The Heart of the Forge was hurled out of the depths of the Warp along with its violently surging tides.
Once the scar across the universe came clearly into view again, the giant ship seized its chance and used its Warp Engine to tear through the veil of the universe.
The ceaseless Warp tides immediately flung the enormous intruder from realspace back out.
The moment the Heart of the Forge returned to reality, its Quantum Data system began synchronizing data.
Meanwhile, Iax's main body, which had remained in reality all along, looked through the information recorded by his subsidiary consciousness with some puzzlement.
The anomalies were obvious enough that even he could spot them.
Still, Iax did not doubt the soundness of his subsidiary consciousness's judgment.
After all, they had been one and the same before entering the Warp.
In fact, nearly two months had passed between the Heart of the Forge entering the Warp and its return to realspace.
While pursuing the Ork battle planet, it should have left and reentered the Warp Route every six hours to adjust its heading and follow the spatial trail.
Instead, the Heart of the Forge had vanished completely after plunging into the Warp.
After twelve hours had passed, Iax dispatched several standard fleets into the Warp to search along its original course.
Yet the situation proved exceedingly strange.
The Warp tides stirred up after Gork and Mork sent the Heart of the Forge flying had been immense, and Tzeentch's foul sorcery had further muddled the traces within the Warp. The shattered daemon souls of the Daemonette Host and Slaanesh's own shrieks had turned the Warp in that region into a multicolored slurry.
All traces of the Heart of the Forge had disappeared amid that chaos.
Iax's main consciousness had worried about the