Chapter 28: The Patriarch's Probe
The moment they saw their injured companion go down, the two remaining purestrains made a decision Rosen hadn't anticipated.
They pulled back.
Both purestrains leapt backward simultaneously, fast enough to leave nothing but two grey-purple afterimages.
The surviving thirty-odd hybrids began withdrawing at the same instant, moving in a controlled, ordered retreat.
The psychic coordination network showed its full capability in withdrawal just as clearly as it had in attack.
Rosen didn't pursue. Chasing Genestealers into their own territory was no different from walking into a killing ground.
"Stop pursuit. Clear the field where you stand."
Two kilometres of corridor had become an abattoir after a three-way engagement. Green blood, purple blood, and red blood, all of it mixing on the deck.
Rosen was crouching beside a hybrid body examining the salvage when something resonated in the back of his mind.
Like hundreds of voices whispering at the same time.
They weren't coming from any physical direction. They seemed to seep upward from somewhere beneath conscious thought itself, like countless mouths opening simultaneously under a thin layer of ice.
A sharp, throbbing pressure ignited at his temples.
He knew what this was.
Psychic pressure.
The Genestealer Patriarch was reaching out to him across the distance.
Its psychic rating was classified by the Imperium as Alpha to Alpha-Plus. At that tier, distance wasn't a barrier. It was just a number.
Rosen locked his jaw.
The whispering grew clearer in his mind.
The Patriarch was testing the strength of his soul's defences. The way a thief taps quietly on the outside of a safe in the dark, listening to the echo to judge the thickness of the steel.
In the corner of his vision, the system interface flickered.
[Warning: external psychic field detected — contact scan against host soul-barrier in progress.]
[Host soul-barrier resonance frequency showing anomalous fluctuation. Recording data.]
[Potential development pathway identified. Conditions not met. Locked pending further development.]
Potential development pathway.
The system didn't specify what the pathway was. Only that the conditions weren't met yet.
But the phrase soul-barrier resonance was enough to start a chain of thought.
Psychic ability originated in the warp.
And every psyker without exception gained access to power beyond normal human limits because of some resonant channel that existed between their soul and the warp.
The anomalous resonance frequency the system had just recorded — did it mean his soul had produced some kind of response under the Patriarch's probe?
Psychic ability was a double-edged weapon.
On one side of the blade was power. On the other was becoming a target for every warp daemon that could smell the opening.
Rosen didn't let himself follow that thought any further.
The whispering stopped.
As suddenly as it had started.
The Patriarch retracted its psychic reach.
Rosen became aware that his back was soaked through with sweat.
He drew a slow breath and stood straight.
The headache was receding, but the residual pressure was still there against the inside of his skull, a thin persistent burn.
"Everyone accelerate the sweep. Withdraw in five minutes."
The Death Warriors moved faster.
The engagement hadn't been without cost.
Number 4 was dead.
A hybrid's chitin claw-limb had driven into him from behind, punching through the left lung and heart and out through the front of his chest.
The hybrid was on the ground beside him. Number 4 had taken half its skull off with a backhand slash in his final moment. The Catachan Fang was buried deep in the hybrid's cervical vertebrae.
In the last second of his life, Number 4 had taken the thing that killed him down with him.
Rosen was silent for two seconds.
In the Death Warrior list in his mind, Number 4's information had turned grey.
Because the hybrid had died from Number 4's counterattack, the system still processed the kill.
[Biomass +13.]
That was Number 4's last contribution, paid for with his life.
"Take his body and his weapons." Rosen gave the order.
Number 11 and Number 15 lifted Number 4's body.
The Catachan Fang was pulled from the hybrid's spine, wiped clean, and recovered along with all of Number 4's equipment.
Number 31 and Number 34's wounds were restored with ten Life Points each.
Then they withdrew.
Thirty-nine Death Warriors moved at full speed through the pre-set withdrawal corridors. Three delayed booby traps were laid along the route. They reached the base intact.
Back at the base, the first thing Rosen did was open the system interface.
Life Points and Refined Steel had received a substantial boost from the three-way engagement's harvest.
Biomass, the new resource, had reached 170 points.
Warp Energy was still at 2.
Rosen opened the Biomass details.
[Biomass: high-density organic energy extracted from kills of Tyranid-related organisms.]
[Current available modification: subdermal chitin-weave implant.]
Rosen stared at that line. His pupils contracted slightly.
A chitin-weave implant meant taking the Tyranid organism's organic armour — the same material that stopped blades and turned small-arms fire — and growing it beneath human skin. The finished result was equivalent to wearing carapace armour.
Carapace armour was the peak of unpowered armour available to mortals. Generally only Astra Militarum elite units, Commissars, and Inquisitorial retinue operatives of that calibre had access to it.
A Death Warrior with a chitin-weave implant could take multiple lasgun shots to the body and hold. Could stop mid-calibre ballistic rounds.
Ninety Death Warriors, all implanted?
That would be ninety Catachan Jungle Fighters with carapace-equivalent protection.
But the cost column brought him back down.
Thirty Biomass and thirty Warp Energy per person. He had just enough Biomass for three. His total Warp Energy was two points — earned from the only two daemons he had killed, both of them the lowest tier of warp entity, one point each.
To hit those numbers he needed to kill far more daemons, or far more powerful ones.
His current strength wasn't there yet.
But the route was marked.
Rosen closed the interface.
A Death Warrior's value wasn't that they couldn't die. It was that they could be rebuilt.
As long as Rosen was alive and resources were available, a fallen Death Warrior could be replaced with a new one.
Rosen spent one hundred Life Points and one cubic metre of Refined Steel.
"Your designation is Number 4."
The new Death Warrior pressed his right fist to his chest.
"Loyalty!"
Same number. Same genetic template. A completely new individual.
Rosen used Skill Transfer to push the essential combat experience accumulated by the previous Number 4 into the new one.
A few seconds later, the steadiness came into the new Number 4's eyes.
Then the expansion.
Refined Steel was plentiful and Life Points had been substantially replenished by the three-way engagement.
Another batch of Death Warriors condensed from nothing. The headcount in the base climbed rapidly.
It settled at ninety-one, plus Number 6 still holding the weapons bay.
Nine full ten-man squads, each with a squad leader.
The base itself had been extended into a two-node structure — the primary node for command and rest, the secondary node for assembly and weapons distribution.
Through all of that — the expansion, the construction work, the constant movement of personnel — a small figure had been busy at every corner of the base.
Little Wrench was starting to show a kind of value Rosen hadn't anticipated.
patreon.com/Twilightsky588 - 30 advanced chapters