Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

167 – Weeding out some cultists

People screaming in terror and the scent of burning flesh greeted me as I swapped places with my drone. With the other places now under control, I could handle over-watch even while playing around with Cain. 

I pulled the memories my drone kept into my mind and quickly ran through them, processing them all in a matter of half a second. Then, I was up to speed on everything and my mask of a frightened damsel in distress slipped on. 

At least my drone didn't overplay it, even showing some competence and some guts. That meant Cain was less likely to lose his shit when I started opening the cultists up from balls to brains with butchering knives. 

I tightened my grip on the knife already in my hand, feeling its grip with both my fingers and aura. It was made to chop vegetables, not for poking people to death, but it would do. I wasn’t planning on playing fair, after all, I just had to keep my cheating hidden enough that Cain wouldn’t suspect it. 

“Nice throw,” the man in question said, his eyes not leaving the burning door frame as he kept careful watch of it. The moment a new cultist’s vague outline showed up behind the flames, he fired at them and I heard the body slam into the ground a moment later. “Forgive my manners, Miss. It seems in all this it has slipped my mind to introduce myself. I am Ciaphas Cain.”

His eyes narrowed in suspicion and snapped over at me, searching for any hint of recognition or whatever else. I gave him none, giving only an uncertain smile.

“E-“ I started, then coughed into my hand as if the thickening smoke was choking me. Let’s not give him my real name, as real as ‘Echidna’ is, anyway. “Emilia.”

Cain gave me an encouraging look, likely taking my stutter for my sanity hanging on by a thread in all this. We had just killed three people, after all. A regular woman in my place would have been close to fainting … or at least, the ‘me’ from Earth would have been. I had an inkling that the humans of this time had been forged into sterner stuff by all the atrocities they’d weathered.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, shooting off another bolt and catching a sneaky cultist right in the eye as it tried to clamber over the broken windows. “Now let’s just hope we get out of here alive enough to continue our conversation. We will need help, and for that, we need to destroy whatever it is they are using to jam our communications.”

I gave a jerky nod, putting on my best ‘resolute’ expression as I poked my head out to watch the entrances. Honestly, my ears worked better for tracking them. These guys were stereotypical Slaaneshi cultists wearing outrageously idiotic clothes, and I was pretty sure they had more drugs flowing in their veins than blood. 

A dozen of them were still ambling out there, grabbing weapons from the van and such while one of them was up on top, handling a pretty sizable lasgun attached to it. For now, he was just leaning over it, but at any moment he could decide to start sending bullets into the cafe by the dozens every second.

Instead, six of them came rushing in through whichever hole they could find in the outer wall. They came through the still smouldering door, jumping over broken windows and making new holes on the few still intact windows.

As they did, I wrapped the young couple huddling in one corner and the waitress up in a ‘notice-me-not’ kinda psychic shield. That had the intended effect, and all the lunatics ignored them to charge towards us in the back.

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Cain managed to blast another two of them into the afterlife, but then three grabbed pistols and started waving them around at us. The design was unfamiliar, but I could tell those firearms used the old school gunpowder and lead bullet combo, not some futuristic energy weapon. 

He ducked back, and a pair of bullets came thundering through the door just a heartbeat later. I winced as they bounced off of metal cupboards and pans, making sure to deflect them off of the two of us in a way that wasn’t too suspicious.

A woman came rushing towards them, having jumped over the lingering flames and the flaming remains of her fellow cultists. The other five stayed back, apparently happy to let the woman wearing a full latex bodysuit and moving like a feral dog try her luck against us.

Cain shifted back, putting a cutlery table between himself and the door as he kept his laspistol aimed at the opening, ready to blast holes into the woman the moment she came through.

Sadly for him, it would have been for naught as the woman pounced, practically flying through the door frame as her drug-empowered muscles had propelled her with almost supernatural strength.

Sadly for her, my kitchen knife jammed into her stomach mid-flight, and by the time I pulled it out, she had a deep cut down to her navel. Her momentum carried her onto the table, but her guts were already spilling out, so she was in no state to actually continue through with her attack.

Cain still shot her face off with a lasbolt though, just to be sure before he sent a weird look my way. I stared at my bloody knife, my best horrified expression on my face as I put a little shake into my arms. I had just gutted a human, which most regular people tended to react badly to.

There was no time for words, or panicking though, as the other five cultists reacted to their comrade’s death by throwing themselves at the two of us. Screams, laughs and giggles accompanied them as they came.

Two ran by me quickly, pouncing on Cain who wasted no time blasting them into smouldering corpses, but while he did that the other three followed through. 

The first came at me as I shuffled back, lunging with a machete poised to run me through but I swayed out of its way. Making sure Cain was occupied, I glanced over, seeing him grappling with the last cultist. Good, he was distracted.

I kicked, my boot crushing the idiotic cultist’s knee as his lunge went wide, then I planted my knife in his kidney. Tearing it out, I pounced on the last cultist.

This one had a gun, a pistol he had been trying to use on Cain, but the man had used the cultist he was grappling with as a human shield. The indecisive cultist just kept his gun trained on him, not firing, but swung it about as the guy I’d stabbed in the back collapsed, groaning in pain.

I grabbed one of his legs and telekinetically yanked it out from under him, causing his shot to go wide as he fell on his ass while I ducked behind a cupboard in apparent terror. 

Cain was done with the man he’d been grappling with, and pounced on his laspistol, bringing it up before the guy I’d tripped over could recover. A second later, the man was sporting a fist-sized hole through the chest.

Cain heaved a deep sigh, and if not for the shaky hand he used to steady himself on a table, he would have collapsed. A brief inspection with my aura told me he had gotten pretty beat up in that brawl, with half a dozen bruises forming all around his body. Thankfully, nothing broke or ruptured, so I wouldn’t have to sneak a heal on him.

“Miss?” Cain asked, and I poked my head up over the table while trying not to snort as I caught some of his thoughts. He forgot my name already. “Are you injured?”

“No,” I said, making myself sound a little absent, as if I was shell-shocked from the fight still. 

“Good,” he said, stumbling over to the door and taking a quick peek out. For now, no other cultists were following in, but there were still a dozen of them outside. “Can you stand? I’m afraid I won’t be able to do this alone. I’ll need all the help I can get if I am to help us escape these lunatics.”

He snatched up a gun, winced as the bloody grip fell into his palm, then flipped it around to hold it by the barrel. I stood up, wary as I could make myself look, and looked between him and the gun before grabbing it gingerly at his encouraging nod. I let my aura flow over the gun, flow into it and feel every moving part inside until I was intimately familiar with how exactly this little gadget worked.

It wasn’t quite what I remembered firearms working like from earth, but even simple ‘slug-throwers’ — as they called firearms that shot solid projectiles and used chemical propellants — had advanced some in the time that had passed. Thankfully, whoever made these didn’t even have the dreadful lack of even a smidge of artistic talent every single Imperial gun manufacturer had. Meaning, it wasn’t just a damned brick with a grip on it and a hole at the end to spit bullets out of, but a proper, handgun-shaped pistol. 

“You know how to use it?” Cain asked, his gaze flickering back to me for a moment before he returned to peering out the open door. The flames were spreading and a thick smoke was clouding the air, obstructing both his view of the cultists outside and vice versa. 

“Y-yeah,” I said, removing some blood splatter that might have caused problems with them clogging up the trigger. I had five bullets left in the mag. That’d be enough if the rest didn’t come running back, which I was pretty sure they’d be doing the moment we shot up the ones outside. 

“Good,” he said, though I felt a hint of suspicion in his tone. Paranoid fucker that he was, he was wary of everything and anything that didn’t perfectly fit the mould. “We have to strike before they do. … follow after me, and try to not shoot me in the back.”

It seemed to physically pain him to have someone unknown with a gun behind him, but he still went on ahead, slipping over to the side and behind the counter with his laspistol trained on the windows. He tugged up his shirt to cover his mouth and nose, eyes squinted as they reddened from the smoke. 

I went after, slipping to the right with my own gun held steady in my hand. I also mimicked the bodily reactions to the smoke he showed, seeming unharmed by it would be an easy way to clue someone in that something was wrong with me.

The three humans huddling around were still alive. The waitress fainted sometime ago, while the young couple was doing their best impression of a statue. A faint mental nudge came from one of my mind-cores and my attention snapped over to what my aura was feeling about a block away.

One of the other vans filled with cultists was parked right outside what I felt inclined to call a tiny mall and while I had managed to make most civies run and hide away, the lunatics stumbled upon some that had been too stubborn to be herded away by such faint mental nudges. Now, I could keep up the act, but that would make me a colossal hypocrite. 

I had told Val not to play with his prey when innocents could die as a result, and now I was close to repeating what he had done myself. Oh well, not quite. I could cheat.

I teleported the numbskull who thought keeping watch over his cart of cabbages was more important than running away from a van full of drug-addled lunatics armed to the teeth with weapons away a few blocks, dumping his dumb butt down in the middle of an empty park with his cabbages raining down on his head. Then I repeated the same with the few others who the cultists were likely to stumble across.

Just as I was done with that, Cain fired off a bolt through the smoke, his bolt of condensed energy flashing through the obfuscation and snuffing out a life on the other side. Not any life either, but the life of the cultist who’d been manning their gun emplacement atop the van. The rest only had regular weapons. 

They would be easy prey.