Magnus remained indifferent to Perturabo. Though he had long been capable of launching broad-scale psychic strikes against the invaders, he felt little urgency. He understood his brother well enough; the Iron Men were formidable, certainly, but after embracing the psychic future Tzeentch had unveiled for him, Magnus cared little for these mechanical interlopers.
Besides, this was Sortiarius. The entire planet was shrouded in the thick, suffocating embrace of the Warp. Magnus, standing here, was effectively invincible.
He knew that Perturabo desperately needed a victory to rebuild his fractured confidence. The shock of the Iron Men's campaign had been too profound: his meticulously constructed fortress-worlds had been easily unraveled, and vast numbers of his sons had been butchered or captured. For a being of such extreme narcissism and self-regard, the blow was nearly unbearable. Yet, even so, Magnus had not anticipated that a mere force of one hundred thousand mechanical units would leave the Lord of Iron so utterly helpless.
One-third of the souls on the planet had been extinguished in the short time the conflict had raged, nearly all of them Perturabo's sons or the mortal cannon fodder that trailed in their wake. When it came to slaughter, these soulless machines were far more adept than the traitors.
Perturabo, his expression twisted in a mask of savage rage, suddenly calmed. He retrieved a reforged warhammer and departed the Tower of the Cyclops. He intended to descend to the side of his sons and fight alongside them, just as the Emperor had once led them in person during the Great Crusade. Back then, the Emperor had stood at the vanguard, sweeping all enemies before Him. Now, Perturabo would do the same for his own progeny.
Magnus did not care what Perturabo intended. He had already allowed his sons to save him once; he would not intervene again. If this was his fate, resistance was futile. The shifting tides of the future were difficult to divine, even for the Great Lord of Destiny.
Magnus raised his Ahn-Nunura once more, and a colossal surge of psychic power roiled around him. Across the planet, psychic lightning fractured the air again. The heavy damage sustained by the Reaver-Eviscerators was instantly undone as a golden radiance enveloped them, mending their broken forms in an instant.
The efforts of the Iron Warriors were not entirely without merit. Over half of the one hundred thousand Reaver-Eviscerators had been damaged in the fighting against the IV Legion. The most significant, large-scale attrition had come from the indiscriminate bombardment of the Warlord Titans; this wide-area, high-energy carpet fire, regardless of friend or foe, was an accidental counter to such agile combat machines. Some units had been vaporized before they could even activate their field-repair modules.
The psychic strikes of Magnus and his Thousand Sons were similarly effective. Two precise, mass-scale bombardments had reduced the machine count on Sortiarius from over ninety thousand to fewer than forty thousand. Many others had been disrupted by the sorcerous onslaught of the Thousand Sons, leaving them vulnerable to destruction by the Iron Warriors' armored columns or the remaining Titan Legions.
After unleashing these two massive, precision strikes, Magnus began leading his sorcerers from the summit of the tower, conducting long-range magical purges against the remaining automata. Many machines, pinned down by the relentless psychic lightning and hellfire, were subsequently crushed by the traitor's armored assets or the remaining Titan Legions.
However, the reality remained that apart from Prospero and Sortiarius, where large numbers of Chaos sorcerers were garrisoned, the other four planets in the system had already fallen to the Iron Men.
The cultists and the small detachments of Iron Warriors stationed on those worlds had been systematically annihilated by the deployed Reaver-Eviscerators. The machines had swept the planetary surfaces with terrifying efficiency. Leveraging their internal gravity stabilizers, the hulking bodies moved at speeds that defied logic. Without the assistance of traitor Titan Legions or massive armored battalions, the sluggish mortals, commanded by a handful of traitor Astartes, were utterly unable to inflict any meaningful losses upon the mechanical units.
The Reaver-Eviscerators on those four worlds had suffered only minor wear and tear. Having purged every enemy from the surface, the scout units promptly located the chaotic artifacts buried by the Thousand Sons. The Iron Men possessed their own methods for dealing with such Warp-tainted abominations; fire, cold and absolute, consumed the items that bled such blasphemous power. As the artifacts were destroyed, the protective barriers of Chaos surrounding the planets dissipated.
Axion restored communication with the mechanical units on those four worlds and initiated an orbital bombardment of the surrounding defensive platforms. Deprived of the chaotic artifacts that served as their anchors, the planets no longer drew energy support from Sortiarius. Under the overwhelming fire of the Void Sword, the orbital defensive platforms were swiftly reduced to space debris.
This abrupt shift in the theater of war stunned the Imperial forces. They had been baffled by the Void Sword's bombardment hours earlier, unable to discern what the Iron Men had deployed upon those fortress-worlds. But as the gargantuan ship opened fire again, the platforms that had previously resisted the Iron Men's onslaught disintegrated into worthless wreckage.
Confirming the destruction of the defensive network, Calgar immediately ordered the fleet to advance, preparing to purge all worlds simultaneously. The Imperial fleet surged back into the system, but unlike the twin stars of Sortiarius and Prospero, the other four worlds offered no counter-fire. Fleet auspex scans clearly displayed the plethora of bastions and orbital defense clusters remaining on the planetary surfaces, but the traitors seemed blind to their arrival.
Stranger still, the scanners revealed clear, unmasked signatures of Iron Men automata on the planetary surfaces. These peculiar units had never been recorded before; the Ultramarines and the Imperial Navy registered the visual profile of the Reaver-Eviscerator for the first time.
A curious Calgar opened a channel to the Retribution Crusade fleet, only to receive a truly staggering report from Logan Grimnar.
Every traitor on those four worlds had been liquidated, and the chaos artifacts had been shattered. In truth, even the participants of the Crusade, including Jaghatai Khan, had only just learned that the Iron Men had deployed scout forces to the surface. These terrifying reconnaissance units had taken the initiative to purge the entire planet of enemies on their own.
Axion had not signaled them intentionally; the data-synchronization protocols had simply updated the detailed logs of all four planets simultaneously, drawing the attention of the tech-priests aboard the ships.
The detailed data from the four worlds included an exhaustive record of the combat, the disposition of enemy forces, as well as the attrition rates and tactical outcomes. The Logis, trembling with horror, frantically transcribed the logs, displaying them before the gathered commanders of the Space Wolves and White Scars.
As they reviewed the action reports, a chilling silence descended upon the command deck, the Great Khan among them.
One hundred thousand Reaver-Eviscerator scout-bots had been deployed to each planet. These incomprehensible machines had achieved all primary objectives within a few hours. They had scoured the entire planetary surface, breached hundreds of fortress complexes housing hundreds of millions of mortal rebels and scores of Iron Warriors, and slaughtered every last one of them.
Most terrifying of all, the feat had been accomplished with nothing more than negligible material wear. Not a single unit had been lost.
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