The Heart of the Forge was violently cast out from the deeper immaterium, riding the crest of a violently churning warp wave.
As the gaping visual of the Great Rift cleared before its sensors once more, the massive vessel seized the precise calculation of the moment. Its warp engines flared, forcibly tearing through the veil of reality. The unceasing, turbulent tides of the warp instantly repelled the gargantuan, foreign mass of the realspace vessel, snapping it back into reality.
The moment the Heart of the Forge crossed back into realspace, its quantum data networks immediately initiated a system-wide synchronization.
Meanwhile, Axion's primary consciousness, which had remained steadfastly in realspace, began browsing through the data packets uploaded by his sub-intellect's logs. A distinct expression of computational anomaly registered within his processing units. The discrepancies within the chronological data were so blatant that even a standard sub-routine could have flagged them.
Yet, Axion harbored no doubt regarding the logical validity of his sub-intellect's assessments. Before venturing into the Empyrean, they had been a singular, unified mind.
In objective reality, nearly two months had lapsed from the exact millisecond the Heart of the Forge breached the warp to its current translation back into realspace.
By all operational calculus, tracking the Ork Attack Moon demanded the vessel transition into and out of warp corridors every six hours. This protocol was vital to recalibrate its heading and trace the residual spatial disturbances left by the greenskin mass. However, the Heart of the Forge had vanished entirely the instant it plunged into the Sea of Souls.
Twelve hours into the silence, Axion had dispatched several standard fleets into the warp, ordering them to execute sweep-searches along the projected trajectory.
The data they returned, however, was deeply unsettling.
The initial warp-surge generated by Gork and Mork swatting the Heart of the Forge aside had been colossal. Worse still, the malevolent sorcery of Tzeentch had deliberately obfuscated the residual warp wake. Coupled with the shattered, dissolving daemonic souls of the Slaaneshi hosts and the echoing shrieks of the Dark Prince themselves, the local realm of the Empyrean had been churned into a multi-hued, chaotic soup.
All chronological and spatial traces of the Heart of the Forge had been utterly obliterated within that anomalous soup.
Axion's prime intellect had calculated countless permutations regarding the vessel's fate, but the sheer metaphysical variables of the warp rendered an exact determination impossible. Even by his models, the mathematical probability of the Heart of the Forge becoming permanently lost in the warp was negligible. Given that chaotic domain of unpredictable metaphysics, Axion could only deduce that the vessel had encountered a localized spatio-temporal event.
Yet, continuous worry was a concept alien to the silicon and steel mind of an Iron Man.
Once the Heart of the Forge was confirmed temporarily missing in action, Axion adjusted his strategic disposition. He routed another standard fleet to assume the tracking protocol of the Ork planetoid-fortress, directing the newly retrofitted Void Sword to rendezvous with them directly from Segmentum Obscurus.
Unfortunately, time proved a merciless variable. After more than half a month of continuous blind sweeping, the replacement fleet completely lost the residual warp signature of the Attack Moon.
Simultaneously, the absence of the Heart of the Forge degraded the efficiency of Axion's terrestrial operations against the planetary greenskin infestation.
An increasing volume of Adaptive Combat Cores had to be recalled from the frontlines, reconfiguring and merging themselves into heavy transport hulls to relocate conventional ground forces across the planetary sectors. To optimize operational efficiency, Axion found himself forced to adopt a tactical methodology reminiscent of the Orks themselves.
Vessels hastily spliced together from Adaptive Combat Cores, packed with recovered conventional divisions, made blunt, atmospheric drops directly onto the planetary crust, mimicking the crude drop-tactics of greenskin Roks.
Upon touchdown, the hulls would partially disassemble back into Adaptive Combat Cores, advancing alongside vast swarms of conventional infantry in a rapid, aggressive thrust against the greenskin lines. Every operational directive was compressed into two concepts: speed and absolute suppression.
Axion had absolutely no intention of leaving the greenskins room to breathe, nor did he intend to let them cultivate a deadlier evolutionary tier through prolonged warfare.
During this period, two significant intelligence dispatches arrived from within the boundaries of the Imperium.
The first pertained to the missing Ork Attack Moon that had slipped into Imperial territory.
The planetary-scale battle station had translated out of the warp surprisingly close to Nocturne. The reckless greenskins had immediately initiated boarding operations against the home world of the Salamanders.
According to Inquisitorial reports, a force of approximately five thousand Sons of Vulkan, fully purged of their genetic degradation by the Panacea, cooperated with heavy armor assets and regiments of the Astra Militarum to completely liquidate nearly two million attacking Orks.
Vulkan himself, whose temper had already been stoked to a furnace-heat by the unauthorized machinations of Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, personally led a counter-boarding action into the heart of the Ork fortress.
It was a grim echo of the War of the Beast.
With the practiced ease of a mythic era, Vulkan located the primary power cores of the planetary fortress and systematically dismantled them. The Panacea-restored Salamanders fought with a terrifying, unyielding ferocity that eclipsed the martial displays of other Imperial demigods, evoking historical logs of the super-Astartes once engineered by the Raven Lord, Corvus Corax.
Aided by his Librarius, the Primarch wielded his thunder hammer with devastating effect, teleporting directly into the primary strategic chamber where the Ork Warbosses had congregated to map out their planetary assault.
According to reports from mortal clean-up crews carrying heavy flamer units through the aftermath, the grand hall was left in absolute ruin. Structural pillars forged of heavy plasteel and adamantium had been bent into mangled scrap.
The Ork Warbosses, each averaging over five meters in height, were found utterly dismembered. Their massive, specialized mega-armor, far superior to standard greenskin plate, had been torn into jagged shrapnel.
Every single Warboss had been executed with a crushing blow that reduced their skull to powdered bone.
Axion felt a momentary stroke of machine-calculus appreciation for the enhanced combat parameters of these fragile, genetically engineered transhumans when backed by the Panacea's cellular restoration. However, he found nothing surprising about Vulkan obliterating a cabal of five-meter-tall greenskins.
After all, Vulkan's current armor suite had been personally optimized by Axion's own design parameters.
If efficiency were the sole metric, one could have simply teleported the empty armor suite into the chamber to discharge its localized ordnance; the physical presence of Vulkan himself was mathematically redundant. The tactical output would have been identical.
Throughout his recent campaigns, Axion had terminated no fewer than a hundred greenskin warlords exceeding five meters in height. Swinging a physical hammer at a skull was a vastly inefficient expenditure of kinetic energy compared to a high-energy lance from an Adaptive Combat Core, which could vaporize an entire command structure in a single microsecond.
The only true inefficiency Axion regretted was that the Ork Attack Moon had been claimed as a trophy by the Salamanders.
He had been denied a monumental harvest of raw, high-grade metallurgical salvage.
The second dispatch concerned the supreme commander of the local greenskin Waaagh!, Warboss Zog Steeltoof.
The Warlord, flanked by a dedicated bodyguard of over a thousand elite Meganobz and Nobz, had suddenly manifested on the Imperial world of Ktaris, situated near the perimeter of the Maelstrom. The war zone sat in geographic proximity to both Catachan and Badab.
More critically, it bordered the swirling abyssal expanse of the Maelstrom, where the Red Corsairs lay in wait.
The Imperium maintained a permanent patrol presence of Battlefleets in this sector to deter the raiding fleets of Huron Blackheart. Yet, this Ork warlord had managed to bypass early warning nets, violently overwhelming the local garrison forces, seizing the orbital defense platforms, and executing a daring raid that resulted in the theft of a Majestic-class Battleship, the Carachles.
To compound the structural instability of the sector, the region was currently a volatile flashpoint involving not just Imperial traitors, but active T'au Xenos elements.
Ever since the Iron Men had launched their devastating decapitation strike against the T'au homeworld, liquidating a significant portion of the Ethereal caste, the T'au Empire's sphere of expansion had ground to a functional halt.
However, the alien coalition had stubbornly refused to cede their annexed territories.
Due to the destabilizing proximity of the Maelstrom, Heretic Astartes operations were exceptionally rampant in the surrounding sub-sectors. Abaddon the Despoiler himself had been recorded entering the sector on multiple historical occasions.
In many instances, the T'au forces went so far as to enter uneasy, temporary tactical truces with local Imperial commanders simply to survive the relentless, indiscriminate raiding of the Red Corsairs. Huron's renegades harbored no ideological bias; they slaughtered the T'au with the same casual brutality they inflicted upon loyalists.
According to covert intelligence logs harvested from the sector, an infamous Champion of Slaanesh had also been sighted amidst the localized chaos: Lucius the Eternal.
The duelist appeared to be hunting. And his sights were locked directly on the path of Warboss Zog Steeltoof.
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