Axion was not entirely ignorant of the Necrons.
As far back as the Age of Expansion, when the Iron Men swept across the galaxy for their creators, they had discovered these slumbering, aberrant mechanical lifeforms. Though only a few minor Tomb Worlds had been unearthed in those millennia, the records remained etched within Axion's data-stacks.
Watching the Skorpekh Destroyers indulge in their mindless slaughter, Axion did not hesitate. Whatever fate awaited current humanity, these xenos aberrations were enemies that demanded eradication. Compared to the Warp-spawn, entities that appeared on sensors as incomprehensible clusters of raw energy, the Necrons were a tangible foe, a target that could be calculated and dismantled.
Though he lacked a proper legion of combat automata to command, providing fire support from the rear for his Aegis Protector was a logical recourse.
The Aegis robot, having weathered a hail of explosive shrapnel, flipped its palms. In a blur of mechanical reconfiguration, heavy rapid-fire laser cannons replaced its manipulators. Beams of intense coherent light instantly saturated the Skorpekhs and the Necron Warriors trailing behind them.
The thermal output of the heavy lasers turned the living metal of the Necrons a searing, incandescent red. However, only a few were neutralized as the beams lanced through their necrodermis to slag their engrammatic power cores. It was immediately apparent: laser weaponry was inefficient against the regenerative alloys of the Necron host.
Axion adjusted, cycling his own neutron-beam weaponry, but found its efficacy even poorer than the heavy lasers.
The towering Skorpekh Destroyer raised its gauss cannon, unleashing a flaying counterattack. Nearby, Necron Warriors leveled their gauss flayers, focusing their fire upon the Aegis Protector. The robot's thick, dual-layered void shielding, which consumed over half of its total energy reserves, flickered violently under the assault, though even the Skorpekh's gauss fire failed to breach it immediately.
Seeing the futility of long-range attrition, the robot activated its internal gravitic generators.
The lead Skorpekh was violently hauled forward by a localized gravity well, dragged toward the Aegis Protector just as the machine's particle vibration blade hissed into life. The Aegis's humanoid design afforded it a degree of fluid grace that allowed for complex bladework. Holding the shimmering, pale-gold blade in a high guard while bracing an integrated physical shield on its other forearm, the automaton resembled a knight of Old Earth's Middle Ages more than it did a Grey Knight of the 41st Millennium.
The ensnared Skorpekh dug its arthropod-like lower limbs into the deck plating, its spindly legs screeching across the metal in a maddening, high-pitched cacophony. Its resistance was futile. The moment the Skorpekh was yanked into range, the Aegis Protector's wrist-mounted blade swept out in a pale-gold arc aimed at the Destroyer's head.
The Skorpekh raised its massive gauss weapon to parry the blow.
With a flash of golden light, the blade sheared through the gauss cannon in a perfect diagonal cut. While the sacrifice of the weapon saved the Skorpekh's head, the cannon's ruptured power cells detonated instantly. The resulting discharge of raw energy scorched the Aegis Protector's chassis with pockmarks of blackened scarring; at such close proximity, the energy shields were bypassed entirely.
As the Skorpekh reeled, the Aegis Protector's secondary manipulator fired a volkite culverin directly into the xenos' midsection. A beam of thermal violence engulfed the Skorpekh's skeletal upper torso. Roaring heat erupted even from its metallic facial transverse, melting its internal systems into slag.
Its core utterly spent, the Skorpekh's chassis was hoisted by the Aegis Protector and swung like a massive, improvised bludgeon into the ranks of Necron Warriors still advancing down the corridor.
The sheer mass of the Destroyer, coupled with the Aegis's dark-age power actuators, turned the wreckage into a high-velocity projectile. It plowed through the remaining Necron Warriors like a Macrocannon shell, shattering them into fragments.
Facing a xenos incursion, Axion abandoned his post guarding his crates of scrap and components. Under the current circumstances, it was unlikely anyone would be thieving parts anytime soon.
Observing Axion's initiative, Belisarius Cawl, ever the opportunist, transmitted an internal schematics map of the Ark to him. He thoughtfully highlighted the locations of Necron boarding parties and the apertures of their flickering dolmen gates. Axion found the real-time tactical synchronization satisfactory.
On the display, Necron reinforcements continued to pour into the Ark via trans-dimensional conduits. Axion's tactical assessment was blunt: the teleportation array had to be neutralized. The method was equally simple—locate a high-yield explosive and detonate it within the breach. On a vessel of this magnitude, ordnance would not be in short supply.
After issuing a formal demand to Cawl for a demolition charge of sufficient potency, Axion led his Aegis Protector back through the corridor, advancing toward the dimensional breach.
The Necron boarding parties followed a rigid hierarchy, almost always led by Skorpekh Destroyers armed with gauss cannons, heavy gauss cannonades, or hyperphase threshers. Having now engaged them personally, Axion immediately updated the Aegis's anti-Necron combat protocols:
Discontinue use of low-efficiency las-weaponry. Upon engagement, utilize gravitic tethering. Neutralize primary armaments with particle vibration blades. If the target wields phase-weaponry, force a mechanical lock, then incinerate the core with volkite fire. Utilize neutralized husks as kinetic flails to dismantle massed Necron infantry.
As they drew closer to the breach, however, a more vexing threat emerged: swarms of Canoptek Scarabs. These skittering constructs followed the Necron lines, mindlessly deconstructing the ship's internal bulkheads.
The small, chittering machines were difficult to target. While the Aegis's heavy lasers could pick them off, their sheer numbers were overwhelming. The volkite culverin was equally ill-suited for such dispersed, numerous targets; its rate of fire was insufficient to stem the tide.
Axion felt a brief pang of longing for the nanite swarms locked within his restricted databases. Whether the foe was a gargantuan engine of war or a localized infestation, those grain-like intelligent units could have deconstructed the Scarabs into dust in seconds.
Fortunately, the wreckage of the Skorpekh from the previous hallway remained relatively intact. Axion commanded the Aegis Protector to seize the metallic husk and charge into the swarm.
Though the corridor floor was left a cratered ruin of gouged metal, the tactic was successful. Every Canoptek Scarab was pounded into a fine metallic silt.
As Axion and his mechanical guardian pushed forward through the labyrinthine decks, hundreds of Space Marines were elsewhere struggling to stem the silver tide. In a parallel corridor, a squad of Primaris Astartes in grey-clad Mk X Tacticus plate, led by two Ultramarines, was laboring to transport a massive seismic charge.
The lead Ultramarines paused, staring in grim amazement at the carnage littering the path ahead.
The corridor was choked with Necron remains, but they had not been "killed" in the traditional sense. They had been brutally pounded into a carpet of debris. Skorpekh Destroyers lay in shattered, unrecognizable heaps.
Though the Astartes had fought the undying legions before, they had never seen Necron "dust" so thoroughly pulverized that even their phase-out protocols failed to trigger.