Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

168 – Daring Escape

I knew exactly where the jammer was; I felt each living being around me for hundreds of metres with pinpoint accuracy even with my aura loose and unfocused. Still, I acted like I didn’t. It was more fun that way.

Never in my life would I have thought there would come a day when my concept of ‘fun’ included fighting a band of deluded lunatics armed with zealous idiocy and guns. Alas, my life was as far from what it had been just a few months ago as heaven was from earth.

A brief lull followed the loud bark of Cain’s gun, a deathly stillness that only the cracking of the smouldering wood broke. The main gunner of the cultist force outside wielding their autocannon was dead, a chunk of his head evaporated as he tumbled into the vehicle.

Then all hell broke loose, and I threw myself to the ground, only vaguely paying attention to diverting the few bullets that should have struck me or Cain. They would have clinked off of my skin ineffectually, but Cain was just a human, and as such getting new holes poked into him was pretty unhealthy for him.

He reacted quickly, quicker than I had with my reaction speed slowed artificially to an average human level. He waited, as did I, for both the gunfire to die down and for another cultist to foolishly saunter into our line of fire.

I felt five cultists still lingering outside, and three of those practically threw themselves at us, or where they thought we might be to be specific. That meant we had three idiots in flowy robes flying over our heads, screaming bloody murder and lashing out with various sharp objects at any bit of smoke that looked at them funny.

One of them was dead before he could even scamper back onto his feet, Cain having tracked his flight and let loose a lasbolt the moment he had the man in his sight. The second pounced on him with a curved knife of some kind and I had my gun trained on the third.

The woman saw me, her eyes bloodshot and pupils as wide as saucers from whatever acid she was sky-high on. She pounced, a pair of daggers held in her hands, aimed to go through my shoulders and likely disable my arms.

I could see my slow, agonising death play out in her deluded eyes before they gave way to a bowline look of shock as a thunderous crack cut through the noise of Cain’s battle. 

She twisted mid-flight, the power of the bullet my gun spat out spinning her around after it went through her chest, Rolling out of the way, I let her limp, dead body slam into the ground. 

I snatched up the pair of daggers without hesitation, sliding them in between my belt and pants while Cain finished off the second cultist on his side. That left only two cultists out on the sidewalk, one of which I could hear screeching into a radio-like gadget for reinforcements while the other was busy trying to extract his fellow cultist from the way to get to the autocannon fixed atop the van. 

If Cain was suspicious before, he was downright certain something was up with me as he looked over to see me stand over the corpse of yet another cultist. Completely unharmed, besides my carefully kept hair now falling into utter disarray and spots of blood and grime now dirtying my snow-white garments. 

I stared back, using a little trick that came to me in the spur of the moment. When people looked at something they thought they knew, they had certain expectations. Like how when Cain looked at me, he had a mental image in his mind of what he expected me to look and act like. 

So I plucked that image right out of his mind as it floated up to the surface of his consciousness. From there, it was the easiest thing in the world to act out what he was expecting to see to dampen his suspicions.

Of course, what he had primarily been expecting was me laying dead on the ground, torn to bits by a deluded cultist. So I had to resort to going with a secondary image.

I limped, a deep gash forming on my hips and my shirt now sporting a tear. The expressions though, those were what I needed the most help with. Despite being both an empath and a telepath, Cain still knew humans much better than I did and had a much more realistic expectation for how a regular human woman would react having just emerged victorious from a life and death duel.

Harried, haunted and terrified with a hint of bitter resolve to survive no matter what shining through, was how I would have described the woman I was showing myself to be. Cain seemed to buy it, though he was one paranoid man and I doubted it would do much beyond dampening his suspicions.

“Two more,” he said, keeping low to the ground where the air was still mostly breathable. Thankfully, the worst of the smoke was escaping through the broken windows. “Then we take their vehicle and run. I’m sure the reinforcements will meet us halfway.”

I gave a jerky nod, then we crept forward and moved through the smoke. In just a few more steps, we would have left behind the obfuscating safety of the cafe, making ourselves easy targets for any cultist alert enough to keep a lookout for us. 

Alas, I knew neither of the two were all that bright, or cohesive. No one was watching the smoke. 

Still, I acted like I didn’t and moved with slow, stealthy steps as I held my gun at the ready. Cain gave a serious nod, he himself skulking forward at a quicker pace. Likely, he had caught parts of the frantic cultist’s call for reinforcements and that had lit a fire under his butt.

Despite feeling not a hint of the Emperor’s ‘light’ in his soul — which was just above average in strength by the way — I was starting to doubt my senses. Cain rushed forth, a power in each move that belied his age.

Before I was even out of the smoke, he was already pointing his laspistol at the cultist squatting behind the radio. I just caught the flash in its barrel before the man’s face disintegrated and his frantic voice cut off mid-sentence. 

That had the last of the cunts, the one trying to pry its fellow out of the harness attached to the autocannon’s mount, go absolutely rabid. He had been moving hurriedly before, unclasping holsters and moving his fellow cultist’s body with some care, but he lost all that.

He grabbed a bayonet from a holster at the small of his back, and started to cut through everything standing between him and the autocannon, be they seatbelts, holsters, or his buddy’s corpse.

I had my gun pointed at where his head would emerge, if he was dumb enough to actually poke his head out instead of just spraying with the heavy-duty energy cannon. Meanwhile, Cain was trying to break into the vehicle to finish the man off, his efforts growing more and more frenzied as the doors refused to give way. He started blasting holes into the offending doors a few seconds in, but I knew he wouldn’t be fast enough.

The cultist’s hands clasped down on the autocannon’s grip and I practically felt his malicious glee radiate out of him. He was so very pleased with himself, I just couldn’t help but want to quash it and break his fragile hint of hope of getting out of this alive. 

Humans were so very fragile. 

A single light tug in the wrong direction, a telekinetic force barely strong enough to lift a single brick. That was all it took to break the finger reaching to pull the trigger in half a dozen places, almost pulverising the fingertip into a gory mess.

The moment Cain finally managed to tear the large side-door of the van off its hinges, an agonised howl of pain tore through the air. Then the tone shifted, along with the feelings emanating from the man inside. Where there was torturous pain a moment ago, the man now only felt bliss as his voice turned into a repulsive moan.

Cain’s laspistol spitting out a final bolt cut that short, silencing the man once and for all and sending his soul slipping into the waiting arms of his demonic patron. 

I heard some crashing sounds, another few rounds of a laspistol discharging its deadly payload into something vaguely metallic before Cain poked his head back out of the van with a frown on his face.

“Everything’s safe in here,” he said. “For now. We need to get going, do you know how to drive this thing?”

“Maybe?” I said, making it sound like I didn’t know what setup this van was using as I hesitantly took a glance inside. Meanwhile, I was browsing through the nearest cultist’s head who was driving another van of the same kind right towards us, only a few minutes away from our current location. “Yeah. I can … probably manage.”

The windshield was busted, the whole steering wheel and all other knick knacks behind it were covered in gore and there was a steaming corpse sitting on the passenger seat. Still, the van had simple enough controls, simple enough that I only mildly fried the brain of the cultist who had served as the source of my secondhand driving experience.

I gingerly wrapped my hands around the steering wheel as I lowered myself into the driver’s seat. The disgust came naturally as I felt chunks of gore not only under my fingers, but under my butt, I didn't even have to fake a thing. With some effort, I managed to hide the fact I was moments away from burning the whole van with psychic flames for dirtying my pristine clothes.

Cain spent about ten seconds dumping all the corpses on the sidewalk before he slid in behind the autocannon mounted atop the van. He swung it about and fired, causing the other van that had just rounded the corner to swerve off to the side.

“GO!” He screamed, letting his finger off the trigger just long enough to let me hear it before he continued on. He fired in short bursts, most of his bolts still going wide but a few smacking into the van with some middling effect. They were armoured, because of course they were.

I stepped on the gas, sending us into a … trudging crawl. Well, we were going at about 60 km/h, but my sense of speed was likely somewhat warped by this point. Being able to sprint around the circumference of a planet in just a few hours did that to people. 

We sped down the street, and I took a sharp turn to the left at the corner, earning me some muffled curses from above.

The fact that Slaaneshi cultists had horrendous aim became evident in just a few exchanges. Even as I sped down the street, Cain managed to aim his short bursts of autocannon bolts close enough to our pursuers to at least force them to evade, if he didn’t hit them outright. 

Meanwhile, the closest we’d come to being hit was a single bolt flying past our heads, about ten metres above. That made the chase rather relaxed, though I still pushed the rickety vehicle to its limits. I was supposed to be panicked and all too eager to put as much distance between me and the crazy cultists as possible after all,

The jammer was busted by now, and I’d almost forgotten about it when the small comm-bead in Cain’s ear buzzed and I overheard a brief message.

“We’ll be meeting with your vehicle in five minutes, Sir.”

Cain didn’t answer, but I could feel relief flood him as he sagged a little. While he was distracted, I reached back to the still-burning cafe with a tendril of my power and snuffed out the flames. The three people inside were unconscious and would have nasty headaches when they woke up from breathing in some smoke, but nothing permanent. 

While I drove, taking a few sharp turns here and there to avoid either of the two vans catching up to us, I went over the state of my global cultist-culling’s progress.

There were some casualties, but there were at least twice as many dead cultists than civilians, which I took as a win. Most of those casualties came from the capital, where these fuckers were hiding in wait by the thousands. I suspected they were getting ready for a total takeover under the command of their precious Daemon Prince.

Me erasing that bitch probably threw a bit of a wrench into their plans.

Half a minute before the promised five minutes, I saw a small convoy of three armoured cars roll down a side street and take up protective positions around our humble van. By that point, Cain had disabled one of the cultists’ vans, having blown its front-right tyre to oblivion and pounded several deep dents into the other. Causing our lone pursuer to trudge after us, fueled more by its driver’s need for vengeance than anything else.

Whether he could have achieved that, we would never know. The armoured jeep pulling up behind us made sure of that, or rather, the man halfway hanging out of it with a shoulder-launched Krak rocket did. 

Where Cain’s new autocannon only dented the armoured exterior of the cultists’ ride, the Krak rocket went through it like a hot knife through butter. Once it was lodged deep inside the van, its payload exploded with a thunderous boom, shattering glass windows across the street and tearing the pursuing van apart and sending its remains flying through the air as smouldering chunks of scrap metal.

The man responsible slipped back into the jeep, letting the now useless rocket launcher drop from his shoulder before slamming the door shut behind him. A few seconds later, I heard Cain’s comm-bead buzz in his ear once more, an entirely nonplussed voice sounding out from it.

“Pursuers handled, Sir.” The voice said, as if he was reporting about the weather and not the explosive end of a group of degenerate cultists. Then it continued with a hint of clear satisfaction. “They won’t be bothering you anymore I think.”

“Thank you, Jurgen.” Cain said, practically melting out of his seat as his anxiety and nerves drained away. “Let’s get back to the safe-house now, if it hasn't been compromised yet and plan our next steps. Tell the Lieutenant to lead the way.”

“Very good, Sir.” Jurgen’s voice sounded from the comm-bead one final time before it went silent. A few seconds later one of the vehicles pulled forward and came to drive just in front of me. 

“Follow that car, if you would.” Cain said, though his voice made it apparent it wasn’t anything but an order. Clearly, he felt much more certain of his survival and that his words would be obeyed now that he had a few scores of battle-hardened soldiers riding with us. For now, I decided not to disprove his flawed understanding of our respective powers. I just nodded and hid a small grin.

That Blank riding in the jeep behind us was powerful. Almost as powerful as the blackened skull wielded by the Shadowkeeper had been. This is going to be interesting. 

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