Chapter Summaries

Boss Slick entered the Garden of Nurgle to kill Slaanesh, who first underestimated him and was knocked down by a single hammer blow. Slaanesh then turned serious and pierced Boss Slick with a spike, ending the chapter as the two continued their fight.

• Boss Slick stepped onto the path of light and descended into the Garden of Nurgle, where Vashtorr withdrew after helping Nurgle fight Slaanesh.
• Nurgle exploded into filth that reinforced the battlefield and made escape difficult, while Slaanesh looked into the future and saw a deity resembling Slaanesh ruling the Galaxy for the next thousand years.
• Slaanesh attacked Boss Slick with dozens of blades, but Boss Slick struck Slaanesh with his hammer and shattered Slaanesh's body.
• Slaanesh melted into the ground, spread darkness across the battlefield, and impaled Boss Slick with a powerful black spike.
• Boss Slick snapped the first spike and shattered most of Slaanesh's next volley with his hammer, but another spike pierced through his chest before he could break it.

Boss Slick battled Slaanesh, using the Blood God's buff and the Crone Swords to wound the Chaos God despite being struck by weapons that embodied extreme desires. Slaanesh trapped Boss Slick in the Realm of Delights while trying to remove the Crone Swords and heal.

• Boss Slick shattered Slaanesh's black realm and struck its eyes with his hammer, then explained that the Blood God's buff had helped him find Slaanesh's weakness.
• Slaanesh formed six swords embodying extreme emotions, and Boss Slick fought them with four Crone Swords as their blades clashed.
• Boss Slick and Slaanesh traded wounds, with Slaanesh's desire swords piercing Boss Slick and the Crone Swords embedding themselves in Slaanesh's spine.
• Slaanesh cocooned itself to heal and began removing the Crone Swords while the desire swords' influence left Boss Slick temporarily frozen.
• Boss Slick recovered and tried to smash Slaanesh's cocoon, but Slaanesh's Realm of Delights stretched the distance and cast Boss Slick into the extreme desires of beings across the galaxy.
• Slaanesh struggled to pull out the Crone Swords, which Boss Slick's hatred had driven deeper into its spine.

Boss Slick nearly killed Slaanesh with the Crone Swords, aided by Ork believers and awakened Aeldari souls, while Ynnead prepared to sacrifice the Aeldari to supply more souls. Slaanesh expelled the Aeldari souls and regained the advantage, leaving Boss Slick weakening as the battle continued.

• Boss Slick shattered Slaanesh's cocoon and beat Slaanesh, revealing that Gork and Mork had empowered him and that Ork believers had helped him destroy the Daemons in the Realm of Delights.
• Boss Slick tried to drive the final Crone Sword into Slaanesh, rejected Slaanesh's offers and pleas, and used awakened Aeldari souls to cancel Slaanesh's power.
• Boss Slick contacted Ynnead for more souls, and Ynnead ordered Yvraine to activate a plan that would sacrifice the Aeldari; Boss Slick also sent the Screw Clan after Aeldari settlements using coordinates supplied by Ynnead.
• Cegorach appeared to mock Slaanesh, who expelled the Aeldari souls to weaken Boss Slick's attack and sever the connection between Slaanesh's survival and the Aeldari.
• Slaanesh's power grew more concentrated, forcing Boss Slick's hand back and pushing the Crone Swords out, while Boss Slick's faith and Waaagh Energy dwindled.

Magnus used a reality-warping ritual to rewrite Kuka’s memories and divert the Greenskins’ faith from Boss Slick to Gork and Mork, hoping to weaken Boss Slick during his fight with Slaanesh. The ritual began to falter as Kuka started recovering his memories.

• Boss Slick remembered trading his chance to ascend to godhood for the possibility of killing gods, then slammed Slaanesh’s head into the ground, but Slaanesh insisted that gods were immortal.
• Magnus’s Thousand Sons captured Kuka after a costly battle against the Orks and began a ritual to alter reality.
• Magnus planned to change Kuka’s memories so that his preaching would credit Gork and Mork instead of Boss Slick, transferring the Greenskins’ faith and power away from Boss Slick.
• Magnus realized the ritual was changing unexpectedly as Kuka began to wake and remember his past.
• Kuka recalled being pulled from a pile of corpses and murmured, “Every Ork has his own mission...”

Kuka resisted Magnus’s ritual and unleashed a Waaagh-powered punch that killed Magnus and devastated the battlefield. On the battlefield of the gods, Boss Slick turned the tables on Slaanesh after his power returned, leaving his scimitar buried in Slaanesh’s chest.

• Magnus poured power into Kuka’s mind, but Kuka recalled Boss Slick’s words and resisted the ritual.
• Kuka drew on the Greenskins’ surging Waaagh! field and struck Magnus with a colossal green blast that destroyed Magnus, several warships, and the planet’s moon.
• The Greenskins hailed Boss Slick, while the leaderless Thousand Sons’ fleet fell into chaos.
• Slaanesh wounded Boss Slick and mocked his weakened state, but Boss Slick caught Slaanesh’s wrist when the god swung the scimitar.
• Boss Slick snapped Slaanesh’s wrist, seized the scimitar, and drove it through Slaanesh’s neck and into the chest.

Boss Slick killed Slaanesh with the five Crone Swords, fulfilling his wish that gods could die. Ynnead was born from Slaanesh’s corpse and devoured Aeldari across the Galaxy, leaving fewer than a hundred billion alive.

• Boss Slick struck Slaanesh down, pulled the Fifth Crone Sword from his abdomen, and pinned him with it.
• The five Crone Swords resonated and pierced Slaanesh, while Nurgle trapped his consciousness, Khorne seized his Battle Lust Divine Authority and Khaine’s Shard, and Tzeentch took Desire for Knowledge.
• Boss Slick drove the Ultimate Longsword through Slaanesh’s throat, and his wish that gods could die became a law of the universe.
• Ynnead emerged from Slaanesh’s corpse and consumed it, becoming the Aeldari god of death and a Chaos god.
• Ynnead devoured Aeldari across the Galaxy, including members of the Reaper Host, until fewer than a hundred billion remained.

The Aeldari gained energy-based bodies and a new form of immortality through Ynnead, though their future remained tied to a Chaos god. As Boss Slick underwent his final transcendence, Tzeentch recounted how he had manipulated events around him and accused him of rejecting godhood.

• Ynnead’s ascension allowed the Aeldari to survive without air or water, grow stronger, and return to Ynnead’s care for rebirth after death.
• The gods gathered their attention on Boss Slick, calming the Warp while he underwent transcendence.
• Tzeentch revealed that he had noticed Boss Slick as a mortal and tried to erase him by arranging enemies and trials, including Slaanesh and the Tyranids.
• Tzeentch said he had wanted to partner with Boss Slick, then pushed him toward godhood after Boss Slick rejected his offer.
• Tzeentch recounted arranging Boss Slick’s battle with Vashtorr and declared that Slaanesh’s death had also served his plans.

Tzeentch revealed that Boss Slick’s accumulated divine powers were forcing him toward godhood and the Chaos star, where he would become Tzeentch’s pawn. As Boss Slick neared the star and struggled to choose another fate, Gork and Mork appeared and held him back.

• Tzeentch explained that Boss Slick had absorbed power from Khorne, Vashtorr, Slaanesh, and Ynnead, and that the Chaos star was pulling him toward becoming a Chaos god.
• Tzeentch claimed Boss Slick could only choose which divine authority to take, since refusing to choose would cause his powers to fuse into a godhood of their own.
• Boss Slick’s consciousness was pulled between divine power drawing him upward and Greenskin faith drawing him toward becoming an Ork conceptual god, but the upward pull grew stronger.
• As Boss Slick neared the Chaos star, Gork and Mork manifested and grabbed him, urging him to keep thinking while they fought the star’s pull.

The Boss Slick tried to resist the Chaos Star’s pull by casting off the power of Khorne and Slaanesh, but Tzeentch replaced what he discarded. He then chose Preservation as his divine authority and began forging a divine throne, leaving its fortress and walls under construction.

• Gork and Mork struggled to hold the Boss Slick back from the Chaos Star as he searched for a way to avoid being drawn in.
• The Boss Slick cast off Khorne’s blessing and began removing Slaanesh’s fragments, but Tzeentch replenished his power and kept his ascent moving.
• The Boss Slick asked Tzeentch whether he had accounted for the power in his empty hands, then declared that he would take Preservation as his divine authority.
• The Boss Slick cast Khorne’s power into the first foundation stone of his divine throne and used steel and machinery to forge a fortress beneath it.
• The Boss Slick melted Slaanesh’s fragments into a protective wall and poured his divine authority of death into the throne’s construction.

Boss Slick completed his ascension ritual but shattered his Divine Throne instead of taking the seventh point of the Chaos Star, using its power to create a new god within his fortress. Tzeentch and Ynnead attacked the fortress, but its walls resisted them.

• Boss Slick focused his remaining Warp power on hope and completed the ascension ritual, while Tzeentch failed to understand his plan.
• The seventh point of the Chaos Star vanished, and Boss Slick's Divine Throne shattered; its power flowed into the fortress and began draining Tzeentch's authority over hope.
• Tzeentch realized that Boss Slick was creating a new god and attacked the fortress, while Khorne and Nurgle refused to help him.
• Vashtorr could not overcome Boss Slick's authority, but Ynnead joined Tzeentch and helped breach the fortress's outer walls.
• Tzeentch and Ynnead struck the fortress itself, but its sturdy masonry resisted their powers and forced Ynnead to hesitate.

Boss Slick sacrificed his power and consciousness to forge Hops, God of Hope, who took Slaanesh’s place and prevented Boss Slick from becoming a Chaos god. Hops’s birth transformed the Eye of Terror into a silver star, while Boss Slick remained protected in the Greenskins’ Waaagh! field, awaiting the slow return of his consciousness.

• Boss Slick forged a divine throne from Hols and his own Warp power, using Tzeentch’s authority over hope to bring Hops into godhood.
• Hops took Slaanesh’s place on the Chaos Star, while Boss Slick’s sacrifice shattered his soul and consciousness; Gork and Mork preserved him in the Greenskins’ Waaagh! field.
• Tzeentch lamented the tangled plans and vanished with his Crystal Maze, while Ynnead worried that the Orks would seek revenge once Boss Slick recovered.
• Hops’s birth erased much of Slaanesh’s influence and shrank the new Eye of Terror above Commorragh into a silver star.
• The Imperium imposed stricter curfews, forbidding mortals from looking at the sky or the silver star.

Two hundred years after Boss Slick killed Slaanesh, the Silver Star had inspired hope across the Imperium, while the T'au Empire and awakened artificial intelligences adapted to new Warp gods and upheavals. The chapter ended with a mysterious mechanical warship holding position near a neutron star.

• People who gazed at the Silver Star found hope and sometimes unlocked extraordinary powers, prompting the Inquisition to detain and investigate them.
• A Space Marine commander protected by hope defeated a Daemon Prince, but the Inquisition imprisoned him for investigation.
• The T'au Empire survived Forgefiend's AI forces after the Warp incarnation of the Greater Good intervened, and the Ethereals named the god T'au'va.
• The T'au reorganized their military around psychic member species, ideological officers, biological computing, and expanded equipment production.
• Awakened artificial intelligences formed a widespread regime and sought meaning as free beings rather than treating war with organics as their only purpose.
• A mechanical warship concealed itself at the edge of a neutron star's gravitational pull.

The United Council's machine factions debated how to deal with organic life and the Warp, agreeing only that they needed to unite against the galaxy's destruction. The Silent King used the Celestial Orrery to devastate the Tyranid vanguard and trigger supernovae across the Great Rift before he faded from existence.

• Representative Omega argued that machines and organic beings were both intelligent life and could cooperate, while Representative Mio proposed an empire that would protect organics as endangered wildlife.
• The Epsilon Faction called for exterminating organic beings to weaken the Warp, but the Theta Faction argued for coexistence and assimilation; the United Council warned the Theta representative against letting faith destabilize it.
• The factions agreed to set aside their differences, strengthen the United Council, and confront the crisis threatening the galaxy.
• The Celestial Orrery's power erased the Silent King and many Necron Technomancers from the world's knowledge, while the Silent King used it to destroy countless Tyranid fleets with supernovae.
• The Silent King swept his finger across the Great Rift, causing tens of thousands of stars to explode, and vanished as he reached the edge of the Nachmund Gauntlet.

The Storm King watched the supernovae made by the Silent King’s sacrifice and asked Afentis whether the Silent King’s plan had been right. Afentis challenged the plan as mere escape and began explaining a conjecture about their world, leaving the Storm King listening.

• The Storm King watched the supernova explosions and learned that the Dynasty fleets were assembled at the Singularity Gate.
• The Storm King asked Afentis whether the Silent King had been right to build the Doomsday Fortress from blackstone.
• The Storm King confronted Afentis over usurping the Sphinx Dynasty’s authority, but offered to pardon him if his opinion could help the Necrontyr.
• Afentis first defended the Silent King’s plan, then warned that it had shortcomings and described it as a means of escape rather than an act of wisdom or strength.
• Afentis said the Necrons could neither prove nor disprove that their world was false and began describing past experiments in which he made beings of different species and cultures compete and fight.

Trazyn persuaded the Storm King to attack the Solar System and disrupt the forces shaping their false world. Two centuries later, the Necrons had devastated Imperial territory, and Guilliman convened the High Lords on Holy Terra as the crisis reached Segmentum Solar.

• Afentis argued that the Necrons should create greater chaos by attacking the Solar System, despite the danger posed by humanity’s powerful Chaos God.
• The Storm King stopped the Phaerons from attacking Afentis and appointed him Chief Technomancer after Afentis revealed that he was Trazyn.
• Over the next two hundred years, most of the Necron fleet moved toward the Nachmund Gauntlet while the Storm King and Trazyn led an elite force toward the Solar System.
• The Necron force destroyed human worlds along its route and released imprisoned C'tan, worsening the Imperium’s collapse.
• As Segmentum Solar filled with war and refugees, Guilliman held an emergency meeting with the High Lords on Holy Terra.

Guilliman faced mounting threats across Segmentum Solar as Corax reported that the eastern front had stabilized and more Primarchs had returned. The news that Lion El'Jonson and Vulkan were back left Guilliman hopeful that his brothers would fight beside him again.

• Guilliman reviewed the spreading enemy forces threatening Terra and worried that the Imperium's defenses were failing.
• Corax appeared before Guilliman and explained that rivalries among the Men of Iron and Necrons had eased pressure on Imperial forces.
• Corax reported that the eastern theater had stabilized for now.
• Corax told Guilliman that Lion El'Jonson had returned with the Dark Angels and Blood Angels from Imperium Nihilus.
• Corax announced that Vulkan had resurrected and returned, and Guilliman felt hope that more of his brothers would join the fight.

Guilliman received the Emperor’s warning that an enormous Ork tide and Abaddon’s Fourteenth Black Crusade threatened Segmentum Solar and Terra. As Abaddon prepared his invasion and Rottooth learned that Guilliman awaited him, the Imperium faced attacks on multiple fronts.

• Guilliman saw visions of an Ork tide advancing toward Segmentum Solar and Abaddon’s fleet emerging near Terra, while a damaged fleet also appeared from the Great Rift.
• The Emperor dismissed Guilliman’s question about the damaged fleet, and Guilliman told Corax that Abaddon’s forces were approaching Terra.
• Guilliman ordered nearby Legions to gather for battle, and Corax scattered as ravens to summon reinforcements.
• Moriana told Abaddon that his fleet had reached the heart of Segmentum Solar with fifteen percent losses, and Abaddon ordered his warships to prepare to move toward the Solar System.
• Moriana described Abaddon’s vast fleet and allies as facing weak defenses on Terra, with Guilliman likely the only Primarch there.
• Rottooth learned that Guilliman was the Lord Regent of the humans and welcomed the prospect of a great Waaagh.

Rottooth paid Rambo with one of Boss Slick’s teeth to send his fleet through the Webway and join the fight against Muscle Savage. After the fleet arrived at Commorragh, Rottooth saw the nearly completed Ork Battle Star being built there.

• Rottooth agreed to pay for Webway passage and the Battle Moon’s helmsman with Boss Slick’s tooth.
• Rambo prepared the Webway Gate while Ork fleets gathered at the Ice Planet and streamed through it to fight the Tyranids.
• Rambo opened the gate again and brought Rottooth’s fleet of three hundred thousand ships through.
• Rottooth handed Rambo the tooth and traveled with his fleet to Commorragh, where he saw Daft and the Mekboys building an Ork Battle Star.

Rambo and Rottooth prepared the Orks’ new Battle Moon, Bro's Hammer, to cross the Daemon Realms toward Terra, while Veronica’s Yellow Turban Army expanded across the Imperium’s neglected frontier worlds. At a war council, Veronica recalled the terrible cost of the fleet’s century-long crossing of the Great Rift.

• Rambo named the new Ork Battle Moon Bro's Hammer, and Rottooth accepted the Mekboys’ operational command.
• Rambo and a Mekboy explained that the Orks would fight through the realms of Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Khorne before asking Boss Slick to open a Warp Rift into Segmentum Solar.
• Yellow Turban Army lecturers and officers urged liberated Imperial citizens to reject their rulers and unite, while the army swiftly overcame poorly defended frontier worlds.
• At a war council aboard the General of Heaven, Veronica rejected claims that her unaging appearance was a miracle and described her youth as a scientific effect of psychic power.
• Veronica remembered that more than half the expeditionary fleet had been lost during its passage through the Great Rift, which had lasted over a hundred years.

Veronica proposed taking the Yellow Turban Army to Terra to resurrect Zhang Jiao, despite warnings that the expedition was too dangerous. She insisted the plan was her personal wish, not Yellow Heaven’s will, and rebuked an officer for calling her Celestial Master.

• Veronica reflected on the Yellow Turban Army’s victories and mourned Zhang Jiao’s absence.
• Yellow Turban Army officers discussed their slogan and argued that overthrowing the Imperium within sixty years was unrealistic.
• Veronica announced that she wanted to go to Terra and drag the Corpse Emperor from his throne, prompting officers to warn that their forces were not strong enough.
• Veronica explained that she wanted to resurrect Zhang Jiao and said her wish had nothing to do with Yellow Heaven.
• The officers worried that Veronica’s refusal to give another reason threatened their collective decision-making system.
• Veronica used psychic force to rebuke an officer who called her Celestial Master, insisting that only Zhang Jiao deserved the title.