Or Not?
Once Andrallo’s psychic power had spread through the whole room, he could finally allow himself to rest for a while.
Thanks to the influence of his Stellaris-derived genetics, Andrallo’s body had changed completely from what it had been right after he arrived.
He could now fully remove the black armor that had once been fused into his own flesh.
Watching Andrallo sleeping in the bed, Maen and Charlotte exchanged a look.
They both knew Space Marines never truly slept, but seeing him lie down this defenseless still caught them off guard.
“Sister, he’s really that relaxed?
Not worried we’ll try something?”
“It’s less that Lord Andrallo trusts us and more that he just doesn’t care either way.
You really think the two of us could hurt him?”
Over the time they’d spent together, everything Maen and Charlotte thought they knew about Chaos Space Marines had been completely upended by Andrallo.
Most days he sat quietly in the corner of the room reading, barely speaking to them at all, as if nothing around him interested him in the slightest.
But when the three of them talked together, he became a different person entirely, curious about everything, even the most basic common knowledge, like a young child just beginning to understand the world.
There were moments Maen felt like she’d turned into some child’s mother giving lessons, and yet the way Andrallo spoke and carried himself made it obvious he’d had a genuinely good education.
“Ugh, I just don’t get it.
Did Lord Andrallo really lose his memory from too many drugs?”
Maen and Charlotte turned the question over and over without an answer, and if Andrallo could have heard what they were actually thinking, he probably would have buried his face in his hand with a sigh.
The truth was simpler: Andrallo was just socially anxious.
Most of the time he had no idea how to start a conversation with the two of them, and only really opened up when there was something practical to actually deal with.
In the days that followed, while the ship was still travelling through the Warp, Andrallo learned how to properly channel his psychic power under Maen’s instruction, while Charlotte taught him how to bind that power into an object.
By the time the ship finally dropped out of the Warp, Andrallo pulled out two necklaces and gave one to each of the sisters.
He’d worked his own psychic power into the gemstones set in each one.
Just holding them, you could feel the power churning inside.
Once each sister put hers on, they immediately felt cut off from the Warp itself.
They could still glimpse it, filtered through Andrallo’s own power, but every whisper and every watching presence that used to haunt them vanished completely.
The two of them, who’d had to hold their minds together through sheer willpower until now, suddenly relaxed.
Their thoughts felt clearer than they ever had, like standing in a quiet forest with nothing but the breeze and the soft rustle of falling leaves.
“Thank you, Lord Andrallo!”
Maen meant it with her whole heart.
Andrallo had just given her the one thing every psyker, every soul in the entire Imperium of Man, valued above all else:
Hope!
Charlotte, equally stunned, tested the change in herself.
She tried casting one of her divination powers and found, to her shock, that the Warp’s whispers had no hold on her at all anymore, that she could draw on her power freely without any risk of it turning on her.
While he rummaged through the room searching for weapons and armor, the two of them put their heads together and whispered.
“Sister, do you think he’s a Living Saint of the God-Emperor?
Sealing us off from the Warp, driving away daemons like that?
I’ve heard only a Living Saint could do something like this!”
“But, but Lord Andrallo belongs to a Chaos warband.
Why would the God-Emperor choose a traitor as His herald?”
“But look, hasn’t he lost his memory completely?!
It has to be the God-Emperor’s power, washing away his sins so he can serve the Imperium again with a pure heart!”
Charlotte grew more worked up the longer she talked, gripping her sister’s arm, barely able to contain her excitement.
“Sister, this might be the God-Emperor’s mercy and His test for us!
He had a warband member like Andrallo save us, and now it’s our turn to guide the God-Emperor’s herald back into the Imperium’s fold!”
“Uh…
would the God-Emperor really have that twisted a sense of humor?”
No matter how hard the sisters tried to keep their voices down, Andrallo could hear every single word.
He kept his opinion to himself.
If the two of them wanted to talk themselves into it, that suited him fine; it would give him a perfectly legitimate excuse to head back to the Imperium eventually.
Whatever else was true, in their telling, the Imperium of Man was still humanity’s rightful house, and that had to be better than staying with this pack of goddamn traitors.
Andrallo had changed a great deal lately.
The body that had once been ravaged by drugs and self-mutilation tools was slowly healing, and he’d gone from some grotesque muscle-monster back to something close to a normal human shape.
Every day his body shed clumps of black armor plating, still trailing bits of flesh and tissue.
Little by little he noticed his own armor losing power entirely, until moving it took nothing but raw muscle.
The loss of power didn’t really slow him down, but it still wasn’t comfortable to wear, and frankly the old armor had been too hideous to look at for long anyway.
He’d tried hunting around the ship for a replacement suit of power armor, only to discover the entire warband was flat broke.
Forget power armor, they barely had ammunition to spare.
“Well, would you look at that.
Here I thought those lunatics fought with blades because it satisfied some twisted urge.
Turns out they just don’t have any ranged weapons!”
After digging around for a good while, all Andrallo turned up was one ornate curved blade and an energy pistol that wouldn’t fire.
He tossed the otherwise useless blade aside and went to find Charlotte instead, hoping to learn how to charge the pistol with his own psychic power.
“My lord, that’s not just some energy pistol, it’s called a plasma pistol.
And it’s broken anyway.
Why not just release a bolt of psychic lightning directly?”
Andrallo thought, easy for her to say.
He didn’t actually know how to throw psychic lightning.
Reinforcing himself with his own power was about the limit of what he could manage, and even releasing it outward was something the sisters had only just taught him. Visit NovelPing for the full chapter.
While Andrallo was still going back and forth with Charlotte about the plasma pistol, Maen picked up the ornate blade herself.
She might not have been favored in her family, but her education had lacked nothing, and their house was still a branch of significant nobility.
Some things she could recognize the value of at a single glance.
By the shape of the blade, its material, the patterning worked into it, and a maker’s inscription near the guard, Maen recognized immediately that it had come from a bladesmith on Terra.
Before Maen could say anything more, the door burst open, and a thick mixture of perfume and rot flooded the whole room in an instant.
One moment Charlotte was in the middle of talking with Andrallo; the next, there was nothing in front of her at all.
His massive frame had vanished entirely.
By the time the sisters caught up with what had happened, Andrallo was already standing between them and the door, moving fast enough that not even their psychic senses had caught it.
Andrallo looked at the Apothecary standing in the doorway, practically glowing with vitality, and felt an inexplicable tension coil in his chest.
“You…
no.
You’re not the Apothecary.
Something about you smells wrong.” Andrallo picked up the curved blade.
“Who the hell are you, really?”
A strange smile pulled across the Apothecary’s face.
He glanced at Maen and Charlotte, an expression of mild surprise crossing his features.
“Interesting.
These two humans are still alive.
Andrallo, your pursuit of art and perfection has really slipped.
Well, no matter, I’m here now.
Let me show you what true, ultimate pleasure really is.”
A strange fragrance began drifting off the Apothecary’s body, and it only confirmed for Andrallo that whatever this was, it wasn’t the Apothecary he’d fought before.
His psychic senses never lied to him.
The scent washed over him, and for an instant it felt like a thousand tendrils and hands were caressing him all at once, a tingling sensation crawling straight into his mind.
His thoughts began to scatter.
The sisters had it far worse.
Where Andrallo felt only a faint pull, both of them had already flushed red, their eyes gone glassy and unfocused.
Andrallo’s brow tightened, and he released his own power at the same instant.
Thick ripples of violet light swept through the room, and in one stroke, drove the malicious influence off the two sisters entirely.
The next moment, Andrallo started walking toward the Apothecary.
With every step, his power filled another inch of the room.
He finally closed the distance until only a single body’s length separated them, and the strange fragrance rolling off the other man was crushed flat before it ever reached him.
Andrallo looked up at the Apothecary, who stood taller than him now, his voice cold and level:
“Scram?
Or not?”