Warhammer: The Worst Start There Is (40k) - Chapter 25: Warp daemons

“Traitor, your ideas are as foolish as your mind. What makes you so confident to appear before me?” Guilliman said to the leader of the rebellion. “You could have crawled back to that disgusting Warp before my arrival. Your courage is admirable, but I also have to wonder if your mind has completely rotted away over the long centuries, especially considering you don’t have much good flesh left in you.”

“You’re very arrogant, Primarch,” Gurl’s face darkened.

He had never imagined a Primarch would say such words.

“When you’re facing a bunch of trash, you can’t help but be arrogant. If your enemies can’t change their miserable fate no matter what they do, what reason is there not to be arrogant?” Guilliman’s tone carried mockery, and his voice echoed across the entire battlefield, making the Imperium’s soldiers cheer.

“You’ll pay for this, Primarch.” Gurl’s sickly green face turned even darker, obviously enraged by Guilliman’s words.

Anyone, even a Primarch, would lose their temper if they were called trash by someone else.

“I hope you have the ability to make me pay, but unfortunately, you don’t.”

Guilliman’s words left Gurl speechless.

He had never encountered such arrogance from a Primarch.

Guilliman didn’t care about Gurl’s anger. His soul was not just that of the former Emperor’s thirteenth son; it had fused with the knowledge and memories of another soul, creating a new Guilliman with a new personality.

“I hope your strength matches your words, Primarch.”

Gurl looked at his assistant, who had a bulky helmet covering their head, and they nodded. Everything was ready.

“You will face the power of the Warp, and you will tremble because of it,” Gurl roared loudly.

The earth began to tremble inexplicably.

The air emitted the sound of shattering glass.

Unclean radiance emerged from the rifts, and these gleams carried the utmost malevolence. Everyone could sense the intense hatred for everything in the real world trying to break through the limitations and enter the real world.

Crack, crack.

The fabric of reality shattered like broken glass, and the light of the highest heavens poured out like a bursting flood.

The nearby Imperium Psykers felt their physic powers enhanced significantly as the boundaries between the Immaterium and reality fractured, granting them a boost in their power.

However, these benefits came with risks.

Once a Psyker couldn’t maintain their sanity, they would succumb to the corruption of Warp and transform into abominable creatures.

Rotund and swollen, covered in pustules and tiny tentacles, with a pair of massive horns on their fat heads, these daemons squeezed out from Warp.

The daemon’s size was nearly ten meters, and it looked extremely obese, wielding a rusty, oversized blade.

Pustules oozed saliva across its bloated body, and it continuously birthed plague flies and Nurglings from within.

The daemon, upon crawling out, emitted a tremendous roar. Guilliman could see a multitude of maggots wriggling around from the creature’s large mouth.

Daemons – the eternal enemies of the Imperium, the eternal enemies of humanity. They were formed from unnatural energies of Warp and imbued with perception by the dark gods of Warp.

Daemons were unkillable; their physical forms in the real universe were mere projections, with their true essence residing in the Immaterium. When killed, they would return to the Immaterium and await resurrection. Only a few weapons or certain terrifying Psykers could truly destroy daemons.

Guilliman’s Emperor’s Sword naturally possessed the power to slay daemons. He had used this sword to kill a traitor whom Khorne favored and who had ascended into a daemon shortly after resurrection.

The composition of Warp daemons was complex, with most being shaped by the chaos gods. Others were formed through the specific worship of various races or certain intense emotions.

For example, the curse of humanity, the only entity capable of killing the Emperor in Warp, the daemon, was known as “Drach’nyen, the End of Empires and the Echo of the First Murder”

Drach’nyen had severely wounded the Emperor during The War Within the Webway, accelerating humanity’s downfall in that conflict. The battle between the Emperor and Drach’nyen was one of the most disadvantageous fights in the Emperor’s long life.

The Emperor was completely outmatched and severely wounded by Drach’nyen within a few exchanges. He had to use the loyalist legions to seal away the terrible daemon, allowing the loyalist legions to carry the daemon away from the Webway.

It was due to Drach’nyen and The War Within the Webway, as well as maintaining the reality fabric of Terra, that the Emperor had been depleted of his power and was unable to confront the Four Chaos Gods when Horus was ultimately manipulated by them.

Fortunately, Sanguinius, who was mercilessly killed by Horus, had used all his power to leave a gap in Horus’s armor before his death. In the end, it was with the assistance of his first Warmaster, Oll, that the Emperor was able to use that gap to kill Horus.

In addition to Drach’nyen, which nearly altered the outcome of Horus Heresy, there was also the Samus, which severely damaged the Imperial Fists Legion in the Solar War, and the daemon also  almost killed the Loyalist Loken. These daemons did not belong to the Four Gods of Chaos.

Loken was once a subordinate of Horus. He was marked for extermination by Horus due to his refusal to betray the Emperor and humanity’s transcendence dream on the planet Istvaan III. Leading the surviving loyalist Marines, Loken defended against the continuous attacks of another Traitor Primarch, Angron, for several months, delaying Horus Heresy.

The loyalists who landed on the planet’s surface eventually died in the orbital bombardment initiated by Horus, leaving only Loken alive.

In order to protect Loken, a dreamer, a female journalist named Mestiti, who had once aspired to leave behind a complete history of humanity, chose to sacrifice herself and banished Samus.

Apart from these two, there were many other Warp daemons not affiliated with the Chaos Gods. They formed their own factions, sometimes battling each other or serving one of the Chaos Gods, fighting their eternal battles on the battlefield against their enemies.

When the Chaos Gods invaded the real world, they would unite with these daemons to reap human fear, emotions, and souls.

The plague daemons summoned by the Plague Marines belonged to their faction, known as the Plague daemons, or the Nurglings.

These daemons served the Dark God Nurgle with the goal of spreading the plague into the real world.

“A Primarch?”

The Nurgling daemon entering the battlefield immediately spotted Guilliman wielding the Emperor’s Sword.

“A disgusting daemon,” Guilliman, who was still attempting to break through the traitor’s last line of defense, looked at the daemon emerging from Warp, his words equally cold.

“Perhaps the unhappy Mortarion needs a family,” the Plague daemon looked at Guilliman with a smile. “I can take you back, and Mortarion will be pleased.”

“That idiotic traitor needs a stake, and you’re no different, daemon. You still have a chance to leave, or I’ll burn you to death right now,” Guilliman said without hesitation, raising the Emperor’s Sword in his hand and striking down the last Plague Marine standing in front of him. Then he stepped towards the daemon.