The Realms Tremble
In the realm of Outworld, Shao Kahn sat upon his throne of bone and iron. Screams echoed through the spires as another conquered land was devoured into his empire. His hammer still dripped with the blood of the fallen.
Victory was meaningless now. The realms were broken, the resistance shattered. He had no challenge left. Only his hunger remained.
It was then — in that still moment of silent tyranny — the air thickened like rotting breath.
The throne room cracked. Shadows twisted. Even the souls in his Soul Chamber wailed in panic.
Then they came.
The Pull of the Warp
It began as a whisper.
Not of a voice, but of hunger. A hunger that mirrored his own.
The sky tore open. Reality bled. And a rift — pulsing with unnatural power — swallowed the Kahn without warning or resistance. His guards were disintegrated by a single breath of the Warp.
Shao Kahn, the immortal tyrant of realms, was dragged screaming into the Realm of Chaos — but not in fear.
In rage.
The Arena of Filth and Fury
He landed in a swamp of flesh and rust.
The skies oozed pus-colored clouds, and disease danced on the wind like laughter. Trees grew teeth. The ground pulsed like it was breathing.
And rising before him was a greater daemon of Nurgle, bloated and smiling with a joy that sickened.
From the horizon came another — armored in blood-brass, face hidden behind a skull mask. A greater daemon of Khorne.
"You reek of conquest," the Nurgle daemon gurgled. "But what do you know of endurance? Of decay? Of rot that claims even gods?"
"You fight," the Khorne daemon snarled. "So fight. If you bleed enough, maybe the Blood God will listen."
Shao Kahn laughed. Loud. Mocking.
"I am Shao Kahn. I have broken gods. You are nothing but worms in a new skin."
And then — the trials began.
Trial of Khorne: War Without End
The daemon of Khorne hurled him into a storm of endless combat.
Against blood-hungry beasts, corrupted champions, beasts that screamed the names of a thousand warlords.
Kahn roared and answered blow with hammer, crushing skulls and ripping open iron-plated chests. He feasted on war.
Every wound made him stronger.
Every kill stoked his fury.
He fought without rest for what could have been months in the Warp — a place where time bent and snapped like brittle bones.
And when the daemon came for him again, Shao Kahn slammed his warhammer into its jaw and forced it to kneel.
"You bleed," he said. "Even gods die."
The daemon laughed — a thunderous, blood-choked laugh.
"The Blood God welcomes you."
Trial of Nurgle: Endure the Plague Eternal
Next came Nurgle's garden.
Shao Kahn was shackled with chains of mucus and dragged through valleys of decay.
Diseases with names too foul to speak invaded his body. Maggots nested in his eyes. His flesh turned purple, then black, then fell away.
But he did not beg. He did not yield.
He endured.
And in that, the daemon saw something special.
"You have always ruled through fear, but now you understand persistence. You are a conqueror of life — and a vessel of death."
Shao Kahn stood, plague-covered but still towering, and crushed the head of a rotting beast with his bare hand.
"I endure not to survive," he growled, "but to dominate."
Nurgle's daemon nodded. "Then rot with glory. And rise anew."
Blessings of War and Decay
Khorne and Nurgle spoke in roars, in coughs, in tremors of the Warp.
They did not love him. They did not trust him.
But they needed him.
A soul who craved empire. Who saw submission as weakness. Who made war a language.
Khorne blessed him with eternal wrath — his strength amplified, his rage sharpened into a psychic edge that could burn minds with pure fury.
Nurgle gifted him a cursed aura — a laughterless plague, a spreading rot that made even Warp-dwellers retreat when his rage erupted.
He became a blight of war. A warlord whose steps poisoned soil, whose breath was the roar of conquest.
A Glimpse of the Joker
It was after the trials, standing at the edge of a ruined Warp fortress carved from bone and hate, that Shao Kahn saw something strange.
A mirror appeared.
Not summoned by the gods, but left behind — forgotten or perhaps planted.
He saw within it the image of a man — face painted in white, smile carved into madness, wearing purple and glee like armor.
The Joker.
He was laughing before a burning planet, standing on a pile of corpses made of cultists, Astartes, even daemons.
And yet… he mocked everything.
"Chaos is just a really bad joke with too many punchlines," the Joker said in the vision. "But I'm the only one who knows how to laugh at the end."
Shao Kahn narrowed his eyes.
"A clown? A jester? The first chosen?"
The mirror shattered.
Shao Kahn growled. He did not know this man. But he knew what he was.
An insult to power. A mockery of authority.
No true warlord would allow such filth to rise without crushing it beneath their heel.
And so, in his newly built fortress of boneflies and screaming metal, Shao Kahn began forging weapons unlike any he had used before — Chaos-infused, fueled by blood and decay, laced with a hunger to unravel laughter itself.
The Conqueror's Creed
In private, he muttered to himself:
"I will not share dominion with fools. If this clown believes he is Chaos' face, then I will become its iron skull."
He stared into the Warp, and it stared back — and found in Shao Kahn not a servant… but a rival.