[Upon discovering Nurgle's warship, the Imperial Navy battle group immediately opened fire.]
[Just as the Imperial Navy's salvo was about to strike, the impossible happened.]
[Countless Imperial vessels and their missiles suddenly began to age; hulls corroded en masse, while the projectiles weathered into scrap as if years had passed in seconds.]
[Even the energy-beam weapons weren't spared, dissipating as though their power had simply waned.]
[In an instant the mighty Imperial fleet was reduced to nothing more than bags of scrap drifting in the void.]
[You may wonder how this was possible.]
[We must speak of the Warp's nature.]
[As a mirror of realspace, the Warp has no concept of time—or rather, its time is utterly chaotic. Our Universe follows a linear timeline of yesterday, today, tomorrow; the Warp does not.]
[Thus Nurgle exploited this temporal disorder, dragging a future consequence into the present.]
[In that future Nurgle had already seeded plague within the Imperial Navy; by bringing the outbreak's result forward, the entire fleet was destroyed.]
——
Super God World
On the screen the majestic Imperial fleet, like solemn iron-gray whales, bore down on the lone, ugly plague ship.
Macro-cannon beams tore the void; thousands of missiles left long trails, weaving an inescapable net of Death.
To the onlookers of the Super God Universe it seemed a one-sided, foregone massacre.
Leina of the Radiant Sun even stifled a yawn, toying with a small golden orb of stellar energy.
"What's this? So many against one—just saturate them with fire and be done with it. All this dawdling."
Yet the next moment the scene on the screen made the orb in her fingers collapse into sparks.
In the cinema every breath caught at once.
The impossible had happened.
The energy beams, moments from impact, drained of power mid-flight, dimming to nothing as if exhausted from the start.
The missiles' metal casings, in hard vacuum, visibly aged and weathered, thick rust blossoming across their skins.
Before they struck, they became inert scrap, drifting silently away—a soundless, absurd funeral march.
More terrifying was the mighty fleet itself.
On the warships' adamantine armor, rust spread like living tissue.
Power cores bled out; lights died row by row.
Within seconds a proud star-armada, before every eye, turned into colossal, lifeless hulks of steel garbage adrift in space.
They didn't even explode—they simply "died" in silence.
"Holy crap—" Ge Xiaolun gaped, utterly dumbstruck.
"W-what the hell? Collective paint-peeling? Did they skip maintenance bills?"
"No." Du Qiangwei's voice trembled; as bearer of the Space-Time gene she sensed the eerie logic behind it better than anyone.
"This isn't energy attack or matter break-down, it's… it's…"
Words failed her, but a primal terror written into her genes at seeing the laws of time trampled left her ice-cold.
At that moment the narrator's voice, devoid of emotion, began to speak.
It explained Nurgle's deed.
The explanation struck like a hammer, shattering the foundational certainties of every mighty being in the hall.
"Rubbish!" Leina was first on her feet; the pride of a Sun god refused such "cheating."
"Drag the future result here and now? That's flagrant foul-play! How are we supposed to fight that?!"
To her, battle was energy clashing, strength contesting.
This bypassed all process and proclaimed the end, rendering her star-driving might a bad joke.
"My god…"
Ge Xiaolun muttered, finally grasping the logic—and the revelation froze him with fear.
"So if I just stand here, and he 'kills' me in the future, then drags the result 'I'm dead' to now, I drop dead on the spot?"
"No chance to resist? Then what's the point of my 'unbreakable body'?!"
He clenched Yan's hand instinctively, palm slick with cold sweat.
Such ability to decree an "ending" was the conceptual annihilation of everything "Galaxy Power" stood for.
The Demon Queen Morgana's ever-mocking grin froze for the first time.
She dragged hard on her cigar; even the smoke seemed uncertain.
"Bloody hell…" she cursed under her breath, eyes wide with shock.
"Time—something so sacred—and they play with it so crudely."
And Holy Keisha, the eternal sovereign who looked down on all with pity and judgment.
Now leaned forward in unprecedented gravity.
Her all-seeing golden eyes bored into the screen while the Holy Knowledge Vault raced at record speed—
only to return strings of "Unresolvable," "Causality Violation," "Logical Paradox."
"This is no weapon…"
At last Keisha spoke, her tone leaden.
"It is… a concept-based assault. It ignores process and defines the 'final state' outright."
It implants the notion of 'decay' like a virus—directly into the timeline itself."
For the first time she tasted true frustration.
Her Order of Justice was built upon the known Universe's physical laws.
But Nurgle before them played an entirely different, deeper game.
Hexi reacted more directly—like a mad scientist who'd stumbled upon a new law of physics, eyes blazing with fanatic awe.
"Incredible… absolutely incredible!"
She murmured, blind to the danger, "This isn't magic; it must be some ultimate tech we don't yet grasp!"
It can access a non-linear temporal dimension, treating the time-axis itself as a programmable variable!"
It isn't travelling through time—it's compiling time! If… if we could obtain its core algorithm…"
——
Warhammer World
"This…" Guilliman, ever the cool, rational architect of the Imperium, felt for the first time the taste of sheer absurdity.
"If the outcome can be predefined, then what meaning is left in every step—strategy, logistics, courage, sacrifice?" he murmured.
His tactics were built on logic and practice, yet everything before him now mocked all logic.
"Sorcery, Sorcery of the highest order."
Magnus's crimson cyclops eye brimmed with shock and a sickly obsession.
As the deepest explorer of the Great Ocean, he could grasp time's non-linearity.
But what he understood was sailing with the currents, glimpsing the ripples of the future.
Nurgle, that filthy being, was like a brutish giant who ripped the dam of the future into the present, drowning today's reality with tomorrow's flood.
"He isn't prophesying; he's… issuing commands."
The Crimson King's voice was hoarse; pity tinged his gaze toward Leman Russ. "And you think to sever the command itself with an axe."
Yet among all the Primarchs, one man's reaction was the fiercest—and the most painful.
Perturabo.
On the screen, as the armor of Imperial warships decayed and sloughed away as if aged eons in heartbeats, the lord of iron's breath caught in his throat.
His eyes bored into the metal that had grown ancient in an instant.
In his mind, a memory buried deepest—one of shame and powerlessness—burst forth like a shattered dam.
The Hrud.
Those insect-loathe xenos, wreathed in time-warping entropic fields.
He had led the Iron Warriors, battling inside the temporal maelstroms those creatures wrought.
He watched his strongest creations, his bravest warriors, turn to rust-colored dust in a blink, or age centuries in moments into desiccated corpses.
He won that war, but the cost was hideous; it was no perfect, calculated victory he sought.
It had been a grisly war of attrution, paid for with the lives of countless sons, slammed against a law he could neither grasp nor quantify.
Now, the scene on the screen overlapped that nightmare perfectly—worse, even.
The Hrud entropy field had been passive, chaotic; Nurgle was actively, precisely, hurling "decay" as a weapon.
An icy chill of shame and fury crept up Perturabo's spine.
He jerked his head, sweeping the hall as though seeking a witness who could understand his anguish.
Then his gaze froze.
Behind the Imperial Fists' line sat a tall figure in plain Iron Warriors plate.
His armor was austere, precise, a stark contrast to the Imperial Fists' bright yellow.
Barabas Dantioch.
The Warsmith who, loathing needless sacrifice and clinging to his own architectural creed, had clashed with him and been exiled to "The Bastion of Hurt."
Perturabo's facial muscles snapped taut; a fury far exceeding his hatred of Nurgle surged through him.
"Dantioch."
The lord of iron's voice was soft, yet its cold inquiry froze the air.
"Why are you here? I recall my order: garrison your fortress until the heat Death of the Universe."
He weighted the words "your fortress," not a question but a sneering reminder.
You, a disgraced exile—what right have you to appear here?
Dantioch rose slowly; his aged, thoughtful face betrayed no emotion.
He did not look at Perturabo. First he inclined his head toward Rogal Dorn in respect, then turned to his gene-father.
"Warsmith Barabas Dantioch, answering the Emperor's summons."
His voice was level, clear, devoid of feeling—as though reciting a structural parameter.
"My duty is first as the Emperor's warrior, second as an Iron Warrior."
"Thus I obey His Majesty the Emperor's command, not… My Lord Primarch's."
The words struck like an invisible hammer against Perturabo's pride.
Perturabo's face turned rigid, ashen beneath its iron hue.
He missed the loyalty to the higher ideal of "Imperium" embedded in Dantioch's statement.
Within his mind, warped by paranoia, the sentence auto-translated into something far more venomous.
[Do you hear? He says you are not the Emperor.]
[He says you failed to solve the Hrud perfectly; you're a failed Commander, so your orders are worthless.]
[He says he's found a Master worthier than you—one who can appreciate his "talent."]
[He says you are unfit to be his father!]
Perturabo clenched the arms of his throne; knuckles cracked under the strain.
In those cold eyes blazed a murderous heat enough to melt iron.
The temperature of the entire area seemed to drop several degrees.
In that suffocating stillness a warm, powerful voice rang out like a gentle spring wind, dispersing the frozen air.
"Brothers."
It was Sanguinius. He rose from his throne, angelic wings unfurling behind him in soft brilliance.
His gaze did not seek Perturabo or Dantioch; it returned to the darkened screen.
"We sit here not to judge each other's pasts, but to see our shared future. What is on that screen is our true enemy."
He stretched out a hand toward the spot where the plague-ship had last appeared.
"An enemy who wields 'outcome' as a weapon. Perturabo, my brother, your genius lies in calculation and siege."
"Now this foe sets us a problem never seen before."
"Turn your intellect to solving it, not to wasting it on futile wrath."
Sanguinius's words carried unassailable authority and sincere concern.
He deftly redirected Perturabo's rage toward "problem-solving," the arena where the lord of iron excelled, giving him a way out.
Perturabo gave a heavy grunt; the stiffness of his face eased slightly.
But those burning eyes carved one last look at Dantioch, as though etching his image onto a Death-list.
He sat down slowly, yet the atmosphere in the gallery had been forever altered by that brief clash.