"By the Emperor, what is that?!"
"The Omnissiah manifests!"
The Imperial forces watched the metal construct emerge from the enemy ruins with sheer terror and awe. Across the fleet, Magi and Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus violently commandeered the auspex consoles of their respective vessels, desperately attempting to harvest any shred of data or telemetry.
The newly birthed megastructure occupied a staggering quarter of the planetary fortress's original volume. Its scale was monumental, defying conventional physics.
The Heart of the Forge slowly adjusted its orientation, drawing closer to the colossal apparatus inch by inch. This massive architecture was not an independent vessel, but a terrifying megastructure known as a Super-Mass Projector.
Its operational paradigm was brutally simple: it utilized active planetary cores as kinetic payloads. In essence, it was a cataclysmic mass-driver designed to hurl stellar-grade marbles.
Compared to standard terrestrial worlds, the Orks' battle fortress possessed immense mass, with a metallic density several times higher than that of a standard mining world. Although greenskin metallurgical refinement was outwardly crude and rudimentary, the resulting purity was exceptionally high. Those scrap-iron plates, seemingly salvaged from refuse, possessed complex and superior material properties.
Furthermore, the lifecycle of the greenskin fungus absorbed vast quantities of mineral components from its environment; their very blood, flesh, and marrow were saturated with dense metallic ions.
Every scrap of these valuable elements had been meticulously stripped by the nanites.
Axion had no desire to waste time recycling the negligible metallic yields from individual infantrymen across hundreds of planetary warzones. However, harvesting tens of billions of Orks simultaneously upon a single battle fortress was an eminently efficient optimization of resources.
This sudden influx of massive material volume pushed the storage tolerances of the nanites to their absolute operational thresholds. Had the 'gorged' Grey Tide returned to the Heart of the Forge normally, even that titanic vessel could not have directly accommodated such a localized mass expansion, the harvested material equated to nearly a quarter of the ship's own displacement.
Thus, Axion resolved to construct the components on site, appending them directly to the hull of the Heart of the Forge.
The ship's baseline design was natively modular and infinitely scalable. The addition of two symmetrical, silver-white prongs protruding several thousand kilometers from the flanks of the twenty-thousand-kilometer-long behemoth did nothing to disrupt its terrifying symmetry.
Within the containment fields of the Super-Mass Projector, the dark-red planetary core roiled violently, unleashing localized waves of tectonic energy. Yet, this was merely a partial, incomplete iteration of the projector's blueprint.
Fortunately, six more Ork battle fortresses remained in the theater. Raw materials were plentiful.
As macro-conduits and structural trunks fused, the nanite swarm seamlessly integrated the architecture of the Super-Mass Projector into the keel of the Heart of the Forge. At that exact microsecond, a staggering torrent of data flooded Axion's processing arrays.
The nanites had not merely devoured physical matter; they had cataloged its informational matrix. They recorded the mechanical configurations, design methodologies, and chaotic biological schematics of the greenskin constructs.
Axion immediately attempted to parse the data. The technology that allowed the Orks to transition entire planetary fortresses through warp-space directly, alongside the methodology used to teleport massive hordes of troops seamlessly onto a planet's surface, were capabilities the Iron Men did not currently possess. If these mechanisms could be deciphered, the Iron Man fleets could execute strategic transits with near-instantaneous velocity without ever exposing themselves to the hazards of the Immaterium.
However, the analytical yield left the machine mind deeply disappointed.
The harvested blueprints were an anarchic, arbitrary mess. The structural geometry of every single macro-teleporter was entirely unique, making a cohesive underlying theory impossible to formulate. The apparatuses resembled random scrap heaps welded together by blind instinct; there was no identifiable logic to dictate how such garbage could form a cohesive machine, let alone project military assets across the stars.
As for the displacement mechanism that propelled the planetary fortresses through the void, Axion could find no trace of it whatsoever. A chaotic jumble of metallic detritus and derelict machinery was piled indiscriminately deep within the subterranean crust, defying any logical categorization.
While maintaining his analytical subroutines, Axion commanded the Heart of the Forge to pivot. The titanic prow aligned toward another Ork planetary fortress currently butchering an Imperial battlegroup in a neighboring system.
Hummm.
A terrifying resonance of energy rippled across the vacuum of space, the backflash striking the ship's hull and creating a localized kinetic concussive wave. Every vessel within the system's radius registered the sudden, deafening detonation of that binharic hum.
The eardrums of countless Imperial mortal ratings ruptured instantly from the acoustic-kinetic feedback. Several Imperial escorts positioned too close to the mechanical flagship suffered cascading power surges; their hulls flickered with violent static before falling completely dark, dead in the water. The destructive capacity of this localized energetic resonance was catastrophic.
Simultaneously, the Tech-Priests and Magi realized that the roiling planetary core chained within the iron jaws of the cybernetic juggernaut had vanished.
In the adjacent system, the Imperial fleet was drowning in despair under the relentless battery of the Ork battle fortress.
Several Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes had launched desperate boarding operations against the xenos world-engine, executing the same strategic protocols utilized during the War of the Beast. In the contemporary tactical lexicon of the Imperium, neutralizing an Ork Attack Moon in open void-combat was deemed nigh-impossible, let alone this nightmare engine, which loomed several times larger than the anomalies of antiquity.
Even when the Salamanders' Primarch, Vulkan, had campaigned against Ullanor, his massive armada had ultimately relied upon brutal, claustrophobic boarding actions to sabotage the greenskin fortresses from within.
Though the Iron Man fleet wielded god-like destructive potential, the Imperial commanders had seen no visible degradation in the Ork fortress's structural integrity. Instead, it was the seemingly invincible cybernetic vessels that were being systematically cracked open by the Orks' sub-stellar armaments.
Left with no viable alternatives, the Imperial commanders resorted to the most merciless methodology known to the galaxy: boarding actions.
Yet, these Ork megastructures were far beyond the capability of a localized Imperial detachment to conquer. Their numbers were estimated in the tens of billions. Worse still, these specific greenskins had evolved through brutal meat-grinder campaigns against the Tyranid swarms; their physical resilience had amplified to a degree that rivaled an unarmored Space Marine.
The boarding echelons had been radio-silent for nearly an hour. Judging by the biometric vitae-monitors monitored by the Chapter vessels, those Space Marines had already been reduced to molecular slurry by the greenskin tide.
"High-velocity asset detected inbound from the adjacent system! By the Omnissiah! This breaks all physical paradigms!"
The Tech-Priests stared in stark disbelief at the tracking runes on their auspex arrays. A macro-object of near-infinite mass was closing the distance at an impossible velocity.
Before the attendant fleets could formulate a response, a blinding lance of kinetic light flashed past the flanks of the Imperial formation, striking the Ork battle planet dead-center.
The planetary-scale Waaagh! energy field, which had proven so resilient against the lances of the Oblivion Cannons, offered no such compliance against a pure, hyper-velocity physical impact. The tumbling planetary core carried its own volatile thermal payload, and its projected velocity imparted an unstoppable momentum that shattered physical matter on contact.
The emerald shield-canopy disintegrated instantly. The incoming core, retaining over sixty percent of its structural mass after breaking the barrier, buried itself deep within the mantle of the Ork battle fortress.
A catastrophic detonation followed by a localized kinetic shockwave and searing thermal bloom instantly enveloped the world-engine.
Massive continental shelves rolled over like waves, completely burying weapon batteries, defense networks, and heavy armor divisions. Even the scrap-built hive structures that towered hundreds of meters above the surface were violently overturned by the planet's internal fury. The Orks on the surface were torn apart by the overpressure before being vaporized into ash by the multi-thousand-degree thermal backflash.
The entire planetary fortress fractured along thousands of fault lines, teetering on the verge of total structural failure.
While the Imperial forces in the system stood paralyzed by the sheer scale of the devastation, the Heart of the Forge glided into the gravity well. Navigating its massive bulk carefully around the local Imperial assets, it approached the dying world-engine.
The grey-white nanite swarm descended like a morning fog, blanketing the fractured planetoid. Within minutes, billions of tons of base elements were harvested. The metallic compounds that had been melted into magma by the kinetic impact were bypassed for the moment; the nanites could not withstand the extreme thermal thresholds, and attempting extraction would be an inefficient use of chronological assets.
Once the primary material harvesting was complete, the Super-Mass Projector projected localized gravimetric fields toward the shattered world. The dying planet's core, along with millions of tons of loose crustal matter, was forcibly wrenched from the carcass, drawn into the cradle of the silver prongs where it began to rotate and build potential energy.
Another round was chambered.