"Aaargh! Raaagh!"
The colossal bulk of the Warboss thrashed and convulsed, his thick, muscled arms violently tearing away the ruined segments of armor plating fused to his flesh. Having been doused in a veritable deluge of superheated liquid metal, Zog Steeltoof exuded a rancid, charring stench that was far more pungent than that of any ordinary Ork Boy.
Yet, while the other Greenskins had been thoroughly cooked from the inside out, Steeltoof was merely seared to a crisp on the exterior; his internal organs remained entirely untouched by the conflagration.
Wisps of acrid green smoke drifted from the cooling chunks of slag as the Warboss ripped them free, tearing away chunks of blackened, sloughing flesh in the process. He was a horrific, blood-drenched spectacle, looking for all the world as if he had been completely flayed alive.
The agonizing pain assaulted every nerve ending in his body, and even the brush of the stagnant air against his raw flesh elicited a furious snarl of torment.
It was only by virtue of his resilient, hyper-engineered Warboss physiology that Steeltoof remained upright. Had an Adeptus Astartes suffered such catastrophic trauma, the automatic activation of his Larraman organ and neuroglottis things would have triggered a forced, comatose suspension, leaving the gene-forged demigod to roast alive inside his own armor like a bird in a clay oven.
In truth, a Space Marine likely would not have survived the initial, shattering arc-lightning discharge to begin with.
The Black Carapace of an Astartes, hardwired directly into both his power armor and his secondary nervous system, served as a lethal conductor. A shock of that magnitude would have shot directly through his neural web, resulting in total, instantaneous paralysis of the entire central nervous system.
For a mortal armored division, the threat posed by Necron arc-weapons was ironically marginally less absolute than it was to the Adeptus Astartes.
The heavy alloy hull of an Imperial tank could act as a rudimentary Faraday cage, shielding the mortal crewmen within from immediate electrocution, even as the raw energy of the arc melted the exterior plating into a bubbling, molten slag-heap. The Astartes, conversely, did not need to be reduced to liquid slag; the localized conduction through their armor would effectively cook them alive from within their power-assisted sarcophagi.
Gazing upon the blood-slicked, roaring mountain of muscle that was their chieftain, the attendant Weirdboys stood paralyzed in a state of uncharacteristic bewilderment.
Though their minds constantly pulsed with the chaotic, half-formed scrap-knowledge of the Waagh!, none of the psychic voices echoing in their skulls had ever taught them the finer points of battlefield triage. Furthermore, within this elite Warboss retinue, there was not a single Painboy to be found.
Suddenly, an enterprising Ork Boy drew a heavy, serrated choppa, lunged over to a nearby pile of dead Greenskins, and hacked away a massive sheet of raw skin and muscle. Without a moment's hesitation, he slammed the ragged, dripping flesh directly onto Steeltoof's exposed, pulsing sinews.
Almost instantly, a grunt of primitive relief rumbled from the Warboss's throat.
His blood-matted head snapped around, his crimson eyes locking onto the clever Boy. "Aaargh! Keep goin', ya gits! More!"
The extraordinary, fungus-based physiology of the Greenskin race allowed them an unparalleled compatibility; they could freely stitch together the limbs, viscera, and skin of their fallen brethren without fear of rejection. They could survive even the loss of half a hemisphere of their brains, provided a crude stitch-job held the rest inside. Their cognitive faculties might emerge altered, but the beast would live on.
Galvanized by the success, the remaining Weirdboys drew their own skinning knives and set to work upon the carpet of corpses, hacking away patches of flesh to patch together their broken warlord.
The shattered, stolen skin seemed to spark with a crude vitality the moment it touched Steeltoof's exposed flesh, instantly beginning to bind and fuse with his own aggressive cellular structure.
Yet, while the Orks were occupied with this crude skin-grafting ritual, the secondary waves of Adaptive Combat Cores arrived, navigating through the standard access corridors. Flanked by phalanxes of Armored Wardens, the machine-minds launched a coordinated, relentless assault directly upon the Warboss's position.
The remaining Ork bodyguards immediately snarled and spun to counter-attack.
However, severely debilitated by his horrific burns, Steeltoof was entirely unable to lead his retinue against the mechanical onslaught. Within moments, the sheer, unyielding momentum of the automata threatened to overwhelm the Greenskin defenses.
In a desperate bid to stem the tide, several Weirdboys unleashed a torrent of psychic energy. They conjured concussive blasts of green ectoplasm designed to shatter the soul and induce psychic trauma, but their efforts were completely wasted upon the soulless Iron Men.
Automata cast aside by the telekinetic shockwaves simply rolled back onto their chassis and re-engaged their threat-indices without a microsecond of hesitation.
Realizing their spiritual assaults were useless, the psyker-orcs pivoted their strategy, attempting to exert pure kinetic pressure to tear the Armored Wardens and Adaptive Combat Cores apart.
Yet, when the invisible tendrils of the Warp slammed into the Adaptive Combat Cores, the localized gravity-manipulation and advanced alloys absorbed the impact like clay being kneaded by a steady hand; no structural damage was sustained. As for the Armored Wardens, minor surface fractures were instantaneously self-repaired, while more severe structural breaches were simply engulfed by the liquid-imbued chassis of an adjacent Adaptive Combat Core, repaired in a flash of nano-assembly, and redeployed as if they had never known injury.
Suddenly, a series of faint, azure flashes illuminated the dim, smoke-choked corridor as short-range displacement arcs flared. A small contingent of compact, lethal shapes materialized directly behind the Ork lines.
Before the hidden Weirdboys could even register the spatial displacement, a series of pale, razor-sharp monomolecular beams flashed through the dark. The Orks' fields of vision spun violently before crashing into the bloody decking.
These newly arrived executioners were the TR-09 Morlanad units, rushed to the front lines straight from the assembly foundries. Combined with their short-range blink-warp capabilities and their structurally absolute, hyper-dense blades, the systematic assassination of unprotected psyker assets was a trivial calculation.
With the deaths of the Weirdboys, the remaining Ork defenders were instantly stripped of their protective psychic kustom-forcefields.
Left exposed in a corridor devoid of viable cover, the Greenskins were mowed down in droves. Even the legendary, obstinate resilience of the Orks foundered when confronted by the mathematical, unyielding lethality of these near-indestructible mechanical units.
Soon, amidst a sprawling valley of severed limbs and shattered bone, Axion located the gargantuan silhouette of the enemy commander.
Steeltoof lay sprawled across a mound of his slaughtered kin. Though he had finally succumbed to unconsciousness, his inhuman vitals were already showing signs of rapid stabilization.
An Adaptive Combat Core reconfigured its forelimbs into heavy-duty pneumatic clamps, hoisting the massive, naked frame of the Warboss into the air.
His green hide was a patchwork quilt of mismatched skin stitched together from a dozen different corpses. A mechanical arm extended, its probe attempting to peel away one of the crudely applied grafts, only to find that the underlying capillaries had already begun to interlock with the foreign tissue. Within hours, the stolen flesh would have taken root permanently.
Even Axion, a mind forged in logic and cold parameters, felt a flicker of clinical astonishment at the xenos' absurd evolutionary resilience.
Yet, an alien was an alien.
A blade shimmering with the pale gold energy of a disintegration field swept out in a flawless, geometric arc, slicing through Steeltoof's trunk-like neck. Under the immense pressure of his hyper-developed cardiovascular system, a torrential geyser of thick, dark blood erupted from the stump, painting the ceiling of the deck in a gruesome arc.
"Primary objective secured."
Though the Warboss was dead, the mechanical legions did not slacken their pace. The individual automata fanned out into the branching access tunnels, commencing a systematic, room-by-room purge of the vessel. Every remaining pocket of Greenskin resistance was thoroughly eradicated.
The captured Imperial battleship was transformed into a monumental tomb, thick with the iron stench of slaughter. The lifeblood of Orks, Imperial Navy ratings, Red Corsairs renegades, and thousands of mortal bondsmen mingled into deep, sluggish pools that washed across the deck plating.
The mangled remains of the ship's original crew lay scattered in broken heaps; some bore the jagged, catastrophic trauma inflicted by heavy alien choppas, while others carried the precise, cruel wounds of bolter-fire, the signature of their Chaos Space Marine betrayers. The mortal indentured crew had fared worst of all, their bodies piled high in monolithic mounds within the holds.
As the mechanical units swept deeper into the shattered sub-decks, they eventually breached a severely compromised holding bay, discovering a vast array of empty, reinforced stasis-cages.
In one of these secure cells, Axion's sensors registered a captive Chaos Space Marine, the infamous Lucius.
Ever since Steeltoof had abandoned the chamber, Lucius had spent the intervening hours attempting to breach the wards of his cage. Yet, his efforts had proven entirely fruitless, bringing the champion of Slaanesh to the rare brink of absolute despair. He had even resorted to a twisted form of dark consolation, reminding himself that at least the crude Orks had not turned him over to the Imperial Inquisition, who would have severed his sensory nodes, flooded his mind with the monotonous liturgies of the False Emperor, and subjected his immortal soul to systematic, clinical torment.
Unaware that his captor had been executed, Lucius had completely missed his window of escape.
Axion, possessing full access to the databanks of the Imperial Archives, cross-referenced the target's genetic and physical profiles, immediately identifying the notorious champion of the Emperor's Children.
No matter how many times the traitor died and remanifested, his scarred, arrogant visage remained a constant across millennia.
Gazing through the reinforced transparency of the stasis-cell, Axion felt a calculated spark of curiosity regarding the trans-mat and soul-transference capabilities exhibited by this individual, a metaphysical phenomenon that had remained entirely undocumented even within the most exhaustive databanks of the ancient Federation.