The planet trembled beneath the weight of his power, mountains shuddering, oceans and lakes roaring as if the very fabric of reality protested his audacity. Entire cities crumbled into dust, and the air itself seemed to crackle with anticipation as Tzeentch, the Chaos God of Change, the Great Sorcerer, spoke through the massive tear Satoru had ripped into the Warp.
I knew you'd be a fun guy to be around, came the voice, a thousand tones blending into one, reverberating across the dying planet. Tzeentch's laughter was like a cacophony of shifting voices, each one different from the other – a man, a woman, a child, or something far more bestial.
Satoru stood at the edge of the portal he'd opened, grinning as the hordes began to spill out. Thousands upon thousands of pink and blue horrors, chittering and laughing maniacally, poured forth like a flood. Their twisted forms warped and shifted as they scurried across the ruined landscape, their giggles echoing eerily in the air. Behind them came even stranger monstrosities: misshapen creatures, impossibly grotesque, crawling, sprinting, and slithering into the battlefield. Some had too many eyes, others too many limbs, wings, or tentacles, their shapes defying the logic of the material world. It was as if the universe had vomited its most bizarre nightmares into existence.
Satoru raised an eyebrow at the sight. Some of the creatures were cool – giant, insectoid monstrosities with wings that shimmered like molten gold, or multi-headed abominations that crackled with arcane energy. But most of them? Honestly, just plain ugly.
A broad grin spread across his face. Oh, this was going to be fun.
He stepped back from the portal, hands in his pockets, as the Warp rift expanded even further, crackling with chaotic energy. The ground beneath his feet fractured, but his Infinity kept the broken shards from touching him, maintaining that calm bubble of space around him.
"It's been cool," Satoru said casually, his tone completely at odds with the apocalypse unfolding around him. The grin didn't leave his face as he spoke. "Same old shit, though. I've gotta wreck this whole planet to keep the Space Wolves pinned down. Not a hundred percent sure why, but there's some plan floating around, I guess."
He shrugged, as if crushing entire worlds was just part of the job.
The booming voice of Tzeentch echoed again, this time layered with satisfaction, though it still sounded like a thousand shifting thoughts weaving in and out of existence. It's not every day that a world is offered to me on a whim. Good job.
"Eh." Satoru shrugged again, his expression unchanged. "Honestly, I don't give a damn about this planet. It's nothing to me. I just want to make the Space Wolves suffer."
The portal swirled violently as more and more creatures poured through, and the very air warped with the weight of Tzeentch's influence. And then, a big blue bird man came forth – not Kairos, since it only had one head. The Cursed Spirit turned to Satoru for a moment, before dipping its head low and then turning away. The Warp energy spilled out like a living thing, coiling and spreading like wildfire, twisting reality in its wake.
His eyes flicked upward as the chaos unfolded. The creatures that were spilling out? They didn't need his direction. That was the beauty of it. The Horrors would do their job, wrecking anything in sight just by existing. The misshapen daemons would run wild, tearing through everything with reckless abandon. And as for the bigger monsters – well, they were already wreaking havoc, leaving cities and armies in ruin as they tore across the landscape.
Satoru's thoughts, however, weren't on the carnage. Instead, his mind drifted to the Space Wolves – those legendary warriors who had yet to face him in earnest, not counting their first engagement, where the Astartes had been entirely unprepared for his ability. They were accompanied by the Devourers, the freaking children of Ryomen Sukuna, but Satoru had barely broken a sweat when he fought those guys. Their famed resilience, their battle-hardened skill, their Jujutsu – it didn't matter.
They would fall like everyone else.
But the thought of making them bleed – that was interesting. And if that meant giving Tzeentch a planet, well, who was he to deny a god his fun?
The ground under his feet rumbled again as one of the larger Cursed Spirits, a massive creature with wings like a bat and a face made of writhing tendrils, let out a piercing shriek. It took flight, its body distorting the space around it as it rose into the sky, casting a vast shadow over what remained of the human forces.
Satoru glanced at it, slightly impressed.
"All this to keep a few furballs busy," he mused, stretching his arms overhead like he was loosening up before a game. "They better appreciate the effort."
The god's voice echoed once more, this time dripping with amusement. You're quite the overachiever, are you? Even I had not considered the possibility of you summoning my legions for this. So random... so chaotic... my avatar; I am pleased.
Satoru smirked, the corner of his mouth twitching upward in anticipation. "I am quite the overachiever, yeah? Well, let's not keep em waiting."
He glanced back at the swirling portal, where another hulking Lord of Change stepped through, its massive talons cracking the earth beneath it. The air shimmered with its presence, and reality itself seemed to bend around the creature's form.
"And hey," Satoru added, turning back to the portal with a casual wave, "if you want to keep the planet after we're done, it's all yours. Consider it a gift."
The chuckle from Tzeentch was a cosmic rumble, a sound that echoed through space and time. A fitting tribute, unlike any other that came before it. This world shall burn and the Wolves and the Orks and the children of Sukuna shall all be turned to ashes, with it. For this gift, I grant you the power to call forth a Lord of Change, to do with as you will.
Satoru's grin widened, and his blue eyes sparkled with amusement as yet another symbol appeared over his skin – a blue one this time, linked directly to Tzeentch himself. He didn't care about tributes or rewards, but if it meant crushing his enemies and having a little fun in the process? Well, that worked for him.
He cracked his neck, staring out at the growing storm of chaos and destruction. The portal was now fully open, spewing countless Cursed Spirits into the material realm. The landscape was already unrecognizable, and the Wolves – wherever they were – would soon realize that their war against the Orks had just turned into something far worse than they could possibly imagine.
"Time to make this interesting," Satoru said, his grin turning wicked. "Hope they're ready."
With a final glance at the expanding chaos, Satoru turned toward the battlefield, already plotting the next phase of his havoc. The planet wasn't going to destroy itself, after all.
And as the legions of Tzeentch swarmed forward, the skies above churned, darkening with the promise of the annihilation to come. Idly, Satoru wondered what the Aeldari were going to think of this – or if Caoimhe somehow anticipated this, since she was a seer or something. Or maybe not. Because even Tzeentch admitted to not foreseeing this sort of shit and wasn't he the Architect of Fate? I am, but – with you – I've elected not to view the future. Makes things funnier when random shit happens on your account.
"True," Satoru chuckled as the land around him began to morph as wave after wave of Cursed Energies came pouring out, like a flood. The screams of humans and orks blended together into a single, harmonious chorus. And, even then, Satoru couldn't find it in himself to care all that much. After all, the original plan would not have been too different, but instead of Cursed Spirits it would've been Asuryani and Drukhari flooding the place and killing everyone and everything. "Oh well, I'm off to find my own amusement!"
After all, Tzeentch's legions were here to do the boring stuff that Satoru himself couldn't be bothered with. The Devourers and the Space Wolves were still out there and they were the ones that offered the most entertainment. The Devourers, most of all, were the ones who came closest to actually challenging him and at least one of them actually did something to breach Infinity without resorting to Domain Amplification.
That had been quite the surprise.
He learned a bunch of new tricks from them too, like that Cursed Energy burst thing that allowed for instantaneous movement. He wondered if the older and more experienced among them also had cool new tricks. Or if they had more refined domains than he did. After all, one thing Satoru had come to accept was the fact that there was... so much more that he had to learn if he truly wanted to become the strongest of this era. Jujutsu, since Ryomen Sukuna came to be, has had more than ten thousand years to develop and, surely, there were far more surprise in store for him.
The battlefield was a maelstrom of chaos and violence, with the cacophony of war ringing in Satoru's ears like a symphony of destruction. Blue horrors, their twisted faces locked in eternal cackles, rampaged across the terrain, tearing into anything and everything that wasn't touched by the Warp's madness. Screams of dying humans and orks alike filled the air as the Tzeentchian legions spilled out of the portal, reshaping the world into something twisted and grotesque. Idly, he wondered just how much Cursed Energy it would take to create his own Cursed Spirit, unlike Nobara which he kind of just hijacked off of the Thirsty Bitch.
Eh. Something to experiment with soon, he supposed.
He strode forward through the chaos, seemingly untouched by the destruction around him. The Warp itself parted as he moved, his Infinity keeping him suspended in that bubble of untouchable calm. Where his eyes fell, the world shifted, and he could feel the waves of fear, surprise, and dread rippling through the Imperial Guard and Space Wolves as they realized the true horror of their situation.
A Space Wolf, clad in thick ceramite armor, came barreling toward him, a chainsword revving in one hand, a plasma pistol in the other. The Astartes was a mountain of muscle and fury, his armor adorned with pelts and skulls, his yellow eyes gleaming with the madness of battle.
Satoru didn't even look at him.
"Blue."
The single word left his lips, and a sphere of cursed energy formed instantly in front of him, small at first, but expanding outward with terrifying speed. The Space Wolf barely had time to register what was happening before the sphere slammed into him, crushing him into nothingness. His body collapsed inward, armor crumpling like tin under the overwhelming force of Blue, and then he was gone, leaving only a crater where he'd once stood.
Satoru didn't break stride.
Above him, a cool looking gunship screamed through the air, its engines roaring as it unloaded a barrage of missiles into the battlefield. Explosions rocked the ground, but they were distant things, barely even felt by Satoru. The gunship banked around, targeting the swirling masses of daemons below, but Satoru's eyes locked onto it, his expression utterly calm.
"Red."
A flash of red light burst from his outstretched hand, rocketing upward. The cursed energy collided with the gunship mid-flight, reversing its momentum in an instant. The sheer force of the reversal sent the gunship spiraling out of control, and with a deafening boom, it smashed into the ground, erupting in a ball of fire and metal.
The battlefield was a storm of madness and death, but to Satoru, it was almost boring.
Here and there, squads of Imperial Guardsmen huddled together, trying to mount some kind of defense, firing wildly into the hordes of daemons that now surrounded them. Leman Russ tanks rumbled across the landscape, their main cannons thundering as they sent shells into the Cursed Spirit ranks, but it was all futile. The Cursed Spirits swarmed over them like ants, and soon enough, the tanks were nothing more than burning wrecks littered across the shattered ground. The Space Wolves clearly weren't prepared for this and many of them were quickly overwhelmed, though a few were putting up a good fight and were actively able to push back.
The Orks didn't give a shit, but that was already a given.
Satoru sighed.
"This is getting dull," he muttered, running a hand through his silver hair.
And then he felt it – a shift in the battlefield. Something new. Something different. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the chaos, searching for the source. His cursed energy perception was second to none, and now, amid the cacophony of war, he felt something..
Far ahead, through the smoke and fire, a group of Astartes strode forward, but they were different. They didn't carry the same brutish energy as the rest of the Wolves. These ones were calm, collected – dangerous. He could feel the power radiating from them, like the pressure of a storm before it breaks. Most importantly, he felt the Cursed Energy that radiated from them.
Satoru grinned, his blue eyes sparkling with excitement. He didn't think the Space Dogs had their own Jujutsu Sorcerers.
"Finally," he said, a note of amusement creeping into his voice. "I was wondering when the real fun would start."
AN: Chapter 58 is out on (Pat)reon!