While the Fortress of Enlightenment underwent its relentless reconstruction, the situation within the Webway grew increasingly volatile.
Vashtorr pushed Wyrmwood through the labyrinthine dimensions with reckless abandon. Legend whispered throughout the galaxy that the Old Ones had interred their ultimate power within the deepest reaches of the Webway, yet the Dissonance Engine was never intended to be a literal key to such a vault. Its true nature was that of a Webway shield-tunneling machine and a weaver of reality-tunnels.
Though the Daemonic Demigod was convinced of the Old Ones' hidden cache, he possessed no coordinates for the vault's precise location. The Webway network spanned the entire galaxy, its internal architecture a maddeningly complex web of non-linear paths. To locate a specific, ancient treasury within this cosmic sprawl was a task of near-impossible magnitude, especially with a gargantuan battleship nipping at his heels.
Vashtorr could not even afford the luxury of halting to calculate his position. He simply careened blindly through the interstitial space between realspace and the Empyrean.
For the sub-intelligence of Axion commanding the Void Sword, the Demigod was a target that could not be lost. Other vessels or infantry might find themselves adrift and forsaken within the Webway's shifting corridors, but for a leviathan like the Void Sword, there was only one path. The Webway lacked any other passages broad enough to accommodate such a titan; only the fresh, raw tunnel carved by the Dissonance Engine offered enough clearance for the Void Sword to follow.
It was, in the most literal sense, a one-way street.
After hours of frantic pursuit, Vashtorr finally purged the lingering influence of the despair-laden psychic strike. The warp-sorcery unleashed by the Thousand Sons, empowered by Tzeentch, had inflicted severe spiritual lacerations, requiring an agonizingly long time for the Demigod to regain his mental equilibrium. The concentrated psychic output of a million psykers was indeed staggering; the sheer emotional weight of the blast had momentarily reminded Vashtorr of the Black Sun that hung high within the Warp.
He had been momentarily cowed by that power, but the root of his dread was not the energy itself, it was the shadow of the Emperor of Mankind.
As for the raw psychic might of a million souls, it was insufficient to slay a Daemonic Demigod. Though the beam had scorched him, the wounds were superficial; the true damage was the scattering of his focus.
And he knew exactly which rats had struck from the shadows. Vashtorr was under no illusions: the other Chaos Gods held no love for him, particularly a certain blue-feathered trickster. Should Vashtorr ascend to godhood, he would inevitably siphon away followers, diluting Tzeentch's own pool of influence.
Rage flared within Vashtorr as he considered the architect of his betrayal, but it was a cold, fleeting fire. He knew that dwelling on Tzeentch was futile. If he failed to achieve godhood, the obstacles in his path would only multiply. He had to proceed with surgical precision.
Adjusting his control over the Dissonance Engine, Vashtorr easily oriented himself within the Webway's spatial logic, then angled the planetary tunneler into a vertical descent. A torrent of Warp energy erupted from beneath Wyrmwood, and the Webway's foundations were unceremoniously breached.
The Dissonance Engine plunged Vashtorr through the Webway's floor and headlong into the raw Warp.
The automated defense systems of the Old Ones' Webway immediately responded. As soon as Vashtorr exited the corridor, a massive spatial patch sealed the breach behind him. The Daemonic Demigod cast a spiteful glance back at the rapidly mending wound in the Webway's wall before guiding Wyrmwood into the swirling depths of the Immaterium. As a denizen of the Warp, Vashtorr feared nothing within his own domain.
Moments later, the Void Sword arrived, nearly slamming into the newly mended Webway wall.
Axion's dimensional sensors repeatedly scanned the area; the vast corridor had simply come to an abrupt end. Nearby, pinpricks of Warp energy bled through the boundary, coalescing into twisted daemonic entities. The road had vanished, and the experimental target along with it, a development that momentarily taxed Axion's logic processors.
However, data analysis quickly provided the answer: the planet had escaped into the Warp. Had the enemy possessed a method to shrink the planet, they would have done so from the start to lose the Void Sword in a narrow passage. Since they hadn't, and the wide path had ended in a leak of Empyrean energy, the only conclusion was that they had bored through the Webway itself.
The Void Sword was heavily armed, but Axion was uncertain if conventional psychic weaponry could breach the Webway's unique structural integrity. Previous tests against the T'au had shown negligible damage to the planetary surface. To investigate further, Axion reached a decisive conclusion.
Assisted by a swarm of nanites, the prow of the Void Sword began to reshape itself. A tunneling apparatus, based on the schematics found within the Emperor's secret laboratories beneath the Imperial Palace, began to take form. If the Emperor could carve an artificial Webway using psychic power, then surely the massive Psychic Crystal could serve as the power source for this cosmic chisel.
Though this "chisel" was several orders of magnitude larger than the Emperor's original design, the scale was irrelevant to a machine. The Emperor had relied on a small cabal of psykers and a mass of mechanical equipment; an Iron Man possessed equipment in abundance. The power held within the Psychic Crystal, the distilled essence of a million souls, was arguably even greater than the raw psychic output of the Emperor himself.
As the massive mechanical structure on the prow locked into place, the energy within the Psychic Crystal was siphoned in a controlled surge. It coursed through reinforced conduits to the ship's nose, forming a slowly rotating vortex of coruscating psychic energy. The Void Sword's engines roared, pushing the gargantuan prow against the Webway's fabric.
Yet, reality refused to conform to the simulation.
The device did not pierce the Webway wall as intended. Instead, it acted like an uneven clamp, gripping the very fabric of the dimension and twisting it. The result was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The Webway was torn.
Colossal volumes of Warp energy began to flood into the surrounding minor Webway arteries, erupting like a ruptured vein. It was as if someone had pinched skin and twisted it—the point of contact held firm, but the surrounding area was pulled until it snapped. Despite the advanced technology at his disposal, Axion found that psychic energy remained a fickle, "warp-sensitive" force. For a soulless Iron Man, the application of such power was always fraught with volatility.
The Webway is a high-speed conduit, and the pursuit had already carried the Void Sword across unimaginable distances. The Warp energy now flooding the system was triggering a chain reaction of spatial collapses, and the primary victim of this catastrophe was already racing toward them through the tunnels.
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