A/N: Yeah, not dead yet.

Baria PDF Headquarters

Situation Room

Radio chatter blended into a single gurgle, filtering in from massive cogitators taking up floor to ceiling on the right. Operating the switchboards and entering data into the central command interface required twenty staff officers at all time in this room, just operating the equipment on this one wall.

To the left the floor rose and rows after rows of analysts and translators worked on cogitators and typewriters, entering in situation reports to be displayed on the central piece of the room; a pit of black sand, shivering and twisting in its three dimensional representation of operational theaters.

"How long was I gone?"

All eyes fell on Olenk's piston-powered arm. On the magnetic display, at the center of the room, she saw a map of the Capital's sub-urban area, close to the warehouses district. The metallic filings making up a short rounded building were tinted red, which a hand-drawn legend, taped to the display's frame, claimed marked AdMech facilities.

Someone, far beneath Olenk in rank, tapped something on the display and the shimmering metallic sand collapsed.

To the left, past the desk-filled slope to the CO's office, a sharply dressed lieutenant walked out "A long time." Said the man, taking in Olenk's singlet, caked with blood and sweat, and disheveled hairs "I'm afraid the governor no longer trusts you to make decisions on his behalf."

Looking around, Olenk saw no new faces, no royal guard insignias, except on the lieutenant's shoulder. "So he sent you to relieve me of my command?" His reply fell on deaf ears, as Olenk considered this.

None of the staff officers met her gaze, so she turned back to the lieutenant, "You work for me now."

Clean shaved, hairs perfectly split down the side, the lieutenant's laugh was every bit the pompous cackle she expected. The lieutenant feigned to turn away, leaving the Major out of his sight just a moment before pulling out his sidearm in a dramatic gesture. The moment it left its holster, however, the royal guard felt it being pulled from behind and was assaulted by the smell of copper and ammonia rising from Olenk's dirty uniform. Her metal arm ripped skin from his chin as wrapped it around his neck.

The gun was wrenched from his hand and forced against his spine.

"O'ran isn't in charge anymore; I am. Ask Landry, ask anyone." Her breath burned the young officer's ear, sweat drenching his perfect hair and motor oil smearing his face. She felt him quiver in her grip and knew she'd made her point.

Releasing him, she turned to one of the room's security staff, who had remained stoic through the ordeal, and barked "Someone show the gentleman to his workspace, make sure he doesn't call anyone."

Warehouse District

"Shut up, Throne on Terra, just shut up one minute, I'll deal with you after this."

My voice resonates and finds no response. The warehouse is empty and dark. It's a warehouse and this is the slow season, so this quiet isn't suspicious in the least. This floor is filled to the brim with unmarked containers, which I am in the process of inspecting one by one.

Black market is both flourishing and stagnant on Baria. A lot of merchandise transits here, a lot of it gets hidden in unmarked warehouses and the authorities hardly ever do anything about it, so that means smugglers everywhere, but intense poverty and Justice Landry's incorruptible nature mean nobody's buying. Yeah, you can get a gun, for the right money, but you're not going to bribe your way out of trouble if you use it, and hired killers are a rarity.

What I'm saying here is; I can't just buy a gun and stealing from the PDF is too risky right now.

However, if punching people was a sound military tactic, ranged weapons would not be a staple of every species' armed forces…

Isn't that an odd thing? If the Imperial Guardsman's pocket book of nonsense is at least broadly accurate, two arms and two legs are the norm; Eldar, Tau, Ork… Well, that's about it. Four races? Oh, there's the Kroots as well, mercenaries the Imperium refuses to us, clearly states their use is illegal and won't hire a mercenary outfit unless it has a few Kroots off the book.

Much of what's out there, cattle and wildlife alike, traces its lineage back to earth.

This is a lot of information to process, I barely notice an assortment of sport bicycles in this next container, the voices are so loud.

These Magos Biologis were not typical, they were brought here for me; couldn't fix something as basic as a kettle, but in regard to anything squishy, machines made from meat and sinews, they had no equals but each other.

They were too proud to find a solution, too focused on forcing their narrow perspective on others and unwilling to instead broaden their scope of vision.

Now, inside my head, their bickering is quelled, to a degree, and conclusions are reached through this merging. Though it is far from seamless; one mind isn't capable of processing this many conflicting personalities at once.

Focus, discipline. I keep the voices on topic as I break the bolt on another container filled with junk.

On earth, intelligence only ever surfaced once, most likely brought about by a perfect storm of events, a one in a billion shot. On the numbers side, it isn't this surprising that only about four races match our criterias for intelligence what does bother me is how human-like they all are in their body structure. Why always hands? Why one head? Why one spine?

I'm tiny, all things considered. Physically minuscule in the cosmic scale, bound to a free-falling amalgamation of rocks, but worse still, I'm insignificant on the intellectual level, even now.

It's like my brain is a muscle I've hardly ever used before, but suddenly got an outrageous dose of steroids. Questions I should have asked years ago just keep flooding me and, while I have not felt hunger for days now, this need for knowledge feels worse than outright starvation.

I need to know about myself, I need to know about Olenk, but also about the world, about Terra and the Galaxy, about the Tau and Eldars and any other race the Imperium won't tell us about. After I uproot the infestation that's spreading on Baria, my homeworld and I are done.

One last debt to repay before I leave humanity to eat itself from inside, collective madness shattering it from the inside like cancer once threatened to do with me.

Sixty containers into my inspection, I finally come across something other than narcotics and xeno artifacts. Stubbers; old design, fresh off the factory lines. Long rifles, carbines, concealed machine guns, pistols. All boxed and neatly tagged as farming equipment, with the ammunition labeled as fertilizer.

No way I can carry one of the belt feds around without arousing suspicions; a paratrooper carbine and six handguns of various sizes and shapes will do the trick. I lay them and all the ammunition I can fit on a length of bubble wrap and roll it tight. Walking back with my poorly concealed arsenal tucked underarm like a baguette, I allow my mind to drop this misanthropic train of thought, on to the next order of business; transportation.

Aircrafts are a no-go. Paperwork, control towers, flight paths and transponders at all time. I'd be more mobile on foot, even with all the checkpoints and watchtowers being set up around town.

So, I need a ground vehicle with enough room to fit a cogitator, listening equipment and weaponry. This vox bead I stole is short range only, I'll need something bigger to get the whole picture, something very illegal.

One issue with this line of thought is that it doesn't tap into the skills of my previous victims, it's all me, a by-product of my time in the PDF. They know who I am, then they know what I'm thinking. Every delivery truck, utility vehicle and trailer will be searched, they probably already searched hundreds of them.

But this will come later, when I have given this more thought. First step is to arm myself, second step is to shut up this wasp nest in the back of my skull. Root out the large concentration of human-like rats that have moved in the nearby habitation block. It tugs at my mind, like leaving the stove on, only getting stronger the more I ignore it.

The moment I'm out of the warehouse, I jog up to the electrified perimeter fence and hop over it like I used to skip cracks in the sidewalk.

Across the street is a convenience store with four apartments piled up above it. I scale the building as quietly as I can and avoid overshooting, instead softly pulling myself onto the poorly covered, slightly tilted rooftop. The tiles are so rotten, they feel like wet cardboard under my heels, squishing with every step until I finally climb off the roof and onto the opposite building's.

The whispers get louder, but do not make any more sense. Language. Language is how humans share information, lets us activate certain regions of one another's brains. These things don't need language, they go straight to the brain, straight to the information.

I hop from one building to the next, cross streets and backtrack when the parasite thoughts grow weaker, like I'm a kid playing Delphan Gruss in the world's biggest pool.

Eventually, I find my prey. Four of them, hiding in… An Imperial chapel, a small one, white walls, eagle above the door, four rows of seats. Very basic. The doors are as weak as you would expect…

Then nothing else is anything like what I expected. This room is full, people, chanting in spite of my interruption, fill every available seat. They are all naked. On the stage is an altar, on that altar is a woman in her early thirties, lying back as some twisted parody of a human being holds her legs apart, frozen in place by my interruption. The roll of bubble wrap falls from my grasp and everyone in the room lets out a haunting screech. They scramble over one another, privates flopping freely in the stampede, but they're not running, they are throwing themselves in my path, at me in some cases, but I just swat those aside.

The four grotesque beasts I came here to cleanse are on the stage, directing the confused masses with their chants.

I will rip everyone here apart if…

They're victims, I can't… No, no weakness, no mercy for those who aid our foes.

Kill. The weak feed the strong, it's the way life has always been, long before there were humans to say otherwise, it's the way life is meant to…

Pain. Sudden and world shattering, it takes me to my knees, makes me howl.

Who? The cult is standing now, watching, but nobody is doing this.

Takes me a moment to realize I'm doing it to myself…

No. I am doing it to It. The body might be new, might have a will of its own, but my mind remains my own. I will not be manipulated.

By now, my insides are nothing but bundles of nerve fibers, buzzing with electrical impulses, pain and rage. The cultists are piling on me, grabbing and tugging at whatever they can, punching and biting anything they can reach…

I lose the skin, thin out the muscles so fast the steam scalds anyone in direct contact with me. Then, I quadruple the pressure on my pain receptors, overloading my entire nervous system with enough electrical power to jump-start a tank. This hurts four times as much as the maximum amount of pain a human being is built to process. I can't even scream, just curl up so tight my eyes pop in their sockets and my spine snaps in eight places.

I don't see it happen, but all that power just leaks into whatever I'm touching, overloading their senses and jumping to the nearest person, knocking them out as well and moving on until it has nowhere to go but down into the floor.

I stumble to my feet, blind, deaf and numb, but healthy enough to heal and quickly erase vestiges of the agony I just put myself through.

I recover my sense in time to see my prey has called for backups; purely animalistic beings, skittering across the ceiling and walls, drooling and hissing as they go. Three of them, coming right for me.

The one on the ceiling pounces, stucco falling off after it. I jump and meet it halfway. We cancel each other's momentum and fall amongst the benches with it on top, biting flesh off my throat and clawing at my face with its four arms. I go to kick it, but something gets a hold of my leg and chops it clean off while the same thing happens to my left arm. The three beasts set to tearing me apart like I'm a limo left unchecked in the slums. They will have me down to a puddle on the floor within minutes at this rate.

Chitin. It melts into my clothes, fuses with skin and muscles underneath and slides into place over fresh limbs, growing thicker and heavier with every blow. The template my body follows is not genetic, it's utilitarian, following the design of an imperial guardsman's flak armor, only more organic, angular.

Underneath it, I just pump out muscle mass and arteries to feed the overclocked tissues. The heat generated by this process is considerable and steam hisses from gills along the back and face.

I reach out and bat the creature sitting on my chest. It shatters two benches and slides towards the altar before recovering with a flip and a roar. It crushes unconscious cultists with every step.

Compassion is a waste of energy.

I rise, a third the height and twice the width as before. The creatures freezes, backing off as the four on stage, hunched over and grotesque, make their way to assist their brethrens, circling me like wolves, smashing pews and statues in their way without ever taking their eyes off me.

Seven on one. I square up, like they showed us in basic, like a boxer in a ring, and they just keep circling, taking in my new plates; the thick breast plate, angled shoulders, sliding scales at the joints and especially the lack of eyes. Eyes are inefficient, meant for long term use, I just cover my armor with short lived photoreceptors, turning my entire body into an eye of sort. It's expensive to maintain, but I'm well fed, I can take the drain.

Finding no glaring weakness, all seven creatures charge, silent except for the smashing of wood and bones as they batter obstacles out of their path. One latches on my back, another goes for the head, but I catch it by the throat, ignoring the savage biting and slashing from the freak on my back, and let them both claw at my new plates.

Another flanks me from the right as my arm is still extended, slashing at the thinner armour under the shoulder, so I rip out its brother's throat and in the same motion, smack it into a column… Inertia has us slowly moving towards the doors, towards the city.

Dust fills the room, like mist, falling from the ancient ceiling and shattered pillar. It hangs in the air, however, leaving ghost images of our fight, trails through the air, like wiping fresh snow from a window.

I dig my heels and throw off my meat backpack, only for it to be replaced instantly by one twice as grotesque. It looks human from the head to shoulder and has a sloshy hump on its back, shouting incomprehensibly in my ear as I struggle to get it off. Reversing the joints on my shoulders, I blast it with a few strikes that shatter ribs and collapse its eye socket. It barely notices.

Claws and teeth come at me from up ahead, demanding my attention. I catch a charging xeno with another backhand strike that has it take one step back and retaliate in kind. They're either getting stronger, or I'm getting weaker.

My new passenger, meanwhile, goes for the back of my left knee, knocking through the chitin to slice tendons and muscles. I fall to a knee, just the right height for the other to slash at my throat with all its appendages.

I slap chitin and claws away at what seems to be a normal pace, but the blows and parries cause the ground to shiver. Dust sticks to me as I strike, behaving like it's heavier than it should be...

Three down. Four to go, two of whom have these four arms and pincers. Raising my knee slightly, I block a slash from the one straight ahead, then duck under a strike from the left and, on my way up, uppercut the first attacker before knocking back the second with a spinning kick.

Two left. A humanoid and an animal. To my right and rear.

Of course, the one with all the teeth and claws is the most brazen, predictable too. It crawls along the floor, sluggish, although its body seems to be fighting air resistance, like it's underwater. I step aside and it barks, as though startled, when I stamp down on its skull with my right hand. Plucking out appendages with the left.

Momentum drags us a few steps to the side and I keep its face pressed down, grating it against granite and up a pillar. It loses all its limbs before we're done moving.

Can't come up with anything clever, so I just rip its head off and toss it over my shoulder.

The last one tries to flee, but I'm on it in two steps. It trips on the edge of the stage, "I am your own personal extinction event." With that, I crush its skull under my heel.