The Aeldari woman bent in a way that was distinctly inhuman, enough to make every yoga enthusiast in the galaxy drown in envy.
Her halted blade instantly transformed into a vicious slash aimed straight at me.
By then, however, I had already flowed out of the split and rolled backward. Throughout the maneuver, I maintained a steady stream of suppressive fire, statistically capable of catching my opponent if she attempted to capitalize on my supposedly vulnerable position in midair, where not even a flip belt could completely negate the limitations imposed by momentum and movement.
With every passing second, our duel gradually transformed into something resembling an elegant dance.
A theatrical performance.
But that was merely an illusion, a deception created by dozens of overlapping factors.
Our psycho-reactive wraithbone training weapons collided with sharp snapping sounds, almost identical to hardened plastic striking hardened plastic. Gradually, and inevitably, I began losing ground. The pressure mounted as the attacks came faster and faster, far too many for me to react to all at once.
I could only focus on the most dangerous strikes.
Which meant the lesser ones gradually slipped through my defenses.
Those impacts didn't immediately take me out of the fight. Unfortunately, bruises were still bruises. Given enough punishment concentrated in one area, they restricted movement.
Only by around ten percent.
But against an opponent who surpassed me in almost every category except raw physical strength, even that missing tenth was critical.
"May the Hungry Bitch have her way with me!"
The curse slipped from my mouth before I could stop it as my opponent's blade flashed directly across my field of vision.
I wasn't even sure there had been a full centimeter of clearance.
Killing Mockery's expression remained unchanged.
This time, however, she stopped attacking altogether.
Allowing myself a moment to breathe, I immediately understood what she wanted.
"The sparring match is over, then?"
Tilting my head slightly, I lowered the barrel of my fusion pistol.
In response, she nodded enthusiastically.
I sighed inwardly.
I still couldn't tell whether she was mute or simply messing with me.
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Under any other circumstances, I would've assumed the former.
But she was a follower of Cegorach.
Just like me.
Given that fact, the second explanation seemed considerably more likely.
"So, how many more sparring matches before we head to see Trazyn, my silent partner?"
Without the slightest hesitation, the Aeldari woman raised both hands and spread all ten fingers.
Then she did it again.
Ten fingers.
Ten times.
One hundred.
Well...
Compared to everything I had already endured, that wasn't too bad.
I could survive a hundred.
Probably.
...
Later
Traveling through the Webway, especially before it suffered catastrophic damage from its growing instability and countless breaches into both realspace and the Immaterium, was outright cheating.
There were no difficulties.
No risks.
None of the endless hardships that plagued travel throughout the Warhammer galaxy, where the journey from one world to another was often more dangerous than the dramatic battle that had preceded it.
Guilliman himself would serve as an excellent example in the future.
Certainly, the Fall of the Aeldari had shaken the Webway to its very foundations.
Countless routes had been severed.
Entire passages, once wide enough to carry fleets and armadas, had collapsed and been swallowed by the Warp.
Yet the surviving routes, those known to the inhabitants of the Black Library from Cegorach himself down to its newest Harlequin, were the equivalent of a German autobahn compared to hacking one's way through the Amazon rainforest.
"So this is Solemnace..."
I stared at the seemingly ordinary green world with immense curiosity.
It was a deception worthy of Tzeentch himself.
In reality, the world was an artificial planet of staggering proportions.
A planetary-scale construct.
Trillions upon trillions of tons of living metal.
Necrodermis.
The substance from which every Necron had been forged.
The greatest museum in the Milky Way projected a flawless illusion across its surface, disguising itself as an ordinary verdant planet. Only the faint green energy rings encircling the world betrayed its true nature. They looked nothing like the familiar rings of ice and dust surrounding Saturn. Those glowing structures revealed Solemnace for what it truly was.
A tomb world beyond compare.
The woman standing beside me clearly didn't share my enthusiasm.
Then again, Harlequins weren't required to laugh all the time.
Even within a theater, some roles were tragic.
Some were grim.
We, followers of Cegorach, were not creatures of laughter alone.
"Oh, come on."
I shrugged with a grin.
"I assure you, Trazyn is an incredibly entertaining Necron. One of the greatest trolls you'll ever meet. Honestly, it's no surprise he gets along with our god."
After all, I wasn't particularly worried.
I had an actual deity backing me.
And not just any deity.
One capable of outmaneuvering beings who had once deceived entire civilizations.
There was little point in panicking unless my death, or something even worse, somehow advanced his plans to save what remained of the Aeldari.
As long as I wasn't actively sabotaging those plans, paranoia seemed unnecessary.
And if I wanted to be brutally logical about it, I fully understood that, compared to the mind of a god, I was little more than an unusually durable cockroach.
Still a cockroach.
To my surprise, Killing Mockery reacted with genuine astonishment.
And no, there definitely wasn't any doubt regarding my intelligence in that expression.
Absolutely none.
"I've decided I don't want to test the effectiveness of a Necron fleet against my truck."
I straightened immediately.
By truck, I meant the vessel I had stolen before fleeing the colossal orgy that had consumed what remained of the now largely devoured Aeldari Empire.
"We're going down."
As our ship descended toward the surface, several vessels rapidly approached.
The Necron equivalents of light cruisers.
They resembled enormous crescent moons wreathed in emerald light, their metallic hulls crowned by angular pyramidal superstructures.
Ancient.
Silent.
Waiting.
And somewhere beyond them awaited one of the most infamous collectors in galactic history.
Trazyn the Infinite.