"Could it be that Perturabo and the rest were never on this ship at all?!"
In a single, agonizing instant, the realization dawned on Magnus. Given the absolute void of psychic resonance in this place, it would have been physically impossible for his warp-jump ritual to function. The fact that he had manifested within the chapel of this Iron Men vessel was not the success of his own sorcery; it was the machinations of his "hypocritical father." The False Emperor had snatched him and cast him into the heart of the Iron Men's ship.
The sheer, burning indignation of that thought nearly consumed Magnus's sanity. Faced with the mechanical warning, he instinctively chose to ignore it, surging his inner psychic fires. Though he was blinded by rage, he was no mindless beast like Angron, reduced to a mere creature of crimson slaughter. He knew that engaging such massive mechanical entities in close-quarters, physical combat was a fool's errand.
The psychic atmosphere outside the chapel was a vacuum. Any sorcerous translocation had failed, and even Magnus found himself unable to conjure a single spark of warp-fire or a bolt of psychic lightning. His power churned within his veins, yet it was trapped, unable to manifest upon the material world.
Still, Magnus refused to surrender. He commanded a panoply of esoteric arts. With a flash of blinding, kaleidoscopic light, his physical form began to warp and expand, surging in size until he towered over the Destroyer-class automaton before him. This was a technique that had seen Magnus prevail against countless gargantuan foes; even the God Machines of the Titan Legions had not given him pause.
This sorcerous augmentation did not merely grant him mass; it bestowed upon him supernatural agility. It was a grace beyond even the wraith-constructs of the Aeldari. Against the sluggish, heavy responses of Imperial Titan-grade machinery, striking Magnus in this state would be an impossibility. Though their weaponry possessed devastating rate-of-fire, the slow rotation of their targeting arrays gave Magnus all the time he needed to dance between their salvos.
Magnus, now a titan of flesh and sorcery, swept his similarly expanded weapon in a horizontal arc, aiming to shatter the Destroyer before him.
The automaton did not even attempt to evade. Its massive power-claw flickered with a pale, golden light. It crouched, and with sudden, violent force, drove forward in a piercing strike.
Biological organisms possessed higher agility than machines, yes, but that did not mean machines lacked the speed of reaction. Magnus was forced to rely on his momentum, twisting to narrowly avoid the claw. In any other environment, Magnus would have draped himself in layers of impenetrable psychic shielding, using sorcerous bombardment to harry the foe until he could tear the machine limb from limb.
But the Void Sword was different.
Axion had easily generated an anti-psychic field within this sector, a zone akin to a Null-zone. Where Necron blackstone technology served to repulse the Warp, the technology Axion had salvaged from Terra worked by siphoning it dry. By maintaining an output speed that outpaced the ambient flow of the Warp, a psychic vacuum was easily sustained. In such a state, Magnus felt his movements encumbered, stripped of the ethereal grace he took for granted.
As Magnus remained fixated on the battle before him, the Destroyer-class unit that had been disarmed moments ago, the one whose claw had been severed, joined the fray without a sound. Its damage had already been repaired. The Emperor's strike had done little more than shear the limb away, making the subsequent restoration a trivial task. The one-armed Destroyer had simply reattached its severed structure with terrifying precision, the nanites erasing the damage as if it had never occurred.
The machine possessed no soul, and Magnus could perceive no hint of malice in its actions.
CLACK!
A soft, mechanical click resonated in the air.
Magnus's movements faltered. A power-claw, unseen, had clamped onto his ankle from behind, and with a slight, rhythmic contraction, it began to crush. The power armor protecting his left ankle shattered instantly. Just before the metal teeth could pierce his skin, Magnus twisted, slamming his right foot into the Destroyer that had attempted the ambush.
The flexibility of living flesh still exceeded that of a machine; such a maneuver would have shattered the skeletal frame of an automaton.
BANG!
With a concussive blast, Magnus was sent sprawling sideways. While flesh was agile, pitting his mass and weight against a machine was an act of hubris. Axion, seeking to capture the prisoner with minimal collateral damage, opted to incrementally increase the severity of the punishment.
Magnus's kick did not land true. The crouching machine had locked its power-claw and met the Primarch's heel with a punishing punch. The sheer kinetic force shattered his entire right leg, the shockwave rippling from his foot through his very core. Jagged shards of bone pierced his flesh, and as the pulverized ceramite of his power armor fell away from his body, it lost the hold of his psychic augmentation, reverting to the lifeless scrap it had been before. The force of the blow was so immense it nearly caused Magnus's internal psychic equilibrium to collapse entirely.
THUD.
His massive body collided with the corridor bulkhead, a dull, hollow impact.
Cough.
The roiling blood in his lungs forced Magnus to cough. He surged his power, weaving a desperate spell upon his own form. The mangled flesh flowed backward in time, knitting together, and the shattered armor reshaped itself.
Before he could catch his breath, Magnus pushed off the deck and vaulted into the air. Two power-claws raked the space where he had been a millisecond before. Had he been any slower, his newly restored body would have been left with great, gaping wounds, much like those of a Plague Marine.
Mid-leap, amidst his tumble, Magnus saw a sight that froze his heart.
A vast legion of identical Destroyer-class automatons had converged, sealing the corridor entirely. A single, panicked sweep of his gaze revealed at least several dozen.
"Can it be?! Is it even possible to maintain stockpiles of combat machinery of this caliber on such a scale?!"
Realizing that to linger was to lose even the hope of retreat, Magnus abruptly canceled his psychic augmentation. The sudden, violent shifting of his size back to his natural form caused the Destroyers to momentarily pause in their targeting algorithms; after all, a Magnus without sorcerous enlargement was no larger than the reach of their own power-claws.
Magnus did not know that the mechanical entity which had warned him was never intended for him in the first place. Axion had never before encountered a situation where its own machines malfunctioned. Its calculations had determined that deploying two Destroyers to suppress the "Statue-type" entity was the most efficient solution, given the statue's gargantuan size.
A single Destroyer might not have been able to suppress it in time before a self-destruct sequence was triggered. The Destroyers were meant to eradicate the statue-type unit with maximum speed and then neutralize its energy core, preserving the data-hub for forensic inspection. Yet, following the vocal command, the "malfunctioning" machine had returned to compliance, adhering once more to the foundational protocols of the Iron Men.
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