Splash!
A deluge of surging liquid rapidly billowed from the conduits, engulfing the gore and mutated carrion on the floor. The Warp-born plague saturating the air began to dissipate with unnatural speed. The terrified Iron Hands warriors, swept up in the torrential flow, found themselves submerged within the swirling filth and effluent.
Those warriors whose power armor had been compromised by the Ferric Blight tore the ceramite plating from their bodies, casting the ruined pieces onto the ground. Among the exposed cybernetics, many were already mottled with that strange, malignant rust.
Yet, as the liquid touched them, these Iron Hands did not recoil. Instead, as if driven by an agonizing torment, they began to violently rip their once-revered bionics from their own frames.
Pale, thinned blood sprayed from the points where metal met flesh. Some warriors even used jagged metal shards to flay their own torsos, exposing cybernetic internal organs and driving themselves to the brink of death. Despite their self-mutilation, their remaining biological limbs moved with a frantic, renewed vigor, as if their very flesh were purging the mechanical interlopers.
Axion could not fathom why these warriors had ever chosen to hollow themselves out to such a degree. The most extreme case was a warrior reduced to little more than a head, a thoracic cavity, and a single arm; the rest was a complex of cold machinery. Within his opened chest, several mechanical organs pulsed with synthetic life.
In truth, the liquid flooding the warehouse was no common substance. It was several tons of high-concentration Panacea.
This elixir possessed the capability to cure all maladies and suppress all viral strains. The logic of the Iron Men was chillingly direct: if a plague consists of microorganisms, then the Panacea is a disinfectant. To cleanse the rot, one simply had to douse everything in the cure.
The Iron Hands' wargear and bionics had been ravaged by the Ferric Blight; their armor's seals had failed, allowing the contagion to infiltrate their internal nutrient solutions. The moment the Panacea, acting as a purifying agent, touched their raw flesh, it began its work.
This miracle of ancient Federation technology possessed the power to reconstruct biological forms. The flesh was reactivated, surging with regenerative potential. The violent rejection of their bionics was a primal rebellion of the flesh, a neuro-chemical reaction triggered by the drug as it stimulated their brains to secrete massive doses of restorative hormones.
The mangled torsos where limbs and artificial organs had been torn away began to regenerate at a visible pace. By the time they rose from the clear liquid, every one of them stood whole, their four biological limbs fully restored.
The Panacea had performed its duty.
The Chaos plagues of Nurgle were utterly banished by the singular potency of the draught. Like a relentless acid, the Panacea dissolved the Nurgle daemons; the corrupt, distorted flesh was scrubbed clean by the technological miracle. The Iron Hands did not yet realize that a body healed by the Panacea became an inviolable temple; even were they to walk naked into the Garden of Nurgle itself, the Plague God's power could no longer take root in their flesh.
Even though the Iron Men had recovered the Panacea STC and possessed its internal data, the underlying technical principles remained beyond standard analysis. Axion's archives contained little on the nuances of biology. The very purpose of an STC, after all, was to provide a finished product to those who lacked the fundamental understanding to build it.
"This is impossible! No one refuses the Great Grandfather's gifts! HRAAAAGH!"
The colossal Plague Beast, once a match for the Destroyer-class automata, collapsed inward as the Panacea washed over it. Its warped flesh dissolved into nothingness; its jagged, protruding bones crumbled into dust. The daemon, which had never known the meaning of pain, now howled with a piteous agony that surpassed all others.
Few knew that even Nurgle himself had once marveled at this human achievement. As a god of the Warp, Nurgle had previously obtained samples of Panacea lost in the galaxy and attempted to corrupt the draught.
The result had shocked him.
Nurgle, who delighted in tossing every biological component into his cauldron to brew his poxes, had once dared to add a single drop of this miraculous substance to his brew. When the Panacea touched the liquid, the countless toxins and plagues within the cauldron began to wail in terror. Ultimately, Nurgle had been forced to use his own divine power to tip the cauldron and pour the Panacea out. Had he not, every microscopic life form he had cultivated would have been annihilated.
The Emperor had long been aware of the Panacea's absolute efficacy. After being entombed upon the Golden Throne and fueled by the worship of humanity, He understood even better why it functioned as it did. Since time immemorial, mankind has never been free of disease, and the conceptual longing for a "cure-all" had never vanished.
As technology progressed and man's understanding of himself deepened, the expectations placed upon such a panacea grew. From ancient dreams of curing sickness and regrowing limbs, to modern aspirations of repairing genetic defects, enhancing gene expression, and optimizing the very structure of the genome.
Layers upon layers of human desire were heaped upon this once-mythical draught. Finally, when biotechnology and mechanical engineering reached their zenith, the Panacea was born.
Constructed via microscopic bio-nanite technology, the drug functioned by correcting genetic sequences, eradicating any invasive abnormal organisms, and forcing limb regeneration. The longevity technologies wielded by the Imperium's Rejuvenat adepts were merely a degraded branch of the science that had birthed the Panacea.
With the loss of the Panacea itself, the people of this age had regressed into a technological dark age. This ignorance, however, yielded a terrifyingly potent effect: when Imperial forces rediscovered the remaining Panacea and witnessed its effects, the conceptual power of "Healing" was projected onto it by trillions of minds.
The Panacea's function grew increasingly exaggerated following the collective expectations of the human race, its conceptual weight becoming a constant within the Warp. Against a constant defined by the most numerous biological species in the galaxy, even Nurgle was helpless.
Vulkan, of course, remained a unique exception. As a Perpetual, his Warp essence was fixed; constrained by the Emperor's design, even the Panacea could only briefly mend his frame before being overridden by the Emperor's will.
Regardless, under the deluge of such a massive quantity of Panacea, even Nurgle was forced to recoil. He might not be slain, but the spiritual drain of such a confrontation was significant. These metaphysical entanglements, however, remained unknown to the mortals present.
Once the Warp plague and the daemons had been scoured away, the Destroyer-class automata stood revealed, their chassis no longer mottled but pitted with scorched depressions. Their internal nanites made no attempt to repair the damage; as the scarring permeated the entire structure, both units were marked for total recasting upon mission completion.
A massive power claw deactivated its destructive particle-oscillation field and retrieved the strange weapon that had been fused to the Plague Beast's arm.
A Sapient Machine Automaton immediately moved forward to begin a diagnostic scan. At the core of the weapon's mechanism, it discovered a string of identification numbers unique to the Federation.
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