Cold. Damp. Suffocating.
It felt like sinking to the bottom of a lightless abyss, where unseen scavengers lurked in the dark, waiting to strip flesh from bone.
In his daze, Adrian thought he saw a sun hanging high in the far distance—a warm, radiant sun in the endless dark.
And seated within that sun, upon a towering throne, was a figure watching him.
His thoughts were sluggish, his body heavy and numb, but some instinct deep inside him urged him forward. He tried to drag himself toward that warmth, toward that impossible light.
Then a rough voice shattered the darkness like a chain snapping apart.
The next instant, Adrian jolted awake.
"Soldier! Soldier! I'm talking to you, you damned idiot!"
Before he could make sense of anything, the voice slammed into his ears together with the thunder of artillery.
Still half-conscious, Adrian let out a vague grunt in response.
When his vision cleared, he found himself in a massive trench choked with mud and smoke.
All around him, a dozen or so soldiers were spread along the firing line, lying against the trench wall and firing into the distance without pause.
Three or four meters away stood a man in battered green armor, clutching a weapon Adrian had never seen before. The man shot him an irritated look.
"Damn it, I thought the blast had deafened you." The soldier raised his weapon, leaned over the trench, and fired a burst before ducking back down. "If you don't want to die, grab a gun! Those damned Tyranids are about to charge!"
The words had barely left his mouth when a black spike streaked through the air.
Its surface shimmered with a sickly green sheen.
Before Adrian could react, the spike punched straight through the soldier's helmet.
The green metal barely slowed it.
The man who had been shouting at him a moment ago was dead before he hit the ground.
Adrian froze.
Then, almost by instinct, he threw himself flat into the mud.
From where he lay, he could see the corpse twitch once before going still. Thick matter mixed with blood and seeped from the ruined helmet.
Oddly enough, Adrian did not feel as terrified as he thought he should.
What he felt instead was his heartbeat—loud, violent, hammering through his chest.
Adrenaline surged through him.
His body moved before his mind could catch up.
Half-crouching, Adrian lunged toward the corpse and dropped beside it. One glance was enough to tell him the body was already being eaten away by a green, corrosive fluid spreading rapidly from the head wound.
Suppressing his nausea, he avoided the liquid and quickly stripped the armor from the dead man's body.
He put it on.
He still had no idea what was happening, but one thing was obvious:
Survival came first.
The armor was battered and scarred, but it was still armor.
Once he had it on, Adrian snatched up the fallen weapon.
It felt strange.
Before today, he should have had no idea how to use gear like this. And yet his hands moved with practiced familiarity, checking the weapon's weight, balance, and charge state as though he had done it a thousand times before.
He pulled the trigger experimentally.
A bolt of blazing red plasma roared from the barrel and lanced into the sky.
Adrian's pupils contracted.
A plasma gun?
The unfamiliar weapon in his hands was suddenly both foreign and weirdly familiar.
A chill ran down his spine.
Then, as if in answer to the worst thought in his mind, a translucent panel appeared before his eyes.
Plane traversal complete. System loading finished.
Current World:Warhammer 40,000
Phase One Main Quest Initiated:
Assist Titus' Squad in reactivating the giant plasma cannon on the surface of Kardak.
Quest Objective 1: Kill 1 Tyranid Warrior
Reward: 1 Gacha Opportunity
Title:Warrior Slayer
Quest Objective 2: Kill 1,000 Tyranids
Reward: 1 Gacha Opportunity
Title:Tyranid Slayer
Quest Objective 3: Successfully reactivate the giant plasma cannon
Reward: 1 Gacha Opportunity
Title:Giant Slayer
Unclaimed Newcomer Gift Pack ×1
Shock.
Panic.
Disbelief.
And beneath them all, a cold thread of despair.
In the span of a few seconds, each emotion flashed across Adrian's face.
Then the panel seemed to trigger something buried deep in his mind.
A floodgate opened.
In that instant, the world around him appeared to freeze.
The artillery blazing across the sky, the Astra Militarum soldiers firing from the trench, the Tyranids charging in the distance—
everything stopped.
Everything except Adrian and the glowing panel suspended before him.
Then the memories came.
They crashed into his mind in a violent torrent, fragmented and chaotic, like someone had reached into his skull and stirred his thoughts apart with a blade.
After what felt like an eternity, Adrian finally pieced together the truth.
First, just as he had suspected—
he had transmigrated.
The good news: he had transmigrated.
The bad news: he had transmigrated into Warhammer 40,000.
Still, by the Emperor's grace, he had not come empty-handed.
The system panel before him had crossed over with him.
From the memories he had just inherited, Adrian gained a rough understanding of what it could do.
The system granted him the power to travel between different planes.
Each time he entered a new world, it would automatically issue a main quest. Completing that quest would allow him to continue on to the next plane.
Along the way, it would also generate side objectives. Completing them would earn him chances to draw rewards from the system.
The rewards could be almost anything.
A rusted and broken bayonet.
Or a Necron World Engine the size of a planet.
Everything depended on luck.
Once he had sorted through the system's basic functions, Adrian turned his attention to the situation at hand.
According to the memories he had inherited, the body he now occupied belonged to an Astra Militarum soldier.
That explained why he had been able to put on the armor and operate the plasma gun so naturally.
It was muscle memory.
Memory etched into the flesh.
Second, based on what remained of the original owner's memories, the current point in time was long after the opening of the Great Rift—after the galaxy had been split apart and Roboute Guilliman had launched the Indomitus Crusade.
His current location was Kadaku, a jungle world in the Recidious System part of the Bastior Sub-sector of the Segmentum Pacificus, a star system lying to the galactic west of Holy Terra, in a region infested with xenos threats.
"Kadaku… Recidious…"
The names stirred something in Adrian's memory.
Then his gaze dropped back to the system panel.
Titus' Squad.
His expression changed.
He understood.
More precisely, he had transmigrated directly into the events of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
And at this very moment, the planet beneath his feet—no, this entire star system—was under invasion by the Great Devourer.
The Tyranids.