Once the Chaos Lord had settled on a target, he called everyone together again.
This time the warband was preparing to strike an agri-world.
According to the Chaos Lord, it sat far from the Imperium’s core worlds, and its own level of technology was fairly low.
Some of the more advanced agri-worlds had their mountains levelled and their environments artificially reshaped, then worked by massive agricultural machinery.
Worlds like that were usually guarded by heavy firepower, and attacking one would be suicide, so the Lord had set his sights on a more backward agri-world instead.
It had only a small defense force, and reinforcements from the wider Imperium would struggle to reach it in time.
Once the Chaos Lord had passed the order down, the entire ship pushed into the Warp and began its jump.
The moment they entered, Andrallo felt the surging tide of energy and emotion rolling through the Empyrean.
He spent the rest of the day looking like he’d swallowed something foul.
Neither the Imperium nor even the traitors who’d surrendered to Chaos could survive direct contact with the Warp, so the warband’s ship activated its protective system: the Gellar field, a device that projected a bubble of real space around the vessel, sealing it off from the Warp outside.
If the field ever weakened, failed, or collapsed while the ship was crossing the Warp, the result would be catastrophic.
Warp entities would tear the vessel apart to reach and devour the crew’s souls, and even Chaos Space Marines bonded to daemons weren’t entirely safe from that.
Whether it was because the ship had gone too long without proper maintenance, Andrallo couldn’t say, but ever since they’d entered the Warp, he kept catching sight of twisted, half-formed shapes drifting through the corridors.
The two sisters, Maen and Charlotte, were especially on edge about it.
Neither of them had stopped praying since the moment the ship entered the Warp.
But the Warp-born creatures and daemons kept appearing near the sisters regardless, trying to tear them apart.
Every time Charlotte or Maen started screaming, Andrallo would be at their side in an instant, shattering the Warp entities with a single punch.
Faced with the psychic power radiating off Andrallo, the Warp creatures generally kept their distance, which was enough to make the sisters start staying close to him on their own.
“There’s always something drifting toward you two specifically.
Is there something particular about you?”
Andrallo asked, after tearing apart yet another daemon that had tried to close in on them.
“My lord, we’re psykers.” Maen bowed in thanks.
“Our souls burn like candlelight in the dark of the Warp.
Daemons and other Warp creatures follow that light straight to us, hoping to make a meal of us.”
Charlotte chimed in.
“And this ship’s Gellar field is clearly damaged.
It can’t protect the crew fully anymore, so every so often something strong enough gets through and finds its way to us.”
“So why not fight back?
You could shatter them with psychic power too, couldn’t you?”
Maen and Charlotte exchanged a look, then answered him in a tone that was equal parts speechless and respectful.
“My lord, not everyone has the kind of power you do.
All we can really do is sense things and glimpse fragments of the future.
We’ve never gone through the specialized training for it either, so we don’t know any offensive disciplines at all.”
Over the time they’d spent with him, Andrallo’s psychic strength had shocked the sisters again and again.
Neither of them had ever seen anything capable of killing a daemon so effortlessly.
The sisters had originally been taken from their family’s estate.
They weren’t exactly favored within the family, but the estate had still been reasonably well defended.
Even so, both of them had watched with their own eyes as the family’s guards, and the local defense militia besides, were cut down effortlessly by daemons.
Well-equipped, well-trained soldiers hadn’t lasted a single second.
The daemons had moved like farmers swinging scythes, each strike reaping dozens of lives at once.
To the daemons, those soldiers were no different from wheat in a field.
If Maen and Charlotte hadn’t been singled out as offerings, they wouldn’t have escaped death either.
But daemons like that had no way to fight back against Andrallo at all.
The black-armored giant needed nothing more than a single backhand to smash any daemon that showed itself to pieces.
Maen and Charlotte had also noticed something else: every daemon that came near Andrallo twisted with visible pain, and the sisters could hear a distinctly inhuman shrieking that belonged to daemons alone.
Eventually, Maen, as the elder sister, worked up her courage and approached Andrallo.
“My lord, your psychic power overwhelms daemons completely, but you don’t seem to know how to properly wield it.
If I may be so bold, I’d like to offer myself.
I can teach you how to use it.”
“Oh!
You’ve had training in this?” Andrallo asked, curious.
“I learned a little back in the family, but we only ever mastered the basics of psychic control.
I don’t know how much help I can really be.”
“Doesn’t matter!
At this point, anyone teaching me anything helps.
The more basic, the better!”
Seeing Andrallo take it well, Maen nodded happily and stepped up in front of the giant, taking hold of his hand.
The instant their hands touched, their psychic energies flowed into each other, and Andrallo, with genuine interest, felt the shape of the young woman’s mental strength for the first time.
Drawing on secret techniques passed down through House Westminster, Maen began examining Andrallo’s psychic power.
It was ordinarily a dangerous thing to attempt, since most psykers couldn’t fully control their own abilities, and it was the kind of risk only minor, out-of-the-way nobility like her own family would ever dare take.
But probing Andrallo turned out to be surprisingly smooth.
Following the psychic link between them, she slipped into his inner world.
And then…
she saw a pond.
A pond wrapped in mist, a light breeze drifting over it, water just deep enough to reach the ankles.
Maen felt a coolness settle through her, refreshing all the way down.
“This is…
Lord Andrallo’s psychic power?
It’s this calm?
Is this really the level someone reaches with no training at all?”
She looked over at Andrallo, her eyes full of shock and confusion.
Not even the tutor who’d trained her back home had ever shown this level of psychic control.
“My lord, please follow my lead.
Try releasing your psychic power outward first, and let’s see if you can control it.”
Andrallo followed Maen’s guidance, releasing his power little by little.
Violet light spread through the whole room at once, and the Warp entities that had been eyeing them eagerly from a distance erupted into anguished wailing.
They tried desperately to flee, only to find there was no way back.
Every one of them could see nothing but rippling rings of violet light turning around them.
By the time Andrallo’s power had fully swallowed the Warp entities, the corrupted things had already dissolved into pure energy, folding into their surroundings.
“Wh-what in the world is this?!”
Charlotte cried out beside them.
Andrallo and Maen both turned to look, and found the collar around the dark-haired girl’s throat webbed with cracks.
Maen looked down at once and found the same thing happening to her own collar.
The warband had fitted them both with these devices to suppress their psychic power, meant to stop the sisters from losing control and blowing the ship apart.
But now, under the influence of Andrallo’s power, that very tool built to suppress psychic ability was shattering apart entirely.
Charlotte stared at Andrallo, dazed, and turned to Maen.
“Sister, why can’t I feel the Warp anymore at all?”