Oh God, I Woke Up in Warhammer 40k

[ClumsyQuill]

Hey All, I am a new user. I have been writing a Warhammer 40k Fanfiction and would love to hear what others think. With out further ado, here is the first chapter of Oh God, I Woke Up in Warhammer 40k:

 

Ajax passed beyond the veil of the world fitfully and with many regrets. His journey had come to an end. Now he was going to discover the answer to the question that had plagued humanity since they first gained the capacity to wonder: What, if anything, comes after death?

Ajax found himself in a void composed of a darkness that defied description — a darkness so black that black would appear white by contrast. Empty and formless. Vast yet finite. Deep and shallow. His thoughts began to wander as he considered where he had arrived. Was this death? Was this the end that humanity had wondered about since time immemorial? Where had his body gone? Would he spend eternity in this void?

These thoughts came unbidden to Ajax’s mind, but as he pondered his current circumstances, he began to smell cooking meat. At first, he didn’t register where it was coming from. He couldn’t see his body — not even his nose. Yet Ajax realized that the smell was coming from the cooking of his own invisible flesh.

Ajax began to scream.To him, it felt as though a flame was creeping up his body, roasting his feet, then his legs, and the rest of him after that. There was a sick horror in being able to feel the flesh cooking off your legs, yet being unable to see the flames — a horror that drove Ajax into even higher peaks of panic. He could feel the fire cooking his testicles until they exploded from the heat. As his eyeballs melted out of his non-existent skull, he realized his non-corporeal body wasn’t the only thing that had burst into flame.

His soul had caught fire. Ajax screamed a garbled wail through the melting mass of his vocal cords as the very concept of himself began to go up in flames. He screamed for it to stop. He screamed for someone to put him out of his misery. But there was no one to hear his screams.

Ajax had received an answer to a philosophical question he’d never wanted answered: If no one is around to hear, does a soul scream in its final conflagration? Yes. Yes, it does.

Ajax was screaming in some metaphysical sense as everything that made him who he was began to burn away. His likes. His dislikes. The memories of every time he had ever failed. All of it — and so much more — began to turn to ash and float away. If he still had vocal cords, they would have long since given out. The pain was all-consuming. He could feel the memories ebbing from his consciousness, replaced with only fire. The past and future burned away, and Ajax was left with only this unending present. More and more memories burned, leaving “Ajax” increasingly hollow. A person was said by some to be the sum of their experiences. When all experience was burned away, what remained?

Ajax was awash in pain, but he was also terrified by this thought. Even though the fear quickly lit aflame and began to burn away, new fear bubbled up from the deepest core of Ajax. He did not want to find out what was at his core. He had loathed himself for as long as he could remember. He didn’t want to see what he was when everything else was stripped away. He didn’t want to see the ugly sludge at the bottom of the barrel after all the good had been poured out.

Most importantly, he did not want to lose the precious memories of his mother and brother. Ajax screamed again — but instead of sheer terror, he screamed in defiance at the fire trying to take the only good parts of him away. He screamed, pushing the memories deeper and deeper within himself, sacrificing more to the flames to save them. If it was his last act, he would save those memories to burn only after the rest of him had turned to ash.

Ajax didn’t know how long he screamed defiance into the fiery void. He became a singular existence with one function: sacrificially burning itself to prevent destruction.

Time held no meaning in that conceptual realm.

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. Everything stopped.The roaring inferno gave way to blessed silence. The aftershocks of pain ebbed away. A deep sense of refreshment enveloped Ajax. To him, it felt like he was a burn victim being submerged in a pool of cool aloe vera. His aches and pains were slowly pulled from his body.

“Wait. My body? I thought I was dead?”

Ajax opened his eyes and looked down to find himself in a body he did not recognize. The body was much leaner than he’d been in his first life. He had some muscle, but it was clear he wasn’t some sort of bodybuilder. He looked like someone shaped by a hard life where food hadn’t always been easy to find. His hands had scars from what looked like blade cuts. There was a big, round wound-scar on one of his forearms. Odd — it was much larger than a bullet hole and seemed like a cross between a gunshot and a burn.

He couldn’t see much more in the dim light. His torso was bare — the night was hot — and he had been sweating into the cot he’d been lying on. He was wearing drab green fatigue pants that had seen better days but could have belonged to any number of militaries across many periods of time.

Ajax sat up and looked around the tent he had woken up in. It was mostly dark, with some light from the night sky filtering through the partially opened tent flap. He could hear voices in the distance now and again. People. Vehicles. Movement.

It was a fair deduction that he’d found himself in an army camp somewhere. Most likely not in enemy territory — not with how noisy it was after dark. If they were near the front, the sound would have drawn enemy combatants like flies to a carcass. Unless the army Ajax had transmigrated into was completely inept, they were probably in a relatively safe location that didn’t require strict noise and light discipline.

“That really doesn’t narrow down where — or when — I am.”

Ajax felt around the tent for some kind of lamp. He needed to check the items inside and look for clues.

“Actually... why the hell am I so calm? Under these circumstances, I should be having a full-blown panic attack.”

He closed his eyes and took a four-count breath — a habit he’d used to calm himself in his past life.

“I remember the fire. Everything besides the heat and pain is kind of drowned out by comparison. It feels like when a camera is exposed to a really bright light and everything else goes dark because it can’t handle the contrast... I guess I’ll worry about my emotions returning once I figure out where I am.”

His hand brushed against smooth glass. A lamp. He fumbled for a switch, found it, and clicked it on. Light filled the tent. Ajax winced as his eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness. Then his gaze was drawn to a glint of metal — a uniform hanging from a stand. Three pieces of gear stood out: a cuirass with a twin-headed gold eagle in the center, a long black greatcoat with red and gold epaulets, and a peaked officer’s cap with a gold skull motif. Ajax froze. Slowly, he lowered his head to examine his chest, praying he wouldn’t see what he feared.Above his heart: the tattoo of the Imperial Aquila. The same double-headed eagle inlaid into the breastplate.

He looked around. Next to his cot was a belt with a holstered bolt pistol and chainsword.

“:cuss:. I got reincarnated into the darkest fictional universe possible. A universe where there is only war. A universe with literal demon gods thirsting for mankind’s souls. Where aliens are running rampant, murdering each other and humanity. Where humanity has become the unholy love child of the worst possible totalitarian regime and theocratic state imaginable. Where techno-monkeys exist. :cuss:. What did I do to deserve this fate?!”

---

[Welcome to the Grimdark Future]

[You have been chosen to suffer a fate worse than death. You must save the Imperium of Man.]

[You have been made a Perpetual and have been gifted the Anathema System.]

[In the grimdark future, there is no hope for Mankind.]

[There is only the laughter of thirsting gods.]

[You are the last-ditch effort of a mad god to reignite hope in this new, dark millennium.]

[You will know no peace.]

[You will know no rest.]

[You exist to break the rules of the Great Game.]

[You must flip the board.]

---

Ajax was silent.

He could feel his heart pounding. Blood rushed through his veins. A loud ringing echoed in his ears.

The weight of the words felt like it was crushing the air out of his chest.

He reached for the belt, unholstered the bolt pistol, put the barrel in his mouth — and pulled the trigger.

BANG.

 

[ClumsyQuill]

Here is the second chapter of Oh God, I Woke Up in Warhammer 40k:

 

Everything had gone dark in an instant. The bolt shell entered Ajax’s cranium at high speed. The bolt passed through with such ease that the mass-reactive warhead in the tip only exploded in a squall of blood and gore. The tent was instantly painted dark red with the blood arterial spurting from the now-headless corpse that had been Ajax’s second body for no more than sixty seconds. Flecks of grey matter and bone shot out at high enough speed to injure soldiers billeted in the next tent over. However, this was not the quick death and fade to black that Ajax had hoped for.

In a flash of consciousness, Ajax was transported to a plane of blight, plague, and rot.

His suffering in the plane of fire had been a walk in the park by comparison.

Here, there was no flame — only decay. The world oozed and festered around him. The very air was thick with disease, and yet Ajax found himself breathing it — tasting it. A miasma of filth clung to his skin and slipped beneath it, burrowing into the flesh like living pus.

He fell to his knees, eyes watering, throat clenching around bile that burned worse than acid. His skin bubbled and cracked open in wet, oozing lesions. Worms crawled from open sores only to burrow back into new wounds. He could feel every fiber of his being becoming infected — body, mind, and soul.

Then came the sensation of time itself rotting. Moments stretched into eternities. Seconds collapsed into nothing. Past and future churned in place like a festering wound that refused to close.

Ajax screamed, but no sound came out. His throat had dissolved into a wet mass of maggots and yellow phlegm.

He could feel himself swelling, not with strength, but with pus. His stomach distended grotesquely. His genitals ballooned to absurd size — and then burst in a nauseating spray of necrotic fluid. The pain was beyond agony — it was humiliation, surrender, corruption. He was being unmade, not by fire, but by softness. The soft, sludgy pull of unclean things.

Every breath in this hell was like inhaling a thousand diseases all screaming in chorus. Cancers bloomed and died in moments across his lungs. Molds crawled down his spine. Every thought was wrapped in a damp blanket of fever.

His teeth fell out, one by one, replaced with wriggling larvae that gnawed at his tongue. His bones softened and twisted inwards, growing wrong, trying to escape his own flesh. Even his eyes betrayed him, their vision eaten away by colonies of fungus until all that was left was milky rot.

“Well, it’s official,” Ajax thought, “at least two universes hate me.”

Even that thought was difficult to form. The plane of fire had burned his body and soul, but the plane of plague was smothering him. Not in silence — but in the endless, disgusting wet sounds of decay. Muffled squishes. The buzz of corpse flies. The burbling laughter of something enormous shook the plane as it delighted in the rot and decay.

It was Nurgle. The Plague God. The Grandfather. The source of this place.

Ajax could feel his very identity softening. His pride bloated into delusion. His pain fermented into numbness. His will began to slough off his soul like skin peeling from a rot-struck limb.

He wanted to vomit.

He did vomit. Again and again. His body was ejecting itself. Organs fell from his mouth like lumps of spoiled meat. There was no end to it.

“All in all,” Ajax thought, “I would’ve figured burning perpetually would hurt worse than being sick forever.”

His humor cracked, fragile. “But it looks like Grandpappy Nurgle is really good at making me eat my words…”

Ajax tried to scream. He couldn’t. His jaw had sloughed off. There was only rot.

As that thought crossed his mind, Ajax felt a swift booted foot strike him in the ribs and send him sprawling as a distinctly Slavic voice rang out:

“Look alive, hetman! Wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself in front of the Uxor over one night of mild celebration.”

Ajax scrambled to his feet and came to attention out of pure guesswork. It wasn’t a bad idea, all things considered. After all, in the grimdark future where there is only war, it was a good bet that you might end up in a military formation pretty often. Ajax studied his surroundings with his peripheral vision, so as not to look like a gawking tourist in the middle of what was supposed to be a disciplined military formation. It was hard not to look like he was having a seizure. One nostril still smelled the ever-present—

Out of the corners of his eyes, Ajax was able to distinguish dark-clad figures leading formations of frankly ridiculously sized troops wearing armored body gloves of leather and chainmail. Each man was roughly two meters tall and looked like they weighed at least 110 kg. They stood with their backs ramrod straight, with waist-length yellow coats covering most of their upper bodies and yellow silk cloaks billowing in the wind. Each man stood at least two meters tall and looked like they weighed 120 kg at a bare minimum. The effect of the billowing cloaks transformed these already imposing men into figures out of Greek legend. The figures in black cut more refined silhouettes than the armored mammoths behind them. They appeared to be military men of less significant physical stature than their troops.

“Let me think. What regiment of the Imperial Guard could they be? Clearly, they must be a genic unit. You don’t get this many absolute units that all look alike outside of the Adeptus Astartes, unless you’re messing around with genes. They don’t strike me as all that bright. Must be why the officers are different.”

Ajax was standing at attention trying to keep his face straight as he pondered what unit he had ended up with this time. In his previous life — not the one where he shot himself with a bolt pistol — he had just been a kind of chubby nerd. He might have the body of a military man now, but he certainly did not have the conditioned mindset of a soldier.

“:cuss: it. Fake it till you make it, I guess. There’s really only one unit that comes to mind, but that makes no goddamn sense.”

Staring off into the distance, Ajax was perplexed by the contradicting assumptions he had made from his two separate lives in this universe. He also had to try not to crack up at his own confusion. He was still trying to make logical sense of a situation where he had been reincarnated into what he had previously believed to be a fictional universe. Normal logic had died with his first death. His second death — and his first and second rebirths — were just teabagging its corpse at this point.

That made the tally: three lives, two deaths, two rebirths, and zero damn explanations.

“Attention!” called out a loud, ringing voice.

In sync, the long line of troops and officers saluted with the Fist of Unification, striking their chests above their hearts with closed fists. Ajax had guessed correctly and performed the correct gesture — not the Sign of the Aquila, which would have been appropriate in the modern timeline of 40k.

“I guess I am gonna have to start calling myself a time traveler as well as a reincarnator, because I am in the goddamn Great Crusade!”

Ajax let a small smile creep to the corners of his mouth. He realized all hope wasn’t lost just yet.

 

I look forward to hearing your opinions and critiques. Hopefully, you've enjoyed reading thus far.

Edited 20 hours ago by ClumsyQuill

[ClumsyQuill]

Here is the third chapter of Oh God, I Woke Up in Warhammer 40k:

 

“This must be the Geno Five-Two Chiliad. The trooper called me ‘hetman,’ which, if I remember correctly, should be the rank designation given to company-level officers brought into the Chiliad to lead their gene-bred troops. He also said I didn’t want to look bad in front of the ‘Uxor,’ which should be their female tactician class — minor psykers. Technically, this is not an Imperial Guard regiment. It’s one of the Old Hundred — the one hundred regiments that battled alongside the Emperor in his Unification of Terra. They belong to the Excertus Imperialis, which was the Imperial Army during the Great Crusade. The army was only formally split into the Imperial Guard and the Imperial Navy later on.”

Ajax was running the last few minutes on repeat in his mind, trying to extract as much information as possible from the limited clues he had — while trying not to stand out. He was fairly confident that his second life had been the (quite short, from his perspective) life of an Imperial Commissar on a jungle world sometime between M32 (32,000 AD) and M40 (40,000 AD). He didn’t think the Imperial Commissariat had been established during the Great Crusade. Only post-Heresy did commissars become commonly mentioned in the 40k setting.

“‘40k setting.’ Heh. I’m still thinking of this universe as a fictional setting made to sell inordinately priced plastic miniatures by a bunch of British nerds. Unless this is one prolonged hallucination, I am really here.”

Ajax realized he had gone totally off-track. Apparently, his new body suffered from ADHD as well — that, or his thought patterns were still shaped by how he had lived in his first life. However, that tangential thought had brought to mind a troubling prospect he’d missed.

“How exactly do I understand everyone when they should be speaking Low Gothic? It all sounds like English to me. I guess you could chalk that up to the weirdness of being reincarnated, but that seems a dangerous assumption to make when there’s a better explanat—”

“10th Company, attention!” screamed a loud non-commissioned gene-trooper, sounding the arrival of the Uxor to inspect Ajax’s company. The NCO seemed to be expecting Ajax to do something. The Bashaw — which Ajax recalled was the Chiliad’s rank for political officers — seemed particularly large and aggressive, even bigger than the standard troops. He was staring a hole through Ajax.

“:cuss: it, here I go.”

“10th Company, ready, front!” Ajax cried out as he saluted the Uxor and the Bashaw with the Fist of Unification — his fist pounding his chest above his heart.

It was hard not to cringe from the dread of hoping he hadn’t guessed wrong.

From behind him, Ajax heard a unified clattering as wooden buttstocks clapped into outstretched palms. He didn’t dare check with his eyes, but he figured the company had brought their weapons into position for inspection. His eyes still watched the Bashaw — it was like the man’s body language was screaming that Ajax still had something left to say.

“10th Company is ready for inspection, Uxor,” said Ajax.

The words flowed from his mouth, but they felt different. They had a sensation that didn’t fit within the standard five senses. It was almost like they tasted different from the language Ajax had been using with his unit.

The Uxor’s eyes widened slightly. Her eyebrows raised, and a faint grin touched her face. The slightly cheeky grin made Ajax knot up in both excitement and fear.

The Uxor was a ravishingly beautiful woman. Standing at 1.9 meters, she had long, elegant lines and respectable… uh… assets. Her fiery red hair and sly grin were right up Ajax’s alley. He bit his tongue hard to refocus his thoughts away from her appearance.

“Now’s not the time to be thinking with the wrong head, dumbass. You have a psyker right in front of you.” Ajax admonished himself.

“Been practicing your High Gothic, Hetman Kjarrick? Your accent has improved tremendously. It’s much better than when I was first teaching you to speak High Gothic,” said the Uxor.

Her words tasted like the ones Ajax had spoken to her — which made the pit in his stomach grow deeper.

“Of course, ma’am. I appreciated your tutelage greatly. Decided to finally put in the work and show you that I took your lessons to heart,” Ajax said, bluffing his ass off.

“That’s funny to hear you appreciated my tutelage, Drogant, as I seem to recall you squealing like a stuck swine about why you had to learn the language of uppity officers and useless government officials in the first place. But it gladdens my heart to hear that you’ve turned over a new leaf,” the Uxor said to the slightly perspiring Ajax.

The Uxor turned her eyes to the formation of men standing behind him, scanning them all. Then her eyes returned to his.

Her violet irises seemed to bore holes into Ajax’s skull. It was only after a few heartbeats that she finally broke eye contact.

“Have the 10th ready for boarding procedures in an hour for the departure to orbit. When we board the Truth’s Razor, report to me in the Archivum. I would like to see how far your hard work has brought you toward fluency,” the Uxor said sardonically.

As soon as she and her attendant Bashaw left earshot, the chuckles started from 10th Company.

“Okay, take a deep breath and don’t immediately pull a Dexter thinking she knows about my situation just from that. I know at least two things I didn’t before. One: my new name and rank is Hetman Drogant Kjarrick. Two: I am definitely a psyker — specifically a logokine.”