Pretty soon, there were pictures of my nigh unto perfect ass hanging all over the galaxy. I had stingers and Tails in some, I had burning black wings edged in gold in others, I had floating glowing horns from my Halo Crown, and the unreal Arakne Arms were obvious psychic limbs crackling in lighting and shooting endless streams of banefire’d lasers and force bolts.

There were images of all these limbs dissipating into nothing, so everyone knew they were psionic manifestations, but they had basically never seen them used like this, in the combinations that I did, or so murderously effectively.

In all of them, my hair was improbably long and swirling like my own cape, my Mask tats were glowing in different shades, and Chalice was out there in a golden core, with Five Stars and Two Suns.

The footage came from multiple battlefields, and it spread across the stars excitedly, as news of brand-new heroes is likely to do. As it did, ripples of unease followed it.

Heroes were fine, but heroes who did not obey the Empire were revolutionaries and firebrands, and potential Warp Servants trying to stir up the masses by misleading examples, rabble-rousing, and showing defiance of the Imperial Bureaucracy.

Naturally I wasn’t paying obeisance to any of them, and several attempts to lay hands on me ended poorly for those concerned. Soon warring media images of a dangerous and powerful radical were competing with circumspect videos from dozens of battlefields showing me laying waste to the enemies of man... and healing thousands of troopers, including regenerating limbs, as I walked through field hospitals before mysteriously and untraceably leaving.

Soon enough, there were teams of Umbrans and Coronals tasked to follow me, find out more about me, and contain or kill me if needed to stop my grandstanding heroics. If I would work with the Empire, take orders properly, and be their shill and face for propaganda, all well and good. If I didn’t, I was obviously a force of the Warp meant to stir up unrest, regardless of my feats, and I needed to be dealt with.

Figuring out where I was going to be was difficult, but simply dispatching teams to watch for me at all the battlefields wasn’t beyond the remit of the Empire, and given time to work with, they certainly could do it. Obviously, tasking senior operatives of the Empire to shut me down was more important than unleashing such competent folk on the enemies of the Empire, after all.

Identifying the more reactionary members of the Empire was never so easy. The Mekkers were naturally totally ready to classify me as something as dangerous as the enemy, and if I was accidentally killed by artillery barrages in the areas I was fighting in, well, those things happened, didn’t they?

There was one common factor on all the battlefields I showed up on, however. There was at least one Hagblood on that world, and naturally said Hagblood were building their own organization of Marked... organizations that proliferated with astonishing speed up and down the Imperial hierarchy, as Ranthas and Briggs sought out the Good people of the Empire, and those with souls yearning for the light, and showed them there was another way.

If those people planning to kill me in the middle of a war or battlefield unfortunately got themselves shot by enemy snipers through their own idiocy behind the front lines, well, there was nothing to do for it but kill more of the enemy, right?

------

Qim’bai IV, a forgeworld in the Leo Sector...

I stepped out from the Underweb behind a pillbox, the spatial coordinates opened up by Trishta Rantha. She was basically serving as one of several Ranthas set up to coordinate with all the others and get ALL the Swordrift links possible. Ranthas at Six and later were spreading out constantly from world to world, both carried on normal Empire ships and on our Scouts moving from system to system as they worked on the Phlo Maps of the galaxy and brought eager siblings to new worlds.

Of course, the Tachyon Drive was still slooooow compared to Helljumping long distances. Yes, to nearby systems it was faster and convenient, and since nobody was expecting ships to be coming outside the heliopause like that, nigh undetectable.

There really wasn’t any particular pattern to how I was choosing where to go. The wars the Empire got into could drag on for years, decades, even centuries, given the sprawling size of it and the numbers of worlds and the enemies involved, so there was never any particular rush to me going here or there. The areas I had appeared in had covered over ten thousand light years by now, walking through the Underweb from one world to another in our little secluded base in the Gloom.

Qim’bai was a world in the Tokkomadai Cluster, settled millennia ago and turned into a Forgeworld providing goods and military wares to the whole Cluster. It had been isolated by the Black Rain Conquest of the Goblins a hundred and twenty-seven years ago, and was one of the first worlds liberated by the incoming relief fleets.

The years of conflict and ever-increasing demands of the Empire had proven fertile grounds for the words of Riggibuhl to proliferate, and the worker class of the planet had risen up under Warp influence, put their overseers and erstwhile rulers to the plasma torch, and promptly started turning the world into an appropriate shrine to the Grandfather Demon.

Of course, losing the quadrillions of credits of forges and foundries on the world was unacceptable, although losing tens of millions of lives of soldiers was not. Therefore, the Imperial Marines had been sent in to reclaim the world and contest against a Warped force of fanatics using twisted versions of the Empire’s own wargear, accented lovably with Warp sorcery, psionics, Possession, and capering demons here and there.

Couldn’t mass bomb from orbit, either, as that would destroy factories. I rolled my eyes at the typical view of Mekkers, regarding machines as things that should endure forever, while human lives were cheap and spent easily.

The Marines had been locked down in a traditional slugfest against a dug-in enemy, unable to just wipe them away with orbital bombardment as they should have, their lives cheaper than a processing refiner or fabber for drive axles.

Into this mess came a Thirteen Rantha Hag.

Paten and Host slapped into my Arakne Arms, voltage crackled and gave them an endless power supply for their rapid-fire lasers as Phrenic Bane popped up on them, which should prove useful against all the real enemies on the battlefield... and possibly my allies too, who knew?

I hopped easily up to the top of the pillbox, as it was built low to the ground to deflect any incoming fire. Trishta reported that the missile fire was minor here, the enemy seemed to prefer guns, which raised alarm bells. Artillery was like hammers, like drums, and pointed to Rituals being enacted, which could be very bad, indeed.

There was a rain of shells coming down, filling the air with thunder, dirt, and groundwater tainted by endless corpses and the power of the Warp, breeding disease in an ideal environment. There were more casualties from skinrot, gutsnakes, and other unnatural diseases than had died to the enemy soldiers.

Well, I should be able to do something about it. The air forces had blown one another apart, missile fire taking out any air cover, while elements of the Warp that had gathered at the fall of the world were maneuvering and jousting with the Fleet throughout the system in brutal slugfests.

Time to do something about this place.

The troopers were on the trench lines, knowing the enemy was coming across a mile of hell, shell craters, barbed wire, rotting corpses, riven machines of war blown apart by one another, more snaking trench lines, and the like. The possible avenues of approach were known, and as soon as the artillery barrage lifted, the real fighting would begin.

Or maybe a bit sooner.

I smiled, my Mask looking right through the dirt and muck thrown up by hundreds of shells falling, tracking the incoming shells, computing speed and arc, and looking past them to raised mountains of steel where the distant guns were throwing out their shells with impunity, because the Marines weren’t allowed to shell them back. That right there was a factory where major components of Imperial Mechs were manufactured; can’t be blowing that apart, what would we do without our idiot walking engines of inane awesomeness?

Well, time to see if I could do something about it.

Psychoactive lightning was subliminally building in the skies. Something was certainly going on here...

Chalice snapped up, Phrenic Bane spat in reaction instantly, and vivic fire swirled up actively, the one feeding the other. Faith floated around me on paramagnetic tethers, and I looked at the hell ahead of me, and smiled.

Perhaps someone behind me in higher elevation saw me, but it didn’t matter too awful much. I’d be seen soon enough...

----------

“She’s here!” Bemrin shouted out, staring at the monitor he had abruptly stopped and frozen.

The entire team paused, and then surged to their feet, heading for the monitor.

They watched the five Tails, four minor ones high on the back and one major one from the base of the spine, emerge and spread out around her like her own personal fire support halo. The faintly glowing, inhuman arms extending off her hips operated below the arc of her Tails, already snapping on line, and the floating Shield was glowing with power and circling idly around her and the gold and black mindsword she was holding in both hands.

“Five Stars, Two Suns,” confirmed Bemrin, sucking in a breath. That was a hideously dangerous person any way you wanted to look at it.

The looming armored hulk that was Tiger Legionnaire Sergeant Kampi growled, “She is already shooting! At what?”

In seconds, she had skipped effortlessly over two hundred meters of trenchworks and the troopers manning them, who could only look up and after her in shock as she virtually flew past them at superhuman speed. Her guns were already starting to pulse, reaching out into the hell of the shelling, plunging into and through it, and by the way she was moving her limbs, she was aiming, not spraying.

“She can see through the shelling,” murmured Sir Mugamu, staring in amazement. “That is extraordinary. She is shooting at the enemy through the shelling, and they can’t even see her!”

They watched her slide sideways, and a second later, a shell that would have impacted right atop her was instead thirty yards to the side. The shockwave broke past her, and didn’t alter her course in the slightest, throw off her aim, and they even watched the wave of debris torn off the ground disrupt as it broke on her... and didn’t even make her hair sway.

A second later, she was gone from view, except for flashes of light coming through the shelling.

“That is some subtle, dangerous power,” murmured Inquisitor Hrom, his dark eyes intense. “A blast going off that close, you should be at least deafened, and blown off your feet. A psionic skinward that can deflect that so smoothly is not something often seen...”

“We can make her tell us how she got it when we capture her,” Techmeister Vahix ground out in his flat electronically generated voice.

“Let’s go,” Sir Mugamu agreed, and weapons and wargear leapt from the walls to the grasp and harness of their owners. The Inquiry Team headed for the skimmer that would deliver them rapidly to the front lines, and onto the trail of the Dark Angel who was so upsetting their organizations.