Warhammer, Ahhhhhhh!

(It was a draft written by the Grey Knights of the Adeptus Custodes.)

(Loyal!!)

Let me see who dares not be loyal.

************

"—!"

A chaotic burst of rapid footsteps rang out from the dark cave.

A group of strange, twisted, vaguely humanoid shadows ran and flickered through the darkness, chasing the figure fleeing ahead in a panic. Their screams were mad, warped, and ecstatic.

"He got away—!"

"Catch him—!!!"

"Offer him to the Master—!!!"

Behind them, several figures in dark-red cloaks were also rapidly pursuing the fleeing figure ahead.

Lin En fled in disarray.

The ground beneath his feet was made of uneven rocks in the mountain cave.

He stepped into empty air and tripped over a hole, banging his knee against the ground. The pain made him bare his teeth.

But he did not stop. He quickly scrambled back up and kept running.

Run. Run. Run.

He had seen these things while playing games.

On the screen, he had thought their designs were incredibly imaginative and their artwork astonishing.

Now he was really seeing them.

He did not want to think they were impressive at all!!!

Chaos.

Heresy.

The Warp.

Chaos Spawn.

Ahhhhhhh, this was Warhammer—!!!!!!!

Joking about it was fine in ordinary circumstances, but if someone really transmigrated into Warhammer, who would not scream?

Run.

Run faster.

He could not let them catch him. If they did, he would die.

He turned a corner, and three paths appeared ahead.

There was no time to hesitate. He chose the narrowest one and squeezed inside sideways.

The stone wall scraped against his shoulders and back.

His coat was torn, but he had no time to care. He desperately forced his way farther in.

There was a crack at the bottom of the stone wall. It was not large, but just wide enough for one person to crawl through sideways.

Without a word, Lin En lunged toward it and ducked inside.

The stone wall caught on his backside. He twisted hard twice and finally squeezed through.

Inside was a small cave, large enough for him to hide in.

The footsteps behind him drew closer and closer, accompanied by those scalp-prickling, low murmurs.

He leaned against the stone wall, covered his mouth, and desperately suppressed the sound of his breathing.

The footsteps reached the crack outside.

Someone said, "He's gone..."

"There's a hole over here—"

"Can't get through. It's too narrow."

"He couldn't have gone far. Search."

Something came toward the crack.

Lin En pressed himself against the far side of the rock wall and covered his mouth and nose more tightly with trembling hands.

Footsteps sounded outside.

The sound was like wet hooves stepping on stone.

A dull, rotten, sticky thud.

One step, two, three. They stopped at the mouth of the crack, stirring up a breeze carrying the stench of decay.

He held his breath.

The thing seemed to push its nose inside.

It stopped right in front of him, separated by a stone fissure less than half a meter thick.

Lin En smelled the rotting flesh and singed fur seeping in through the crack, along with some indescribably sweet, bloody odor, like spoiled meat left out in summer.

He closed his eyes.

Don't move. Don't make a sound. Don't breathe.

Then he heard an inhalation.

Very slow. Very long. Wet.

It sounded as if liquid were churning inside a windpipe.

The thing was sniffing for him.

Lin En heard his own heartbeat pounding. It was too loud, too noisy. He fought desperately to endure it, until only one thought remained in his mind:

Don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move, don't move—

The thing stopped for several seconds—or perhaps several minutes. Lin En could not tell. In any case, after an unknowable amount of time, its head withdrew.

Then the hoof lifted again. Once, twice, three times, it gradually moved away.

Lin En waited until the sound had completely vanished, then waited much longer before daring to lower the hand covering his mouth.

He collapsed onto the ground, pressing his back tightly against the cold stone wall.

Sweat covered his head, face, and body, soaking his clothes through.

He really wanted to cry.

As an ordinary college student who had played several Warhammer games, he still knew the basic setting of the Warhammer universe.

The forty-first millennium.

The galaxy.

Only war.

No hope.

The Imperium of Man was barely holding on. Chaos Daemons lurked hungrily in the Warp. Aliens were everywhere, and every one of them wanted to kill you, while all you had was a flashlight.

"Flashlight" was a joke among players. It meant that the Imperial Guard's lasguns were so weak they were about as useful as flashlights.

Yesterday, he had still been playing games in his dormitory.

Back then, his biggest worries had been that he still had three final exams to prepare for and that the hotpot he had planned with his roommates had never happened because someone kept working overtime.

He remembered lying on his bed and scrolling through short videos when he came across a Warhammer female-recruitment video. The comments below were all over the place, with everyone making jokes.

Some people were loyal. Some called for the Inquisition.

Offering their loyalty to the Emperor.

Everyone claimed to be loyal, but when asked, no one was willing to go.

He had laughed at the time.

Now he could not laugh, because he had come without anyone even asking him.

Couldn't you at least ask whether I was willing to come? What is this, forced purchasing and forced selling?????

Lin En slowly sat up.

The crack was very narrow. Fortunately, the monsters in Warhammer were often two and a half meters tall, so they could not get in.

The ridges in the rock wall dug painfully into him.

This was the deepest hiding place he had been able to find. The passage outside happened to turn a corner, making this a blind spot from outside.

He raised his right hand and felt around inside his pocket in the darkness.

His phone was gone. He might have dropped it while running, or it might have disappeared when he transmigrated.

All that remained in his pocket was a crumpled wad of tissues and half a packet of unfinished Skittles—

Damn, I really transmigrated in person.

Let him tell everyone about something more terrifying than transmigrating into Warhammer.

He had transmigrated in person.

In a completely ordinary mortal body, no less.

He felt he might be the unluckiest person in the world.

He had woken up inside a cave.

He had not been given any transition period. There had been no white light, no system notification, and no transmigration gift package. One moment he had been turning over in bed, and the next, cold stone had been pressing against his face.

He opened his eyes and saw complete darkness.

His first reaction was that he was dreaming. He turned over, hit his head against the rock wall, and saw stars from the pain.

The shock jolted him fully awake.

Dreams usually did not hurt this much.

He reached out and touched rough, cold stone.

There probably were not things like this in his university dormitory.

He began to panic.

He stood up, hit his head against the rock above him, and crouched down again in pain.

Crouching on the ground, he groped wildly through the darkness with both hands.

His phone was gone. Apart from stone, all he touched was more stone. The air carried the damp, moldy smell of underground earth and an indescribable mineral scent.

?????

What was going on?

"Is anyone there?" he shouted.

His voice bounced around the cave several times, eventually becoming a string of muffled echoes before vanishing.

No one answered.

Judging from the echo, he seemed to be inside a massive underground cavern.

Staying there was not an option, so he began feeling his way forward in the darkness.

The ceiling was very low. He crouched and shuffled forward little by little, one hand against the rock wall beside him, until he finally left the cramped cave.

Outside the cave was an even larger cavern.

But that did not matter. He knew that in an invisible maze like this, the best method was to keep one hand against a wall. No matter how long he went around, he would eventually find his way out.

He did not know how long he had been walking.

When he stopped to rest for what was probably the third time, he noticed light ahead.

It was a flickering red glow, perhaps from torches or lamps.

Lin En's heart gave a sudden leap, followed by overwhelming joy.

Someone.

There was someone in this godforsaken place!!! This was wonderful!!!

He instinctively quickened his pace toward the people. He was already arranging his words in his head: Hello, I'm lost. Could you tell me where this is? Are we still on Earth—

But when he reached the cave entrance, he saw what was inside before he could say a word.

The light really did come from torches.

One torch was held by a person wearing a dark-red robe. A hood concealed most of the person's face, leaving only a chin marked with black patterns—like tattoos, or perhaps scars from scorched flames.

The person held a knife. Dark-red, half-congealed liquid dripped slowly from its blade.

That person was not alone. Several others stood nearby in similar robes, forming a circle around something.

Lin En shifted his gaze to the thing they surrounded.

Then he saw it clearly.

It was a corpse.

It looked like a short man, nailed to the ground with his limbs spread wide. His chest had been opened, his insides torn out and arranged into a pattern on the stone altar.

The pattern writhed in the torchlight.

It was moving. It really was moving. It was supposed to be moving.

Several vaguely humanoid things with twisted limbs flickered nearby, vanishing and reappearing again and again.

Lin En's mind processed the information at lightning speed, and the first name that appeared was: Chaos Spawn.

His stomach lurched violently.

His hands began to tremble.

Then one of the robed figures raised its head.

Beneath the hood, those eyes stared at him.

They were strange. Extremely strange.

The pupils were vertical, like a snake's, while the whites were covered in blood vessels that moved like living things.

"There's another one," the person said.

"..."

The word Chaos cultist suddenly leaped into his mind.

Cultists. Warhammer. Followers of the Dark Gods.

"--!!!!!!!"

Lin En's expression changed drastically. Without hesitation, he turned and ran. He had never run so fast in his life.

He had taken five minutes to run a thousand meters in a physical education exam and been cursed out by his teacher for half a class. Now, he felt like he might have broken the world record.

Screams came from behind him. They weren't sounds a human could make at all, and they made his scalp crawl.

What the hell was that?

Warhammer 40,000!!!!!!!!

Aaaaaaaah!!!!!!

Lin En screamed even louder than the monsters behind him.

Oh heavens, why was he in Warhammer 40,000? And why had he appeared surrounded by a bunch of Chaos cultists? Aaaaaaaah! Emperor, save me! Where the hell was my cheat?! Where were you?!

Background information:

Warhammer veterans can skip this. I'll give newcomers a rough overview of the setting.

This is a sci-fi setting. The "k" means thousand. We're currently in the year 2000, while Warhammer 40,000 takes place in the forty-thousandth year.

Over the course of thirty thousand years, humanity went through highly advanced technology, the Men of Iron Rebellion, renewed division, civilizational decline, the Warp invading reality, and all sorts of other chaos. After that, the Emperor reunified humanity and built the Astronomican, gathering the Imperium of Man back together.

The Warp can be viewed as an inverted world, or as the inside of a wormhole. Interstellar travel is possible through the Warp, but it's extremely dangerous, because the Warp is filled with Chaos Daemons and Warp Storms.

Unknown biological emotions, feelings, souls, and other things flowed into the Warp. Four inherent flaws gathered within Chaos and produced four evil gods: Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle, and Slaanesh. The four evil gods and Chaos are collectively known as the Chaos faction.

Using his genes and mysterious technology, the Emperor created twenty Primarchs. You could think of them as twenty superhuman leaders, each commanding a superhuman legion.

In 30k, the Chaos faction corrupted Horus, the Primarch who commanded humanity at the time. Nine Primarchs and their legions defected to the Chaos faction.

At that time, the Emperor was carrying out the Webway Project. The Webway was another kind of hyperspace network built outside the Warp.

If the Webway Project succeeded, humanity would no longer need to travel through the Warp. They could stay away from Chaos and Warp Storms, and humanity would be safe.

The Primarch Magnus wanted to report Horus's betrayal to the Emperor, but Tzeentch manipulated him. Magnus accidentally shattered the Emperor's Golden Throne, creating a breach between the Warp beneath the throne and the Webway. If left unchecked, the Warp would swallow Terra. The Emperor had to sit on the throne to suppress it, leaving him trapped there and unable to rise.

The rebels laid siege to the Imperial Palace. The Primarch Archangel Sanguinius was killed by the traitor Horus.

The Emperor's second-in-command, Malcador, temporarily took the Emperor's place and sat upon the Golden Throne to suppress the breach. But he was never the Emperor, and he was drained dry. Enduring his grief, the Emperor teleported to Horus's flagship and faced Horus, who had become the vessel of the four gods.

At the time, Horus wielded power infused by all four gods. The Emperor defeated and annihilated him, but he was also gravely wounded and left on the brink of death.

The Emperor returned to the Imperial Palace and, reduced to a withered skeleton, sat upon the Golden Throne once more. Half-dead, he continued suppressing the breach and fueling the Astronomican.

The Webway Project failed.

The Imperium of Man shifted toward extreme rule.

By 40k, after the Emperor's consciousness had remained in the Warp for ten thousand years, he had nearly become a god and could no longer rise from the Golden Throne.

He now relied on the Golden Throne to preserve his humanity, suppress the breach, and fuel the Astronomican. The moment he rose, the Imperium of Man would splinter, and his divinity would overwhelm his humanity. The one who stood up might no longer be the Emperor, but a fifth evil god: the God of Order, or the Tyrant.

So the current situation is this: the Imperium of Man relies on Space Marines—the Adeptus Astartes—Imperial Guard—the mortal armies of the Astra Militarum—the Inquisition, the Ecclesiarchy, and Battle Sisters—the all-female military order of the Ecclesiarchy—to resist the Chaos faction and other species, including the Aeldari, Necrons, T'au, and Orks, as well as the Tyranids.

Everyone says that the Imperium of Man in Warhammer is a dark and rotten regime, but I think it's actually not that bad. Setting aside the people who are genuinely evil, it's an Imperium of Man staking everything to guarantee humanity's survival.

Let me make this clear in advance: this novel is staunchly loyalist. If you aren't, you can stop reading here.

Once the Emperor stands up, he'll deliver a thunderous smackdown and shatter your dreams of rebellion.