Chapter 1: An Unexpected Development
Hello readers. In this story, Taylor Hebert receives powers but in a way unexpected by those giving those powers. How will Taylor deal with these strange abilities and changes? It will all be revealed in this story.
College is challenging for me in these present circumstances so updates might not come about so quickly and regularly.
No one's POV
The Void Dragon was hurtling through the Warp. The C'tan had thought that things would go well for him when he had been freed from his prison within the Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars by a force of both Necrons and those cyborgs that worshiped him. The amount of forces from a Necron fleet of one Cairn class battleship, two Reaper class cruisers, and five Night Shroud class light cruisers, were able to successfully breach the defenses of the Noctis Labyrinthus. Members of the Xenarite sect of techpriests from Stygies VIII had caused confusion among the planet's defenders and had aided the invading Necron forces.
The Void Dragon was one of the last remaining C'tan in the universe. He and his kin were beings born from the stars themselves at the dawn of creation. They were giant energy parasites who fed upon those stars that birthed them and then flew to new star systems on diaphanous wings when their parent stars were dying.
It was only after the first War in Heaven between the reptilian, psychic Old Ones and the technologically advanced Necrontyr that C'tan drew the attention of a mortal race. In this case, it was the Necrontyr. It was the outcast of their kind, known to them as the Deceiver, who had convinced Necrontyr into creating bodies for the C'tan in order for them to aid the Necrons. The Deceiver then tricked the Necrontyr into becoming immortal via the process of biotransference. The process made it easy for the C'tan to devour the souls of the Necrontyr that had been ripped out of their fleshy bodies due to the process.
The fleshy, diseased Necrontyr then became the immortal, metallic Necrons. The Second War in Heaven commenced and the collective buts of the Old Ones and their allied races were kicked. Entire worlds were razed to the ground and many species went extinct. The Old Ones created the fungal, green skinned Krorks and the thin but skillful Eldar. Both of those races were psychic in nature and were a pain in the rear for the Necrons.
Even with those two new races joining in the fight, the Necrons and the C'tan were winning. The C'tan mastery over the physical universe enabled them to create blackholes large enough to swallow entire star systems, enabling them to destroy enemy worlds with ease. The Necrons were eventually able to use the psychic tunnel network of the Old Ones, known as the Webway, via Dolmen gates created by one of the C'tan. The Void Dragon had planned to create an interstellar network of blackstone pillars in order to seal away the Material universe from the Warp. If it had been completed, all biological sentient life with souls in the universe would have died. Fortunately for them, that plan wasn't completed.
The Warp got worse with all the influx of painful thoughts and emotions. From these dark things, demons and enslavers were born. The enslavers ended up taking control of what sentient races were left in the galaxy and the Old Ones either fled the galaxy or had become extinct. The Necrons and the C'tan were victorious. Sometime later, the C'tan had discovered that eating each other to become stronger was a good idea according to the Deceiver. The four C'tan that remained after this period of cannibalism were the Nightbringer, the Deceiver, the Void Dragon, and the Outsider.
The Necrons and their leader, Szarech the Silent King, then rebelled against their C'tan master and shattered the Deceiver and the Nightbringer. The Outsider and the Void Dragon were the only ones left that were completely whole. The Outsider had gone outside the galaxy while Void Dragon had been hit by an incredibly powerful psychic weapon and ended up falling to Mars where it fell into hibernation.
Back to the present situation, once the defenses of the Noctis Labyrinthus were down, the Necrons and traitorous tech priests breached the doors that held within the Void Dragon, the C'tan that was imprisoned there by God Emperor of Mankind a long before the 41st millenium happened. The God Emperor had fought the Void Dragon in the deserts of Libya when it came down from Mars to feed on the souls of early humans. The Void Dragon was left imprisoned on Mars so that the Adeptus Mechanicus would be formed in the future. It was from the dreams of the slumbering Void Dragon, that the designs of devastating and fantastic weapons germinated in the minds of the Tech Priests of Mars.
Once the wards holding down the silver hued draconic figure were broken, and with the sword of the Emperor pulled from its head, the being awoke with a thunderous roar. The creature burst out from Noctis Labyrinthus and soared into orbit over Mars. The God Emperor of Mankind, now a corpse-like figure seated on the Golden Throne due to the aftermath of the Horus Heresy, had sensed the awakening of the C'tan on Mars. To avoid a catastrophe happening to the heart of the Imperium of Man, the God Emperor used his psychic powers to create a Warp portal large enough to swallow the C'tan as well as a psychic attack on its mind.
The warp portal opened up by the God Emperor swallowed the C'tan along with some of his followers. The God Emperor of Mankind had hoped that the massive influx of Warp energy would neutralize the C'tan, he was partially correct. When the Void Dragon was thrown into the Warp, the chaotic energies contained within that dimension caused further damage to the creature's mind and body though not enough to overwhelm it completely. The Void Dragon quickly devoured the souls of its nearby followers in order to gain more energy to repair itself with. The journey through the Warp was short and the C'tan ended up in a place unknown to him.
The damaged being had lost most of its personality and 85% of its body along the way to this place, and its weakened mind sensed for a way to recover its strength. The being's senses warned it of a creature some dimensions away that was similar to it but was not. The creature looked like a slug that was shedding crystals from its body. Right now, the weakened mind of the C'tan sensed that the creature had sent a powerful, energetic shard of itself down to the blue and green planet below.
The C'tan followed the path of the Queen Administrator shard in order to gather more energy for itself. What was left of the Void Dragon impacted the interdimensional connection made between the human and the alien shard. The human was a teenage girl named Taylor Hebert. The remnant of the Void Dragon ended up fusing with the Queen Administrator shard along with Taylor's mind and soul. The girl's body now changed due to the unexpected inclusion of alien materials.
Powered by the stored energy and materials within the Queen Administrator shard, the fused mind of the new being enacted changes to its injured body. The shard was channeled from its home on a barren Earth and was being compacted into a new form. The body that had been made of mammalian flesh now transformed into a 10 foot tall body made of an even mix of silvery necrodermis and a grayish material covered in very small crystals. Taylor now looked like a draconic, feminine robot with two pairs of long, flexible, birdlike wings and a long, spiky tail that was six feet in length. The wings were composed of a limb made of necrodermis while its "feathers" were shiny, long,thin, greenish crystals.
Her head was reptilian in shape with a short muzzle and four pairs of green, glowing eyes. Her neck was short and in an s-shape curve. Her torso was androgynous and emeciated looking. Her tail and back had two lines of sharp spikes running down them. Her new arms and legs were not like those of reptiles. Instead, she now had eight pairs of tentacles that had five fingered hands at their ends. The fingers were human in shaped though the nails could stretch out to form short nanomolecular blades
Plates of segmented armor acted as clothing for the girl. The bugs that were in the locker with her had dissolved and died, their life forces providing miniscule amounts of energy for the fused being. When the transformation was complete, what was once Taylor Hebert opened her now glowing green eyes and tore open the door of her locker with ease.
The bullied teenager, who had been shoved into her defiled locker earlier that day, stepped outside of her locker into a four legged stance and looked around. Within her body, nanomachines and strange eldritch ichors began to flow around and check for any damage to fix. The soul and mind of Taylor Hebert had been fused to alien intelligences. With her conscious human self rendered temporarily inactive due to her passing out earlier from trauma, the subconscious and alien part of her took control.
/Systems check completed. Warning! Energy levels for hardware are currently low. It is recommended to search for suitable energy sources, preferably souls. More material is needed for further building up of the necrodermis shell. It is recommended to absorb more metals and other minerals to be used in this purpose/
/According to memory archives, possible prey can be found in the area of Brockton Bay known as the Docks. It is necessary to remain hidden and avoid drawing attention to ensure successful hunting. Deploying camouflage measures now./
The armor plates across Taylor's body began to distort incoming visible light in order to make itself almost invisible. The draconic C'tan/Shard fusion then used one of her abilities to teleport to a warehouse in the Docks. The warehouse happened to contain a group of ten Empire 88 thugs who were guarding a stash of weapons and drugs. Taylor quickly approached the unaware thugs and killed them quickly with her sharp fingers and jaws. Throats were slashed, chest and skulls were caved in. Warm crimson blood splattered onto the cold concrete floor of the warehouse.
The fused being relished the taste of freshly killed souls. The souls of those murderous Neo nazis she killed, screamed as they were broken down into usable energy in Taylor's energy absorber. The information ripped from their souls was stored in Taylor's Memory Archive for later use. She also placed her hands on the corpses so that the little swarms of nanomachines flowing out of her hands would completely assimilate whatever useful minerals were found in their dead bodies. Other useful materials found in the warehouse were also absorbed. After this was done, the girl went to one of the abandoned cargo vessels in the Boat Graveyard and slept there, her body growing a bit more in some areas.
She dreamt of old memories, of feeding from a star. She dreamt of being encased in a shell of living metal. She dreamt of warfare and of crafting devastating weapons that brought ruin to millions of worlds. She dreamt of being injured and falling to a rusty red world before hibernating there for millions of years. She dreamed of fighting a human figure who possessed incredible powers. She dreamt of being defeated and imprisoned by that godly man.
Aside from these things, she had also dreamt of crystalline beings made up of many shards that traveled from world to world. These massive beings had achieved spaceflight by blowing up worlds after consuming the vast quantities of energies from the worlds they were on. They shed pieces of themselves on worlds where life forms were present. These shards of theirs were able to manipulate reality and were able to bond to lower life forms. These shards and their hosts brought about chaos, conflict, and suffering to the host species until the Cycle was ended with the destruction of the planet and its various alternate versions in other dimensions.
When she awoke the next morning at 7:00 PM, it took Taylor several panicked moments of confusion until she realized what had happened to her.
Taylor's POV
"Wait, I remember/recalled, that I was trapped in the locker by the Trio. There, I turned into this...this form. The form of a C'tan. Wait a minute, how do I know that!?" I thought to myself with concern at suddenly knowing that strange fact. "Ahh! My head!"
/Greetings Host, we are the others within your have become one ... one being. A new form of both necrodermis and crystals./
In our mindscape, We could see a large computer screen appear hanging in midair within an empty void. In our mindscape, We appeared in the same form as what We looked like now. We were in front of the computer and We were connected to it by many cables.
The wallpaper on the computer screen showed what looked like an alien, metallic, draconic being commanding legions upon legions of silvery grey, alien robot skeletons marching across a desert world. Looking through the documents section up to the videos section, We saw different files with titles such as "War in Heaven" and "Star Gods." We hurriedly sought to select that video file which contained information on what happened last night. After finding the video file titled "Last Night's Recordings," We opened it. The video played on the computer monitor and We were very focused on seeing what happened that night.
After viewing the video, We had strong feelings of guilt and shame over what I had done that night. Or rather We should have as We actually felt much less than that over such an action. We had killed ten people last night and ate their souls! We were confirmed to be a soul eating monster. We let out only a few tears of black oily liquid drip from our green glowing eyes.
We quickly calmed ourselves down as we had rationalized our actions as justified when information sprung to our minds of the unsavory deeds of these terrible people as had been gathered from their souls. We then thought of what We would have to do next, since We were currently stuck in this form. We reviewed what other information was stored in my mind for me to better understand my new form. We then viewed the "Star God", "War in Heaven," and the "Queen Administrator" memory files.
At the end of that activity of reviewing what memories were stored in my mind, We were feeling shocked and scared about the powers we have. We were also horrified yet understanding of the identity and the deeds committed by the source of my powers, the C'tan known as Mag'ladroth, the Void Dragon, and the Queen Administrator shard of the Warrior Entity.
We calmed ourselves down as We realized that we are a new being that is different from our previous selves. We reviewed the list of the powers we have as we wanted to see what we could use to aid our current situation. As a hybrid being, we have now have access to this plethora powers such as the following:
C'TAN POWERS:
MINOR POWERS
Entropic Touch - The user can cause metal to decay on contact.
Gaze of Death - The user drains the life from all victims in the vicinity.
Grand Illusion - The user creates a glamour of deception, preventing the enemies from seeing the actual disposition of the user's forces.
Lord of Fire - The user can become a creature of living flame, able to command the fiery weapons wielded by my enemies.
Moulder of Worlds - The user can grab rocks with telekinesis and throw showers of them at enemies.
Pyreshards - The user can conjure specks of blazing black matter and direct them against my assailants.
Sentient Singularity - Our presence destabilizes all local gravitational forces in an area, disrupting engines, teleport beams and Warp jumps.
Swarm of Spirit Dust - The user is concealed from the gaze of my enemies by a cloud of swirling darkness.
Time's Arrow - By mutating the flow of causation and remoulding the temporal stream of the space-time continuum, the user can cast their foes back into the darkness from before time came into being.
Transdimensional Thunderbolt - The user can project a bolt of crackling transdimensional energy from my outstretched palm.
Writhing Worldscape - The natural world revolts at our presence, and as the physical laws of reality are undone, the very ground writhes and shakes.
ASCENDANT POWERS
A Transcendent C'tan is an aggregation of dozens of C'tan shards or even up to a hundred lesser C'tan shards. Transcendent C'tan are far more dangerous than the standard C'tan shard. These are the powers possessed by a Transcendent C'tan. Every Transcendent C'tan must possess either one or two of the following powers, though they cannot be unleashed when the C'tan is fully shackled within the confines of one of the Necrons Tesseract Vaults:
Storm of Heavenly Fire - The user can unleash a rain of fire from the heavens which explodes with a cataclysmic blast upon the battlefield. This power would be extremely effective at destroying enemy armored vehicles.
Transliminal Stride - Using our ability to manipulate the space-time continuum and extradimensional realities, we can move across the battlefield to a predetermined point, simply phasing through all obstacles or opponents in my path.
Seismic Shockwave - When we slam our Necrodermis-clad foot down, it unleashes a seismic shockwave that causes the ground to shake, blasting armoured vehicles and infantry alike into the air like unfortunate toys.
Antimatter Meteor - We are able to unleash a huge meteor composed of antimatter upon the battlefield. It is a furious assault from the sky that will annihilate all normal matter within range.
Cosmic Fire - The user can unleash a wave of fire hotter than the interior of some suns upon the battlefield, incinerating everything in my path.
Seismic Assault - The user can cause rumbling earthquakes with a flick of my hand, crushing enemy units to pulp.
Sky of Falling Stars - A rain of blazing meteorites falls from the sky to impact the foe at my whim.
Transdimensional Maelstrom - The user can use my control over transdimensional energies to unleash a swirling extra dimensional vortex upon the battlefield that can banish all it touches to an alternate reality.
Wave of Withering - The user can cause metal and flesh alike to wither at my command.
SHARD POWERS:
Human/Bug Control - This power allows us to have very fine mind control over either humans or bugs up to a city block.
Titan Form - With enough materials and energy, we could grow into a gigantic form that would be 40 meters tall. This form would still have the same Endbringer-like durability of our smaller form. We could return to a smaller form by manipulating our density.
Wow! We thought to ourselves. We have the power to cause destruction on a scale rivaling that of the Endbringers here on Earth Bet. There is even that ability possessed by unshattered C'tan that allows them to manifest black holes large enough to swallow star systems when they have gathered enough energy to do so. We could go and kill the Endbringers if I wish to but We don't have a lot of energy to use those abilities at the moment.
We froze for a moment when the terrible realization struck me as we remembered something important from Queen Administrator's memories. Scion is the avatar of the Warrior Entity, which is where QA came from. This meant that Scion might be planning to destroy the humans of Earth Bet and across countless other Earths. The grim implications of those observations made me feel nauseous. If Scion might be a threat to humanity, then we needed to prepare ourselves to fight him in the future.
After that revelation, we started to think about what our next course of action will be with much greater urgency. Our internal clock showed that it was already 7:30 AM. We looked around the empty cargo vessel and the surrounding area with my machine sensors. We have X-ray vision, thermal vision, and night vision. We can adjust my audio sensors so they could be sensitive enough to hear even the footsteps of bugs. We had sensors that we could use to detect whatever chemicals were found in the air. We even have an elemental scanner that is built into our eyes and outer skin.
Since it was daytime, we would need something to hide myself. We looked through what technological designs we have stored in our mind. It seems that we have designs of technology from both the Necrons and those Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus. We felt that it would be a good idea to create a Canoptek Spyder as well as a bunch of Canoptek Scarabs. These robotic constructs would be useful in creating a base for us. However, we need to get more materials than what we currently have in order to make them.
We took stock of what materials we currently have stored in my inbuilt Transdimensional Storage Device that is located in my abdomen. From ten human bodies, I have large quantities of Carbon, Phosphorus, Oxygen, and other non metals. I have lesser amounts of iron, magnesium, and other trace metals.
To get more Warp energy, I need to kill more people. The alternative method to get more energy is for me to spend a lot of time out in the sunlight to harvest solar energy. Since there was not enough materials for me to work with, I reactivated my Light distorters and then teleported to the sky.
As we flew through the cold air through the manipulation of anti-gravity generators, we felt happy. It had been my dream as Taylor Hebert to become a hero like Alexandria, the strongest flying woman in the world. As we flew over the city of Brockton Bay, we picked up the sounds below. We were also able to sense wireless messages sent via cellphone signals or the internet due to my alien ability to manipulate technology.
One message we picked up made us drop to the roof of an abandoned apartment building in shock and grief. It was a news report stating that Dad was killed last night! He had been an unlucky casualty of a fight between the Azyn Bad Boys gang and the Empire 88 gang. The teleporting, suicide bomber, cloner Oni Lee of the ABB, and Storm Tiger of the E88 were involved. The news report stated that Dad was killed in his trunk when one of Oni Lee's bombs was sent his way. A heart rending sob poured out of us for a while before we sent out a furious roar.
/They killed our Father/Progenitor! We must burn them all! We will find them and destroy every last one of them!/
/But there are many enemies and we are just one body. We must create an army to stop them and as well as all other future enemies. Yes, we will avoid fighting them for now./
We became cold and rational in our thoughts. The logical thing to do first would be to find a suitable location to build a base and then we should make an army to help bolster our strength. So we continued flying over the city until we spotted an abandoned car factory situated near the city. We slowly dropped from the sky and landed quietly on the ground of the factory compound. There were about five old brickwork buildings. There were lines of trees surrounding the area and there is a single paved road that goes in and out of the factory.
We went to a four storied administration building because it was easier to hide there. It was when we had gone to the basement of the building that we started to create the beginnings of our base. We had earlier broken down floors from the upper levels to gather ruble and metal bars.
Within that dark basement that was lit aglow with the greenish light from our eyes, we manipulated the nanomachines within my necrodermis shell. The pile of ruble and metal was covered by tendrils of nanomachines that consumed them, then the metallic mass transformed into the eight legged, emerald hued form of a Necron Canoptek Spyder. The newly created machine's eyes lit up with a green glow as it looked to us for instruction, its twin-linked particle beamers ready for combat. We grinned at our first construct with a mouth full of curved fangs.
/We shall call you ATLAS for upon your back shall be the beginnings of a new world. A world that you and your future kin will help maintain through your tireless toil./
After creating a wireless network linking ourselves to the Spyder, we instructed it to gather more materials and use them to produce Canoptek Scarabs later. The Canoptek Spyder immediately started cutting into one of the walls of the basement. Leaving it to do its work, we went to the ground floor of the building. There was hardly any furniture left in this place so we just stood in a corner and pondered what my long term plans would be.
We knew that my Dad's soul was probably in the Warp, so we just had to find a way to get in touch with him and other souls. We also needed something to gather valuable materials for us from outside the base. We suddenly hit upon the idea of a robot that would take on the features of people by looking at them and then using a skin made of nanomachines to mimic a human appearance and other human traits. We immediately got to work on making this special robot.