Jump 340: Adepta Sororitas

Jump #340: Adepta Sororitas
>Three of Swords (Sorrow), reversed: A trust or confidence betrayed in an attempt to help someone in need.
>Order: Orders Militant
>Identity: Drop-In
>Drawbacks: (+1000) Not Your First Crusade, Exstended Service, Commorragh, The Black Stain
MISTAKES. WERE. MADE. Still, this is the same 40k that I'd left behind after spending ten thousand years here before - it's nowhere near as grim as it might have otherwise been.
>Scenario: The Piety of Seth
Seth sounds like a pretty cool guy, but some people take things too far.
>Companion Import (1800)
I'm going to need my companions to watch my back. .. I just realized that six of eight of my companions are female, and two of them are as fluid in gender as I am, meaning that they can pull off being female just fine too. Welp, might as well go all-in, right?!
>The Emperor Protects (Free)
Now this is a particularly useful perk for this universe, even if chaos is perhaps not QUITE as corrosive as usual.
>Basic Training (Free)
As Heinlein says, specialization is for insects.
>Sanctioned Xeno (Free, Drop-In)
Considering some of the crap I'm going to probably end up pulling while I'm here... necessary.
>Litany of Hate (Free, Militant)
Even in a brighter 40k, this is very much not wrong.
>Rotation with the Commissariat (Free, Militant)
It certainly doesn't hurt to know how to order soldiers around. I don't think I've been to any other universe where mere mortals are up against the same level of opposition as you see here.
>Seraphim (1700, Militant)
Dual wielding, jetpack blazing. I could get behind this sort of tactic.
>Heightened Senses (1600)
Being able to diagnose injury and disease with mere sight and smell is rather useful, considering how often I use medical skills, quite frankly.
>The Unforgiving Blade (1300, Militant)
Being able to ensure any weapons I hold are the bane of the daemons and unholy... immensely useful. Extending that to those around me? Priceless. Let's hear it for capstone boosters.
>Soul Storm (1000, Militant)
The Emperor's light suffuses me. Perhaps it's repayment for the changes I helped make. Perhaps it's simply that he believes in me as much as I believe in him. He's not perfect. But he is a man, not a god. Like the rest of us, he is more perfect for his flaws.
>Mental Fortress (400)
Much like the Unforgiving Blade - being immune to temptation and trickery, and ensuring those around me are likewise immune.
>Living Saint (0)
Okay, now I have to admit this is a completely awesome, being able to temporarily assume this form. I'm not really sure how much mileage I'll get out of it, but it's darn neat if nothing else. Plus a heavy durability boost and power boost while it's active.

So, I expected to start this jump with the Adeptus Sororitas. I did not expect to start it in a very familiar place - a half burnt-out-and-hellishly-reconstructed Commorragh, in the hands of a particularly sick and twisted individual. I think it probably says a great deal about my stay here that I chose to purge 95% of the memory of my stay in the city of Commorragh, once the jump ended, but it was a particularly heinous three months that I spent there. I did not break - though I could not escape, I knew I could not be contained forever no matter my lack of powers during the time of my captivity - but quite frankly I'd forgotten how expert at torture the Dark Eldar were.

I would also like to note that, once I'd gotten back out and into the real world, I used a small bit of translocation magic to return here again when it was not expected. I brought with me an army of warded magitech automatons and put them to work - making sure that the surviving 40% of Commorragh's Eldar population that I hadn't wiped out during my previous stay here was removed. I've moved on to using LMDs for army-on-demand purposes, but I don't trust anything that could possibly be corrupted by chaos.

That took most of the first year of my stay here.

After that point, the next near-decade was spent hunting down Miriael Sabathiel. I assumed, of course, that she'd simply been empowered by Slaanesh and would end up being some sort of Chaos-powered atrocity. It was much, much more insidious than that: as things turned out, she had her own twisted version of the Sororitas that she was running, scamming planets, interfering with the Inquisition, giving actual cults what would seem like the stamp of approval. It was she that saw to the sacrifice of scattered hive cities and garden worlds to Chaos. It was she that sabotaged the Mechanicus and caused the loss of not only a Forge World in the Calixis sector, but an entire Imperial Fleet undergoing maintenance at that world. It was she that corrupted the Shrine World of Seth, to the point where cutting out the cancer of that corruption required cutting the planet off from the rest of the galaxy for six months and systemically purging eighty percent of the population on the surface - not only corrupted for Chaos' sake but some being members of a genestealer cult besides. Were we anyone else, I don't think we would have been able to save any of them at all.

It was her that saw to the massacre of Isstvan V, an elaborate invitation that was addressed to me, hundreds of billions slain in a single day. Sajuuk met a trio of Chaos battleships in orbit, and though it was damaged, they were rendered into scrap by its otherworldly weaponry. When we landed, we were greeted with a hellscape, a warp storm enveloping the planet mere moments after we'd arrived. There was a single living soul on the surface of the planet, and she was directing armies of lesser and greater daemons as a conductor might direct a symphony, if the symphony were composed of the screams of the damned and the cackling of the unholy.

My eight companions took to crowd control with gusto, while my form crackled with golden energy, Vercingetorix's six golden wings enabling me to approach the arch-heretic without having to touch the diseased ground.

It was all my fault, she told me as we traded blow for blow, the landscape warping around us in space and time. I ruined everything - Chaos was lacking, its vitality stolen, the Imperium stagnant, Necrons awakening and threatening to exterminate all the living, Tyranids threatening to overrun the galaxy and devour what escapes the Necrons. The power she struck at me with staggered me. She wasn't empowered just by Slaanesh, but by all four of the Chaos gods.

I flexed my gauntlet, warping the surroundings... or rather, returning them to a normal semblance. Spatial manipulation can be used to reverse spatial manipulation, after all. My wings wrapped around me after and were battered by eldritch energies, but I sustained the attacks, pitting balefire against warpfire. Of course the galaxy is imperiled, I told her, and the listening gods. The galaxy will always be imperiled. Chaos never had more than moments of ascendency in any universe, and this one was barely different. The only universes that ever saw Chaos ascendent saw the universe degenerate into bloodshed and kill itself off, leaving handfuls of worlds to starve the gods.

She screamed in anger and pain, her body vislbly twisting and becoming more inhuman as the gods forced more of their energy into it. Daemons rushing from all around, merging with her, my retinue doing their best to cut down as many as they could. I would call her a Daemonhost, but frankly, Legion would be a much more fitting title for her. More powerful than any mere daemon, eclipsed only by the gods themselves. And she lashed out as a god would lash out - trying to wipe me out of reality itself. Trying to remove my influence on the timeline.

Quite honestly, she hit harder than I would have ever expected. Had I not forsaken my Sororitas armor for my Praetor armor - its latest modifications of Uru and Adamantine rendering it black and gold - I might have died. As it stands, my companions were forced back as reality warped around us. Past and future... potential pasts and future, all whirled around us as we fought. My gauntlet stayed securely on my arm, glittering with all of the gems of power embedded within it as I met force with force.
Even if I struck her down, she said, she was blessed by the gods. Elevated by them. Never would I escape her, nor the gods I cheated out of power. There would always be more daemons to lend her power, and until I fled the universe with my tail beween my legs, she would never relent, always at my heels. On and on she prattled, pouring the raw warp out at me, magical shields beginning to crack under the strain at long last. And when the shields crumpled and my form was enveloped by the Warp itself, she cackled like a hyena.

When the blade of the Black Sword parted the warpfire in front of me, permitting me to walk in relative safety toward her and exposing my true form to her, her laughter stopped. I paused before her as she kept flinging everything she could, the blade deflecting every last bit of energy, and inclined my head.

"Fall," I told her, making a motion with my gauntlet, clenching my fist. She shrieked in frustration, the warpfire flying in all directions as she was forced onto hands and knees. I nodded to myself, the blade coming to rest with the edge under her throat. A manipulation of energies and I pulled the surrounding few meters out of step with reality. Out of step with time. The energies of the warp had no sway, frozen in an impotent swirl.

"You are alone, child," I told her, gently. Her frustration gave way to weeping, feeling the infused power taken from her, leaving her weaker than she had felt at any time in her life. "There is only darkness for you now, and only death for your kind. You hoped to oppose an empire that spans a billion worlds. You thought to extinguish its light, a fool's errand if ever there was one. You are strong, child. But I am beyond strength. I am the end and the beginning, the fire of creation manifest. And I have come for you, the daemons, and the mad gods alike."

Time resumed its flow. She felt the power of the warp suffuse her body just in time for the necrosword to separate her head from her shoulders, her body breaking down into warpfire and ash as the sword absorbed the daemons that had powered her.

The unnatural skies faded to a dull red, the warp storm receding, Chaos taking what remained and fleeing into the aether. My golden aura faded, my wings folding and receding, and the Black Sword sent back to the Warehouse.

Turning to my companions, feeling more weary than I had in a very long time and noticing that they looked much the same, I shook my head. "There's nothing left for us here. Let's go."