Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-25222488-20150811023557/@comment-6078851-20150901130302

technically it's not emps holding them 'in check' at the moment but themselves: the chaos gods very, very rarely work together (and even when they do it's never 100% co-operation) and so the fight-ratio is actually 1v1v1v1 - essentially 'every god for itself'.

the gods are doing their godly thing across the entire galaxy in millions of different arenas, and every single aligned daemon is a direct portion of a god - the gods' very bodies are psychically/physically stretched over the whole galaxy. emps on the other hand has his whole body in one place (with him being corporeal and all), only his mind stretches across the galaxy, and at that he's only keeping an eye on a single species and not subdividing himself into millions (or even trillions) of smaller components as the gods do with daemons.

if the fight was ever truly 4v1, and the gods truly worked together and 'recalled' every aspect of themselves (basically every daemon returned to it's god's essence so that the gods were 100% whole), then emps would be a charred smudge before he think "oh fu..."

yes emps is powerful, maybe even powerful enough to defeat the gods 1 on 1 - he's unquestionably the single most powerful corporeal being to have existed in 40k, but he is not a match for the gods combined. emps is powerful enough to require great effort on behalf of the gods to destroy him (especially as things are with each god being weakened in direct proportion to the volume of daemons they've created), but while they can take him they don't trust each other enough to put in the required effort for fear of their chaos-comrades turning on them when they are spent from the fight... which they would almost certainly do :P