Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

198 – Weirdboy

As if I had to play such inane tricks to get what I wanted from this arrogant blue asshole. IF I wanted to concoct some scheme to earn his trust, I would not have used something as boring or easy to see through as a group of fucking Orks to throw ‘missiles’ at him that were held together by hopes and duct tape. 

The urge to do away with this little game, this farce had been strong. I was playing with him because it was amusing, because I enjoyed it and it proved a nice workout for my nascent skills in deception and politics. It wasn’t even the fact he pushed back that set me off, not that he thought he was better than me and had enough leverage to pry my secrets from me, but that he thought I was dumb enough to really try a hare-brained scheme like he’d implied.

I knew it was likely he was just saying it to play with my emotions, to press me into a corner. After all, he was technically my ‘handler’ in the Tau Empire, my primary link to their government, so when he accused me of staging the attack, I had to defend myself. That was how it went. He came up with an accusation, which I’d have to scramble to disprove, which would establish his power over me without him having to do anything as uncivilised as resorting to threats.

He had pushed me into a corner. That’s what this was, and I hated being pushed into a corner, every fibre of my being revolted by it and I found the mere notion of it abhorrent. I was free. I would not be chained, not by the Gods and not my anyone else. I refused. How dare some little blue fuck who didn’t even know he was a tiny goldfish in an ocean full of monsters force my hand? Even if in just the tiniest, most insignificant way possible? 

The most infuriating was that to get out of the checkmate I’d been pushed into with his crude tactic, was that I knew I could get out of it with a thought. I just had to … give up our little game. I mean, pulling out my gigantic psychic might and slapping it onto the table was the equivalent of knocking over the table in chess. It was cheating, throwing a tantrum and losing all baked into one. 

So I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure what my plans were, but I had the urge to beat some Orks into a collective fungal pulp while simultaneously putting the fear of ME into the annoying Ethereal.

I couldn’t ‘win’ our little game of politics without cheating, but I could make him feel like he’d rather not have won once all this is over and done with. He’ll regret being so casual about pushing all of my worst buttons.

“You can truly protect us from the missiles?” He asked doubtfully, though with a greater amount of faked polite curiosity than he’d bothered to put on for a while now. Seems like letting my emotions slip for a moment had him properly spooked. 

I stomped down on another surge of irritation at having my abilities doubted. Had my foes been Necrons, or Elite Eldar warriors, I would have understood the concern, but these were just orks. There could be a billion of them and I’d still stomp them into the ground without breaking a sweat.

Why did it annoy me so much? I was pretty narcissistic about my looks … okay, that was probably it. Somewhere along the way, my psychic powers joined the ranks of the traits of myself I took pride in. Now, calling them into question felt like someone called my painstakingly sculpted to near-perfection body ugly.

It did not set off that primal rage from before, that only feeling cornered or having something that was mine messed with deserved. The only other time I remembered feeling a similar, and even more intense rage was when the Changeling took the guise of Selene. I had thought it was wearing her skin. Even now, I could feel embers of that rage simmering in the back of my mind at the memory.

“Yes,” I said simply, narrowing my eyes at him in a dare to question my abilities further. He relented, nodding in apparent defeat as he gave a gesture to one of his guards, who transmitted my request to the pilot. The shuttle shifted course, circling around and heading towards the Orkish encampment.

I could see them, of course, I had been watching the Orks and listening in on their idiotic conversation for a while now. 

“Wot we do now, Boss?”

“Git more rokkits ready, ya gits!” the biggest Ork bellowed, smacking the smaller one upside the head. “Grab da big ‘unz an’ get da Weirdboy ta make ‘em real nasty wiv ‘is madgik! We’z gonna swat dat fly outta da sky an’ give ‘em a proppa stompin’! Ain’t no weedy metal burd flappin’ ‘round in our skies!”

“Surr ting, Boss!”

That was the gist of it at least, the rest were just excitable Orks practically vibrating at the possibility of getting into a beat-down with whatever’s in our shuttle. Seemed like these idiots somehow forgot that these skies were mine and they were just one of the animals populating my jungles. 

I’d have to have a little talk with Throgg and politely inquire as to why there were Ork Bosses running around on the planet who didn’t understand the proper pecking order in place. I had enough trouble getting my arcologies in order; I did not need random Orks popping out of the woodwork trying to terrorise me. 

“More missiles will be coming,” I said idly, mostly in an attempt to keep the Tau from panicking and changing the shuttle’s current trajectory. I radiated confidence and nonchalance without much effort, and hopefully, that would be enough to keep them calm as well. “Keep on course.”

Aun’Saal looked thoughtful, but he did give me a nod of agreement as a holographic projector sprang to life and displayed the view from outside the shuttle. We were hundreds of meters up in the air, but rapidly descending towards the rolling hills covered in thick greenery.

Our target was a copse of trees spread sparsely around a gully, which was filled with Orkish fortifications and their shoddy buildings. Had I seen pictures of the place back on Earth, I’d have assumed it was the drug-growing operation of some gang or another deep in the Amazon Rainforest. 

The hulking Orks and scrambling Snotlings would have likely changed my guess though, to a super-realistic illustration. Everything in the encampment looked like it’d fall over any second now. Logs were just thrown atop each other and only had mud glueing them together in random spots while in others it was actual duct tape that held the constructs in one piece.

Where the fuck were they getting that much duct tape in the jungle? That was one of the great mysteries of the Orks I’d never figure out. 

I watched on, some interest and curiosity dampening my previous anger as I watched a thinner Ork leaning on a curled wooden staff ambled out of a shack and head over to the haphazardly laid out missiles. 

That was a Weirdboy, wasn’t it? An Ork Psyker, or at least something similar. The smart thing would have been to smite the little git where he stood before he could do whatever he was preparing to do. I didn’t do the smart thing. I was too interested in what the first Weirdboy I had encountered would do to kill him just yet.

Also, I couldn’t make this seem too easy to my blue friends. 

The Ork leaned heavily on his staff, limping along like it was the only thing keeping him from falling over but whenever another Ork was too slow to move out of his way, he dropped the act long enough to smack the offending Ork out of the way with a psychic push. Snotlings scampered out of his way, and Orks twice the Weirdboy’s size jumped out of the reach of his staff, while the slower ones were sent flying up into the canopy or rolling through the mud. 

I felt more of my annoyance draining away at the utterly amusing scene. Whatever little regret I had for taking in the Orks after this trouble they gave me went away as I remembered the primary reason as for why I kept them. They were hilarious. It was like having a million idiots ready to put on a comedy-skit for my amusement. 

Though the endless tide of bio-energy they provided for me was also very welcome, and my logical side would attest to that

Speaking of my vast stores of bio-energy, fun fact: I could, by now, create a reasonably large Tyranid Splinter Fleet. 

By my latest count, I could make a little over 100 fully battle-capable bio-ships filled to the brim with warrior organisms ready to begin a planetary invasion. Even if I spent a tenth of that energy instead on making more Narwhals to let them travel faster, I could still expect a fleet of that size to devour a handful of Imperial planets, maybe scores of them if the Sector Fleet took long enough to arrive and try to stop its advance. 

Now, if I made myself a nice little sword made of the latest iteration of the Norn Emissary’s bone sword, I’d still have to cut down the size of the fleet by a quarter. For a single sword the size of my arm. 

If I merely wanted an army, I could field hundreds of thousands of Tyranid warrior organisms. But Tyranids were the costliest of templates to create, so what about other races? Millions of Orks. Billions of Humans.

For the fun of it, I had a mind-core calculate how many puppies I could make, and the number came back at a staggering 56 billion. It was ticking up rapidly; the count increasing by about a hundred every second that went by. Then it jumped up by a thousand, and a quick query returned that a battle took place on the other side of the planet and a few dozen Ork corpses had just been devoured, their biomass added to the pool.

Back to the present, the Ork Weirdboy finished waving his staff over the missiles, which did nothing outwardly visible beyond spreading a cloud of conjured glittery stuff over them. The extent of the change was that the dirty rockets now glimmered when a stray ray of sunlight caught them, like they had diamond dust scattered over them. 

My aura, though, felt the true difference. A glob of writhing, twisting bit of psychic power sat in each rocket and pulsed with energy to a chaotic rhythm, spreading its strange energy into the object. 

“Half a minute until we reach the destination,” one of the guards said. “The pilot insists there is no site where the shuttle can safely land, as the terrain is forested and uneven.”

“Sit back and wait,” I said. “There will be one by the time we get there.”

Before any of them could retort, I grinned and held up a fist in the universal sign of ‘shut the fuck up and let me work’ as the Orks unceremoniously shoved the missiles into shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. The Weirdboy waved his staff around again, and tapped the five muscular Orks handling the RPGs with its tip, infusing them with some enhancement if I had to guess. 

I poked one of the buffed Orks with a tendril of my aura, tasting the energy seeping into his body. Power, resilience, tenacity. Just to make sure none of the rockets had anything I couldn’t deal with without it getting annoying, I did the same to the energy nestled within them too.

It was strange, to say the least, and I didn’t quite manage to discern the purpose of the enchantment before the five Orks pulled the triggers one after the other, sending the rockets blazing up into the sky. The five got thrown back, rag-dolling across the ground and smacking into a few things until they came to a stop. Two of them were dead, necks broken, while a third had his spine broken but was still alive. The last two had limbs bent the wrong way, but they seemed like they’d live.

Guess the buff they got wasn’t nearly enough. I mused, focusing on the five rockets racing towards us and had to raise an eyebrow in surprise. They didn’t come at the shuttle straight. Oh no, three flew in a large arc that would probably have them impact the shuttle from the sides while the last two were flying in a chaotic spiral as they approached from the front. 

Okay, so he put some variety into them too. 

I conjured up a smaller white fist and smashed it knuckle first into one of the spinning rockets as a test while miming the action for the Tau’s benefit. Curiously, the rocket didn’t explode. It bounced off my fist and went careening off to the side before reorienting itself. Then it resumed its spiralling advance.

“Fascinating,” I hummed aloud, grinning. I had seen Tyranid bio-forms wielding Psychic powers and had first-hand experience with how Eldar wielded theirs thanks to Valenith, but this was something new; it was novel. Such things always inspired me to come up with new ways to use my own powers. Hopefully, I could get some use out of this Ork Weirdboy before I had to kill him. 

Just to get myself time to test more things, I went through the motions of slapping away all five missiles one after the other, sending each off mark and spinning away. They would be back, but I wanted to test them more.

“Stop, and hover in place,” I said. “Or you can start circling the encampment. I need some time to deal with these rockets.”

Curiously, they went along with my request without questioning it or retorting that I couldn’t command them. I paid them little mind as I focused on the rockets. It was time to experiment.