Scarus sector, Aboard the Exodus
The Exodus vibrates as Ork boarding torpedoes slam into the starboard mid-section.
Ferrum-Rho remains hard-wired into the command throne, his consciousness partitioned across the ship's internal security grid.
The Orks detonate shaped charges, breaching the hull and flooding the corridors with the roar.
WAAAGH! WAAAGH!
The chant that overloads local audio-sensors. The greenskins advance in a wall of slab-shields and scrap-armor, firing solid-slug "shootas" that fill the halls with ricochets and cordite smoke.
Ferrum-Rho monitors the kinetic impact data on his Noospheric display, observing the Orks' assault, a frontal assault intended to overwhelm his defenses through sheer physical mass and noise.
Ferrum-Rho coordinates his 1,000 Skitarii through his central processor. He bypasses the Skitarii's independent target-acquisition, forced-loading enhancement protocols that cause the warriors to fire their galvanic rifles in perfect, synchronized volleys.
The Skitarii do not take cover, they stand in rigid lines, firing into the smoke with a 90% accuracy rate. When a group of Ork nobz breaks through the first line using heavy choppas,
"Stomp 'em, ladz! Deze shiny humies iz made of da gud bits! Get me dat Boss-cog!" Warboss Kipppa Grimlak, raged as he kick a nob blocking his way.
Waaagh!!
The skitarii on the ship recently created by Ferrum-Rho, with greater muscle density, and sub-dermal Armor , 5 kataphron breachers move forward covering retreating lines of vanguards.
1 kataphron destroyer and 100 rangers maintained a back line as the unleashed sundering fire on the breach and the warboss.
After years of service Magos Xerath-17, has become the right hand of Magos Ferrum-Rho. As the battle moved on, a noospheric burst echoed in the halls.
"Venting of atmosphere timed for 1 min. Appropriate movements apply."
Magos Xerath-17, indicated understanding and began to re-calibrate their threat-response protocols of skitarii in combat.
Taking back the more useful units like the Kataphron units, leaving behind mainly the vanguards and the ranger units.
Ferrum-Rho activates the ship's internal atmospheric vents, sucking the oxygen from the sector to extinguish the Orks' biological stamina while his cybernetic troops continue to function unimpeded.
He monitors the exchange of fire as a series of logic-loops, adjusting the Skitarii's positioning to maximize the kill-zone.
The Greenskins respond by lobbing crude "stikkbombs" and returning fire with heavy, belt-fed weapons that chew through Skitarii armor and industrial conduits.
Ferrum-Rho calculates the damage to the Exodus in real-time, when a secondary plasma relay is hit, causing a power surge in the lower decks.
He shunts the excess energy into the internal defense turrets, which deploy from the ceiling to rake the Ork flank with high-intensity las-fire.
Meanwhile Segmentum Solar, Sol-system, Terra
Constantine Valdor stands before a squad of five Custodians, including Aurelian Gaius Trajan. The mission is the neutralization of an Abominable Intelligence located in the Francish Hive-clusters.
Malcador the Sigillite though present remains silent, observing the briefing from the periphery of the strategium.
'He is right. I do not understand what it is but he seems to be growing stronger… Hmmm … I wonder what surprises he will bring in the coming time.' Malcador thought to himself as he looked at Aurelian.
The custodian once named as the ghost, has begun to grow more healthy looking. His figure filling out into his armour more consistent with what a custodian should embody.
The initial plan of disposing of him now changed to seeing what benefit he could bring to the Imperium.
Valdor projects a schematic of the target facility, a pre-Unification data-vault currently being utilized by techno-barbarian insurgents.
The device is a self-replicating logic-core from the Dark Age of Technology that has already subverted the local defense grid and several cohorts of labor-automata.
The threat was a Castellax battle automata unit. The squad is tasked with total erasure of the site. A logic virus is provided to them to insert into the primary terminal, while phosphex would be used for clean up.
"No survivors are to be permitted, Its logic-core possesses memetic capabilities. I expect the task to be completed with precision." The Captain-General affirms.
"""YES"""
The squad is assigned a Teleport Homer linked to the Veritas, a strike vessel positioned in low orbit, which will provide a single extraction window once the objective is confirmed destroyed.
A radiant light washes over the squad as the disappear from the room, Constatine Valdor turns to Malcodore.
"What do you access"
"He may bring us more surprises than we think. He has approved proceeding with the plan."
"Hmm, his will be done."
715.M30 Ultima Segmentum, Ghoul Stars, Cygnis III
There is a saying that hatred can be a great fuel. Today Caspian is an exemplification of that principle.
After waking up from his toss-up with the Necron Flayed One, he does not know why it left him and simply departed.
Counterintuitively, he is angry that it left him for dead and did not even skin him. Somewhere in his mind, a strange pride commonly seen in a person that defies logic makes him believe that, by the Flayed One's behaviour, a good hunt was not achieved therefore skinning is un-warranted.
'You think I was too easy, right… I will make you regret not finishing the job,' he thinks to himself, fuming.
As he fumes, his hands never stop working. He needs a weapon, and there is none here, so he will simply make one for himself. There is enough scrap metal for him to forge a sword.
His hands move with a heat-blinded ferocity, the nerves in his palms deadened by decades of survival.
He hammers the white-hot billet with a stone, his flesh sizzling against the metal, but the pain is distant compared to the cold fire of his resentment. When all the molding is done, he inserts the sword into the earth to cool.
What comes out of the ground after cooling is a copper-colored straight sword with a full tang. The body is rough by any standard, and the edge is not sharp. He needs a weapon, and this will suffice for now.
With a sword in hand, Caspian leaves the ruin he is in and begins his search for a primary residence. He needs it to be far away from others and positioned defensibly.
This is how the story of the dreaded one on Cygnis III begins. Whenever Caspian passes close enough to a human city, the large area of his null field affects the population there, and something always dies in his presence.
He hunts various abominations across the planet, from the northern continent fighting with the crystalline wyrm, to the west where he slays the ghoul stalker, in the east he tussles with the mechanical Iron-Lichen, and the south where he meets the .
He also locates many more ruin sites, some containing xenos technology, such as a long-range rifle with a smooth design that he can only assume belongs to the Eldar.
In another ruin he finds a weapon bearing the iconic green that reminds him of the Necron gauss flayer. He also discovers a schematic for shielding plates, of which he makes one for himself.
One thing bothers him, though. Both gun-like weapons he finds fail to fire every time he uses them. Initially he thinks they are simply nonfunctional, but as he tinkers with them more often he discovers he understands them well enough to know whether they are intact or broken.
Click. Click. Click.
Again he tries.
'What is happening?' he thinks.
Although he wants to ask the others, he refrains from doing so. They have made it clear: he must build himself before he can speak with them.
So he keeps trying. Whenever he finds places with the necessary materials, he attempts to fabricate his own versions of the weapons.
730.M30 Ultima Segmentum, Ghoul Stars, Cygnis III
For fifteen years he hunts down every monster he can find, every beast he can fight. He iterates many versions of xenos technology from scratch. Yet not a single firing weapon works when he uses it.
The one thing that remains the same is the rough copper sword he fashioned fifteen years ago. That is a special weapon he is saving for the Necron Flayed One.
If anyone could see the skin beneath his layers of fabric, they would find a tattoo of a gear, completely black with a deep golden outline, and a glaive tattoo, also fully black but lacking the same golden depth found in the gear.