A few minutes may seem fleeting to most, but for the Chaos fleet, the daemons serving Vashtorr, and the Imperial traitors gathered there, it was an eternity of escalating slaughter. As for Vashtorr himself, he had never imagined that the Warp-rift he tore open would serve as a convenient gateway for an interloper.
Amidst the black mists of roiling Warp energy, the massive machine fleet did not slow its pace, unleashing a relentless barrage upon the Chaos vessels and Wyrmwood itself.
Wyrmwood, now a fully realized Dissonance Engine, was an ancient construct of the Old Ones entwined with the malefic power of the Immaterium. This unholy union granted it an extraordinary resilience against conventional energy weaponry. Whether it was the railgun slugs from the machine fleet or various high-potency beam weapons, their destructive force withered significantly upon entering the planet's atmosphere. Though the surface was wreathed in pillars of fire and explosions, the actual structural damage to Wyrmwood remained negligible.
Axion simultaneously calculated the combat efficacy of the engagement. In response to the data, the weapon profiles of the machine fleet began to shift in real-time.
Aboard numerous vessels, primary laser arrays and plasma turrets were refashioned by swarms of nanites and automated assembly systems. In their place, forests of rail-weaponry emerged, their calibers growing increasingly grotesque in scale. In this moment, Axion found himself understanding why Chaos relied so heavily on energy and the Imperium on the physical.
Those seemingly crude and ponderous macro-cannons were indeed the optimal choice for engaging the Warp. Super-massive solid slugs presented a physical reality that the laws of the Immaterium struggled to subvert; even for the Warp to corrupt such mass required a window of time. Energy weapons, by contrast, proved far less effective against these Warp-entities and their semi-material vessels. Furthermore, the larger the entity, the more resistant it seemed to be. A Chaos entity the size of a planet possessed a resilience to energy fire that slightly exceeded Axion's initial projections.
However, this was a hurdle, not a halt.
Beyond switching to mass-driver weaponry, Axion conducted several experimental salvos. The plasma turrets on a portion of his Strike Cruisers began a fusion test: if standard aperture and power were insufficient to inflict damage, they would simply scale the output upward indefinitely.
Vashtorr gazed with disdain from the surface of Wyrmwood at the various weapons lashing out from the void. Corrupted, toxic pollutants dripped from the corners of his maw as he bared his teeth in a contemptuous sneer. The Old Ones were beings comparable to gods; the majesty of a god's creation was not something these mortal constructs could hope to fathom.
Yet, for the numerically superior Chaos fleet, the Iron Man's mechanical vessels were simply beyond all logic.
Under the canopy of intersecting beams and kinetic impacts, the once-dreaded Desecrator-class and Despoiler-class Battleships fared no better than common destroyers or frigates. Thick lances of light punched through void shields as if they were parchment, before gutting the hulls behind them. Chains of explosions erupted from the breached superstructures, venting fire mixed with the precious atmosphere of the decks.
The counterattacks from the Chaos fleet, by comparison, were agonizingly futile. Lance fire and macro-cannon shells hammered the shields of the machine vessels, but it often required the concentrated broadsides of an entire squadron just to overload the aegis of a single mechanical ship.
When the heretics cheered at the sight of a machine ship's shields flickering out, the scene that followed caused their elation to freeze.
The heavy armor of the machine vessels rose to meet its purpose. Sheets of fire bloomed across the outer plating as shells detonated. Occasionally, a black-red Chaos lance would punch through a hull, but the result was more despair-inducing than the hit itself.
Projectiles would skip off the streamlined armor plates, followed by a shimmer of silver light as the nanites restored the gouged metal almost instantly. High-explosive rounds detonated against the outer skin in blinding flares, only for the machine vessels to cruise through the fire utterly unscathed.
Most horrifying of all were the Warp-tainted Chaos energy cannons. Those black-red beams typically wreaked havoc on Imperial ships, corrupting damaged sections and driving crews into madness with residual Warp energy. Yet, against the machine fleet, they merely left scorched craters. There was no chaos, no panic, and no loss in the frequency of the machines' return fire.
It gave the Chaos crews the soul-crushing illusion that their attacks were simply being ignored.
In truth, the Iron Man's ships carried no crews to corrupt. Even if a Chaos beam pierced a hull, so long as it did not strike the heavily shielded sapient cores or the primary power reactors, the damage was irrelevant. Energy conduits could be rerouted or rebuilt by nanites in seconds. Structural failure was addressed within heartbeats of the impact. Sections of the hull terminally tainted by Warp energy were simply excised by nanites and ejected into the void, as metal whose molecular composition had been twisted by the Immaterium could not be safely integrated without total smelting.
The genius of the nanite systems lay in their ability to maintain combat capability regardless of the severity of the damage. A few holes in the hull were of no consequence to a fleet that functioned as a single, cold-hearted machine. Furthermore, because the interiors of the Iron Man's ships were largely vacuum environments, conventional secondary explosions or fires were non-existent.
The spectacle was nothing short of macabre to the Imperial and Mechanicus fleets watching from the sidelines. They saw silver ships sporting massive, jagged rents, some even pierced through from port to starboard, yet they remained as active and lethal as vengeful wraiths. Their heavy beams and railguns continued to pour fire into the surrounding heretics without pause.
The Tech-Priests of the Mechanicus broke into loud, binary canticles, praising the arrival of the Omnissiah and the blessing of the Machine God.
Vashtorr, meanwhile, felt a distinct shift in the tides of faith and worship that had been flowing toward him. The majesty of the Machine was no longer his alone to demonstrate; his "ignorant" followers were beginning to stray, their awe stolen by the silver invaders!
Simultaneously, aboard the other Imperial vessels, the ratings and officers of the Imperial Navy, now reduced to mere spectators, shouted praises to the Emperor. They watched with wide eyes as the silver fleet charged from the enemy's own Warp-rift and unleashed a cataclysmic strike upon the Great Enemy. Every time a Chaos ship blossomed into a silent fireball in the void, a roar of triumph went up from the Imperial decks.
Just as Vashtorr decided to abandon his efforts to corrupt these vessels and prepare the Dissonance Engine to erase this fleet entirely, the Warp-rift began to buckle and twist.
The Titan-class vessel, the Void Sword, arrived on the battlefield.
On the surface of Wyrmwood, Vashtorr's face contorted in shock. He sensed an inexplicable, existential threat emanating from this titan of the void.
Cawl was equally stunned. The sheer scale of the Void Sword rivaled the Fortress of Enlightenment he currently commanded. He had never imagined another such titanic construct could exist. Though Guilliman had described the gargantuan nature of the Titan's Spear to him, he had never seen it with his own eyes.
To Cawl, the master of the Fortress of Enlightenment, he had believed he was looking at the largest space-faring structure in existence. He was wrong.
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