The moment those bizarre, airborne entities breached the strange barrier and entered the void, the Titan fleet unleashed a cataclysmic barrage of fire.
Countless beams and luminous projectiles surged from the Titans, forming a disciplined, vertical wall of destruction. This dense curtain of fire swept across the awakening targets like a colossal flyswatter. In an instant, the grotesque creatures were obliterated, reduced to a fine spray of debris. As their peculiar hearts shattered, they unleashed ripples of psychic energy that cascaded outward.
Although the alien environment and chaotic energies had previously masked the Iron Men's state-of-the-art Federation sensors, the veil could not completely obscure their optical tracking. Relying on advanced algorithms, Axion continuously calculated and scrubbed the psychic interference caused by the creatures' deaths, recalibrating the optical drift in real-time.
After assessing the structural integrity of these countless 'insects,' the Titan fleet adjusted their fire patterns, synchronizing their salvos with imperceptible intervals. 'Light weaponry' cycled in interlocking arrays, while 'heavy weaponry' provided overlapping area-of-effect suppression. Kinetic rail arrays were deactivated as the ships reconfigured their weapon mounts. Deep within the hulls, the anti-matter reactor cores flooded the weapon systems with a continuous, surging torrent of power.
The enemies, an unsettling fusion of biological and mechanical traits, seemed infinite in number. The Titan fleet sustained this violent barrage for nearly half a Terran hour, yet the swarm showed no signs of thinning.
Just as Axion began to authorize a full volley of doomsday weaponry, the psychic waves released by the dying creatures reached a threshold thousands of kilometers away.
In a heartbeat, a tempest of psychic lightning erupted. The seemingly endless, eerie forest appeared to exhale its fury, channeling raw psychic power through its pulsating veins. This violent discharge pulverized all incoming fire, simultaneously disintegrating a vast expanse of the insectoid entities.
The sudden, focused release of energy instantly shattered the Titans' void shields, leaving jagged, lightning-scarred grooves across their hulls. Damage warnings flared simultaneously across more than a dozen ships; the nearest, Titan-42, was pushed to the brink of structural collapse.
Axion had never anticipated such lethal defensive capabilities from the forest. Sensing the intensity of the counter-attack, the fleet was forced to retreat, holding position to conduct emergency repairs while running a comprehensive analysis. Axion speculated that this might be the very reason the Chaos Gods had never dared to lay claim to this uncanny woodland.
Within the memory fragments of Magnus, prophetic visions had clearly depicted Leman Russ entering these boundless woods. Yet, those visions lacked detail; Axion remained ignorant of the Primarch's specific insertion process. There was no recourse but to experiment further to glean more intelligence.
The Titan fleet broke formation, dispersing to scout for alternative vectors of approach toward the forest, which lay tens of thousands of kilometers distant. The results were dismal. No matter how far the warships spread out, the forest rejected them.
After a meticulous analysis of the forest's threat-trigger mechanism, Titan-36 attempted a stealth approach: it voluntarily powered down its void shields and forcibly deactivated its anti-matter reactor, relying solely on inertial momentum and emergency gravity-regulation thrusters to drift toward the tree line like a silent, wandering moon.
Yet, the retaliation was instantaneous.
A massive psychic thunderbolt nearly disintegrated the vessel. The heat from the psychic flare engulfed and ignited the entire Titan. Even the ultra-dense alloy of the outer hull seemed to become fuel, roiling and burning in the vacuum. Only by the emergency intervention of the fleet's graviton beams was the burning hull of Titan-36 dragged away from the brink of total annihilation.
Axion was forced to re-evaluate every possibility, revisiting data streams previously dismissed as insignificant.
Seconds later, a single, slow-moving torpedo drifted toward the grotesque forest. It carried no special modifications, nor was it particularly large, it was simply packed with conventional high-energy explosives.
It met no resistance.
At the intersection of the Titan fleet's sensor sweep and the forest's barrier, the torpedo glided through, unimpeded, relying on its momentum. It struck the forest floor, gouging a crater over ten meters wide. The flash of the explosion and the resulting impact site were captured clearly by the optical sensors; without the light-warping effects of the psychic barrier, the image was crystal clear, even at a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers.
A successful breach promised a wealth of data.
Axion immediately began testing. From various classes of torpedoes to heavy-grain kinetic projectiles fired from super-heavy railguns, a strange conclusion emerged: the barrier's defensive mechanism functioned similarly to the Imperium's void shields, yet it possessed a distinct difference. A void shield could not 'retaliate,' but this barrier actively intercepted every large entity deemed a potential threat. The psychic storm had even caught a massive, multi-ton kinetic slug, smelting it into molten slag within the void.
Axion immediately formulated a plan. As long as the barrier's defense was not entirely indiscriminate, the Iron Men would find a way.
However, when a transport crate containing twelve dormant Reaver-Eviscerator Armed Reconnaissance Automata was shattered by the barrier during a trial run, Axion shifted the strategy.
Countless heavy metal blocks were fused into hundreds of tons of solid kinetic slugs and poured into a targeted sector. Mixed into this bombardment were disassembled standard-issue assembly lines, a batch of Sapient Machine Automata, and dozens of Eight-Legs. These mechanical units were packed into small, low-profile missiles and launched toward the surface.
They would touch down and initiate localized production, effectively bypassing the barrier's restriction on large-scale incursions.
Everything proceeded exactly as Axion had calculated. As long as the volume remained below a certain threshold and lacked active energy shielding, the bizarre barrier remained dormant, neither triggering nor retaliating.
As the Sapient Machine Automata struck the ground, they immediately began executing their programmed protocols. From the debris of the missile casings, the Sapient Machine Automata recovered the modular components of the assembly lines and began constructing a fabrication facility on-site. The massive, solid impact slugs embedded in the crater were salvaged, repurposed as the raw foundation for their new forge.
——————
This fanfic is now complete! If you want to read the entire story ahead of everyone else, check out my pat-reon: pat-re-on.c-om/magnor (remove the hyphen to access normally)