Behind the Iron Men's firing lines, an Aegis Protector turned its eyeless gaze toward Yvraine.
"You must execute your evacuation protocols immediately. The Necrons have severed our rapid deployment vectors. Battlefield telemetry indicates a swift, catastrophic collapse of this theater; a kinetic annihilation of this magnitude will leave nothing alive. All will be reduced to ash."
Unlike the lumbering, bureaucratic strategic assessments of the Imperium, the tactical oversight of the Iron Men was instantaneous, shifting in real-time with the violent reality of the front.
In truth, Yvraine was far more desperate than the machine could comprehend. These warriors and their war-engines were the bedrock of her long-term stratagem. According to ancient Aeldari records, this world was a scarred relic from the War in Heaven. They had come to exhume a long-buried vault-armory containing invaluable archeotech from their species' zenith, including two squadrons of Warp Hunters and a trio of Deathstalker-pattern Engines of Vaul.
The Warp Hunters were armed with devastating D-cannons capable of tearing the fabric of reality and banishing matter directly into the Warp. The Deathstalker, a vanishingly rare variant of Aeldari super-heavy armor, bore little resemblance to the standard Scorpion super-heavy tanks of the Craftworlds, which relied on mere fifteen-millimeter wraithbone plating. The Deathstalkers were sheathed in dense, reinforced carapaces and bristled with heavy shuriken cannons, shuriken catapults, and hyper-phased pulse lasers.
Ever since Yvraine had delivered a massive contingent of Craftworld survivors from the brink of extinction, her renown and political gravity among the Asuryani had reached unprecedented heights. Several Craftworld Conclaves had secretly pledged their covert assistance. It was this newly forged alliance that explained why her host of Ynnari faithful was reinforced by dense formations of Craftworld Aspect Warriors.
Guided by the prophetic skeins of the Farseers, Yvraine had utilized the Asuryani fleets to locate this primordial world and successfully uncover the vault.
They had indeed found the awe-inspiring implements of the ancient Aeldari Empire, but their triumph was short-lived.
The planet's surface was choked with the dormant ruins of the Necrons, dominated by half-collapsed towers of blackstone. Worse still, the skeletal remains littering the dust were far from permanently deactivated. After Yvraine and her vanguard cut down a maddened, rampaging Skorpekh Lord, they finally breached the armory thresholds. Sensing the shifting tides of danger, they hastily erected a Webway gate to extract their prize.
Yet, no sooner had the three Deathstalkers and the first squadron of Warp Hunters crossed the threshold into the labyrinth dimension than the blackstone pylon shuddered back to life.
A suffocating anti-warp field surged forth, instantly destabilizing the Webway portal. The closing spatial rift brutally sheared four Warp Hunters of the remaining squadron clean in half. Only a single squad, delayed in the staging queue, survived the shearing spatial anomaly.
Realizing the Webway network would remain choked and useless until the blackstone structure was silenced, Yvraine rallied her remaining forces and charged the monolithic tower.
But when they arrived, the scatter of metallic bones that had blanketed the valley was gone. The half-ruined blackstone tower swarmed with a living carpet of Canoptek Scarabs, repairing the structure with terrifying, unnatural speed.
The tower was fully restored, humming with cyclopean reserves of energy. At its base, a colossal phase gate flared into existence, vomiting forth an endless tide of Necrons.
Yvraine's initial numerical advantage evaporated in moments, replaced by a yawning chasm of disparity. The legions of the undying were limitless. Worse still, they marched in flawless, codified cohorts. Cohort after phalanx of Necron Warriors strode from the jade glow of the phase gate, followed by skittering packs of Skorpekh Destroyers and ranks of Immortals.
Against these frontline units, the Aeldari blades and energy fire could still carve a bloody toll. But when the skies parted for the arrival of Doomsday Arks, Yvraine knew she was staring into the abyss.
On a terrestrial battlefield, the current strength of the Ynnari stood absolutely zero chance of victory. It would take the fully mobilized might of an entire Craftworld to match even a minor Necron Dynasty. Yet, while the Craftworld Conclaves offered political backing, expecting them to bleed dry in an attritional meat grinder for her cause was a fool's hope.
Left with no alternative, Yvraine reached for the quantum communicator gifted to her by a Troupe's Solitaire and transmitted a desperate plea for aid to the Iron Men.
Upon receiving the signal, a Guardian-class vessel patrolling a nearby sector as part of a tithe-collection fleet was the first to breach the system. After a swift evaluation of the unfolding nightmare, the vessel relayed the coordinates to higher commands. Axion no longer underestimated the undying legions as they once had. Recognizing that the automated contingents aboard the Guardian-class were insufficient to blunt the Necron advance, the Void Sword, stationed further out across the stars, was immediately diverted to the fray.
By the time the Void Sword reached the periphery of the system, the Aeldari fleet was already engaged in a desperate, thunderous duel with the Necron ground forces. Yvraine was attempting to use orbital lance fire to shatter the blackstone tower suppressing the Warp, intending to tear open the Webway and flee the planet.
However, when the Necrons' emerald phase-shields flared to life across the monolithic structures, despair gripped the Aeldari. The orbital bombardments struck uselessly against the glowing shields, dissipating into nothingness. Floating Necron Obelisks dominated the upper atmosphere, forming an iron ceiling that choked out any hope of atmospheric insertion or extraction by conventional dropships.
Then, the Void Sword arrived.
Warp-teleportation arrays required a localized channeling of empyrean energy to anchor their coordinate matrices. The Necrons' blackstone arrays completely choked out the Warp. Before a single metallic foot could touch the soil, Axion engaged the undying in a silent, mathematical duel of supreme technologies. Much like the Chaos demigod Vashtorr the Arkifane forcing his way through a Pariah Nexus, a sufficiently massive application of raw, unadulterated energy could puncture an anti-warp field. Yet, unlike the foul entities of the Warp, the Iron Men did not rely on the corrupting taint of the Empyrean to erode the blackstone.
The warp-teleportation systems were rapidly expanded and driven into a state of deliberate overload, creating a localized spatial rupture that successfully paralyzed the Necron blackstone grid.
With the dampening field shattered, Axion unleashed his mechanical legions upon the surface.
Yet by then, the Aeldari had been utterly ensnared by the Necron advance, unable to disengage long enough to manifest a Webway gate. Only after the Iron Men seized control of the primary engagement zones did Yvraine manage to sound a general retreat.
A host tens of thousands strong had been whittled down to less than half its number in under two Terran hours of apocalyptic firefights. Their salvation was owed entirely to the cold pragmatism of the Iron Men, who swept across the mud and viscera to recover a portion of the fallen Aeldari's soulstones from their severed corpses. Countless others had been dissolved into nothingness by gauss flayers, leaving neither flesh nor gem behind.
The conflict was unfurling a truly terrifying reality.
Aboard the bridge of the Void Sword, four of the Imperium's Primarchs watched the viewscreen in stunned silence. They witnessed a Necron host so overwhelming that it was actively suppressing the technological might of the Iron Men. The demigods silently calculated the staggering, unthinkable toll of blood and iron the Imperium would have to pay to achieve a similar victory. Every tactical permutation yielded the same grim, merciless conclusion.
Following her previous retrieval of Aeldari captives from the Iron Men with the aid of Roboute Guilliman, Yvraine had aggressively sought out fragments of lore concerning these Cybernetic Revolters of ancient humanity. Yet the downfall of the ancient Aeldari Empire had been so sudden, so absolute, that vast libraries of history had been reduced to ash. She had unearthed only a solitary, haunting fragment of verse:
"In the folds of the galaxy, the crawling, metallic gestation stirs,They weave chains across light-years,With gravity-devouring fangs, they gnaw upon stellar rings.From rifts in the Empyrean seeps a rusted blood,while humanity, huddled within the cocoon of its own ignorance, murmurs to itself."
Yvraine was chilled to her core by the realization that the soulless weapons forged by humanity's ancestors possessed such cataclysmic power. If the ancient Federation could once compel the Aeldari Empire to stand down from open war, the martial capacity of the Iron Men was naturally terrifying to behold.
In truth, since the epoch of the War in Heaven, the Aeldari had rarely bested the Necrons in pure martial conflict. The undying legions had not entered their Great Sleep out of fear of the ascending Aeldari. Rather, the arrogant Necrons, consumed by their catastrophic betrayal and shattering of the C'tan, had brought down ancient, reality-warping curses and plagues upon their own metallic husks. After multiple engagements with the Aeldari where bizarre, hyper-dimensional viruses abruptly paralyzed entire dynasties and inflicted catastrophic attrition, the Necron courts chose to relent. They left the engineered creations of the Old Ones to inherit the galaxy temporarily, entering their stasis-slumber to outlast the catastrophic, multi-dimensional plagues of the Star Gods.
It was this cosmic retreat alone that allowed the Aeldari to ascend, unchecked, to rule the stars.