As the long construction cycle humd in the background, Axion began accepting a continuous stream of missions from Leontus directed at the Tyranids. Four Swarm Strikers and a transport laden with troops beca a frequent sight across the Segntum's war zones.
The fleet translated out of Mandeville points across the sector. In every system, the assault cruisers would accelerate, delivering point-blank strikes at hyper-velocity. Thick neutron beams charred bio-ship carapaces, while neural-shredder cannons sent the xenos vessels into lethal convulsions. The daggers of the fleet literally dismbered bio-ships by ramming through them, while drones and particle streams erased the smaller organisms.
Once the void was purged, the transport would deploy its cargo pods. Legions of Automated Sentry-Troopers swept through the ground swarms, their fire-patterns turning xenos waves into mulch. Synapse creatures were torn apart by the claws of the Destroyer-class Heavy Automata. Every pulse of the energy shockwave weapons cleared entire sectors of the battlefield.
With such absolute orbital superiority, the Iron Man ground forces were unstoppable. They moved in a relentless, non-stop advance. High-energy particle beams that could core a bio-ship were used to perform "surgical" deletions of Tyranid Bio-Titans.
Within days, the Imperium would receive a "clean" planet, marred only by slight residual radiation and mountains of xenos corpses. The tide of the counter-offensive was rising.
For the Hive Mind, it was a catastrophe. The Iron n's kill-rate was so high it began to outpace the swarm's ability to spawn replacents.
Axion, however, was hunting more than just glory. He was searching for more Leviathan tendrils. In recent battles, he had found several fallen worlds and "roasted" the xenos remains, but while standard bio-ships contained tals, they lacked the rare IUF-93291 alloy. It was clear that this extra-galactic material was exclusive to the macro-appendages.
To reinforce his entire legion's weaponry, he needed to find those tendrils, shatter them, and reclaim the "ore."
Over several weeks, Axion reclaid twenty-one planets and six star systems. To the soldiers of the Astra Militarum, the efficiency of these machines was soul-crushing. A single automaton possessed higher combat efficacy than a Space Marine. They required no logistics in the traditional sense, gave no conflicting orders, never rested, and ignored casualties. They were the personification of cold, lethal logic.
The Guardsn, who had always been told they were the "Hamr of the Emperor" and the "Foundations of Victory," suddenly felt obsolete. The "Grip of the Enemy" seed fragile beneath the tread of these tal gods. Regints like the Cadians and the Mordian Iron Guard felt a profound psychological blow. Even the Astartes felt the shadow. Their legends of blood and sacrifice seed small next to the chanical slaughter.
Ancient Dreadnoughts, awakened for war, watched the Iron n and felt a haunting sense of déjà vu. They rembered the Great Crusade, when Legions, not Chapters, fought by the hundreds of thousands under the Primarchs. Back then, the enemies of the Emperor were swept away with the sa rciless, crushing weight. The battlefield looked like a mory made manifest: the tread of iron over the broken remains of resistance.
This shift in morale did not go unnoticed. The Ecclesiarchy and the Departnto Munitorum issued urgent pleas to the Theater Command, demanding the Lord Solar cease this thod of warfare. The efficiency of these killing machines was poisoning the spirit of the Imperial troops.
Commanders of battered regints began to ask why these machines hadn't been sent first, sparing their n such sacrifice. High-ranking Generals questioned Leontus's intent.
Leontus, following the principle that a good tool should be used until it breaks, decided to send Axion's forces deeper into occupied space. Their role shifted from frontline support to independent planetary and systemic purgation.
Axion did not care; he only cared for the mission.
However, a new problem arose. The occupied zone was like a pool of oil-slicked water. Every ti Axion's fleet entered a system, like a drop of detergent, the oil scattered.
Whenever the silver fleet arrived, the Tyranids would imdiately accelerate their biomass reclamation, leaving behind worlds scoured to the bedrock before fleeing into the void. Biomass that couldn't be retrieved in ti was simply abandoned.
Axion watched his kill-counts stagnate as the xenos refused to engage. Finding only capillary towers and empty reclamation pools, he would land his Destroyers to "roast" the planet anyway, hoping to refine whatever tallic traces remained in the bio-sludge.
When the following Imperial forces arrived, they found planets that looked as though they had been struck by an Inquisitorial Exterminatus—seared beyond recognition. Yet, the infrastructure and machinery were often intact. The swarm only cared for at, and the Iron n had no use for Imperial hab-blocks. The reclamation pools were incinerated into glass pits.
Occasionally, an Imperial administrator would notice that rare ores or industrial equipnt, items the Tyranids usually ignored, had vanished from the Hives. But compared to the value of a liberated world, the loss of a few high-end machines was a trifle. No one dared to ask where the "paynt" for the Iron n's services was going.
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