I looked up into ’s eyes, finding him staring back with a mix of aermination. His surface thoughts were clear enough and told me enough of what he was thinking.

  ‘She teleport a damable twenty miles in a snap, how am I supposed to hit her with a damned spistol?’

  Then there was my armour, which resembled the ones worn by my bat drones, whom he knew never even got injured while purging the cultists. Those worries and a dozen more were running through his mind as he tried to decide whether Jurgen’s Bnk aura would be enough to stop me from using any of those powers.

  Knowing his trusty aide was just outside the tent, ready to fire his heavy melta to douse me in a psma burning at a few thousand degrees celsius was the only reason he was even risking fronting me.

  That, and haviold to do so by Amberly of course.

  “I would have thought your self preservation instincts were better than this,” I muttered, my demeanour uned but my voiow had a tighto it. I stared into his eyes, my face void of expression as I spoke in a calm, measured tone, “you pull that trigger and I’m breaking your arm. If you pull it again, I’ll cut you into bite sized pieces and that goes to all the soldiers standing outside this tent. You get one shot that you’ll survive as a warning because I feel just a tiny bit bad for stealing your toy. One shot, then you go see how well ‘the Emperor protects’.”

  “You have held us at Psychipoint up until now,” Amberly said with some mild reproa her voice. I gnced over, finding the Inquisitor now behiwo goons, who had a pair of hellguns levelled at me. “This is just evening the scales.”

  I tilted my head, squinting at her as I all but ighe three guns aimed at me, and the other dozens that I couldn’t see, but knew were there.

  “Fair enough,” I allowed, the edge of my lips curving upwards into a smile. Not the polite, pyful smile I wore before but one a hint more manic, holding an echo of the grins I teo wear while engrossed in a fight to the death. “If that is what it takes to calm your nerves. I’ll tell you though, your pet Pariah won’t stop me from killing you all. I’ll just have to get my hands dirty. With the due threat out of the way, I’m curious, what are you hoping to achieve with this?”

  “We ’t allow you to leave with the artifact,” Amberly said with finality, making it known she was willing to risk testing my cims of being able to kill them all to get what she wanted.

  “And I won’t allow you to have it either,” I said, smiling wolfishly. My visible ck of at having three guns poi my face was having some adverse effects ohree men’s ce. Now, the two goons were mirr ’s uainty who himself was looking like he was cursing everyone and everything that pounded his meeting with me. “Quite the drum.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” said, speaking up for the first time since I’d revealed myself. He sounded uain aant at the start, but was quickly getting more and more sure of himself with every word. His spistol left my face, his aim jumping low, nding … right oifact. “No one having the artifact seems like the perfepromise to me. her of you want the other to have it, but I feel like her of you are enthused about using the thing yourselves either. It’d just be rotting in some vault anyway, wouldn’t it? We might as well destroy it now and erase the da represents here and now.”

  I hummed thoughtfully, my gaze catg the desperate yet hopeful look in ’s eye before I slowly let it move over to the Inquisitor. She looked ready tue, clearly unwilling to let the fruits of her months-long work be destroyed, but she kept her mouth shut.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said with a smile, curtailing her respoh an agreement. Now if she disagreed, whatever happehereafter would be wholly on her. “I like promises. One addition though, if we are to destroy it, I want it to be destroyed thhly.”

  “Yes?” Cais asked, a hint of fusion in his voice as he looked back at me.

  “That peashooter of yours won’t do,” I said, waving vaguely at his spistol. “Have your pet Bnk shoot it with that big fuckoff gun of his until not even the scraps remain.”

  looked over at Amberly, who had her lips in a thin frown of clear unwillingness. A momehough, it drained away a only resignation.

  “Fine,” she said. “But it stays within the Bnk’s influeil it’s destroyed.”

  She then gave a meaningful look to the table I had teleported here. Fair enough, I’d be worried about me telep away nanoseds before the melta hit it too had I been in her shoes.

  No one would be able to tell if I did, after all. None of their eyes could grasp details happening on that timescale.

  I shrugged easily, as if it didn’t matter, though I felt slightly disappointed inside. Sure, I didn’t really want the toy, but I would have liked to research it, anyway.

  Oh well, no loss on my part. I thought to myself. Dangerous as it might have been, a tool to protect my soul could have been useful. Those Shadowkeepers had attacked it after all. If in no other way than to serve as an inspiration on how to improve my own defences.

  Almost every use of my psychic might have been just stolen ideas and random superpowers from pop culture I had mao make work after all. I was barely scratg the surface of what ossible because I was too dumb to e up with viable uses of my powers on my own.

  In my defe was hard to e up with anything crete when teically, everything ossible through the use of Psychic powers, but was in practice limited by vague and mysterious rules I was still figuring out.

  If I could see how this thing worked, without actually having to endanger my own damned soul to do it, I might just be able to get something out of this, anyway. How do I do that though, without bag out of this ‘agreement’ and making myself look like an ass?

  “Before all that though,” I spoke up, smiling disarmingly as they turheir suspicious gazes at me. Rightly so, because I inteo do something that might not really be in lih the spirit of our yet to be cluded agreement. “I’m curious about how this thing works. Aren’t you?”

  “No,” said before he could catch himself. A brief expression of disgust flickering across his face as he g the artifact. The man looked like he’d rather be in the same room as a Pgue Marina than with the artifact.

  “Uandable,” I said with a smirk, then stood up with slow and measured movements so as to avoid spooking the soldiers and the goon duo behind Amberly, both of whom still had their psma rifles aimed at me int. “And before you worry, I don’t io touch it, nor am I willing to let it touch me and do whatever it means to do to my own soul. I’m merely proposi it ect to a … test subject. To see what it does. It’d be informative, and I’d take it as a favour, which I’d be willing to return here and now.”

  “I have two questions,” Amberly said, eying me suspiciously as I took a few steps away from the table, bag up a little. “What use would we have of this favour? Sed, where would you be getting your test subject? I am not letting you use one of my men and nor am I all that willing to let you just grab one of the locals.”

  A bit surprised she didn’t tell me to go eat a bolt of psma in case of an answer — like I suspect 99% of Inquisitors would have respoo an alien telling them they’d like to test their dangerous artifact — it took me a long sed to answer.

  “I was not intending to use her your men, or the locals,” I said dryly. “Oe of favours, I could provide you with rejuvenatioments the likes of which you in the Imperium only dream about. If you don’t want that for some reason, or don’t trust me to not sneak in something you’d find distasteful, we talk about what other services oods you’d be ied in. Alternatively, I could give you a demonstration and you could have your pet Psyker check my work afterwards.”

  was looking increasingly weirded out by the dire I was taking our discussions in, but Amberly was now looking a mix of intrigued and wary.

  “I think I’d like that demonstration,” she said, settling into her chair and waving the two men behio lower their guns. It was just a gesture, sihe ones outside still had their much rger guns poi me, but I took it as the sign of goodwill that it was and gave her a polite smile. “But I’d like to know what exactly you’re intending to do, so we cross check afterwards.”

  “I do just about anything with anic material,” I said, tapping my as if in thought. “But I was thinking along the lines of returning people you chose to their physical primes, removiic defects that’d make them more likely to tacurable diseases and infusing them with some life-force. The st of which would allow them to stay in their prime state I’d returhem to for a long time, the extent of which would be determined by how muergy I io them, and how much of that energy would be used up prematurely to heal wounds or various illnesses.”

  A few seds of dubious silence followed that, with Amberly being the first to digest my answer and manage a response. A follow-up question, at that: “How long would that life extension be?”

  “Depends on how much I’m willing to make it,” I said. “Really, I could make it upwards of four millennia, but afterwards yeics would start to unravel as your cells’ memories weaken. Not that I’m willing to eveend one of your lives that long for a favour this small. I’m willing to give you a single millennia, spread across as many people as you want and no more. Healing someone up to tiptop shape would reduce that by a tury per person.”

  Extending their lives beyond four millennia ossible, of course, but that’d involve more ih ges. I’d have to make them new ans that’d remake all of their cells every five years and reinforced them every time they did. I had some temptes that could work with some modifications too, but I wasn’t willing to go that far here and for them, and nor did I think they’d be willing to let me put some strange new an into them.

  Even if one of those temptes I could use came from the standard Space Marines.

  “And you would be willing to demonstrate that capability?” Amberly asked. “A my Psyker double check it?”

  “Only the healing part of course,” I said. “I don’t want to sit here for the hundred years just so you make sure the recipient really stopped aging. Nor do I think it would be a good use of your time, for that matter.”

  “Right,” Amberly said with an awkward look, looking slightly sheepish before she recollected herself. “The’s do that before anything else.”

  “Sure.” I shrugged. “Who do you wao do? I take it you won’t be taking the role of the test subject. Soooo … maybe him?”

  I gestured towards with my , then turned my gaze owo men standing at her shoulders.

  “Or maybe one of them?” I asked with a zy tone, having to hold back a giggle at the absolute revulsion and horror washing over the tter two. “I could also do your Bnk … Jurgen, was it? Removing all the dozens of skin diseases he has and de-aging him would be doable, and I might as well add in a minor modification for free to make his sweat smell like roses.”

  For whatever reason, Amberly didn’t think to eain my suggestions and instead called out to someone by the name ‘Sebastian’, who lumbered in through the fp of the tent a few tense seds ter.

  “Him,” Amberly said, turning her intense blue eyes on me. “Should be pretty visible and obvious whether you truly do what you cim.”

  “True enough,” I said, eying the newer. Theed in a murmur as I ran my gaze over him, “True enough.”

  Sebastian was an old man with dark gray hair and where his skin cked wrinkles, it sported scars of cuts and burns. He also had a biomeical eye and a fully meical right hand from the elbow down.

  True enough, even a blind man would be able to tell whether I could really heal and de-age someoh old Sebastian as my patient.

  Well, challenge accepted. I thought, a slow grin f on my lips. Not that this will be much of one. Should be easy enough.