Chapter 390: The Emperor's Whispers, Part 2
Watch closely. This daemon's name is Pretty Boy, and here's what happened to his head after a high-intensity binge of the worst memes humanity ever produced.
"Humans are my masters! I want to be a human's dog! Woof woof woof woof! Awoo! Woof woof woof woof!"
Somewhere in a forgotten corner of the Warp, a twitching knot of daemonic energy sprinted in circles, howling the whole way.
Silentium said, "Have you come to a deep and genuine understanding that, as a daemon, eating people is wrong?"
The daemon shouted, "It's wrong! It's wrong! Eating people is wrong!"
Silentium said, "The Emperor is the one true god of this universe. Every other god is worthless garbage."
The daemon shouted, "Yes, yes, garbage, worthless garbage, every other god is garbage!"
"Now recite the holy scripture forward, then recite it backward."
The daemon obeyed, launching into the recitation.
Silentium turned to Kian.
"Damn, you actually broke him. Boss, you really do have the moves."
Kian puffed out his chest like a proud rooster.
"Please, address me as the Shovel King."
Silentium scratched his head, watching the daemon dutifully recite scripture.
"We got him to submit, sure, but I'm not seeing how any of this is actually useful."
Kian waved a hand.
"Don't worry about that. You just need to open your mind a little."
He had the recitation halted, then leaned in and murmured further temptations into the daemon's ear, in his own best imitation of a daemon's seductive whisper.
"Not bad. Since you've mastered the holy scripture, you've passed the Emperor's first trial. Now for the second trial. Pass this one, and the whispers in your soul will start to fade, little by little."
The daemon's whole spirit flushed crimson at the words.
"Quick, quick! What's the second trial? I'll do it, I'll do anything! Long live the Emperor! Long live the Emperor!"
Even now, his soul was still under assault from a hundred screens cycling through the worst hundred memes of 2025, played on triple speed, twenty-four hours a day, striking directly at his soul. Closing his eyes did nothing. If this had been a crime, the law would've been the more merciful punishment.
Kian let out a wicked chuckle.
"Excellent. A true and faithful servant of the Emperor."
Just then, another daemon happened to drift by. An unremarkable little thing, still unformed, wandering the Warp as pure psychic energy in search of a way into reality. Minor daemon-spirits like that were everywhere in the Warp, easy enough to run into now and then.
Kian said, "See that little daemon passing by? Kill it. That's one screen gone."
At those words, the corrupted daemon lunged forward like a thing possessed, slamming into the passerby.
"Whoa, hey, what's your problem?!"
The passerby daemon had no idea what had just hit it.
"In the sacred name of His Most Holy Majesty the Emperor! Die, foul spirit!"
The two knots of psychic energy crashed together, brawling, devouring one another. A moment later, the passerby daemon had been consumed whole, its essence absorbed, its Warp-nature strengthened by a negligible fraction.
Kian looked thoroughly pleased.
"Excellent. You've proven your loyalty to His Majesty the Emperor. Now, His Majesty shall grant you a blessing. Tell me, which screen would you like removed?"
"The dancing banana one! What the hell, why does it keep laughing mid-song? I can't take it anymore. No wait, actually, get rid of that yellow thing clutching its stomach laughing! Why is it laughing, why won't it stop, I'm going insane! Wait, wait, wait! Get rid of the squatting penguin instead, please, I'm begging you, make her stop!"
The corrupted daemon howled in anguish. Kian replied, cool and detached.
"So many demands. You're being greedy. Still, His Majesty is merciful. Here's the deal going forward: every daemon you kill, we remove one screen. But every twenty-four hours, one new screen gets added. No cap."
The daemon felt itself teetering on the edge of madness. A new screen every day, with no limit?! He couldn't even imagine what it would mean if the count climbed to a thousand screens a day, all playing triple-speed garbage around him at once. He'd rather just die.
Kian said, "That's settled, then. Warrior of the Emperor in the Warp, peace is your reward for service. If you want peace, go fight. Even if you fall in battle, your soul returns to the Golden Throne. Later!"
With that, Kian and Silentium severed the link.
They'd both been sinking so much time into tormenting the daemon that they were starting to get bored of it themselves and needed something else to occupy them for a while.
Silentium had already set the soul-brand to run automatically. He didn't need to keep monitoring it directly, just feed it a steady trickle of psychic power to keep the mark functioning inside the corrupted daemon's soul.
The two of them logged off, so to speak, to handle other business, while out in the Warp the daemon spiraled deeper into frenzy.
Ninety-nine screens battered his mind nonstop. He couldn't stand even a single moment of it anymore. So he switched into full berserker mode, throwing himself at every daemon that happened to pass by and pounding them senseless.
Daemons don't die in any permanent sense. Even one beaten to nothing by another daemon simply disperses for a while, then reforms itself somewhere in the Warp given enough time. That's exactly why daemons generally don't kill each other over nothing. Come back from that later for revenge, and where does that leave you?
But this daemon had already been corrupted by the Emperor and driven fully mad. He didn't care who he ran into, he just charged in and started swinging.
They were all minor daemon-spirits, none stronger than the others, and the corrupted one got killed outright more than a few times in the exchanges.
Each time he died, some unknown span of time later, his body would reform. Silentium's brand, burned directly into the daemon's core essence, simply came back along with him.
During the stretches when he was reforming and not killing anyone, the daily screen count kept ticking up regardless, climbing toward two hundred. Double the worst memes, nearly enough to make his mind detonate outright.
The instant he reformed each time, faced once more with the full riot of nonsense flooding his skull, he'd go berserk again, attacking everything nearby just to knock a few screens down and earn a precious moment of the Emperor's blessing: silence.
After that, Kian and Silentium mostly stopped paying attention to the daemon. Plenty was happening on their end in the real world to keep them occupied.
Much, much later, this maddened daemon was still out there, throwing himself at anyone he could find, dying, waiting to reform, then throwing himself right back into it. His frenzied rampage eventually caught the attention of a Greater Daemon under Khorne's banner, who took a liking to him and granted him a blessing of his own. And just like that, the little daemon got hired, officially on the books as staff at Khorne Incorporated.
Even with an official position now, though, the screens in his head had already driven him well past sanity. He hacked at anyone he saw, anyone at all. Which, if you think about it, was actually a perfect fit for the job description. Khorne loved exactly that kind of personality, and personally stepped in to bless him a few more times after that.
The little wild daemon just kept growing, and growing, and growing. By the time Kian and Silentium finally remembered him and checked back in on his status, he'd made it somewhere they never expected.
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