At Axion's prompting, Guilliman personally issued the command to engage. The vox-casters carried the Primarch's voice to every deck, snapping the shipmasters back into a state of lethal focus.
The roars of captains filled the command decks across the fleet.
Once they recovered from their momentary awe, the Commissars cracked their whips, lashing out with barbed rebukes at any mortal ratings still paralyzed by the spectacle.
Ratings fell back into their frenzied rhythms; Tech-Priests slaved servitors to shipboard systems, and mortal soldiers suppressed their trepidation with fervent prayer. Whether in the Astra Militarum or the Imperial Navy, these graduates of the Schola Progenium remained equally severe, and equally decisive in their summary justice.
If one wished to avoid a decimation, it was best to return to the holy task of war immediately.
Against the obsidian void of the cosmos, the fleet's silence was broken as their batteries once again set the darkness ablaze.
The ghost-blue plasma had vanished, and the incandescent "iron flower" was being torn asunder by the sheer momentum of the Ark of Omen. Despite the staggering impact, the Ark was not a world; its structural integrity, even as a mass of fused ship-graveyards, was far superior to the crust of a terrestrial planet.
The Atmospheric Incinerator Torpedo was designed to ignite a planet's gaseous envelope, turning its very air into a global furnace. Even modified by Axion, its yield was insufficient to unmake a vessel of such titanic proportions.
The only saving grace was that the Ark of Omen was now a defenseless target.
Molten slag coated its hull, slagging every weapon battery in the impact zone. Intense heat triggered sympathetic detonations in the munitions magazines of the fused wrecks, and the void shield generators arrayed along the perimeter had been utterly liquefied.
With no barriers to oppose them, the concentrated lance beams and high-explosive macro-shells of the Imperial array hammered into the Ark's cratered midsection.
Within the Ark, the powers of the Warp began to churn with frantic malevolence.
A silver-tongued Abaddon, driven to a state of incandescent fury, ordered an all-out boarding action against the fleet. His sorcerers from the Thousand Sons wove jagged threads of empyrean magicks. Deep within the Ark, legions of daemons and traitor Astartes vanished in a flash of unholy light.
Abaddon himself chose to board the Dawn of Fire, Guilliman's own flagship.
Fury and madness gnawed at the Despoiler's reason. He had waited for a perfect ambush, only to see his prize vessel savaged by ancient, forgotten technologies.
As Axion utilized the cover of the fleet's volley to launch his remaining Nucleonic Fire Torpedo, his data-links immediately pinged with a breach.
A squad of Astartes had materialized within his own craft.
Alongside them appeared a host of bizarre, chaotic energy-entities. The warriors of the Black Legion, barely recovered from the disorientation of warp-teleportation, stared in bewilderment.
The ship's interior was hollow—a massive, multi-tiered shell devoid of conventional bulkheads. Strange, monolithic machines lined the central spine, and there was no cover to be found.
The dense arrays of Automated Sentry-Troopers, their crimson ocular sensors glowing like dying stars, stared directly at the intruders. Data-feedback was instantaneous.
Axion did not hesitate. He gave the order to fire.
In a previous era, he might not have recognized these corrupted Astartes or the entities of the Warp. But since integrating the data-vaults of the Cawl Inferior, he had cataloged every enemy of the Throne. He was a collaborator of Guilliman; Guilliman represented the Imperium. Therefore, the enemies of the Imperium were his enemies.
While the Black Legionnaires were still shaking off the "warp-ghosts" of transit, the surrounding sentry array opened fire.
For an Imperial ship, a strike force of dozens of Astartes and thousands of daemons would be a nightmare to excise. For Axion, it was a logic puzzle. Efficient data-distribution ensured that the Iron Man's forces rarely wasted firepower.
Against a limited number of targets, the sentry-troopers completed their target-locking in milliseconds.
The inner circle of sentries dropped to one knee the moment the enemy appeared, while the rear ranks leveled their weapons over their shoulders. Every unit with a viable line of sight fired simultaneously. Neutron beams lanced out with clinical precision.
Dozens of Black Legionnaires were turned into charnel sieves by nearly a hundred neutron beams before their first breath on board was finished. Hundreds of daemons were vaporized in the same heartbeat.
Each traitor was left with blackened, cauterized holes where their hearts and skulls had been. Their power armor, forged in the hell-smithies of the Dark Mechanicum, was no more resilient against ancient neutron-beam technology than a mortal's skin was against a Necron's gauss flayer.
The surviving daemons shrieked, swinging their hell-blades at the mechanical sentries. Axion, naturally, possessed the Iron Man's methodology for dealing with such warp-entities.
In his energy-spectrum vision, a daemon was merely a localized knot of bound empyrean energy. If one introduced a superior volume of energy to disrupt its form, the remaining essence would dissipate into the aether.
The daemons were purged in swathes by the overwhelming neutron fire and the laser arrays of the Executor Heavy Tanks, vanishing like digital artifacts being deleted. This clinical slaughter ensured the boarding party was erased before they could even draw blood.
To the Silica Animus, daemons were preferable to Astartes; they left no corpses, no corrosive blood, and required no sanitation.
As a second sun ignited upon the hull of the Ark of Omen, the Warp-sorcerers recalled every soul they could reach. Even a raging Abaddon was snatched back into the warp.
The Nucleonic Fire Torpedo caused the dying iron flower to bloom once more, carving a gargantuan, red-hot void into the Ark's depths. Two strikes had effectively "lightened" the moon-sized vessel, shearing away nearly half of its mass. Fire continued to geyser from the structural ruptures.
"You cannot stop the coming of Chaos, Guilliman! I shall return with a power you cannot fathom, and you shall tremble in your fear!"
Abaddon's roar echoed across the wide-spectrum vox-channels. Then, the shattered Ark of Omen tore a jagged rift into the Warp and plunged inside.
Guilliman did not respond to the Despoiler's taunt. He merely signaled the fleet to fire a parting volley into the closing rift. However, the strength of the barrage was less than half its previous intensity.
The daemons Abaddon had left behind as a rearguard were still rampaging through the Imperial ships.
Clouds of Thunderhawk Gunships and boarding craft began to swarm between the vessels. The Astartes of the Ultramarines and the Black Templars launched themselves into the fray, assisting the crew in purging the warp-spawn. Mortal soldiers, despite their bravery, were ill-equipped to face daemons who possessed an unnatural resilience to ranged weaponry, especially within the cramped confines of a ship.
The Ark of Omen was broken, but it had left a stinging parting gift. Even as it fled, the traitorous Thousand Sons had, at Abaddon's command, hurled a final wave of daemons onto the Imperial ships to ensure Guilliman could not give chase.