Localised gravity anomalies formed around what remained of his weapons.

  They did not strike his armor the way the broader forces did. They there was no precision. Just pure force clawing at everything on him that was strapped to his person. Aethernus Vhal watched as unseen waves of gravitational stress wrapped around his bolter, the weapon that had executed heretics across a hundred worlds.

  Metal groaned. The weapon’s frame distorted under pressures no artificer had ever designed for. The machine spirit howled at a register only he could perceive as molecular bonds began to fail. The force required to maintain his grip rose with each passing fraction of a second. Soon, retaining the weapon would demand more strength than even his enhanced musculature could provide. Stress projections indicated collateral damage to his remaining gauntlet if he continued to resist.

  The decision was simple.

  The bolter was a tool. Tools could be replaced.

  The mission could not.

  He released his grip.

  The bolter tore free at once, captured by a vortex of gravitational shear. The barrel twisted into an impossible spiral before the weapon vanished into the fractured depths between realities.

  He logged the loss without regret.

  Next was the combat knife.

  The sheathed blade rattled against his thigh as another localized anomaly wrapped itself around ceramite and adamantium. The pressure built more slowly than it had with the bolter, granting him several microseconds to recompute risk. If the knife tore free with the ceramite armor that covered his thigh, while still sheathed. It would took a portion of his remaining leg armor with it up to his hip.

  He drew the blade with mechanical precision before the gravitational field intensified further and pulled it away. He held before him, the weapon bent.

  The knife had been forged to his hand centuries prior.

  Its edge had split armor, bone, and worse with ease.

  Now the metal yielded like softened clay and the atom-sharp edge dulled visibly as atomic structures surrendered to pressure beyond conventional physics.

  He opened his fingers before the deforming blade could transfer destructive stress into his gauntlet.

  Aethernus Vhal groaned at the loss of so many resources that could have been used to slaughter more heretics and their False Deities. All he could do was log everything he lost. Restocking was going to be impossible. There were no centers of true human civilization within the warp except for the corrupted and now he was being thrown in a direction beyond his understanding and cartography.

  Ammunition packs followed.

  Magazines sealed to the remaining armor plating shuddered as conflicting gravity vectors seized them from multiple directions. The competing forces threatened to tear his gear, and potentially his body, apart. He disengaged retention clamps one by one. Each pack drifted free before its mounting could be wrenched away. He tracked their paths until they vanished beyond perception as well.

  Aethernus Vhal couldn’t lie to himself. This hurt more than he expected it to. Everything was sentimental to him. How many heads had he blasted through? How many cultists had he carved up? Champions of the warp he had slain in combat? And now all his memorable weaponry was being stripped.

  The purge continued regardless of his thoughts.

  Secondary systems went next. The bolt pistol at his hip. The backup blade at his boot. The emergency beacon integrated into his last intact pauldron. Each was stripped away by invisible forces and catalogued with the same distant precision. Every loss reduced his options.

  Yet, none reduced his will to continue. The scale of the assault remained impersonal except for sentimental damage.

  He had faced daemon princes whose presence reshaped local reality. Xenos warlords wielding technology capable of rewriting fundamental forces. False Deities whose corrupted ascensions had brought them to the edge of dominating entire swaths of the universe.

  None had ever wielded power like this.

  This was not malice or strategy.

  He had been stripped of weaponry by something that operated on a scale and configuration beyond his prior experience. The wormhole did not care about his mission, his weapons, or his oaths. It existed. In existing, it stripped from him the tools that had defined his role longer than most civilizations endured.

  He found the experience… informative.

  A reminder that no matter the extent of his genetic engineering, his augmentations, or the centuries of refinement behind his warplate, he remained small beside the structures that shaped the universe.

  He didn't consider this humbling.

  Humility was a luxury of lesser minds.

  It was, however, a tactical fact.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  He filed it accordingly.

  The sequence continued with almost methodical efficiency.

  Signal flares calibrated to penetrate warp storms. Emergency teleport recall. Purity seals and oath-scrolls, symbolic, but formally part of his kit. Digital weapons woven into armor joints. Each item was torn away in its turn and logged in his mental ledger.

  He thought like a quartermaster standing in the wreckage of his own armory.

  The final loss came with violence.

  A concentrated surge wrapped around his ceremonial chain of office. The chain had hung from his armor across millennia, its weight a constant reminder of obligation. Its links had been forged from material capable of enduring direct plasma exposure.

  They stretched then shattered like thin wire.

  He watched the ancient emblem, symbol of authority and burden alike, spin away into the void, its substance dispersed into scattered atoms across dimensions.

  He took stock once more.

  Less than thirty percent of the original structure remained, held together more by proximity to his body than by engineering. Critical systems, power distribution nodes, neural junctions, environmental seals, were gone. What remained was an uneven lattice of fractured ceramite plates and torn internal mesh. All he could still functionally use from everything he had was his helmet, that had been untouched so far.

  He didn't attempt salvage the rest.

  He allowed failing components to break away as the gravitational fields demanded. Effort was reserved for reinforcement of what could still endure, his own altered physiology.

  His black carapace, the internal exoskeletal layer that bound him to his armor, remained largely intact. An unintended demonstration of the exquisiteness of his design, even as the technology built around it failed.

  The helm was the that would not yield.

  Whether by chance, design, or some quirk of construction, the helmet clung stubbornly to its function. Systems flickered, but remained active. Visual feeds degraded. Status runes died and revived. But the core continued.

  He noted the anomaly.

  He did not attempt to explain it.

  A lot of the False Deities worked around tricking the minds of his ilk into trying to explain things that have no proper explanation to begin with. The intelligentsia and psychic tended to fall for that ploy far more than others too. He was no intelligentsia or psychic, that was for sure.

  Contextless data remained data to be recorded for later analysis though.

  As the last fragments of his wargear vanished, the character of the wormhole tilted on its head.

  It began to re-align itself around a single vector. The diffuse tearing became a focused drag, a unified pull.

  Translation, once wild, grew purposeful.

  The journey approached its conclusion.

  Aethernus Vhal braced for emergence, unarmored in all but helm, flesh, and will.

  Whatever reality waited at the end of this cosmic path, the hunt would continue. Transit did not pause to acknowledge his readiness. Aethernus was dragged onward into the wound in space. The forces tearing at him didn't lessen though. They changed into difference energies than he had ever experienced. Foreign energies he had yet to encounter in his thousands of years marching upon the warp and its choitic entities.

  Somewhere within the violence of transit it hit him like an exploding planet…

  Aethernus Vhal recognised an absence that had always been part of his existence. There were no minds pressing against his own. No malignant intellects testing the boundaries of his psychic wards. No whispers of temptation threading through the cracks between thoughts. No claws raking at the edges of his soul. For most of his existence, such intrusions had been constant. On daemon worlds. In tainted hives. Aboard profaned vessels drifting through the void. Awareness of corruption had become reflexive, an instinct layered over instinct.

  Now there was nothing and the silence was as absolute as the stillness after a battle that had lasted for years.

  This was not the warp, the immaterium, where reality eroded into thought and emotion, nor was it the domain where gods and their lesser reflections crowded hungrily against the skin of realspace. No predatory presence pressed against him. No alien will sought purchase.

  What surrounded him was empty, space bent and folded through dimensions, but space nonetheless.

  Natural in its existence, however exotic its configuration.

  He examined the new knowledge with the same detached focus he applied to any tactical report.

  The False Deity hadn't called for aid from its patrons.

  Nor had it opened a gate into some deeper hell.

  It had found a natural phenomenon, a wormhole, a tunnel torn through space-time, and weaponised it. The false deity had not controlled where it led or how it behaved. It had simply opened the door and pushed him through.

  The entity had been

  The conclusion arrived without emotion.

  It wasn't blessed, guided, or aided in its last moments. Simply positioned correctly where desperation met opportunity.

  Aethernus rarely attributed outcomes to fortune. Proper preparation and disciplined execution removed most variables that others labelled as luck.

  Yet here he was, subject to nothing more complex than unfavourable probability.

  The question followed. How did one prepare for luck and fate aligned against mission parameters? The question was not philosophical. He considered it seriously as the wormhole dragged him toward an unknown destination. Additional redundancy protocols? Expanded reserve equipment? More aggressive scanning for anomalous energy signatures in proximity to ascended entities? Acceleration of termination sequences when engaging False Deities to minimise reaction windows?

  He began amending his internal doctrines, line by line, under the assumption that he would survive to implement them.

  Adaptation would be mandatory to prevent this… from having a role in his holy war again.

  He would emerge into an unfamiliar region, stripped of most equipment, without his weapons, supply, or established worlds just outside of the Warp that housed his production facilities without knowing better. Yet. the mission directive remained constant. Locate and eliminate threats to humanity one by one until none existed. Operational execution would vary according to the nature of the reality that awaited him.

  The wormhole shifted once more.

  The pull was now overwhelming to his senses. Messing with his thoughts, sight, smell, and touch, until finally everything stopped abruptly. Gravity reasserted itself.

  It wasn't gradually, but as a sudden crushing pressure that sought to compress his transhuman frame into a singular density.

  The end of transit had finally arrived.

  Ahead, a widening circle of white light dominated his field of view, expanding until it consumed everything else. Aethernus engaged emergency physiological protocols, systems designed to harden his body against abrupt changes in pressure, temperature, and atmosphere. Without armor, their effectiveness was reduced.

  Even diminished, they far exceeded the capacity of any baseline human.

  The wormhole expelled him.

  The sensation of non-locality ceased. For an instant, there was only the afterimage of motion and the awareness of open space.

  His velocity remained though, as slowed as it had become. He remained a projectile.

  Below, a planet filled his view, a globe of bright blue against the dark. Oceans glimmered. Atmosphere refracted light in familiar patterns. By visual estimate alone, it was capable of sustaining life. Trajectory calculations formed instinctively.

  Impact would follow shortly after without a second declaration. He could still feel the taint of the warp clinging to his black carapase, as though he would allow it to consume him without his armor intact. Such foolishness brought a slight smile to his face–

  He remembered the mustard seed of arrogance that had consumed his heart right before he was about to kill the latest False Deity.

  The opportunity he provided the corrupted thing to send him out into the Warp and through the universe.

  Aethernus Vhal wiped the smirk off his face and looked down toward planet fall.

  His momentum had already begun to increase.

  Soon enough he would have to rediscover this place and whatever fauna existed within it.