I don't own Halo or Warhammer, obviously, otherwise Halo 5 would be very different and Warhammer would be a bit less grimdark. Hereby the beginning of my idea to merge those 2 settings to get a bit of a better far future where there might not be only war. That doesn't mean there won't be any fighting though.

Chapter 1: Mindnapped

"Are you sure you want to use this one? It seems… off."

There was something very, very wrong. My head was pounding, my limbs didn't want to cooperate and I couldn't even feel the bed beneath me.

"The others got used up."

"Ah. Do I want to know how?"

"…"

"Nevermind that, then."

With a groan that came out more like a squeak than I would ever admit to I tried to open my eyes. Six eyes blinked, taking in a variety of different light and promptly closed.

"See, it'll be fine."

That wasn't right.

"It blinked. That does not indicate something is 'fine'. I know you're not great with most living things, but even you should know that."

That wasn't right at all. I know I had been drinking last night, but I hadn't had that much, surely?

"Eh, no other choice now. Besides, I don't have the time to get another one."

"True, the pulse will be fired shortly. I'll go prepare the Crypt. If you survive this mad experiment you know where to find me."

No, it really hadn't been so much, there had to have been at least half a bottle left. So why was I hallucinating?

"Sure. I'll see you in a bit."

I opened my eyes again. For some reason I had six eyes, but hallucination, so I ignored that. There was a large room made of bright metal with me stuck in a tube close to a wall. Only one person was in the room and he - at least I thought it was a he - was fully enclosed in some form of suit, an opaque mask hiding his face.

"Don't worry, you'll be fine. I know you're probably not feeling the best right now, but that's just the effect of my last little experiment. Mind transfers can cause such incredibly weird result."

The man's voice sounded slightly manic, and more excited than he had any right to, considering that I was stuck in a tube. It took me another few slow blinks before what he said really penetrated. Mind transfer? What the hell was he talking about? That wasn't possible, was it? A high-pitched laugh that sounded wrong brought my attention back to the man on the other side of the glass, who was most definitely mad.

"Poor thing doesn't know that the Crypt won't work. I needed power, you see."

And now he was monologuing. Wonderful.

"Lots and lots of power, even by our standards. The local star won't survive the amount I'm about to drain, not that that will matter after the Halos activate."

I wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. On the off chance the madman somehow wasn't only speaking gibberish, I had checked my body. I had been more worried about what I was wearing than anything else. Turned out, I was right. Not only was I naked, my body wasn't my body any more.

My head, which actually had six eyes, was set on a flexible neck that I could bend way too far. It was connected to a bulbous body that contained what felt like gas bladders that kept me afloat, which was very weird to feel. Six tentacles that I found I could manoeuvre as if I had been born with them sprouted from the -my?- body. Four of them ended in what looked like feathers, but now that I was focusing on them I could feel that that wasn't the case. The 'feathers' were made up of an uncountable amount of very tiny appendages that I could use as easily as I had once done with my fingers. The other two tentacles didn't have the feathery ends. There was a tail sticking out of what I suppose was my ass now, too.

A tap on the glass tube brought my attention back to the room. The madman was now right in front of me. I could see my face reflected back in his faceplate. I absently noticed that I was a rather fetching shade of blue.

"Hey! You should listen when I speak! Now where was I? Oh, yes: lots of power, the Halos, everything being gone after they fire."

This time, I did hear what he said, and promptly wished I hadn't. I also now recognised what I was.

"There won't be a single living thing left in the whole galaxy. They're magnificent machines, the Halos, but so very deadly. One of my best creations to date, I have to say!"

A Huragok. I was in the body of a Huragok, one of the 'Engineers' from the Halo game. To make matters even worse, I was apparently in that universe in a time just before the firing of the Halo Array. That was about a hundred thousand years before the events of the game, if I remember right.

"Each one will wipe out every living thing within twenty-five thousand lightyears. Sentient species, animals, anything with nerves. All. Dead. Gone! Vanished! It would have been amazing to see. Pity I'll die as well. Ah well, after more than fifty thousand years I'm not afraid of dying anymore. My little assistant is still young though, and still very much wants to live. A pity for him, but this just happens to be it for us Forerunners. I wonder whether the universe will even notice? Probably not, but well, we'll be gone either way."

Now I was becoming really afraid. Not only had I been shifted into a new universe and a new body, I was the prisoner of a Forerunner. One who seemed to be not entirely sane. This was not good for my chances. If the Halos fired, the Forerunner would die, and I would be stuck in this tube until I died or someone came to let me out. The earliest possible time that could happen was in around a hundred thousand years by either the Covenant or the UNSC. I did not want to spend all that time in a tube, because I'm pretty sure that in that time I would have gone quite mad myself. Or died, of course.

The madman went on with his monologue, appearing to have gotten over his maudlin mood.

"That is where you come in, my little floating friend! I'm fine with dying, should really have kicked the bucket a long time ago with some of the experiments that I've done, but I've been lucky. What I can't stand though, that's the idea that the Forerunners will vanish from history. There may be some who try to figure out what we were like, but they would never be able to really understand what we were like." He laughed, suddenly. It was a very brittle sound. "Then I realised: do we Forerunners even deserve to be remembered? I know all the horrible things our race has done. We destroyed our creators, the Precursors, and took their Mantle of Responsibility for ourselves. It wasn't ours to carry this burden though."

While the Forerunner was talking, I had been looking around for a way out. There was no way I was going to stay here any longer than I had to. It was because of this that I noticed that the floor of my tube had a familiar symbol inscribed into it. Almost against my will I let one my new feathered tentacles brush over it, a feeling of reverence welling up in me.

"The Tree-mark, the symbol of the Mantle." The Forerunner commented. "A Mantle that should have been for humanity to carry! And what have we done but wiped out the Precursors' heirs! Humanity is gone, wiped out by us and the Flood. Now we are going to have to wipe the slate clean to stop the Flood from consuming everything!"

He paused to look around the room before giving a short cackle, demonstrating that even after giving that very coherent speech I shouldn't forget he was utterly crazy.

"This place though, will redeem me! I designed the most dangerous weapon the Forerunners ever even conceived of, and my Halos will clear the whole galaxy of life in less than an hour. With that the Forerunners will be ended and the Flood will starve to death. You, however, carry all the knowledge of the Forerunners in your mind. It wasn't easy getting it all in there, even with the body you are now in being an amazing marvel that combines biology and nanotechnology unmatched by any other race."

With a flourish he tapped a button on a floating screen. A hum started up in the background and started getting louder and louder.

"Getting your mind, the mind of a human, was even more difficult. The few humans that are left don't really have any civilisation to speak of. Ah, I thought, if only history had gone differently! That brought me to the multiverse theory, and from there it was surprisingly easy. It only took a couple planets before I figured out how to do what had to be done."

My hope that this was all some kind of very vivid hallucination brought on by too much drinking grew a little smaller at that explanation, since this had to be either a dream or somewhere in the multiverse the Halo universe existed and it contained a mad kidnapping Forerunner.

"Originally I was just going to send you back to where you came from, but there's some kind of strange interference blocking the way back to your original universe that I don't have the time to figure out. So, I'm just going to stick you in a different universe that I found also contains humans. What you do with the knowledge I've given you is up to you. I'm perfectly content with the knowledge that somewhere the Forerunners' legacy still lives on."

Anything further he said was drowned out by the noise growing so loud that it started to hurt. The tube I was still stuck in started to rise, passing through an opening in the ceiling and continuing up into a massive chamber. It had to be kilometers across, at the very least. Massive spires extended from the walls, all pointed inwards to a single point that my tube was heading for.

The moment the tube stopped it shimmered and disappeared. Before I even had a chance to try to move away from that central point, all the spires lit up and a beam of light shot out of each of the tips. The beams raced towards me and just as I feared what would happen if they hit me they stopped, less than half a meter away. A bubble of light formed around me and became so bright that I could still feel it burning through eyelids I was forced to close to avoid having my eyes burned out of their sockets.

There was a roar of sound I could feel more than hear, a trumpet call, maddening laughter, colours bursting in existence that shouldn't be, a bright golden light that felt reassuring and then there was nothing but darkness.