M39.026
The Warp trembled.
Not rippled. Not shifted. Not churned in rage.
It trembled—as though something vast and ancient had stirred beneath its surface, too terrible to name, too immense to comprehend. Across the Immaterium, a strange stillness unfurled. Not peace. Something worse. Something empty.
The Chaos Gods paused.
In the realm of madness, where emotions swirl like storm clouds and reality bends like molten wax, such stillness was a blasphemy. Something was happening that even the Gods could not predict. No warp storm heralded its arrival. No prophet screamed its name. No cult dared whisper its truth.
Far from the thrones of the Great Powers, a daemon-seer hung suspended above a pool of screaming light. Its six eyes twitched in rhythm, tongues babbling layered truths. It had peered across eternity, seen futures bloom and die, seen entire timelines devoured by the whims of the four.
But now—nothing.
The pool turned black. No visions. No timelines. No echoes of possible tomorrows.
Only non-being.
Its body convulsed. Eyes boiled. Tongues went still. In a voice not its own, it muttered:
"It is coming."
Then, without sound or fury, the daemon ceased to be. Not slain. Not banished.
Erased.
The ripples spread. Warp currents slowed. Daemon hosts fell silent. Even the great screaming tides that fed the Four grew still, like lungs held in fearful breath.
Khorne's fortress, a continent of skulls and fire, rumbled. The Blood God stood, iron hand clenched around the hilt of his axe. No enemy presented itself. No challenge, no war cry, no scent of blood.
Only an absence.
He growled low, like a beast sensing a predator it could not see.
Tzeentch twitched atop his morphing throne, eyes shifting in maddening geometries. He watched the future collapse into a single vanishing point—a line of fate that ended in nothingness. No schemes unfolded beyond it. No branches extended. Only a dead end.
That terrified him.
In Grandfather Nurgle's garden, the flies fell dead mid-flight. The rot ceased to bubble. His cauldron cracked in silence. No new disease. No joyous decay.
No cycle.
Only finality.
Slaanesh stirred upon silken waves. Their eyes narrowed as they sensed not silence, but lack. No craving. No desire. No temptation. Nothing to seduce.
And for the first time in eternity, the Dark Prince of Excess felt bored.
Without summons, the champions began to arrive.
Joker appeared first, as if gravity had forgotten him. One step, two steps, then a somersault into the void. He landed with a chuckle, shoes skidding on nothingness.
"Well, well, well. What's the fun in a room full of gods if everyone looks like they've seen a ghost?" he quipped, spinning a warp-born cane in his hand. "Or maybe... something worse?"
He sniffed the air. Felt nothing. No madness. No music. No madness-induced melody to dance to.
He laughed—but not in delight. It was nervous. Hysterical.
Because something was very wrong.
Then came Darth Vader, cloak trailing behind like a shadow with purpose. He didn't kneel. But he did pause, sensing the same unease in the Force he had not felt since Mustafar—the moment before everything burned.
"This is not the Warp I know," he said through his vocoder. "Something ancient stirs. Older than chaos. It does not breathe. It does not think. It waits."
His saber clicked to life out of instinct.
Hisoka arrived with a lazy strut, fingers twirling a card of shimmering red. His eyes, half-lidded, gleamed with something between amusement and hunger.
"I came chasing a new toy," he said softly, voice almost musical. "But this? This is... flavorless. No thrill. No pulse."
He licked his lips.
"That only makes me want it more."
Griffith floated next, alabaster and composed, as if untouched by the turmoil around him. His gaze flicked toward the Gods, and then outward, beyond them.
"There's no desire in this thing," he said quietly. "That is what makes it dangerous. No ambition. No hatred. No hunger. Nothing to negotiate with."
He closed his eyes. "It simply is."
And last came Shao Kahn, dragging his warhammer behind him like a scepter of extinction. Flames clung to his armor, his jaw clenched tight.
"Something dared touch my realm," he spat. "But left no challenge. No mark. No war."
He slammed his hammer down.
"I will find it. And crush it."
They stood in a circle now, these champions—warriors, monsters, gods-in-the-making. They looked at each other not as allies, not as rivals, but as bearers of the same question.
What has shaken the Warp itself?
None spoke the name. Because there was no name. It had no signature. No warp trace. No psychic echo. No scream.
Just the feeling.
A shape, vast and waiting, behind the curtain of unreality.
Not Chaos. Not Order.
Not hunger, rage, decay, or desire.
Only...
Oblivion.
And somewhere, in a place no map reached, something blinked open an eye not made for seeing. It did not think. It did not feel.
It simply became aware that it had been noticed.
The Warp trembled again.
And this time, it wasn't alone.
The Maelstrom churned, a vortex of screaming colours and gnashing realities at the edge of the galaxy, but even here a tremor ran through the raw stuff of the Warp.
In the Great Game—where realms of bone rose on tides of rage and seas of blood boiled with despair—such tremors were common. Yet this was different. It began as a subtle eddy, imperceptible to even the keenest daemonettes, yet profoundly wrong. Not a surge of fury, the groan of decay, the shiver of paradox, or the gasp of excess. It was… alien. A discordant note of calm and order in the symphony of Chaos.
Deep within a pocket dimension that defied description, Xy'rathus, the Oracle of the Unseen, convulsed. A daemon-seer forged by Tzeentch to parse truths from lies, it had glimpsed futures in fractal storms—yet these visions were impossibly clear. They were sharp edges in the blur of probability, solid shapes in the flux.
Across the chaotic expanse, the Four Powers stirred in their impossible domains.
Khorne seated upon his throne of skulls felt a disciplined stillness that chilled him.
Nurgle in his bubbling gardens sensed a vitality that refused to decay.
Tzeentch discovered his intricate schemes collapsing into inscrutable nothingness.
Slaanesh, drowning in ecstasy, recoiled from a purity beyond corruption.
They reached out—not with war cries or pestilential whispers, but with hesitant probes of raw power—toward their greatest champions.
---
Darth Vader knelt atop a mountain of corpses in Khorne's realm, his lightsaber humming with warp-stained energy. The tremor caught him mid-breath. He saw a fleeting vision of a calm, arrow-marked youth commanding air and water, untouched by hatred or fear. Aang. Even Vader's scarred lungs tightened at the certainty: this presence must be broken.
---
In Slaanesh's chasmic court, Hisoka juggled orbs of distilled desire. The tremor rippled through his aura, a jolt of cleanliness. He glimpsed a fiery-haired swordsman—Tanjiro—fighting not for power but for love. Such purity was a masterpiece waiting to be shattered.
---
Upon his obsidian throne in Khorne's domain, Shao Kahn felt the ground tremble underfoot. A disciplined calm, a silent force of unbreakable will, brushed past him—a figure in simple garb wielding a katana with god-like precision. Samurai Jack. The notion of a warrior so utterly focused enraged him.
---
Griffith, floating in his realm of perfected sacrifice, felt the tremor as a ghost of defiance. A golden knight, radiant and resolute, haunted his mind—a judge of his own shattered dreams. Artoria Pendragon. The memory of lost ideals stirred something long thought slain.
---
In Nurgle's garden of rot, the Witch-king of Angmar hovered, mist clinging to his form. He sensed not decay but a purifying storm—a hunter of damnation itself—preying upon the unholy. Alucard. The wraith recoiled at the thought of a predator who feasted on darkness alone.
---
And Dr. Henry Wu, his clinical mind honed by Tzeentch's curiosity and Nurgle's patience, stood amid swirling plagues. The tremor translated into data—impossible alchemical sequences restoring life, erasing decay. Edward Elric. Science itself rebelled at this anomaly.
---
The tremor peaked in the maelstrom, a single note of perfect, unyielding stillness. Reality itself recoiled. Even the Warp dared not claim this space.
For the first time in uncounted millennia, the Chaos Gods felt true dread—not the fear of enemy armies, but the existential terror of erasure. An enemy born neither of flesh nor of passion, but of balance, order, and absolute will.
Amid the thunderous silence, Tzeentch's cloak of shifting hues snapped tight. "We must act," he rasped, voice fracturing the void. "These anomalies defy our gods. Let us… distract them."
"Feed them stories," hissed Slaanesh. "Corrupt their purity."
"Let them stain the battlefield with blood," roared Khorne, "so they cannot claim empty victory."
Nurgle chuckled, a bubbling growl: "Let them sprout rot—and we shall feast."
Their champions—Joker, Vader, Hisoka, Shao Kahn, Griffith, Witch-king, Wu, and the Lord of Kings himself—would fan out across the galaxies to hunt these strangers, to challenge this balance.
But somewhere, beyond mortal sight and warrior's reach, the true threat waited—unchallenged, untainted, unforgotten.
And the hunt had just begun.