Snapping back to lucidity at the automaton's prompt, the Iron Hands warriors began a frantic self-examination. It was then they noticed a jarring anomaly: the faces of their battle-brothers.
The countenances of the twelve legionaries had become hauntingly similar. There was a profound, aching familiarity in those features, a face they had seen in a thousand tapestries and icons of devotion.
One warrior's expression shifted from confusion to revelation. He sprinted toward a nearby bulkhead adorned with relief carvings. Among the lithic gallery stood the image of their Gene-Sire—Ferrus Manus.
As the others watched their brother's movements, they turned to stare intensely at one another. Each man's face now bore a sixty-percent resemblance to the Primarch of the X Legion.
The suddenness of this metamorphosis left them in a state of clinical shock. What they did not yet realize was that the Progenoid Glands and gene-seed organs once nestled within them had utterly vanished. The genetic legacy of the Primarch had undergone a secondary optimization and integration, merging irrevocably with their own biology.
Because all twelve had been submerged in the Panacea simultaneously, they had initially missed the subtle nuances of their transformation. But as they focused, more details emerged. Their height had increased substantially. One legionary reached down to retrieve a scatter of discarded plate and bionics, only to find that the neural interface ports, once prominent on his skin, had vanished. The Black Carapace, that essential subdermal interface, had been purged from their bodies during their earlier spasms, torn away like a sloughed skin.
Their physiques were massive, powerful, and devoid of a single scar. Moreover, they realized with a start that their discarded power armor was now significantly too small.
This cascade of biological deviations left the Iron Hands reeling. It was the Apothecary who first regained his professional composure, moving to check the vital signs of his brothers. Though stripped of his narthecium and diagnostic HUD, his encyclopedic medical knowledge remained intact.
Following a series of rapid visual inspections and tactile assessments, a conclusion emerged, one as logical as it was terrifyingly abnormal.
They were healthy. Incredibly, impossibly healthy.
Reflexes were sharp; tactile, auditory, and visual senses had all been heightened far beyond the standard Astartes baseline. Muscle density and agility had seen a meteoric rise, and their thoughts flowed with a newfound, crystalline clarity. Even without the power-assisted servos of their plate, two warriors working together could effortlessly hoist a Volkite Caliver using raw muscle alone. Their physical strength had tripled at the very least.
The Apothecary knelt, hesitatingly opening the metal case the automaton had provided. He retrieved a golden cube and pressed the activation stud on its side, as he had seen the machine do. The Field Repair Module activated, the cube liquefying into a golden fluid that coated his hand.
His skin registered the biting cold of the metallic liquid. But nothing happened.
The fluid dripped from his hand onto the pitted, plague-scarred metal of the floor. There, it flickered with light and spread rapidly, mending nearly twenty-five square meters of the warehouse floor until it shone as if freshly forged.
The conclusion was undeniable: there was not a single scrap of machinery left within their bodies to repair.
The other Iron Hands stared at the case of golden cubes, their eyes burning with a sudden, fanatical zeal for the technology. But before they could speak, the Apothecary turned his gaze toward the waiting automaton.
"That liquid... the flood. What was it?"
The automaton's head tilted slightly. It gestured toward the case.
"Do you refer to the nanite fluid contained within the activated Field Repair Module, or the Panacea?"
"The Panacea?!" the Apothecary shouted, his pupils contracting in disbelief. "The liquid that scoured the daemons... that was all Panacea?"
The machine's metallic head bobbed in a mimicry of a nod.
"A total of 1,136.34 tonnes of Panacea solution. Is there an inquiry?"
The battle-brothers stood mute. While Space Marines are profoundly polymathic compared to ordinary mortals, their knowledge has its specialties. As an Apothecary, he had heard the legends of this ancient technological relic, the ultimate, universal cure. And he had just watched over a thousand tonnes of this holy relic being poured away like common bilge water.
The realization brought a sudden clarity to their transformation. The Panacea had reinforced their biological frames and mended every shred of physical trauma. It had even restored brothers whose mangled bodies had met the criteria for interment within a Dreadnought sarcophagus. It was proof that these "Iron Allies" had not practiced deceit.
Standing naked in the wake of the deluge, the Apothecary looked at his brothers, all bearing the face of his father, and froze. Then, he bellowed:
"Techmarine! Tell me, where does the drainage system of this facility lead?"
The equally naked Techmarine blinked. "It appears to discharge into a subterranean magma lake."
The filth and gore had only accumulated because the rot of the Nurgle daemons had choked the drains. Once the Panacea had dissolved that abnormal meat, the superior physical architecture designed by the Primarch had resumed its function. The remaining miraculous drug had been swept down the corroded pipes and into the depths. By the time they realized the value of what they had stood in, the Panacea was gone.
Bereft of their power armor, the Iron Hands were forced to rely on the Sapient Machine Automata to vox for extraction. A Thunderhawk gunship soon screeched down from the heavens.
When the fresh Iron Hands reinforcements disembarked and saw twelve men bearing a sixty-percent resemblance to their Gene-Sire, their collective cognitive functions nearly overloaded. The discovery was so jarring that they neglected to recover the technology in the warehouse, choosing instead to rush the twelve naked warriors back to the strike cruiser.
Only then did the twelve truly grasp the scale of their change. Even without armor, their physical bulk rivaled that of their brothers clad in full Mk.X Tacticus plate. Only the records of the Primarch himself suggested a stature more imposing than their own.
A conclave of Apothecaries and Magos Biologis was immediately convened to subject them to a battery of tests. The findings were staggering.
The genetic material of the implanted gene-seed had seemingly fused entirely with their native DNA; the gene-seed organs themselves had dissolved into the system. Their facial shifts were a direct phenotypic expression of the Primarch's genes within the seed. Furthermore, the Black Carapace had been utterly purged, and every mechanical implant was gone. Their artificial organs had been "accepted" by the body, seamlessly integrated without a trace of surgical scarring, as if they had grown there naturally.
When the Biologis attempted to re-implant the Black Carapace, they found the flesh healed with a speed that defied comprehension. Their bodies rejected the interface before the needles could even be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, on Nocturne, Vulkan sat in stunned silence, staring at a handful of his sons who had been selected for the initial clinical trials of this new treatment.
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