Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

150 – Kill the Heretic!

Things were looking … fine-ish, even with me and Selene restricting ourselves to merely mini-Astartes levels of power and a thin bio-armour in her case and a Necrodermis equivalent for me.

The defenders were tough and didn’t even flinch at the towering Orks charging at them with gleeful abandon. They didn’t even twitch when some of the Greenskin pulled out Tau-sourced railguns and plasma rifles that created head-sized sizzling holes in whatever they hit.

Stormtroopers, as I’d learned, were made of sterner stuff than that and these even more so. These were the best of the best, the ones who took to both their training and indoctrination like fishes to the water, and were as such trusted by the Inquisition to assist them in their duties.

It didn’t help them though, that I flicked out healing pulses of bio-energy and soul energy onto whichever Ork impressed me and was alive enough after doing so. 

“Traitor!” One of them near me shouted as I sent another’s head flying, dancing under his following spray of lasfire and kicking him in the chest hard enough to send him crashing into a wall. He spat to the side, raising his hell-gun in trembling hands. “Heretic!”

I snorted, shifting the necrodermis armour on my left hand into a small shield which I used to swat his next bullet to the side before running him right through with the silvery blade I’d shifted my right hand into.

Fanatics, zealots and overly stubborn morons irritated me. Some might say they were innocents, born to the wrong time and were just the results of societal brainwashing.

To them I say, fuck you. These cunts were beyond help and would have been gleefully grinning had they managed to kill me. 

I liked to think of myself as a mirror in circumstances like this, ignoring all bullshit and reflecting their attitudes towards me right back at them. 

If they surrendered, I’d have let them, but with how they were … well, who gave a fuck. Fuck them. That fanatical zealotry radiating off of them annoyed me enough to shank them just by itself and shooting at me more than made them deserving of my blade.

So I slaughtered them. It had been nothing personal, initially, but now I took some measure of satisfaction in killing every last one of them who shot either bullets or idiotic curses at me.

Then I heard it, a screech not unlike what I’d heard some smaller Tyranids make coming from further up one hallway. My largely retracted aura, kept so to make me focus on the fight I was taking part in, felt like one of the human Psykers closing in quickly.

It felt … wrong, feral. I frowned, putting up a psychic shield around me for a moment and ignoring the dozens of hellfire rounds splattering against it ineffectually.

Then I saw her … or it, to be more accurate, because only the shape remained human. I threw off the playful restrictions I’d placed on myself and grabbed the Psyker in a vice-like grip, pulling it up close to observe.

“What have they done to you?” I asked, fingers reaching up to cup the sunken cheeks of the ‘woman’. She tried to snap at me like some rabid dog, her eyes bloodshot and mouth foaming. 

Her power surged, struggling to get out of my hold and I could tell she was reaching for more power than her body could handle. So I clamped down on it, squeezing the connection she had to the Warp like it was her throat. 

I reached into her mind, looking for clues on what, how and why this happened to a Psyker. 

It was both harder and a thousand times easier than usual, her mind was in tatters, fragmented and abused into near-oblivion.

I looked through the fragments I could touch without breaking them even further, trying to be as gentle as I could. As I did, I felt a righteous fury rise up in my heart. I felt the woman’s pain, her desperation and her simpering pleas. I felt as she retreated further and further into her own mind as her psyche shattered further and further with each passing day under the ministrations of Inquisitor Xander Thrace.

Inquisitor Xander Thrace. I saw him before me, larger than life as he was from the kneeling perspective of the woman who had once been Mara, Shaman Queen of Nirea.

But that was for later, I … wanted to do something for this woman. The poor thing didn’t deserve even a thousandth of the suffering she’d gone through.

Unfortunately, while I could heal the body and protect the soul from daemons, I couldn’t do anything for the mind. Still, I did the best I could do.

My power reached out, gently seeping into her body and locating her soul in the Warp while another part reached into the deepest depths of her mind where the last remains of her mind hid.

Glancing inside that last fragment, protected by her failing power, I saw a little girl barely into her puberty rocking back and forth and hugging her knees, calling for her mother. 

I encased that fragment, protecting it from the rest and the abuse still lingering on them as a gigantic soul tendril of mine pierced into the Warp and fished out her soul, battering away all the lingering daemons.

Then I pulled both into my Realm, placing the soul into one of the nicer little sub-realms and linking it up with that mind fragment.

As for the body, … I turned it into dust after taking a single sample of it for when I had time to make a replacement for the woman. For now, she’d be fine in my little budget afterlife. I could make her a new body later once I could make sure her mind was intact enough for it and had the time otherwise.

Now though, I had an Inquisitor to hunt and kill very painfully. 

“What’s wrong?” Selly, the sweetheart that she was, felt my tumultuous emotions in an instant and was next to me in a moment.

“I think I am going to enjoy killing that Inquisitor,” I said darkly, my aura finding his location in moments. He was coming right towards us. Perfect. “He is one nasty bastard.”

“No torture,” Selene said, squinting at me. “You promised.”

“I did.” I deflated a little, my shoulders slumping as I discarded half a dozen ideas about making him regret ever being born. “I’m still going to make it hurt. He more than deserves it.”

With that, I sent Selene a summary of poor little Mara’s memories and she grimaced. “An Inquisitor? Really?”

“He is just a man like any other,” I said darkly as I heard the clang of his armoured footsteps approaching even over the din of battle. “Just a man with far too much power and no restrictions placed on him. He still bleeds red and shits brown. He will die like all the rest.”

“No torture,” Selene reiterated, taking a trembling breath as she shook off the memory dump I’d given her. “Even a shitstain isn’t worth risking your mental health.”

“You wish is my command,” I said, feeling myself smile thinly at her clear worry for me. I gave her a little peck on the cheek just before I turned to face the armoured man levelling a heavy flamer at the entire battlefield. 

When I saw it ignite, a ferocious grin stretched across my face and with a flick of my hand redirected the burning promethium back at his own men.

I wouldn’t torture him, I promised, but I was going to make him despair and feel at least a fraction of the soul-crushing terror he’d made Mara feel.

Crushing the egos of arrogant, evil bastards is going to be my favourite hobby if I continue on like this. Oh, well. Could have been worse. The Dark Eldar are testament to that.

*****

Zara stiffened, her steps halting for just long enough for the stormtrooper behind her to smack the butt of his gun into her kidney.

She hissed, stumbling forward as the pain radiated throughout her body, but she could hardly bring herself to care.

Her powers were unleashed now, set loose to kill the enemies of Mankind, but those very same powers also opened her eyes to the powers hiding just beneath the veil.

“Move,” one of the stormtroopers said, nudging her forward roughly, and she hurried to catch up with the Inquisitor.

Well, it looked like that from the outside, anyway. She wanted to see, no she had to see what was happening in the cavernous storage room up ahead.

It just so happened that the Inquisitor only now stepped through the door and raised his heavy flamer to fire.

Zara peered under his shoulder, her violet eyes filling with curiosity for the first time in what felt like ages.

The poor, drug-addled Psyker they’d been following was gone, reduced to dust … but Zara had felt it. She knew exactly what she felt. For the first time ever, a departed soul had been claimed near her, saved from the terrible fate that awaited most.

Oblivion, or worse. Oh so much worse, if the brief glimpses her powers allowed her were anything to go by.

Zara was a divinationist and a telepath, her talent laid in seeing what was hidden, and that’d given her an inkling to what happens to souls after death.

And it wasn’t even close to how the chaplains or the Ecclesiarchy described it. There was no afterlife worth living, the Emperor wasn’t there to take you under his protection; you were just … left alone, left to fend for yourself in a world even more treacherous and ruinous than the real one.

She’d thought the Emperor just didn’t bother, likely far too busy guarding humanity from the grasp of the Great Enemy. Or maybe she’d just been too weak, too blind to see the powers of the Emperor at play … though she doubted that. 

Now those doubts were realised as she’d just felt a soul being embraced by some bright, brilliant power and whisked away. It was hard to miss it, practically impossible for a Psyker of her power being this close to the event.

Not that she ever gave voice to her doubts, not doubting anything related to His Divine Majesty as a Psyker usually earned one quick trip to the afterlife … or something just as horrid involving Thrace and her Psychic Hood.

Not knowing what to expect, it took Zara a moment to take in the battle happening before her.

Greenskin battled with their usual glee, pulling the triggers of their guns like it was giving them physical pleasure and facing them was a platoon of stormtroopers huddled up behind cover.

Zara’s eyes flitted over them, but only stopped when her gaze landed on the unique pair standing in the room. A pair of human-looking women.

The smaller one was wearing some strange carapace-like armour, and another dressed in thin silky white robes that were just airy enough not to show more than the general shape of her body. 

Zara saw the pair of glistening emerald eyes staring at the Inquisitor with endless loathing in them, only eclipsed by the sheet psychic might she felt threatening to come bursting out of the woman.

The heavy flamer fired, spitting a plume of hissing flames forth and blinding Zara for a moment, the white-hot flames bright enough to shine through even her shut eyelids.

Blinking away the dots in her blurry vision, Zara saw … that the woman who’d been the main target of the flames stood unharmed. As did the greenskin, the only ones worse off were the defending stormtroopers who seemingly all took a melta grenade up their asses.

The Orks gave their warcry, their bestial voices sending a wave of dread down Zara’s spine as her bones and lungs clattered from the primal bellow.

They lunged forward, right at the Inquisitor who wasted no time to level his auto-bolter at them and spray them with the explosive shells.

“Back,” the woman spoke, her voice as soft as the silky clothes she wore looked but everyone in the room heard it. 

To Zara’s mix of horror and awe, the Greenskin stiffened and like beaten puppies subserviently lowered their weapons and stepped back.

Thrace wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth though, and continued firing at them.

The white-clad woman stepped forward, the clangs of her boot’s heels against the metal floor the only sound besides Thrace’s bolter firing.

Every bolter shell that flew at her, or at the Orks halted mid-air or flew up and into the ceiling, exploding harmlessly.

“You’ll run out of shells,” the woman said dispassionately, walking towards the Inquisitor. Seeing as the man was wearing power armour, it would have usually been a monumentally stupid idea, but Zara couldn’t feel like confronting the woman had been the real idiotic idea. “Inquisitor Xander Thrace, I presume?”

Thrace took a step back, though Zara knew it was not from fear or anything of the sort. Thrace wasn’t a coward … but he also thought he was the Emperor’s gift to humanity, and that his own life was worth more than millions of others’, and even the success of his mission. 

He took a brief glance behind him, his helmet’s visor panning across the stormtroopers still lined up behind him and Zara took a glance as well.

They stood frozen, muscles twitching and straining against an invisible hold. 

“Well, you make an atrocious conversationalist,” the woman sighed theatrically, which would have been more believable if Zara couldn’t feel the naked hatred washing off of her in waves. “You still feel confident. Hmmm. Why is that? Do you think that tin can you hide inside will do anything to protect you from me?”

“It has done well enough against your wretched kind so far,” Thrace said, his voice blaring from the vox speaker built into his armour. “Traitorous Witch.”

Without another word, he raised his flamer again and Zara snapped her eyes shut, surprised when she could actually scamper away from the blooming heat that followed.

“Burn the Witch,” the woman’s murmur ignored the hissing air, travelling to the ears of everyone in the room. “What an ancient tradition, do you know how the original story went? It was a commonly held belief, that if you suspected someone of being a witch, one of the ways to test whether that was true was to burn them at the stake.”

Zara watched as the flames harmlessly swirled around, as if guided by some invisible current. Plumes flickered, dancing around like a troupe of their own while the woman walked in their midst, not even a single ember scorching her robes.

“If the woman burned,” the ashen haired woman said, her mouth curving into a mocking grin. “Then she wasn’t a witch, now was she? But if she did?”

The woman looked down at herself, then with a flick of her hand all the flames got snuffed out in an instant. 

Thrace pounced at her, lightning claw poised to tear the woman to shreds. Then he froze, still mid-lunge, like time came to a crashing stop with the tip of his claws bare inches away from the woman’s body. 

“You thought those silly anti-Psyker Wards in your armour were going to protect you, didn’t you?” The woman asked with faux pity, walking up to the man’s still as a statue form and patted his armoured chest. “An unfortunate miscalculation on your part, you couldn’t know I wasn’t one of the sad, weak little Psykers you can beat into the dirt with just the power of your idiotic beliefs and a power armour … oh, finally a hint of dread! How exciting! But you still hope, I wonder why that could be?”

The woman’s eyes panned over to Zara just as the comm-bead in her ears buzzed and Thrace’s voice came through, nearly shouting into her ears. “Kill it, kill the Heretic this instant or you know what happens!”

Zara gulped, her eyes not leaving the predatory pair of emerald eyes locked onto her like a Lictor to its prey. This is it, if I just manage to kill him instead of-

Something pierced the skin of her neck, just under the collar part of her Psychic Hood and an icy dread washed over Zara just as her mind started to go numb. She clutched at her head, a primal shriek of agony, speaking of the soul-rending pain she was feeling tore its way out of her throat.

Her mind trembled, the power of her shackles, both physical and mental clamping down on her entire being. She couldn’t breathe, the physical part constricting her windpipe and cutting off the blood flow in her arteries while the psychic part came down on her mind like a charging Carnifex, smothering it until she could barely think of anything but the pain spreading through her body. The pain, and the last command she’d heard.

“Kill the Heretic.”