Warhammer 40k: Ours Journey

Chapter 14: Our Power

"Wait, so I went to the trouble of figuring out how this cheat system works and shared my findings, only to be treated like a Tzeentchian daemon?"

After hearing Arthur's explanation, Romulus was fuming. He couldn't believe this was how his best friend saw him.

One of them shoots me on sight, the other was ready to stab me at any moment.

So this is how I'm repaid for my kindness.

"...It was a hypothetical! Just a hypothetical! You guys aren't really daemons, and I didn't actually stab you, did I?" Arthur quickly corrected himself.

The corruption of Chaos was insidious and unpredictable. How could he possibly trust them without verification? Besides, he wasn't some crazed zealot. He had his suspicions, but he had merely considered investigating them. The fact that he hadn't just stabbed Romulus on sight to see if his blood was blue or red was proof of his restraint. As for now, he honestly couldn't rest easy until he found a Blank to check them all out. Even if their powers weren't related to the Chaos Gods, if they were connected to the Warp in any way, it paid to be careful.

"So, Karna, you—" Ramesses began, awkwardly changing the subject.

Karna didn't even bother to look up. "I didn't study it either. Just turned on the Black Rage and charged."

So that's why Romulus got shot.

"I was busy having a mental breakdown at the time," Karna added. His logic was simple: with three smart guys already thinking about it, there was no need for him to burn his own brain cells. He would just listen.

So much for that brother.

"Alright then—" Ramesses shrugged. "Guess it's up to me. I'll break down the principles of our abilities and how we get the raw materials, based on my personal understanding, of course."

He cleared a space on the table and, with a wave of his hand, three materials of different sizes appeared.

The largest piece resembled ceramite, with a metallic sheen on its surface. The middle one looked like a piece of high-purity silver, shimmering with a deep, dark luster under the light. The last piece was the smallest and as thin as a cicada's wing, but it was also the most brilliant, shining with the radiant gold of the sun.

"Auramite," Arthur said, his eyes fixed on the gleaming metal.

"Thank goodness I used to paint Custodes, otherwise I'd spend a lifetime sifting through the complex data of the Warp and never find it," Ramesses said, ignoring Arthur's astonished gaze as he continued to explain.

"One of our abilities is to create matter by spending these so-called 'points.' I'm tentatively calling this ability 'Psycho-materialization,' since these points are, for all intents and purposes, quantified psychic energy. As for the cost—"

He gestured at the three materials, which had all been created using the same amount of psychic energy.

"The cost is based on the complexity of the created object's atomic structure and its Warp-component level. The difference, as you can see, is significant."

"Based on my experiments, the most economical use of this power is to create power armor, small-to-medium-sized vehicles, and various weapon production lines. You can forget about dreaming of conjuring up a Gloriana-class battleship. We just don't have the juice to create something of that quality."

"And STCs," Romulus added. "STCs are mostly small in volume."

"Right, right, almost forgot about those," Ramesses said, slapping his forehead.

STC, a Standard Template Construct. A high-tech computer containing the blueprints for virtually every piece of equipment a human civilization might need since its first steps into the stars. It allowed colonists from the Dark Age of Technology to build a civilization from the most primitive materials without any prior knowledge. In layman's terms, it was a crafting table with a built-in recipe book.

"All four of us should be able to perform this conversion process. As for the items in our adaptive interface, those are tied to our own knowledge. Only objects we have a concrete understanding of and that actually exist in this universe can be displayed."

"So that's why our initial forms were based on our game avatars?" Arthur said, nodding in understanding. Then a look of confusion crossed his face. "But why not a Primarch, a Custodian, or even the Emperor?"

They were all deeply knowledgeable about the Warhammer franchise. For the kind of fan who could argue about a Space Marine's height until the high-dimensional chaos god GW was forced to change the lore, there was no being in the human faction bigger or more WAAAGH! than the Emperor himself. If they were going to transform, shouldn't they have become the Emperor?

"You really want to be stuck on that toilet?"

"Not necessarily."

"Well, do you know the biological makeup of the Emperor or a Primarch?"

"No."

"That's the reason. We have no concrete knowledge of the physical composition of the Primarchs, the Emperor, or the Custodes. Even for us, it's a mystery."

"Furthermore, that information seems to be a closely guarded secret. I couldn't find anything about it even when I searched the Warp. Oh, and souls. Souls are very expensive, and we have to program them ourselves."

Ramesses shared the part of his item panel he had organized with the others.

"First, we establish knowledge. Then, we collect information and complete the data entry. After that, we can use psychic energy to directly manifest these items. We can also modify them to a certain extent, like replacing all the materials in a suit of Terminator armor with adamantium or something else."

"So how did you unlock so many blueprints?" Romulus asked, scratching his head as he looked at the huge list of new items in the shared interface. "Does painting miniatures all day give you this kind of advantage?"

"My methods were a bit... wild," Ramesses said, a look of embarrassment on his face. "Since I had already given up at the beginning, I just focused on studying this ability. To get better gear, I started dredging the Warp for information directly, without caring if it was a Tzeentchian plot or not. That's how I found the data for Auramite and the others."

"The Warp is a sea of souls. Any being with a Warp-presence will have their essence absorbed into it upon death, or be devoured by the terrible entities within. So the Warp itself is a massive database, containing information on all sentient life."

"The problem is, the Warp doesn't have a search engine. The process is like finding a needle in a haystack. For now, I've only been able to quickly filter out useful data based on the miniatures I remember painting. There's far more useless, chaotic junk information. And you guys can experiment with the 're-editing' function yourselves. I couldn't find a 30k Thousand Sons paint scheme, so I had to make this one myself."

"You're even crazier than I am," Romulus said, speechless after listening to Ramesses's surprisingly logical explanation.

When he had first discovered this ability, he too had suspected it was a Chaos plot. It was only when he found himself on a ship that was about to be overrun that he decided he couldn't afford to be so cautious. After a series of careful tests, he finally confirmed that the ability wasn't related to the Chaos Gods and dared to use it without restraint.

But Ramesses... this guy...

(End of Chapter)