The Necron ground forces deployed across the battlefield were swelling to absurd proportions, their reinforcement rate staggering. Beyond the horrifying martial engines stepping seamlessly from hyper-dimensional corridors, Doomsday Phalanxes were snapping into formation at multiple coordinates across the planet's surface.
Legions of Obelisks floated through the heavens alongside sky-darkening swarms of Canoptek Acanthrites. On the earth below, Necron Warriors marched in textbook hundred-man phalanxes, and of these, Axion's sensors calculated several thousand.
More troublesome still were the elements interspersed between these blocks.
Squads of Skorpekh Destroyers and Locust Heavy Destroyers darted through the gaps. Deeper within the enemy lines, massive arrays of Doomsday Arks and strangely contoured Tesseract Arks were positioning themselves for fire support. Above them, squadrons of Doom Scythes and Night Shrouds, resembling sinister croissants and jagged, severed doughnuts, claimed the airspace.
Scanning those bizarre xenos aircraft, Axion registered terrifying power signatures.
The most prominent of these energy profiles was antimatter. Whether deployed as antimatter bombs or payloads for structural missiles, their destructive potential remained catastrophic. Under normal operating conditions, antimatter ordinances were far less lethal than the singularity armaments wielded by the Iron Men's own heavy constructs.
But here, the sheer volume was overwhelming.
Even across half the width of a star system, the Void Sword picked up tens of thousands of individual antimatter signatures. If detonated simultaneously, they possessed enough raw output to collapse the planet into a localized black hole.
The Void Sword itself harbored no dread of a singularity. However, the lingering presence of the unevacuated Aeldari would trigger a terminal breach of contract.
The Iron Men had to accelerate protocol execution immediately. Once the xenos completed their mass mobilization and converged from all vectors, the total annihilation of the ground forces would become a mathematical certainty.
Axion remained unaware that the Necrons had been fully capable of deploying these overwhelming numbers much earlier. When the Lychguard had queried their Necron Lord, the slumber-addled mind of the Necron commander had simply expressed a desire to watch the interlopers struggle. This caprice alone had kept the conflict scaling at a deceptively equal pace.
None knew that this world served as one of the vital anchor points for the pocket dimension belonging to a dynasty whose very name had been eroded by the long aeons of sleep. Beyond the hyper-dimensional gates lay a crown world of immense scale.
Processing tens of millions of battlefield simulations, Axion's subroutines isolated the itinerary with the highest probability of success.
On the ground, hundreds of thousands of Iron Men units abruptly disengaged from their immediate targets. Sentry-Troopers swung their particle blades, cleaving through the surrounding Necron Warriors and Immortals before pivoting into a dead sprint toward the Noctilith blackstone towers to the rear.
Every discharge from the enemy's Doomsday Arks vaporized hundreds of Sentry-Troopers at a time, yet the machines possessed no emotion, knowing neither hesitation nor fear.
The shoulder-mounted atomic pulse cannons of the long-range Armored Wardens entered a state of deliberate overload. Piercing beams of light erupted in continuous, self-destructive salvos. The moment a pulse cannon's core melted into slag, the long-range unit would hurl itself into the densest clusters of the Necron line, triggering a localized atomic detonation.
Miniature mushroom clouds bloomed one after another across the war zone.
Concurrently, the melee-configured Armored Wardens whipped their four arms in rhythmic frenzy. Their particle sabers wove shimmering, pale-gold barriers that minced any xenos unit foolish enough to close the distance. This sudden spike in combat efficiency instantly liquidated nearly half of the frontline Necron presence.
Far behind the ranks, the green balefire within the Necron Lord's ocular tracks narrowed slightly.
"These mechanical lifeforms possess an anomaly. Their tactical logic defies comprehension."
Destroyer-class Heavy Automata abandoned their harassment of the heavy constructs and drove forward in a frantic, low-altitude blitz. Utilizing gravitic tethers, they slipped through the sweeping particle whips lashed out by the floating monoliths, answering with bursts of incandescent ion flame from mid-air. The searing heat scorched everything it touched.
Meanwhile, the Adaptive Combat Cores, previously dispersed to bloat unit numbers, re-converged, shifting their physical geometry into sleek, heavy combat drones that rocketed directly toward the towers. To maximize momentum, the skies offered the clearest path.
This rapid metamorphosis caught the Necrons completely flat-footed. By the time they rerouted their croissant-shaped Doom Scythes into intercept vectors, the gambit had already succeeded.
The heavy, saucer-like drones slammed directly into the Necron blackstone spires in a synchronized mass impact.
Taking advantage of the aerial distraction, the remaining dozen or so Destroyer units breached the overlapping anti-Empyrean null fields generated by the blackstone grid. The machines operated with flawless fluid mechanics, entirely unhindered by the anti-warp field, a detail that sparked clinical curiosity within the Necron leadership. After all, these machines had initially arrived amidst distinct warp signatures. The Necron Lord had assumed them to be specialized entities forged of raw immaterium. Seeing them move seamlessly through a null-field upended his hypothesis.
THOOM. BOOM!
The heavy combat drones tore gaping chasms through two newly raised blackstone spires, their internal plasma reserves erupting to sever the structures cleanly at their midsections. Though the Necron fire line remained devastatingly potent on the main front, the sheer resilience of the Destroyer automata ensured they were not instantly vaporized.
A handful of chassis successfully reached the bases of the final spires and initiated self-detonation.
The violent concussions bypassed the Necrons' phase shielding entirely, blasting the remaining Noctilith towers into the upper atmosphere. A surging wave of emerald energy rippled across the planet's surface, fracturing communications and sensor arrays in an instant.
With the dampening field shattered, the restored warp energy conduits re-anchored their telemetry on the planet's crust.
Huge, alloyed drop-pods plummeted into the rear lines of the engagement zone, slamming down nearly flush against the Aeldari positions. As the structural hatches blew outward, swarms of Eight-Legs poured out into defensive perimeters. Inside each open hull stood an unactivated webway gate woven from psychically reactive wraithbone, its skeletal arch surrounded by clusters of psychic crystals humming with a violent empyrean tide.
An Aegis Protector turned its inorganic gaze toward Yvraine, who stood frozen at the sight of the sudden webway gates, and pointed a heavy chassis-arm toward the raging front.
"According to calculated projections, the survival threshold of the remaining rearguard is under fifteen minutes. The Necrons require precisely one hour to reconstruct the Noctilith network and suppress empyrean energies. This is your final extraction window. Should you decline this evacuation, the Iron Men will unilaterally terminate the protocol."
Even as the machine spoke, several automatons bristling with embedded psychic crystals stepped forward, activating the gates ahead of the xenos. With a sharp crackle of arcing energy, the webway portals stabilized, revealing stable vistas within the labyrinth dimension.
Seeing the shimmering pathways open, Yvraine immediately barked the order to retreat.
The Eight-Legs did not wait for compliance; they hoisted the Aeldari Fire Prism tanks and Warp Hunter engines outright, hurling the armored vehicles bodily through the portals.
Far across the field, the Necron Lord, who had been idly waiting to see what novel adversary would emerge from the dropped structures, finally realized the intent behind the deployment.
"Pulverize those metallic hulls! The cowards are fleeing the theater!"
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