A colossal mechanical claw ripped the grand blast doors from the grand hall, dragging the fused wreckage of an Armored Warden and the frame of the gate along with it. The corridors, which should have been guarded by a phalanx of Iron Warriors, had already fallen. The floor was a carpet of scattered components and viscera, where blood and machine oil mingled in a sluggish, darkening slurry.
Ever since their defection from the Imperium, the warriors of the Iron Warriors had been plagued by the "blessings" of the Dark Gods. Even when they did not explicitly offer sacrifices to a specific Ruinous Power, the nature of their slaughter inevitably drew the attention of the Warp. The Gods were never stingy with their gifts, but these boons brought dire side effects, most notably, the agonizing growth of erratic, twisted limbs and jagged bone-spurs.
The Iron Warriors were forced to excise these mutations, which violated their cold, clinical aesthetic. The solution was as brutal as it was efficient: amputation. If an arm mutated, it was severed; if a leg twisted, it was removed. All such deformities were hacked away and replaced with mechanical prosthetics.
Yet, the corruption of Chaos continued to take root, weaving itself into the very fabric of their power armor and bionics. In a perverse way, this made their cybernetics and armor far more flexible than those of the Iron Hands, who also obsessed over the machine. The Warp forced otherwise "impossible" subroutines to function in ways that defied comprehension, answering the unspoken desires of their masters.
In a sense, they were not unlike the Orks; their equipment functioned on a state of "I fink it works, derfor it does." It was precisely this anomalous power that allowed them to retain combat effectiveness against the Iron Men. Had their wargear remained bound by the physical laws of the Great Crusade era, Axion would have dealt with them as he did the T'au: by turning the electronic-muscle bundles within their armor into iron coffins. He could have subjected them to the ultimate despair: watching helplessly as the Iron Men hijacked their own armor, forced their bodies to raise their weapons, and pulverized their own skulls. Even after the head was shattered, the headless corpse would be shackled by the armor and driven into the fray against its own kin.
Unfortunately, the taint of the Warp rendered their systems a chaotic, incomprehensible mess, shielding them from Axion's data-intrusion. Since the most efficient path was blocked, the Iron Men reverted to the method they executed with terrifying proficiency: remorseless, total annihilation.
Aside from the half-hemisphere of the planet that the Void Sword had slagged into a sea of magma, the rest of Medrengard was a theater of constant, grinding warfare. Perturabo, catching a glimpse through the fortress windows, understood the gravity of his situation instantly. He had no support left; his vaunted bastions were howling in the wake of the Iron Men's artillery.
BOOM!
A Destroyer-class Heavy Automaton struggled as it maneuvered, squeezing its twenty-five-meter-tall frame through the "narrow" corridors of the fortress. Perturabo was a high-value target; Axion sought to capture the traitor Primarch alive. The encroaching machines retracted their shimmering particle blades, switching instead to dexterous, bionic manipulators.
Backed by an infinite repository of combat data, the Iron Men were far more terrifying than anyone dared imagine. Even without their primary weaponry, their hand-to-hand combat prowess was masterful.
Perturabo commanded his remaining Iron Circle automata to engage, but the mechanical aptitude of the Iron Men far surpassed his own creations. Under the constant stream of shared data and synchronization links, the Sentry-Troopers performed with perfect, lethal synergy. They crossed their shields to deflect the melta-fire of the Iron Circle, surging forward in the split-second interval between shots to tear the automata's arms directly from their chassis.
While the bionic hands of the Sentry-Troopers were modeled after human structures, they were forged from superior alloys. In raw force, the machines were more than a match for the Iron Circle. Furthermore, the automatons felt no pain; it was common to see them catching projectile fire with their palms or parrying power weapons with their bare chassis.
As Perturabo directed his Iron Circle to hold the line while he retreated toward his throne, a sudden shimmer disturbed the air. Several TR-09 Morlanad assassins materialized, their slender blades coated in a complex, Federal-era anaesthetic. A mere scratch from these blades could down a hundred gargantuan xenos beasts; a creature with a slower metabolism would be dead within seconds.
The ambush failed. While Perturabo was not the swiftest of the Primarchs, his agility remained a blur that even Astartes could not track. The TR-09s, designed for mass production, could not compensate for such speed.
A power hammer, wreathed in vicious, arcing energy, carved a perfect, lethal semicircle through the air. A cacophony of shattering metal erupted as the TR-09s' thin armor and alloy frames were crushed into ruin. Had Axion not issued a mandate for capture, these units would have triggered their rapid-self-destruct protocols; even a Primarch would not have walked away from multiple nuclear detonations at point-blank range.
Watching the metallic debris scatter, Perturabo felt a surge of arrogant confidence. "If this is all they have, the Iron Men are nothing more than over-hyped scrap."
BZZZ…!
A beam of searing light lanced out, obliterating one of Perturabo's arms in an instant.
"Gah!"
Reeling from the sudden trauma, the truth dawned on the Primarch: the Iron Men were not weak; they had simply restrained their most terrifying armaments to ensure his capture. Fear, a sensation he had rarely entertained, finally took root.
The corridors of the hall were swarming with endless ranks of machines. His Iron Circle bodyguard had been reduced to a pile of discarded components. Amidst the chaos, Perturabo watched in mounting horror as the shattered silver automatons began to recombine, a new unit rising from the wreckage, reconstituted by some form of liquid-metal assembly. The despair of facing an inexhaustible, unkillable foe flooded his mind.
Perturabo scrambled onto his throne and pulled a hidden, purely mechanical lever. With jarring speed, the throne and the Primarch plummeted into the depths of the fortress.
As the throne vanished, the mechanism triggered a chain reaction, melting the surrounding structural supports with melta-charges. Molten metal poured down the channel, sealing it behind a wall of slag. The gap left behind was a perfectly seamless fit, mirroring the design of the mechanical passageway.
The maneuver was so abrupt, so purely mechanical and devoid of electronic signals or data-flow, that even Axion was caught off guard by the absence of warning.
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