"The Crusade begins, the Daemons recede; by the power of faith, we are invincible. In the Emperor's name, we purge the evil; we fight to the end, never faltering."
...
The Song of the Crusade, the Emperor's Shield, Glory to the Master of Mankind, and the Psalms of the Golden Throne, hymns such as these echoed incessantly through the vox-emitters of servitor-habs.
To operate within the soul-stifling depths of the Pariah Nexus, the Imperial Navy had been forced to muster additional choir-covens for every vessel in the fleet. On every ship, at least one choir stood in perpetual vigil, chanting holy canticles twenty-four hours a day without cease. These choirs were composed of lobotomized choir-servitors, their organic minds stripped away and replaced by mechanical augmentations.
Through these neural implants, they were purged of emotion and exhaustion; all that remained was an obsessive, hard-wired devotion to the God-Emperor. The holy resonance drifted through the decks of every Imperial ship, anchoring the souls of the mortal ratings against the soul-banishing effects of the Nexus, preserving their sanity and combat readiness against the encroaching void of the spirit.
Though the civil war between Imotekh the Stormlord and Szarekh the Silent King raged on, it did not mean the Necrons had abandoned their hostility toward the Imperial forces. The Tech-Priests of Battle Group Hephaestus posed a threat to the Necron dynastic legions far greater than that of conventional Imperial military assets. These Magi recklessly field-tested Dark Age of Technology relics unearthed from forbidden vaults—ancient, terrifying engines of destruction that unleashed unpredictable devastation upon Necron and Imperial forces alike.
One Magos had deployed a satellite array known as the Spheric Constellation around the perimeter of a Necron nodal world. This was a weaponized orbital network from the Dark Age of Technology, spanning thousands of miles and consisting of twenty-five high-yield orbital satellites.
However, the Magos's understanding of this "gift from the Omnissiah" was fragmentary at best. The weapon's target identification protocols and command-and-control logic had long since decayed into corruption. When the ignorant Magos activated the array, the heavens bled fire. Massive beams of coherent energy lanced down in a salvo whose destructive magnitude rivaled the Orks' Attack Moons during the War of the Beast.
Initially, the Magos calculated the kill-ratio with cold satisfaction as the Necron lines vanished in pillars of white light. But the logic-circuits soon cooled as the orbital strike system spiraled beyond all control. Having vaporized the Necron presence on the surface and in high orbit, the satellites redirected their fury toward the Imperial lines. Searing explosions rippled across the planetary crust and through the surrounding void-docks. The Magos himself narrowly escaped annihilation by the very weapon he had roused from its slumber.
Beyond such conspicuous follies, there were other, even more harrowing relics of a forgotten age.
One Biologis Magos unleashed a Hyper-Megavirus that reduced every physical object in the infection zone into a churning, viral slurry of bubbling mucus. Then there was the Locker of Oblivion, which projected anti-molecular shockwaves. Its operating principle appeared to weaken intermolecular bonds, instantaneously transitioning every unit, friend and foe alike, within the target zone from a solid state to a liquid one.
Most enigmatic of all was the Orb of Darkness. This "relic of the Machine God" was unleashed by a Magos facing a legion of thousands of living-metal constructs. The Necron Cryptek of the Crystalline Cult, utilizing esoteric technomandrite rites, had splintered a shard of Iash'Uddra and bound its energetic fragments into these constructs. Under their assault, the consciousness of the Imperial soldiers began to splinter; the clicking of mechanical rhythm echoed in the minds of the victims as they felt their identities dissolving into synthetic fragments.
When the Orb of Darkness was triggered, it triggered an unknown reaction with the C'tan energy, rapidly expanding into a silent, pitch-black sphere of absolute void. The sphere engulfed vast swathes of both armies. When it finally ceased its expansion and dissipated, one-third of the planet's mass had been utterly annihilated. Naturally, it took the Magos with it.
Nearly every Dark Age weapon produced results that were as awe-inspiring as they were catastrophic. This "wonder" was shared equally by the screaming Imperial commanders and the incredulous Necron Overlords.
Among the myriad "gifts," however, were more reliable instruments of war, such as the Ordinatus Ulator. Derived from the massive macro-cannons of capital ships, its design was deceptively simple, essentially a self-propelled macro-battery. Yet, due to the regression of materials science, the Adeptus Mechanicus of the 41st Millennium is incapable of replicating this terrifying engine.
In response to these eccentric and often nonsensical weapons, the Necrons delivered their own "shocks" to the Imperial forces.
The Necrons had taken a high-mass star on the verge of supernova and, using sub-dimensional distortion to warp the laws of physics, compressed and stabilized it within their fleet's hold. Known as a Bound Dwarf, this device provided near-infinite power to the Necron vessels. Backed by such an inexhaustible energy source, the Necron fleet attained a state of near-invulnerability. In extremis, the Necrons would collapse the containment field, launching the active star like a gargantuan projectile. Such an act could snuff out billions of lives in an instant or be used to shatter a planet in a localized hyper-nova.
One desperate Imperial fleet eventually attempted a suicidal ramming maneuver against a Necron carrier, inadvertently damaging the stellar containment apparatus. The uncontrolled Bound Dwarf erupted into a cataclysmic solar storm, scouring the Imperial fleet, the Necron host, and the entire star system from existence.
Then there was the Thermo-Gravitic Annihilator, which utilized a planet as a literal electrode. Consisting of heating arrays, gravity-manipulation modules, and energy-conduction vanes, this weapon fused extreme thermal energy with precise gravitic control. It exploited the physical properties of matter in high-temperature states. The weapon would first flash-heat the matter in a target zone to ultra-high temperatures, rendering atoms and molecules extremely volatile. Then, by manipulating the localized gravity field, it forced this superheated matter toward a central singularity, generating immense pressure. When the pressure and temperature hit a critical threshold, the matter underwent a reaction far more violent than nuclear fusion; portions of the mass were annihilated, releasing a colossal burst of energy.
It could target both planetary surfaces and orbital assets. For a void-fleet, the Thermo-Gravitic Annihilator was a nightmare; the energy it released could bypass void shields and hull plating in an instant, dragging the internal mass of a warship into the annihilation reaction. This weapon bore a haunting similarity to the SLR-09 Star Forge once employed by Axion. However, the SLR-09's gravitic arrays were not designed to fuse matter, but rather to drive structures in reverse to prevent gravitational collapse and fusion reactions.
Yet, beyond these technological terrors, the greatest threat came from the ten C'tan Shards unleashed by the opulent Necrons of the Nihilakh Dynasty. These enslaved star-god fragments vented their eternal fury upon the Imperial ranks, wreaking havoc on a scale that Imperial technology was almost powerless to halt.
Through long war experience with the Necrons, the Imperium knew that if the control mechanisms could be destroyed, the Shards would immediately turn upon their Necron jailers. However, the Necrons and the devices binding the Shards were shielded by layers of impenetrable hyper-technology. Despite launching countless lightning strikes and boarding actions, the Imperial forces saw no success.
The Imperium's only saving grace remained Imotekh the Stormlord, whose total war against Szarekh the Silent King occupied the Silent King's full attention. Had it been otherwise, the Imperial forces currently within the Pariah Nexus would likely have been extinguished by the Silent King's hand long ago.
——————
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)