Perhaps realizing he had said something he shouldn't have, Olot offered a strained, awkward smile and fell silent.
Axion's curiosity was piqued by the organization hidden in the shadows behind the man, but a precise facial analysis made it perfectly clear that the other party had no desire to pursue the topic.
Consequently, Axion immediately steered the conversation back to his primary objective.
"Take me to see the Titan mechanics capable of channeling psychic power."
Olot did not speak in response to Axion's demand. He merely nodded.
Under his guidance, Axion continued to venture deeper into the heart of the stronghold.
They traversed chamber after chamber, each filled with ancient, slumbering machinery. Axion noted that many of these apparatuses bore the distinct, unmistakable hallmarks of Federation-era design, though their hulls had been retrofitted and overhauled over successive eras until their original functions were entirely obscured to the untrained eye.
Armed sentries patrolled the deep, echoing galleries in rhythmic, unbroken cycles.
These soldiers were a far cry from the Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii cohorts Axion had encountered guarding other Titan Legions. Though they too bore extensive cybernetic augmentations, the technology woven into their flesh was fundamentally divorced from standard Martian orthodoxy.
Their condition more closely mirrored Astra Militarum troopers outfitted with deep-subcutaneous bionics. They wore carapace armor of exceptional quality, typically reserved for Militarum Tempestus Storm Troopers, and wielded plasma weapons configured in the patterns of standard-issue rifles. Yet, the heavy heraldry stamped upon their gear proclaimed their true, terrible allegiance: these men were the Titan-guard of the Ordo Sinister.
Axion remained unaware that these unassuming sentinels were all Terran-born.
Even as mere civilians of Terra, their status by birthright naturally eclipsed that of almost any mortal hailing from the Imperium's far-flung frontier worlds.
As they marched on, Axion's optical receptors caught sight of an even more specialized, unsettling insignia.
It was the sigil of the Sigillite's chosen agents.
Relying solely on the presence of this single crest, Axion's processing core instantly generated a matrix of theoretical deductions.
The engineers who still claimed these archaic titles were, in all probability, direct remnants or inheritors of the organization once commanded by Malcador the Sigillite, the legendary Grand Master and Regent of the Imperium.
Axion possessed a vast wealth of data regarding this mythic figure.
Countless historical fragments of obscure origin and heavily redacted records within the Imperial archives detailed his deeds. Though a massive portion of these texts consisted of maddening hymns and bizarrely phrased hagiography, Axion was still capable of parsing an immense volume of concrete data from the prose.
Furthermore, Axion had parsed entries regarding Malcador within the Emperor's personal journals.
Malcador's full name was recorded as Malcador the Sigillite.
He had entered the Emperor's service as early as the Unification Wars of Terra, witnessing the very genesis of the Primarchs and serving as the Master of Mankind's chief administrator throughout the Great Crusade. By the closing days of the Horus Heresy, his biological lifespan had reached a staggering 6,718 years.
According to the accounts preserved within the Emperor's journals, Axion had unearthed several deeply buried, classified histories.
The First Legion of the Adeptus Astartes had once fought under the Emperor's direct command to crush a cabal of powerful psykers known as the Sigillites. This order possessed sufficient psychic might to withstand direct telepathic assaults from the Emperor himself, and Malcador had been one of their number.
When Malcador first encountered the Emperor, the latter was little more than one of many Terran warlords, devoid of grand, cosmic vision. It was Malcador who had counselled, urged, and driven this shaman of ancient Middle Eastern origin to claim the mantle of "The Emperor" and to execute the monumental duties that such a title demanded.
In certain literary archives that had been systematically expunged from existence, the Sigillites were documented as brutal, tyrannical psychic oligarchs.
The Emperor had not only read these accounts; he had transcribed his own reflections on them into his journals.
Back then, the Emperor recognized that Malcador was of his own kind: they were both Perpetuals.
The Emperor subsequently deduced that he could utilize Malcador to decipher Terran history, establishing a bedrock for the Imperium's future expansion. He then slaughtered the remaining Sigillites and repurposed their subterranean redoubt into his own central command center, the structure that would evolve into the Imperial Palace of Terra.
Malcador was also the architect of the Inquisition and the first Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. He had personally overseen the creation of various administrative organs of state, including the Orders of Remembrance and Antiquity.
As the absolute leader of the Sigillite order, he viewed the preservation of human history as his sacred, eternal duty.
The Emperor placed absolute trust in Malcador, vesting him with supreme authority. Wherever the Sigillite walked, he spoke and acted with the absolute mandate of the Emperor himself.
The Master of Mankind had even tasked him with managing his twenty proud, temperamental Primarch sons.
In truth, only Leman Russ had truly viewed Malcador as family; the other Primarchs all harbored varying degrees of jealousy regarding the intense, unshakeable closeness between Malcador and their gene-sire.
During the apocalyptic Siege of Terra, Malcador had engaged in a fierce, desperate duel against Ahriman, Horus's favored sorcerer.
Though Malcador displayed extraordinary courage and staggering psychic power, he was ultimately undone by Ahriman's sorcery.
Nevertheless, his final sacrifice bought the Emperor precious time to stabilize the volatile, broken Webway gate beneath the palace. By taking the agonizing weight of the Golden Throne upon himself, he allowed the Emperor to depart and confront Horus directly aboard the Vengeful Spirit.
Malcador was first mortally wounded in that psychic conflagration, and his remaining life force was entirely incinerated by the insatiable, draining psychic feedback of the Golden Throne. The convergence of these two catastrophic traumas brought about his final demise. He had sacrificed everything down to his very soul for the Imperium and his Emperor.
Axion had meticulously cross-analyzed this segment of the journals and arrived at a stark conclusion: the Golden Throne had utterly erased Malcador's warp signature and spiritual imprint, ensuring this specific Perpetual could never resurrect.
It was only after making that deduction that Axion had abandoned his original calculations to destroy the living corpse entombed beneath Terra in hopes of triggering a rebirth.
It was terrifyingly obvious that the Golden Throne inflicted absolute, irreversible destruction upon a Perpetual's metaphysics.
To destroy a Perpetual reduced to a state of living death would, with near-certain probability, result in true, permanent expiration rather than a resurrection.
Yet, though Malcador had perished, the web of institutions he had set in motion had not vanished from the galaxy.
It was highly probable that these engineers, with their strange, unorthodox traditions, were a splinter faction surviving under the ancient mandate of the Sigillite's order.
At last, they stepped into a colossal, cavernous vault.
As the massive, armored blast doors ground open, the space revealed a labyrinth of towering metal gantry cranes, scaffolds, and support struts. Majestic Warlord Titans stood in rigid, silent formation along both flanks of the hall, locked within their towering docking cradles.
Having brought Axion to his destination, Olot stepped to the side and waited.
However, it did not take long for Axion to detect an anomaly.
His high-precision composite scanning arrays were experiencing severe psychic interference. Compared to other Imperial Titans, whose internal schematics could be laid bare at a glance, these warmachines pulsing with psychic resonance were entirely unorthodox.
A vast multitude of their psychic matrices and internal geometries defied standard sensor readings.
After a brief, calculating silence, Axion turned his massive chassis toward the quiet figure of Olot.
"I require comprehensive data readouts concerning the armaments and operational systems of these Titans. In exchange, I can attempt to rectify several of your outstanding, ancient technical anomalies."
The directives handed down by the Imperial Regent and the High Lords of Terra were explicit: give the Iron Man whatever he demands.
It was precisely due to this mandate that the task of acting as a guide and interlocutor had been dumped on the relatively junior Olot.
Despite their ancient lineage, they had never before interacted with a fully functional, self-aware Iron Man.
Olot tapped a rapid, complex sequence of commands into a nearby terminal, bringing up a massive repository of blueprints and schematic data before the towering mechanical entity.
Axion's massive, metallic hand rose slightly. Two silver-white alloy cables slithered from his chassis like living serpents, jacking directly into the data ports of the terminal.
A torrent of technical readouts and dense data streams flashed across the screens in a blinding, dizzying blur.
Every scrap of information regarding the Psi-Titans was rapidly harvested by Axion's core processors, beamed across the void via data-link, and compiled directly into the archives of the Void Sword.
A succession of software integration protocols and engineering optimization routines immediately commenced within his central computing matrix.