Everything had gone dark in an instant. The bolt shell entered Ajax's cranium at high speed. The bolt passed through with ease as the mass-reactive warhead in the tip exploded Ajax's skull into 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 thought burning perpetually would hurt worse than being sick forever.'
His humor cracked, fragile from the agony .
'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. 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.
'Fuck 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.