Within the Chaos Realm, demons marked by a halo occupied a special status.
In the language of other Chaos pantheons, they would probably be called the Chosen.
They were beings who had earned Havoc's attention.
Objects of envy among their fellow Havoc Demons.
Beyond that, strength was measured by wings.
Drex wasn't interested in creating some rigid, repetitive hierarchy where every demon looked identical. The wings of Havoc Demons came in countless forms.
Bat wings.
Pterosaur-like wings.
Dragon wings.
Feathered wings.
Bone wings.
Light wings.
Flame wings.
Flesh wings.
And many more.
Even a demon's second pair of wings could differ completely from the first.
As a result, two-winged Havoc Demons occasionally resembled one another.
Four-winged Archdemons almost never did.
And six-winged entities were guaranteed to be unique.
There were simply too many possible combinations.
Rune's first pair of wings consisted of massive black flesh-wings.
The skin stretched across them was pitch black, so thin that veins and skeletal structures could be seen beneath the surface. They looked like enormous bones wrapped in dark living membranes.
His second pair was entirely different.
Bone wings.
A metallic framework of branching skeletal structures spread outward behind him, gleaming like forged steel.
As for absurd situations where two Greater Daemons fought each other for eternity only to have some random mortal claim the victory at the end...
That wasn't happening here.
Drex valued his demons.
The bizarre nonsense that occasionally occurred in the Warhammer universe wasn't something he intended to imitate.
His first experiment was straightforward.
He sent Havoc Demons against the Source Wall of the DC Multiverse.
The result was immediate.
Every single one ended up stuck to it.
"Thought so."
Drex sighed.
"Looks like getting inside isn't that easy. Shame. I was hoping I might be able to conquer Darkseid's Apokolips someday."
The disappointment lasted all of two seconds.
Then he redirected his attention elsewhere.
The Warhammer universe.
Specifically, the Warp.
He unleashed the Havoc Demons into it.
At first, the demons struggled slightly.
The Warp's lack of conventional time created a few adaptation issues.
But those problems disappeared the moment they encountered another force.
Khorne's daemons.
The Blood God's servants took one look at the unfamiliar invaders and responded in the only way they knew how.
They charged.
No questions.
No negotiations.
Just violence.
Drex wasn't surprised.
That was Khorne in a nutshell.
The Blood God and his followers lived for bloodshed and death, whether the victims happened to be enemies, allies, or themselves.
"Talk about luck."
Drex leaned forward with interest.
"They landed in Khorne's territory immediately."
Khorne.
The Blood God.
The most violent and destructive of the four Chaos Gods.
He embodied endless warfare.
Mindless slaughter.
Battlefield madness.
And oceans of blood.
His hunger for violence was insatiable.
Anyone who killed in his name earned his favor.
Friend or foe meant nothing to him.
Every massacre.
Every atrocity.
Every act of carnage.
All of it delighted him equally.
Legends claimed that when Khorne's war horn sounded across the Chaos Wastes, his rage intensified even further.
At the height of destruction and slaughter, his roar could echo throughout entire realities.
Those unfortunate enough to hear it often descended into irreversible madness.
Among the Chaos Gods, Khorne was the greatest instigator of war.
He constantly drove his followers toward conflict.
Urging them to lay siege to cities.
Towns.
Villages.
Entire civilizations.
Again and again.
Within the Warp, Khorne possessed the largest territory.
A kingdom stained crimson by endless bloodshed.
Jagged canyons scarred the landscape.
The ground was riddled with chasms and battlefields.
Countless monsters and daemons roamed those lands.
From the moment of their creation, they slaughtered one another relentlessly.
Not for survival.
Not for resources.
Only for Khorne's favor.
And high above it all sat the Blood God himself upon a colossal brass throne, silently observing the carnage.
Under the influence of such endless bloodlust, Khorne's armies required no justification for war.
War was the justification.
That single fact made them the largest and most destructive military force among the servants of Chaos.
Where Khorne's armies marched, worlds became blood-soaked wastelands.
Even during the Age of Sigmar, some of the first horrors encountered by Sigmar's followers had been Khorne's legions.
When the Stormcast Eternals returned to reclaim the Mortal Realms, Khorne's armies stood among their greatest enemies.
The Havoc Demons were different.
They fought in silence.
No roaring battle cries.
No pointless speeches.
No boasting.
Their bodies were weapons.
Every blade-like limb.
Every armored joint.
Every monstrous claw.
Particularly their enormous right-arm talons, sharp enough to carve through almost anything.
Every part of them was built to kill.
The contrast with Khorne's daemons was striking.
Khorne's followers preferred melee combat as well, especially axes.
They embodied recklessness.
Brutality.
Fearlessness.
They charged forward regardless of the odds.
The reason was simple.
Khorne despised cowardice.
To him, anyone using ranged weapons was a coward.
Spellcasters ranked even lower.
Sorcerers and wizards were beneath contempt.
On that point, Drex actually found himself in agreement.
There was something satisfying about close-quarters combat.
Fists meeting flesh.
Blades drawing blood.
The pure simplicity of violence.
That was how warriors settled matters.
Rune raised his massive claws and finally spoke.
"In the name of Havoc..."
"Kill them all!"
The only four-winged Archdemon unleashed the order.
The response came immediately.
"In Khorne's name, kill!"
"Khorne watches!"
"Blood for the Blood God!"
"Skulls for the Skull Throne!"
The daemons of Khorne roared their war cries, desperately hoping their patron would notice them.
Unfortunately for them, Khorne's attention never arrived.
Something else did.
Something far more unfamiliar.
A Chaos God they had never encountered before.
The gaze of Havoc fell upon the battlefield.
And with that gaze came understanding.
They learned his name.
Havoc.
A title that represented the end of civilizations.
The destruction of universes.
A newborn Chaos God.
The Khorne daemons were stunned.
More importantly, Havoc differed fundamentally from Khorne.
Khorne cared about bloodshed.
Drex cared about everything.
After all, his most reliable power had always been the black hole.
The reason he had mastered so many concepts so quickly after ascending was simple.
He consumed them.
Swallowed them whole through the power of his black hole and transformed them into part of himself.
At the level of multiversal demon gods, every being eventually discovered its own path.
Its own truth.
A singular principle to pursue without hesitation.
The path itself mattered less than the commitment to it.
Once chosen, it became the foundation of everything.
Originally, Drex had considered building his path around Doomsday.
But there was a flaw.
Doomsday could still be killed.
He still had weaknesses.
After thinking it over, Drex realized there was a better option.
The black hole.
It suited him perfectly.
He enjoyed using it.
Understood it instinctively.
And trusted it more than any other power in his arsenal.
Of course, at the multiversal level, a black hole was no longer merely an astronomical object.
It had become something far greater.