The galaxy collapsed into nightmare.
The boundary between the material universe and the Warp had grown thin after millions of years of slaughter.
Every death, every scream, every act of destruction unleashed during the War in Heaven fed the madness swelling within the Immaterium.
Now the Warp answered.
Across countless worlds, reality cracked open.
Invisible horrors gathered at the fractures between dimensions, clawing their way toward physical existence with ravenous hunger.
Entire civilizations disappeared overnight as Warp storms consumed systems in tides of impossible energy.
The surviving Old Ones fought desperately to contain the catastrophe they had unleashed.
New warrior races emerged from their ancient laboratories at accelerating speed.
Among them were the simian-like Jokaero, creatures capable of instinctively understanding and recreating advanced technologies, and the brutal green-skinned Krork, monstrous warriors engineered solely for endless conflict.
But the Old Ones were already too late.
The Webway itself had begun failing.
Warp entities flooded into the labyrinth dimension through breaches caused by uncontrolled psychic upheaval.
Entire sections of the ancient network became corrupted beyond recovery.
The Old Ones destroyed many of their own Warp Gates rather than allow the horrors spreading through the Immaterium access to untainted worlds.
Ancient strongholds burned.
Great libraries vanished.
Worlds once considered eternal fell screaming into madness.
Mike observed the collapse from orbit above a dying Webway nexus world.
The planet beneath him had once been among the Old Ones’ greatest centers of power.
Vast crystalline structures and dimensional pylons still stretched across continents below.
Now they burned beneath tides of Warp-spawned abominations.
Reality itself twisted unnaturally across the surface while psychic screams echoed even through heavily shielded Necron systems.
One cryptek monitoring the battlefield spoke carefully.
“The Old Ones are destroying their own gateways.”
Mike watched another dimensional portal collapse into singularity fire.
“They understand containment is impossible.”
And then came the worst of them.
The Enslavers.
Even the name unsettled ancient records.
Unlike most Warp predators, the Enslavers possessed terrifying intelligence and one catastrophic advantage: they could dominate the minds of psychic species completely.
Wherever vulnerable psykers existed, the Enslavers spread.
Possessed individuals became living portals into the Warp itself.
Entire populations mutated into gateways through which more Enslavers emerged in endless numbers.
Civilizations collapsed within days.
The younger races created by the Old Ones turned against their creators under psychic domination.
The galaxy spiraled toward extinction.
Mike stood within a sealed observation chamber while projections displayed infected systems spreading across the galactic map.
Red markers multiplied continuously.
“Containment probabilities?” he asked.
The cryptek answered immediately.
“Negligible.”
Another projection appeared.
Entire Necron harvesting worlds abandoned due to uncontrolled Warp contamination.
Even the C’tan avoided heavily infected regions now.
Not from fear.
From incompatibility.
The Warp itself had become poison to them.
Mike processed the situation rapidly.
The Old Ones had lost.
Not merely militarily.
Completely.
Their creations, their Webway, their psychic empire everything had collapsed beneath forces they no longer controlled.
The War in Heaven had ended not with triumph, but with universal ruin.
And amidst that ruin, the final phase of another plan quietly approached completion.
Massive Blackstone pylons rose from dead planets while dimensional forges spanning entire moons activated in silence.
Countless crypteks labored endlessly beneath Mike’s command, refining technologies forbidden even among most Necron dynasties.
God-killing weapons.
The culmination of millions of years of preparation.
Mike stood within one of the primary command vaults alongside the Silent King himself.
The chamber was silent except for the low hum of impossible energies moving through hidden machinery beneath the planet’s crust.
For a long time, neither ruler spoke.
Then Szarekh finally broke the silence.
“The Old Ones are finished.”
Mike nodded once.
“Yes.”
The Silent King stared toward the projection of a dying sector.
“I waited for this moment for millions of years.”
There was no triumph in his voice.
Only exhaustion.
Only regret.
Mike understood.
The Silent King had damned his entire species to defeat the Old Ones.
And now that victory had finally arrived, nothing remained but ruins and monsters.
Szarekh turned slowly.
“The C’tan are weakened.”
Mike’s eyes narrowed slightly.
The surviving star gods had exhausted enormous amounts of power fighting one another, consuming the galaxy, and resisting the psychic onslaught unleashed by the younger races.
For the first time since biotransference
The C’tan were vulnerable.
Not weak.
Never weak.
But vulnerable enough.
Mike spoke quietly.
“They will never suspect rebellion now.”
“No,” the Silent King agreed.
“Their arrogance blinds them.”
Another silence followed.
Then Szarekh looked directly at Mike.
“You prepared for this long before I did.”
It was not a question.
Mike answered calmly.
“I understood what they were the moment they devoured our souls.”
The Silent King’s expression darkened slightly.
For the briefest moment, something almost human flickered beneath the cold metallic face of the ancient ruler.
Sorrow.
Then it vanished again.
“We end this now,” Szarekh said.
Mike inclined his head once.
“At last.”
The betrayal began without warning.
Across the galaxy, hidden Necron weapon arrays activated simultaneously.
Entire stars dimmed as impossible amounts of energy were extracted directly from reality itself and redirected into colossal hypercannons created by the greatest crypteks in existence.
Weapons beyond conventional understanding.
Weapons designed for one purpose only.
To kill gods.
The surviving C’tan realized the danger too late.
The first strike annihilated an entire stellar region.
Causality itself twisted beneath the unleashed energies as beams capable of tearing apart fundamental physical structures struck the star gods directly.
One C’tan screamed.
The sound echoed across dimensions.
Another exploded into fragments of burning stellar matter as Blackstone resonance fields tore through its existence.
The galaxy shook beneath the revolt.
Mike stood aboard his flagship while unimaginable battles unfolded across the stars.
Entire fleets vanished instantly as wounded C’tan unleashed their fury upon the Necrons.
Planets shattered beneath retaliatory strikes while dimensional storms consumed entire sectors.
Yet the Necrons did not stop.
For the first time since biotransference, the immortal legions fought not as servants
But executioners.
A cryptek turned toward Mike urgently.
“My phaeron, containment fields destabilizing!”
Mike observed the battlefield projection calmly.
Before them, a massive C’tan entity writhed within layered Blackstone trap networks while billions of nanites surged across its fragmented physical shell.
The star god roared in fury.
“You dare!!”
The rest vanished beneath the firing sequence.
God-killing hypercannons struck again.
Reality folded inward.
The C’tan’s form shattered.
Not destroyed.
Fragmented.
Thousands upon thousands of burning shards exploded outward across surrounding space like pieces of a broken sun.
Mike watched carefully.
Exactly as predicted.
The C’tan could not truly die.
They were woven too deeply into the fabric of reality itself.
Destroying them completely risked damaging existence beyond repair.
So the Silent King had chosen another solution.
Fragmentation.
Break the gods into pieces too weak to dominate the galaxy again.
And imprison what remained.
Across the stars, the rebellion spread.
The Deceiver vanished amidst dimensional illusions before containment could fully secure him.
The Burning One shattered after destroying three entire systems in its death throes.
Others were broken apart one after another beneath overwhelming Necron firepower.
The galaxy became a graveyard of dying gods.
Even the Necrons themselves would later struggle to remember the full horror of those battles.
The weapons unleashed damaged time, causality, and memory itself.
Entire records disappeared.
Histories fractured.
And afterward, the Silent King personally erased much of the knowledge surrounding the god-killing technologies from Necron archives.
Even he feared what such weapons might become in the future.
Mike understood why.
Because he had preserved copies.
Hidden deeply within Thokt systems beyond even the Silent King’s awareness.
Insurance.
Always insurance.
As another shattered fragment of a C’tan was sealed within layered Blackstone prisons, Mike looked across the burning stars silently.
The War in Heaven was ending at last.
The Old Ones were gone.
The C’tan were broken.
The galaxy lay in ruins.
And now only the Necrons remained to inherit the ashes.