I’m sitting here in Theresa's office, sitting at her desk, going through her computer; she did have it locked, but I managed to take the password for that from her brain when I ate her, along with a couple of other things from the various other people who were involved. Now, while I did sort of kill the ruling council of the town, it should be fine, surprisingly enough, there are things in place in case that happens, namely vices that can sub in just in case.

Also, apparently, they have a hydroponics building, powerplant, a deep well which pulls water from an underground reserve, and a bunch of other things that allows the town to sustain itself even without the divers, whose main role is actually gathering more basic supplies from the city, and even the forest. Stuff like preserved or naturally grown food, blueprints, useful everyday items from way back when and the like, kind of interesting, but I suppose it makes sense, the town couldn’t survive if their only source of food was the small amount of well preserved food they’d get.

That aside, it turns out they actually don’t have anything to do with the imperium, and the Rosarius she had was stolen from a crashed Vulture transport, and the designs for most of their laser weaponry were reverse engineered from the few Lasguns and Laspistols onboard. It seems that whatever this world is, it has a habit of drawing in things from my universe, intriguing; and it turns out, they actually had a name for this universe due to the frequency of items/people coming from there, although a living being had yet to survive the travel until I came through, along with that one Termagaunt from a while back.

They called it “M41”, because the date log on the Vulture was from 999.M41, which they took as some form of dating system, which is right, and for somebody who doesn’t know the standard Imperial Dating System, would be very confusing to try and figure out since the Calendar they use is a standard Gregorian one. For your information, the year is 2243, although since I don’t know what the year was when they lost the war against the “invaders” as they were first called, it doesn’t help me figure out how long it’s been since the apocalypse.

Anyway, my work here is more or less done, there’s nothing too terribly important on the computer, although I did find out the name of the city, which is ironically called Aquila. It’s a shame she didn’t have any research stuff on her computer, but according to her memories, it wasn’t her department, so she didn’t bother, which is fine, I guess, I can do it myself, or I could just steal it from the appropriate department, or, I could do a molecular analysis using the reclamation pool, which would destroy the item, but provide a mostly accurate depiction of the item on a molecular level.

Which is probably the faster, and better option, since my knowledge probably already eclipses the entire department; the humans on this planet aren’t very intelligent, but they’re about 40 thousand or so years behind the Imperial humans, so I can cut them some slack. Well, time to go, and by using my new teleport ability, along with a single Ripper, I am back at my little base in an instant, pretty useful.

Alright, so, first things first, I’m going to investigate that little knife, and by that, I mean breaking it in half. From what I can see, it always regenerates from the hilt, and it regenerates the blade at about 1 cm per second; the broken blade however, does not disappear when it regenerates, so it has to be getting that matter from somewhere, and if I could find that somewhere, that would be real nice.

Aside from the blade, the “magical” properties of the blade seems to come from the hilt, which intrigues me; if I were to break the hilt in half down the center, would it regenerate into two blades, and if not, then which half would regenerate and why? The answer is no, it wouldn’t and that’s because there seems to be some sort of short silvery metal rod in the hilt, about 5cm/2in long, and 1cm/0.4 in in diameter, fairly small, but this seems to be the source of the regeneration, since when I extract this, the hilt regenerates around it, then the blade follows after.

Again, like the blade, the hilt does stay behind when it gets regenerated, material wise, it seems to be a carbon fiber plated polycarbonate plastic, and the blade is a titanium gold alloy, strong, durable, and light, but most importantly, expensive. Molecular wise anyway, the titanium gold alloy is much denser than regular steel or iron, and the carbon fiber polycarbonate hilt is difficult to manufacture the way it is, requiring near atomic precision, how do I know this? I threw the broken pieces in the pool and slowly dissolved and scanned them, leading to an exact atomic copy of each regeneration.

That’s not where the strangeness ends either, you might think the blade is painted, being colored pitch black when the material that makes it is very much not, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but you wouldn’t be quite right either. By the looks of it, each individual atom is painted vantablack, which normally would make the blade highly unstable, but somehow it doesn’t, it also leads to the blade looking like a black hole, not the shine you’d get from a black painted weapon, but instead just a void where there’s nothing, just in the shape of a monomolecular blade.

Did I mention that? Yeah, it’s also monomolecular, and if I didn’t have my necrodermis bones, and instead still had the CrCoNi ones, it would have sliced right through my body like butter, which is intriguing. According to the memories of the teleporter, she found the blade within the lab, and with the help of the psychic, it would be possible for her to teleport in, so that could make sense, good to know that whatever material the lab is made of isn’t psychic proof though.

Enough ranting about the anomalous blade, time for the main event, throwing the entire thing, core and all, into the pool and figuring out how this thing works. Tossing the blade into the pool, I wait as it slowly dissolves it, and finally reaches the core, and I am instantly confused, firstly the metal which makes it up has 500 protons, and 500 neutrons, and from what I can tell, isn’t an alloy, and a metal with an atomic number of 1000 just doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be sitting around, it would be decaying in less time then it takes for you to see it, so that’s already one law of physics broken, but we don’t stop there.

Remember the whole “infinitely generating matter” problem, which I had theorized it just gets from somewhere else? From what I can tell, it doesn’t, it just sort of makes it; I don’t know why, or how, but it just makes it from nothing, which very obviously violates reality, but violating reality is nothing new for us, especially after coming to this world. But at least we have the decency to do it within the boundaries of reality, not just ignore it completely, but whatever, next off, the core is regenerating faster than I can destroy it, so that’s something.

Taking the core out of the pool, I watch as over the course of 2-3 minutes it regenerates back into the full blade; it’s more or less indestructible, but now I’m intrigued, what if I stop it from being able to regenerate? By say, throwing it into the pool again, destroying everything but the core, then encasing it in super durable bone, would it break through, or just not regenerate?

Thinking about it, this is probably the same way my dress works, although I don’t know where the core for it is, that’s good to know. Taking the mass of bone out of the pool, I wait for it to do something, and it doesn’t, so it seems to simply stop regenerating, as I crack the bone in order to extract it again, I’m surprised by the blade suddenly, and very violently, regenerating all at once, and popping out of the casing, did it shoot downwards and stab my foot, maybe, is it now stuck in the wall because I kicked it out of irritation, no comment.

Regardless, I can’t destroy it, and I don’t really have a use for it, unless I were to use that shooting feature to make a pseudo railgun, although it would only have one use, it would destroy pretty much anything that wasn’t necrodermis, so maybe something like that would have a use. In fact, it would be very easy to conceal too, due to the small size of the core. In the end, I have what looks like a bone bullet, and by breaking off the tip the blade shoots out at near supersonic speeds, it’s a consumable item I can only recharge in the Reclamation pool, and it only costs 1 biomass to make the casing, so it’s pretty cheap too, just a shame I need a magical regenerating blade for it.

Slipping the Bone Bullet as I’m calling it, into my pocket, which luckily this dress has, I briefly go down my “investigate later” list mentally, finding the core on the dress seems doable, which doesn’t take long, there’s this ruby brooch sewn into the neck of the dress, and by ripping that out, I now have two dresses, one without the brooch and one with, so that’s how that works. Carol had mentioned that the dress just worked that way because it was monster materials, but I think she just didn’t realize what it did either, another thing of note, the dress is actually fairly tough, about as strong as the body armor that the guards I killed earlier were wearing, although it seems to be very weak to laser fire, and doesn’t protect very well again blunt force, but it’s fairly resistant to piercing and slashing.

Next on the list, is the Scorn's strange ability to collect souls, which I certainly didn’t add, yet it can do anyway, and can even suck up souls using other Tyranids as a medium, and then even safely store them, I don’t know what the limit to on space is yet, so that’s yet another thing, but I can’t test that yet, I can’t exactly start making fake souls to fill it up with. After a bit of searching, from what I can tell, the Scorn has the ability to steal and store souls, because it was made to store souls, I learned this by trying to release a soul, and it ended up drifting back to the scorn, which means that when something dies, it’s soul finds the least path of resistance to a “waiting point”, that being the Immaterium, but instead, it goes to the Scorn because it’s easier then going to the Immaterium.

To put it simply, the Scorn is an artificial Hell, and because that’s closer than the Immaterium, they go there instead, it’s actually quite similar to how Aeldari Spirit Stones work, just on a much blogger scale, and much more efficient somehow, and also being a big mass of pulsing flesh instead of a pretty little rock. Enough about that, as it stands I quite literally cannot get rid of the souls until I find some way to transform them, or I destroy the Scorn, which I can’t exactly do at the moment since it’s also hosting my soul, and it doesn’t matter enough to pull it out just to toss away the others, they aren’t conscious so they can’t affect me, and if they somehow wake up, I can just shatter them with a quick psychic attack, so they aren’t a threat either.

I don’t know what radius the Scorn can pick up souls, but it can’t be terribly large since there isn’t a constant influx, so I’ll just ignore it for now. Well, that’s enough theorizing about stuff, let’s get something done, and by that, I mean looking for more of these artifacts, and more biomass, always more biomass.

Walking outside of the factory, I look over towards the lab, seeing a Warmachine down the way, there’s a lot less of them now, I really wonder what they were doing there, it might be my fault because I left the door open, oops.

Either way, a minor annoyance but not really my problem, whatever every single warmachine in the city wanted in there though, is a different story. It appears that looking at them was a bad idea, as one of them in its jittery nature, falls over, gets up, and in the process sees me looking, even from as far as I am, and consequently starts running towards me.

Luckily it’s just one of them, and I can now easily deal with that, but as it turns from the much smaller horde, about halfway through it’s completely obliterated by some sort of cannon, and from out of an alleyway steps out some sort of large walker, and scanning through the memories I’ve taken, I can deduce that it’s a destroyer class Warmachine. Yep, an even larger type, the normal Warmachines are considered Infantry class, while the Destroyer class ones are a lot larger, and a lot more dangerous, although they are both Warmachines, due to the collapse of any sort of command and friend or foe identification, they mostly attack anything in sight, including other Warmachines; the only reason the horde didn’t self destruct was because they all equally had a more important target, that being whatever was inside.

As for the Destroyer, it’s a large bipedal walker, about 6 meters/20 feet tall, the legs were shaped like a lightning bolt, zig zagging from the waist and ending at a flat A-shaped flexible foot, like the infantry class some parts are visible, but it is overall a lot more armored, only it’s “thighs” and “waist” being exposed. In the middle of it, it has an omnidirectional camera with a red lens, not going to comment on that, the torso is flat, and only about a meter/3 feet tall, but it’s fairly long, about 4 meters/13 feet, in the center is what looks like a targeting laser, along with a flap that can drop down and protect it, and on the right side a large cannon, that being what shot the Infantry class.

Predominantly they were used as scouts, or for hit and runs rather than direct engagements, hence the lack of weaponry, the weaponry it does have though, is very long range, with a decently large rate of fire, it is comparable to a rapid fire anti-material rifle, which is pointed at me now.

The Destroyer starts opening fire as I run across the street and behind cover, from my estimation, it’s shooting ~4 rounds each second, and taking chunks out of the concrete, ammo wise, it could probably keep this up for another hour at maximum capacity, which is probably how it’s lasted so long without a refill. Man, stealing knowledge is great, I can get a good estimation of the combat capability of enemies I’ve never met before, and all I had to do was kill and eat the right people, real easy.

That aside, my best bet is to go at it from above, since it has trouble dealing with elevation, and because there's something I want to test, so I teleport up to the roof of the building, and slowly begin making my way over to the destroyer, it appears to be trying to circle around to where I was previously, since that alley was a dead end, but I betcha it never expected teleportation.

Teleporting to the roof of a building on the other side, somewhere nearby it, I wait for just the right moment, and leap from the roof, landing squarely on the middle of its roof, the Destroyer of course, tries to buck me off, but I have great plans for this thing. Plans which involve the hatch on top of the right side, yep, these Destroyers can be manually piloted, although it’s done by a team of two, luckily that means there’s enough space for me to fit inside it, now you might notice a problem, there is nowhere near enough room to sit inside this thing, and you’d be right, that’s why you lay down inside it.

Time for Tyra’s tutorial on how to requisition and pilot a Destroyer! First thing, locate the release hatch on the roof, next, push in the release and open up the hatch, and make sure not to fall off now. Secondly, you may need to remove a pesky corpse, make sure you pull it out and toss it away if need be, then you have to enter it feet first, sliding your body towards the back of it, next if applicable, make sure to slide over to the pilots position so the copilot can get in, but in this case we’ll be getting assisted by the inbuilt AI, for particularly large people, or those with extra bits, it may be best to stay in the middle rather then on each side. Finally, you’ll see a handle in the middle of the console in front of you, in between both sides, if that handle is turned vertical and pulled out, the machine is off, in this case the machine is currently on, so we’ll want to turn that off, to do so, push the handle into the console, it should fall about half a centimeter or so, or 0.2 inches for the American folks, then turn the handle clockwise, that’ll lock it in place, and finally turn off the destroyer.

Now then, to initiate a manual override, first make sure the machine is turned off, then you should look for two small buttons on either side of the power column, each side represents the pilot, or the copilots function, the pilot will obviously, pilot the Destroyer as well as perform scouting, and checking radar, while the copilot will handle communications, weaponry, and minor adjustments. If you want to take manual control over one side, you can push in one of the buttons corresponding to each side, the buttons are a toggle, so you don’t have to worry about keeping them pushed in while you turn it back on, in this case, we’ll be taking manual control of both sides, so we’ll push the buttons in, and toggle them into the “out” position, then we can turn the Destroyer back on by performing the opposite of what we did to turn it on, turn, and pull.

Now that the Destroyer is on with the manual override active, we have complete control over it, and the Pilot should be able to move it, to do so, you’ll see four screens in front of you. One will show the camera located on the waist, and a small joystick can control its direction, this screen will be on your right; to your left, you’ll have the short range radar, there should be a switch right below it to toggle it on and off, for the moment, we’ll want this off, above you, you should see a statistics panel showing the overall status of the mech, we’ll ignore this for now; and finally, right in front of you is the high definition forward facing camera, which is on the top left side of the mech. You might wonder where the controls for the mech itself is, and the answer is above you, that’s right, right above you should be a small and very light helmet embedded in the roof, this is what pilots the mech using your own brain signals, unfortunately, I myself cannot wear this as I have horns.

This is why there are a set of manual controls you can enable, just in case, and by flipping a small switch near the helmet, it should be labeled Neuro, and Manual, we’ll want to flick it to manual, now, you should see the touchpad right below the main screen turn on, and a set of controls should show up, for moving the mech you’ll want to place your left hand on the left side of the touchpad, where it says WASD, yep, it controls just like a video game, although Neuro controls are a lot more precise, WASD will work in a pinch. Now that you have taken control over the Destroyer, you’ll want to pilot it back to a safe place, for me, that will be my super secret factory nest, don’t tell anybody now.

Alright, enough messing around, piloting the now requisitioned Destroyer class Warmachine, I take a glance at the status panel above me, 73% core fuel, and 4793/14000 rounds remaining, not bad, but since the AI is completely useless, I can’t use it to fire the main weapons, so I’d have to design something to do that for me, or just make a quick humanoid Tyranid to do it with me since the person who was, I think his name tag said Cooper or something, can’t anymore. Either way, that’s something for later, the mech makes a lot of noise, since it weighs quite a bit, roughly 30 or so tons, a lot lighter than heavier armor, but it’s fit for its purpose, 7 of those tons is pure ammunition, which is mostly stored in the backside of the long body, as well as having areas on the back of the outside to carry supplies for longer travels.

You might be wondering how such a machine could carry on walking around for over a hundred years, and that’s because of the power core, which is a beefier version of the Infantries micro fusion reactor, it has enough fuel in a low burn mode to last it about 200 years. The only actual issue would be maintenance, but that can be carried out by automated stations, those don’t have a friend or foe, and the AI is smart enough to use them, although even that can only last so long, as the stations eventually run out of resources, but sense it can strip parts from broken mechs, it can kill other mechs, and push them into the stripping section, and use its parts and ammo to repair and resupply itself.

Contrary to what it seems like, I only just discovered all of this myself, piloting included, and I learned all of this, because every single thing in here is labeled, which is nice, and over on the copilot's side is a map, and that map includes the location of the maintenance stations, and I can put it together from there, I suppose it could also refuel from these stations, it’s kind of interesting how the AIs learn to make use of these things like an ecosystem, but that’s not important, what is however, is the Destroyer I now have parked in my factory.

Not that I really have a use for it, but I can’t deny the importance of heavy vehicles in war, and it’s much cheaper to steal one of these than to make a larger Tyranid, it might be a bigger hassle, but until I can pump out Tyranids like they’re free, this is going to be a lot easier. The only actual issue would be piloting it, but I can whip something up to do it; I kind of like that aesthetic, big bulky machines, then you destroy it and it turns out the pilot(s) are actually just a bunch of flesh molded to fit right, and not actual humans.

Anyway, now I have this, it wasn’t in the plans, but this is also a good outcome, and it’ll do. Now where was I? Right, exploring to get some artifacts, or finding something to kill and get some biomass from, so the usual.

Stepping out of my factory yet again, I choose to not look over towards the mess that is currently the Lab, at least not for very long, and instead quickly teleport up to a building and start looking around, time wise, it was just about getting dark, which isn’t a problem for me, and even less so now that I can see psychically as well.

Now, I could explore around the town, or I could head to the maintenance station that was nearby, about 40 kilometers/25 miles away, which would take me, running there, about 40 minutes, or, I could take the Destroyer, and arrive in half that time since it runs full speed at about 120 kph/ 75 mph. The only issue is that while using the Destroyer I can’t exactly fight back, unless I use a Psychic Lenser to connect to the Neurohelm and control the entire mech Pychichally, I only just had the idea, but I like it.

Well then, there’s the plan, use psychic Lensers to pilot the Destroyer, which I shall affectionately name Nacht, up north and check out the Maintenance station, because it seems interesting. Grabbing two Lensers from the Reclamation Pool, I hop up and into Nacht, carefully putting them on the inside of the Neurohelms, after switching the control scheme back anyway, and within minutes I’m walking out of the factory, and running out of town.

Running into the forest I follow the map provided by Nacht, weaving in and out of trees as I sprint at 120 kph through the woods, I probably could have done some form of hunting while out here, but I think the ~30 ton mech sprinting at full speed through the woods scared anything off, oh well.

Just like I estimated, it takes about 20 minutes to reach the station, and it’s doing surprisingly well, as little flying maintenance drones are buzzing about, clearing foliage, fixing holes/gashes on the station, etc. and in front of me one of the drones does a quick scan of the mech, and then provides a holographic arrow to point me in the direction of an open maintenance bay. Interestingly enough, it looks like weaponry is remotely disabled by the station to prevent conflict and accidental damage, it can probably be overridden somehow, but I don’t know, so for the moment, I just follow it in, seems interesting.

I follow the arrows until I get to a large platform, which is labeled Maintenance Bay 11, there appears to be 12, and there don’t appear to be any other mechs here, but I do notice the scrapping area. The floor shifts, and slowly lowers down as a hatch covers the opening, it lowers about 15 meters/50 feet before coming to a stop, and a platform juts out of the side, and docks to the mech. I am then asked to please power down and exit the mech while the automated systems take care of maintenance, after a few seconds I decide to play it out, and take out the Lensers, swallowing them, before turning the mech off and exiting it, then stepping out onto the platform.

Walking down the platform I come to a walkway, a small bipedal bot, about 120 cm/4 feet tall, walks over to me, before speaking in a jubilant British accent. “Hello there! It has been many years since a human piloting a Warmachine last docked here, er, you are a human right?” 

Deciding to play along, I continue the conversation, “More or less.”

“Right well, we don’t discriminate, my name is BT, but you can call me whatever you like! I assume this is your first time at this location right?”

“That would be right.”

“Wonderful! Your mech was last here 17 years ago, so it’s much past its scheduled maintenance, but with the basic AIs piloting them, they only come in if they’re damaged, so I greatly appreciate you bringing it in! We’ll have it topped off and polished in a jiffy, if you’d like, we can even repaint it, or add a name to its code, or something like that if you’d like!”

It seems to be able to modify the mech, could it perhaps fix it? In that case, I have an idea.“Well, now that you mention it, the friend or foe system seems to be on the fritz, would you mind taking a look at it? Oh, and I did name it Nacht.”

“Oh that’s certainly not good, I’ll take a look at that right away madam! Nacht did you say, what a wonderful name, I’ll make sure to add that right away! I would ask if you’d like refreshments or a quick meal, but it appears we’ve gone too long without a proper restock, so we currently don’t have any available.”

“That’s certainly abnormal, how long has it been since the last restock?”

“Well, to tell you that I’d need to see your clearance level, and since you aren’t wearing your uniform, I can’t tell right away, would you mind showing your identification?”

Ah, yeah, that could be an issue, let’s bluff it, “Well, apologies but my uniform was all torn up, and my card was lost with it, hence my current appearance, I’ll have to get one reissued from a Quartermaster.”

“That’s no issue, but we can’t do very much without an ID, so after we perform maintenance, as well as fixing the Friend or Foe, I’ll have to ask you to leave, but don’t worry, there’s no trouble, it’s just protocol, in the meantime, I’ll show you to the lounge, and you can relax for a little while!”

“I understand, it will have to do.” Following the little bot, I can tell from the conversation that it’s an AI alright, but as a non combatant it likely wasn’t affected by whatever update to the systems which destroyed the old military. After a minute or so of walking I arrive at the lounge, where the bot informs me that it will be about 20 minutes before Nacht is ready, and leaves me, looking around the lounge, it seems to be a large resting area, couches, dining tables, a small bar, although there’s no drinks or food, and it doesn’t look like they stocked alcohol either.

Exploring the little lounge area, I wait the 20 or so minutes until the bot comes back, and after a little bit the door opens.

“Ah madam, there you are, I’m happy to inform you that WMD-10476 has been reidentified as Nacht-001, and we’ve performed a routine maintenance, the friend or foe system has been fixed, and it will no longer go around attacking whatever comes across it, that must have been horrible to deal with, and I apologize. Now then, let’s get you out of here, and back into the fight, we can’t have humanity losing this war after all!” Looks like this little guy, BT I think his name was, was never informed that Humanity lost a long time ago, but that’s AI for you, it was never programmed with that as a possibility, so it can never deduce that humanity already lost, that’s almost funny.

Following the bot it leads me to bay 11 where I see Nacht, looking brand new, waiting for a pilot, so I walk up the platform and re enter it, making two Lensers and placing them inside the Neurohelms, I connect to the mech after turning it back on, and the platform retracts before the floor starts to raise up, and the hatch above opens to the night sky. Checking the statistics panel, the ammunition is now full, the Mini Fusion Reactor is at 100%, and the light damage it had sustained is completely gone, almost too well repaired for it to have simply swapped out parts; I wonder how it repaired it, another thing to look into later then.

Stepping out off of the floor as it rises to ground level, I pilot Nacht back to town; as exciting as this was, there’s nothing of actual use for me here, at least not yet, so I just leave it. Upon getting back to town, I go back over to the factory, and park Nacht where I did last time, between some large machinery, then power it down, taking the Lensers, and exiting Nacht, before I walk over and toss them into the Reclamation pool.

Well, that was a nice little bonus I guess, learned a bit about this world, but nothing too important really happened, well, besides getting Nacht, so I’ll be heading out again, this time I won’t get distracted for sure.