Eight Atlantis mechas charged into the missile storm, their strides as heavy as mountains.
Their ponderous footsteps shook the earth—a landscape piled high with bloody mire and the ashes of the dead. They were unshakeable.
The very instant before the barrage struck, the shield generators on their left forearms suddenly flared to life, deploying pale-blue dimensional shields like a rising tide.
As the incoming projectiles drew near, they were swallowed by alternative space.
The missiles were manually detonated, splattering plasma. While the shields blocked most of it, the small amount of splashing plasma that got through was absorbed by the mechas' personal body shields.
Amidst the violent explosions of the plasma missiles, the blue-white, high-temperature slurry engulfed all line of sight.
As the heat and smoke billowed, the towering figures held their shields forward, standing defiant within the plasma bombardment zone.
"Omnissiah above!"
Witnessing this scene through holographic feeds, members of the Adeptus Mechanicus fell to their knees. Raising their arms and mechanical augmentations high, they praised the glory of the Omnissiah.
Their cold, mechanical voices trembled as they chanted the blessings of the Machine God in binary.
In just their first clash, the Machine God's avatar in the Nour Stars had annihilated ten of the aliens' filthy creations, proving the power of the machine with absolute strength!
At the edge of the battlefield, the Rangdan Titans sprinted across the earth, treading over the wreckage of their fallen comrades.
They would never allow grief to make them squander the opportunity their compatriots had bought with their lives.
Their missile pods roared without pause, bombarding the human Titans in waves to suppress their agility.
Once the missile pods were empty, the bio-Titans decisively jettisoned them to increase their maneuverability.
The bio-Titans suppressed their targets with short-gun fire from one arm while snapping open plasma-vibrational blades on the other.
If they could not win at range, they would settle it in close quarters!
Yet, their charging steps faltered. Their rapid movements were interrupted multiple times, and their shields flared with intense light, teetering on the edge of overload.
The giant acceleration cannons of the mortal Titans accelerated adamantium shells to three-tenths the speed of light, crossing the threshold of sub-light speed.
The adamantium shells slammed into the shields, their immense kinetic energy causing the void shields to wobble like soap bubbles.
Under the relentless sub-light bombardment, the void shields finally buckled under the strain, shattering like popping bubbles.
Suddenly, a wave of dread washed over the battlefield as the temperature steadily plummeted.
Within the plasma missile bombardment zone, one of the Atlantis mechas raised its left arm, an ominous purple lightning crackling across its left chest.
As its five fingers splayed open, the laws of physics instantly inverted. The incoming swarm of missiles froze in mid-air, perfectly still.
With a crushing motion of the mechanical palm, space itself crumpled like a piece of paper.
Accompanied by the ear-grating screech of twisting metal, the missiles and physical munitions were kneaded into a deformed iron ball by an invisible, colossal force.
The titanization of psychic power!
During the campaign against the Kurav, the Doom Marines had captured a psychic Titan. The artisans of Nour had studied it day and night, finally unlocking the application of psychic circuitry.
They placed rigorously trained psykers into these mechanical vessels, amplifying their power through psychic circuits to unleash terrifying forces capable of warping reality.
Generally, such intense psychic energy would attract warp entities or even cause the pilot to mutate.
But with a Doom Marine at the helm, there was absolutely no need to worry about psychic backlash.
In the blink of an eye, the iron ball slammed into the chest of a Rangdan Titan, shattering its massive frame and sending it crashing heavily to the ground.
"By the Omnissiah!!!"
The Adeptus Mechanicus wailed. They beat their chests and stamped their feet, unable to tolerate the pure body of the Machine God being defiled by filthy psychic energy.
"Heresy! This is heresy!"
The Tech-Priests and Magi could not hide their grief. Their fanaticism evaporated, leaving their remaining flesh-and-blood faces pale with a despair and sorrow that bordered on the collapse of their faith.
Seeing order and machinery warped by supernatural forces, a crack appeared in their beliefs, and they found it immediately unbearable.
"Omnissiah above! I understand now!"
Amidst the chorus of mourning, someone suddenly let out an ecstatic shriek: "Harnessing supernatural power within a mechanical vessel—this is the ultimate avatar of the Omnissiah!"
These words struck like a bolt of lightning, bursting through the chaotic thoughts of the Mechanicus members and igniting a dangerous epiphany.
After careful consideration, they found this line of thinking to be incredibly close to the true nature of the Machine God.
Only a true divine machine could command both physical and non-physical forces, demonstrating the extraordinary power of the Omnissiah.
With this sudden enlightenment, the Mechanicus members wept tears of joy, having grasped a brand-new dogma.
They immediately sat upright upon their mechanical thrones to watch the divine machines purge the heretics.
As the covering fire dispersed, the Titan war-machines grappled together. These pinnacles of cutting-edge technology fought using the most primitive of methods.
Dimensional lances pierced plasma engines, and giant battle-claws on arm gauntlets tore through biological carapaces.
In close-quarters combat, the Atlantis mechas displayed an agility that defied their massive frames, swinging various dimensional weapons to slay the Rangdan war machines.
Two-handed battleaxes shattered layers of shields, shore through bio-armor, and hacked the filthy creations in half.
Screams echoed from sirens. Intestine-like energy conduits spilled out, and biomass fluids and fuel poured from the wounds like boiling blood.
The Titan clash was unimaginably brutal. Even as the Atlantis mechas swept through the enemy lines, losses were inevitable.
The mortal Titans achieved remarkable results, their acceleration cannons sniping small and medium-sized Titans, though many enemies still managed to close the distance.
Bio-Titans used their plasma-vibrational blades to slice through alloy hulls, triggering reactor chain-explosions that reduced them to irreparable molten metal.
Over a hundred Titan units clashed, their massive bodies making the battlefield feel exceptionally cramped.
In just a few minutes, the Titan war completely reshaped the terrain. The dying roars of giant beasts and the screech of collapsing structures echoed endlessly.
The shockwaves of massive explosions washed over the battlefield continuously, putting immense pressure on the legions and testifying to the sheer horror of a war involving such high-level units.
As the pulsar neared the horizon, casting a dim "dusk" over the landscape, the transhuman soldiers fought even more fiercely, with the fall of the colossal war machines serving as their backdrop.
The Rangdan heavy tanks fired their multi-cannons in unison, weaving a net of death with sickly green radiation beams, blue-white plasma streams, and red suppression lasers.
The Iron Men cohorts broke their sprint, bracing their bodies on six mechanical legs. Their leg armor plates slid open, and micro-missiles flew out like thousands of thin threads.
From their upper-body weapon platforms, gravity cannons fired dark, space-warping distortion rays, while forcefields projected protection for their allies.
Matter annihilators flickered with sparks, reducing enemy tanks to atomic dust.
Missiles rained precisely into the enemy ranks, though the fierce explosions only caused their shields to flicker, yielding minimal damage.
The Rangdan shield technology was incredibly advanced; their elite warriors possessed personal shields, to say nothing of their various vehicles.
Nearly all of them were equipped with shields, providing defensive capabilities far exceeding those of the Space Marines.
Yet, ballistics were merely auxiliary—the firepower of the Iron Men was horrifyingly immense!
Cutting beams, disruption rays, plasma cannons, gravity weapons, decay fields, and disintegration cannons.
A fully unleashed heavy Iron Man poured ordnance from its weapon platforms, continuously obliterating enemy armored units.
Multiple shields flared with light as the cooling systems of the war machines ran on overdrive, doing everything possible to cool down the weapon systems.
The Iron Men swept away the enemy with precise intelligence, carving out a zone of death.
"Die, xenos!"
The deafening roar drowned out even the rumble of artillery. A black phantom, trailing blue light, surged toward the Rangdan warriors.
John let out a fierce war cry, but his mind remained incredibly calm, tracking every single trajectory heading his way along his attack path.
With nanosecond-level reactions coupled with extreme physical attributes, his body movements were executed in microseconds.
The double-headed light-saber spun in his hands, slicing physical ammunition to pieces and deflecting all energy beams and high-energy rays.
The elite Rangdan warriors could see the Astartes' movements, yet they could not comprehend this phantom of death.
With dimensional light-blades flaring like butterfly wings, the Legion Swordmaster led his veterans, plunging into the Rangdan ranks like a tiger among sheep.
The light-blades were indestructible, slicing through both shields and biological armor in single strokes.
By the time the first struck Rangdan pilot unit parted to reveal a clean cut, its core consciousness slipping away in bewilderment, the storm of death had already swept past.
Wherever the Doom Marines trod, they left behind a trail of severed limbs and ruined wreckage.
The Rangdan warriors did not even have time to scream. They could only watch helplessly as the blades reached them, slicing through their bodies inch by inch.
The only action they could manage was to frantically drive their bio-armor—their minds filled with desperate urgency—only to die before any biological signals could even register a response.
The human warriors moved too fast; the enemy could not lock on.
Before a trigger could be pulled, the black-armored warriors had already vanished from their positions, reappearing beside the next victim to ruthlessly harvest another life.
On the rare occasion someone managed to aim and fire, there would only be a flash of blue light as the bullets and rays were sliced down by the light-blades.
"Cowardly!"
A contemptuous, angry curse rang out. The Rangdan warriors reacted in panic, trying to aim, only to realize that the life signals of over a hundred of their comrades had already vanished.
"Useless!"
The figures vanished from their targeting arrays. By the time their minds processed the movement, the black armor was already right before their eyes.
In the very next instant, their consciousness plunged into cold, dark silence.
Over a hundred Doom Marines—a vanguard composed of seasoned veterans and fresh blood alike—wreaked absolute havoc within the Rangdan host.
Their shoulder-mounted auxiliary cannons fired continuously, their smart-targeting systems calmly picking off high-value targets one by one.