As the overwhelming torrent of light beams enveloped the unopened pods, their outer metallic structures shattered into fragments. One by one, webway gates forged of wraithbone were exposed before the Necrons.
Yet, the initial assault failed to damage the gates themselves. The psychic crystals piled around them served not only to accelerate the connection and stabilization of the webway pathways, but more importantly, to act as a power source. The containers themselves were trivial; beneath the base of each webway gate, Axion had embedded shield generators, drawing their power directly from those psychic crystals. Though the shimmering psychic shields shuddered violently, they remained incredibly resilient.
The situation grew critical, however, when the Doomsday Monoliths began lashing out at the webway gates with their particle whips. A single strike was enough to completely vaporize the psychic crystals surrounding both sides of a gate, and a second hit would shatter the entire structure into dust.
Fortunately, the density of the Necrons on the front lines was relatively low due to their prior efforts to destroy the blackstone pylon towers. After delaying for several minutes, Yvraine was forcibly shoved into the final remaining webway gate by a cadre of her loyal followers, who then sealed the portal from the outside.
Even with the legendary agility of the Aeldari, out of a force of nearly forty thousand, over five thousand warriors were ultimately forced to give up on their escape due to the sheer speed at which the twenty-three webway gates were being demolished. Their native gates were far more fragile than those provided by the Iron Men, obliterated by single volleys from the Necron Doomsday Arks.
To Axion, however, this was a favorable outcome. With the core objective safely evacuated, he no longer had to hesitate. The execution of the pact might not have been perfect, but now that the full scale of the enemy's strength lay exposed before him, things did not seem so bleak.
The remaining mechanical units flickered with light, the unmistakable luminescence of warp teleportation. But the flashing lights were abruptly snuffed out.
A colossal city suddenly materialized and began to crawl slowly across the terrain. Atop its structure, numerous apparatuses resembling blackstone towers projected pillars of emerald light straight into the skies, attempting to envelop the entire planet within a massive containment field.
On the bridge of the Void Sword, data streams flashed endlessly across the monitors until they finally pulled up several blurred battle-reprint images. For a long time, the Imperial military had mistaken this entity for a static fortress. However, Axion re-analyzed all recorded Imperial engagements with the Necrons, discovering that this monstrosity had likely appeared on numerous separate occasions. It had taken the Imperial Inquisition's Ordo Xenos considerable time to correct their misconceptions and identify its true nature.
It was a city-class vehicle that crawled across the surface on countless mechanical legs, bristling with an immense array of gauss weaponry and housing infinite swarms of scarabs. The Aeldari literally called it the world-harvester, an engine designed to reap all life from an entire planet. On the ground, this city-vehicle, known as an Abattoir, was a virtually invincible entity.
Clearly, the Necron Lord had no intention of allowing the remaining survivors to escape. He had gone so far as to deploy this terrifying megastructure just to ensure total annihilation.
Yet Axion no longer cared about the material costs. The enemy blindly amassing high-value targets on the planet played precisely into his calculations.
The Void Sword gradually pulled back its distance as the Dimension Collapse Bombs inside its armory neared completion. Before unleashing this ultimate weapon, however, Axion wanted to perform a test to see the true efficacy of a doomsday weapon engineered from psychic technology.
To this end, Axion summoned hundreds of thousands of mortal psykers into designated chambers. There, they were confronted with the grim visions they dreaded most, specifically tailored to ignite the absolute apex of their collective fury. Even the one hundred experimental subjects were summoned to these specialized sectors of the ship. In terms of pure psychic amplitude, these hundred individuals were far more astonishing, though that was secondary to the sheer volume of the collective mass.
As the massive crowds were guided through their preparations by mechanical automata, a terrifying psychic resonance began to brew within the Void Sword, lingering out in the void beyond the star system. Everyone could feel a sense of impending doom, as if the end of days had arrived, including the four Primarchs aboard.
Flashes of psychic radiance rippled continuously through the void, spiraling around the planet-sized hull of the vessel. When the energy finally converged at the prow, the fusion of red, gold, and blue coalesced into a mottled beam of absolute white light. Piercing through space, it enveloped the entire planet.
Time was warped under the weight of this psychic might; space folded and tangled into a chaotic snarl. The bizarre phenomenon extended outward from the Void Sword's prow cannon, stretching all the way down to the planet's surface. The hull of the behemoth ship itself shuddered with a strange vibration, sounding like a profound roar of the soul accompanying the beam toward its target.
In an instant, the strike crossed the vast gulf of space and struck home. Most of the Necron legions on the surface did not even have time to react.
The five thousand remaining Aeldari warriors on the surface felt the immediate call of death. The terrifying power utterly shattered both their flesh and their souls into complete nothingness, executing them so swiftly that even the curse of Slaanesh could not claim their souls in time.
The staggering psychic force brought the Necron Abattoir to a grinding halt. Its warp-suppression matrices were completely overloaded by the energy backflow, reversing their polarity and inadvertently amplifying the psychic devastation. Necron vessels in the skies tore apart in the furious glare, while countless obelisks, floating monoliths, and other techno-arcana crumbled into ash within the light.
Worse still, this incredible energy did not merely impact the planet itself; it tore into the vast fabric of space surrounding it. The psychic force rapidly shredded the cosmic veil of the local reality.
The remaining Craftworld Aeldari ships in orbit desperately fired their thrusters to flee the planet's vicinity, but it was entirely futile. Space was imploding. The entire planet was being exiled from the material universe.
Physical constants dissolved into chaos. Psychic fires and storms of warp-lightning reduced everything on the surface to cinders, sparing not even the Necrons. The caught Aeldari vessels were nearly dragged into the Immaterium through the fractured spatial rifts. Within the violent, chaotic streams of energy, countless daemons of Slaanesh materialized immediately around their hulls, drawn by the inescapable power of the Dark Prince's curse. Ever since the fall of their ancient empire and the birth of Slaanesh, the Aeldari dared not step into the Sea of Souls; any who attempted to enter the Warp would instantly draw hordes of daemons, eager to slaughter them and offer their souls to the Chaos God.
The chaotic psychic storm twisted the planet, fracturing it into a mosaic of madness. Unlike a standard planetary destruction caused by conventional armaments, the planet was completely saturated by psychic energy, reflecting bizarre, surreal phantasmagorias within its burning crust. Surreal cataclysms played out continuously, and even a city-sized vehicle as monumental as the Abattoir began to fracture and disintegrate.
The sudden outbreak of this disaster caught the Necron Lord off guard, his shock rapidly turning into an uncontainable fury. As the staff in his hand flared with light, a relatively compact Necron construct was forcibly manifested through the multidimensional webway. As it deployed, countless arcs of green lightning could be seen imprisoning a blinding, ethereal silhouette at its center.
Among the four Primarchs on the bridge of the Void Sword, who had been watching the screens in stunned silence, only Roboute Guilliman recognized the device.
It was a Tesseract Vault. The Imperial Navy elements that had cooperated with Archmagos Belisarius Cawl during the campaigns in the Pariah Nexus had reported this terrifying asset. Imprisoned within its heart was a shard of a C'tan. Ever since the Necrons turned on their star-gods in retribution, these shattered fragments had been captured and bound within these bizarre constructs, perpetually drained of their reality-warping energies to power the Necron empire.
With the manifestation of the C'tan Shard, the surrounding psychic energies began to rapidly dissipate, and the warp anomalies started to calm. The C'tan were the physical laws of the universe made manifest, the literal bedrock of the material realm. The powers of Chaos were inherently anathema to them, and it was precisely for this reason that the Old Ones had fought their ancient war against them in the dawn of time.