Across from the burial chamber, a heavy metal gate stood sealed tight, its surface covered in intricate energy runes. Behind it came stronger energy fluctuations and the steady hum of machinery.
Eric's gut told him there was probably better loot inside, though whatever was guarding it would be a hell of a lot tougher.
"Boss! There's gotta be good stuff behind that door! Let's bust it open!" Scrapjaw was practically bouncing, his Choppa already in hand, ready to charge.
"Hold it!" Eric threw up a hand to stop him. After everything they'd tangled with by way of traps and guards, he'd at least learned to look before he leaped. He swept his eyes across the room for a control panel or a weak point.
His eyes had just landed on that cluster of energy conduits in the corner when everything changed.
The chamber floor gave a faint shudder. Directly in front of the great gate, the ground split open without a sound, and an elevator platform rose slowly into view. What stood on it was nothing like the warriors they'd fought before.
Nearly a head taller than the previous guards and close to two meters, it had a heavier frame with sharp angles, thick limbs, and joints ringed in flickering energy shields.
Its head was a smooth inverted triangle, and its red eye-light was colder and more focused than anything they'd seen.
Its right hand gripped a long blade crackling with unstable green energy along its edge, a hyper-phase blade. Its left hand held a multi-barreled launcher, muzzle already pointed at Eric and his crew.
A Necrontyr Construct.
The moment it appeared, no warning, no pause, it swept its blade and came at Eric at a speed that left everything they'd faced before in the dust. Its heavy footsteps hit the floor like hammer blows.
"Now that's a tough one!" Eric's stomach dropped. He tightened his grip on his phase blade and braced to meet the charge, shouting back at the others, "Spread out! Find an opening..."
He never got to finish.
Off to the side and slightly behind the construct's charging path, the scrawny Ork Boy who had been crouched and shaking in the shadow of the energy conduits finally hit his limit.
The hands that had been clutching his skull flew apart. His eyes bulged. The chaotic green light in them was gone, replaced by two furiously burning, lightning-spitting green psychic flames.
His mouth fell open without making a sound, and an invisible, savage psychic surge tore outward from him like something that had been caged way too long.
Boom.
Not a physical explosion — a pure mental-energy and Waaagh!!! force storm, a psychic tempest unleashed.
A blinding, thick green lightning bolt materialized out of nowhere, twisting like a serpent, and in an instant ripped through the scrawny Ork Boy's already-ruptured skull, then burst outward in a wild, branching cascade.
It ignored physical barriers entirely, jumping from one Ork Boy and Gretchin to the next.
Their bodies locked up, green light blazing in their eyes, and then they went off one after another like a chain of firecrackers.
Not with gore flying everywhere, but with psychic overload — their bodies dropping, their minds wiped clean, each dissolving into drifting wisps of green luminous dust.
The lightning chain spread at a terrifying speed, striking the energy conduits along the walls and setting off a cascade of power-surge explosions. One fat branching bolt landed square on the Necron construct, which had only made it halfway across the chamber.
Crack!
The shields around the construct flickered and buckled violently, shrieking under the strain. It lurched to a stop, and the energy along its hyper-phase blade went dangerously haywire.
Eric, standing not far from the epicenter, took a scorching, soul-shaking shockwave straight to the side.
His vision drowned in a torrent of blinding green light. All he could hear was a sharp, shrieking ring of rampaging energy, and underneath it, ghostly sounds like ten thousand Orks screaming directly inside his skull.
He had no time to react. His mind went blank.
[You have been killed by an "Unknown Psychic Explosion."]
A brief darkness.
The familiar sensation of clawing up through dirt.
Eric pulled himself out of a fresh mushroom pit once again. Stark naked, coated in slime and grime, empty-handed. The gear he'd looted, the phase blade, and the crew he'd worked so hard to build... all gone.
He stood on scorched earth and just blinked, trying to make sense of anything.
"What... what just happened?" He instinctively patted his own head, making sure it was still attached.
"Wasn't I in the pyramid fighting a boss? How am I back on the surface? And why am I naked? Where's my weapon? Where was anyone?"
He replayed the final moment in his head: the metal hulk charging at him, and then... blinding green light, deafening noise, then dead.
"Was that the thing's last resort? Did it self-destruct? No, that doesn't track..." He couldn't puzzle it out.
But before he could get anywhere with sorting through the wipe and hard reset, something far bigger unfolded.
Hmmm!!!
A force that dwarfed anything within the game's normal range seized every player on the Lithoeremos-313 map all at once.
It didn't matter if they were fighting, sneaking, looting, or just standing around; their view was ripped away from first- or third-person and yanked upward at dizzying speed.
The perspective swept above the chaotic battlefield, above the low-slung ruins, above the green tide and scattered gunfire, climbing higher and higher until it hung at near-satellite altitude above the dead planet's surface.
Then every player saw something that left them completely speechless.
Across the planet's surface, where only a handful of black pyramids had stood before, something had tripped an ancient switch. More of them were rising now, far larger, in shapes ranging from black metal obelisks and pyramids to structures built like colossal spiders and scorpions, erupting from every corner of the globe.
From wastelands. From valleys. From the ocean floor. They split the earth, drove through layers of rock, and broke back into starlight trailing a cold silence that had been sleeping for a million years.
The surfaces of these newly risen tomb-structures were covered in flowing energy runes, pulsing with increasingly powerful psychic energy. Like leviathans waking up, they slowly opened their eyes.
Then countless points of light erupted from the newly risen tombs like a meteor shower running in reverse, raining down across the planet's surface.
Where they landed, the radiance faded, revealing Necron legions — larger, better equipped, and boasting a far wider range of unit types than anything seen before.
These were not just the warriors and constructs they had run into earlier. There were Destroyers, floating Tomb Guardians, and the shimmering spectral outlines of Monolith-class colossi still taking shape.
A vast, cold voice, completely stripped of emotion, like the planet itself making an announcement, resonated inside the mind of every single player:
[Warning: Large-scale unauthorized biological activity and energy disturbance detected.]
[The Necron Dynasty Tombs beneath... are fully activated.]
[Intruders... will be purged. All presences that disturb the eternal sleep... will be eliminated.]
[Obelisk network activated. Support signal transmitted to the nearby Dyingstar Expanse.]
[High-value target detected: residual "Wolf-Lord" marker. Revival protocol: priority elevated.]
[Initiating... systematic purification.]
[Eliminating... all biological contaminants. Commencing purification of Lithoeremos-313.]
From the overhead view, what had been a localized, chaotic Christmas event map had become something else entirely: a Death World waking up with full, comprehensive, and unstoppable force.
From the Necron tombs, silver and black metallic floods began advancing, methodical and merciless, pushing toward every concentration of life on the planet's surface, especially the loudest and most conspicuous patches of green, encircling them and closing in.
This event, "Waaagh!!! Is Here! Merry Green Christmas!", had apparently managed to kick a hornet's nest nobody knew was there. The Christmas surprise had turned into a genuine crisis.
Eric hung in the high-altitude view, watching the upheaval spread across the planet below, mouth hanging open.
"Is this... actually how this event is supposed to go?"