One strategic conclave in Markspace, leaving out numerous parties who would dearly love to be involved...

“What prompted the interest of Dark Elvar beyond mere piracy?” Duke Parablum asked, brow furrowing. It wasn’t like drow raiders were a new threat, but daring to go after a planet with existing and well-positioned orbital defenses was a great risk by their standards. They were either incredibly daring, or outright stupid.

“The Saber and Widow taking out their ambush so handily, I’m guessing,” I replied. “Then, they went eavesdropping on the Boole, and saw a bunch of exciting things here.”

“Hundreds of minor psions in combat,” Duke Rimval nodded slowly. “Ideal slaves and sacrifices to the Warp.”

“Precisely.” And I could confirm it, naturally enough. “We’ve made ourselves interesting. The Briggs Brothers are especially interesting to them. Big strong I R Dumb humanoids butchering one another at their whims are like sweet wine to the drow.”

“The Portal inversion will make it impossible for them to mount a planetary attack that bypasses orbital defenses. Despite everything, they will be forced to launch further attacks from space. That is not a preferred tactic of theirs,” Captain Dornal noted.

Briggs agreed. “In addition, their Underweb connection here has to be either down or corrupted, and will, for the short term, be unavailable. So, they will have to take their slaves another way.”

“Except they really want to hunt down both the Saber and the Widow and take them and their crews apart to find out what makes them tick. They are now designated trophy prey. The drow are OBSESSED with that sort of shit,” I offered.

“That means they will send personal assassins or hunters,” Duke Rimval noted, a hint of worry in his tone.

“Have.” Everyone blinked. “Ah, Tab didn’t tell you about the stalker in her shower? And the shadow in the corner of Tiff’s bridge? Must not have wanted you to worry. The twats thought shadow-slipping and hiding in temporalspatial cracks escaped True Sight.

“On a side note, Briggs has also popped a couple stalkers they’ve sent out to probe him, since he’s a bit more accessible with the time he spends with the lads. They’re surpassingly deadly when ambushing people, but, you know, they crack easy when a big power fist comes down on their skulls while they are skulking in spatial cracks.”

Briggs just smiled casually, brushing it off. “It was basically done in passing. No big deal,” he admitted.

“Should I be hoping one tries the same on me when Vala is around?” Duke Parablum mused aloud.

“Yes!” I nodded agreeably, and he had to smile despite himself. “Of course, that just makes you a bigger, funner target. We’re expecting them to try sniping next, and then move on to explosives, then start raising the stakes.”

“They will invade worlds just to set up duels with notable characters,” Duke Rimval noted. “I think we have made ourselves a target of their idea of fun...”

There was some silence from those in attendance.

“Normal forms of dissuasion simply will not work on the drow. The greater the challenge, the greater their desire to overcome it, by whatever methods are required,” Captain Dornal observed. “And if they fail, well, they take vengeance on whoever has foiled them.”

“The catastrophe of the invasion definitely has someone wiping egg off their face, if they survived,” Briggs murmured. “Individual assassins aren’t working, it follows that they will try teams next, doesn’t it?”

“If they are going after targets to take down who move about, yes. If someone is constantly surrounded by guards, they will still send out the individuals, until their most legendary killers get involved,” I supplied helpfully. It helped to have one of their bladewitches to reference this stuff against. There was a heaping load of stuff I and the other three girls had downloaded into an Akashic Node about the drow, and it was being gone through with a fine-tooth comb. They would probably be REALLY unhappy that outsiders now had such a good look into their society, how it worked, and some of the history behind it.

On the other hand, learning how to fight them better meant a whole lot of Coronal, Umbran, and Legion eyes were looking at all of it with great interest. The trio of duelists were teaching a class on drow fighting techniques and how to face off against them, with great enthusiasm.

“Speaking of the catastrophe, was there any indication of Portals elsewhere in the system?” Duke Parablum inquired. “I assume since you were looking at the planet you might have been looking elsewhere...”

I smiled slightly. The Map popped up between us, zeroed out for a system view, and nine points blinked on, six on planets, one in the asteroid belt, one inside Janus III’s orbit, and the other near the edge of the system, past the eighth planet in open space. “No eruptions, but there were planar instabilities. If we weren’t looking for them, they would have passed as background static.” The memories of the drow had supplied us the locations of six of them, so the other three were a neutrally undesired surprise. Serendipity, let’s say.

“Those locations should be mined or Interdicted,” Captain Dornal stated.

“I think we should utterly surprise them with horrific bad luck if they use them, first,” Briggs posited in return. The Legion Captain considered that, eyes flickering to Janus III’s representation, and smiled grimly, nodding. “I do confess to not having the nasty turn of mind to design something suitably devastating and completely random to annoy the piss out of them with...”

“Crowd-source it. There are kids with some really nasty Talents out there,” I waved it off, and everyone present agreed with that. “We’ll review their ideas for prime hilarity, and try to make it look as much like total bullshit luck as possible, while killing the drow in new and entertaining ways.”

“It is how they want to die, is it not?” Duke Parablum nodded agreement. The Coronals had learned long ago not to even bother attempting a fair fight with the dark elves. If they were found, they should be killed by whatever means were expeditious. The list of atrocities done at their hands simply did not allow for hesitation in this matter.

If the drow wanted to out-demon the demons of the Warp, they had to be treated like them!

“I would like to bring up the problem of the big Hole in the room,” Briggs said forthrightly. “Does anyone have any ideas on what to do about it?”

I eyed the Dukes, who looked at one another and sighed. “The cost of evicting it is quite literally far worse than if it stays and does nothing. In either case we are likely looking at a Tekron incursion, which is likely to wipe the planet,” Duke Parablum stated. “Any and all divinations attempted related to the topic simply breed disaster.”

Everybody around made faces. That was not welcome news. The fact they’d even attempted some future viewing to resolve the issue showed how seriously they took it.

During the cerevore incursion, there’d been a couple attempts by the ‘vores to suss out the Hole. The first one cost them a few thousand pslaves, who went in, went quiet, and then came back out with attachments and self-destruct bombs that wreaked immense havoc among the pslaves in a wide area to show the Hole’s disapproval.

The second attempt was done with grown xenos with cerevore riders, swarming in with undead-reaping power.

They went in, went quiet, and a short time later half-dissolved, chopped-up xenos came shambling out to blow the heck out of the local hiveminds in anti-acidic pscreaming detonations of soul-blasted ‘vores powering psi-shock bombs, knocking out something like fifty cubic miles of the ‘vore and xenos hivemind network as they did so. They also blew out the brains of close to a million humans at the same time, as basically every non-Forsaken or senior Psion in the area ate the brainshock and their cortexes were liquified.

We had managed to vivic most of the dead, but at least fifty thousand corpses had disappeared down the Hole for later use by the owner. We cleared out the area of all the dead, which burned very, very clean over the following weeks, and the Hole was avoided like the plague by the Xenos thereafter. I guess cerevore-fueled necrotech bombs did some nasty stuff to the hivemind...

“Can it be recruited to aid in its own defense?” Duke Rimval wondered aloud. The Tekrons were a nightmarish threat, as undead robots at TL 17+ are wont to be. They didn’t want to bring them in... and discovery of the Tekron by any outside force was an excuse for said outside party to invite the Tekrons to investigate.

“It’s not impossible, but it must believe the risk is worth it. I let it know that we know about it, that we have the power to remove it, and have chosen not to because of the associated risk of discovery or whatever retribution it would undertake. The likelihood of it being discovered if the drow were to start infiltrating...”

“Almost a certainty,” Duke Rimval said after a short pause, hypercalculating divinations going off. “Their necrotech rivals that of the Tekrons, and their science isn’t far off, just in a different direction. Adding in psi-senses on top of things, and it can’t hide from them like it can its kind.”

“Then we’ll go about establishing contact, as it really doesn’t have a choice at this point... except to leave. Its undead cover is pretty damn solid, but it won’t fool the drow. The best thing to do is keep them as far away as possible by as obfuscated a means as possible. It should have some recommendations to that effect.”

“The consolidation of the undergangs should give us some leeway to work with,” Briggs agreed. “Having more control over random elements is good stuff from its standpoint. While our actions might be attracting attention, they are diverting it at the same time with the stuff we are pulling off, none of which is related to it. As long as we don’t ask for tech, we should be good.”

------

The Xenos Incursion had pried off the lids of a bunch of nasty secrets, with a bit of (lot of) help from Ranthas. The necroic and axiomatic Events combined with Warp Incursions had revealed the massive infiltration into the undermafia families of all the human settlements. Further investigation of their vatting tech had revealed the corruption in them, and their leadership was completely subverted and wiped clean.

The undermafias themselves were badly shaken by the revelations of how they had basically been designed to be vulnerable to Warp possession, and indeed that very knowledge led to hundreds of scattered possessions that ended in messy violence.

As a result, all of the undermafia members had been rounded up and shipped offworld. None of them were spared, being sent off to the Urnkal Archipelago to fight against the goblins invading and investing the worlds there.

Their fate was to die fighting in the Empire’s service, or they were going to end up fighting in the service of the Warp.

Their officers were all young generation Ranthas and Briggs. Or rather, Themis-Ranthas, Skraeling-Briggs, and mixed Ranthas and Briggs of the other families.

They were Vatted members who had died in the fight against the Xenos while staying true, reborn as Ranthas and Briggs Brothers.

That was the destiny they could embrace: die in humanity’s service, and be reborn without the threat of the Warp hanging over their head, and able to fight back against it.

The Trika, the Sweiss, the Steiners, and the others all had kin reborn as Hagbloods. It would take time, but they weren’t going to heaven... what they were coming back as was right with them already.

Their performance in the Urnkal War so far had been outstanding. They were already skilled fighters, technologically savvy, and once they pooled their efforts instead of shooting one another, they were actually extremely good at their jobs. Being Marked and commanded by Hagbloods was truly useful, of course, and the fame of the Janus Underspire Army was only rising.

It was also spreading Ranthas and Briggs Brothers to ever more locations. Knowing nothing else, but seeing their raw ability, there were more and more generals wondering if there weren’t more of these incredible fighters from Janus running around they could recruit...

Every four months, ten thousand new Hagbloods were quietly moving into the Warp Zone to get blooded and eliminate the last vestiges of the Warped there, so the Zone could finally be extinguished. The areas they had cleared were growing rapidly, but there was a lot of land to cover, so they weren’t done yet...

They didn’t come out until they were Sixes, spreading out among the surviving human cities, beginning the process of building up their civilian followings, or pursuing other careers. But they were shaking the foundations of Janus III, as those who occupied the upper reaches of society found these newcomer gene-twists implacable, monstrously talented, coordinated, and with a far larger amount of support than any of them thought possible...