The suddenness of the strike left the entire battlefield in stunned silence.
Magnus stood within the ejected bio-dome, his consciousness drifting in a haze. The phantom of Tzeentch had been summoned through the Primarch's own sorcery, but as the manifestation suffered tangible damage, a backlash of frenzied psychic energy tore through Magnus's own soul. His spirit, already a precarious patchwork held together by the Changer of Ways' forbidden arts, was suddenly webbed with fractures, as if it might shatter into a billion shards at any second.
"My Lord, deep-space scanners detect no targets. The attacker is beyond our sensor range."
The report echoed across the bridges of every Imperial vessel, the words nearly identical. The attack had been too abrupt, its destructive power too terrifying. Even the Iron Men's Titan-class ship had been cleaved in two in a heartbeat. More horrifyingly, the severed sections did not drift away as debris; they had simply converted into a strange, particulate mist, gradually dissipating into nothingness.
Yet, Jaghatai Khan noticed something peculiar. Despite suffering such a catastrophic strike, the Iron Men's vessel had not detonated. The thousands-of-kilometers-long midsection had simply vanished, leaving no secondary damage behind. The colossal, severed bow and stern drifted in the void, and there was not a single spark of fire flickering from the jagged, broken edges.
"Something feels... incorrect. Was this an attack orchestrated with specific intent?" The Khan narrowed his eyes at the sundered vessel, trying to deduce the logic behind the Iron Men's actions. "Would these machine-entities truly calculate a maneuver such as this?"
He found his own hypothesis difficult to believe. Yet, the reality was even more extravagant than they dared imagine.
On the periphery of the star system, over a dozen colossal warp rifts tore open in rapid succession. Their sheer scale was deeply unsettling. As massive shadows emerged from the roiling warp storms, the battlefield fell deathly silent.
Each rift disgorged a Titan-class ship.
The auspex arrays of the Imperial fleet were flooded with the signatures of these massive entities, each vessel proactively broadcasting its designation:
[Production-Model Hybrid Armament Titan-class—"Luminous Conqueror-class"]
[Batch Number: 031-044]
Fourteen previously unseen Titan-class ships had appeared on the system's perimeter. Their hulls were positioned with rhythmic precision, encircling the entire system at intervals of one hundred million kilometers. The sheer presence of such a force plunged everyone present into a complex web of dread and awe.
Then, fresh data packets flooded the ship-systems of the White Scars and the Space Wolves: an after-action report and kill-confirmation log.
[Titan-class vessel, Void Sword: 55% damage confirmed. Status: Critical.]
[Elimination confirmed: 52,219 Traitor Iron Warriors. Traitor Primarch Perturabo eliminated. No trace of soul-signature escape detected. Probability of total termination: >99.93%.]
[Elimination confirmed: 24,558 Traitor Thousand Sons. Traitor Primarch Magnus status: Pending apprehension.]
As Logan Grimnar stood in a state of numb shock, forwarding the tactical logs to Calgar, a beam of energy, differing in hue from the previous strike, erupted from the prow of Luminous Conqueror #033. The colossal lance struck the surface of Sortiarius without resistance, vaporizing the entire planet in a single, silent instant.
Logan silently appended a new log entry for Calgar:
[Confirmed: The Thousand Sons' homeworld, Sortiarius, has been destroyed.]
As the newly arrived Titan-class ships deployed graviton-beams, the drifting bio-domes were drawn toward the fleet. Two of the Titan-ships began to tow the remains of the Void Sword.
Inside the recovered dome, Magnus sat paralyzed, his face a mask of absolute agony and despair. The moment those world-ending beams had vanished, he had felt the light of his sons' souls extinguish. Even Ahriman, his most trusted advisor, had vanished from his psychic map. As for the Iron Men's fleet, Magnus had no emotion left to give. His soul, compromised when his spells were disrupted, had fractured. Countless competing thoughts and fragments of memories from different eras of his life screamed at one another in his mind, rendering him completely unable to manifest a single spell.
When the earlier shriek, a sound capable of tearing a mortal soul asunder, had echoed out, the daemons manifested from the corrupted mortal psykers were ignited by the sudden surge of psychic fire, reduced to nothing but ash. As the bio-dome was retrieved, Magnus, now little more than a broken wreck, offered no resistance, allowing the mechanical constructs to seize him and consign him to a containment cell.
Only then did Axion have the time to review the shelved mystery: why the Statue-type construct had gone offline and begun to operate independently.
Everything was as the Khan had suspected; the Iron Men had calculated for every variable. While accidents had occurred, none had exceeded the parameters of Axion's pre-arranged contingencies.
On the galactic rim, the immense Kraken Hive Fleet was once again attempting to flee into the void beyond the galaxy.
But the Hive Fleet was smaller than before. The colossal mass of meat was a landscape of scars and gaping craters. Vast quantities of blood drifted in the void, yet the swarm showed no inclination to reclaim this biological mass, even though it represented more biomass than a dozen high-population Imperial worlds combined. The Kraken Hive Fleet simply did not stop.
One Terran month after the Crusade of Retribution had commenced, the gargantuan fleet of super-structures that had been tailing the Hive Fleet finally caught up to the sluggishly writhing Kraken.
Sun Eaters drove their massive mechanical forms into the inner reaches of the Kraken's defensive tentacles. Deep within the meat, these machines tore voraciously, casting fragments of the hive out into space. The mega-structures Axion had dubbed "Tyranid Mineral Cutters" sheared off the Kraken's massive limbs. Unlike previous engagements, the Iron Men did not stop to refine the remains; they stayed on the hunt, relentlessly carving the Kraken apart.
By utilizing entropy-based weaponry mounted on the Mineral Cutters, the Iron Men sliced away nearly five light-years' worth of biomass during the Kraken's retreat, a quantity of mass that defied calculation.
The enraged Great Devourer exhausted every adaptation at its disposal, but to no avail. Evolution took time, and the Iron Men offered no reprieve. The soulless machines could not be cowed by its psychic will, and the Sun Eaters burrowed into its flesh, immune to the interference of the Tyranid psychic shield. Worse, destroying these iron husks yielded no biomass in return; each battle only resulted in a more catastrophic loss of substance.
After nearly a month of this relentless pursuit, the harvested material far exceeded the capacity of the super-structure fleet. Finally, as the Kraken Hive Fleet began to desperate attempt to mutate its entire being to survive, the Iron Men ceased their pursuit and abandoned the chase into extra-galactic space.
In the preceding months, over two-thirds of the galaxy's Machine Weavers and the Heart of the Forge had been redirected to the galactic rim, where a massive influx of standardized Titan-class ships had been constructed. The first thirty had been dispatched by Axion to reinforce the Crusade's fleet in the Warp.
Yet, after entering the Immaterium, those ships had spent all this time searching for the ghost of the Crusade fleet.
The fleet now present on the battlefield was the second wave.
Axion had not anticipated how the Crusade fleet could suddenly re-emerge from the Segmentum Ultima. However, upon synchronizing the data, the sub-consciousness immediately updated the main-mind. The Void Sword had uploaded its combat logs from the Warp, while Axion's primary intellect in the realspace coordinate had finally received the long-awaited data regarding the reinforcement fleet.
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