I've noticed some good crossover fics written for this section, and decided to try by hand at it with something that's been bouncing around my head for a while. Because 40k combines with everything.
(x)
Inquisitor Raphael charged up the steps leading to the boarding ramp of his craft as the larger starship it was nested in shook from the force of a high-g maneuver. As he entered the lower transport bay of the craft, he slammed the button to seal the outer door. As it closed behind him, he pressed his hand against the wall next to him for support as ship shook from another barrage.
As soon as the worst was past, he walked forward and began to cycle through the inner airlock door. As soon as he was halfway through, another explosion rocked the ship. He was running out of time.
Raphael reached into his mind, hating himself for doing so. People! He shouted telepathically we have to go!
Allright another softer, more defined telepathic voice responded brace for launch.
The instant the voice responded, Raphael spun, reviewed his mental map of the ship, then pressed himself flush against one of the bulkheads. As he did so, he felt gravity begin to change, the acceleration pressing him against the bulkhead.
As soon as the acceleration passed, Raphael began to make his way to the bridge. He was reasonably safe now. His ship, the Astral Star, was small for a starship, around a fifth of a mile in length, and fast, even for a vessel of its size. It would have an excellent chance of making it past the ork fleet in orbit around the planet.
(x)
Raphael reached the bridge a few minutes later. He had gone the entire way without seeing anyone; the ship was heavily automated, more than anyone but the Inquisition could have gotten away with.
Sometimes he thought, looking over his retinue at their command stations, I love my job.
For a man who nominally possessed the status of a full inquisitor, Raphael was rather young, though even he couldn't say exactly how old he was. Several decades had passed since he was born, but he had made dozens of long-range Warp jumps with his mentor's retinue. Most of them had only felt like weeks to him, months at most, but given his mentor's penchant for chasing after bizarre warp anomalies, he had 'missed' years of time in realspace.
He walked over to his command throne, pressed his hand to the bio-identification plate, and sat down. Instantly, he was surrounded by a cloud of holographic images. "Report," he said, waving away the data feeds.
"Ship is undamaged," techpriest Morisato responded, "and all the stealth fields are holding. If the greenskins hit us, it'll be entirely by dumb luck" The augmented man looked down at his displays. "Which is not even remotely out of the question."
"Unfortunately," a tall, uniformed man standing at the honorarily included commodore's station said, "the same cannot be said for my ground forces. Most of their equipment, as well as their vehicles were loaded, the troops were yet to embark when we were forced to detach."
One by one, the various members of his retinue, cross-trained to operate the starship responded, indicating that all situations were more or less normal.
Once they were done, silence reigned over the bridge. They were moving at an incredible speed, but space was a big place.
The minutes passed slowly and tersely. Raphael hated stealth missions.
"Sir!" Tactical officer and Sanctioned Psyker Florentina shouted "all stealth systems offline."
"What?" Raphael said, springing to his feet.
"Sir," Galerius, a stormtrooper currently manning the sensor station, said, "I think I found it." He pressed two buttons.
Immediately, a detailed hologram appeared in front of Raphael's command throne. It depicted several Ork warships, all of which were spraying... something into space.
"Paint, sir." Galerius muttered. "If the Orks can convince themselves that'll reveal stealthed enemies, then it will."
"Evasive maneuvers." Raphael said, sitting back down in his command throne. A series of fields enveloped him as the ship began to maneuver beyond the capacity for its inertial compensators to handle.
His holographic display flickered as barrages of Ork shells detonated around his ship. It was rocked by several near misses, but so far the ship had managed to avoid taking any direct hits.
"Sir, massive war signature detected on the lead ship!"
"It's a Shokk Attack Gun!"
Raphael could literally feel the warp rift rushing toward his ship. He reached into himself, and, for the second time that day, drew out his psychic power. He poured it into the Command Throne below him, feeling it begin to resonate with the Geller Fields the crew was desperately attempting to bring online.
The scything warp portal struck the tip of the ship with a blinding flash of white light. As the crew of the Astral Spirit screwed their eyes shut against the flash, they felt something, the very fabric of the space around them, distort.
There was also a small pop, but none of them heard it.
The light passed, and space was empty.
(x)
Raphael fell through an empty, utterly lightless void. There was a sensation of falling, but he felt no air rush past him, no wind buffet him. Instinctively, he reached out and wrapped himself in a protective cloak of his psychic power.
He couldn't say how long he fell.
Several times, he felt some kind of pressure in the psychic shield that surrounded him. The first few nearly overwhelmed him, but whatever was attacking seemed to grow weaker with each attack, vanishing completely after what Raphael was fairly sure was the eleventh attack.
Shortly thereafter, a faint light appeared in the direction he was falling. Raphael screwed his eyes shut as it rapidly grew to blinding intensity. Then, with a flash that was painful ever through his eyelids, all sensation stopped.
(x)
A park near Kuoh Academy
"So, Issei," Yuuma said, "I-"
"What is it?" Issei said. "Do you want-"
"I'm sorry, but I have to kill you." Yuuma shouted, as her clothing shredded and her body transformed. Off-white wings extended from her back, and she grew slightly taller, her face slightly more mature.
"Wait, what are you? What do you mean you have to kill me? What's going on?" Issei shouted, stumbling backwards away from the transformed Yuuma. "Yumma, what is this?"
"My name is Raynare, and I doubt that I have to explain myself to you. You are, after all, a mere mortal." Raynare held out a hand, and rays of light radiated from her hand, and a spear of light grew in her hand. It expanded till it was at least half as long as a man was tall, then stopped, its glow subsiding somewhat. "Now die."
Raynare cast the spear forward, flinging it into Issei's chest. It struck, tearing through his clothing and skin like it wasn't there, and sliced through his flesh, slicing muscle and severing blood vessels.
Issei took a single step backwards and clutched his hand to his chest, then fell to his knees.
"Why?" He gasped, then coughed, flecks of blood appearing on his lips. His torso drooped. Issei propped himself up on his arm for a second, then fell, rolling onto his back as he did so. A pool of blood began expanding on the ground around him.
"Now then," Raynare said, stepping forward. "Time to-"
Everything stopped. Raynare stopped speaking. The water in the fountain stopped flowing, droplets hanging in the air. The leaves that had fallen from the trees froze in the windblown paths. Every supernatural sense Raynare possessed warned her that something was terribly, desperately, wrong.
There was a horribly ghastly stillness. Then there was a horribly ghastly movement, then stillness again.
The water in the fountain started flowing again. Where there had once been a lonely garden feature, a young man dressed in strange robes now crouched against the stone. He shook his head, then looked up.
"By the Throne." He muttered, looking around in confusion, "What... what happened?"
"A witness?" Raynare said, head snapping around toward the newcomer. "Well, we can't have that." Another spear of light appeared in her hand. "I'll just have to eliminate you, too."
(x)
Raphael's feet touched the ground. It was an utterly mundane sensation, but after his otherworldly experience, it was sweeter than the best syncocoa. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself.
"By the Throne." He muttered to himself as he surveyed the area around him. It seemed to be a perfectly normal scene that wouldn't have been out of place on any number of Civilized worlds. "What... what happened?"
Then he noticed the corpse. A moment after that, he saw the winged figure standing over it. Was it a mutant, caught in the act of murdering an Imperial Citizen? It turned toward him and said something, but his ears hadn't recovered enough to make it out. Then the creature help out a hand, and a shaft of light appeared in it.
This was no mutant. The only possibilities were Psyker of Daemon. Raphael reached out with his psychic sense, and a sensation unlike anything he had ever experienced flowed over him. Whenever this creature was, it was utterly alien.
The creature said something else, and threw the spear of light toward Raphael. The weapon sped toward him as fast as a stubber bullet, zooming toward the young Inquisitor's heart.
A foot before it impacted, it struck something, and shattered into shards that evaporated into light.
(x)
"What the..." Raynare said, holding her hand out and summoning another spear of light.
(x)
As the bolt connected with the psychic barrier he had erected, Raphael grunted. He was weakened by whatever had happened to him, but the mental wall held.
He had sensed no release of sorcerous energy with the attack. There was only one remaining possibility.
Daemon.
For more than ninety nine point nine-nine-nine percent of humanity, that conclusion would have been utterly terrifying.
For Raphael, it was fine.
He was an Inquisitor of the God Emperor of Mankind, and eliminating such monstrosities was his sacred duty. Raphael touched the decorated "I" pendant hanging from his neck, then reached inside himself and summoned his psionic power.
Emperor, I hate this part. Something in him whispered, but he suppressed the voice. He needed this power, and he needed it now.
As his mind touched the warp, the fallen angel readied another attack. As the second spear of light appeared in her hand, Raphael lashed out with Witchfire.
It was one of the most basic psionic attacks, one learned by nearly every Sanctioned Psyker of the Imperium. It channeled Warp energy into the physical realm in the form of fire, one of the most primordial shapes of purity and power. It was a simple, elegant, and effective attack.
The bolt of energy flew toward Raynare, but she took off into the air, letting the rush of eldritch fire shoot harmlessly underneath her. She soared over the fountain, her wings hardly moving as she did so.
"What are you, mortal?" She shouted, clasping her hands together. "You shall not stand before me!"
As she spoke, light began to gather in her hands and form into another spear, much longer this time. Raphael launched a bolt of Witchfire at her, then began to prepare a shield for himself.
The bolt of light materialize mere instants before Raphael was ready with his defense. Raynare cast the bolt, and as it sped through the air, a barrier formed, bisecting the bolt into unequal pieces, deflecting the majority of it but allowing the tip of the spear to strike the Inquisitor.
Raphael was knocked backwards by the sudden violence of the strike, and he went tumbling across the cobblestone of the park.
The armored skinsuit he wore saved his life, managing to absorb most of the energy of the attack. However, the remainder knocked Raphael off balance and tore a hole in his skin.
As too-warm blood began to run down his chest, Raphael drew upon his power and sent it flooding through his body. He cringed as all of his sense, including touch, flared to superhuman levels, the wound on his chest going from a dull burn to a flaring, explosive pain.
However, the psychic power boost also granted him strength and speed, and it allowed Raphael to roll out of the way fractions of an instant before Raynare launched a second bolt of energy toward him.
Raphael was launched into the air by the inhuman force of his roll, and twisted in midair to land on his feet, droplets of blood flying in an arc away from him, driven by the force of his movement.
Raynare opened her mouth as if to say something, but Raphael gave her no respite. He drew deeper on his power, launched a barrage of witchfire at Raynare.
The Daemonic creature dodged with inhuman speed and grace, but was driven backwards by the attack. As the bolts of sorcerous energy closed in on her, she took off into the air, once again soaring over the waves of fire.
"I'm beginning to tire of you, mortal!" She shouted, gesturing as a forest of spears appeared in the air around her.
"That's perfect!" Raphael shouted back, the wound in his chest flaring in pain. "Because I'm going to run you over!"
As the enemy readied his attack, Raphael stitched tactics .He summoned lighting. Warp energy built up in his body until it reached an almost insane level, then he gestured, just as Raynare launched her barrage of light-spears.
The pair of attacks collided in mid-air, living lighting cracking around and through shafts of light. For a moment, absolute chaos reigned.
Then the attacks passed. A hail of shards of light rained down on Raphael. He screwed his eyes shut, lowered his head, and raised his hands to protect his face, trusting his psionic sense to warn him of danger. The shards of energy fell cutting his coat and skin in several places.
The remaining electricity from Raphael's attack crawled through the air, seeking the only target available. Raynare moved to evade the attack, but the bolts of Living Lightning followed her and, as if possessing some inhuman intelligence, changed their rates of progression to strike as one. Eldritch energy masquerading as electricity flowed through the body of the monster, scorching and burning it.
Raphael took a deep breath, gritted his teeth, and looked up. His enemy was drifting listlessly in the air, slowly dropping toward the ground. Gathering his psychic power for one final attack, Raphael charged forward, his movements still empowered by his power. As he charged, he recited a litany to the Emperor, a ruddy light radiating from his fists as he activated his Daemonhammer ability.
Warp energy, sanctified by his devotion and will, coursed through Raphael's fists as he charged and leapt into the air. Wind whipped around the tattered remnants of his cloak as he flew in an arc toward the enemy.
Raphael reached his enemy and grabbed his enemy. Using Raynare's body as leverage, he wrenched himself upward, pushing her downward and into a heavily modified wrestler's hold. Everywhere his fists touched the body of his daemonic foe, they sizzled, smoke rising from the point of contact.
Ignoring the unpleasant heat rising in his hands, Raphael twisted and writhed in the air as he attempted to subdue the Daemon. It had barely resisted at first, but the moment his enhanced fists made contact with its skin, the creature began to fight like, well, like a daemon.
Wrenching her arm back, Raphael made to put the creature in a headlock. Just as he began to wrap his arm around his enemy's neck, something began to happen. A point of light appeared next to the body of the fallen human boy, which quickly expanded into an ornate, rotating circle.
Raynare's eyes widened at the sight, and she renewed her struggle against Raphael. She spun in the air, then flipped over. Raphael, disoriented by the sudden shifts, nearly lost his grasp on his enemy. She began to write under his grasp and, in a single moment that seemed to stretch into infinity, slipped free of his grasp.
Raphael began to fall. As he hung in the air beneath the still slightly-shouldering daemon, she looked down at him.
"What are you?" She whispered, then took off into the sky.
As Raphael crashed into the ground, figures of light began to emerge from the still-spinning magic circle. As they stepped out of it, they resolved into a pair of tall girls in elaborate uniforms, one with long, bright red hair and the other with longer black hair.
"Now," The red-headed one said. "What do we do with these?"
Raphael stumbled to his feet and extended his psychic senses toward the newcomers. Given their method of arrival, they clearly weren't baseline human, but it didn't seem like anyone he was meeting today was.
The two entities standing before him felt strangely similar to the creature he had just fought, but at the same time completely different. Under normal circumstances, such blatant use of psychic power without an Imperial sanction would have been grounds for immediate execution. Such was the only prudent course of action; dabbling in the mystic arts without the proper precaution could doom an entire planet.
However, these were not normal circumstances. Raphael was on an unknown world, one that, judging by the caliber of monster allowed to roam the streets, had either been greatly separated from the Imperium or fallen away from His light. Raphael couldn't be sure that his blanket sanction as an Inquisitor would be honored by the local justice system, and the inevitable Imperial vengeance if it wasn't wouldn't do him any good if he was dead.
More pertinently, he was wounded, possibly badly. Using his psychic powers to amplify his physical abilities had a significant cost. It pushed him beyond the normal limits of the human body, which took its toll on him. Furthermore, he had suffered an injury in battle against the daemon, and he didn't yet know the extent of its severity. In his present state, a battle against two unsanctioned Psykers could prove to be too much for him.
Reluctantly, he stayed his hand. He drew himself up straight, trying to ignore the trickle of blood dripping down his front.
"Who are you?" He demanded, "What are you doing here?" He grasped his Inquisitorial pendant and thrust it forward. "This is Inquisition business."
The redhead raised an eyebrow. "Inquisition? Are you with the church... never mind. There's no time. Can't you see that boy is dying?"
"There's no hope for him." Raphael said. He had no idea, but judging by the amount of blood the child had lost, it seemed plausible.
"There are things you cannot know, mortal." The black-haired girl said.
The redhead stepped forward and pushed Raphael aside. He was in no state to resist. She walked toward the fallen boy and knelt down next to him, the pool of blood surrounding his body rippling slightly as her knees disturbed its surface.
"What are you doing?" Raphael said. "Stay back, Psyker." She could be trying to claim his soul for the Dark Gods, or raise his body as a zombie.
"Like Keno said, there are things you cannot know." The redhead said, not looking away from the body she was tending. "Now be gone from here."
The lighting shifted, and another glowing circle appeared surrounding the body of the fallen boy. She gestured, and something glowing red appeared in her hand.
Raphael took a step backwards, feeling an immense wave of sorcerous energy wash over him. The pure power being unleashed her was something that, even in his prime, he would want to handle gently.
So he did the sensible thing. Inquisitor Raphael of the Imperium of Man took three steps backward, then ran away.
(x)
Fifteen minutes later, Raphael was wondering is he shouldn't have taken his chances with the unknown... whatever they were. He was wandering, unknown, on the streets of an unknown city, on an unknown planet.
None of the passers-by seemed to recognize the authority of the Inquisition, or even seem to know what it was. He had approached what seemed to be a local officer of the law, but the man didn't seem to recognize his authority, and seemed to think he was crazy.
Raphael's wound hurt like Hel, but it didn't quite feel lethal, though he didn't have much in the way of experience with such things. In his fifteen years of service to the inquisition, he hand never suffered a truly life-threatening injury. He had been shot, stabbed, lasered, and blown up, but he had usually had his armored skinsuit on, and the high-tech material had borne the brunt of those wounds.
As Raphael wandered the streets of the city, he thought back to when he joined the Inquisition. He had been a mere boy of eight, plucked out of his agricultural village by a passing inquisitor to use as a good-luck token, a ward against dark powers. He had resented that, at first, but as he came to understand the fate of most human Psykers, he gained a more philosophical outlook on the matter.
Not that a day went by he didn't wish whatever dark god had chosen to grant him the gift of psychic power had chosen to pass him by.
Raphael reached down to his laspistol. He had decided not to use it in his fight with the daemon, but it could-
"Raphael!" A familiar voice shouted in his mind. Sanctioned Psyker Florentina.
Turning toward the source of the psychic voice, Raphael spotted Florentina, still in her combat fatigues, running down the abandoned street toward him. Her delicate features were overshadowed by concern.
"Sir." She said, using her normal, beautifully musical voice. "Where were you? And what the Warp happened to you?"
"Daemon." Raphael said with a grimace.
"I've found Galerius and Morisato." Florentina said. "Morisato has retreated to our temporary accommodations, and Galerius is out scouting."
Raphael raised an eyebrow. "Temporary accommodations?"
"Morisato hacked into the local datanet and appropriated some funds from the local government. I used them to purchase a suite at a local hotel."
As the pair began to walk back toward the hotel, Florentina turned toward Raphael.
"I fear there is something desperately wrong in his city." She said, without preamble.
"You mean other than the daemons wandering the streets?"
"That's part of it." Florentina, "but this whole city stinks of sorcery. What do we do, sir?"
"First, I get this wound cleaned up." Raphael said, "Then we wait. And plan."
(x)
"My Emperor, sir, what did you do?" Galerius said, watching critically as Raphael removed the top of his skinsuit and placed it on the floor, bloody side up. "It looks like you took a shotgun blast to the chest."
The stormtrooper, skilled in field medica, was about as close to a trustworthy doctor as Raphael was likely to find. Florentina was in the other room, meditating, searching for a plausible source of the daemonic infestation in the city, and the Morisato was off doing whatever it was that techpriests did.
"Nothing so elaborate, trooper." Raphael responded. "Just a spear."
"Just a... sir, the only reason you haven't fainted from blood loss is that some of this is cauterized."
"Well, I've checked the wound for taint, and it's clean." Raphael said.
"Fine. Now lie down, sir. This is going to hurt. A lot."
(x)
Raphael grimaced as Galerius applied the last of the nano sutures. It had, in fact, hurt a lot.
"So now that that's over with." Raphael said, pushing himself to a sitting position. "I need to know what Florentina has discovered about the problem in his city.
"It's fine." Galerius said. "It get her."
The stormtrooper left the room, returning a moment later with Florentina, who looked rather haggard, as if she had been expending large quantities of psychic energy.
"Well," she said. "I've found the center of the daemonic infestation in this city."
"Good." Where is it? We need to rally the local forces and move to purge it."
"First of all, I've probed the minds, and data nets, of the local officials." Florentina said, sitting down on the bed next to Raphael. "I don't think they're likely to cooperate. Fortunately, I have a back-up plan."
She reached into her pocket and produced a brochure labeled 'Kuoh Academy', which depicted a series of stately buildings on a hillside.
"See, the source of the taint appears to be this location. I took the liberty of securing the brochure."
Raphael didn't comment on that. Sometimes the scope of Florentina's powers scared him.
"In any case, if we can't destroy whatever cult is lurking here, then we need to infiltrate it so we can destroy it from the inside, or so I figure. There's only one problem."
"And what is that?"
"It's the equivalent of a secondary schola."
Raphael groaned. "You're not serious."
"So in order to infiltrate it..."
(x)
I really need to execute Florentina.
Raphael stood up in front of class 1-C and bowed.
"Hello." He said, in perfect Japanese. "My name is Raphael Valance. I am a transfer student from America. It is a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to studying with you all."