"Seriously? I share my best practices for using our 'cheats' and you tag me as a Tzeentch daemon?"
After hearing Arthur's explanation, Romulus was a little furious. So that's how his best bro saw him.
One stabs me on sight. Another is ready to stab me any minute.
So this is how you repay kindness.
"Hypothetically. I said hypothetically. You're not actually daemons, and I didn't actually cut you, right?"
Arthur rushed to clarify.
Chaos corruption is hard to guard against. Without verification there was no way he'd trust easily.
And he wasn't unhinged. Even with suspicions, he chose to test, not lunge in with a blade to see whether the blood was blue or red. That was already restraint.
As for now, honestly, he still wanted an Untouchable to validate things before he could relax.
Even if this wasn't Chaos, anything tied to the Warp deserved caution.
"So, Karna, you—"
Ramses awkwardly shifted the topic.
Karna did not even bother to lift his head. "I didn't research anything. I flipped on the Black Rage and bulldozed through."
So that's why Romulus got stabbed.
"I was busy shutting down emotionally," Karna added.
Karna's logic was simple. Three smart heads were already thinking. No need for him to burn neurons. He'd just listen.
So he's not someone to rely on here either.
"Alright then."
Ramses shrugged.
"I'll lay it out. Let me analyze how our power works and how we source the raw inputs. This is my personal understanding."
He cleared a patch of table. With a light motion of his hand, three materials of different sizes appeared on the surface.
The largest looked like ceramic with a metallic sheen. The middle piece looked like very high purity silver, glinting with a deep, dim lustre under the lights.
The last was the smallest and thin as a cicada's wing, yet the brightest, gleaming like gold.
"Auramite."
Arthur's eyes went to the shining metal.
"Good thing I painted Custodes armor before. Otherwise with the Warp's insane signal density, I could scrub for a lifetime and never sift this out."
Ignoring Arthur's suspicious look, Ramses continued:
"One of our abilities lets us burn 'points' to directly instantiate matter. I'll call it soul-to-matter conversion. Those points are basically quantified psychic or mental energy. As for consumption—"
He gestured to the three samples. All three were cast with the same amount of mental energy.
"The more complex the atomic structure and the higher the Warp component, the higher the cost. The gap is obvious to the naked eye."
"Based on my feel, the most economical outcomes right now are power armor, small to mid-size vehicles, and weapons or manufacturing lines. Don't dream of pulling a Gloriana-class battleship. At our current ceiling we cannot afford that quality."
"And STCs. They're compact," Romulus added.
"Right. Almost forgot."
STC. Standard Template Construct. A high-tech computer from humanity's Dark Age of Technology that contains blueprints for basically everything colonists might need. It lets them bootstrap a civilization with primitive materials and zero prior knowledge.
In plain terms, a crafting station with the recipe book built in.
"All four of us should be able to do this conversion. The 'adaptive panel' items correlate with our cognition. It only shows things we understand concretely and that have actually existed in this universe."
"So our starting avatars matching our game minis is because of that?"
Arthur nodded, then frowned.
"But why aren't we Primarchs, Custodes, or the Emperor himself?"
They knew Warhammer inside out. For fans who once head-canon'd baseline Astartes into giants so hard even high-dimension GW had to adjust the lore, there was nothing in the human sphere bigger than the Emperor.
If you're going to transform, wouldn't you pick the Emperor?
"You really want to sit on a toilet?"
"No need for that."
"Do you actually know the anatomical schema of the Emperor or the Primarchs?"
"No."
"That's the reason. We don't have concrete knowledge of their body construction. It's a mystery even to us."
"And this seems to be classified information. I can't find it even combing the Warp. Also, souls are expensive, and we have to author or edit them ourselves."
Ramses shared his curated panel with the team.
"Build cognition. Gather data. Record it. Then we can instantiate those items from mental energy and even do a degree of revision. For example, swap all the Terminator plate materials to Auramite or something else."
"How did you unlock so many entries?" Romulus asked, scratching his head at the suddenly swollen catalog. "Does painting minis give you this much edge?"
"My path was… messy."
Ramses looked a bit embarrassed.
"At first I basically gave up on everything else and focused on this power. To chase better loadouts, I went dredging the Warp for information. I didn't care whether it was a Tzeentch plot. Things like Auramite are what I netted."
"The Warp is an ocean of souls. Anything with a Warp projection merges back after death or gets devoured by horrors. So the Warp is a gigantic datastore, recording all information of soul-bearing life."
"But there's no search engine. Dredging is pure needle-in-a-haystack. I fast-filtered what I could use based on minis I'd painted. The useless and chaotic garbage far outweighs the usable bits. As for re-editing, you can experiment yourselves. I couldn't find authentic 30k Thousand Sons livery. I had to build this one myself."
"You're even more unhinged than me."
Romulus was speechless. He had also suspected a Chaos trap at first, but once he realized he was on a ship about to fall, caution gave way to action. After careful tests convinced him the power wasn't of Chaos, he used it freely.
Unlike Ramses, who just…
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