Warhammer 40k: The Men of Iron Return to the Galaxy Chapter 340 340: The Shattered Pariah Nexus

The Void Sword now lay adrift at the northern fringe of Segntum Obscurus, its internal systems ravaged by catastrophic structural failure. A full third of the hull was fractured, and nurous primary energy conduits bled vital power into the void. The only saving grace in this disaster was that the antimatter reactor cores remained unbreached; had the containnt failed, the Void Sword would have collapsed into a localized black hole before ever reaching realspace.

Swarms of Eight-Legs, Sapient Machine Automata, and nanite clusters crawled across the jagged wounds of the vessel, performing desperate, rudintary repairs.

In assessing the vessel's combat effectiveness and structural integrity, the Iron n still adhered to the ancient standards of the Federation. The damage to the Void Sword was far more severe than that of the Fortress of Enlightennt recovered by Cawl; the great ship had effectively lost its value as a repairable asset. The current efforts were rely a stay of execution, designed to prevent further decompression and structural collapse. Once the Titan's Spear arrived with the relief fleet, the Void Sword would undergo a total Reconstruction Protocol.

The reconstruction of a Titan-class vessel is a monuntal undertaking, necessitating a massive expenditure of energy rely to safely power down the antimatter cores. Consequently, the process required the direct assistance of other chanical units.

A Titan-class ship deprived of its own power would lose its internal gravity stabilization; its sheer mass risked triggering a localized matter-collapse reaction. Other vessels had to tether themselves to the giant, feeding energy into the gravity control units distributed throughout the hull to keep the ship's mass from crushing itself.

Massive Ship Printing Modules would then be deployed around the Titan-class vessel, initiating a systematic quantum disintegration of the damaged hull, treating the broken ship as raw feedstock for its own rebirth.

It was a cold, logical efficiency: just as it is often faster to reinstall a corrupted vox-program than to scan, compare, and patch individual damaged files, it was faster to rebuild the Void Sword entirely. Since one-third of the hull was torn away and the remaining two-thirds were riddled with micro-fractures, total reconstruction was the only rational path. Furthermore, as most of the vessel's physical mass remained present, only a few HG-class carriers' worth of minerals would be needed to complete the process.

Despite its crippled state and isolation at the galactic rim, Axion harbored no fear for the giant's safety. Even before the reconstruction began, the ship's "conventional" batteries remained operational, and its internal complents of combat automata were largely intact. Should any predator look upon this sparking, lacerated titan and see easy prey, they would find only a swift and agonizing end.

…

While the Void Sword endured its long ordeal in the Webway, the situation within the Pariah Nexus was undergoing a slow, inexorable shift.

Without the persistent interference of Vashtorr's power, the Necron pylons finally began to purge the lingering Warp corruption from their structures under the influence of their own dampening fields. As the Necrons' anti-Warp shielding stabilized, the massive rift generated by Wyrmwood began to rapidly contract and dissipate.

Once the Imperial fleet and Belisarius Cawl's sensors confird the receding Warp signature, the chanical fleet, which had been holding position, resud its directives.

The attempt to construct a Webway Gate was aborted; with the Warp being driven back, the psychic energy required to sustain the Gate could no longer be drawn. Moreover, since the Void Sword had already returned to the Materium, the need for a gateway was now redundant.

The machine fleet moved in as the vanguard, coordinating with Imperial Navy battle groups and Adeptus chanicus Explorator fleets to begin a systematic saturation bombardnt of every Necron node.

Heavy Combat Cruisers ford disciplined ranks, overlapping their thick energy shields to create a vast aegis wall against the Necrons' gauss beams. Compared to the Imperium's Void Shields, the energy shields utilized by the Iron n appeared less sophisticated in their taphysical "phasing," yet they possessed a far superior defensive capability against molecular-disruption weaponry.

The primary reason Imperial vessels were so fragile in the face of Necron fleets was the inherent failure of the Void Shield against Necron hyper-technology.

Necron weaponry is founded upon unique chronomancy and exotic particle physics. Void Shields are designed to displace traditional kinetic shells and thermal energy beams into the Warp. Against the specific energy frequencies and particle streams of the Necrons, the defensive resonance of a Void Shield is often non-existent. It is like a vox-receiver tuned to a specific frequency; if the incoming signal falls outside its range, it simply fails to pick it up. The Void Shield cannot "recognize" or interact with the Necron particle beam, allowing the green light to pass through the shield as if it weren't there, striking the hull directly.

In contrast, the energy shields of the Federation era were brute-force constructs, solid walls of stacked energy. They did not attempt to phase energy away; they simply blocked it. This "eggshell" style of all-frequency defense was incredibly energy-intensive, but it proved remarkably effective at intercepting and absorbing the Necrons' particle-shredding beams.

Commanders of the Imperial Navy and the Adeptus chanicus watched the ripples of green energy washing harmlessly over the machine fleet's prows with undisguised envy. Since the conflict began, both the Navy and the Priesthood of Mars had learned the true, terrifying potency of Necron science. They had watched countless sister-ships reduced to ash by those erald beams, hulls turned into drifting dust in a single salvo.

Yet the Iron n's ships held.

This revelation led many Archmagi to question whether the Imperium's holy Void Shields were, in fact, woefully obsolete. Cawl, never one for tradition over efficacy, bypassed protocol and directly petitioned Axion for the schematics of these energy shields.

When Cawl received the massive data-packet from Axion, he was montarily stunned by the sheer complexity and raw volu of information. However, he quickly shook off his astonishnt and plunged into the data-analysis with frantic fervor.

For Axion, providing technical support was rely a fulfillnt of their accord, provided the organics knew what to ask for. The Iron n were not masters of the Warp or telepathy; if the Imperium did not speak, the machine could not know their needs. He would consider their requests, but he would not suffer them to constantly covet his own chanical essence.

As Cawl labored over the shield data, the Necron fleets likewise realized that their conventional weaponry was losing its lethality against these silver-hued machine-vessels. Even their established void-doctrines were failing.

Against the Imperial Navy, the Necrons favored using their superior maneuverability and structural resilience to plunge into the heart of the Imperial formation, shattering hulls through close-quarters brawling and even ramming actions. Against the Iron n, such tactics were suicidal.

The prows of the Heavy Combat Cruisers were bristling with energy-projecting "spears." Even from a distance, the crackling power fields around these protrusions made it clear that any attempt to ram would result in the Necron vessel being shorn in two.

So Necron ships did attempt to flank and strike from the side, but the result remained the sa. The machine-vessels were gargantuan, their internal structures vastly denser than the hollow cathedrals of the Imperium. A Necron vessel hitting an Iron Man ship was like a bird hitting a high-density alloy slab. Night Scythes and even larger Shroud-class cruisers often failed to penetrate the primary armor belts, and even the formidable Monoliths found little purchase in such brutal exchanges.

Furthermore, the Iron n were perfectly willing to use their vessels as colossal fire-bombs. If a vessel was too heavily damaged by a Necron ramming action, the machine mind would simply detonate its energy core, trading its own existence to annihilate the precious Necron assets nearby.

Clearly, these silver invaders were a far more harrowing foe than the fragile servants of the Corpse-Emperor.

——————

If you want to read ahead of everyone, go to my pat-reon: pat-re-on.c-om/magnor (remove the hyphen to access normally)