The Imperial forces had no inkling of why the Iron Men had ordered the fleet to accelerate. They simply followed the wake of the colossal Titan-class vessel, blindly straining to maintain speed and pouring every ounce of their remaining firepower into the void.
Even though the vast majority of their attacks failed to pierce that bizarre, shimmering aegis, the torrent of prismatic light erupting from the Void Sword to slam against the alien construct gave the Imperials a false sense of dominance. They felt, quite naturally, that the enemy was being suppressed.
In reality, the alien fortress continued to lash out with unrelenting ferocity. Having lost four of its satellite Blackstone Fortresses, the power output of the central octahedral bastion had dimmed, but Axion knew better. Most of their bombardment was striking nothing but air or being absorbed. Furthermore, the regenerative capabilities of the alien citadel remained a terrifying unknown.
If they were forced into a protracted exchange of heavy cannon fire, the current rate of penetration suggested it would take tens of hours to deal a truly lethal blow, if not longer, provided the enemy possessed self-repair protocols. And there were even darker questions: did this fortress have reinforcements waiting in the wings? How many more of these bastions lurked in the dark?
To the Iron Men, these were unacceptable variables. A war of attrition was the least efficient form of combat.
Through the massive influx of data gleaned from their own relentless fire, Axion had finally isolated the fortress's weakness. That peculiar shield was not invincible; it existed in a dynamic, shifting state. When the threat of energy weapons was prioritized, the shield maximized its refraction resistance. During the cycling intervals of heavy energy batteries, it switched to kinetic dissipation. It was a sophisticated, adaptive defense that effectively parried both physical and energy-based blows, but it could not be perfectly balanced for both simultaneously. This latency was why, occasionally, a stray shot would punch through to score a hit on the hull.
Axion's solution was elegant and brutal: synchronize both attack modes to reach maximum output simultaneously. If the shield were forced to account for both energy and kinetic extremes at once, the probability of the enemy's destruction would reach certainty.
The Imperial ships flanking the Titan were completely oblivious to the faint, ethereal shimmer beginning to coat the lower half of the Void Sword's prow. Perhaps it was serendipity, or perhaps the cold hand of destiny: Axion had once equipped the Void Sword with a specialized lance array to counter Ork planetary bastions, a modification that had seen no use until this very moment. Only the Iron Men would conceive of using a 4,000-kilometre-long prow as a massive battering ram, coated in an active kinetic field.
Deep within the recessed chambers of the bow, the Oblivion Cannon began to prime. Axion's plan was straightforward: ram the Void Sword directly into the enemy, and at the instant of impact, trigger the doomsday weapon. Regardless of how the fortress's shield toggled its resistance, the enemy would be forced to choose between annihilation by the Nullification Mode or being torn asunder by a lance-armoured prow.
Nothing could block the march of the Iron Men. If necessary, even a Titan-class vessel was expendable.
As the Void Sword closed the distance, the alien fortress entered the ten-kilometre range of the Titan's protective screen. The enemy acted as if it were entirely oblivious to the intent of the Iron Men, remaining stationary in the void and continuing to rain fire upon the approaching hull.
Within this closing gap, countless beams of alien origin hammered against the Void Sword. These were weapons of immense destructive capacity. Massive outer armour plating, dozens of metres thick, was blasted and scarred in a thousand ways. Corrosion, detonation, extreme heat, absolute zero, warped spatial geometry, and stuttering time-flows erupted across the ship's exterior. The heavy plating, which could withstand the point-blank bombardment of an entire Imperial fleet without buckling, began to crack and slough away.
Yet, a vessel of the Iron Men was not built like a conventional ship. That thickness was designed to endure the unimaginable. Beneath the outer layers lay secondary plating of even more resilient, exotic materials. Only after both layers were breached could one reach the primary hull structure, itself ten kilometres thick. And deep within the heart of the ship were six additional layers of internal bulkhead and structural core. The central power conduit and the sentient logic cores were shielded by a lining of massive armour exceeding hundreds of metres in density.
A breakthrough from the outside was effectively impossible, unless the enemy could conjure a black hole directly against the hull, as the Necrons were known to do.
RUMBLE…
The sound of the collision, a cacophony of screeching metal, reverberated through the entire structure of the Titan. The impact caused the Void Sword to shudder and slightly decelerate, causing the Imperial fleet, which had been maintaining a parallel pace, to surge ahead until they were level with the Titan's prow.
It was then that they witnessed the true horror of the scene.
The searing light of the Oblivion Cannon, now firing point-blank, was refracted violently off the fortress, skittering upwards at an impossible angle. The discharge was so devastating that it vaporized a massive section of the Void Sword's upper bow superstructure. A deep, jagged 'V'-shaped maw now scarred the prow; armour, structural decking, and conduit were gone. Even a Titan-class vessel could not withstand the back-pressure of its own doomsday weapon.
In that singular moment, the bizarre, solid-state shield became critically unstable, and the barrier pressing against the prow vanished entirely.
Unimpeded, the lower half of the Titan's bow drove deep into the heart of the alien fortress, piercing it by a third of its total volume. The energy beam of the Oblivion Cannon generated immense kinetic push, slightly dampening the force of the ramming impact, but the situation shifted instantly. The energy-vacuum created by the Nullification Mode caused the surrounding Warp energies to surge back like a tidal wave, slamming the alien bastion violently into the prow of the Void Sword.
The fortress was driven halfway through the Titan's bow.
The octahedral bastion, apparently having suffered a critical strike to its core, went silent, losing all signs of life. The two remaining Blackstone satellites, stripped of their protective screen, were quickly dealt with: one was obliterated by a single shot from a massive railgun, while the other blossomed into a beautiful, pyrotechnic death under a concentrated energy beam.
Axion attempted to command the Void Sword to reverse thrusters, but the inert, captured alien fortress remained cruelly wedged into the damaged prow. The doomsday weapon was already compromised, and firing it further carried the risk of total structural failure.
Axion had no choice: he would deploy ground units for an extraction.
With the prow damaged, the Geller Field in that sector was unstable. Nanites could not be exposed to the Warp, or they would spiral into uncontrollable corruption. The adaptive combat cores were not standard nanite swarms; they were ill-suited for ship repair unless Axion desired the core to simply devour the entire Titan.
Legions of mechanical units began to march along the outer hull toward the bow. Thanks to the massive 'V'-shaped breach, some 70 kilometres wide and 600 kilometres long, any machine-entity could easily traverse the gap, even the hulking Punisher Titans. He would have to manually dismember this alien debris.
Just as Axion began directing his mechanical forces, the Space Wolves, who had been straining at the leash for this entire engagement, maneuvered their ships toward the breach. They deployed a swathe of Thunderhawk gunships, charging headlong toward the Void Sword's shattered hull and the embedded alien fortress.
Space warfare was not the natural domain of the Astartes, but any boarding action was a call they would answer with savage enthusiasm. Facing the aid of his allies, Axion found he could not rebuke them, even if the Iron Men required no help at all.
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