Conquering Wyrm 1 (Worm/GEOM Commission) (Patreon)

Dealing with shit like this was rather tiresome sometimes, I mused to myself as with a twist of my wrist I popped open the locker, just as the screams within were reaching the highest pitch. The crowbar in my left hand, the teeth hooked into the gap next to the padlock, pulled the door open, while my right arm reached out and caught the shivering, shaking, and filthy girl who fell out.

Honestly, the only thing even remotely strainful about this was how long I’d had to keep the muscles in my neck tense. When the Queen Bitch’s attack dog had tried to keep me from approaching the locker, she’d started by standing in front of me. When I kept walking, she moved out of the way and instead grabbed onto my arm. When I moved like she weighed nothing to me, she instead used my arm as a fulcrum to swing her legs up and wrap them around my neck in a somewhat decent chokehold.

It was about as effective as her earlier attempts, and Hess was practically bending herself in half trying to apply more force on my neck in her attempt to cut off the flow of blood to my brain. As such, I gave it as much consideration as I did the rest of her efforts in stopping me. That is to say, none at all.

She wasn't worth the effort of actually countering or even acknowledging, really. In the end, when I pulled Hebert out of the locker filled with rotting filth, she was still clinging to my neck, her legs wrapped around my head and her crotch pressed into my shoulder. Which was how I could feel the fact that she was packing a bit extra downstairs.

Certainly not something I'd been expecting, but neither was it my primary focus at the moment. Getting Hebert to the front of the school to be picked up by the EMTs I called before grabbing the crowbar was.

Hess didn’t last much longer after that, her grip going slack as the sound of the EMTs arriving made her lose her nerve and flee. After that, it was mostly a matter of getting Hebert to the ambulance and then watching her be carried off. I let out a sigh, before turning around to deal with the ensuing bullshit that was Winslow's attempt at discipline.

The usual kind of bullshit, browbeating the ones who don’t immediately bare their bellies to the ones who throw their weight around, was a lot less effective when I was the tallest person in the school by more than a foot and had to bend down just to squeeze through each and every doorway. On top of all that, it had fairly recently come out that my “European uncle” had passed away recently and willed his fortune to me.

No such uncle existed, but it was the reason the ROB that brought me to this world had created to explain why a rich white kid was in this shithole of a school instead of Arcadia. The fact that the news spread before I got said money, as in I hadn’t yet seen so much as a single penny, just made my current living situation all the more annoying.

“So, Peej,” a familiar voice spoke up to my left as I reentered Winslow. I halfheartedly swatted her way, and Aisha ducked around behind me. “Alright, alright, Big Pete. Ya know ya kicked over a fuckin’ hornet’s nest, right?”

I didn’t answer, just grunting as I continued on my way. But Aisha hopped onto my back like a demented monkey. Before I could decide whether to answer her or pry her off like an attention starved barnacle with parental issues, another person stepped in my way. This one I couldn’t shove away as believably as I could with Hess.

I outmassed the linebacker who was almost certainly a recruit for the Empire Eighty Eight, and that was ignoring the fact that I could bench press a Ford pickup truck, along with a bunch of other psychic bullshit. But he was big enough that unless I wanted to out myself as having powers, I couldn’t just walk through him and force him to get out of my way.

“Peter, right? Saw the tail end of whatcha did. Nicely done,” the linebacker whose name I hadn’t bothered remembering said. “Especially the part with Hess.”

I just rolled my eyes and gave him a piercing stare, “I know where this is going. You’re probing me to find out how I feel about the Empire’s stance on ethnicities. I don’t give a fuck one way or another. But I suppose a better way to put it…”

Stepping up right in front of him so that I loomed over him, my seven and a half foot frame making the linebacker seem tiny in comparison, “Would be five little words: fuck around and find out. Now are you done wasting my time?”

He took the opening I’d given him, positively bolting down the hall. I felt Aisha climbing up my back and popping her head onto my shoulder. I was three feet taller than her, at least, thus making the fact that the linebacker hadn’t seen Aisha behind me something that I wouldn’t judge him for, just everything else about him.

“Y’know, I feel like that Hebert girl’s more your speed, so I think I’ll try to use some more fancy schmancy talk for this,” Aisha began, wrapping her legs around as much of my torso as she could and resting her arms on my shoulder. Clearing her throat, in a faux, posh British accent she said, “I feel only the hot rush of a dangerous weapon, pointed at one that hast vexed me so, when thoust informs them to test the assumptions of thine patience at their discretion. In the crude vernacular, to ‘coitus and investigate.’”

My current position and the fact that Aisha ducked behind me kept me from looking at her. I was going to ask what the hell she thought British people talked like, when she licked the back of my neck and in her normal voice declared, “If you ever become a supervillain, I suggest Brick for your cape name, and I call dibs on being your first henchman.”

She hopped off my back, but by the time I turned around she’d already run off one of the branching halls. If I couldn’t tell from the feel of her mind, I’d wonder if she had already Triggered, but no, she was just very quick and sneaky naturally.

“That girl,” I muttered to myself.

[hr][/hr]

Several hours later, I was at the hospital, with a guest sticker on my jacket that looked comically tiny on my frame. I was here to see Taylor, and the only reason I was allowed was because one of the paramedics who’d picked up Taylor from Winslow was passing through and recognized me.

I was here for a few reasons, the majority of them could at best be described as ‘enlightened self interest’. My powers were kinda screwy: I could tell that I had something like the God Emperor of Man from Warhammer 40,000 but on a much, much more limited scale. I didn’t have nearly the strength, durability, or psychic might that he had, but from what I’d read, it was still enough to make me a major player among the cape scene.

However, by the time lunch had rolled around, I’d noticed something: my powers had gotten better. Previously I’d have to focus for a full minute in order to hear someone’s thoughts, but I’d done so in only a few seconds (about six if I had to guess) when I’d noticed Hess’s constant staring in the halls.

Her thoughts were all centered around wondering why I’d bother with someone like Taylor Hebert, but the fact that what I’d done had resulted in my powers growing led me here, visiting Taylor, to see if I could leverage this. My current plan to do so? Biomancy.

Biomancy being the catch-all term used in Warhammer 40,000 to refer to psychic powers that affected living things. Such as healing. Healing the damage that Emma and Sophia had done, as well as removing the scars, would be a small thing to do, and hopefully would result in some improvement to my powers.

Squeezing through the door to the room that Taylor was resting in, I took a moment. Just staring at the girl sleeping in the hospital bed. She looked… fragile, like a piece of porcelain that had been cracked so badly that with the barest touch and it would shatter.

I didn’t trust any of the chairs in the room to fit me, so instead I got down on one knee next to Taylor’s bed, pushing aside the bafflement and disgust I felt towards Barnes and Hess for doing something this vile to someone that had done them no ill. Forcing aside all other distractions alongside the emotions, I focused, teasing out psychic power and shaping it to my will.

Directing the healing energy into Taylor, I found myself quoting an old poem, “Out, out are the lights, out all. And, over each quivering form; the curtain, the funeral pall; comes down with the rush of a storm; while the angels, all pallid and wan; uprising, unveiling, affirm.”

A hand on the small of my back nearly made me jump out of my skin. The healing wasn’t quite finished, so I did my best to focus on that, even as a woman’s voice said, “‘Man’, by Edgar Allen Poe. I must ask, what are your intentions towards my daughter, Conqueror Worm?”

I didn’t answer, not immediately. Only once I cut off the flow of psychic power into Taylor, her complexion vastly improved, did I stand up and turn around. Even without her words, there was no mistaking the woman as anyone but Taylor’s mother. She was tall for a normal woman, coming up to roughly mid-shoulder blade on me, with long, burly brown hair that matched her daughter’s own.

Meeting her gaze, I glowered down at her. While the God Emperor of Man would light a beacon that would cut through the roiling chaos of the Warp across an entire galaxy, at the point I was at, it was all I could do to keep from showing just how much the healing I’d just done had exhausted me. My head felt like a ten-pound bowling ball bouncing on a string, and it was only sheer determination and a desire to not look weak in front of someone like Annette Hebert that kept me on my feet.

Finally, I spoke, in a low tone, not quite a growl, but close enough, “If there is something you want from me, Mrs. Hebert, I would ask that you simply say so. I deal with enough double talk in my home life, I have no desire to deal with it any more than necessary.”

She looked me up and down, her amber-green eyes looking for something behind her glasses, before she mused, “This really isn’t the best place for this conversation, and I do owe you for helping Taylor…”

Stepping around me, she checked on Taylor, muttering something about Taylor being kept overnight, before nodding to herself and turning back to face me. Looking over the rim of her glasses, she said, “You are at the very least getting dinner for helping Taylor, young man. We can discuss anything further then.”

So I was going to be blackmailed over dinner instead of in a hospital room. Well if fanon was anything to go by, hopefully it’d be a really good lasagna. Either way, I wasn’t looking forward to it, particularly the ride. I’m seven and a half feet tall, there’s no way that whatever university professor’s car would be even remotely comfortable, if I could even fit inside.

[hr][/hr]

I did not blush in embarrassment as I sat in the truck. I am a nascent god emperor, and nascent god emperors do not get embarrassed. Even if it was obvious in retrospect that the widow of a blue collar worker would have a pickup. And if it was equally obvious that she’d be expecting to drive home her daughter who would almost certainly be on some kind of drugs that would result in her being splayed out.

The neighborhood wasn’t the most well off, but it was better than where I had been staying. I didn’t say anything as the truck was turned off, taking note of the overgrown lawn and other elements of disrepair. A frown spread across my face, even as I followed the woman up the front steps, taking note of one that was composed of wood that was badly rotten.

It wasn’t my place to fix the house or the yard, but I was feeling the gremlins in my head screaming at the state of disrepair. I don’t know why, but I had the impression that the gremlins were all wearing rust red robes.

“Make yourself at home,” she said as she entered the house, pulling me from my distraction.

I just grunted, maneuvering myself through the doorway six inches shorter than I was. Closing the door behind me, I paused as Annette Hebert’s hand went to my stomach, just above my pants, with the tied rope I used as a belt. Stepping closer to me, she looked up at my face, her hand beginning to roam across my front.

“I could use a man around the house, and if your homelife is as bad as you say, you are more than welcome to stay here for a while,” she said, her voice carrying a particularly husky note to it.

…what does it say I was more tempted by the idea of not sleeping in a cardboard box than the blatant flirting?