Here's chapter 2! The first chapter got 6 reviews, 47 followers, 30 favs and 578 views. That's quite a lot in my mind! I hope everyone likes this chapter as well. I know Warhammer typically has a lot of fighting, and this story will get there too, but it'll take a while. See you all in two weeks for chapter 3!

Chapter 2: Displaced

It took a long time for me to get my mind back in a place where I could really think again. Whatever method the mad Forerunner had used had not agreed with me. For a while I was simply too happy to have survived the experience at all to worry much about what was going on around me.

Eventually the stillness got to me and I opened my eyes. I had to blink my six eyes a bit to get them really working again after the bright flash. Even then I was worried there was something wrong with them. Wherever I was, there was no light except for the soft blue glow the luminescent patches on my skin emitted. That light didn't reach very far though, and outside of my little shine there was nothing but darkness.

I got the distinct feeling that I was in some type of long forgotten hallway. The floor and one wall were clearly once made of some type of smooth metal but were now pockmarked and cracked. The ceiling and the other wall weren't there any more, being replaced by a combination of rocks and metallic debris that glittered here and there in the light I cast over my surroundings.

At first I thought that I had to be underground somewhere. The collapsed tunnel, darkness and stuffy atmosphere certainly pointed that way. I had to rethink that when I realised that even with me now naturally floating in the air, I was floating very easily. Too easily. Gravity was far less here, where ever here was, I concluded, watching a small stone drop very slowly to the ground. At an angle that didn't match the orientation of what I thought was the floor at all. It didn't take me much longer to realise that the odd protrusions in the floor were broken lamps. The kind you normally find on the ceiling.

Now leaning towards being in a wrecked space base or starship, since that was the only reason for the wonky gravity I could come up with, I was starting to get a little uneasy. There was no end of grisly things that tended to take residence in places like this. If I had still only been in my own dimension, I wouldn't be so worried, but after meeting a Forerunner I was a heck of a lot more, well, let's be generous and call it apprehensive. I had absolutely no desire to meet the Flood in any capacity. Or the Necromorphs. Or any other kind of thing that took over abandoned derelicts in what-should-have-still-been fiction.

For the first time I was happy not to be human any longer. A human wouldn't have survived in a place like the one I found myself in. In fact a normal human would have suffocated to death already, the atmosphere had too much carbon monoxide in it for them to breath. The bionanological body my mind now inhabited however, laughed at minor things like the atmosphere not being quite right. I couldn't fully deal with the void of space, but anything even slightly more hospitable would be just fine for me now.

Still, while I might not die by the simple expedient of being here, I was just as vulnerable as any human against whatever may lie in wait in this place. More even, humans were generally build of sturdier stock than me. Luckily, even there I now had a solution open to me. The feathery ends of four of my new arms were masterpieces of engineering. They were capable of arranging individual atoms in any way I wanted at a rate that combined ludicrous and world-breaking in a manner only the Forerunners' particular style of bullshit could come up with.

Having the best engineering tools in the universe was amazing, but completely useless if I had had no clue how to use them or what to make with them. Here the Forerunners again showed how good they were in what they did, even when completely mad like the one I had encountered. Using the feathery things came completely naturally to me. So much so, that it took me a moment before I realised that it shouldn't be so easy. But it was. Somehow.

The amount of mental tinkering that must have gone into making me comfortable in my new body made me shudder for a bit before I focused back on what I was doing. Work now, have an existential crisis later.

Once I had realised that the lumps on the floor were light fittings, something in me had pushed for me to try and fix them. Taking the nearest apart took less than a second. Figuring out that the problem was a broken wire and actually fixing that wire took not much longer. When it hadn't lit up I'd traced the power line and found that there was no power coming through it. Figures. No power equalled no light, so fixing them was useless.

It was staring at the fixed fitting that I was absently screwing back together that had made me realise that using my new limbs came too easy to me. Also, even with me effortlessly using my new tentacles -which still sounded very wrong to my ears- I shouldn't have been able to fix the light.

I studied biochemistry, not engineering! I had trouble with replacing a lightbulb, let alone anything more complicated! I shouldn't have been able to have done what I just did. With the realisation that I really needed to know what I was doing something in me clicked into place. My mind expanded like a balloon as an utterly massive chunk of data made its home inside my head.

Formulas from all sorts of disciplines; from mathematics to ecology, through economy and astronomy. Colossal blueprints with a level of detail that went beyond the atomic scale. How-to engineering for galactic scale projects. Theories, doctrines, concepts, conjecture, speculation, it was all there. Enough knowledge to win every single science prize on Earth for millennia. Enough that a normal man just wouldn't have had enough space in their brain to store it all. They would've died as either their brains liquified and slushed out of their ears or as their heads exploded like a grenade went off inside.

Me? I was perfectly fine. Forerunner digital storage methods were as utterly broken as most everything else they had.

Going over the data I soon came to the realisation that while I had blueprints, they were severely curtailed. There was a blueprint for design seeds, assembler vats, smartmatter and a very bare bones Halo. There was no slipspace FTL engines, shield systems, or any type of complete stand alone combat unit. I'm pretty sure I had all the scientific knowledge to create them, but that was what I would have to do if I wanted them: create them. And that took time.

The smartmatter was the most directly interesting thing. It was made up of basically bacterium-sized lego pieces that fitted together with hardlight bonds. On a macroscopic scale, a swarm of them could take any shape, had enough processing power to handle a basic artificial intelligence and was significantly stronger than steel. Combining it with other pieces of tech was especially easy as well. Making it out of basically anything I could grab was child's play for me.

Design seeds and assembler vats were the two basic methods the Forerunners used to construct anything. Where design seeds were meant for rapid, on-site construction for things you needed right now, assembler vats were the factory version; massive, fast, less energy intensive, and capable of producing a staggering amount of anything a civilisation needed. They were both useless to me at the moment. The seeds and vats both required massive amounts of power. The smallest assembler vat might work with a basic fusion generator, but anything bigger probably needed matter/anti-matter or other better energy generation methods.

The Halo design was something I wasn't interested in, at all. In my opinion, the weapon should never have been made. Killing everything in such a massive radius was utter insanity. I suspected that if the Flood had been a little bit less horrific than it was, looking into how to even do such a thing would never have been approved by the Forerunner leadership in the first place. I turned away from the design for the genocidal weapon that had unfurled so readily in my mind. I had to focus on the here and now. That I had the technical knowledge to wipe out all life in the galaxy with ease was something to be horrified over later.

When my mind came back from the terrifying idea of being the only living being in the entire galaxy I was still alone. There was still a dreary, half-destroyed hallway leading off into darkness either way around me. The loneliness was starting to get to me, but that I could now fix, at least. My engineering limbs reached out and sheared off bits and pieces of the walls and various rocks. Then they really went to work.

There. Not alone any more. After a fashion.

A small, finger-sized robot looked back at me. It had six legs and looked like an overgrown ant. Made out of smartmatter and with a tiny fusion reactor inefficiently converting hydrogen scavenged from some water ice I'd found into helium it was surprisingly fast and strong. I controlled the little bot with a controller that had a touchscreen meant for the minuscule cilia of the engineering marvels pretending to be my limbs.

Practicing with my little explorer went rather well. I only accidentally bumped into the walls on three occasions. I meant to do it the other five times, I swear. In all honesty, it went way better than I had expected. The very limited Intelligence of the bot learned quickly what it was capable of and how to move efficiently. In less than half an hour I went from 'move that leg forward, no, the other one' to 'go there'.

Once I was satisfied with how well it performed I sent the little robot on its way into the dark.