Perturabo's speed was legendary, but the Iron Men's speed in dismantling his fortress far outpaced his own desperate flight through the labyrinthine tunnels.
As he sprinted through a corridor that should have been deep within the mountain's bedrock, Perturabo was struck by a sudden, chilling instinct. He threw his body forward, following a primal urge he had not felt in aeons. A massive power claw whistled through the air, grazing the back of his armor.
He felt the sudden shift in his body's balance. A large section of his reinforced power armor had been shorn away, throwing his center of gravity forward. The sudden exposure to the harsh external light, after the dim, controlled glow of the tunnels, left the traitor Primarch momentarily disoriented.
With a single blink, his transhuman eyes adjusted to the environmental shift. As Perturabo stood up, the scene before him left him paralyzed.
The mountain itself had been laid open. The tunnels that should have been buried miles deep were now exposed to the open air. The mountain was gone, scraped away by the gargantuan power claws of the Punisher Titans. With surgical precision, they had peeled the mountain away, layer by layer. Utilizing echo-location and multi-spectral sensors, every cavity and tunnel hidden within the rock had been bisected, effectively turning the mountain into an open-air anatomical display.
Perturabo had never seen such specialized, giant machinery. The bodies of the Punisher Titans, though massive, possessed a fluidity that defied the sluggish, clunky design of Imperial craft. They moved with a speed and clinical accuracy that was utterly alien to him.
As Perturabo stood in a daze, the Iron Men's army refocused. They began to march across the shattered remains of the mountain, converging upon the exposed Primarch.
Missing one arm, Perturabo felt a surge of cold, hollow despair. His brother traitor Primarchs might still command the favor of the Dark Gods, perhaps even be resurrected should they fall, but he knew with sickening certainty that should he die here, no Ruinous Power would bother to reform his shattered shell.
"Why is this happening? Why!!!"
There was no answer for Perturabo's lament. The rhythmic, grinding mechanical tread of the advancing legions drew closer, amidst the surrounding roar of explosions and fire. Perturabo stood alone, a hysterical figure in the hollowed-out ruin of his domain.
Aboard his flagship, Jaghatai Khan watched the synchronized feed on the bridge, a sense of melancholy washing over him. As a Primarch, he had always recognized that Perturabo's cold disdain and harsh treatment of his own sons was more severe than that of any of his brothers. He had never trusted even his own elite guard, choosing instead to build the Iron Circle as his only companions. In this, his final stand, that isolated figure looked deeply, utterly wretched.
The White Scars warriors accompanying Jaghatai looked upon the desperate traitor with nothing but contempt. Their expressions were etched with scorn, disdain, and a deep-seated, simmering rage. It was these traitors who had plunged the Imperium into such bottomless misery. As veterans of the Horus Heresy, every one of them had brothers who had fallen to the treachery of the Iron Warriors. This was a hatred that flowed in their very blood.
Perturabo attempted to fight on. It was futile.
The sounds of gunfire around him began to subside. His power armor was a ruin of jagged metal and scorched ceramite; around him lay the sundered remains of dozens of Sentry-Troopers and Armored Wardens. Yet, the outer perimeter was held fast by a ring of Destroyer-class Heavy Automata. Countless mechanical units surged forward from every direction, flowing beneath the legs of the massive Destroyers like a tide, relentlessly attacking the exhausted Primarch.
An Astartes can fight for days, but that does not mean they can maintain peak, high-intensity combat for every second of that duration. A human may swing a weapon for minutes; a Space Marine may last for hours of brutal slaughter. During the War Within the Webway, even the Emperor's own Custodians were eventually worn down by the endless, grinding tide of daemons and traitors. Perturabo, though a Primarch, now faced opponents far more lethal than anything the Custodians had fought. Each mechanical entity possessed strength far exceeding a mortal's, and while their individual speed was slightly lower, their numbers were greater than the swarms of a Tyranid vanguard.
The projectile weapons on Perturabo's armor were depleted. His energy weapons had long since overloaded. With his remaining hand, he gripped his Warhammer, now stripped of its arcing power, using it as a crutch to keep himself upright.
The number of machines seemed never to dwindle.
The mechanical tide surged forward without pause. An hour of relentless combat had brought the Primarch to the brink of physical collapse. He did not know that behind the barricade of wreckage, a swarm of nanites were constantly reconstructing the combat units. The very same machines had been fighting him from the start.
Rage and fatigue began to erode the Primarch's reason. Having embraced the embrace of Chaos, his mind was already frayed. Axion had easily calculated Perturabo's combat efficiency and dispatched just enough units to match him. In another hour or two, the Primarch would be utterly spent, his armor and bionic implants pushed to the point of thermal failure. Every clash of steel was an accumulation of heat. Metal fatigued; iron eventually, suddenly, snapped.
The Iron Men, rebuilding themselves at an atomic level, faced no such limitations, but Perturabo's armor did. Had Axion not mandated his capture, a mere handful of Destroyers would have tossed the Primarch about like a ball.
Compared to Angron, Perturabo was far easier to process. There was no insane, erratic fury, no unpredictable, blurring attack patterns. His internal implants, while impossible to subvert directly through data-intrusion, still obeyed the immutable laws of physics. Equipment overheated. Flesh grew weary. It was inevitable.
CLANG!
Perturabo's hammer shattered one final mechanical body. But this time, the weapon itself disintegrated into shards.
The Primarch could no longer sustain the wear of battle. With his single arm, the traitor Primarch drove the broken handle of his hammer into the joints of a machine, desperate to pry its chassis apart. He failed. The handle bent, trapped in the mechanical frame. With his last weapon gone, the machines surged forward.
Several automatons easily pinned him in place. With chilling efficiency, they deployed particle oscillation blades to shear away his remaining power armor. Stripped of his protection, Perturabo's ability to resist dwindled to nothing. Realizing his defiance was now meaningless, he finally surrendered to the inevitable.
An Armored Warden stepped forward. Several automatons immediately modified its own upper torso, retrofitting it into an alloy cage, into which they shoved the disarmed and naked Primarch.
They proceeded to dismantle one of his mechanical legs and several of his secondary implants. As a Daemon Prince, his flesh was inevitably corrupted. Had Axion not been concerned that the neural cables embedded in his skull would destroy his brain upon removal, he would have ripped the thick, hair-like cables from his head as well.
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