As the Despoiler of Worlds, Abominatus, collapsed into a heap of scrap metal, Axion performed a swift assessment of the battlefield. The Punisher Titan had been completely neutralized and stood motionless to one side. With a sudden crackle of arcing energy, the colossal mechanical construct vanished into thin air.
This sudden disappearance left the Imperial forces momentarily stunned.
Even Roboute Guilliman found himself whispering in silent speculation.
The Titan Order was well known for its capability to deploy Titans via teleportation, but he had never heard of them possessing the technology to recall their forces through the Warp mid-battle.
And indeed, they did not.
Teleporting a Titan demanded an astronomical amount of energy; it was a resource-intensive gambit reserved exclusively for emergency deployments to the theater of war. Recalling units, however, was traditionally done the hard way, by sending heavy transport ships down to the surface to haul the massive war engines back up piece by piece.
Furthermore, Warp-targeted teleportation required external energy guidance systems. Not even a Titan Order dared to activate such guiding beacons within the confines of their own starships. After all, there was no telling what else might be drawn to the signal alongside their own Titans. Should a Greater Daemon of Chaos suddenly materialize within the decks of a voidship, the entire crew would likely perish in the cold vacuum of space. On a planet's surface, a Titan could readily engage and destroy such an entity, but inside the cramped decks of a hull, it was an entirely different nightmare.
The Magos of Lucius were deeply anxious regarding this technology, not merely due to the tactical advantage it offered, but because of the immeasurable risks woven into its very nature.
Axion, however, had subjected the technology to rigorous data simulations the moment he acquired it, refining and modifying its core mechanics.
For an Iron Man, energy was never a limiting factor.
As for security, a purely mechanical entity possessed no soul-echo in the Warp, nor did it carry living personnel; it naturally failed to register on the senses of Neverborn entities. The hazards of the guidance system were similarly non-existent to the Iron Men. The holding bays of a fully mechanized vessel shared nothing in common with the architecture of an Imperial warship. If an Imperial ship attempted to construct a hollow, two-hundred-meter-tall deployment bay within its hull, its structural integrity would be the first thing to buckle.
More importantly, the vast majority of the Iron Men's vessels housed nothing but mechanical legions, not a single living soul drew breath aboard them. Should a denizen of the Warp dare to manifest within those halls, its reception would be nothing short of catastrophic.
The reason Axion had chosen to recall the Titan prematurely was, in truth, quite simple.
This was Holy Terra.
With the sheer destructive output of a Punisher Titan, it would take only a few minutes to permanently rewrite the geography of the entire polar region. Ever since confirming the conceptual-destruction properties of ectoplasmic dissociation weaponry, Axion had placed additional strictures on their deployment. On any other world, he would have operated without such constraints, but this world was different.
This was the ancestral birthplace of the Creators, the ancient heart-world of the Federation.
The employment of cataclysmic armaments had to be handled with extreme deliberation. It was for this reason alone that the daemons had managed to trade blows with the Iron Men's mechanical armies until the Imperial reinforcements arrived. Had it been otherwise, the Neverborn would have been completely obliterated from existence before the ectoplasmic dissociation weapons.
Axion's glowing optic sensors flickered as they locked onto Angron and An'ggrath, who were currently locked in a brutal melee with the Destroyer-class Heavy Automatons. He continuously redirected his legions to heap immense pressure onto the two keystones of the Khornate host.
The Iron Man had crossed paths with the Daemon Primarch on multiple occasions, and the tactical profiles regarding An'ggrath were thoroughly archived in his data-vaults. The cyclical resurrection of these warp entities was tedious; this time, Axion intended to grant them a final, absolute termination.
In his daemon-form, Angron possessed monstrous physical might and a terrifyingly fluid agility. The chainaxe and broadsword in his grip wrought devastating ruin. While the Punisher's destruction of Abominatus had drawn the gaze of the entire battlefield, the Daemon Primarch had already torn apart over a dozen Erratana-class Armored Wardens and shattered nearly a hundred Automated Sentry-Troopers engaged in close combat with the daemonic horde.
An'ggrath's destructive capacity was slightly inferior to the Primarch's, but the havoc he unleashed was no less staggering. Each sweep of his massive axe shore through Sentry-Troopers with ease, and even the melee-specialized Armored Wardens struggled to contain his fury.
Consequently, Axion ensured the Bloodthirster received the exact same treatment as Angron.
The deployment of the Destroyer-class Heavy Automatons quickly brought the two rampaging monsters under heel. Standing twenty-five meters tall, these gargantuan war machines possessed an agility that completely defied their immense bulk. A pair of flashing power claws struck with blinding speed, severing Angron's sword-arm along with his blade in a matter of exchanges.
Angron roared, swinging his remaining chainaxe in a desperate bid to cleave the joints of the Destroyer before him. Yet, under the crushing weight of the gravitational fields projected by the surrounding Destroyers, the Daemon Primarch's movements ground to a sudden, agonizing halt, as though someone had hit a pause button, before he was violently slammed into the earth.
The precisely tuned gravitational force pinned Angron flat, immobilizing him entirely. His daemonically warped skeleton groaned under the pressure, keeping him from being utterly pulverized but leaving him utterly incapable of making even the slightest movement.
With the Primarch neutralized, the automatons systematically severed his remaining limbs, his bat-like wings, and his barbed tail. A meticulous Axion even utilized weapons still searing hot from continuous firing to cauterize the stumps. The warp-tainted blood hissed and hissed against the scalding alloy, giving off a putrid stench, but the treatment proved exceptionally effective.
Reduced to nothing more than a roaring torso and head, Angron thrashed and snarled, but he was promptly hoisted into the air by an Armored Warden.
An'ggrath was handled with far less ceremony.
The Exalted Bloodthirster had been thrashing his massive wings, leading a pack of Bloodletters in a desperate counter-charge against the Armored Wardens. In the brief suspension of a leap, a localized gravitational spike dragged An'ggrath violently from the air, slamming him directly before a Destroyer.
A five-meter-long power claw swept through the air, severing both of his legs at the knees. The moment he crashed to the dirt, a swarm of Armored Wardens converged, instantly carving the Greater Daemon into a limbless trunk.
Moments later, the two howling, limbless forms were cast into specially fabricated containment cages.
Though Angron had surrendered the vast majority of his higher cognitive functions to mindless wrath, it did not mean his memory was entirely gone. The design of the cage sparked a flickering sense of dreadful familiarity within him.
The loss of their limbs had not weakened the Daemon Primarch or the Greater Daemon, but the psychic-siphoning apparatus woven into the cages, sharing a clear lineage with the technologies of the Golden Throne, inflicted an unspeakable agony upon them. The very warp energy extracted from their forms was redirected and inverted to reinforce their own confinement.
Ever since a prototype of this cage had successfully contained Angron within the Webway, Axion had upgraded the temporary construct, formalizing its blueprints into his databases. He designated this pattern the Adaptive Daemon Detention Device.
Axion's strategic objective was uncomplicated: secure Angron and An'ggrath, immediately transport them off Holy Terra, and then utilize ectoplasmic dissociation weapons to disintegrate them within the void of space. If no variables interfered, his prior weapon-testing metrics suggested that these two particular daemons would never manifest in the material universe again.
The base of the containment cages emitted a low, rhythmic thrum. Inside the containment fields, the bodies of Angron and An'ggrath convulsed violently, twitching like massive, bloated maggots trapped in a jar.
With Khorne deprived of his primary anchors to channel his wrath into the mortal realm, the colossal Eight-Blooded star that had choked the sky began to rapidly fray and dissolve.
Sensing that defeat was total, the Blood God attempted to exert his will one final time, reaching out to tear the souls of Angron and An'ggrath back into the safety of the Immaterium.
Yet, this time, the gesture failed.
The residual Chaos energies, stripped of Khorne's direct momentum, were instantly blotted out by the blinding radiance of the Astronomican. Countless lances of golden light, the bane of all daemonkind, slammed shut the closing warp rifts before the dark god could claim his prizes.
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