The sudden manifestation of the Tesseract Vault instantly arrested the planet's terminal descent.
The surrounding cosmic veil began to knit itself back together with alarming speed. High above, the furious Necron Lord bellowed at the Lychguard flanking him.
"Awaken the dynasty's fleet! I must bring immediate, absolute annihilation upon these wretched pests!"
"As you will, my Lord."
The Lychguard, who had stood vigil by his side, hoisted their dispersion shields from the floor, bowed in crisp unison, and vanished into the emerald shimmer of a phase-teleportation beam.
Averting his gaze, the Necron Lord's mechanical frame crackled as arcs of green energy violently pulsed from his chassis. Rage, hot and unyielding, flooded his severely degraded engrams, threatening to overwhelm what little clarity he retained.
Yet, it was the C'tan Shard's containment within the Vault that had temporarily suppressed the local anomalous anomalies.
Sensing the shift, the remnants of the Aeldari fleet drifting in planetary orbit immediately redlined their engines. Without looking back, they surged into the void, tearing open a Webway gate at the extreme periphery of the star system and fleeing headlong into its labyrinthine depths.
Meanwhile, the Void Sword had already slipped away, submerging into the turbulent tides of the Warp.
But at the very edge of the system, where the massive Titan-class vessel had hovered moments before, a precision-engineered mechanical device flickered silently against the dark.
Inside it, the Dimensional Distortion Engine had just been triggered.
The device operated flawlessly for a mere ten-thousandth of a second before total, catastrophic failure tore it apart.
The blinding, apocalyptic radiance of the Dimension Collapse Bomb engulfed the entire star system. In a fraction of a heartbeat, the fabric of realspace began to fold inward, collapsing upon itself.
Instinct or ancient programming must have warned the Necron Lord. In a flash of emerald phase-energy, he vanished from the surface and reappeared aboard a colossal Tomb Ship.
The dread vessel activated its inertialess drive the exact microsecond it materialized from phase-space, accelerating to several times the speed of light as it fled toward the system's outer rim.
Behind it, a void-black light bloomed at the heart of the star system.
The region became completely saturated with waves of localized, wildly chaotic energy. The dimensional collapse was absolute and merciless. Every single planet within the system fractured and dissolved into nothingness in an instant. Even the burning star at the center could not escape the gravitational back-draft; it detonated in a violent stellar explosion, unleashing cataclysmic energies that swept across a radius of a full light-year along a flat orbital plane.
Space itself fluctuated wildly, tearing back and forth between two, three, and four dimensions.
The veil of reality shattered once more. But this was entirely different from the erosion caused by the previous psychic shockwave. If the psychic assault had been a slow, agonizing thinning of the cosmic veil until it cracked, the Dimension Collapse Bomb was a physical violation, it had seized the veil and ripped it into jagged, irrecoverable shreds.
Chaos reigned. Space and time fractured, twisting over and under one another in cascading dimensional overlapping that triggered even more severe localized cosmic destruction. Distorted, miniature spatial rifts broke open like miniature black holes, hungrily devouring any stray matter within reach.
"Aaaaarrrgh!"
A rare, unbridled surge of fury forced a mechanical roar from the Necron Lord's vocal synthesizers.
Yet, just as the turbulent space briefly began to plateau, a new anomaly came hurtling directly toward the Tomb Ship. Space seemed to splinter, jagged fractures rushing toward the vessel like crystalline waves.
The Necron Lord's rage flared hotter. The sight made him realize he had committed a critical error in his haste, a lapse in protocol that had allowed a high-value prisoner to slip the leash.
Out from the epicenter of the roiling destruction, a luminous, transcendent figure materialized.
It was the C'tan Shard, freshly escaped from the shattered confines of its Tesseract Vault.
"Miserable, verminous Usurpers!"
The alien, reality-bending voice echoed through the vacuum of space through impossible means, vibrating directly through the hull plates and into the bridge of the Tomb Ship. As a living embodiment of the physical laws of the universe, the C'tan possessed terrifying, godlike manipulations over realspace.
It drew hungrily upon the raging, volatile energies of the collapsing space around it, funneling them directly into its essence. The Shard's form expanded exponentially, ballooning into a stellar giant whose core blazed with the blinding intensity of a supernova.
The distorted space that should have swallowed all matter was forced into a reverse-expansion. Under the violent fluctuations of the dimensions, space warped into a bizarre, localized Moebius strip.
The star-wrought giant swept its hand forward. A horrifying wave of spatial distortion slammed directly into the Necron Tomb Ship.
The violent kinetic and dimensional impact hammered against the ship's phase shrouds. The massive Tomb Ship shuddered violently, its ancient metal groaning as if it would be torn apart atom by atom.
"Activate the containment protocols!"
The Necron Lord commanded, slamming his staff heavily against the deck of the bridge.
At the aft section of the Tomb Ship, the monolithic, pyramidal superstructures began to shift, unfolding in a complex sequence. Realspace around the vessel began to warp and buckle, the visual hallmark of a hyper-dimensional labyrinth being brought online.
It was this exact, esoteric techno-arcana that the Necrons had used tens of millions of years ago to shatter and ensnare the fleeing fragments of their star-god masters.
The C'tan Shard, though blinded by the intoxicating prospect of vengeance after eons of agonizing torment, snapped back to cold clarity the moment it recognized the unfolding geometry of the hyper-dimensional labyrinth. But while the Necrons had hunted them once, they were fully capable of doing it again.
By the time the Shard realized it needed to flee immediately, it was already too late.
The moment its temporal tendrils pricked the surrounding space, the entire zone unfolded into a closed Klein bottle structure. The C'tan Shard was instantly ensnared within an infinite, self-referential loop of localized space-time.
Within those infinite iterations, the Shard repeated its rage and its futile attempts at vengeance over and over. But its fate was already sealed; it stood absolutely no chance of escape.
As a new Tesseract Vault was systematically constructed and locked into place across the sub-dimensions, the Necron Lord struck the butt of his staff against the floor once more.
A microscopic aperture opened within the hyper-dimensional labyrinth.
Trapped within the maddening time loop, the C'tan Shard recklessly charged toward the opening to break free, only to plunge headlong into its freshly prepared cage. The specialized containment fields snapped shut instantly, pinning its cosmic essence firmly in place. Strands of Canoptek Scarabs flooded the exterior of the Vault, immediately beginning repairs on the micro-fractures caused by the C'tan's leaking energy.
Re-sealed and broken once more, the C'tan Shard fell into a state of absolute, hollow despair.
The Necron Lord turned his hollow, glowing eye-sockets back toward the void where the Void Sword had vanished into the Warp.
"A peculiar adversary," he muttered synthetically.
Then, he abruptly paused, raising a metallic hand to tap the side of his necrodermis skull.
The anchor point for the dynasty's pocket dimension had been utterly obliterated, yet the dynasty itself still endured. The C'tan Shard could not be lost; however, relocating the pocket dimension and establishing a new spatial anchor would require an astronomical amount of energy. If the Shard had escaped, the dynasty might truly have been lost to the dark corridors of time forever.
Worse still, the Necron Lord ran into a far more troubling issue: he could no longer recall the precise coordinate sequence to locate the dynasty's pocket realm.
Though a lingering trace in his engrams suggested a relocation protocol was possible, he could not, for the life of him, retrieve the specific data path required to execute it.
Suddenly, a phase gate rippled open on the bridge.
The Lychguard who had been dispatched to the pocket realm to awaken the fleet stepped out of the emerald light.
"Lord General, the Phaeron has expressed severe concerns regarding your current operational stability. He has commanded me to recall you to the dynasty's primary domain immediately."
The Necron Lord stared back at his subordinate in sheer, uncharacteristic bewilderment.
"The planet housing the spatial anchor was completely annihilated. How are you still capable of conducting normal phase-transit back to this coordinate?"
The Lychguard tilted his head, his vocal grill emitting a click of mutual confusion as he replied:
"The spatial anchors were never limited to a single node, my Lord. The dynasty's domain is vast. Under the guidance of... a certain esteemed noble during the Great Sleep, we established multiple spatial anchors across this sector. Though one has been destroyed, we still possess several operational spatial apertures in the neighboring star systems."
Though the Lychguard's damaged memory banks could no longer recall exactly which noble had overseen the anchoring of their realm, one fact remained perfectly clear: the gateway to the dynasty's pocket world possessed more than a single door.
——————
If you want to read ahead of everyone, go to my pat-reon: pat-re-on.c-om/magnor (remove the hyphen to access normally)