…
Five days had passed.
Throughout the star system, every crew aboard the Nurgle Fleet succumbed to growing terror and despair. Some desperate souls attempted to escape, only to discover in horror that their warp drives refused to engage, rendered inert by an unseen, malign interference.
Even near the Mandeville Point, gravitational anomalies akin to the pull of celestial bodies began to manifest like false gravity wells, and these disruptions escalated in intensity with every hour.
Reality twisted into impossible angles. Light bent in mocking spirals. So distorted was the space-time fabric that even a full-powered escape burn from the fleet's engines past any known stellar influence would prove futile. It was as if the system had become a sealed coffin, its walls tightening with every passing moment.
All warships had been rendered combat-ineffective, their once-deadly arrays now silenced. Even the plague-infested weapon systems, typically stubborn, resilient things, hung dormant like rotting limbs deprived of motive force. Amidst the desolation, none noticed the creeping, inky black fog that slithered across the barren surface of the black planet.
Over time, this murky mass gathered along the equator until it took on the shape of a towering metallic entity, roughly ten meters in height.
The being that emerged was a nightmare given form. Its body was forged from an impossible alloy of starlight and void, a polished obsidian shell etched with shimmering veins of anti-energy. Its form was gaunt yet regal, draped in a tattered cloak of living night that writhed like smoke in a vacuum. The shroud did not hang, it floated, as though space itself recoiled from its skin.
Its face was no face, but a warped semblance of a skull carved from celestial obsidian, expressionless, angular, and impossibly ancient. Hollow eyes radiated a darkness more complete than any mortal shadow, a gaze that seemed to peer not at, but through all things. Those who glimpsed it in dreams would claw out their own eyes just to forget.
A shard of the Nightbringer, Aza'gorod, had descended.
This obstinate fragment, proclaiming itself as the true incarnation of the Nightbringer, swept its gaze over the barren world, and was taken aback.
The void was empty.
There was nothing here. No armies. No defenses. No trap.
Not even the low hum of surveillance drones or the flicker of an automated defense grid marred the silence.
In the shard's estimations, its manifest presence on the planet should have been met by legions of Necrons arrayed across every conceivable vantage, ready to seize it.
Yet, for reasons unknown, whether through negligence or hidden stratagem, no adversaries were in sight.
〈"Perhaps Shapeshifter isn't on this world?"〉 the Nightbringer mused.
It closed its eyes to reach out with its ancient, predatory senses. Millennia ago, when it was whole, it had devoured Star Gods, and possessed an uncanny sixth sense; now, the Nightbringer was unerringly certain that the Shapeshifter dwelled upon this black planet, trapped in the interstices of a dimensional rift. It could smell its kin, like rot beneath a sealed tomb.
The sensation was faint, distorted, as though filtered through layered dimensional glass, yet unmistakable.
〈"Pitiful slave race… miserable, feeble kin!" it hissed venomously. 〈"Where are those wretched metallic thralls? I must exterminate every traitor who dared betray me!"〉
Another voice replied, its own, yet not.
〈"Isn't it delightful, to have no opposition? Look! there's a fleet in the system!"〉
Muttering in a near-crazed soliloquy, the Nightbringer's mind swirled with the discordant voices of a myriad of Star Gods. Often, its inner thoughts would contradict one another, though on occasion, they provided invaluable hints.
Each thought was a broken echo of its former godhood, fragments from devoured brethren still screaming in its psyche. Their whispers dripped with despair and cosmic hunger, a chorus long denied unity.
Upon mentioning the fleet, the shard raised its gaze to the heavens.
Far off, it beheld a scattered formation: a fleet of warships that, though originally immobilized, had been grotesquely reanimated by the corruption of living flesh. Their once-stolid hulls now bore biomatter fused with broken mechanics, granting them a pitiful semblance of mobility.
This fleet was so feeble that the Nightbringer regarded it as hardly worth confronting. It had assumed that its own revulsion and fury were reserved for the metallic slaves ensconced in the subterranean tombs of the planet.
〈"Disgusting vermin,"〉 it sneered.
The flesh-ridden warships, though repulsive, paled in comparison to the abhorrent metallic skeletal constructs it recalled from epochs past. But what repulsed the Nightbringer most was the Warp energy they emitted, a defilement in every sense.
〈"This is blasphemy!"〉 it roared. 〈"No, it is an act of provocation! Indeed, indeed... provocation that demands mass slaughter!"〉
The air around the Nightbringer crackled with layered voices, each urging destruction. And they all agreed: annihilate the unaccounted-for fleet that now marred the system.
Raising its hand in a grasping gesture, the Nightbringer transformed the scorched soil beneath it into living metal that coalesced into a massive scythe.
The weapon pulsed with anti-life, an echo of the cosmic tool it once used to carve stars from existence.
With malevolent intent, it vanished from the planet's surface, reappearing near the Mandeville Point… directly before the corrupted fleet.
〈"They've already lost so many,"〉 it murmured triumphantly. 〈"Frail mortal constructs… merely our nearness is sufficient to plunge them into terror and despair."〉
The Nightbringer fixed its baleful gaze upon the fleet. By the time it manifested, the crews had already begun their descent into madness and mass suicide. Only a few resolute souls remained aboard, trembling like dying embers. But their plight was futile.
As its gaze swept over each crippled warship, the feeble life-essences within the crewmen erupted in agonized screams, their miasmic souls wrenched from their decaying flesh.
With cold efficiency, the Nightbringer began to devour these dying souls. Though the taste was mediocre to one so ancient, it cared little, having plummeted into such depths of his former glory, it found even such wretched fare was welcome.
In a single, murderous glance, tens of thousands of mortal lives were snuffed out.
Whereas other Star Gods might unleash a bolt of divine lightning to obliterate legions of mere mortals, the Nightbringer needed no such theatrics. Its very presence was enough to extinguish countless lives in an instant.
〈"Let us do the universe a favor,"〉 its voice intoned. 〈"Let us eradicate their pitiful warships."〉
With a sweep of its arm, a colossal vortex of black energy materialized over the fleet.
From it, countless obsidian tendrils each formed of pure negative matter reached down, ensnaring corrupted warship after warship, dragging them into the shard's personal dimension, a place of death beyond comprehension.
Those who entered did not die; they ceased to be.
Once these repugnant vessels were banished, the Nightbringer returned to the planet's surface to attend to its next grim task.
....
Within the system, Shapeshifter's illusionary projection rendered every detail in real time.
Shapeshifter itself did not consider the Nightbringer's power surprising. This, to it, was… even weak.
Qin Mo, however, saw things differently. This was terrifying, but it made sense.
Terror and logic were not mutually exclusive; in fact, in the grim calculus of the Warhammer Universe, they often went hand in hand.
The Nurgle fleet had stumbled into the wrong system, and into the wrong enemy.
A mere glance from the Nightbringer sufficed to snuff out the life of every crew member aboard a all the warships; its proximity alone incited nightmares and drove many to suicide. This was its inherent nature.
Had another Star God shard arrived instead, it might've required actual effort from it to annihilate the fleet.
But this was the Nightbringer.
While observing, Qin Mo meticulously analyzed the might of this Star God shard in his mind. The power level of different Star God fragments spanned an enormous spectrum.
He knew well: not all C'tan are equal.
The weakest Nightbringer fragments could be scared off by a single Adeptus Astartes Captain wielding a melta bomb.
At the upper extreme, they could command Necron legions, turning even their former enemies into tools. Their will could override ancient protocols, assuming control of constructs not meant for them. It was not command, it was domination.
Others could shatter Tomb Worlds or melt entire mountains with a wave of their hand.
The shard before them, however, appeared to reside in the mid-tier of potency.
Not invincible. But no pushover.
"I fear, this may be my end," Shapeshifter admitted, its voice quavering as it assumed the form of a protective shield.
Its fear was not without foundation. The Nightbringer shard had already descended deep beneath the planet's surface, employing its own unique methods to locate the dormant, technologically fortified Necron tomb complexes.
These tombs were not ordinary graves; they were buttressed by advanced relics, stasis fields, dimensional fissures, and other arcane defenses, that might delay its progress for precious seconds.
Yet, the conditions within these tombs remained unknown. The Nightbringer shard had decimated the Nurgle Fleet in the system, yet the Necron Dynasty still lurked, inactive in their hidden vaults even as their tomb-world was under siege.
"Rest assured, you are not doomed," Qin Mo said with unwavering confidence, addressing Shapeshifter. "Even were I to confront the Nightbringer shard alone in the void for a duel, I might yet prevail. Besides, I'm not alone, I've deployed every trump card I possess."
In response, Shapeshifter waved its hand to shift the illusion. The display transformed, projecting instead the expanse of space within the Talon System.
Far off, two satellite-like orbital fortresses circled a newly constructed, massive artificial planet, its skeletal framework still under construction.
"This contraption clearly isn't finished," Shapeshifter remarked, its voice laced with apprehension.
"Of course it isn't," Qin Mo replied with a nod. "Had it been fully complete, it wouldn't be called a fortress, it'd be the Celestial Engine. But trust me, with the combined might of the Leviathan, the Nexus Firmament, and every other ace up my sleeve, defeating the Nightbringer is merely a matter of time."
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