["...Do not take any weapon or equipment you have never seen before."]
[The last word leaves your mouth at the same instant your vibranium hand opens wide.]
[You move your fingers.]
[The ten metal rings hanging at Trazyn's waist answer immediately, humming to life with a surge of purple light, the energy building in the space of a single breath before they tear free of where he had them stored and come to you.]
[In the same motion, your other arm swings the Blood Scythe backward: a sharp, deliberate arc aimed directly at Fulgrim's clone behind you.]
[Kacha.]
[Metal on metal, a clean catch. Fulgrim's clone's eyes go wide for one instant. Then his massive hand closes around the haft of the blood-red scythe, the green light of it washing across his palm, and the fury in him ignites.]
["For the Emperor!"]
[He is moving before the roar finishes.]
[Fulgrim's clone hits Trazyn's position like a purple and gold storm, the Blood Scythe coming in fast and relentless. At the same moment, the Ten Rings tear into Trazyn's metallic body from your side, each ring striking with the force that years of integration have built into them, ripping through the living metal that the Necron race carries as skin and armor and pride.]
[Trazyn retreats.]
[He raises the Empathic Obliterator to deflect the Ten Rings, angling his frame away from Fulgrim's clone's approach, trying to split his attention across two targets moving at different speeds from different angles. The retreat is controlled but it is a retreat.]
[You close the remaining distance under the cover of the Ten Rings' sustained impact.]
[Both vibranium hands shoot forward and close around the shaft of the Empathic Obliterator.]
["Let go."]
[You say it quietly, your eyes locked on the green light behind Trazyn's eye sockets, and you mean it as a statement of what is going to happen rather than a demand.]
[Then your boot rises from the floor and drives into Trazyn's chest and abdominal assembly with everything your frame can produce.]
[The sound of a metal limb snapping is sharp and clean in the enclosed space.]
[Trazyn's scream is not the sound of a mechanical system failing. It is something older and more indignant than that, the voice of an intelligence that has not experienced this outcome in a very long time. He flies backward, the scepter remaining in your hands, and his body has barely cleared the distance before Fulgrim's clone is already there.]
[The Blood Scythe moves in a sustained sequence of strikes that each find purchase in the living metal of Trazyn's frame. The green glow of the blade leaves afterimages in the air. In the span of a few breaths, what had been a commanding Necron Overlord is reduced to scattered pieces of living metal, each one still faintly luminous, drifting apart across the metal floor.]
[You watch it settle. Then you exhale.]
[The Empathic Obliterator drops from your grip and hits the floor with a heavy, dull impact.]
[The Ten Rings coil upward from where they fell and reassemble above your power pack, forming the familiar purple halo, settling into their resting state like something returning from a long absence.]
[You look at the scattered remains of Trazyn's double.]
[It had taken everything you and Fulgrim's clone had. But you had won this exchange.]
[In truth, the plan had been assembling itself slowly across every loop. Not with clarity, not as a conscious strategy you could have written down. More as a growing shape at the edge of your animal instincts, built from every iteration: the way Trazyn moved, the confidence he carried, the particular pride of a collector who had never lost anything he truly wanted. You had been looking for the blind spot in that pride. The complacency. The assumption that anything he had already acquired and categorized was no longer a threat.]
[The Ten Rings at his waist had given you the answer.]
[If you won, you and Fulgrim's clone had a real path out. If you lost, it was simply the beginning of the next cycle. With each cycle, your instincts had sharpened further, and the table would reset with you slightly more prepared than before.]
[You had decided to bet everything on it.]
[Fulgrim's clone walks back toward you with the Blood Scythe still in hand, his expression grave.]
["Two Primarchs, working together, spent everything they had to destroy one clone." He stops beside you and looks at the scattered living metal. "These Necrons are considerably more complex than I had imagined."]
["Brother." You take the Blood Scythe back from him. "The Necrons are one of the ancient races that single-handedly disrupted what the Warp once was. Their wars played a direct role in the conditions that allowed the Chaos Gods to emerge. And beyond that, they also..."]
[A low hum fills the air.]
[It is not a sound so much as a sensation: something pressing against the edge of perception, a vibration that moves through structure rather than atmosphere. One after another, invisible barriers within the Tesseract Labyrinth begin to peel away, the layers of the temporal construct dissolving, the boundaries between false-space and real-space collapsing in a cascade you can feel as much as observe.]
["Hiss." The sound escapes you before you can stop it. "Why did Trazyn release the Tesseract Labyrinth so easily? I expected many more cycles before we found the actual exit condition."]
[The last layer dissolves.]
[The museum floor reasserts itself beneath your feet. The labyrinth's tight metal corridors are gone. Around you, a vast alien containment area stretches in every direction, recently repaired: Canoptek Scarabs moving in organized clusters across the ceiling and floor, Necron Warriors repositioning alien containment fields, the entire space busy with the quiet efficiency of post-incident recovery operations.]
[Before you or Fulgrim's clone can raise your weapons, the recovery operations stop.]
[Every Necron in the space, across the full extent of what your senses can reach, turns its head at the same moment. Thousands of emotionless green eyes find the two of you simultaneously and lock there.]
[The silence that follows lasts for the span of one held breath.]
[Then every Necron present releases a sound simultaneously, a roar that is not built for lungs or throats, a sound that the architecture amplifies until the metal walls and ceiling are all vibrating with it.]
[And through the roar, rising above it with the precise, furious enunciation of someone who has had very little practice at loss:]
["Give me back... my... scepter!"]