Chapter 490: An Armed Bid for the Titan, Part 2
Captain Doron and his fifty Astartes warriors boarded a handful of shuttles and made straight for the Titan Temple.
By the time they arrived, the Temple had already been battered into ruin by Ork bombardment. The outermost of the steel walls, struck by some kind of unknown high-energy weapon, had entire sections of plating melted clean through, leaving gaping breaches.
Ork mechs, infantry, and tanks were pouring through those gaps, pushing their assault against the second wall!
When the Astartes shuttles arrived overhead, sections of the second wall had already fallen entirely, and some Ork forces had begun pressing their attack against the third wall.
The sudden appearance of shuttles in the sky drew the attention of Ork anti-air weapons.
A wave of Ork missiles launched skyward, streaking toward the shuttles.
The shuttles responded instantly, deploying hundreds of flares while executing wide evasive maneuvers, dodging every missile and landing safely.
The moment they touched down, all fifty Astartes rallied together and charged straight for the Knight outfitting bay, where Kian was waiting.
Moving at full sprint, the Astartes covered ground with terrifying speed, three-meter frames in full power armour thundering across the compound with every stride.
Along the way, Chaplain Reisach, using a private channel, reached out to Doron, voicing his concern.
"Brother, have you fully considered the consequences of this course of action?
If this goes wrong, it could bring genuine ruin down on our Chapter. The Mechanicus could use this as grounds to hunt us for the rest of our days."
Doron answered, still running full speed:
"Rest easy. I've already worked out a contingency. This will not bring disaster on our Chapter."
Then, quite abruptly, he asked a different question entirely:
"Old friend, what's your read on Battle-Brother Nor'n?"
Reisach had no idea why the question had come up now, but gave his honest assessment regardless:
"Nor'n's history would have killed an ordinary battle-brother outright, twice over.
And yet, twice, he clawed his way back from the very edge of death. That kind of trial must have forged something genuinely unbreakable in his character."
Doron gave a small, satisfied grunt.
"Unbreakable character makes for leadership material."
The fifty Astartes charged through the raging battlefield, reaching the Knight outfitting bay in short order.
Boothe had been keeping watch outside the bay entrance, and waved frantically the moment he spotted them.
"Quick, come in! Count Voss is inside!"
He led the Astartes into the bay, where several Knights stood, their plasma reactors already removed and set aside near their hip mounts.
Parked nearby was a Leman Russ, Lieutenant Colonel Noa's own tank.
Upon learning Kian needed help, Noa had driven her own vehicle straight here to lend her support.
Which meant Kian now had, at his disposal, one Leman Russ, and fifty Astartes.
Right now, Kian sat propped against the tank's tread housing, looking distinctly worse for wear.
Doron approached and looked down at him. "Count Voss, you look far from well."
Kian grumbled: "Try withstanding a full twenty-four hours of psychic overload from five thousand cogitator arrays yourself. You'd look worse than me."
Doron asked: "Can you still pilot the Titan in your current state?"
Kian shook his head.
"No idea. All I can do is try."
He pulled a cable braid out from the back of his own skull, still flecked with blood.
"I had Boothe perform a quick trepanning procedure on me. This heavy neural cable lets me connect directly to the Titan without any interface delay.
Whether I can actually get it moving depends entirely on whether the machine spirit inside is willing to accept me."
Doron looked at the blood-streaked cable and nodded, then turned to Noa.
"Lieutenant Colonel, help the Count into the tank. After that, don't engage in combat yourself. Simply protect him and keep him moving toward the Titan. We'll handle everything else."
Noa saluted with the crossed-forearms Aquila salute.
"Yes, my lord!"
Noa helped Kian into the Leman Russ, and Doron turned to Boothe.
"Where is the Titan right now?"
Boothe was just about to answer when, suddenly, the deep, mournful toll of the great bell rang out across the entire site.
Dong!!!
Dong!!!
Dong!!!
Boothe's face went pale with alarm.
"No! That's Magos Ferrocore's final toll! He's about to push the Titan into the lava pool! We have to move, NOW!!"
Meanwhile, atop the hundreds-meter-tall steel pyramid, the mechanical worm, Ferrocore, rang the great bronze bell one final time, sounding the requiem for the machine spirit's slumber.
As the requiem echoed out, in the distance, the Gargant breached the Temple's first steel wall.
The Titan Temple's outer defenses consisted of a full five layers of steel walls, all forged from molten-down greenskin scrap metal.
Right now, outside the first wall, the towering Gargant's eyes flared crimson, and a beam of blood-red laser light tore into the thirty-meter steel wall.
The full force of that beam poured straight into the metal, melting nearly two hundred meters of wall structure to slag instantly.
Like a demon-lord descending upon the earth, the Gargant strode over the molten breach, pushing into the Titan Temple grounds, and advanced on the second wall.
Ferrocore withdrew his gaze, looking down at the great rail track below, and out at the distant lava pool.
From the pyramid-shaped Titan Temple, one kilometer straight ahead, lay the molten lava pool.
The pool stretched over eighty meters long, forty meters wide, and more than fifty meters deep.
Beneath it sat a colossal plasma reactor, continuously venting raw heat, keeping the molten steel within in a perpetual, churning boil.
Before the Orks had arrived, the pool had been used to produce fresh steel for warship construction.
After the Orks came and destroyed every shipyard in low orbit, the pool had been repurposed instead for melting down and destroying salvaged Ork war-machines.
Along the one-kilometer stretch between the lava pool and the Titan Temple's pyramid sat a full array of rail tracks.
The forty-plus-meter Reaver Titan stood mounted atop a massive transport platform, one capable of carrying it steadily along that rail array, all the way to the lava pool itself.
The sheer deliberateness of the design was chilling. It felt as though Ferrocore had planned for the Titan's eventual destruction from the very beginning.
As the final toll of the bell faded, the Titan Temple's massive alloy gate rumbled open.
Several thousand tech-priests and templar-guardsmen, arranged in perfect formation, marched forward onto the great rail track. They were the sacrificial escort, meant to leap into the lava first, clearing the way for the machine spirit's return to the Omnissiah's embrace.
Behind them, the massive transport platform began its slow crawl forward, hauling the Titan out from the pyramid's depths.
"This is the end for us. I will walk with you to the very last..."
The mechanical worm gazed at the Titan, an inexpressible, aching devotion behind his eyes.
He murmured softly, then dropped down from the pyramid's height, scrambling on all his limbs, crawling to the Titan's side, and began leading the procession forward, step by step, toward the lava pool...
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