In the far ancient cosmos, the godlike race known as the Old Ones fell during the War in Heaven, which had turned the entire galaxy into a sea of fire.
Then came Szarekh, the Silent King, ruler of the Necrons, who struck the C’tan—gods of the material realm—as they reveled in their victory, shattered them into fragments, and sealed them away.
And then, once again, came the Aeldari, who stabbed the C’tan in the back and betrayed them, then seized the opportunity to attack the weakened Necrons, exhausted from barely managing to seal the C’tan away.
Within that endlessly repeating, accursed cycle of war, Szarekh, leader of the Necrons, finally clicked his tongue and said, “Ah, fuck. You bastards really fight like shit. Fucking cunts.”
In the end, he officially declared GG, and his entire species entered a comfortable Great Sleep, promising to meet again in the future.
Thus the Aeldari—those space pointy-ears who had begun with silver spoons in their mouths and ended things in the most underhanded way imaginable—came to reign openly as the absolute rulers of the galaxy.
Through the Webway, the great legacy left behind by the Old Ones, they traversed every corner of the galaxy as easily as walking through their own homes.
With their overwhelming military might, superlative scientific technology, and psychic powers no one dared oppose, no species in the galaxy at the time could defeat them.
With all rivals gone, they built a mighty empire in the galactic core and began to enjoy endless prosperity.
And at the end of that long prosperity, the Eldar grew more arrogant with every passing day.
Eventually, they sank deeply into the vile swamp of conceit and racial superiority, convinced that this entire splendid galaxy had been created for them alone.
Endless prosperity bestowed upon the Eldar—whose senses were several times more acute and whose emotions were more extreme than those of ordinary mortals—the dreadful curse called boredom.
And to dispel that ennui, the space pointy-ears began blindly pursuing pleasure, and ever more stimulating pleasure.
At last, Pleasure Cults—omens of doom, spreading like a plague—ran through every corner of their radiant empire like wildfire.
As though falling into the mire of narcotics, once Eldar became absorbed in intense pleasure, their insatiable greed led them ever further down darker and more twisted paths.
In Eldar society, bloody torture and murder had already degenerated into an ordinary form of performance art.
They now focused on devising innovative and horrific entertainments: how to violate other living beings more cruelly, and how to tear them apart and kill them in more outlandish ways.
But to complete such sadistic art, they always needed “stage materials.”
To procure sacrificial victims for their pleasures, the Eldar traveled the Old Ones’ Webway and scoured every part of the galaxy, indiscriminately capturing countless alien species and dragging them away as slaves.
Naturally, the scope of that merciless hunt fully included humanity—the humans who had spread throughout the galaxy.
The slave hunters of Calidon, one of the many trade cities woven deep into the Webway and known as the City of Bloody Chains, decided as usual to collect living toys to sell in the slave market.
They opened a Webway gate toward coordinates they had previously marked, and leapt into the hunting grounds to hunt the lesser race known as Mon-keigh—humans.
But the reality they encountered was utterly unlike anything they had expected.
Endless barrages of lethal energy, spatial paradox traps that twisted dimensions the instant one stepped upon them,
and combat drones raining down hellish firepower relentlessly from the sky.
The place they had swarmed into thinking it would be an enjoyable hunting ground turned out to be no different from a blood-spattered battlefield.
"...The resistance is far fiercer than expected!"
"I requested more reinforcements from headquarters! If this hunt fails, we might become slaves ourselves, so we have to succeed in capturing them."
"This won’t do! We’ll provide fire support from the front, then teleport inside that fortress and launch a surprise attack!"
"While we cause chaos inside, we’ll use sorcery to neutralize the Mon-keighs’ shields."
The human settlement they had raided this time had defenses that were strangely solid.
It was bad enough that they were having serious difficulty taking slaves alive, but above all, they simply could not believe that members of their superior race had been brought down by those primitive, inferior Mon-keigh and left lying around as corpses.
It was staggering that such a heavily armed force was stationed in this barren frontier colony, unimaginably far from their capital.
But the pointy-ears of Calidon, blinded by arrogance, did not retreat.
The more casualties they suffered, the more their sadistic lust burned into fury.
In the end, the Eldar deployed even transdimensional psychic sorcery that present-day humanity could never dare imitate. They finally brought down the shields and solid outer walls, then began to storm the branch facility.
As sorcery that mocked the laws of reality exploded around them, the Yurick personnel of Gateway Corporation inside the branch screamed and desperately fled toward the emergency evacuation portal, their final refuge.
The branch guards, combat humanoids, and even the small contingent of Immortals stationed there joined forces to protect them, holding the defensive line to the end against the surging aliens despite being vastly outnumbered.
Yet against inscrutable alien technology passed down from distant antiquity, and psychic pressure that shook souls to their very core, the hastily assembled emergency defense line gradually began to crack.
While powerful psykers used sorcery to bind the most dangerous Immortals in place, groups of Eldar who had passed through the defenses by teleporting and launching flanking ambushes finally seized the heart of the branch.
The remaining personnel who had failed to escape through the emergency portal were ultimately bound and restrained by the cold hands of the Eldar.
At the very moment the hunters tightened their ropes, smiling in triumph as they indulged in sadistic fantasies of how they would violate the inferior Mon-keigh,
Screeeech—!
[Aaaaagh!!!]
Without warning, ear-splitting screams began ringing across the Eldar’s entire tactical communications network.
[What? What the hell is happening?!]
[More Mon-keigh are pouring in than we can count!!]
[No matter how much we fire at them, they won’t die! Even when they fall, they immediately get back up and crawl toward us!]
[They keep coming! Retreat! Everyone retreat! Grab whatever Mon-keigh we’ve captured and get out through the Webway!]
[Aagh! Don’t let those monsters catch you! If they get hold of you once, they drag you somewhere and you vanish without a trace!]
The Eldar hunter, who until only moments ago had been delighted to hunt inferior lifeforms,
could not make sense at all of what was happening beyond the communications network.
But an ominous chill ran down her spine, and acting on instinct, she slung the female Mon-keigh she had just bound over her shoulder.
She was about to at least take her trophy and swiftly retreat to the Webway gate.
Yet rather than crying, the Mon-keigh thrown over her shoulder was smiling.
In a frail voice, smiling as though something pleased her greatly, she kept calling someone’s name in their language.
"Noah... Noah has come! Noah has come to save us...!"
‘Noah?’
The Mon-keigh cradled in the hunter’s arms stared fixedly in one direction, tears of joy streaming down her face as her whole body shook with the certainty of salvation.
That was the very moment it happened.
Rumble, rumble, rumble—!
A violent tremor that shook the entire building tore through the air.
From beyond the corridor the Mon-keigh was watching came a bizarre, overwhelming noise that numbed the eardrums.
The Eldar hunter instinctively turned her head.
And there, she witnessed a sight so horrifying that it froze her soul solid.
‘They’ were coming like an enormous tidal wave.
There was not even room to set foot on the floor.
Hundreds, thousands of Mon-keigh with identical faces had filled it all, crawling over the walls and ceiling like spiders.
Filling her entire field of vision, they all reached out toward the precious child of the family who had been tied up and bound,
then looked toward the Eldar hunter standing behind her.
Because she was an Eldar with keen psychic senses, she felt it vividly with the eyes of her soul.
Within those millions of bodies, one vast and immense “single self” had merged together and was staring at her as though it would devour her.
"Ah... Aaaagh!!!"
The pride of that arrogant alien hunter shattered in a single instant.
The Eldar threw the Mon-keigh she had been carrying brutally onto the floor and began screaming as she fled without looking back.
"Ah, Noah... You came to save us."
The Noahs threw themselves forward and caught the precious child flung through the air, then carefully wrapped her in their arms and evacuated her to the rear.
The instant they had secured the child’s safety, thousands of eyes turned as one toward the fleeing Eldar, and the merciless pursuit resumed.
"Stay away! Don’t touch me! Stay away, I said!!!"
From every direction in the fleeing Eldar’s vision, thousands of arms grotesquely emerged from the corridor walls and armor panels.
Weeping in terror, she desperately twisted her body and kept running forward.
Even when her entire body was seized as she ran, she detonated the bombs she carried and escaped with her body mangled. Even when her ankle was grabbed and she fell, she crawled away.
In the midst of that miserable flight, she instinctively realized something.
She was being thoroughly toyed with by those grotesque monsters.
If they had wanted to kill her, they would have torn off her limbs and killed her long ago.
But like a cat playing with a rat, they were cruelly tormenting her like a toy, just as her own kind had done to inferior races.
They were repaying a bloody vengeance as sport.
All the conceit she had possessed as a proud Eldar had already collapsed without leaving a trace.
Consumed by nothing but the instinct to survive, the Eldar screamed and ran endlessly onward, staring only ahead.
At last, she began to see a dazzling exit leading out of the building in the distance.
Beyond that door was the Webway.
But when the Eldar ran desperately for the exit and finally burst out of the fortress building, the sight that met her was not salvation.
What remained was only the afterimage of the Webway gate, already closed without a trace, leaving nothing but empty air behind it.
And Noahs packed densely in every direction, all turning their heads at once to stare coldly at her alone.
Her escape route had been cut off long ago.
"N-no! Stay away! Get the fuck away from me!!!"
In the depths of utter despair, the Eldar indiscriminately fired her shuriken weapon,
struggling desperately to remain alive for even one more second.
But it was useless.
Even with half their heads blown apart by the projectiles, even with their torsos split in two, the chunks of flesh from the clones rolling across the ground writhed grotesquely and continued surging toward her.
And at last, one of those countless hands seized her fleeing shoulder tightly.
The instant that powerful grip dug into her bones, the screaming Eldar hunter was swallowed whole by the wave of Noahs and vanished somewhere without a trace.
She was never seen again.
*
"Those monstrous Mon-keigh bastards...!"
The Eldar hunters who had barely succeeded in escaping raced through the Webway’s subspace passage, frowning unpleasantly at the number of Mon-keigh they had captured, far short of their planned quota.
But when they saw the pitiful livestock hanging their heads as though they had abandoned all hope of life,
sadistic delight welled up in them once more, improving their mood considerably.
"Still, strangely enough, we didn’t catch a single one with bright yellow hair."
"That’s true. We need diversity if we want to sell them at a high price."
They failed to notice that every one of those captured humans was hanging their head and smiling with a chilling brightness.
And so, unaware of the calamity they had brought aboard their vessel, they altered course toward Calidon, the Webway city of blood and chains.
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