Deep space was b, ay. Eveier than regur space.

  The Nes hounded us for a bit, but they quickly stopped when we closed in on the fringes of the gaxy. I wasn’t sure how their ships worked, hell, I wasn’t sure how Imperial ships or even a toaster worked, so I couldn’t guess whether they were just happy to have chased us away a us be, or if they couldn’t actually chase us.

  I leant towards the first one, holy. Though I guessed they would be grumpy enough to chase us for a while still. Oh well, whatever. This left me to twiddle my thumbs while the ship swam through the emptiness.

  With extreme reluce, I added ara week of thumb-twiddling as we closed in on the Rift. That thing gave me the i a thousand different levels and I didn’t want to be within a gactic rock throw of it if I could help myself.

  When I stared deeply into the rift with my third eye opened, I found savage grins looking back at me. So no, I was not putting a sioe into that gactic cesspit. There is being fident in my power, and then there is going through that rift. I might as well gift- myself and hop onto Khorne’s p by that point.

  Anyway, that left me with just about nothing to do … The two newers were busy ag like they did and Val took to drilling Selene on psyker stuff until she dropped from exhaustion. I didn’t even think she could be exhausted in her new body, but that sadistic space elf knew what he was doing.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t even join in since what they were talking about was not a problem for me: elling energy from my realm.

  To me, that was instinctual and effortless. The energy jumped to fulfil my every wish. Hell, most of the time I had to hold it bastead of w about it not moving or ag fast enough. After a few hours of practice, Val decided the best training for me would be fighting, some more fighting, and maybe some bat to spice things up. He also offered up all sorts of restris to put on myself to make even regur bat with regur little humans somewhat challenging.

  We will see hht he is I guess … I ’t go in and hand wave all the bullshit I’m doing as Psyker stuff in front of the Tau who don’t even know such a this. I’ll have to do things on the down low at the start.

  Did I really though? Holy, no, but being stealthy and ag like a regur human with secret magic powers appealed to the childish part of me … which was a siderably rge part.

  My Bliainly increased a bunch more from my own R&D than my training with him, but I couldn’t really have even cast it in the first pce without his help, so I wasn’t vinced yet. I’d have to make sure I milked that Eldar dry of all of his Psyker knowledge.

  In the end, I decided to py with my space magic. It wasn’t a hard decision. As for which part of it specifically? Well, I still had to make my new Hrud sample usable. As it was now, it bsted everything arouh an intense decay aura, including me. Which roblem, since terag that with my bio-energy took more of it than face-tanking a bolter round and healing my bits back up after it.

  The only problem was that the ship was tiny, and I could very easily actally decay poor Bob or Zedev into a pile of ash if I wasn’t careful.

  I had some options: expand the ship, make a drone and send it flying away into space to do the experiments, or shelve the experiments until I could do it safely and on a p.

  Could I even do option 2? We were going … fast. Well beyond the speed of light, how long could I keep my e up with a drone if I left it behind? I could experiment on a sed ship, but it would be such a colossal waste of energy if it got turo ash.

  Annoying. What to do? Do I have anything else to py with?

  Actually, I do. There are hundreds of neles I guilliman and even a few curious ones I nabbed on Baal … like that stupid pieummifying moss.

  What a vicious little t that moss was. Though it wasn’t even really a moss. It looked just like water, but when it felt someooug it, it pounced and sucked them dry of any moisture. Vicious little thing.

  To my delight, Guilliman even had some Cata flora and fauna samples stowed away on his ship. They were awesome, too. A pnt that shot spikes that could mutate struck targets into a new spe of that pnt and an hoo god roper from DnD.

  Okay, maybe ly, as its tendrils were ced with paralytic toxins and the pnt wao eat you i-fun way. But still. It was a nasty little fucker, and it looked just like some ground-hugging shrub when it was dormant. Perfect for some traps.

  There was more stuff, but these two stuck out on my first cursory look through the list.

  Fiiiineeee. I’ll py with something else. The Hrud sample wait.

  That brought me bay two oys, he Death Ray and the k of neis that came with it.

  The first would take a lot of time to get to work … but the sed. It py little act that I even mao get it, but it turned out to be a great sotion prize when I found out it would be a while till I could be shooting particle beams at people.

  The k of livial was the size of a human torso, which was both a lot and far too little at the same time.

  It was much easier to get to work thankfully. My eldritstincts took over the wheel the moment I absorbed the first finger-sized bit, and I felt my awareness spread over it instantly.

  In that moment I also uood two very important things about it: ohat my bio-energy worked eerily well as a power source for the metal and two, that while I could trol the material as if it was my own flesh, I could never replicate it with my powers.

  It might be called livial, but in the end, it was inanic. I could let my tendrils fiddle with it and gobble them up, but the pieetal just swam around inside my eldritch gullet without dissolving or being in any way absorbed. In that se was like any other metal.

  That torso-sized k was all the neis I’d have to experiment with for the foreseeable future.

  The Hrud sample fotten, I delved deeply into expl the capabilities of the livial. My extremely g uanding of what the material really robably stunted my efforts, but I still mao make some fun stuff out of it.

  For one, I had enough of the stuff to make a full bodysuit out of it, plus some ge. sidering we were going to probably be pying as human meraries for the Tau, having a source of strength that they could somewhat uand — a power suit — might be helpful.

  Even if I covered my whole body in a five-timetre thick body armour from the toes to the top of my head, I still had a quarter of the stuff remaining.

  Actually, let’s see how much I improve on a baseline human with just this k of neis.

  I plopped my soulbone skeleton into a er and reabsorbed my current avatar into the eldritch mass at its tre before building myself back up, but into a simple human body.

  Then I went to work. With my mind-cores taking care of navigation and trolling the gravity engine of the ship, I could fully devote myself to the exercise.

  Could I ce my bones with the metal? ge just the skin? Interweave strands of it iween my weak human muscles? ge the skin out for the metal?

  My questions were many and the list only grew the more time I spent thinking about it. Time to answer some of those questions.

  First of all, I made a thi-like wall between me and the rest of the ship. I wasn’t too worried about Selene seeing me disassembling and reassembling myself for weeks on end, but it’d be annoying to keep myself clothed during the experiments, and the rest of them didn’t deserve to see me nude.

  With that done, I jumped right into the first experiment. Project Bodysuit was on.

  Making the livial flow over my skin and cover me was done in a matter of seds. Making the metal move and bend along with my body naturally and without my stant manual manipution of it was not. It was like I encased myself in a diamond-hard mould.

  eg the material up with my nerves proved to be an effort of frustration. It was just inpatible with the human body it seemed, entirely disregarding any bio-electric charges I tried to throw at it.

  But bio-energy worked, even if I used just the ti amount of it. The neis didn’t o be trolled on the cellur level, it only had to receive ands in a way it could uand and decipher.

  That was the first stump and as the hours flew by and turned into days, I worked on it. Two days ter, I had a workable start. I’d mao partmentalise the k of neis into separate parts that did separate things based on ining bio-energy.

  They were basically meical muscles really, as the best I managed was mimig biological flesh with the livial and using bio-energy for the bio-electric charge. At least it was almost free. The bio-energy I got from abs a single human cell was enough to trol a meical muscle for a minute.

  How the fuck did Ferrus just dunk his arm into this stuff and walked away with two perfectly funal neis arms? Stupid Primarch cheats.

  Another day of fiddling ter, I had a rudimentary body armour. Every iny skin was covered in my newly designed metal muscles, which made me look like someone skinned me, and it might have given Bob a ti attack when I poked my head out.

  Anyway! It was just the start. If I could make this prototype suit into something that could withstand some damage, it would be worth it to use it even over my Psyker Form. Why? Because while healing my anic armour took eye-watering amounts of bio-energy, neis re-knit itself for free.

  Re-knit, not repair, though. That was important. A ssh that cut it in half? Gone in a sed, without a trace. A hole blown into it that melted some of the metal into scrap? That’s a problem. Especially since I had such a limited supply of the stuff.

  Well, if the stuff was good enough for Ne Overlords, it would be good enough for my cover. ’t be too greedy.

  Awo days went by with me streamlining the muscles, making them more pad eg them seamlessly together into a single mesh that looked no different from a bodysuit. That gave me back two-thirds of the metal I used for the initial armour and I went about making use of the leftover.

  Coating my bones iuff turned out to be easy and barely used up any of the reserves as I made the coating a millimetre thiext, I made some extra muscles now under my skin out of the metal, making use of my prior experiments to make them effit and small.

  Even if my bodysuit mostly moved itself, I didn’t want the human body underh to be too weak. Ligaments and tendo , all of them thrown out and repced by the livial.

  Aire week went by until I was satisfied with the final figuration of my newly empowered muscles and repced ligaments/tendons. I could still tell there were pces to improve upon, but I’d get to those once I had muind cores to throw at the problem.

  I’d been doing my R&D mostly with only my main sciousness, though I boosted its speed and multitasking by abs a few mind cores into it for the extra processing power.

  Getting every single question meically answered with perfect precision instantaneously was fun at times, but figuring things out by myself and at my own pace had a charm of its own. Though I would have to keep that sort of thing for when I wasn’t pressed for time.

  Now, do I stop here … o all in, balls to the wall? I rubbed my thoughtfully. Metalligers ked against my metal-covered . I probably looked like one of those dress-up dolls in clothing shops if they made them out of gleaming steel. It wasn’t the best look, but it beat the horror-indug skinned corpse the first prototype had. Not even a question. I still have like three whole damned weeks to kill. I don’t even know what I’d be doing once I’m doh this. Let’s do it.

  As for what was the st step? Well, it was quite simple, actually. I wao make the bodysuit into subdermal armour. Basically, instead of c my skin, my skin would cover it.

  Just thinking about how to do that without ging my body shape and making myself look like an ogre was sending my mind spinning in circles. It was a challehat would for sure occupy me until we were ba gactic space, maybe even beyond that.

  I got back to work, food, sleep, water, ing and every other human need I still did out of habit went right out the window as I worked twenty-four hours a day. The task turned out to be just as challenging as I expected.

  Even with all my shrinking and streamlining, the bodysuit was still almost aire timetre thid if that went under my skin, especially on my face … well, I tried and to say it was nightmare fuel would be underselling it.

  So most of my time, from then on, ent making the suit slimmer, thinner and sleeker without giving up any of its strength and durability. Weeks flew by with me barely moving, calcutions and ideas warring in my head as I tested out iteration after iteration of the now subdermal armour.

  The armour steadily grew thinner as I found more and more effective ways to weave threads of the metal together. I dove into my memories, digging up every memory I had of material physid sci-fi books using them.

  I shaped the metal into tubes, rolled them up into thicker threads, made crystalline meshes and just about every figuration I could e up with oer the other.

  One day, when I opened up my eyes and stared down at my bare skin with a scrutinising gaze, I couldn’t find any bit of my body out of pce. Even when I jured up a mirror and stared at my face like an artist at its creation, searg for any mistakes or spots that gave away a fuckup, I found nothing.

  The body erfect replica of the one I designed for my Psyker Form, a, I could feel the livial mesh shifting just under my skin as I moved my arm.

  I didn’t celebrate yet. This wasn’t the first time I mao make aion of the subdermal invisible blend in perfectly with my body. The faults of those were quickly made apparent when I actually tested them.

  I unched into a well-practised routiretches at first, then a bit of yoga and some bodyweight exercises. Usually, every previous iteration failed to hold up at the first one. Maybe it didn’t let me bend my arm, maybe it fixated my spine in paybe it just restricted my range of movement in some other way.

  Which meant I had to be thh. I bent my body in every ceivable way, so much so that maybe even a tortionist would have grimaced at some of the poses I mao twist myself into.

  When nothiits up through all that, I went to the sed phase of testing I called ‘does it actually work?’. I mean, if it doesn’t actually empower my now human avatar any or if the subdermal doesn’t actually stop bullets and bster rounds, what was the point of it all?

  To my surprise, it held up to most tests, only faltering when I shot a psma-bht through it.

  I hissed in pain, my silly human body insisting that ‘oh-my-god-I’m-so-going-to-die’. I rolled my eyes as the bio-energy surged and repaired the steaming finger-sized hole that’d been bsted right through my heart. Leaving it, and my lungs siderably more roasted and airy than it was healthy.

  Silly human body, it’s just a heart.

  P3t1