We continued our dance. He went at full power from the start, striking with the intent to cleave me in half clear in each of his swings as I slowly dialled up my own power. Or well, what I was dialling up was my toolkit and versatility.

 

A simple sword vs spear quickly became something much more fantastical as I started incorporating anything from illusions, bursts of speed, extra limbs clad in jagged claws, gusts of matter-consuming flames, and blasts of pure energy.

 

He had to defend himself on multiple fronts. I came at him from the front while my spells arced around him and struck at any sign of weakness he dared show while Atiesh targeted his back at all times.

 

Then he used the beam.

 

“Nasty,” I clicked my tongue as I watched it burrow through the wasteland and draw a new ravine into its flat face. “Too slow, though.”

 

I Blinked back in, just as I Blinked right out at the first sign of energy gathering in his spear.

 

He didn’t relent. Any sign of doubt, hopelessness, or giving up — that any normal human would have shown after I danced around him for half an hour — was absolutely absent from him.

 

His mind wasn’t just a fortress. Space Marines’ minds were fortresses, with gates, walls, weaknesses, and soft squishy humans inside of them that I could attack if need be, but not him.

 

The Shadowkeeper’s mind was a single piece of unbreaking and unbending diamond. Any telepathic influence slipped off of it or splattered against it helplessly and direct attacks on his body weren’t much more effective.

 

Every fibre of his being resisted being altered or affected by warp sorcery. It was just that though, resistance, not immunity.

 

I could still feel my gestating spell working in his body. It was doing its damndest to bring the fortress that was his body crashing down from within. It was a slow process, but it should already be sapping his stamina.

 

He struck out again, this time a piercing attack aiming to impale me through the belly, but a push of Telekinesis sent his pierce to the side and I kicked him in the chest with all the enhanced strength I could manage.

 

Flames danced on his form; green, red, white, and black, all latched onto him and ate into whatever they could find.

 

“You aren’t looking too good,” I noted. “Want to give up?”

 

Stupid question really. The answer was obvious, and it couldn’t even annoy a single curse out of him.

 

Not that he was looking all that bad — if you ignored the flames, not that they were doing much with his sigils and power-field holding them off for now — I struck him a few times but never drew blood.

 

All he had was some scratch marks on his armour, and despite my repeated attempts to skewer him at speeds he had no right to react to, he still did so anyways. At least he was struggling to keep up, every deflect coming at the last possible moment.

 

“Out of curiosity,” I hummed as he fended off Atiesh bombarding him with a variety of Spells. “What would you do if I ran? You do know I am faster than you, right?”

 

“I am one of many,” he said, his voice sounding only the slightest bit strained. “You can run, but you cannot hide.”

 

“So talkative,” I hummed, eyes going wide as Atiesh threw a huge fuck-off fireball at him that exploded into white flames, burning away all the residual warp energy in the vicinity. His sigils shined bright, but fizzling light a lightbulb right before going out. “Am I to be playing cat-and-mouse with you guys for the rest of eternity?”

 

“You are nothing but a tool,” he said gruffly. Sigils flickering, but as the flames died down, they went back to being as they were. “A broken one at that.”

 

“You know how to hurt a girl’s feelings,” I hummed. “No wonder your kind never gets married.”

 

“We are infertile.”

 

“I know.”

 

Maybe he was trying to play for time, or just fishing for information. I was certain I was not what he expected to find at the end of his hunt. Maybe he was curious?

 

Instead of continuing to banter though, he did what I was nervously waiting for since the start. He touched the black skull.

 

Goosebumps rushed across my skin even if my Danger Sense remained eerily silent, only giving me a faint foreboding sense of impending doom. I blinked away, a good dozen metres further than the maximum radius of the sphere he previously conjured.

 

Before the dark light could even emerge from the skull, I aimed my palm at it and sent an exploding spike flying at it. Then, just to be sure, I sent a dozen birds flying out of my body and taking up positions all around the Shadowkeeper.

 

One after the other, they all transformed into Combat Drones I could jump into if by any chance he destroyed my Avatar. Even if I didn’t like controlling multiple bodies at once, it was an unmistakable edge I had over my enemies and not making use of it would be foolish.

 

I debated morphing my Avatar too, but having it as a Psychic support to keep up the pressure on the Custodian was just as important as the pure strength an additional Combat Drone would have provided.

 

Instead of the sphere activation on touch, it remained condensed deep within the skull as he raised it. A deep pit formed in my stomach as I looked into the dark eye-sockets of the long dead and defiled Blank.

 

It held my gaze, and I felt stupefied by the malice I somehow felt from it for a single fleeting moment.

 

Then its jaw fell open and a soul-searing scream blasted out of its non-existent throat. I tried blinking, but my ever so faithful soul-energy refused to answer my call, no, it couldn’t answer.

 

A beam of white light washed over me and my third eye went blind.

 

Then came a white light, and I screamed. I screamed as my mind frayed and my body shattered.

 

Disintegrating energy pushed into my body, peeling back my armour, flaying my skin, and incinerating my flesh until only my marble skeleton remained. I somehow still held some consciousness in it, my mind protected deep inside my skull.

 

I called on whatever I could. I pulled on energy I trusted with my life so far and where one failed, the other answered. Bio-energy fought back, building layers upon layers of the hardest, thickest armour between me and the beam.

 

My mind dimmed along with the thread that connected me to my soul. My soul, which was only an echo of a strange sensation now in the back of my mind.

 

I tried reaching out, jumping to another drone, and escaping into my back-up Avatar, but I felt neither.

 

I screamed, desperate and furious. The pain was unimaginable, but I could bear it. But death? Here? No.

 

My soul-thread thickened just a bit, and I regained a fraction of awareness for the briefest moment.

 

Two split minds smashed together as memories mixed before my will frayed and I was back to being alone.

 

The spear, or maybe the skull, split my body from my soul and with it, cleaved my mind in half. A part stayed with my dying Avatar while the rest remained in my soul and was desperately trying to fight off the mind-searing white energy that used my soul-thread as a conduit to strike at the core of my being.

 

It was trying to fracture my mind and erase my parasitic consciousness from the Emperor’s artefact.

 

It was failing so far, but I saw the Custodian stumble towards me for a brief moment. It was fighting off my feral Combat Drones, but it was steadily making its way toward my prone body with the silver sphere levitating in front of him.

 

As my desperation started to mount, threatening to overwhelm my conscious thoughts, I felt it all die down all of a sudden. I felt nothing but a cold, vengeful fury at something daring to come this close to snuffing out my life.

 

My will hardened, my resolve pushing back the white light seeping into every fibre of my being. My body is my own. I am the master of my body. GET. OUT. NOW.

 

I felt Atiesh, not through any physical sense, but I just knew it to be right next to me, trying to protect me from the beam. I pulled on it; I pulled on its power and on the power of the one part of my body that still remained intact.

 

Feeling returned into my body, I was aware I was nothing more than a brain, a tendril, and some tendons remaining on a white skeleton, but that would be enough. Soul Energy might refuse to help me in this null-field, but reality obeyed even without it when my will crashed into it.

 

Reality warped as I felt the Soulbone surge with power. Then, reality warped.

 

I didn’t move, but space bent in front of me and the twin beams bearing down on me were suddenly firing not at me but far to the side.

 

The tiny tendril still protected deep inside my skull, bristled and energy burst out of it. Tendons, organs, and muscles stitched themselves back together over my skeleton and with a last surge of power, skin covered it all as even my hair grew back.

 

Then the warped space snapped back into how it was like a rubber string. The rebound sent both me, my Drones, and the fucking asshole Shadowkeeper flying back with a resounding shockwave.

 

I crawled to my feet as my soul-thread ever so slowly widened. It was weakened, and as my minds merged again, I understood why. The white energy of the spear attacked both body and mind, it ravaged through whatever it could touch and the soul-thread was what held my being together. It was like throwing a spark at a mountain of kindling.

 

The only reason my mind was still intact was the fact that my soul protected its core like an impregnable fortress.

 

Memories of a war that spread over more dimensions than the human mind could comprehend rushed into my mind.

 

It would all heal. It would. I knew that.

 

But that didn’t stop the liquid fury pouring into my veins as I stumbled to my feet. I glared at the distant form of the Shadowkeeper who stumbled out of a cloud of dust, skull, and spear held in each hand.

 

“You will pay for that.”

 

He scoffed.

 

My Avatar was whole, the physical substance was there, but I was weak. I felt like a truck ran me over and then went back to do it again for good measure. Despite every cell of my body bursting with energy, something deeper was barely holding on.

 

It’s all his fault. I gritted my teeth. Then I calmed down, the irrational anger slowly seeping away. I stepped into this fight knowing I might die and now I got angry that I got close to it? That was … pathetic.

 

Still, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t make sure he went through the same pain I did.

 

But I wasn’t a beast, lashing out mindlessly. I was better. I was supposed to be more. I wanted to be more.

 

I got arrogant; I thought I knew all his tricks. I assumed he could only make a sphere-shaped null-field and that assumption nearly got me … what? Dead?

 

No, my soul was fine. The only reason it even got into a bit of danger was because it wanted to keep the soul-thread active and take back the mind-fragment in the Avatar.

 

I wouldn’t have died, but I would have certainly lost a part of myself. Knowing which part, or how such a thing would have affected me was impossible. Maybe I’d have gone back to being as I was with an hour of healing, it could have healed by itself. Or it could have left a permanent scar on my mind.

 

Having two sets of memories was so weird. I was both the Avatar and the Soul, even if the two were separate at some point. The two were one now, they merged back together, though the seams were still frail. Something I would hopefully only have to worry about later. It seems to be healing at least, even if slowly.

 

I had to be careful. I could not take another hit like that. The stupid skull had to die, where even did the spike I shot at it go?

 

Narrowing my eyes at it, I saw that now the dark cranium was adorned with a deep scar running along its side. The fucker must have tried deflecting the spike, but it still hit his precious skull.

 

Gingerly pulling on my puddle, I grimaced as soul-energy came streaming through the thread. I felt droplets falling out of the thread, leaving my puddle but in no way making their way into my body. The channel I had trusted so much before was spotty and filled with holes and not only that, it felt like someone just poured molten metal right into my skull.

 

The pain was manageable, but I would have much less energy to go about until I healed back up. Annoying. Still, I was already planning to switch tactics before the fucker blasted me in the face with his spear.

 

“Alright,” I growled. “The ol’ reliable it is.”

 

When psychic power failed, one only had pure, unadulterated physical violence to lean back on. And tech.

 

I blinked, bio-energy already surging to transform my measly Psyker Form into the Combat Form, but I held it back for a moment. How one forgot something that was literally stored inside their bodies was a mystery of its own, or maybe I was just an idiot.

 

The Necron Flayer I’d kept stashed away, phased in my body, jumped into my hands and I fired it without any further fanfare. I should really use this phasing for something more useful than a budget store dimensional storage box.

 

The Custodian only had time to cover his torso with a gauntlet before the beam of sickly green energy smashed into him.

 

His power-armour held strong against the alien tech, annoyingly enough, but to be sure I kept the beam going until the thing started fizzing and giving out in my hands, its green energy storage spent.

 

I let the weapon phase back into my hand and let the transformation go through. It was worth a try. Still, I was growing increasingly jealous of that auramite power-armour.

 

With what soul-energy I had, I reestablished my control over my remaining Combat-Drones and handed over control of each to one Mind-Core.

 

Time for round two, asshole.