999.M41 A FEW DAYS AFTER THE FALL OF CADIA || FOLLAX IV; SEGMENTUM ULTIMA; IMPERIUM NIHILIS

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Legs coiled like a spring again.

Flood them with energy.

Release.

Transform, now into a form resembling a glider.

Reach out with four tendrils.

Grab onto the wall.

Pull myself up quickly.

Reform my human body.

I did that for what felt like the thousandth time by now and my enthusiasm was rapidly dwindling.

The motion was near flawless due to the repetition but I was still only a third of the way to the central spire and it's growing increasingly boring with each near-identical rooftop I land on. I need something else for a bit, something to stimulate my mind.

Colours damn it, everything is grey or black up here.

Let's explore this building for a bit, it seemed a bit different, maybe more well-built or solid from the looks of it. The brutalist architectural style still shone through as it looked like a large grey brick but it was solid and its walls mostly smooth.

The roof was conveniently collapsed so I didn't even need to search for a window or a vent to get in.

On closer inspection the 'collapse' might have been intentional, considering the scorch marks that were nearly invisible from further away on the dark grey concrete.

I walked over and crouched down, ran my fingers over the scorch mark and thought.

Well, tried to but I wasn't some kind of detective so the most I could gather from the marks was that the thing wasn't melted through but only blown through. The heat of the explosion only scorched the upper layer of the rocky material.

I shrugged my shoulders and jumped into the hole, with the dim sunlight that got through the smog cloud lighting my way.

I landed with my legs bent and my knees creaking a bit under the exertion but I managed to land from five meters up without much of an injury.

Looking around I noted that most of the room was beyond fucked, whatever collapsed the ceiling was followed by another of its kind that exploded in this room. With a bit of scraping I managed to dig under the scorch on the wall to reveal a grey, almost marble-like material.

Fancy stuff, probably.

The rest of the room was barely recoverable. The charred remains of a wooden desk and maybe a bookshelf? It was hard to tell but it looked like one.

On the wall was the frame of a painting, yeah only the frame. Whatever painting once was there, now only half molten wall remains in its place. It must have offended whoever came here.

Wasn't blowing the room up enough? Couldn't they just blow the whole building up then?

Maybe they wanted the bodies, for a Ritual you know? Like the one I found?

Eh, still soo impractical. Whatever.

Something other than wood is among the remains of the desk so I carefully dug it out, revealing a ... typewriter? It was a bit molten and battered but it was a typewriter for sure.

I thres it back onto the ground.

I looked through all the rubble when I spotted something shiny and golden peaking out beneath a fallen eh- I have no idea what it was. I pushed the somehow unburned cloth-like material off to reveal a small sculpture.

Looked a bit battered and similarly molten but the shape was still recognizable, a two-headed golden eagle.

I stared at it a bit but shake my head. Eagles have long been incorporated into crests and flags, along with dragons and other animals. The Romans used a golden eagle in a similar pose on their Aquilas, minus the second head.

Still, I couldn't dismiss the stupid idea that sprung into my mind upon seeing the thing so similar to the Imperial Aquila from Warhammer but that was dumb.

It was one thing to travel forward in time which was scientifically possible, it was still comprehendible if I was in a parallel universe as that was a thing that was theoretically possible. It was another thing entirely for that other universe to be a fictional universe thought up by humans on my Earth for a tabletop game. It wasn't totally, entirely impossible as there are supposedly infinite universes so there ought to be one like the Warhammer universe out there but the chance of ending up in it randomly would be more than astronomical.

I didn't end up here randomly though, something pulled my soul here quite literally. Which by itself is something outside of anything even theoretically possible, by that I mean souls.

The human consciousness is the ever-changing connection between the neurons and the chemicals affecting them, humans were still far from understanding its intricacies back on Earth but we 'knew' that souls weren't a thing. Well scientifically anyway, a thing of which existence can't be proven nor disproven is not something science bothers with.

I put the little eagle back on the ground carefully like the fictional emperor of humanity would smite me if I was disrespectful to it and backed away.

More exploration will more likely than not disprove my stupid hypothesis.

There wasn't much else of note in the room so it was time to go, there was still much more to explore in this building. Hopefully, they are more intact than this room.

The door was lying next to the wall on the opposite side of the hallway in many smaller fragments, its hinges still attached to the doorframe. Someone didn't have the patience to open it it seemed.

The scorching was much less out here but some of the walls and floor were still blackened by it, flamethrowers maybe?

The next few rooms proved to be much more boring than the first, kitchen, lounge, bedroom and a few other similar ones.

I dared not hope for something interesting when I peeked through the tenth doorframe, its door was in a similar state as most of the others, but I was positively surprised as it turned out to be a small library, sort of.

My first thought was joy quickly followed by confusion. I assumed I was in the future, so, like, why the hell did this small library have only what looked like scrolls of papyrus in them?

Even in dystopian cyberpunk settings, people used futuristic tech, computers and memory banks not paper. What the hell?

No, let's focus on the positives. I could get new information out of this, even if the language might make it a pain in the ass. I still couldn't quite accept that this mish-mash of earth language was the real language now but we will see.

I plopped down on a blessedly intact couch and pulled out a handful of scrolls from their places on the nearest shelf.

Reading proved much more of a problem than I first thought as most of the scrolls were not written in the one I assumed to be the common language but a bastardization of Latin. My dumb brain was telling me to call it High Gothic but I refuse, not until I have conclusive evidence.

I didn't want that to be true, suddenly I would go from an apex predator that I would be on Earth with my current powers to a considerably sized ant. I didn't like that, at all.

I did know the utmost basics of Latin, well Ecclesiastical Latin but it had as much in common with this as did Roman Latin I assumed. Mostly only the words sounded like Latin but the grammar seemed very similar to English, someone was very damned lazy here. Did they just want cool-sounding words like in Harry Potter?

The scroll I was reading was a yearly report on production, in this sector of the city. I could understand the date too, god damn it. 985.M41, IF this was from what I won't name would mean it's the 985th year of the 41st millennium.

The next scroll was the same thing, but with 986.M41 as the date.

I threw it behind me and greedily grabbed at the next ones, only looking for the dates one after the other, thankfully Arabic numbers were still the ones used. Would have been even more of a pain if they switched to something else.

988.M41

993.M41

...

998.M41

A sinking feeling settled into the pit of my stomach, that was the last scroll. That would mean the current year would be the next, 999.M41. Even if I wasn't much of a Warhammer fangirl I liked the setting so I've read a handful of the books and watched a bunch of lore videos while eating lunch. You always have to have something to watch while eating, that's just common sense.

So from all that I knew that year, the year when the 13th Black Crusade has torn a new asshole to the Galaxy which the Imperium called the Cicatrix Maledictum or the Great Rift for less nerdy people.

I ripped the dumb scroll apart.

I was breathing heavily as my mind spun in circles, trying to come up with answers but most of myself was denying it still. This could be some sort of well-made recreation of a Warhammer Fan, yeah, totally believable. Maybe humanity just started using the same date system as the Imperium, that was much more likely.

I started feeling light-headed, my mind numbed and my breathing quickened even more in dreadful panic.

My vision blurred and started darkening.

A small part of my mind realized I was hyperventilating from the panic but it didn't matter anymore as I fainted soon after.