NOVEL WEB 91 – Gathering Shadows
After our little talk, I was feeling unusually shy, yeah, me, shy. I know. That doesn’t really go well with narcissism, but it is what I had to deal with. It didn’t help that Selene went from treating me like some goddess, to a puppy she just rescued from the shelter.
It was embarrassing as hell, and it didn’t help that the happy little butterflies were still going wild in my stomach from the kiss and what it meant.
She still likes me … she accepted me. I still had my old look on me, and while I loved the acceptance and the smothering she was giving me. I was still very damned sure I didn’t want to be the woman I was even if she accepted that part of me.
I changed. I was not that person anymore, and I wouldn’t be wearing that face if I could help it.
“Ehm,” I tried to catch her attention.
“Yeah?”
“I,” I started, not really sure how to ask if I could turn back already. Might as well just ask it. “Can I turn back now?”
“Yes, of course,” she said without letting me go. “Thank you, for showing me this … part of yourself.”
The smile she gave me made me feel so damned guilty about not doing this before. I just gave her a thankful smile as I shifted back into my carefully sculpted look.
[~~ding!~~ Your new Psyker Form is completed. Resources redirected to continue previous tasks. Thank you for employing DID Inc!]
Rolling my eyes, I shifted again and felt my new form’s psychic conductivity diminish ever so slightly. It wasn’t even close enough to not be worth the trade off though. It just meant I had to make my super Eldritch Blast destroy only 99.9 metres squared, instead of a hundred.
“What was that?” Selene asked with a frown on her face, looking me up and down.
“I just finished designing the new form without the Eldar empathetic defect.” I twirled around to show off my … exactly the same looking body. Not that she seemed any less interested in it.
“Oh,” she blinked. “Nice?”
“I don’t think I feel any different,” I hummed. “I still don’t feel like caring all too much about random humans though.”
“Well,” she said. “That should be entirely on you now.”
“Yeah,” I gulped. “We’ll see, I guess.”
“That we will,” she hummed. “And I will make sure to tell you off before you go flaying children.”
“Thanks.” I said with a wry roll of my eyes. I wouldn’t flay children. I wasn’t that far gone.
“What now?” Selene asked, seemingly unwilling to move from her couch. “We still have, like, a day right?”
“Hmmm,” I thought it over, slumping down at the end of the couch right next to her feet. “We could do some … space exploration.”
“That doesn’t sound too relaxing,” she whined adorably, though she obviously didn’t notice how she sounded saying it.
“We can do it from here.” I smiled, flicking a bit of eldritch matter off my finger. It shifted mid-air, morphing into some streamlined humanoid. It was haphazardly made, but it’d do what I wanted. “See?”
I threw up an Illusion, a holographic feedback of what the weird drone could see as it turned and looked around our room.
“That’s so weird,” said Selene. Then she smiled. “Sounds good. What are we exploring?”
“I just want to take a look around the star system and check out the fleet. I’m sure there are some interesting things hiding out there in the darkness of space.”
“Okay then,” she said. “Let’s explore space from our couch. Sounds like a totally normal thing to do.”
Selene Voss
Selene felt … content. Truly content with where she was in life for probably the first time in her life. Humming in satisfaction as Echidna’s fingers massaged her feet idly while she gazed at the floating image.
Through the image, she could see a blazing star from up close expanding as far as the eye could see. Selene was sure even with her armour, she’d be cooked alive if she stood as close to it as the drone.
If she squinted — or when Echidna felt like changing up the colour spectrum of the image — she could see hundreds of differently sized and shaped other objects floating in space.
If Selene understood it right, these things were some sort of satellites that could transform sunlight into the ‘bio-energy’ Echidna lived off of. The science behind it escaped her, and by her observations, it also escaped Echidna.
Still, it seemed to work to an extent, if only based on the grin on her face. Despite this supposedly only being a test run to check the future viability of building a swarm of those drones and dropping them off around a nearby star, she could see more of the damned things floating out there than she’d killed Tyranids on Baal.
“How is it going?” she decided to ask. Sure, they had gone over the few micro-planets on the way to the star, but all she'd seen so far of space was darkness, rocks and the star. Not all too wondrous for someone who’d been travelling the void for decades.
“Oh,” Echidna snapped out of her fixation, blinking as if her conscious mind just now pulled itself back into her body. Then she smiled confidently. “It’s alright. It should be a nice bump in energy once it gets going, but I’ll still need to hunt if I want to keep my body working on the same level as now.”
If Selene wasn’t sure her memory was working properly, she could never have imagined that this was the same woman who nearly broke down just an hour ago. Her supernatural level of self-confidence was back working overtime along with the face that she could hardly even compare to the one she showed her back then.
Selene wasn’t sure why she even asked, a part of her knew there was a very real chance Echidna would just shrug her off or shut down, still the question had been burning at her for weeks.
Even if the woman’s ‘backstory’ had been airtight — which it was not on closer inspection — she liked to think she still would have noticed something being off about Echidna. There was just a piece of the puzzle missing before, but now she felt it all snap into place.
Now the subconscious sense of wrongness she felt whenever she looked at the woman’s confident smirk was gone, and all she could feel was … understanding? Selene didn’t quite pity her, she knew that was the last thing she wanted, but she did her best to show her acceptance.
She liked to frame her impulsive kiss that way, and not just her taking advantage of Echidna being uncharacteristically vulnerable. That scared girl that hid under the guise of the prideful goddess pulled at her heartstrings all the same though.
It was all a bit complicated, but she was happy and Echidna was happy. No, they were happy before, now they were … relaxed and content. Selene felt like the unbridgeable gap between the two of them that existed before had been closed in a matter of minutes and Echidna seemed like a weight she didn’t know she was carrying all along had been lifted off her shoulder.
It was nice.
“Not that your drones aren’t interesting,” Selene said. “But we’ve been looking at that burning ball of death for half an hour.”
“Oops,” she said and Selene was tempted to roll her eyes. Well, it wasn’t like she didn’t enjoy the foot massage, but she was promised interesting space exploration and not real-time satellite crafting. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright,” she shrugged. “So? What now?”
“I want to check out the inner asteroid belt,” Echidna mused while the myriads of smaller satellite drones flowed back into the drone she was controlling. “I think I felt something funky going on around there, but I can’t be sure from th-”
Without saying another word and before Selene could understand what's happened, Echidna was standing, full battle regalia covering every inch of her body and psychic power surging in her body.
“Wha-?” Selene asked.
“Something is killing my drones,” Echidna said in a tone as frigid as ice.
Selene glanced at the Illusion, but found it still in place.
“It seems fine?”
“Not the ones in space,” she said. “The ones on the planet. Something is hunting them. Hunting Me!”
That sent a chill down Selene’s spine, she stood up and let her own armour cover her from head to toe. She didn’t know whether she’d be of any use, but not being ready to help if Echidna needed it would have been something she could never live down.
“Can I help?”
I blinked, slowly turning towards Selene, now wearing her full armour and staring at me with an eager glimmer in her eyes. I … didn’t even consider that. Something out there was butchering my scouting bird-like drones along with the swarm of butterflies I left out there to keep collecting bio-energy.
Well, butchering wasn’t exactly the right word as they were just there one moment and gone the next and while that wasn’t something crazy — those drones were only strong compared to regular butterflies and birds, even a good smack with a hatchet could kill both — the fact that they were tracked was making me queasy.
“I,” Should I let her? I don’t even know what is hunting my drones. “We need more information first. I don’t even know what the hell is hunting my drones.”
“Sure,” she nodded, helmet covering her expression, but I could still feel her resolute support through it all. “Just know that I’m here to help if there is anything I can do.”
I smiled, even as I felt another bird blink out of existence. Where before there was a subtle sense of this desperate need to prove herself useful to me, now Selen just felt willing to help, if need be.
“I will,” I said. “And thank you. But as I said, information.”
“Right,” she nodded, sitting back down, still in her armour, just with the helm melding into her chest plate. “Why are you ready to jump into action, then?”
“...”
I dismissed the armour and sat back down, clearing my throat as I decidedly avoided Selene’s amused gaze locking with my own. Investigation, I needed investigation, and fast. Something could track my drones and destroy them before I could see them through the drones.
Unfortunately, using my aura to see what was destroying the drones was not viable as I’d have to move their soul-thread over to connect directly to that drone if I wanted to do that.
Those drones weren’t directly connected to my soul, so even using psychic powers through them was challenging to say the least and highly straining on my telepathic connection with them.
This hadn’t been much of a bother before, sure if I could shoot Eldritch Blasts out of each and every one of my drones, that could be OP, but I’d mostly only used the smaller drones as scouting units.
After all, the only thing they had that a regular version of them — a normal bird / butterfly — didn’t have, was my microscopic eldritch tendril sitting at the core of them, ready to absorb biomass and transform the drone.
The eldritch flesh was also extremely psychoactive. If it took 1% of my brainpower to hold up a telepathic connection with a regular drone that didn’t have it, it took 0.01% of my brainpower to hold up the same connection if they had it.
The only thing more receptive for psychic power I had was Soulbone, and that wasn’t quite the same. Soulbone channeled power while my eldritch flesh was receptive to it, like it was a specific frequency radio signal that it was designed to respond to.
Was that how the thing was finding them? Did the eldritch tendrils have some signal or presence to them that I was unaware of and which could be tracked? That could be bad.
I pushed the space explorer drone to the back of my mind, letting a mind core handle directing it into the asteroid belt where I predicted the fleet to cross over. I could check up on what I sensed there later.
The illusory hologram changed. Now we received the bird-eye's view of a jagged landscape where spiky sandstone pikes burst out of the blood red desert wastes down below.
I sent a command and the eldritch flesh complied, merging fully with the bird, but before it did so, it changed the design of it to perfectly mimic the few vulture-like avians of Baal I’d absorbed to make them.
Of course, before this they had beautiful plumes of feathers and looked more like white doves than the ravenous birds of this wasteland planet, but leaving an identifier for my hunter wasn’t a smart idea.
The drone now looked no different from the local birds and it had no physical differences either, with my tendril fully merging into its flesh. This was an irreversible change and locked the drone’s form as it was, but if that was how they were tracked, that was a trade-off I was willing to make.
Slowly, I changed hundreds of the drones. In some, I left the tendril, others I only removed the tendril, but left them looking like doves. I wanted to know which ones would attract the hunter.
I waited. I wasn’t just staring at the image feedback; I was letting everything every single drone on the planet saw flow into my mind. I might usually delegate most of the thinking to mind cores, but if I wanted, I could merge all of my brain-power into a single main mind. It was just easier to live a ‘normal’ life when I wasn’t thinking about a thousand things at once at speeds even quantum computers would envy.
Selene stayed silent next to me. We waited a minute, and then another. When the third one passed, I barely noticed a shadow flashing through the vision of one of the birds before its presence disappeared from my mind.
Narrowing my eyes, I pulled up the memory and played back what the white dove with one of my tendrils saw just before its death.
“Slow it down …“ I murmured. The bird could barely catch a large dark form moving towards it before it died, but that was a problem with its brain and not its eyes. I replayed it at 0.001 speed.
I heard Selene gasp at me as the figure cleared up, but I barely noticed it as something primal in me was fixated on the being in the image.
A large, ten feet tall humanoid clad in pitch black power armour with gold accents and readying a glaive-like weapon to strike.
Shadowkeeper. What are you doing here?