Aethernus Vhal stood over the fallen god.

  His bulk cast a long shadow across its broken form as it writhed against the stone, limbs dragging uselessly, flesh struggling to obey laws it had already violated too many times. The warp tended to make its own. The False Deity’s many mouths gurgled and gasped, spilling curses in tongues both ancient and newly born. Some he understood. Some were never meant for human cognition.

  It tried to crawl away from him.

  It would have been easy to end it.

  One precise shot, into whatever structure passed for its central nervous system, and another corruption would be excised from reality. Another sector spared the slow rot of its influence. The calculus was simple. Clean. Familiar.

  Aethernus allowed himself a moment for the first time since breaching the palace. Maybe in centuries.

  He raised his blaster and felt something close to satisfaction.

  A thin smile tugged at his mouth beneath the helm as the False Deity’s many eyes widened in realized fear. He could see them tremble as he towered over it.

  He did not speak the words aloud. Words were wasted on the damned–

  Those three seconds cost him.

  Figures had been moving at the far end of the sanctum during his dog walking of the False Deity

  The remaining technicians, overlooked in the aftermath, had reached a console embedded into the wall. The device was crude, assembled from salvaged technology and forbidden science, its design ugly with desperation. Their hands flew across its surface, bypassing safeguards, ignoring warning glyphs. Red emergency lights flared. Sirens screamed.

  Aethernus turned, recognition arriving a heartbeat too late.

  The structure he had dismissed as another altar began to awaken. Dormant conduits pulsed to life, channels flooding with unstable power that arced and spat as it fed into a central framework. The machine groaned as it activated, a sound that carried pain in its resonance.

  Within the framework, gravity lenses, ripped from wrecked starships or stolen from Imperial installations, began to spin.

  Faster.

  Beyond tolerance.

  Their rotation destabilized space itself. Light twisted. Distance warped. The air between them bent inward, folding like heated metal.

  All within a split second of time.

  Aethernus knew what it was.

  A construction. A last-resort portal weapon, used not to destroy, but to remove. Typically meant to tear reality open and allow reinforcements to pour through from the warp.

  This one was different. The configuration was wrong and the energy flows were chaotic, unfocused.

  It wasn’t meant to bring something in. It had been designed to send something away.

  Cold realization washed through him.

  He had given them the time they needed.

  A mistake borne of a mustered seed of arrogance and haughtyness.

  The kind that got even veterans of a thousand wars killed.

  The False Deity dragged itself toward the machine, ichor spilling from its body and sizzling where it touched the stone.

  “Yes,” it crooned, voice thick with triumph. “The Exile Engine. Kill this vessel if you wish, our Great Work will endure!”

  Aethernus raised his blaster and targeted the device’s central power node.

  Reality tilted before he could blast plasma into it.

  Space bent outward from the machine in visible waves. His armor screamed warnings, gravitational instability, dimensional shear, physics violations cascading faster than his systems could compensate. The floor beneath him softened. Stone behaved like liquid, dragging at his boots and resisting every step. The air thickened, becoming something he had to push through rather than breathe.

  Only seconds remained.

  Two options presented themselves with ruthless clarity.

  Retreat, pull back beyond the field’s influence and wait for collapse or stabilization, then finish the kill. Or advance, force his way through the distortion and end the deity now, regardless of the cost. If the god escaped, retreat meant failure. If the portal fully engaged, advance meant exile.

  The choice was never truly a choice.

  Aethernus lowered himself and charged through the distortions.

  Each step demanded more effort as reality pushed back. His shield bore the brunt of spatial fractures, its surface rippling as it deflected forces never meant to interact with matter.

  Twenty feet.

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  Fifteen.

  Ten.

  Blasting his gun at the ruined fabric of space even though he likely needed to cut the False Deity in half with his holy sword.

  The False Deity’s eyes widened further.

  “Impossible,” it hissed. “No human body can resist the pull of the Exile Engine!”

  At five feet, the portal reached critical mass.

  The sound that followed was not noise but rupture, the tearing of reality itself. A vortex of screaming energies erupted from the machine, filling the chamber. His armor flooded his vision with failure alerts as internal compensators ceased to function.

  The pull became absolute as his boots tore free from the floor.

  Aethernus clawed at the stone, fingers biting deep, but the force overwhelmed him. He was lifted off the ground and dragged backward toward the vortex.

  The god watched, relief and triumph warring across its fractured form.

  He fired anyway.

  The blaster’s beam twisted mid-flight, bent away by warped space. Just like every blast since the engine had been started.

  The False Deity laughed.

  “The hunter becomes the hunted,” it jeered. “Wander the void between realms, mortal. If you endure, know that the Great Work continues!”

  The portal consumed him.

  Reality folded around Aethernus Vhal, stretching and collapsing like paper caught in a storm. His armor held, but armor could not anchor existence. Through the distortion, he saw the god’s body beginning to stabilize, drawing strength from the chaos it had unleashed.

  As the last anchors to this reality snapped, Aethernus locked eyes with it.

  His helm amplified his voice, cutting through the scream of the void. “Exiling me only delays your deaths!”

  Then he was gone. The portal shut. The rupture did not end with passage though.

  The moment the portal severed its connection, containment failed. What had been a weapon became a wound within the universe. Space tearing itself apart in Aethernus Vhal’s wake. Momentum did not carry him forward so much as reality rejected him, casting him outward with escalating violence.

  The Exile Engine’s influence clung to him like a malignant echo, its warp energies unraveling into something far less controlled. Direction ceased to exist. Orientation followed shortly after.

  There was no corridor. No boundary. Only collapse and an endless fall.

  His armor screamed as systems attempted to reconcile the impossible transition. Neural interfaces flooded with contradictory data as the last rules he recognized dissolved. He registered the change not as movement, but as sustained failure of locality.

  Then reality failed completely.

  The portal’s forces clawed at Aethernus Vhal and his armor alike, not as a corridor or passage, but as an ongoing collapse. It ripped the shield from his hands first. There were no tunnels, no guiding vectors, no stars to orient by. Instead, waves of crushing gravity slammed into him from all directions, each impact testing the limits of a body that had already surpassed the human baseline.

  Warp transit was familiar.

  This was not that.

  His enhanced senses, capable of parsing battlefields in microseconds, struggled under the assault. Colors without names washed across his vision. Sounds existed where sound should not, vibrating through his helmet and into his skull rather than his ears. For a brief moment, perhaps the first since his ascension, his mind failed to categorize the experience.

  Nebulae streaked past. Entire galaxies elongated into burning lines of light before collapsing into nothing. Space and reality twisted and folded. He attempted to log landmarks, to establish vectors that might one day allow return, but the journey refused structure. His eidetic memory, flawless across centuries of war, found no purchase in this non-Euclidean passage.

  He assessed everything as clinically as possible.

  Yet, there were immutable truths no matter what happened to him. His Endless war would restart wherever he emerged.

  That did not trouble him either way. There were always more False Deities to slaughter.

  A low-frequency vibration began in his armor’s power core. It intensified rapidly, blooming into destructive resonance that spread through neural interfaces. Warning sigils cascaded across his visor as power distribution systems desynchronized, unable to reconcile themselves with the wormhole’s underlying physics.

  The armor was not failing from damage.

  It was failing because reality no longer supported its design.

  Targeting augurs collapsed first. Environmental regulators followed.

  Internal compensators failed in sequence, each triggering emergency protocols that dissolved moments later. The armor had endured vacuum, planetary pressures, stellar radiation, and direct exposure to warp energies. It had never been asked to function between universes. Energy feedback surged through subsystems. Sections of the armor overheated beyond tolerance. With thermal management already compromised, pain receptors, dormant for centuries, reactivated.

  He acknowledged the signals. Pain was information just as his other senses were.

  Structural failure followed.

  Gravitational shear tore at the armor unevenly, forces pulling different sections in incompatible directions. His left pauldron detached first, wrenched free by a sudden localized gravity well. He observed it being ravished into scraps, diminishing until it vanished entirely.

  No emotional response registered. Additional losses followed after the pauldrons untimely fate.

  The breastplate fractured along stress lines that should not have existed. The outer shell of his right gauntlet peeled away in fragments, exposing the neural interface mesh beneath before that too was torn free. Each loss was catalogued with methodical precision.

  Transit intensified.

  Time became increasingly unstable. Duration lost meaning, milliseconds indistinguishable from centuries. Constellations formed and died at the edges of perception. Dimensional boundaries blurred, revealing impossible realities: worlds where matter and energy were indistinct, where causality ran backward or sideways, where time spiraled instead of flowed.

  The armor continued to come apart.

  Greaves fractured and spun away. The reactor pack, engine of centuries, ruptured, venting streams of blue-white energy that twisted into unfamiliar geometries before fading into nothing.

  His body endured forces meant to tear him apart.

  Different sections were pulled in opposing directions, as if briefly existing in multiple dimensions at once. Reinforced bones creaked. Augmented organs shifted. Secondary and tertiary biological systems activated autonomously, maintaining function even as the concept of equilibrium ceased to apply.

  His mind remained clear.

  This was not combat.

  There was no enemy to destroy.

  Only survival.

  He adapted.

  Rather than resist the loss of armor, he yielded to it. Clinging to compromised systems would have destroyed him along with them. Letting them go preserved what mattered.

  A violent surge ripped away his chest plate entirely, exposing the reinforced black carapace beneath. Neural warnings flared, then vanished as severed connections went silent. External sensors failed one by one, narrowing his awareness until only internal references remained.

  For a moment, he considered whether the False Deity had anticipated this outcome.

  Unlikely.

  The god had acted from desperation, not foresight.

  Luck had played its part.

  He dismissed the concept no matter how much it rung true with this latest encounter.

  Preparation and execution were the only constants.

  Transit continued, stripping away the last remnants of his defenses. Less than forty percent of the armor remained, and what survived was irreparable. His body, however, held.

  His purpose remained intact.

  Whatever awaited him at the end of this passage would face him diminished in equipment, but not in resolve or strength.

  As if in response, the wormhole convulsed. Colors deepened. Forces multiplied. The trajectory bent sharply, accelerating him toward an unknown terminus.

  The remaining armor groaned under the final strain.