Across the surrounding systems, countless bio-ships shuttled relentlessly between the macro-tentacle and the neighboring worlds. These planets had already been reduced to desolate husks; everything, save for the raw earth itself, had vanished. At the tip of the tentacle, the organism remained impaled deep within a planet's crust, siphoning the very matter of its core.
The scale of the enemy exceeded Axion's initial projections, but to an Iron Man, such size was not unprecedented. Records within his databanks spoke of select Iron Man chassis that surpassed even this magnitude. Continental-scale hulls, spanning thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometers, were capable of housing tens of billions.
However, those were not dedicated combat vessels. They were designated internally as Super-Arks. Beyond being fitted with zenith-tier weaponry and defensive arrays, they contained self-sustaining biospheres and environments. These ships represented the pinnacle of the Creators' engineering, vessels truly capable of intergalactic transit. The intelligences helming them were of the highest echelon; while their algorithmic cores might not have been as efficient as Axion's late-model architecture, their sheer processing volume rendered such defects irrelevant.
Beholding the titan before him, Axion felt a sudden, fleeting desire to construct a Planetary Ark. Such a craft, equipped with Trans-Horizon Engines, could annihilate entire star systems in a single discharge.
The fleet continued to accelerate to evade the saturation fire. Unburdened by biological reaction times, the flotilla maintained staggering speeds while executing precision strikes in transit. The Swarm Strikers acted as the fleet's vanguard, ensuring no other ship was damaged by collisions as the formation entered an irregular orbital path around the massive space-tentacle.
The Tyranid bio-ships unleashed a torrent of bio-rays and occasional plasma bursts, but they could only rarely clip Axion's hyper-velocity fleet. Biological muscle, no matter how evolved, could not match the near-instantaneous response of electronic mechanisms. This disparity, often masked when the Tyranids fought the Imperial Navy, was now glaring. Imperial vessels lacked sufficient automation; their rate of fire was throttled by human crews, and excessive velocity would cause them to lose all accuracy.
For the Iron Men, these weaknesses were non-existent. As the fleet accelerated, the probability of being hit plummeted, while their own accuracy remained absolute.
As the bio-fleet was systematically dismantled, the Hive Mind, in a fit of predatory fury, took direct control of several clusters, attempting to physically interpose bio-ships to block the Iron Men and surround them for a saturation strike. The Swarm Strikers at the vanguard cared little for such tactics. Relying on their immense hull integrity, they carved a path directly through the biological blockade, leaving a trail of shattered biomass drifting into the void.
Seeing the blockade fail, massed bio-ships began to retreat toward the safety of the macro-tentacle. Then, moving with a logic that seemed to defy dimensional physics, the tentacle tore itself free from the planet it was siphoning and accelerated toward the orbiting fleet with the force of a falling moon.
Axion was forced to abandon his offensive posture, prioritizing the evasion of this horrific "physical" strike. To be struck by such an appendage was no different from a head-on collision with a planetoid. With sub-light engines at full burn, the fleet traced a sharp arc, narrowly avoiding the tentacle, an object that moved with deceptive slowness yet possessed a terrifying angular velocity.
Protected no longer by its escort bio-ships, the macro-tentacle began to endure the direct fire of the Pectaro's Nova Cannon. This planet-killing weapon was Axion's most effective tool against such macro-entities. Analyzing the feedback and sensor telemetry, Axion timed a sustained discharge during the tentacle's next sweep.
The gargantuan energy weapon, which typically required a cooling cycle after every shot, was held open for several seconds. The pillar of light incinerated the tentacle's surface before tearing through space itself, birthing a localized spatial singularity.
A colossal, bloody crater instantly appeared in the center of the massive appendage. A chunk of meat at least tens of kilometers in diameter was pulverized and consumed by the tiny singularity. As the energy fluctuated and faded, the singularity vanished.
This effectively extinguished the Great Devourer's fury. The biomass contained in that lost hunk of flesh was more than the Hive Mind would have gained from devouring every spark of life in the entire system. To continue the fight against these "Iron Men" would result only in senseless loss.
Just as the Great Devourer reached this epiphany, the Pectaro, circling to a fresh angle, fired again, shattering another massive section of flesh. This time, the singularity effect did not trigger; instead, the shredded meat drifted out into space.
The Leviathan tentacle lashed out one final, violent time, sweeping through the system to scoop up the bio-ship wreckage and its own severed flesh before retracting at a frantic pace.
Axion pursued for a short distance before letting the "bitten" tentacle flee. The gargantuan chunks of meat, seared to "well-done" by pure energy, floated through the system like a macabre landscape.
Axion, acting with cold pragmatism, commanded the transport ships that had been trailing the fleet to use their gravity well systems to gather the meat and dump it onto a nearby planet that had already been rendered a Dead World. Having discovered that incinerating Tyranid Hive Ships could yield high-quality materials, Axion sought to verify this on a larger scale.
The system was a wasteland; the xenos had siphoned almost everything, leaving only mounds of dust and spheres of barren rock. Axion decided to put this waste to use, treating the planet as a gargantuan crucible to see what surprises might emerge.
After spending dozens of hours gathering the scattered Tyranid remains, Axion began a grand ritual of refinement.
The fleet formed a precise line. Weapons were calibrated. The plasma bombardment began.
The planet chosen as the crucible rapidly increased in temperature. Mountainous piles of Tyranid flesh were systematically incinerated. The bombardment was relentless; a ceaseless rain of plasma fell upon the meat-mountains. After several days of thousand-degree temperatures, Axion began to pull water-bearing ice meteorites from the distant asteroid belt.
The surface of the crucible world was now a roiling sea of crimson magma; there was no place left for a ship to land. Metal content would have to be analyzed once the crust solidified. To avoid the atmospheric friction loss of a natural descent, Axion used gravity wells to carefully stack and place the cosmic ice-blocks directly onto the surface.
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