The Necron fleet was repelled with unimaginable swiftness. In stark contrast to the lower-right quadrant of the machine fleet's formation, which was now choked with the drifting drift-shards of Aeldari hulls and a constellation of corpses, the sector to the lower-left, once occupied by the Necrons, was a void of absolute nothingness.
Over-saturated fire had scoured vast swathes of the empyrean, ultimately reducing a distant asteroid belt to a slurry of molten slag cooling in the vacuum.
Within Axion's core logic-engines, infinite streams of data flickered in a nanosecond. The battlefield assessment was eminently satisfactory. Of the entire Aeldari fleet, only a handful of minor escort vessels had managed to slip away into the dark. Every ship exceeding the displacement of a destroyer had had its stern sheared clean off, reduced to powerless hulks wallowing in the void.
Where other races might employ boarding torpedoes or risky teleporter strikes, the Iron Men's methodology was characterized by a brutal, unadorned pragmatism.
Automated Sentry-Troopers and a contingent of Armored Wardens scaled the dorsal hulls of Heavy Combat Drones. Nanites fused the mechanical infantry's mag-locks to the drones' chassis, creating a seamless bond. These drones, resembling iron discs encrusted with mechanical "fungi," streaked toward the crippled, lightless Aeldari vessels.
Concentrated plasma bursts lanced into the xenos hulls, the high-density bombardment melting through the wraithbone in heartbeats. Once a breach was established, the drones punched directly into the interior of the enemy ships. The mechanical units were released as internal support structures were instantaneously reconstructed; the drones themselves became temporary bunkers, wedged into the hull to serve as fortified fire-points.
If necessary, Axion could simply overload the six plasma batteries on each drone for a localized cataclysm. The result was a devastating plasma detonation within the enemy's structural marrow, effectively turning the "powerless" drones into ship-killing charges.
Ten millennia had passed. Most Aeldari who had looked upon the face of an Iron Man were now either encased in spirit stones or long since devoured by Slaanesh in the depths of the Warp. These younger Aeldari warriors had no comprehension of the foe they faced.
Shuriken pistols and splinter rifles were, to the Iron Men, less than irritants. Such weapons barely left a scorch mark on the ceramite plate of an Adeptus Astartes. Even the baseline Automated Sentry-Troopers, having undergone two successive upgrades, found these pathetic armaments posed no threat to the Machine Legion, even without the benefit of individual void shields.
However, as the mechanical tide pressed deeper into the vessels, the surviving Aeldari defenders began to deploy advanced wargear that matched the high-threat entries in Axion's databanks.
…
BOOM!
A searing orange atomic pulse slammed mercilessly into the form of a Wraithguard, a towering construct of psychotropic wraithbone.
"How can this be?" The ancient Aeldari soul-construct turned its sensory array toward the D-Scythe mounted upon its arm in bewilderment.
These advanced vortex weapons were considered insidious, taboo instruments of war even by the Aeldari. A D-Scythe could tear a soul from its physical shell and banish it directly into the Warp. When fired, it produced no visible explosion and caused no physical trauma; it left behind only a soulless husk. They were typically fitted to Wraithguard to ensure total lethality.
Yet, what the spirit witnessed defied the memories of its several thousand years of existence. The D-Scythe had clearly bypassed the enemy's shields and scored a direct hit.
The Erratana-class Armored Warden struck by the vortex didn't even falter. Following the trajectory of the attack, the machine retaliated with a heavy atomic pulse of its own. The Wraithguard was blasted backward, slamming violently into the bulkhead.
Similar scenes were playing out across every Aeldari cruiser and capital ship. Compared to the ranged-combat Wraithguard, those wraith-constructs armed with ghostswords and ghostaxes fared slightly better. These towering figures used their exquisite, fluid martial arts to carve a path through the Sentry-Troopers. Any machine caught in their sweep was severed. Their larger chassis provided superior power output, granting them a massive advantage in close-quarters against smaller units, while their preternatural reflexes allowed them to evade the fire of the distant Armored Wardens.
But as more mechanical forces made planetfall, or rather, "ship-fall," the melee-variant Armored Wardens, propelled by multi-legged chassis, surged to the front lines.
These four-armed close-combat Wardens cared nothing for elegance or technique. They relied on a power output far exceeding that of their xenos counterparts and the sheer redundancy of their limbs. Often, a Wraithguard's two-handed weapon would be parried by the Warden's twin blades, only for the machine's other two arms to either tear the construct apart with raw force or shatter it with particle-vibration swords. The machine would then unceremoniously rip the spirit stone from the shattered wraithbone breastplate.
The mechanical army advanced without pity. So long as their power cores remained intact, the broken Sentry-Troopers were quickly restored to functionality. Every limb and component was individually tracked; the nanites made no errors in identifying their constituent parts.
A group of newly-blooded Dire Avengers were equally confounded by these automata. Their power swords were designed to be lethal to all living things; usually, a mere scratch would suffice to banish a foe's soul. But these opponents differed drastically from the teachings of Asurmen. No matter how they fought, their wraithbone-crafted imitations of the Sword of Asuryan failed to achieve their intended purpose.
The soulless mechanical legion was silent and implacable. A silver tide, shrugging off interlacing beams of red and blue light, continued its relentless crawl forward.
Axion was indifferent to their resistance. He would take every Aeldari survivor.
Melee Wardens spearheaded the assault, dismantling the Wraithguard that dared to counter-charge. Ranged variants suppressed enemy fire-points. Every living Aeldari was marked for capture by the Sentry-Troopers. Against the machines' layered shielding, ranged fire was meaningless. As for melee...
The physical strength of the mechanical forms was vastly superior to that of the Aeldari. A Sentry-Trooper would pin a xenos to the deck with a single hand, crushing them into the plating. Nanites would then rapidly construct sets of manacles, locking the captive in place before the mechanical unit moved on to the next target.
In their wake, transport craft brought in vast numbers of Sapient Machine Automatons. These machines began to comb through the debris like beachcombers of ancient Terra. Amidst the shards of shattered wraithbone and ornate decorations, they carried metal crates, stooping to retrieve the spirit stones that had been discarded by the combat units.
Whether they came from fallen Wraithguard or strange Aeldari weaponry, the spirit stones were gathered like common refuse and tossed into the bins. Once a box was filled, the Automaton would lead a string of Aeldari captives back to the transports to be ferried to the Titan's Spear.
Of all the vessels in the Iron Man fleet, only this gargantuan flagship possessed the internal volume and life-support systems necessary to sustain biological entities. Every other ship, save for the localized warmth of cooling conduits, was a tomb of absolute vacuum.
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