Ersen stood completely at a loss, staring at the one hundred towering figures gathered before him. They radiated an aura of pure terror.
These super-demigods, each a full head taller and a broader girth than Ersen himself, were crowded together, murmuring in low whispers. Ersen could tell they were consciously trying to lower their voices, yet amplified by their post-human physiology, their speech rumbled through the chamber like muted thunder.
Ersen cast a dubious glance at the nearby Sapient Machine Automaton standing off to the side. Only when he saw that the machine made no move to intervene did he finally accept the sheer reality of his assignment.
Judging by their conduct, these individuals possessed absolutely no concept of military discipline.
As an Astartes, an Angel of the Emperor, a demigod of the Imperium, Ersen knew that from the very moment of a candidate's selection, they were subjected to brutal conditioning and filtering. While Space Marines would always exhibit certain psychological predispositions based on the lineage of their gene-seed, their grueling ascension ensured they understood the absolute necessity of absolute discipline.
Yet every single person standing before him seemed entirely out of sync with the next.
Through mere observation, Ersen could deduce with absolute certainty that these men did not hail from any known Astartes Chapter within the Imperium.
As if sensing Ersen's confusion regarding their origins, the adjacent automata suddenly projected a roster detailing the subjects' identities.
When Ersen discovered that every single one of these behemoths had been harvested from the lowest rungs of various hive worlds, common laborers, tech-slaves, dregs, and stateless nomads, his expression twisted into utter horror.
A terrifying realization dawned upon him: the Iron Men had taken a mass of unsanctioned, rogue psykers and forged them into warriors far more imposing than the Emperor's own demigods.
Worse still, the physical conditions and genetic baselines of these subjects were composed entirely of the very stock the Imperium routinely deemed genetically deficient and discarded.
By all rights, any viable psychic tithe-candidate would have long since been rounded up by the Inquisition and shipped to Terra. On the Throneworld, those candidates would face further sorting, destined for the Adeptus Astartes Chapters, the Inquisition, the Astra Militarum, or the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Those who failed those final yields would be claimed by the Adeptus Astronomica, rendered down as immediate Kindling to fuel the psychic beacon, or kept as high-quality reserves destined to consume themselves over time.
Yet here was a collection of rogue psykers who lacked the raw stability to even serve as mere fuel for the Golden Throne, and the Iron Men had elevated them into these nightmarish specimens.
How could Ersen not be struck with absolute dread?
Axion, for his part, had no true conception of just how unfathomably intricate the gene-seed of Alpha Primus truly was.
It was a masterwork born of Archmagos Belisarius Cawl's tireless, obsessive calculations spanning nearly ten millennia. Even Cawl himself, despite having unrestricted access to the Sangprimus Portum, could no longer replicate a second specimen. It was a statistical anomaly, an accident of fate, a stroke of sheer, blind fortune within the cosmic tapestry that had allowed its birth.
This singular gene-seed held choice genetic sequences painstakingly isolated by Cawl from the primordial source code of the Primarchs themselves. Cawl had expended ungodly amounts of time and cogitator cycles attempting to weave this staggering array of superior traits together, exerting every ounce of his genius to expunge every latent, volatile flaw he could identify.
Yet this peerless, absolute miracle of biological engineering lost all its legendary scarcity when subjected to the analytical parameters of Federation technology.
Once its complete genomic map and bio-synthesis architecture were logged, Axion could utilize quantum printing modules to mass-produce this super-gene-seed in infinite quantities.
Furthermore, the physical hosts, who should have faced an excruciatingly low survival rate during gestation, presented no challenge when treated with the Panacea.
The moment any baseline human accepted the seed and received an injection of the Panacea, their metamorphosis into a super-warrior was virtually guaranteed. The fatal risks that traditionally plagued the implantation of trans-human organs and gene-seed were entirely eradicated.
The Panacea eliminated all instances of genetic rejection. The super-seed of Alpha Primus merged effortlessly with the native biology of each host, while any unstable, lethal strains were immediately isolated and dissolved, leaving behind only perfect, unyielding stability.
Had it not been for the intervention of the Panacea, the absolute best-case scenario for these wretches would have been a cursed ascension into something resembling the tragic, unstable Thunder Warriors. Those rare individuals who managed to survive the process would have been walking ticking time-bombs, riddled with horrific physical and psychological decay.
Once Ersen managed to steady his rattling nerves, he began his attempts to train these fast-tracked demigods.
Fortunately, following their genetic restructuring, the subjects' cognitive capacity and neuro-muscular reactions were deeply superior to their past lives. They absorbed Ersen's instructions with incredible speed.
As a son of Lorgar, even though his own gene-seed had long since been dismantled by the Panacea, Ersen's formal training and a lifetime of zeal meant he still bore the undeniable soul of a Word Bearer. As a descendant of the architects who first structured the Imperial Creed, Ersen effortlessly stoked the flames of devotion within these new giants. He utilized the sheer, unyielding weight of their faith to anchor their minds, guiding them to restrain their volatile warp signatures and forge their collective willpower into an iron redoubt.
In the subtle currents of the Immaterium, Ersen could feel a gaze from the Empyrean locking onto him.
That warm, blinding radiance seemed to convey a complex, wordless storm of emotion. Within it lay a sense of paternal pride, intertwined with an undercurrent of deep, fatalistic resignation.
For the first time, these newly forged demigods truly felt the absolute reality of the divine protection washing over them from the Empyrean. The maddening whispers of the Warp could no longer breach the bastions of their minds; their willpower, anchored by fanatic devotion, had become an impenetrable fortress.
As the weeks bled into one another, these super-demigods finally reached a point where they could be disconnected from Axion's psychic siphons without triggering localized warp phenomena. The cascading torrents of psychic energy were successfully bound within their flesh by their own intent, circulating harmlessly through their post-human frames.
Not only that, but several individuals who proved more adept than their peers had even begun to master crude applications of their psychic gifts.
Some utilized arcs of biomantic lightning to ignite their tobacco rations; others conjured brief bursts of pyrokinesis to heat their meals, or utilized cryokinetic manipulation to manifest shards of pure ice to chill their drinking water.
These utterly mundane, sacrilegious displays of psychic might left Ersen deeply unsettled, yet he found himself entirely powerless to stop them. After all, having spent their entire lives as ordinary Imperial citizens, these men had never once contemplated relying on their own bodies to wage war. Even now, gifted with post-human frames and immense power, the concept of combat remained completely alien to them.
Ersen could ultimately understand their perspective. Under the absolute dominion of the Iron Men, war and bloodshed were indeed none of their concern.
Glancing at the relentless mechanical phalanxes patrolling the sub-decks, Ersen knew all too well that even if these super-demigods were to take up arms, their chances against these cold, unyielding machines would be utterly negligible.
Furthermore, Axion had never intended for Ersen to instruct them in the arts of war.
In truth, the Iron Man had never considered arming these entities or deploying them as soldiers. To Axion, they were merely organic components for an unavoidable weapons system, living nodes whose sole purpose was to modulate and channel psychic frequencies. Their monstrous physical durability was engineered for one reason only: to ensure these components could withstand the devastating, structural stress of the battle-machinery's operation.
Flesh, after all, always possessed a breaking point; its biological imperatives required too many variables to accommodate.
As the Tech-Priests of the Forge Worlds were fond of declaring:
"The flesh is weak. It softens the mind, destroys discipline. But when metal undergoes wear, you can simply replace it. Furthermore, the machine is the highest form of knowledge; by assuming the form of the machine, we draw closer to the Omnissiah."
Axion found himself in agreement with the first half of that dogma. The divergent, chaotic thought patterns of his creators had indeed made them notorious for flouting regulations, even the very laws they themselves had codified.
As for the Omnissiah worshipped by the Adeptus Mechanicus, Axion neither comprehended nor cared to understand the concept.
Within the cognitive framework of the Iron Men, it was the simultaneous possession of cold logic and raw emotion, two fundamentally contradictory ideological states, that allowed them to truly mirror their creators, drawing deeper insights from the friction of those conflicting realities.
As for gods?
Before the Federation had encountered the pantheon of the Aeldari, the creators had refused to even acknowledge the existence of the divine. When technology advanced to a point where every facet of reality could be controlled and manipulated, the creators themselves had become indistinguishable from gods.
Just as Axion was waiting for the first batch of subjects to conclude their psychic containment training, a massive Imperial fleet abruptly transitioned out of the void, dropping into realspace along the outer perimeter of the Void Sword.
From the heart of the armada, an Apocalypse-class Battleship serving as the command flagship hailed the vessel.
Roboute Guilliman, Vulkan, Lion El'Jonson, and Jaghatai Khan, accompanied by two High Inquisitors of the Imperial Inquisition, requested immediate permission to board the Void Sword.
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