched for just a few seds as one guardian spear wielded by my purple-cloaked protector scraped against the Tyranid’s side. It left a tiny mark, but barely a tenth of the depth of what would be o strike flesh.

  Just as I was w how to amp up the fight a bit, the Emissary seemed to have e to the same clusion as I. If the current fight tinued as it was, it would lose and its Queen would get butchered soon after.

  There was a minute shift in its stahe way it swung its cws and the way its body moved. It was barely noticeable, but I was sure Guilliman caught it as well.

  That might have been the only reason both of us mao react when it let out a psychic screech. I was ready, my mind already coated in yers of shields, but it gave the Primarch that moment of pause the monster o lu its arget: Dante.

  I didn’t allow myself to hesitate. The tempting thought of letting the rude ander get butchered was crushed even before it could form. The only reason my bones didn’t shatter uhe strain of far too muergy flooding my body was that they were made of soulbone.

  Faster thahe Emissary. My armoured body crashed into Dante’s a him flying. I think I might have felt a minute glee from the colossal Tyranid, it went for the weak link, but the annoying tiny enemy running circles around it — that being me, if you couldn’t guess — decided to jump into its attack.

  Each of its cwed fingers was the size of my thigh, with edges mere molecules thid vibrating with immense psychic power.

  My armour and body underh didn’t stand a ce. Only the skeleton held, where muscles and ans were crushed into paste and torn away.

  It didn’t relent, atack following the first, then a stomp and then a vicious strike with its shoulder scythes.

  It must have had memories of how I healed against other Tyranids. Otherwise, it would have thought me dead already. I let it, unwilling to show the Imperials just how little the destru of my body meant to me.

  Then it screamed, Guilliman’s sword having taken an arm ing to tear into my skull. Finally.

  I let the bio-energy flow, repairing my ravaged body in just under a sed. By the end, I was already lunging at the monster with a snarl.

  If Guilliman was surprised, he didn’t show it. Though Octavia like he would have had a heart attack if such a thing ossible for a Custodes.

  He was o me the instant the attaded, but got swept away by a casual punch from the Emissary.

  I decided to gh my repertoire of psychic spells, just in case. Telekinesis failed to move the thing, be it because of some i resista had or because it was just too fat to be moved. Biomancy was utterly incapable of tg onto its body while bolts of lightning didn't even leave marks on its armour, and the same went for most of my fmes.

  The green life-eating fmes and the bes feasting on molecur bonds held. If barely. Its armour was ridiculous and saturated with so much energy that even those were just an invenience.

  I cut both off when it started using its fme-cd fists to burn nearby mario ash. At least they had the decy to be burned, uhe damned bug.

  I sidered cheating, giving a meaningful go the psychic barrier Mephiston was bashing his head against. I could probably bst through it … in a minute or two.

  Would the Emissary really just drop dead if we killed the queen though? I wondered, weaviween the vionster’s strike and nding enhanced pu its shin and ao throw its bance off while it tried to stomp on me.

  I tried to look for any signifit bond linking the two, something beyond the regur web of the Hive Mind. It was almost impossible, with the being all murky, but I stht uhe beast.

  There was something. A much stronger psychid reached out from the emissary … it didn’t stretch towards the Queen, but right into Guilliman.

  I gave the Primarch a dubious look. Was he ied with something? Did geealers of all things, get the blue demigod?

  Nah. That’s ridiculous.

  I sent an experimental psychic bst at it, half expeg it to just bounce off of the link. What I didn’t expect, was for it to dissolve into a dark fog and for the Emissary to go into a wild frenzy for the moment it took for the link to reform.

  “What did you do?” Guilliman asked, rolling his shoulder whiow sported a new scar on it.

  “Does it matter?” I asked back.

  “ you do it again?” He asked between defleg strikes.

  “Yes.”

  “Do it on my mark then.”

  I shrugged, giving him a nod.

  The loss of an arm didn’t suddenly make our victory a sure thing. It still had another cwed hand and two limbs ending in long scythes. Though when Dante jumped bato the fray a mier, the pressure lessened on the Primiarch signifitly.

  “Now,” Guilliman shouted, just as the monster went to bloe of Dante’s strikes.

  It sized up for the briefest instants as I bsted its mental link, the wild. trolled swings suddenly became feral swipes and where each attack was measured before, now it struck with such force that its muscles were tearing uhe strain.

  I didn’t know what Guilliman’s pn was, but I somewhat suspected getting a fist into the chest and smashing into the wall a hundred metres away was not it.

  Dante redoubled his efforts, nding blows as he flitted around his foe midair, his jump pack burning its skin as he passed. I did my part too, making the Emissary stumble when I smashed into its leg with a charge.

  Then the link came back, and its mind cleared. With that, it swatted Da of the air like a fly and bounded after the Guilliman-shaped hole in the distant wall.

  That’s not good. I doubted the blue man was anywhere close to dead, but unscious? Maybe. Injured? Perhaps. What I did know was that he wasn’t back yet and that if he didn’t hold the Emissary’s attention, it would probably spend the rest of eternity beatio a bloody paste.

  A swarm of tiny butterflies loaded with as much bio-energy as possible shot out of my skin and rushed after the Emissary, burning energy to catch up with it.

  When they reached it, they bombarded its eyes, its mouth, its ears and wherever they could find any soft tissue on its armoured body. The faint surge of psychiergy in the area was the only warning I got before a massive bst of psychic pround into my shields a my body flying.

  My mental shields held, but the physical ones did not. The bst fyed my body of skin and flesh the moment my protes failed and crushed whatever else remained inside my skeleton into dust.

  Well, that happened. I mused, now reduced to a single white glob of flesh sheltering inside my skull and a translut pile of bones.

  With a mental nudge, I set my skull upright and stared after the Emissary. It stood still, head raised and mouth open in a roar I couldn’t hear, but felt as my bones rattled. Then came a fsh of light and the monster was burning, a wrathful giant cracked blue armour wielding a fming sword stepping out of the debris.

  That was the moment I realised I might not be the ‘main character’ of this gaxy, despite all I’ve got going for me. I might have godly psychic power on my side, as well as eldritch bioengineering, but Guilliman? He had fate. He had to.

  Nothing else would make sense. I fug hate fate.

  P3t1

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