It began with rot.
The flesh-ring pulsed, wet and obscene, its edges quivering like a wound that refused to close. What had once been ten sanctioned psykers no longer resembled humanity in any meaningful way—bone softened, organs liquefied and reknit into architecture, nerves stretched into living conduits for something vast and impatient.
The portal breathed.
With each contraction, reality thinned.
From the ring spilled corruption, not as a wave, but as a condition. The ground blackened first, stone sweating oily residue that hissed and steamed. Fungoid growths erupted from cracks in the dust, pallid and blistered, weeping spores that clung to armor seals and rebreather grills.
Then the tentacles came.
They did not lash wildly. They reached with intent, snaking outward along the ground and through the air, splitting into finer tendrils that sought warmth, motion, life. They pierced flak armor like parchment, burrowed through joints and seals, and wrapped around screaming men with intimate cruelty.
The first guards died choking.
The second wave did not die at all.
Those touched did not simply fall—they changed. Flesh sloughed from bone and reformed in grotesque parodies of function. Limbs elongated, joints inverted, eyes multiplied and dissolved into slick, staring masses. Mouths opened where there had been none, chanting litanies that were not words but equations of despair.
Lasguns discharged wildly as men fired at comrades they no longer recognized, red beams cutting through bodies that refused to stay dead. Vox channels erupted in overlapping screams, half-prayers, half-gibberish.
“Warp breach! Warp breach!”
“By the Throne, they’re inside us—”
“Kill them! Kill—no, Emperor forgive me—”
Pestilence rolled outward like a tide.
Armor seals failed as unseen rot ate through ceramite linings and plasteel clasps. Men retched as lungs filled with spores that bloomed into choking growths. Others laughed—high, broken sounds—as their minds fractured under pressure that was not entirely psychic, but wrong, twisting thought into devotion.
And through it all, more shapes forced themselves into being.
Neverborn clawed their way out of the portal, not bound to any single patron, their forms unstable and contradictory. Some shimmered with iridescent scales that shifted color with every blink, limbs folding in on themselves only to re-emerge elsewhere. Others dragged corpulent masses of diseased flesh that split and reknit as they moved, each step leaving behind pools of virulent ichor that hissed and crawled.
Change and decay, braided together.
Unaligned. Unrestrained.
They fell upon the newly made thralls with equal hunger, tearing them apart only to reassemble them into fresh horrors, using human remains as scaffolding for fresh incarnations.
The portal swelled.
With a sound like tearing silk and breaking bone, a surge of raw warp energy detonated upward, a column of impossible light punching through the cloud cover and staining the sky in colors that did not exist. It burst and fractured, cascading outward in radiant arcs—like fireworks, obscene and celebratory—visible for kilometers.
A beacon.
Across the city, across the army.
Every auspex screamed. Every even barely, warp sensitive soul beyond the perimeter convulsed in agony or ecstasy. Faith wavered. Discipline cracked.
And at the heart of the advancing column within the city, the castaway stopped.
His head snapped up, eyes narrowing as the surge washed over him and died against his presence, the warp recoiling as if burned. Anger—cold, focused, and unmistakably human—cut through his expression.
“Captain,” he said, vox tight and sharp. “We have a breach.”
Steelheart turned toward him as another distant detonation rippled through the skyline.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN A BREACH!? WHAT IS HAPPENING?!”
“The Spawn of Immaterium found purchase in your tormented psychers, and now, there is a price to pay…” the Castaway answered as his fist tightened, knuckles resounding loud enough to bring out the surrounding humans out of stupor.
“MEN! PREPARE FOR BATTLE! WE GO TO WAR!” The Captain screamed, and her men obeyed.
Captain Steelheart drew breath to issue orders—sharp, decisive, Imperial—
—and the castaway stepped into her space.
Not aggressively. Not hurriedly.
He simply raised one arm.
The gesture was absolute.
Steelheart bristled, teeth parting as authority surged to the front of her voice—but the words never came.
Because he spoke.
Not a shout. Not a command barked in panic.
A declaration.
“Activate Protocol Jericho Stands,” he said, voice carrying with impossible clarity across vox channels, open air, and machine relays alike. “Raise the walls.”
For a fraction of a second, nothing happened.
Then the city answered.
Deep beneath ferrocrete streets and composite towers, dormant systems woke. Power conduits long silent thrummed as ancient capacitors discharged. The ground itself seemed to shift as armored plates slid into place with grinding inevitability.
Walls rose.
Not hastily erected barricades, but layered fortifications—interlocking ferrocrete segments locking together with thunderous finality. Kill corridors unfolded. Fire lanes aligned. The city’s sleek architecture reconfigured, shedding civility in favor of brutal purpose.
Turret housings irised open along battlements and rooftops. Long-barreled las emplacements elevated, optics flaring to life. Missile racks emerged from concealed bays, their warheads humming as targeting spirits synced across overlapping fields of fire.
An energy grid flared into existence with a low, harmonic roar, translucent walls of force snapping into place around critical sectors.
The vox crackled.
The castaway did not hesitate.
“Divert two percent to inner circle barrier,” he said immediately. “Protect the ship. All remaining output to turrets, munition depots, and artillery arrays.”
A pause—machine hesitation, not refusal.
Then compliance.
Ancient artillery emplacements rotated from their housings, barrels extending and locking with the sound of massive systems settling into readiness. Ammunition elevators began to cycle, feeding shells forged for wars no Imperial tactician remembered.
The castaway lowered his arm.
“Let them taste,” he said, and for the first time there was heat beneath the calm, “the fire of the past.”
Data surged outward.
Tactical overlays, firing solutions, kill-zone geometries far more ruthless than anything in the Munitorum manuals flooded the logis adept’s systems. The man stiffened as his cogitators struggled to keep pace, then snapped into furious motion, relaying the information onward—first to the captain’s command staff, then rippling through the officer corps.
Steelheart stared at the unfolding lattice of death being drawn around her army.
She wanted to shout. To demand answers. To reassert command.
Instead, she swallowed it.
This was not the moment.
She turned sharply to her men, power sword raised high, its field crackling as it caught the light of awakening war engines.
“Soldiers of the Divine Promise!” she roared, voice amplified across every channel. “You stand upon ground that defies the warp itself! Hold fast, trust your steel, and let the enemy break upon us!”
A cheer rose—ragged, fierce, desperate.
Behind the walls, guns aligned.
Ahead of them, the sky burned with warp-light.
And somewhere beyond the perimeter, the first of the neverborn felt the city wake up—and learned, too late, that this world would not fall quietly.
Armsmen were already moving, boots hammering ferrocrete as firing platforms filled and gun crews snapped into place. Orders overlapped, were clarified, reissued. The city’s defenses roared awake in earnest now—servo-motors screaming, capacitors whining, artillery locks clanging home. The walls had become a crown of iron and light.
Captain Steelheart did not watch it unfold.
She turned and surged toward the castaway instead.
Her gauntleted hand caught his tattered clothing and yanked—hard. Fabric tore. He did not move an inch.
“What is this?” she demanded, fury sharp enough to cut through the din. “You told me this world was safe. You said this would be a milk run.”
“It would have been,” he answered flatly, irritation bleeding through the calm at last, “if you and your people had possessed the barest level of competence.”
The words landed like a slap.
Steelheart stiffened, eyes flashing, breath drawing in to explode—
—but he continued, relentless.
“Normally, I would scour the land,” he said, voice low but carrying, “burn the infestation out at the root. A clean solution. Efficient.”
His jaw tightened.
“The problem is the scale. The power required does not allow for finesse. Not with you here. Not with them.” His gaze flicked, briefly, to the massed Imperial troops scrambling along the walls. “It would tear your minds apart. Strip your souls raw. I have to restrain myself so completely that I could not even feel the intrusion before it took hold.”
For a heartbeat, the noise of battle prep seemed distant.
Their gazes locked.
Steelheart saw no fear there. No doubt. Only anger—cold, controlled, and directed inward.
He scoffed, breaking eye contact first.
“This is not the time for arguments,” he said. “We prepare. We save what we can.”
He turned sharply and started toward the wreck.
“Follow me.”
Steelheart hesitated only a fraction of a second, then barked orders over her shoulder. Her retinue closed ranks. Elias scrambled after them, eyes wide, heart pounding, the horizon behind them now split by warp-light that clawed upward like a wound in the sky.
They crossed the threshold into the ship.
The moment they did, the hull answered.
Veins of light crawled across the ancient chassis, dormant runes flaring to life beneath layers of scarred alloy. Systems long silent surged, not smoothly, but with stubborn defiance—power rerouted, fields hardening, internal structures locking into war-configuration.
The ship did not flee the tear in reality.
It faced it.
As if remembering what it had once been built to endure.
Captain Steelheart did not slow.
Her voice cut through every channel at once, sharp and unyielding, correcting firing arcs, barking range adjustments, calling for reserves where hesitation crept in. Where voices wavered, she slammed iron certainty into them. Where fear took root, she burned it out with command and promise.
“Hold the line! You fire until the barrels glow or your arms give out—then you reload and fire again! This city stands because we stand!”
The vox howled with acknowledgements. Somewhere above, artillery spoke.
They moved deeper.
The corridors of the archeotech ship swallowed them whole—vast, sloping passages where the walls curved like the inside of a ribcage, layered with alloys that drank light instead of reflecting it. Power conduits pulsed now, slow and deliberate, casting the passageways in pale, clinical luminescence that made every face look gaunt.
Elias stayed close. Too close.
He shook as he walked, boots clumsy on unfamiliar decking, breath loud inside his helmet. Every distant thump made him flinch. Every metallic groan of the awakening ship sent his heart racing.
The goliath snorted, rolling his shoulders as the chain-grid hammer thudded against his back. “Heh. At least it’s honest,” he said, voice thick with amusement. “None of that holy marble nonsense. This thing was built to work.”
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The ratling padded along a gantry rail, peering down into shadowed maintenance shafts with predatory interest. “I don’t like it,” he muttered, ichor stick glowing faintly as he ignored the no-smoking runes flashing in protest. “Too quiet. Feels like it’s thinkin’.”
The preacher clutched his flamer tighter, lips moving constantly. “The Emperor tests us,” he intoned, voice trembling despite himself. “He tests us with fire and heresy both, that our faith may be tempered.”
“Faith won’t stop a daemon claw,” the goliath replied, dismissive. “Aim will.”
The logis adept spoke through vox-filtered monotone, data-streams flickering across his ocular implants. “Structural readings exceed acceptable tolerances. Power rerouting is… inefficient. Elegant, but inefficient. The design philosophy is—”
“Alien,” the battle-oriented Magos interrupted, servo-limbs clicking irritably. “And blasphemously competent.”
The castaway walked ahead of them all, unhurried, hand occasionally brushing the walls as if reacquainting himself with an old wound. Systems came alive at his passing—panels unfolding, runes igniting, pathways shifting to accommodate his stride.
Distrust followed him like a shadow.
So did hope.
Elias stumbled as the deck shifted underfoot and nearly fell. A massive hand caught him instantly, steadying him without effort.
“Eyes forward,” the castaway said quietly. “Breathe.”
“I—I’m trying,” Elias whispered, voice cracking. “I’ve never… it’s so loud. Everything’s so big.”
“I know,” he replied. “That fear means you’re still paying attention. Hold onto that.”
Ahead, the ship’s heart beat stronger now, a low resonance thrumming through bone and metal alike. Behind them, the vox crackled with gunfire and screams and the distant thunder of walls holding—or failing.
Between distrust and salvation, between the Imperium and the warp, they descended deeper into a machine that had not been meant to wake again.
And Elias walked on, trembling—but still walking.
The vox erupted.
“—contact on the outer ring!”
“Multiple entities, unknown configuration—by the Throne—”
“Walls holding, but they’re learning—”
Steelheart was already issuing counter-orders, snapping commands that routed fresh units to failing sectors, reinforcing kill corridors before panic could metastasize. Her voice was steel and fire both, driving men forward even as the warp screamed at the edges of their courage.
They stepped onto the lift.
It did not resemble any conveyance Elias had ever seen. No cables. No pistons. The deck hummed once—and then the world let go.
Anti-grav panels flared to life beneath their boots. Gravity twisted, folded, inverted. Elias cried out as his stomach lurched, vision blurring as the lift shot upward—not straight, but sideways, then through, space bending around them as if corridors had been suggestions rather than laws.
Steelheart barely shifted her stance.
The goliath laughed, a booming sound edged with exhilaration. “Now that’s a ride.”
The ratling swore creatively as he clung to a railing that hadn’t existed a second earlier. The preacher muttered prayers at triple speed. The logis adept froze, cogitators struggling to reconcile impossible vectors.
The castaway stood motionless at the center of it all, coat fluttering in nonexistent wind, eyes distant as the lift threaded through the ship’s interior like a thought passing through a mind.
The vox screamed again.
“—they’re climbing the walls!”
“Emperor preserve—artillery breach—”
Steelheart shot him a sideways look, hard and sharp. Measuring. Accusing.
He did not answer.
The lift slowed abruptly and stopped.
Before them stood an armored vault door the size of a hab block fa?ade, its surface layered in composite alloys etched with unfamiliar geometries. No skulls. No scripture. Only function.
The castaway stepped forward.
He raised his hand.
The flesh flowed.
His palm split soundlessly, skin unfolding into a lattice of cybernetic tendrils—sleek, precise, alive with internal light. They extended and merged seamlessly with the vault’s interface, metal meeting machine in intimate recognition.
The door responded.
Blue-green luminescence raced across its surface, patterns blooming and aligning. Deep within, mechanisms engaged—locks disengaging that had not moved in millennia.
The vault opened with a low, reverent whine.
“Come,” he said simply. “We need to prepare.”
They followed.
The chamber beyond was vast—and impossibly clean.
Surgical lights flared to life overhead, bright and clinical, banishing shadow entirely. Racks upon racks of equipment lined the walls, suspended in null-fields or cradled in precision mounts. Weapons unlike anything the Imperium still manufactured rested beside tools whose purposes were not immediately clear.
Armor plates of unknown alloys gleamed softly, seamless and unadorned. Blades that drank light. Firearms with barrels too narrow, too smooth. Devices that hummed faintly, restrained by containment fields that made the air around them feel tight.
Elias stopped dead.
“Throne…” he whispered.
Treasures of wonder. Of terror.
An armory.
Not a hoard.
A legacy.
The armory breathed.
Cabinets unlocked in sequence, their seals peeling back with soft hydraulic sighs. Transparent containment fields shimmered and stabilized as cybernetic data-feeds cascaded to life, pale glyphs and diagnostic runes scrolling across the air in tight, efficient columns. The lighting adjusted automatically, brightening where eyes lingered, dimming where attention moved on.
The two Magi were no longer pretending restraint.
One stood rigid, mechadendrites trembling as his optics dilated, binharic cant spilling from his vox-grille in reverent staccato. The other reached out instinctively—then froze mid-motion, as if remembering himself at the last possible moment.
“Pre-Imperial patterning,” one whispered. “No… no, post-Strife refinement—”
“—material cohesion at this scale is statistically—”
“—Omnissiah preserve—”
The ratling let out a low, appreciative whistle, eyes darting from rack to rack. “By the Golden Throne,” he muttered. “This place could buy a moon. Maybe two.”
The castaway did not indulge them.
“Focus,” he said, and the word carried weight.
He turned, scanning the chamber as if reading an old map only he could see. “You,” he said, pointing to the preacher. “Cage three.”
The preacher blinked. “I—what?”
“Scorch armor,” the castaway continued. “Integrated heat shielding, sealed underlayer. Plasma dispersal sprayer mounted along the forearm. You’ll want something that can cauterize what refuses to die.”
The preacher swallowed, then nodded fervently. “By His will,” he breathed, already moving.
The ratling hopped onto a nearby crate and squinted at a bulky frame housed within another containment field. “Oi. That one,” he said, pointing. “Cage five.”
Inside rested a stocky exo-suit, compact but dense, its silhouette bristling with stabilizers and recoil dampers. A long, elegant barrel extended from one arm, far too refined to be a simple stubber.
The designation hovered beside it in pale script:
HORIZON-CLASS RAIL SNIPER PLATFORM
The ratling’s grin faltered. He cocked his head, then snorted. “You’re havin’ a laugh. I won’t fit in that. I’ll rattle around like a coin in a can.”
The castaway stopped walking.
Slowly, he turned.
Annoyance flickered across his face—not anger, not yet, but the thin patience of someone explaining gravity to a child.
“Most of the systems in this chamber,” he said evenly, “were designed for variance. Height, mass, skeletal density, organ placement. Humanity was never uniform. We accounted for that.”
He stepped closer to the cage, gesturing once. The suit’s internal components shifted, plates sliding, joints reconfiguring with smooth, almost organic grace.
“Enter,” he instructed. “Lock in. Allow neural and muscular handshake. And do not panic.”
The ratling hesitated.
“They will feel invasive,” the castaway added. “They will touch you. They will map you. If you thrash, you will confuse the alignment process and injure yourself.”
A beat.
“But once bonded,” he finished, “it will move as you intend it to. Faster than you could without it.”
The ratling stared at the suit, then at the castaway. Finally, he shrugged. “Well,” he muttered. “Wouldn’t be the first time somethin’ tried to crawl inside me.”
He stepped into the cage.
Panels closed. Light flared. The suit began to adapt.
Around them, the armory hummed louder now, ancient systems waking fully—not to impress, but to endure.
And outside, beyond walls and guns and faith, the warp screamed its answer.
The Logis Adept’s vox burst into a shrill cascade of binharic cant, the sound sharp enough to make several of the armsmen flinch.
“—UNACCEPTABLE. ARCHAEO-TECH PATTERN DEVIATION DETECTED. OMNISSIAH-BLESSED RELICS MAY NOT BE DISPENSED TO THE UNINITIATED. FLESH WITHOUT THE COG IS ERROR. ERROR. ERROR—”
He took a step forward, mechadendrites twitching, lenses dilating as if to physically consume the armory with his gaze. Data-scrolls unfurled from his robes, streaming threat assessments and doctrinal prohibitions into the air.
Before he could finish, the other Magos moved.
The Magos Dominus struck the deck with the iron-shod end of his staff, the impact ringing like a bell struck in a cathedral of steel.
“LOGIS ADEPT K-THETA-NINE,” he intoned, his voice no longer merely amplified but layered, harmonized by sub-vocalizers and ancient machine spirits. “BY AUTHORITY OF BATTLE-COHORT SIGMA-PRAXIS AND SEAL OF MARS-ULTIMA, YOU WILL CEASE.”
The Logis Adept froze mid-recitation, binharic collapsing into static. His lenses flicked once—twice—and he stepped back, chastened, mechadendrites curling inward like scolded serpents.
The Dominus turned.
And then, to the visible shock of nearly everyone present, he bowed.
Not the shallow inclination of courtesy, nor the stiff acknowledgement given to rogue traders and void nobles—but a full, reverent bow, servo-joints whining softly as his massive augmetic frame lowered before the Castaway.
“ANOMALY,” the Magos Dominus said, voice reverent, almost trembling. “NO. NOT ANOMALY.”
He corrected himself, lowering further.
“ARTIFEX OF LOST AGES. BEARER OF TRUE SYSTEM-WILL. I HAVE WALKED TEN THOUSAND BATTLEFIELDS AND NEVER FELT THE MACHINE SPIRITS SING AS THEY DO IN YOUR PRESENCE.”
The Captain’s jaw tightened. The Ratling muttered something vulgar over a private channel. Elias simply stared, wide-eyed, barely breathing.
“BLESS ME,” the Dominus continued. “GRANT ME UNION. LET ME BE YOUR INSTRUMENT. LET ME CARRY YOUR WAR.”
For a long moment, the Castaway said nothing.
He studied the kneeling figure—not the robes, not the sigils, but the man beneath the metal. The scars where flesh met steel. The crude grafts over elegant solutions. The devotion twisted into dogma, but still devotion nonetheless.
“At a cost,” the Castaway said finally, voice low, measured. “What you enter was not made for worship. It was made for burden.”
The Dominus did not hesitate.
“BURDEN IS PURPOSE.”
A silence followed—then a nod.
“So be it.”
The Castaway gestured once, sharply.
“Leave your servitors.”
The Dominus obeyed immediately. The two lobotomized war-servitors halted mid-step, augur arrays dimming as their master severed command links without ceremony. They stood idle, forgotten relics of a lesser war.
The Castaway turned toward one of the deeper cages, its markings unlike the others—older, stripped of iconography, its surface scarred by tool-marks rather than ritual engraving.
“Cage Seven,” he said. “Enter.”
The Dominus rose and stepped inside without a backward glance.
The cage sealed.
Then it dropped.
Not lowered—dropped.
Gravitic clamps disengaged and the entire platform plunged down a vertical shaft that vanished into the ship’s depths. Elias gasped. Even the Captain’s eyes flicked to the abyss for a fraction of a second.
Far below, something woke.
The shaft flared with light—blue, then white, then a furious green as ancient systems recognized a viable operator. The cage locked into place with a thunderous clang that reverberated up through the deck plating.
And then the mech rose.
It was squat, broad-shouldered, built like a walking bastion—artillery housings unfolding along its spine, missile racks irising open with mechanical grace. As the Dominus’ augmetics interfaced, the drone bays opened, and a cloud of palm-sized constructs poured out in a shimmering wave.
They did not fly like servo-skulls.
They did not hover like cherubs.
They scuttled through the air, vectoring in sharp, efficient arcs, folding and unfolding along invisible paths, their movement precise, tireless, and unsettlingly purposeful.
Palm-sized machines turned into a shimmering swarm—dozens, then hundreds—each one a dart of metal and light, wings of energy snapping open as they stabilized. They moved not like servitors, nor like automata, but like living things—sharp, precise, impossibly fast.
Cherubs, the Castaway thought distantly. No. Better.
Lightning given form.
They whirled around the mech in tight formation, data-links flashing between them in pulses too fast for unaugmented eyes to track.
Inside the sarcophagus, the Dominus screamed.
Not in pain—but in ecstasy.
The mech’s systems slammed into his augmetics, bypassing layers of dogma and restriction, flooding him with tactical overlays, drone telemetry, artillery solutions, threat vectors unfolding in three-dimensional clarity. His battlefield awareness expanded outward, no longer confined to flesh and optics but spread across every hovering construct, every sensor node, every firing solution.
He was no longer commanding machines.
He was among them.
When the mech took its first step forward, the deck groaned in protest.
The Dominus’ voice returned over vox—changed, steadier, layered with machine harmonics.
“—I SEE,” he said softly. “OMNISSIAH FORGIVE ME. I SEE.”
The Castaway allowed himself a thin smile.
“Good,” he replied. “Then you will not waste this gift.”
Outside, beyond the walls, the warp howled.
And through their maintained noosphere connection, data began to flood into the Logis Magos.
“—SYSTEM IDENTIFICATION STREAMING,” he announced reflexively, lenses dilating as his mechadendrites twitched in agitation. “Drone deployment lattice detected. Pattern designation: SCARAE-Auxilia, Mark Theta. Command topology… non-linear. Swarm intelligence derived from recursive hierarchies rather than master-node control.”
“Designation addendum,” the Logis continued, quieter now, as if the machine itself demanded reverence. “Protocol: Khepra. Autonomous target acquisition. Adaptive pathfinding. Regenerative subroutines active at microstructural scale.”
The Logis Adept’s voice dropped to a reverent murmur.
“—Motion efficiency exceeds Mechanicus optimization baselines. Energy expenditure minimal. Behavioral imprint resembles… funerary automation rites.”
The drones reformed instantly into a defensive lattice, then dispersed again, faster than the eye could comfortably follow.
The Castaway watched them for a long moment.
They moved as if they remembered war.
And somewhere deep within the ship, systems long dormant acknowledged the swarm’s presence—not as intruders, but as something… familiar.
No alarms sounded.
That, more than anything, unsettled the Logis Adept.
The Castaway keyed into the command net with a thought, slipping past layers of encryption that now barely slowed him. His voice cut cleanly through the roar of alarms and distant detonations, carried directly into the Battle Magos’ expanded consciousness.
“Move. Now,” he said, clipped and precise. “Outer perimeter is being breached. Automated defenses report seven percent degradation and rising. Unit losses at three percent. That margin will not hold.”
The Dominus did not question him.
The newly awakened war-engine turned, its mass shifting with a thunderous groan of stressed deck plating as it aligned toward the city exterior. Drone-swarms reoriented in perfect synchrony, peeling away in disciplined vectors.
“You are not a line-breaker,” the Castaway continued, eyes fixed on the tactical overlays blooming across the armory’s hololiths. “That frame is a command nexus. Battlefield control. Area denial. Ordnance coordination. Use it as such.”
A pulse of binharic affirmation crackled back, layered with machine-cant reverence and something close to elation.
“Granting you access to artillery grids and munitions depots,” the Castaway added. “Buy us time. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
The city answered before the Magos could.
Klaxons—ancient, industrial, meant to be heard over planetary storms and orbital bombardments—howled to life across the skyline. Not the shrill Imperial alarms the armsmen knew, but deep, resonant warnings that vibrated through ferrocrete and bone alike.
On the walls, armsmen flinched as the sound rolled through them, a pressure in the chest more than a noise. Then the ground beyond the perimeter lit up.
First came the flash—white-hot, eye-searing, punching through dust and warp-fog alike. Then the sound arrived, late and monstrous: a concussive wall that flattened debris, rattled teeth, and drove men to their knees behind the battlements.
Earth heaved.
The kill-zones beyond the walls vanished beneath overlapping detonations as artillery awakened that had not spoken in millennia. Macro-shells screamed in from concealed emplacements, their impacts tearing the land open in incandescent blossoms of fire and shrapnel. Energy lances carved glowing scars through the air, scything through masses of warpflesh that had been mid-charge moments before.
From the walls, the armsmen watched as the no-man’s-land became a slaughterhouse.
They saw traps—pits, grav-snares, kinetic impalers—already choked with mangled bodies, rent limbs, and dissolving ichor, evidence of how quickly the first wave had been devoured. The bombardment did not slow as it reached them; it intensified, timed with inhuman precision to avoid the walls by meters while erasing everything beyond.
Warp-things screamed.
Not in pain alone, but in confusion, as the disciplined, layered fire denied them momentum, cohesion, and space. Bodies burst apart under shockwaves, reforming only to be torn apart again as the next strike landed milliseconds later.
The pressure on the defenders eased palpably.
Men who moments ago had been firing blindly now found breathing room. Reloads became measured. Orders became coherent. Laughter—short, sharp, disbelieving—broke out over vox channels as the relentless tide faltered.
“By the Throne…” one armsman muttered, staring at the hellscape beyond the wall.
Above it all, guiding the storm, the Battle Magos stood wreathed in data-streams and flickering hololithic projections. His drones moved like living punctuation marks across the battlefield, adjusting trajectories, recalibrating fire, thinking faster than flesh ever could.
And far behind the walls, deep within the ancient ship, the Castaway watched the casualty graphs stabilize—just barely—and allowed himself a single, grim breath.
Time had been bought.
Whether it would be enough remained to be seen.