349 – Eye contact

“Have you worked much with runes before?” I eventually asked, not looking away from my latest attempt at forming a rune of my own. Alex had slipped inside the room I’d turned into my private lab maybe twenty minutes ago and plopped himself down at the edge of the desk, just watching me work silently. 

“‘Much’ is relative; I’m no expert, but I’ve used them on occasion, which meant studying them enough to understand how to do so safely and well,” he said, glancing up at me. “I’ve found that they are often not worth the effort. They are tools for the less learned and powerful to touch upon concepts and abilities they can’t wield or channel directly. For the most part, I’ve long grown past the need for them, but they still have their uses on occasion.”

“The Eldar still use them,” I countered. “It might make sense, with your logic, if they only took up the practice after the Fall but before?”

“I didn’t say they were useless, or that they had no place in the arsenal of someone powerful,” Alex said. “They do make channelling powers in a specific way, reliably, much easier. They can also facilitate making the creation of an artifact mass-producible. For you, they could be an excellent tool to augment your fine control, which is rather lacking from what I’ve seen.”

My fine control was just fine; it’s been improving rapidly … but that didn’t mean it was anywhere near the level I’d seen Alex wield on the rare occasion where he called on his Empyrean powers. His raw psychic might had taken a substantial hit when he got torn off the larger soul of the Emperor, but he still had all the expertise and skill in wielding those powers born of countless millennia of life. 

It would take more — much more — than a single year to catch up to someone like him when it came to dexterity and skill, and the less said about actual experience, the better. 

“Any pointers on what I’m doing wrong with this thing?” I said, gesturing at the misshapen rune floating above my table. It had a glob of soul energy clinging to it, which I’d infused with meaning as best as I could, but its effect was extremely underwhelming. 

I could have achieved the same with a twentieth of the energy investment and probably a hundred times less effort if I’d just brought the effect into being directly, without bothering with a rune. 

It was a vanity project, if I was being honest with myself, which was why only a quarter of my Avatar’s processing power was devoted to it while the rest worked on my Planetary Shield project. Turning those Tyranid Megastructures towards the purpose of projecting global energy shields was the easy part, but making those shields actually work properly was proving to be much more troublesome. 

The megastructures had been made to handle a single catastrophic and largely uncontrolled unleashing of Warp Energy, not for the steady and controlled channelling of it. Maybe I would be forced to make lesser relays across the globe, but I wanted to see whether I could manage with just the two shield-generators on the poles. 

The projected energy shield would have to be solid and uniform across the globe before I could continue on to the next step of the plan: attempting to make a gigantic Storm Ward that could handle the channelling of that level of energy. I wasn’t even sure it was possible yet; that part of the plan was in the purely theoretical phase, but I sure as hell was going to try.

If the ‘the best defence is a good offence’ plan, which began with blowing up that star, was put on hold until I could find out whether it had any substantial effect, then I’d have to go with the second-best option for defence in the interim, which was actual defence. Thus, shields. I didn’t want to be forced to deploy the full Pylon network on Vallia ever again. Valenith was still cranky about it weeks later.

“For a start, that might look like a rune, but it sure doesn’t function like one,” he said. “The runes the Eldar use draw on the metaphysical power the Immaterium lends to their collective history. It's borrowed power, in a sense. Your ‘rune’ isn’t borrowing anything, nor is it trying to connect to any larger source of power that it might channel. It’s just an … unstable battery with a shoddy faucet spewing out a supernatural effect.”

“I see.” I frowned, then, with a wave of my hand, vanished the failed experiment. “‘Connect to a larger source of power’. Is that how Arulent wards, purity seals and things like hexagrammatic wards work?”

“For the first two, yes,” Alex said. “Arulent wards were my own creations, a way to produce armour with protections against the Immaterial, even for non-psykers like the Custodes. Purity seals … they tap into Faith, the collective belief that they work and that they imbue a sliver of Big Me’s ‘Divine’ power into whatever they are applied to. It’s a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy that way. I’m not sure of the specifics, but I think they don’t actually tap Big Me’s power, just the power of Faith in the purity seals themselves … though I could be wrong. Those processes happen deep in the Warp, where Big Me’s soul-self resides, which is not a place I have much insight into in my current state.”

“And hexagrammic wards?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Those are much more fundamental; my guess is that they are something similar to Ennouncia.” Alex shrugged. “The power they hold is akin to a fundamental law of the universe, not some ephemeral power drawn from the Warp, or mortal Faith. Perhaps only those Old Ones you spoke of would know for certain.”

“I don’t suppose you would be willing to show me how to do it?” I said, raising an eyebrow at him. “I haven’t failed to notice that you’ve been exceptionally miserly with exercising your power since we left the Webway.”

“Using them out here is like lighting up a lighthouse for everything wanting to take a bite out of me.” He shrugged. “Which would be annoying to deal with, both for me as well as you. I thought I’d be a good guest and do my best not to draw any more daemons into your house than you already do just by being, well, you.”

“Is that so? Well, that’s appreciated, but then you have nothing else besides your willingness stopping you from helping me figure this out, right?"

“Partially correct, I’m not exactly in tip-top shape as far as psychic might goes,” he said with another shrug. “I doubt I could manage any of the more … brute force expressions of power as I am without paying a rather severe price for it. More subtle applications of my power are what I’ll have to limit myself to. I could show you how to infuse a proper rune, how to tie it to some source of Higher Power … but I think it would be a much more worthwhile way to spend our time if you first showed me what you can already do and I gave some constructive criticism on it. Useful as they can be, runes have a rather niche use, and there already exist pre-made runic scripts like the Aeldari lexicon for almost any purpose you could ever want a rune for.”

I didn’t want to admit to Emperor Junior that the only reason I was even working on this project was pure vanity and pride. I didn’t want to borrow power from Aeldari history; I wanted runes that I could feel were my own. If I could make some that drew on human history the same way the Aeldari Lexicon channelled the power of the Aeldari history, I’d be happy. 

Maybe it would be actually useful; I had some hopes for making something worthwhile out of a rune or runic sequence that could weaponise the ‘indomitable human spirit’, but oh well. Alex was right. It’d probably be a smarter use of both of our times to have him tutor me in what I thought of as psyker combat fundamentals rather than waste time on runes that may or may not end up being of any use.

*****

“Well, let’s start simple,” I said, mostly to myself as I did my best to quiet the sudden bout of nerves I felt. I was going to show off my amateurish, crude applications of psyker power to possibly the greatest psyker to have ever lived. 

Maybe it was just a bit understandable why the anxiety I thought I’d left behind in another life reared its ugly head again. 

Stop stalling. I chastised myself. He probably saw through me anyway, but there was no point in wasting time on stupid feelings that should have stayed dead. 

I raised a hand and an Eldritch Blast snapped forth, a single beam of furious energy connecting my fingertip with a distant cliff-face. For a single instant, the beam hung there in the air, then vanished, and the resounding echo of the explosion rolled over the empty valley we were in as rocks and rubble flew through the air. 

My Eldritch Blast was no bolt or bullet made of energy; it was closer to a lightning bolt forced into a straight beam shape, then used as a delivery mechanism for transporting fuck you levels of destructive energy to the target.

It was simple, reliable and easily scalable. I liked it. I pointed it at something and that something exploded. Nice and simple. 

It could even be powered by other, more specialised types of energy, like Smite-infused silver flames or whatever. It was no great arcane ritual, nor would it wow any true masters of the sorcerous arts, but it served as my … bread-and-butter ranged attack option. There was a beauty in simplicity, and everyone who’d been in actual combat could tell you that reliability was one of the most important attributes any weapon in your arsenal could have.

“Not much to say there; more power for that technique will come as your control improves and you learn how to better wield your will,” Alex said, nodding once, then looking at me as if saying, ‘Next?’

I obliged him. Next came a shield, barriers, pyromancy and telekinesis, with each entry taking more and more time. As the complexity went up, Alex gave more advice and critique on the technique. Telekinesis was the simpler of the two, pure will converted into pure force, but pyromancy could be more. It could be more than mere physical fire, as I had learned with my dark and silver flames. Still, even telekinesis had tricks that could make specific applications cheaper in energy and more potent in results. 

After that, though, things grew complicated. We discussed the techniques I used to enhance my physical form and my mind for what felt like hours, though it was only half of one. Being able to exchange tremendous amounts of knowledge telepathically made that half hour more productive than a month of straight talking. 

Then came the topic of telepathy, my spatial manipulation technique, teleportation, portals, technomancy and even some of the psyker abilities I’d shamelessly stolen from the Grey Knights.

“You need to devote much more time to mastering telepathy,” Alex ended up saying. “It’s clearly your weakest avenue of combat, and every halfway intelligent enemy will try to exploit it. All other topics we’ve discussed would be worthwhile to devote more time to, but they would only make you stronger. Telepathy … it will shore up your most glaring weakness. You have the power, but not the finesse, and when it comes to telepathy, that means a master of the discipline could slip past your mental defences without ever engaging you in the mental equivalent of a fistfight. You have the raw power advantage over almost everyone, so no one with even half a brain will get into a mental contest of strength with you. I’m sure you know this; I can sense you’ve spent a good bit of time refining your mental defences, but it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. It needs to become an impregnable fortress.”

And so we began; I did not dare to broach the subject of payment. I felt like it would be a mistake, making our exchange of knowledge and help become something more transactional, which … I didn’t want. I wasn’t sure why, but it felt wrong. 

A tendril came down from my realm, slurping up Warp energy in a far-off corner of the star system, drawing in all the daemons lingering nearby. With that done, Alex felt a bit freer to exercise his psychic muscles.

As he said, he never went for brute force. His tendrils of psychic energy tried to worm their way into my mind again and again. It felt insidious and helpful at once, each attempt showing me a weakness, a gap that could have been exploited by someone who actually wished me harm. 

At first it was mere finesse, him somehow slithering through the cracks with so tiny slivers of energy that I barely even noticed it. He probably even covered them in effects that diverted the attention, made even more effective by the fact that he had two much more obvious intrusion attempts for every incredibly sneaky one. 

Then when I started getting the hang of fending those off, he started doing something more … esoteric. The energy just sort of appeared in my mind, its effect unfurling before I could swat it out of existence. In effect, I was watching pink illusory sparkles dance through my vision, hearing some absolute earworm of a song, smelling mint—for some reason—or a dozen other minor but annoying sensory feedbacks he conjured in my mind. 

“How the hell are you doing that?” I asked with a huff after the fifteenth failed attempt to figure it out. 

“Eye contact,” Alex said simply, and I frowned.

“I thought I was protecting against that already,” I grumbled, then turned my entire focus towards that. Trying to see how exactly he was using eye contact as some sort of metaphysical bridge to sneak past my mental shields. 

It took me roughly twenty minutes, which was basically an eternity in relative time, to figure out the bastard was lying. He wasn’t piggybacking off of eye contact, but perception, always switching up which of my senses he attached tiny packets of concealed energy to. I only noticed when he tried to do the same with my psychic perception, which I finally managed to catch in time. 

Of course, the psychic energy packets were always tiny slivers, further hidden by minor effects that turned the attention away. They only affected me for mere instants, but by the time I snapped out of it, the effect was either already working, or the packet of energy had vanished, making me question whether I’d seen anything at all. Only hindsight and my perfect memory convinced me I hadn’t been imagining things. 

“In a battle between telepaths, simple misdirection is a simple but useful tool,” Alex said when I gave him a glare that could have curdled milk. He just smiled, the little shit. “Every word can be a weapon, or just a piece of a scheme meant to lead you into a trap. Lies are a potent tool, and selective truths even more so. I had been using eye contact to slip past your guard in that one attack you’d questioned me about, so even if you could sense whether I was lying, it would have rang true, pulling you further into the misdirection.”

I did, in fact, have protections built in against attacks like this, a filter that was supposed to scrape away any smidge of foreign psychic energy clinging to sensory feedback. I’d built the whole thing after that Lord of Change managed to get into my head, and I’d been pretty proud of it. Then Alex slipped right through it like it wasn’t even there. Which meant that the fact that Lord of Change died, ‘unable’ to repeat its trick … was probably part of some long-term scheme to lull me into a sense of security. Make me think my countermeasures were sufficient. Or Alex was just straight up better than a Lord of Change. Possibly both.

I wasn’t sure which of those options was worse, but the fact was I had to upgrade my mental defences and fast. I couldn’t allow such a glaring weakness to remain.