The soft blue glow of the monitor was the only light in Maverick Langley's cramped apartment, painting his tired face in shifting shades of white and neon. He leaned back in his creaking office chair and clicked the "submit" button with a finality that felt far more dramatic than the task deserved.
Five hours. Five straight hours of transcribing rambling podcast interviews about cryptocurrency and whatever the hell "growth hacking" was supposed to mean.
"Finally," he muttered, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. The frames, held together by a thin line of super glue and stubborn optimism, slid right back down again.
At twenty-three, Maverick had perfected the art of existing in that uncomfortable limbo between employed and unemployed. He worked—technically. Transcription gigs, data entry, the occasional freelance writing job that paid in exposure and broken promises. It covered rent. Usually. When clients remembered he existed. His most stable relationships were with instant ramen and his secondhand gaming chair.
He stretched until his shoulders popped and his spine cracked in protest.
Time to waste the rest of my evening doing absolutely nothing productive, he thought. As is tradition.
He cracked his knuckles and opened his browser. Reddit beckoned, as it always did when his brain needed to be turned off like a faulty machine. He scrolled through memes, arguments about movies he'd never seen, and strangers screaming into the void about cereal etiquette.
Then a title caught his eye.
"Fictional Verses That Would Be Absolute Hell to Reincarnate Into – Ranked."
Maverick snorted softly. "Oh, this should be good."
He clicked.
The thread was exactly what it promised—hundreds of comments, passionate debates, and enough nerd rage to power a small hive city. He skimmed the list with growing amusement.
Number ten: Attack on Titan. Fair. Giant naked cannibals were a hard sell.
Number five: Berserk. Yeah. That world was basically suffering given form.
Number three: Worm. He didn't know that one, but the comments made it sound like a cosmic horror story wearing a superhero mask.
Then he reached the top two.
Number 2: Warhammer 40,000
Number 1: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Maverick whistled low. "Okay, yeah. Number one tracks. Eternal torture by a sadistic AI is kind of unbeatable."
He'd played the game adaptation years ago, during a long, boring weekend. The story had lodged itself in his brain like a splinter—humanity reduced to five immortal playthings, kept alive solely to suffer. No death. No escape. Just endless cruelty.
That deserved the crown.
But Warhammer 40k at number two?
"Huh," he murmured, scrolling.
He knew of Warhammer the way most people did—through memes, wiki dives at two in the morning, and that one friend who would not shut up about the Emperor of Mankind. He'd never played the tabletop game or read the novels, but cultural osmosis had done its work.
Grimdark future. Space Marines built like walking tanks. A corpse-god Emperor on a golden throne. Orks who believed painting things red made them faster—and it somehow worked. Chaos gods feeding on emotion. Necrons, soulless metal skeletons. Eldar space elves who'd literally murder-fucked a god into existence.
You know. The basics.
The comments were a mess, as expected.
XxNoScopeEmperorxX: "If I got isekai'd into 40k I'd just become a Space Marine and purge heretics all day. FOR THE EMPEROR!"
GrimdarkEnjoyer: "You realize 99.9% of humanity lives in squalor, right? You'd be eating corpse-starch on a hive world until you die at thirty."
RealityCheck_40k: "It's pure luck. You could be a noble on a paradise world… or Guardsman #4,583,291 who gets eaten by Tyranids in five minutes. Or worse. Commorragh."
Maverick chuckled darkly. The internet never changed. Everyone thought they'd be the protagonist.
Still, a thought wormed its way into his exhausted mind.
Would it be interesting to live in that kind of world?
Not good. Not safe. Not survivable. But… interesting? In a horrifying, existential way?
He shook his head. Jesus, I need sleep. I'm getting weird.
He bookmarked the thread—because of course he did—and kept scrolling until his vision blurred and the words stopped making sense. Eventually, he glanced at the clock.
2:47 AM.
"Fuck," he mumbled, closing his laptop. "Tomorrow's gonna suck."
He stumbled to his bed, didn't bother changing out of his T-shirt and sweatpants, and collapsed face-first onto the mattress. His glasses clattered onto the nightstand. The darkness crept in.
His thoughts scattered—work, bills, servo-skulls, the Emperor, heresy—
Weird how the brain works when you're falling asleep, he thought.
Then everything went black.
The sensation hit him like a freight train.
Falling.
Not the gentle drift of a dream, but the gut-wrenching plummet of sudden, violent motion. His stomach lurched. His heart slammed against his ribs. His eyes snapped open—
—to green.
Not the green of grass or leaves. A sickly, chemical glow, faintly luminescent in the dark.
Liquid.
I'm in liquid.
Panic detonated in his chest. He tried to breathe and immediately choked as warm, viscous fluid flooded his mouth and nose. Something was forcing air into his lungs. Tubes. He could feel them now—down his throat, in his nose, inside him, invasive and wrong.
What the fuck—
He thrashed, or tried to. His limbs were weak, uncoordinated. Pain flared with every movement, deep and all-encompassing, like his muscles were tearing themselves apart from the inside.
His fist slammed against something hard.
Glass.
A tube. He was trapped in a glass tube.
His hand—small.
Too small.
The realization barely registered before a shadow loomed beyond the glass. A tall, robed figure approached, moving with precise, mechanical certainty. Its silhouette was wrong—too many angles, too many cables. Metal and flesh fused into something obscene.
The liquid began to drain.
As it siphoned away with a wet gurgle, the pain intensified. Tubes shifted. His body convulsed.
She tried to scream.
Nothing came out.
The glass hissed open. Cold air slammed into wet skin. Figures surrounded her—shorter, stockier, moving in eerie unison. Servo-assisted hands seized her arms, gripping with inhuman strength.
Then they pulled the tubes out.
One by one.
The one in her throat came first, scraping upward like barbed wire. She gagged, tasted blood. Then her nose. Then others she hadn't even known were there—each removal a fresh spike of agony that made her vision white out.
She collapsed forward, barely held upright.
Her body was shaking.
Wrong.
She looked down.
Naked. Small. Childlike.
Female.
No.
Her hands—too delicate, too thin—confirmed it. Maverick Langley's body was gone. In its place was a girl, maybe ten or eleven years old, pale and trembling and utterly not him.
Her.
The word echoed in her mind, cold and final.
She looked up.
Servitors.
Lobotomized humans, hollow-eyed, flesh fused to machine. And behind them, the tall robed figure—red robes, augmetics, mechadendrites coiling like metal serpents.
A tech priest?
The thought surfaced from half-remembered memes and late-night wiki dives.
Oh God-Emperor.
The realization crashed down on her with crushing weight.
The thread. The rankings. Number two.
Warhammer 40,000.
In the grim darkness of the far future.
In a child's body.
The servitors began to drag her away. Her bare feet scraped against cold metal. The air smelled of oil and sterilization. Machinery loomed in the red-lit gloom.
Somewhere, deep beneath the fear and pain, a single thought crystallized.
I'm going to die here.
In this world. In this body.
I'm going to die in Warhammer 40,000.