The following couple of days turned out to be surprisingly calm. OR b, depending on who you asked.

  I spent the rge majority of it attempting to beat Valenith bd blue while limiting my power output to the same level he was at. Emphasis on ‘attempting’.

  The newly ‘asded’ Eldar might have some of his screws a bit looser than before, but he was by no means worse for it. Maybe a bit of madness was ushed him to eveer heights.

  I admit I’d thought he was a bit of a orick pony throwiating lightning bolts out of the sky like some budget store Zeus, but he showed me during our first spar that he could do far more than that. He just preferred the lightning because it was le, blindingly fast, and absolutely devastating.

  He unveiled more and more tricks as I pushed him further and further. Whenever I came up with a ter to one of his tricks, he pulled a new o of his ass a me into the dirt with it.

  Case in point: Right fug now.

  “Another miss,” he intoned gleefully, his voice eg in the wastend for a hundred mouths curving into a smirk. “Where am I? Find me! Find me!”

  There were hundreds of him, each damned e a tangible illusion that somehow radiated the exact same aura as all the rest. If I didn’t know only one was real, I would have thought he’d split his soul among them.

  They had the same st, same pattern of movement, same weight, same everything.

  He was teag me, in his own weird way. I’d told him I sort of messed up my infiltration because my Illusions couldn’t hold up to the scrutiny of the Imperium’s elite. Ever sihen, he’d been using more and more eborate illusions in our spars and making me figure out what he was doing.

  The bay ingled and my arm snapped out before my mind could catch up with it. Power coated it and my palm spped away a bolt of devastation, sending it out into the distance where it carved a twenty metre long gash into the ground.

  That was one of his ‘quick bolts’ as he called them. Low power, maximum speed. Not that even an Astartes could walk one of these off if it caught them in the chest. Every miss on my part would result in him trying to zap me with one of those bad boys.

  Now, if I didn’t limit myself to only using the same amount of power as him, I would probably send a bst of energy in all dires and see what happened. Or split myself into a hundred drones a eae up one on one.

  There were other options too, especially since Guilliman thankfully kept up his part of the bargain and I had another fifty exotic temptes in my arsenal. Some were still being ‘digested’, but there was a frog thing from Cata that teo explode when scared with enough power to make nuclear warheads blush. That one was the first I rushed to plete. So I had nukes now.

  Doing any of that would be admitti though, showing I was incapable of outsmarting Valenith. Nope. I’d rather spend the day here getting zapped while my mind cores worked on a solution.

  That was another problem I only retly found out. The mind cores teo be rather uive, leaving the innovation part of most things to me. They could take scraps of ideas and turn them into diamonds, but I had to provide the scraps. That was both f to know and an annoying limitation.

  So, how does one find the single real slippery Eldar in a crowd of fakes?

  “Time is tig, Mistress.” He was basically purring now, what the hell? And who are you calling Mistress? … though it has a nice chime to it … hmmm.

  A tial zap from the mind core dedicated to keeping my wandering thoughts aimed at my goal rushed through my brain. Right. Focus.

  Every ade the same sounds as they moved, each breathed in the same pattern, each had the same heartbeat, same st, same fug everything. Even opening my third eye proved useless since Val’s immaterial soul was locked in spaside my forest realm.

  Out in realspace though? It was as if his soul was really split into a hundred equal parts, even though I khat should be impossible. Well, not impossible, but doing so teo fracture the psyche irreparably and was the worst form of torturous agony imaginable.

  So he was faking it, somehow. That was what I had to figure out, there had to be a tell, some insistency between the fakes and the real deal.

  He probably only split the soul energy held in his body among the es, not his actual soul. Hmmm, the split energy would be then used up to maintain both the illusions and the fake aura thing.

  I spped away another impatient bolt and ighe grumbling space elf.

  That would mean, with time, the e’s aura should diminish as the imbued energy is used up. Shouldn’t it? So why isn’t that happening? We had been at it for two hours now and I refused to believe the spell he used was so damned effit that I couldn’t feel the dimming soul energy in them.

  He had to be maintaining them, tinuously, elling power to the es stantly to keep their auras level. How though? I felt no threads of energy crisscrossing the air, no web of power eg all the es. They all felt like entirely separate, autonomous structs.

  With a fliy hand, I had one of the es tumbling towards me and my fingers cmped down around its dainty neck as it reached me. I squi it. Where are you getting energy from?

  The e grinned, my Danger Sense screamed, and I only had a moment to pull a shield up between me and the struct before it exploded into a tiny thuorm. Arcs of lightning crawled on my shield, finding purchase, digging in while some others rushed around it.

  I jumped bad pulled up another while sending a wave of what Val called ‘dispersing energy’. As the wave met the annoying arcs of lightning, parts of both annihited each other.

  The wave stopped, spreading into a tiny cloud as it ate up the remaining lightning, losing parts of its density with each absorption.

  So he wasn’t going to let me dissect a e. Annoying, but predictable. That was exactly what I would have done, what I had doh my own es and drohough mine was more of a normal explosion, not whatever this thundercloud thing he had going on was.

  Was I overthinking things? Even with the power I was limiting myself to, with Val’s power being spread equally between the es and none of them making actual moves aside from terattag when I hit them, I should be capable of destroying a rge number of them.

  Would he remake some es? That would give me a better ce to catch how he els his power so stealthily. Or he would just up and stop pying, elling the freed-up energy into the rest of the es before making them swarm me.

  Plus, that would sort of be like I’m admitti. Or that I’m a brutish muscle head, the horror. Nope, we ’t have that. I’m a space wizard now.

  Targeting another e, I sent a bolt of lightning its way. The e only gave a token effort of dodging and putting up a shield, but the lightning arced through the air, zig-zagging around the shield and twisting towards the e’s new position before hitting home.

  The e froze up with no apparent damage as the lightning seeped into it. Follow the energy. That was my and to it, and that was what it did. Swimming against the current of soul energy in the struct.

  e on, e on. I focused on guiding the arcs of energy. This spell was a weird mix of just willing lightning into being and shoving a bunch of ands into it. It was half will-cast bullshit and half practical ands not too dissimir from lines of code.

  It was a new way of using my psychic power, though only to me. Val treated it as a matter of fact that this was the most effit way of doing it. One part made sure the result wouldn’t be strained by realspaud the ave it dire aility beyond ‘go that way and explode’.

  Anyway, it was w, sort of. It found some sort of energy current in the e, but I could tell Val was slowly getting trol back over the paralyzed e. Sending another bolt would disrupt the previous one and diverting energy from following the currents would be terproductive.

  Instead, I let loose another dozen bolts into random es. Divide and quer, was it? Well, the only thing I was dividing here would be Val’s focus, and I had no iion of doing any quering of Val. Selene would have been unhappy with that, I think.

  It worked, kinda. His attention was now spread between the dozen es, but he still focused on the first ohe most since I assumed the spell was already getting close to reag his secret. Plus, he was much faster iher es, probably because all the spells acted the same and he already devised the perfect ter to it.

  Alright, let’s mix it up then. I added some randomisation into the code so every bolt from now on would act a bit differently. These things cost quite some energy so I would only have enough power to shoot off another fifty — without breaking the rules of this training.

  I went with twenty for now, aimed at es all around, and Val’s footiceably vaned, his resistance faltering in the previous es. Though the first one mao self-destrueed to make the paralyzation a bit stronger.

  That would make the spells even more costly.

  I waited for a mirag how deep my spells were peing and making modifications to the st batch I could shoot off. They would be the st and if they didn’t hit Val, the real Val, I would officially lose this bout.

  After another minute, I sent off the st ten bolts, made even more expensive by the modifications I’d made, and sat back. I’d be a bit exhausted were this really my limit, but I felt nothing as I crossed my legs and followed the many arcs of electricity burrow into the es.

  Either sychic powers were quite unlike any sort of magic described in most stories ba Earth. My body didn’t store the energy, it was just a duit and the only limiting factor on how muergy I could bring to bear.

  If I was ected to the near infinite that is and not a tiny puddle, not that I would ge anything. I rather liked my mind un-molested by demons and my soul un-possessed.

  Eating up the ey of my little puddle in a fight would be disastrous, possibly sending all the souls I held in my realm falling bato the . I wao be doh this Baal excursion in the near future. It was well pastime I found myself a real pce to settle down and expand from.

  I hat damned farm that would replenish the bio-energy I needed and I also had to find a way to replenish my soul energy without opening a damned gateway between literal hell and my soul — that ’t be healthy.

  With four psykers stantly draining my puddle, it was noticeably dimming. It would hold for a few years at the pace it was losiy, but I wa as robust as possible.

  Finally, finally, one spell strue. It found the end of the current and … disappeared from my senses. Hmmmm.

  I squinted. I held a faint e to it even after it disappeared for a few moments. Then it was gone food. What sort of tomfoolery is this?

  Another one dimmed, but this time I tched onto the e and strengthehe spell with as muergy as I should be reasonably able to draw on after two minutes of resting.

  It held for three seds this time. Not a total waste, though. I had an idea of what he was doing. Damned cheat. That’s why I couldn’t find his main body among the horde of es: It wasn’t even here.

  I don’t know if he somehow made a tiny pocket space or is just oher side of the p … I frowned. My third eye popped open, and I let it take in Baal. Guilliman, Mephiston, Dante, and the Farseer were hard to miss, and Val should have been the same, but there was no trace of his soul.

  Pocket space it was.

  The problem was, I couldn’t make them and had only the fai idea of how they worked. It was a Aeldari bullshit and Val said it needed a delicate toud a clear mind. By which he clearly meant I should ‘get good’ before asking for that sort of stuff again.

  How do I crack open that dimensional egg he probably hid himself in? And where is it even? Shouldn’t a damned spatial distortion be apparent in my aura when I felt even the ripples a -Jump made?

  There were no easy answers forthing. My aura read over all the es, but there was no sign of as much as a ripple in spaot even a tiny bump. Obviously, he wouldn’t pce his hidey hole in the pce where he kneould be fighting.

  If our roles were switched, I would be anding those es from one of the damned moons. With my aura reag a kilometre in radius when I pushed it to the limit, I had no hope of finding him without trag the energy ba.

  Time ticked. Spell after spell disappeared and I tried to follow them to no avail. He was using some sort of microscopic portals to el his energy anchored to the es I assumed, though they were so stable and fwless that I couldn’t sehem with my aura.

  Another shortfall that would o be fixed. The damned list was ever-growing.

  The active spell disappeared, and a moment ter, my e to it snapped. Based on the rules, I was out of energy. With all my spells gone … I had lost. Again. Damn it.

  A portal opened up before me, and the annoying Eldar strode out of it.

  “That was great progress, Mistress.” He grinned easily, no sign of his usual unbearably arrogant smirk. “I believe you might win our bout.”

  “How did you do that?” I asked with a frown. “The thing where the es mimicked your aura?”

  The mystery of why I couldn’t feel his real soul beh seemed to be that it just wasn’t here, but the aura mimicry could be handy.

  “It is a plicated teique,” he shrugged. “Though one o perfectly uand their own aura and sink into its depths to even have a ce of doing so. This takes turies of targeted meditation for the Aeldari to aplish, though I’m certain you will manage in a few decades.”

  “Right,” I sighed. “Well, I guess that’s it for today.”

  “It indeed is,” he nodded. “Same time tomorrow?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “Good night, Val.”

  “To you too, Mistress.”