"It's here," Shapeshifter whispered, raising its hand and pointing toward the shifting illusion it had crafted.
The Nightbringer shard had penetrated deep beneath the surface of the blackened planet, into the vaults of a long-slumbering Necron Tomb Complex.
The tomb appeared to have suffered degradation over millennia. When the Nightbringer stepped into its depths, it found nothing but rubble. What had once been an impenetrable bastion of necrodermis alloy and hypershielding now lay fractured.
Ancient stasis fields and defense grids flickered intermittently, barely functioning. Gauss flayer turrets sat inert in their housings, and the once-lethal scarab swarms had disintegrated into corroded scrap. Even the tomb's dimensional lock fields groaned under entropy's bite.
Its form melting into shadow, the Nightbringer passed through the ruins unhindered.
Here and there, dormant Necron constructs aimlessly wandered the halls. They did nothing, showing no reaction to the arrival of a C'tan Shard.
To a mortal eye, they were lifeless. To the Nightbringer, they were mocking. Machines built to last eternity, now reduced to twitching echoes of their creators' arrogance.
As the Nightbringer passed each Necron, their necrodermis bodies began to fracture and collapse. Their living metal writhed and quaked, unable to self-repair.
Corrupted data-streams ran wild through their cortical matrices, their command protocols severed from the tomb's decayed command node.
Without the activation of their Resurrection Protocols, they twitched helplessly in agony, scraps of what once were warriors of the stars. The Protocols themselves, once the pride of the Necron legions, had begun to fail entirely, lacking the full integrity of cryptek oversight and compromised by aeons of isolation.
In the absence of a Phaeron or functioning Overlord, their logic subroutines defaulted to erratic looped behavior, some simply stared at the walls, others tried to follow phantom orders, and a few turned on each other in fits of decaying madness.
This was the unseen decay of immortality: not fire or war, but time itself. Time had become the Necrons' greatest enemy. These tombs hadn't been breached by Adeptus Mechanicus or any rival species, they'd simply eroded over countless ages.
Whole dynasties had slumbered too long, their systems corrupted by stellar drift or cosmic radiation. A few had reawakened to find their memory-cores blank, their dynastic command structures obliterated by millennia of desynchronization.
Some dynasties even awoke having forgotten their very names.
"Hahaha! You are no C'tan, you cannot withstand the erosion of time."
"Pathetic slave races, dreaming of equality with us?"
"Don't get cocky. We're only lucky we didn't run into a dynasty like the Nihilakh, we'd already be destroyed."
The Nightbringer laughed in voices not its own, fragmented remnants of Star Gods echoing in broken madness. It rampaged through the tomb at terrifying speed, a silent shadow that slew every Necron it encountered. Walls and wreckage alike offered no resistance before its incorporeal wrath.
Eventually, it reached the tomb's heart, a failed stasis chamber housing a floating green sphere.
A Tesseract Labyrinth.
To the shard, it looked laughably small, not even the size of its fingertip. But within it was a being powerful enough to draw its interest: The Shapeshifter, a fellow fragment of the divine.
The labyrinth bore glyphs of containment in ancient Necrontyr script, etched by Crypteks during the War in Heaven. These seals, while potent, had long since dulled.
With practiced ease, the Nightbringer disabled the containment from the outside, bypassing the labyrinth's fail-safes. The construct shattered, and an overwhelming surge of Warp-resistant energy pulsed outward.
The Shapeshifter was free.
"Devour it!"
"We require its abilities!"
"Enough chatter, what if it escapes?!"
The Nightbringer's scythe struck with blinding speed, its blade already cutting through space toward the constantly shifting form of Shapeshifter, mere millimeters away.
"Now!" Shapeshifter shouted.
To the Nightbringer, it looked like madness, calling out while death loomed over it.
But in the next instant, Shapeshifter vanished.
The shard halted its swing.
A blue rift had opened in space, a dimensional rupture that distorted both time and gravity. Shapeshifter had used his release as a hyperdimensional beacon, initiating a long-range teleportation through space-time.
The Nightbringer paused, staring at the fading rift.
"Blue... a blue rift. The Forgemaster's dimension... he's alive. Excellent."
"We can still track the Shapeshifter. Pursue it!"
The Nightbringer shot skyward, phasing through tombstone and mantle alike, until it burst onto the surface. It immediately cast its vision north and south, seeing both poles from where it stood.
At the poles, massive flexible mechanical arms were rapidly constructing two titanic structures. Their shape resembled monolithic Necron pylons, but fused with technology foreign even to the Nightbringer, perhaps hybrid constructs forged from both lost Necron forges and recovered xenotech.
Looking farther, the shard spotted a satellite-like construct in high orbit.
The colossal facilities neared completion. The planet's upper atmosphere began to swirl with radiant blue energy, forming a containment shroud. The atmosphere vibrated with a harmonic frequency eerily similar to the ancient Celestial Orrery.
....
Aboard the Leviathan.
Qin Mo stood over the Nexus Firmament, eyes shut, immersed in the device's sensory field. The Shapeshifter's true body hovered quietly beside him, its ever-shifting form pulsing with faint starfire, vaguely humanoid but constantly in flux.
"You're not going to erase a C'tan shard with that thing," the Shapeshifter observed. It had already deduced the Firmament's limitations.
"I know," Qin Mo nodded. "Just like it can't kill us with a glance."
Still, Qin Mo reached deeper, extending his senses across the entire world below. He could feel the heat of rocks, the sway of winds, the smallest granules of dust...
But not the Nightbringer.
He opened his eyes and stared at the towering figure on the surface. He could see it, all ten meters of it, but not sense it. It was like trying to feel the presence of a shadow.
Shapeshifter shook its head. He really didn't know when to quit.
"Doesn't matter," Qin Mo said flatly, removing his hands from the Firmament's surface. "I didn't build the Nexus Firmament to kill it. I built it to create a battlefield."
He turned and spoke aloud to the ship's AI: "Bring in the Celestial Engine. Commence orbital bombardment."
The Leviathan's command AIs were already standing by. The moment the order was given, they executed emergency dimensional-vector calculations.
In the very next second, the Celestial Engine arrived in orbit.
Two massive metallic moons, each 500 kilometers in diameter, emerged from teleportation stasis, orbiting a half-constructed artificial planet.
Each moon was a superweapon platform, their surfaces bristling with tens of thousands of particle lance arrays.
An eerie thrum echoed through the ship's hull as the arrays charged, rising in pitch like a chorus of stars screaming.
The lances fired simultaneously.
Thousands of converging beams merged into singular superblasts from each satellite. The two titanic beams met, then fused, striking the surface with a force beyond any Imperial Exterminatus-class strike.
Reality blurred. The atmosphere ignited. Clouds were torn apart by raw energy. The ground vaporized on impact, the planet's crust boiling like water under a welding torch.
The Nightbringer shard, caught mid-flight, was enveloped in light.
From the Leviathan, Qin Mo and Shapeshifter saw only its scythe vaporize instantly. The rest of the body was lost beneath the continuous inferno of energy.
Lightning sparked across the feedback feeds. Data distortion flared as space-time itself warped under the force.
Localized gravity wells collapsed. Even the Nexus Firmament struggled to maintain anchor-locks.
"It's not dead," Shapeshifter said. It could still feel the presence.
Qin Mo nodded, eyes locked on the Nexus Firmament's data feed.
The Celestial Engine continued firing, for ten full minutes.
Ten minutes of planetary annihilation.
The beams pierced the crust, the mantle, the core. The blackened world cracked apart like brittle glass.
Fragments of planet drifted in orbit, still glowing with residual heat. The bombardment ended. The Celestial Engine's lances cooled, beams fading into red sparks.
"Send the Celestial Engine to a nearby star for recharge," Qin Mo commanded. At the same time, he activated the Nexus Firmament's restoration function.
Beneath their feet, the planet began to reassemble.
Continents reversed their disintegration. Mountains reformed. Oceans poured into place in reverse cascades. It was like watching time play backward.
The Nightbringer still clung to existence. Its form was shattered, fragmented but held together by sheer force of will, like bone shards bound by a psychic field.
A hollow scream of hate made manifest, trembling in the bones of the reformed planet.
"FORGEMASTER!" it roared toward the void.
Its voice shredded the vacuum, vibrating through the hull of the Leviathan.
"I'm here," Qin Mo said calmly. He activated the Nexus Firmament again.
In the next instant, wave after wave of Iron Men were teleported from the Leviathan's storage bays directly to the planet's surface.
The first units materialized in perfect formation, their feet slamming into reformed stone, weapons already raised.
Infantry units surrounded the Nightbringer, firing as they advanced salvo after salvo of directed energy fire. Artillery and Knight-class Iron Men unleashed indiscriminate bombardment.
The air filled with the shriek of beamfire and the seismic drum of plasma mortars.
Chunks of necrodermis were peeled from its form under the onslaught, yet it kept coming, flowing like liquid horror, lashing out with tendrils of living void.
Shapeshifter watched and understood Qin Mo's strategy immediately.
A war of attrition.
The Celestial Engine would bombard. Then recharge. While it did, the Iron Men would engage, occupy, and wear the Nightbringer down.
The Nexus Firmament's role? To ensure the battlefield could not be destroyed, restoring terrain, conditions, and geography no matter the devastation.
An immortal enemy. An immortal arena.
"Why not let me recharge at the star and power the Celestial Engine instead?" Shapeshifter asked.
"You've been trapped in a labyrinth for ages. Your connection to stellar energy is weak," Qin Mo replied. "And you've got a more important job. Save your strength."
.....
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