Inside the Webway, time lost all purchase. The monotonous flicker of impossible vistas left the Blood Ravens bringing up the rear in a state of growing unease, questioning their ultimate destination.
Axion led his column in the wake of the Aeldari vanguard, while behind him, the Space Marines maintained a constant, low-voiced litany of tactical binaric and prayer. More than once, Axion detected the vox-thrum of brothers grunting in sudden, sharp pain.
Even within the shielded arterial paths of the Webway, the soul-withering field of the Pariah Nexus bled through. It gnawed at the warriors of the Blood Ravens, but for Cohn, the Chapter's Librarian, the effect was agonizing. He felt his connection to the Warp being systematically strangled, his very soul subjected to a violent, wrenching torsion.
The reaction was so aberrant that Cohn began to fear the Webway path was leading them directly into the lightless heart of the Great Rift. When he saw Axion's legion suddenly veer off and vanish into a shimmering side-artery, Cohn barked an order, leading his brothers into a desperate charge to keep pace.
They burst through the threshold, and the sudden shift in environment caused the Blood Ravens' hearts to sink.
A host of Aeldari was already deep in the throes of an assault on a nearby Necron phase-gate. Howling Banshees flickered across the killing zone like streaks of ivory light, their power swords severing the heads of Necron Warriors from their necrodermis shoulders.
Axion had already deployed his mechanical host, integrating his fire patterns with the Aeldari as if they had been combat-bonded for decades. The xenos were visibly startled by how intimately these machine-slaves understood their maneuvers, but with the undying enemy before them, they had no choice but to press the attack.
The Aeldari's sensitivity to the Warp was no less keen than that of the Blood Ravens' Librarians; they, too, knew they could not linger here. Even Wraithbone constructs were suffering. The hero-souls within the Spirit Stones were being slowly flayed, threatening to dissipate and leave even the mighty Wraith-Titans as hollow, inanimate husks.
The only entities entirely immune to the malaise were Axion and his unliving legion. Some Servitors might have retained vestigial flickers of a soul, but its loss did not impede their programming. Their biological components were slaves to the machine; as long as the flesh could twitch, galvanic impulses and combat stimms forced it into motion.
Consciousness was an unnecessary luxury. Every unit acted as a node in a vast, distributed processing swarm.
Servitors equipped with shock whips and chainswords sprinted across the battlefield with a fluid, uncanny grace that left the Blood Ravens stunned. They dodged the emerald beams of Gauss Flayers with preternatural agility. When avoidance was impossible, they threw themselves at the enemy in suicidal gambits of mutual destruction.
Las-equipped Servitors maintained disciplined, concentrated volleys. While a single unit was no match for a Necron Warrior, the swarm focused their beams until they melted through the exposed, glowing logic-cores of the undying soldiers, dropping them instantly.
Lucius-pattern Battle Automata traded punishing blows with Necron Destroyers, their heavy energy cannons roaring in a cacophony punctuated by the erratic, spiraling trails of Aeldari rockets.
Nearby, a squad of Dark Reapers, their skull-masks staring impassively, sighed in frustration as their second volley of star-shot missiles slewed wide of the mark.
Yvraine, currently eviscerating an Ophydian Destroyer with a sweep of her blade, spun toward the faltering Reapers and shrieked over the vox.
"Cease relying on psychic guidance! The empyrean is unstable here! Your spirit-sight is a lie, aim with your eyes!"
Striking Scorpions moved in tandem with the mechanical legion's long-range fire, their chainswords reaping a harvest of Necron heads.
The Blood Ravens, finding themselves suddenly thrust into a maelstrom of xenos, instinctively raised their bolters. However, seeing Axion's forces already embedded with the Aeldari against the Necrons, they suppressed their indoctrinated hatred and fell upon the metallic foe.
Cohn surveyed the chaos, briefly wondering if they had lost time within the Webway's folds. The coordination between the machine-units and the xenos was too seamless for a first encounter. Had they been fighting together for hours while he was blinded by the Pariah field?
The shuriken catapults of the rank-and-file Aeldari lacked the raw, kinetic stopping power of the Astartes' Bolters and Plasma. Once the Sons of Vidya joined the fray, the rate of Necron attrition spiked significantly.
Axion, meanwhile, was finalizing his assessment of the Mechanicus' automated units. Fragile.
Their hybrid nature made them woefully vulnerable to ranged fire. The Combat Servitors had to rely entirely on micro-adjustments and evasive sub-routines. If a melee-servitor was struck by a gauss beam before reaching its target, the biological components simply vanished into atomic dust, leaving behind a useless heap of scrap.
Much of the battlefield's cover was now composed of such "mechanical remains."
The machine legion possessed the numbers, outstripping Yvraine's Ynnari force, but they lacked durability. Only the few dozen Lucius-pattern Automata held their ground, acting as high-quality, if expendable, ablative shields. Axion privately noted that their bulk made them an inefficient use of raw materials.
The true masters of the field were the Erratana-class Armored Wardens. Standing as tall as Dreadnoughts, their heavy atomic pulses tore through Necron Warriors and Immortals alike, leaving smoking furrows in the earth. Whether it was a Skorpekh or a Destroyer, a single hit from an Erratana punched a gaping, molten hole through its center.
The melee variants moved like armored dervishes, their shields flared as they plunged into the Necron phalanxes. Aeldari Aspect Warriors watched in muted shock as these strange constructs pinned Necrons wielding hyperphase swords to the ground, before jamming twin, esoteric firearms into the machines' "mouths" and detonating their heads.
Axion stood motionless at the Webway's exit, a silent conductor directing the symphony of slaughter, while his Aegis Protector stood before him, its thick energy shields humming in a protective dome.
Cohn tried to manifest a psychic kine-shield, knowing that his Artificer Armor might not withstand a direct gauss hit. But the Pariah pressure was suffocating; the shimmering dome of force that should have been a fortress was reduced to a thin, flickering film clinging to his plate.
As the battle intensified, the gear the Blood Ravens brought to bear began to draw increasingly strange looks from the Aeldari. The xenos, having dealt with the Imperium for millennia, knew the Astartes better than Axion did.
Nearly every Blood Raven brandished a weapon with a "non-standard" provenance. Aside from their bolters, their sidearms were a gallery of stolen history. One brother swung a thunder hammer embossed with a white bull against a red field; another wielded a power sword engraved with a winged blade and High Gothic litanies. There were chainswords bearing the marks of half a dozen different Chapters and plasma weaponry with the distinct, ancient etchings of various Forge Worlds.
The most egregious was Cohn himself. In one hand, he gripped his Force Staff; in the other, he raised a boltgun of sublime craftsmanship. Any Ultramarine veteran would have recognized it instantly as the Guilliman's Example, a relic that should only have been found in the hands of a Macragge-born hero of ten thousand years' standing.
Sensing the lingering stares of the Aeldari, the Blood Ravens simply redoubled their efforts, swinging their "inherited" weapons with practiced ease. They had endured similar looks from other Chapters during joint campaigns, and it had never resulted in anything more than a few sternly worded missives.
Why should they care if a few xenos found their collection... unusual?