“Understand the world around you, the people under your command and your enemies. If you do, you will have the fundamental information needed to form viable pns as a leader.”

  It sounded simple, reasonable and made perfect sense. Which was why I couldn’t even refute it. Selene was right, and I knew it.

  The part that bothered me still was where she said I never accepted this 42nd millennium Milky Way for how it is …. Because who would want to accept this shithole for how it is? It’s terrible in every conceivable way with only silver linings that barely manage to take the edges off of its atrocious state.

  Evil Gods, man-eating aliens who want to consume everything, pompous assholes who see humans as ants, psychotic ancient robots who can snuff out stars for shits and giggles, and the list goes on without me having even mentioned the pile of garbage that became of humanity.

  I knew that this pce was made to be grimdark. It was written like that. It was never supposed to be real, and I was never supposed to be forced to live in it.

  Did accepting how horrible it was, mean giving up on ever actually turning things around? If I became just another alien warlord, blessed with supernatural powers, would I just become another bullet point on that previous list?

  I could become an alien warlord unlike any other. I was confident that, if I ignored all of my worries and reservations, I could be a force to be reckoned with all by myself. Stars syphoned for an endless source of energy to power my limitless armies of mindless drones that were built based on temptes taken from the most powerful beings in this gaxy.

  Logistics would be my greatest opponent, transporting my drones to where they needed to be.

  I was confident in that … but which alien warlord wasn’t? And what happened to them? What remained of them?

  Nothing, but trophies on a wall and droll records in some Administratum libraries. Even the Cacodominus, a powerful psychic creature that mind-controlled the entire popution of 1300 star systems at once, is nothing but a memory with its skull paraded around by the Bck Temprs.

  I was powerful, sure, but not anywhere close to powerful enough to even think about replicating that feat.

  What killed it? A bunch of regur Space Marines. Their weapons? Being absolutely deranged lunatics and fanatical zealotry.

  Despite my confidence, I couldn’t help but fear that by some weird twist of fate, the same would be enough to kill me.

  Which was why I’d been trying to stay low and be careful. I didn’t have primarch plot armour, and not even just a regur one. Any random guardsman might just pull some bullshit McGuffey out of their ass that’s just perfectly primed to kill me.

  “Can I get you something, honey?”

  I looked up at the sudden sound coming from above, propping myself up from the wooden table and gncing at the matronly woman smiling down at me. After my talk with Selene, I’d Blinked down pnetside and decided the best pce to think and chew over my thoughts on it was in a rustic cafe.

  “Yeah,” I answered slowly, gncing down at the menu she’d pced in front of me and a vaguely familiar entry caught my eye. “Can I get one cup of this … tanna tea?”

  “You sure honey?” The woman asked, looking at my face, then down at the menu. “It has a … peculiar taste. A little too bitter for most of the more delicate customers around here.”

  “Huh, why’s it on the menu if it’s so bad you have to warn me about it?” I asked her, blinking away the lingering daze my previous brooding had left me in.

  “The owner loves the thing.” The woman shrugged. “There was this one veteran who came here to compin every day he couldn’t drink his favourite drink this far from home, so we put it on the menu for him.”

  “I’ll give it a try,” I said with a smile, shrugging lightly as I leaned back. “Plus whatever you think will be a good pate cleanser afterwards. Might as well try it once.”

  “Sure!” The woman smiled, snatching up the menu. “I’ll be right back.”

  I watched her go, then let my gaze pan around the faint little cafe. This city was on the other side of the pnet, far from where Val had his battle with the Daemon Prince. Meaning, it was still calm.

  I watched people. The cafe was small, with just a few tables and had even fewer customers sitting in. A man in a dishevelled suit-like thing chugged his drink and shoved the food in his face hole like every second spent eating was a waste of his time.

  At another table sat a young couple of what would have been high-schoolers if this was Earth. They were fully absorbed in their own little world and I could feel so much innocent love and lust radiating off of them it was almost … refreshing. Their emotions were so much less tainted by life experiences that they were just more raw than adult emotions.

  The fourth person other than me was a middle-aged man greying at the temples, nguidly flipping through a newspaper while taking a sip of some steaming concoction on his table every so often.

  They were all so familiar to me, with just a few tiny changes to the decor and clothes, I could imagine this cafe being just down the road from my apartment back on 21st century Earth.

  And yet, it’d take me growing elongated ears and all these familiar humans would transform into something utterly alien to me. The humans I knew would have complimented my cospy. These humans?

  I looked at the balding man, my enhanced eyes locking onto a bullet wound on his forearm and noting the straight-spined pose he sat in. He looked like he had a mppost shoved up his ass, but somehow, he made it look like he was comfortable sitting like that.

  No, these humans would jump to attention and either scream in fear or attack me with spoons and forks. There was so much hate and fear cooked into them over the millennia, they would loathe me just for a slight difference.

  I … knew that, but Selene said I didn’t truly believe it. That I had never internalised it, and that it made my reasoning somewhat deluded.

  I briefly considered testing it, just changing into some alien form to see how they would react. Something non-threatening, maybe even cute. Would they really try to lynch me, if I did?

  “Here is your tea, honey.” The waitress came back, pced the warm mug down before me and then put a rger gss filled with a vibrant pink drink and ice to the side. “Fingleberry lemonade, it’ll get even the persistent aftertaste of tenna tea out of your mouth with a few gulps.”

  “Thanks,” I said, putting on a smile as I gnced up appreciatively. Would she have screamed, or would she be one of the people lynching me? The answer would be a single thought away. She was a mere human so my telepathy would have little trouble browsing her mind.

  “You’re welcome.” She nodded, then slid over to the teenage couple who were waving her over.

  I eyed the steaming liquid suspiciously, knowing I could wipe the taste from my tongue even if the thing had acid mixed in. I shrugged and took a small sip. A grimace pulled at my face the very moment it touched my tongue. Not only was it steaming hot, but it also tasted like battery acid mixed in with the worst homemade beer in existence.

  I coughed, but swallowed the small sip anyway as my grimace deepened. I could have turned off my taste buds, but I felt it would be worth it to experience the true taste of the abominable drink at least once in my life. If I didn’t fuck up something, I was set to live until the st stars died out and the st organic beings died out, depriving me of the bio-energy I’d need to continue on. Experiencing as much of the gaxy as it was now might be the only way some of these things would be remembered in the eons to come.

  Taking another sip, despite my better judgement, I decided there were some things that might deserve to be forgotten.

  Putting the cup down, I grabbed the cold lemonade made of whatever a fingleberry was and took a deep gulp. It had a tangy fruity fvour like elderberries, but maybe a touch sweeter.

  As I enjoyed the sourness being purged from my mouth by the fruity goodness, a strange thought occurred to me. If this tenna tea thingy was from another pnet, and a veteran kept requesting it, that meant he too would have to have been from some far-off pnet.

  But this pnet was ruled by a damned Daemon Prince, so how in the nine hells did a veteran from who knew where end up here? This part of the Jericho Reach was supposed to be rgely isoted from Imperial influence for the st few millennia.

  It just didn’t make sense.

  Or was I wrong? Had this pnet been conquered by that crusade they had going on in the near past?

  Nah. They take worshipping this totally-not-Saneh goddess of theirs far too seriously. I didn’t even catch a single word being spoken of the Emperor since I came down here. They have to have been separated from the Imperium long ago … which makes this tea thing all the more weird. I’m like, 99% sure it wasn’t originally from this pnet.

  I gnced up and saw the older man with the newspaper looking over at me with a slight grin. On instinct, I caught his surface thoughts. He looked military-esque enough to be a veteran, but would he be the veteran whom asked for this atrocious drink to be served here?

  Despite his outwardly calm demeanour, when I poked my telepathic nose inside his head I found a tightly wound ball of anxiety and fear. I could barely parse his regur thoughts as visions of his own gruesome deaths pyed out before his mind’s eye one after the other.

  The interesting thing was, he saw himself being torn apart by daemons more often than not, or lynched by a mob in some others.

  He shuddered and snapped his gaze over at me, a smile on his lips and a frown on his eyebrows. I tilted my head, not bothering to hide my staring and gave him a beatific smile.

  His chaotic mess of a mind cleared up for a brief moment, and I finally found myself a name. Only my quick reflexes stopped me from dropping my gss as my eyes widened.

  Caiphas Cain.

  That was his name, and I was shocked to find it so familiar. Of the few warhammer series I had read more than one book of, his memoirs were one of them. I gnced down at the atrocious tea on my table and finally made the connection as to why its name sounded so familiar; the man loved this damned thing.

  But what would a retired Commissar of the Imperial Guard be doing on this pnet at the ass end of the Milky Way?

  Something to do with the Daemon Prince ruling it, I’d wager.

  As I watched him, he watched me and I quickly disengaged from his mind before it jumped to pces I’d rather not see.

  Still, this had my curiosity peaked, and I was aching for a distraction either way. I’d have to somehow mollify Val and bring his dampened morale back up after the undue verbal beating I had given him.

  I still felt like he had been an asshole, but I agreed with Selene’s stance on him being wired that way. I couldn’t expect him to just think like me without even expining to him my thought process … that is, if my thought process were even the right ones to have.

  A few hundred deaths would have made the headlines back on Earth.

  ‘Strange alien comes down from the sky, kills the President and massacres hundreds of civilians as it causes havoc in the surroundings.’

  I could almost see it on the news, and hear the horrified voices of the newscasters. However, this wasn’t that Earth. Not anymore, and maybe it never had been.

  Pstering a flirty smile on my face, I stood up with my two drinks in hand and sashayed over to the undercover Commissar.

  “May I?” I asked, motioning for the seat, into which I slid into the moment he gave a gracious nod. “Thank you. I suspect you’re the one who cursed this menu with this atrocious drink?”

  “It is an acquired taste,” he said with a charming smile that hid his underlying suspicions almost perfectly. I caught a wandering thought from him thinking I was some Saneshi enchantress trying to eat his soul. That was either the most fttering worry to be had when meeting me, or the rudest. I wasn’t quite sure yet. “How may I help you?”

  “I am in need of a distraction,” I confessed, a smile still on my lips. “Thought you might be able to help me?”

  P3t1