Seconds slipped away like water through clenched hands as the final repairs neared completion. Conduits were wrenched from their ancient moorings and hastily repurposed, while scorched housings lay exposed, revealing the cannon's dormant heart. Nanites, gleaming like quicksilver, burrowed through cracked stone, carving out a firing aperture as they stitched together decayed motors, willing them into reluctant motion.

  The hololith flickered, casting its cold glow over the chamber. A vision of ruin sprawled across its surface—a battlefield on the edge of annihilation. The Imperial frigates were little more than burning wreckage, but still, their guns spat defiance into the void. Even as their skeletal frames vented atmosphere, even as fire consumed them from within, they refused to surrender. The cruisers fared no better—one drifted, its engines severed by a jade-colored beam, while the other spun in a slow, graceless spiral, half its macrocannons reduced to molten slag.

  Through it all, Kade watched, his crimson gaze flicking between the charge meter and the brutal display of attrition. The energy buildup crawled upward with agonizing lethargy. The countdown continued, each second stretching taut with the weight of impending catastrophe.

  He exhaled, his voice barely more than a growl. "For all our sakes, I hope your abomination is wrong."

  "Rude, but I cannot help but agree," Sasha chimed in, her golden orb floating serenely within the hololith. She rotated slightly, monitoring the reactor readout. "That said, we have another problem. Reactor output is only at ten percent. Any higher, and they will notice."

  Koron's fingers hovered above the controls, his muscles locking as realization coiled around his gut. His jaw clenched, tension visible in the sharp tick of his cheek. "We're not gonna make it. At ten percent output, we need another fifteen minutes. The Salamanders won't last three."

  A silence settled over them, thick as oil.

  Sasha broke it first. "...Overload?"

  "Yeah." Koron's fingers flexed over the console. "...It's a gamble, but I don't see another option."

  Kade's voice rumbled from behind, deep and certain. "Death is inevitable. Choose the path that offers, at worst, a draw."

  Koron scoffed. "I'd rather take the option where they die, and I don't." His fingers moved with purpose, red warning sigils stuttering to life as he dismantled the reactor's safety locks—an unspoken summons to the ship.

  Deep within her broken frame, something stirred—not in desperation, but in defiance.

  The ship shuddered, deep and bone-rattling, but it was no panicked tremor—no aimless thrash of something being forced awake. This was different. This was not a malfunction. It was choice.

  She was dying, but she would not die alone.

  The ancient reactor groaned as it surged beyond its limits, not in protest, but in purpose. Power roared through arteries that had long since fallen silent, flooding broken systems with a final breath of defiance. The decks trembled—not with fear, but with the weight of duty.

  Koron grit his teeth as he forced another override, killing another safety measure that screamed at him in flickering red sigils. The control panel was a graveyard of warnings, all of them ignored.

  "Reactor at thirty-five percent," Sasha reported, her voice steady but edged with something almost reverent. "Stabilizers compensating—she's…she's holding."

  For now.

  A deep rumble rolled through the walls, a sound like distant thunder. Not pain. Not refusal. A warrior's breath, drawn deep into failing lungs, bracing for the final charge.

  Koron's fingers flew across the console. "Just one more time, old girl," he whispered. A prayer. A plea.

  She answered.

  A flare of energy surged through the conduits, pulsing like the slow beat of a great heart. The flickering lumen strips overhead burned brighter, casting long shadows as the charge built higher, faster.

  Forty percent.

  The first conduit ruptured, an arterial wound that sent a blast of superheated plasma spewing across the bulkhead. She bled, but she did not break.

  Koron barely had time to register the detonation before another shockwave rocked the chamber. The steel beneath his boots shifted, compensating for the stress, the ship herself adjusting to take the strain.

  Fifty percent.

  "Koron, something's wrong—the ship is breaking, but she's… fighting it!" Sasha murmured, her voice unreadable. "Reactor heat's spiking, but she's—she's controlling it!"

  Koron blinked. That was impossible. There was no intelligence behind these systems, no guiding hand beyond the crude algorithms meant to manage efficiency. But the numbers didn't lie—power was shifting, rerouting away from compromised relays, feeding into stable ones instead.

  It was as though the ship knew what was at stake.

  Another detonation—this one farther away, a ruptured coil somewhere in the belly of the vessel. The old girl was tearing herself apart, burning her last reserves, but she did not falter.

  She would not fail her crew again.

  Sixty percent.

  The ship shook, but not as something breaking—this was a warrior's roar, a final act of defiance against the inevitable. The battle outside raged, the hololith's cold glow illuminating the carnage—Imperial ships burning, their crews fighting to the last.

  And here, buried beneath stone and steel, another battle raged. A ship on her last legs, raging against the dying of the light.

  Seventy percent.

  A crack split across the ceiling, dust cascading in lazy spirals, the viewing panes cascading in showers of broken glass. The once-sterile air was thick with the scent of burnt wiring and scorched metal, flames bursting from consoles overloading. The heat was rising too fast.

  She was burning herself alive to give them this shot.

  Koron swallowed hard, fingers digging into the metal. "Come on, just a little more—"

  Eighty percent.

  A final boom rocked the chamber, a cascading failure warning flashing across the hololith. The ship was breaking, collapsing inwards, but she was taking control. Choosing where to fail, where to hold.

  Choosing her final stand.

  Sasha's golden light flickered, her voice softer now. "Whatever this is, whatever's happening...she's not stopping."

  Ninety percent.

  Kade exhaled sharply, fingers curling into fists. He could feel it, the weight of what was happening, the unspoken truth hanging in the air.

  This ship wasn't just dying.

  She was giving them everything she had left.

  Ninety-five.

  Koron's breath hitched. "Just hold a little longer—"

  A single line of text flickered onto the screen—one final message.

  Not from Sasha. Not from him.

  "All for one, one for all."

  Ninety-eight.

  The ship trembled, a final, heaving breath.

  One hundred.

  The world shattered.

  There was no sound—only blinding, all-consuming light.

  Then with a thunderclap, it came back. Not just the ship—the very air, the metal, the stone. A pressure unlike anything Koron had ever known slammed into his chest, a silent boom that drove the breath from his lungs.

  A spear of raw annihilation erupted forth, shaking the ship to its very bones. The cannon's ancient conduits, already pushed far past their limits, screamed as they died, funneling more power than they had ever been meant to handle. The deck buckled, steel warping from the sheer force of the discharge.

  For a single, searing moment, the dark was driven away—replaced by a newborn sun.

  The Necron Harvester had no time to evade.

  The lance struck dead center, and reality came undone The lance did not strike—it pierced, burrowing through necrodermis, boiling space-time itself as the Harvester's phase displacement collapsed. A single, perfect hole formed in its armored hide—then widened, gorging itself on the alien metal, as the Golden Age weapon, what had once been known as a Sunfire Lance, drank deep of its prey.

  The beam raked up and down.

  The Harvester convulsed as the Lance carved through its spine, its immense form twitching as though in the throes of some colossal seizure. Whole decks peeled away like flesh, the ship's interior exposed to the abyss. Green fire flickered and spat—Necron self-repair systems working furiously, trying to seal wounds that would not close.

  It wasn't enough.

  The Lance held.

  The Lance did not flicker. It did not wane. It consumed. For ten full seconds, it poured its fury into the Harvester, a wrath that could not be quenched. Where it touched, metal boiled, then ceased to exist altogether—erased, as though it had never been. The immense vessel—eons old, forged by a race that had defied death itself—began to split.

  A deep fracture yawned across its surface, running from bow to stern like a wound too great to mend. Glistening ribs of blackened metal were exposed as whole sections sloughed away, tumbling into the void.

  The Harvester spasmed one last time.

  Then, with a final, rending crack, it broke in two.

  The twin halves began to drift apart, momentum still carrying them forward even as their insides burned from within. Strange green embers flickered along the sundered edges—Necron energy desperately trying to stitch the ship back together.

  The Harvester died, and even its alien resilience could not deny it.

  The Lance guttered out, its task complete, leaving behind only the smoldering ruin of what had once been an unstoppable predator. A titan, felled.

  In the sudden silence, only one sound remained—the shuddering breath of the dying ship.

  Almost reverently, Koron put his hand onto the console, thumb unconsciously stroking the metal. "Sasha…?"

  "I don't know darlin. Perhaps residual warp influence... or something deeper. A memory? A will carried beyond death? I…I don't know."

  "Doesn't matter." He mumbled, watching the power readouts switch off. The stellar core of the ship faded with each passing second, her last energy exhausted.

  He met one of the bridge's ancient cameras, unsure if anything remained to see him. Still, he raised a hand in salute. "Rest now," he murmured. "Your duty is done."

  -

  The data-stream stuttered.

  Fabricator-General Thrant's optics flickered as she parsed the sudden deluge of sensor feeds, the incoming telemetry conflicting with projected outcomes. Something had changed. Something vast.

  Her chamber, perched at the zenith of the forge-city's primary spire, was silent save for the whisper of data-spirits cycling through her throne's cogitator links. Below her, the great engines of the manufactorum toiled endlessly, oblivious to the event unfolding beyond their walls. But she was not.

  She could see it.

  Through the reinforced viewport, she had a clear sightline to the void beyond, where the battle still raged. She had anticipated its conclusion—grim, inevitable, unpreventable. The Imperial forces were outmatched, dwindling, burning away like embers in the wind. The last moments of a dying fleet.

  And then—

  Light.

  Not the sterile, synthetic glow of Mechanicus plasma arrays. Not the flickering, baleful green of Necron weaponry.

  This was something else.

  A spear of gold and white, a lance of fire and fury, carved up from the planet's surface with all the wrath of a god forgotten by time. It did not simply strike the Necron harvester—it claimed it, burning so brightly that even the auto-darkening auspexes in her optics struggled to compensate.

  The ship buckled, its monolithic form contorting as the lance scythed through it, raking across its body like a blade drawn through flesh. It did not falter. It did not fail. It tore.

  And then it kept burning.

  Thrant's augmetics seized upon the numbers, the cold data beneath the spectacle, and what they told her should not have been possible.

  This was not a lance strike.

  This was wrath.

  And the Necron vessel—a harvester, an apex predator of the void—was dying beneath it.

  Her lenses refocused. She could see the damage unfolding in real-time, could watch as the xenos ship's necrodermis attempted to stitch itself back together, its alien energies fighting to endure—but the lance did not allow it. The energy seared away the repair protocols before they could take hold, shearing through hull, through superstructure, through whatever unholy mechanisms lurked within.

  A deep fracture split its form, widening, deepening, as if the ship itself was coming apart at the seams. Two halves, struggling to remain one.

  The beam did not stop.

  It raked, whipping, carving through weapon emplacements, core structures, entire decks with surgical brutality. Secondary detonations burst within the harvester's sundered body, emerald fire blooming into the void as containment fields ruptured one by one. A chain reaction had begun.

  The Necron vessel did not explode in the traditional sense.

  It unraveled.

  Systems failed in cascading succession, entire segments of the ship peeling away like dead skin, its once-imposing silhouette collapsing in on itself, until at last—

  It ceased.

  Where once had been an indomitable warship, now drifted ruin.

  Where once had been certainty, now stood only questions.

  Thrant did not move.

  Her optics dimmed, filtering out the lingering afterimage of the blast. Her mind, precise as any machine, should have already been compiling a logical sequence, assembling data, forming conclusions.

  But for the first time in decades, she found herself hesitating.

  The source of the weapon: unknown.

  The means by which it had fired: unknown.

  The purpose behind it—

  Unknown.

  A deep, mechanical exhale.

  She turned away from the viewport, her gaze flicking back to the sensor data, the flickering reports, the fractured vox-feeds of panicked adepts struggling to interpret what they had just witnessed.

  Her voice was calm. Unshaken.

  "Find it."

  The command was absolute.

  The Sea of Rust had given birth to a ghost.

  And now, the Fabricator-General would claim it, Necrons be damned.

  -

  Captain Tavos stood rigid upon the command dais, his gauntleted hands braced against the tactical hololith as the bridge trembled around him. Warnings screamed across the displays—armor breaches, failing void shields, entire decks venting into space. His fleet was dying.

  And he could do nothing.

  Four of his six ships burned beneath the emerald wrath of the Necrons. The Drake's Wrath was little more than a crippled tomb, its engines severed, drifting toward the gravity well. Pyreborn had already begun to break apart, its hull buckling from successive strikes. Warheart and Vigilant Flame still fought, their macrocannons spitting defiance even as their frames glowed red-hot, rent and torn from prow to stern.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  His own battle-barge, Hammer of Nocturne, was the only vessel still fully combat-capable. The Forge-Tender Indomitable clung to its side, bloodied but functional. They could still leave. They could still survive.

  Tavos's breath was slow, controlled—forced. The weight of the choice threatened to crush him.

  Stay, and more of his brothers would die.

  Leave, and he abandoned them to their fate.

  Vulkan did not suffer cowards.

  "Captain," his First Lieutenant, Orvek, turned from the hololithic projections, his voice tight with restrained urgency. "We must decide. If we are to retreat, it must be now."

  Tavos closed his eyes.

  They were losing. No strength of arms would change that. The harvester vessel was relentless, its weapons firing with mechanical precision, wearing them down, piece by piece, until nothing remained.

  He looked again to the hololith, at the dwindling life signs aboard the ruined ships. At the still-burning souls of warriors who would not surrender, who fought even as the abyss loomed. The millions of innocents still below upon the world being claimed by the skeletal horrors.

  How many more would die before I call the retreat?

  The hololith flared white.

  His fists clenched. He had seen Nocturne's volcanoes consume cities. He had seen the orbital bombardment of an Exterminatus. He had seen the terrible fury of the void itself.

  He had never seen this before.

  A second later, the bridge shook, as if the very fabric of the universe had recoiled. Auspex alarms wailed, crew shielding their eyes against the sudden burst of impossible brightness.

  A spear of gold and white tore upward from the planet's surface, splitting the darkness, ascending like a blade cast by the very sun.

  The beam struck the Necron harvester with all the wrath of a dying star.

  The void itself seemed to recoil from the sheer force of it, energy arcing violently along the beam's length, white-hot plasma raking across the xenos vessel like a god's judgment made manifest. It did not merely strike the harvester—it consumed it, an unrelenting inferno that sheared through the monolithic ship as though it were nothing more than parchment in a furnace.

  The harvester buckled.

  Tavos watched, unable to look away as the ship's necrodermis fought to mend itself, its eerie green glow pulsing, attempting to heal—but the lance did not allow it. The wound widened. The ship burned.

  The beam did not falter.

  For ten full seconds, it carved the vessel apart, raking up and down, severing it, bisecting it, reducing it to ruin. Internal detonations rippled outward as containment fields collapsed, as its energy sources failed catastrophically, its eerie green flicker guttering like a dying flame.

  The harvester folded inward, the sundered halves peeling apart, breaking into ruin, falling into the void in disjointed, collapsing pieces.

  It was dead.

  Not wounded. Not dormant.

  Sundered.

  Silence.

  No one spoke.

  Even the klaxons had quieted, as if the ship itself struggled to comprehend what had just transpired.

  Tavos exhaled, only now realizing his breath had caught.

  He had braced for death. Had steeled himself for the loss of his brothers. For failure.

  Instead, he had witnessed a miracle of destruction.

  "Emperor's breath," someone whispered.

  Tavos turned sharply to the sensor officer. "Source?"

  The officer's hands flew across the controls, searching, scrambling. "We—we don't know, my lord. The beam originated from the planet's surface, but—" he hesitated, voice unsteady. "Not from any ship. Not from any of our ground forces. It came from… from beneath the surface."

  "Impossible," Orvek murmured.

  Tavos did not reply.

  His gaze remained fixed upon the viewport, upon the dying remnants of the harvester ship, the impossible destruction wrought by an unknown hand.

  His mind should have been racing with strategy, with analysis, with questions.

  Instead, only one thought surfaced, unbidden.

  What in the name of Vulkan's forge sleeps beneath that rust?

  -

  He could hear the tromp of the Admech marching, still in lockstep, down the halls back towards the entrance. Koron was typing at the console for several more seconds before he finished one last keystroke, a new timer appearing, this one counting down from ten minutes.

  "…What are you going to do with me?"

  The trapped Marine's gaze flicked between the hololithic display—where the broken pieces of a Harvester tumbled—and the man at the console.

  Koron didn't bother feigning misunderstanding. There was no time to play games. The countdown ticked ever lower, the ship's systems shifting from green to crimson one by one.

  "You'll be released and returned with everyone else on the shuttles," Koron said simply.

  "…Why?" Kade's crimson eyes narrowed. "You must know I will report everything to my superiors. The records will prove my words." His jaw tightened as he counted the factions that would inevitably take up the hunt. "You will be pursued across the stars. By everyone. There will be no place to hide, nowhere to run. Those here will—"

  He stopped mid-sentence as realization struck like a hammer on an anvil.

  Koron snapped his fingers, the sound sharp against the ship's metal walls. "And that. That hesitation? That is why I want you to live."

  He pushed back from the console, tapping it once as the final crimson warning sigils replaced the jade. Two drones, slim, quiet, their bodies shaped like metal teardrops, glided silently from the door to Koron, objects in their mechanical limbs.

  One carried a rectangular black metal block, barely an inch thick, but a foot high and wide. The other carried four rods of the same metal. Koron took the rods, placing two onto the tops of his forearms, the other two melding into the block that the drone affixed to his back. Before Kades eyes, the block dissolved, flowing around and into his armor while it also rolled over his arms, leaving behind what appeared to be thicker armor plating.

  "How much were you able to save?" He asked, twisting his torso as he checked his range, the two drones landing on his armored shoulders, where they sank into the metal.

  "Not much. But we got the arm set up, and future resources will build the rest of it. The staff is good though, ready for use as we need." Sasha replied.

  Nodding, Koron lowered himself onto the single step of the dais and removed his helmet, his sharp azure gaze meeting Kade's. "The next few minutes will determine whether what I say here means a damn thing. But I'm going to say it anyway."

  Kade's expression remained taut, his voice edged with skepticism. "I have little interest in your words."

  "Even though I am neither heretic nor renegade?"

  "That remains to be seen. Words are easy to say. Their truth is harder to prove."

  "Fair." Koron inclined his head. "Then I will say what I must, and you can decide their worth later."

  Kade gave no reply, his silence permission enough.

  "You're right," Koron continued. "Once your Imperium learns of my existence, they will come for me. If they discover Sasha, they will hunt even harder. And if they learn what else I have in my head—" he exhaled, shaking his head. "They will burn entire systems to catch me."

  Kade's eyes widened, the realization hitting him like a thunder hammer. "By the Emperor… You are claiming to have—"

  "I keep telling people the same thing," Koron interrupted, tapping his temple. "I am an engineer."

  "Contemplate what that entails."

  Kade fell silent.

  Memories surfaced—of the forge, of steel heated to white-hot perfection, of hammers striking iron under the watchful gaze of the Anvil-Sage. The old man's voice echoed through his mind, words burned into his memory like sigils upon tempered steel.

  "The fires of the forge do not ask if you are worthy. They burn all the same. It is the craftsman who decides whether that flame creates or consumes."

  A slow, shuddering breath filled Kade's lungs, his throat suddenly dry.

  "Prove it."

  Koron held his gaze for a long moment, then gave a small nod. Reaching into his armor, he retrieved a compact dataslate. One of his fingers split into tines, scratching across the slate's surface with rapid precision.

  Thirty seconds.

  Then he slid it across the floor toward Kade.

  The Marine cast a wary glance down. A schematic. Engineering blueprints. His brow furrowed as he examined it—a lumen-torch?

  "You mean to prove your knowledge of an STC… with a lumen-torch?" Kade asked, skepticism dripping from every syllable.

  "Look closer."

  Kade did as instructed. At first, the design seemed mundane, utterly unremarkable. But when his eyes landed on the power source, the disbelief cracked.

  "Self-charging…" His gaze snapped up to Koron, then instinctively flicked to the glowing blue circle on the man's arm. The tines moved again, crafting something unseen.

  Koron stood, moving behind Kade with casual ease, rummaging through his webbing before muttering, "Aha!" He returned to the stair, holding Kade's own emergency torch in his hand.

  Kade tensed.

  With practiced efficiency, Koron cracked open the torch's casing, removed the power pack, and replaced it with the small component he had just crafted. He flicked the switch—light burst forth, bright and unwavering. Then he turned it off and placed it back in Kade's pouch alongside the dataslate.

  "Check it when you get out of here," Koron said, his voice quiet but steady. "See if it ever runs out of power."

  Kade's lips tightened. "This is not proof."

  "Perhaps not now," Koron admitted. "But when you return to your brothers, you will be able to test it yourself."

  "Then we return to my original question. Why?" Kade's crimson eyes narrowed. "Why tell me this, knowing it is being recorded? Why give me these evidences, knowing they will damn you?"

  "Precisely because of that," Koron said, voice even. "You will need proof of my existence, of my knowledge. Those who learn of me will not be satisfied with just your words or your video."

  "Yes, but why?" Kade growled.

  Koron stepped forward, his footfalls light against the metal floor, before lowering himself onto the step before the towering Astartes. Even kneeling, Kade still loomed over him, a mountain of ceramite and muscle. The faint glow of the hololith bathed them in ghostly light, flickering with distant reports from above.

  "Because I want them to live."

  Kade said nothing. He simply listened.

  "I could kill you, the priests, and likely scrub much of the footage of us in the city. But questions would remain—about the Necrons, the deaths of so many priests, the loss of a sergeant. I cannot ensure their safety, their survival, like that. Nor could I find them new homes where my pursuers could not reach them. Too many isolated systems, too many backups to try and scour."

  "So their best chance?" Koron met his gaze. "Is you."

  Black brows furrowed. "Speak plainly."

  "I want you to take them with you to Nocturne," Koron said, blunt as a hammer. "You won't lie about me or Sasha. There are too many unknowns, too much at risk for that. But they don't deserve to die." His gaze hardened. "You saw their reactions to Sasha, to me. They had no idea who—what—I am. They are innocent. Do not condemn them for showing kindness where none was required."

  For just a moment, Kade saw them.

  Tara, her wide, inquisitive eyes, the sharp mind behind them that asked questions, that offered help. Milo, the veteran who had poured him a drink, thanking his Chapter for their support in some distant warzone decades ago. The faces of those who had fought and died against the Necrons, raging with a fury that mirrored the fires of Vulkan himself.

  A hammer is not meant for ruin, but to build.

  "Even if I agree," Kade said at last, "the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Inquisition—they will learn of them."

  "Not if you lie on your report."

  The silence between them stretched, heavy.

  "...You would have me dishonor myself?"

  "No." Koron's reply was quiet but firm. "I would have you save their lives." He leaned forward, metal fingers whispering against each other. "I can remove myself from footage of their group, alter the logs. Easier to remove one person than eighty plus after all. I can erase them from your footage here, and the Adeptus Mechanicus won't remember a thing from this place anyway."

  He pressed a single metal finger against Kade's chestplate. "Those who come for me will get what they want—what they need—a clear, obvious path to chase. And with me in their sights, Dusthaven will be forgotten. Left to live as best they can."

  His voice dropped to something lower, something sharper.

  "Everybody wins in this, Kade. You get to warn the Imperium about me. About an—" his lips twitched in wry amusement "—abominable intelligence. You get to save hundreds of innocent, loyal, devout Imperial citizens from a judgment you know is wrong."

  Kade's expression darkened. "And what happens when they catch you? When they rip the truth from your mind? I, my Chapter—we will be implicated. They will come for us then, and we will be forced to turn them over. By Vulkan, we might hand them over ourselves if this comes to light."

  Koron nodded, as if he had already considered every possible outcome.

  "I know."

  That small grin of his grew as he stood, brushing the dust from his trousers before reaching for his helmet.

  "But," he mused, turning it over in his hands, "as it was once said: 'All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Foes, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you—digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed.'"

  Seating his helmet with a final hiss of pressurization, he turned half-away, toward the door.

  And then, just loud enough for the recorders—for those who would watch this later—to hear, he added with a wry grin:

  "And I'm one wascally wabbit."