The two Ultramarines, leading their file of Greyshield Primaris Astartes, navigated the long, cavernous corridors previously scoured by Axion and his Aegis Protector. Though they pushed forward at a forced march, they had yet to overtake the vanguard Belisarius Cawl had described; they found only increasingly buckled deck plating and thickening drifts of Necron debris.
It was not until they approached the grand hall housing the dolmen gate egress that the squad bore witness to the full, staggering violence of the engagement.
When Axion registered the arrival of the Astartes, he was holding a severed Necron head, plucked casually from a Deathmark assassin that had attempted to claim his life from the chronometic shadows.
The relentless pace of Axion's advance had not gone unnoticed. The Necron command-nodes aboard the tomb ship had logged a localized spike in attrition so severe it demanded immediate tactical correction. The total absence of phase-out signatures, indicating that the enemy's destructive capacity was absolute, suggested a high-priority threat.
Through the sensory feeds of surviving units, the Necron Overlord identified the anomalous pair. Seeing the larger mechanical construct consistently interposing itself to shield the smaller unit, the cold logic of the Necrons concluded that Axion was a critical command-node.
To eliminate these singular targets, the Necrons awakened a Deathmark from its stasis crypt. Once the target was marked with the ocular signature of the hunt, the assassin was deployed through a trans-dimensional conduit onto Cawl's Ark.
The moment the Deathmark stepped from its oubliette, Axion and the Aegis Protector had already breached the wide chamber. The assassin instantly identified Axion as the bearer of the Mark of Death. It reached into a pocket of hyperspace and drew a long, sinister weapon: a synaptic disintegrator.
The Necrons had studied the forces of the Imperium extensively. Their Crypteks had formed a consensus regarding the Adeptus Mechanicus: regardless of the machine's complexity, it was almost always bonded to flesh. Units with visible organic matter were deemed true "Cyborgs," while those entirely encased in metal were assumed to contain internal biological components to facilitate consciousness.
Given their five-meter height and the fact that they had been observed communicating, the Necrons categorized Axion and the Aegis Protector as a new variant of the Dreadnought. They surmised that, much like the Imperial walkers, this "New Dreadnought" required at least a vestigial organic brain or a shard of consciousness to function.
A synaptic disintegrator was the perfect solution. Its beams could bypass most Imperial armor composites to liquefy the nervous system of an organic pilot and even inflict trauma upon the soul. The death it dealt was not instantaneous, but a lingering, agonizing dissolution of the self.
As the Deathmark utilized its phase-shift to slip into the interstitial shadows for an ambush, Axion was preoccupied, assisting the Aegis Protector in a duel against a Skorpekh Lord.
This entity, towering over the standard Destroyers, was proving far more formidable than Axion had anticipated. Its hyperphase reap-blade was significantly sharper than the blades of its subordinates; even with its particle vibration field active, the Aegis Protector's sword was beginning to show micro-fractures.
Axion cursed the limitation of his current resources. Particle vibration weaponry was tethered to the quality of its substrate; without higher-tier alloys, there was a hard ceiling on the frequencies the blade could sustain.
The chamber was further congested by a phalanx of Immortals. While they bore a superficial resemblance to Necron Warriors, these elite soldiers were far more lethal. Axion had initially attempted to pick them off with neutron beams, but the Immortals displayed superior tactical indoctrination. They dispersed, utilized cover, and employed leapfrog fire maneuvers to suppress Axion's position.
Their weapons, too, were a step above: twin-linked gauss blasters that doubled the fire volume of the standard warriors.
While the Aegis Protector struggled to find a killing opening against the Skorpekh Lord, the Immortals shifted their focus, concentrating their fire to crush Axion. Sensing the threat to its core unit, the Aegis Protector executed a sudden retreat, followed by a low, powerful sweeping kick.
The maneuver, a low-profile strike requiring fluid hip rotation, seemed to baffle the Skorpekh Lord. Its multi-legged, arthropod-like chassis was built for skittering aggression, not the nuanced balance required for a mid-tier grapple.
You may be an ancient killing machine, Axion thought grimly, but I have joints and a waist.
The massive Skorpekh Lord, caught with its three mechanical limbs mid-stride, was upended.
THOOM.
The Lord slammed into the deck, its massive weight cratering the metal. Its hyperphase reap-blade sheared through a layer of the ship's hull, leaving a gaping rent in the floor. Only a desperate grasp on the hilt prevented the weapon from falling into the lower decks.
Temporarily ignoring the prone Lord, the Aegis Protector lunged into the ranks of the Immortals. Despite their superior firepower and durability, the Aegis's void shields held firm. In the close-quarters press, the Immortals attempted to defend themselves with their bayonets, but they were no match for the machine's raw strength.
Lacking a Skorpekh husk to use as a club, the Aegis Protector struck with its bare manipulators. After the particle vibration sword cleaved an Immortal diagonally, the robot immediately spun to engage the next. The Necron phase-out protocols were working overtime here; the shattered remains of the elite soldiers were being whisked back to the tomb ship in flashes of green light.
The Aegis Protector hunted them down, using its gravitic tether to drag distant targets into range while its massive feet crushed Canoptek Scarabs into the deck.
Axion, meanwhile, was careful to avoid the sea of gauss fire. While the Aegis was shielded, he was not. Though his unique atomic-scale armor plating and specialized alloys could reflect or ignore most conventional energy weapons, gauss beams were different. They worked by stripping away the target's matter atom by atom.
If he were struck by a concentrated volley of hundreds of gauss beams, the density of his outer shell would fail. The hyper-advanced armor of the Federation, a triumph of ancient materials science, would eventually succumb, dissolving into atomic dust just like any creature of mere flesh and bone.
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