Chapter 406: The Reaver Titan
Mechanicus militants were essentially small iron men, with barely any organic tissue left, which meant they could handle weaponry too dirty for ordinary humans, including high-radiation arms. Rad-guns, for instance, fired ultra-high-intensity radioactive rounds. Even a target that didn't die outright from the hit would succumb to radiation sickness afterward. And because the militants used radioactive weapons constantly, their own bodies carried radiation levels off the charts, standing there like something out of an old irradiated-trooper sprite from a strategy game.
Kian's power armour made radiation a non-issue, but this fight wasn't his to get involved in, and he had no particular interest in jumping in uninvited. He just stood by the window and watched the show.
It was full night by then, the sandstorm still raging, visibility poor. All he could make out were occasional flashes of light bursting through the dust.
He had no idea how large the Ork incursion was, or whether the militants could actually hold the line, but for now he was content to watch it unfold in comfort from his room.
Over an hour passed before a violent flash lit up the window, followed immediately by a deep shudder that shook the whole structure.
"Nuclear shells! They're using nuclear artillery!"
Kian let out a startled shout.
Whatever this Ork incursion was, it had to be massive. Through the heavy curtain of dust outside, flashes kept lighting up again and again. The nuclear detonations kept flashing through the night. He counted along, and by the time it was over, the militants had fired a total of twenty-seven nuclear shells over the course of a single night.
As the terrible flashes kept rolling on, time crept forward slowly, until finally the sandstorm died down, the sun rose, and the chaos outside settled back into quiet.
That was when a knock came at the door of his quarters. Kian answered it to find Tech-priest Boothe waiting.
"Count, the fighting is over. Every Ork intruder has been eliminated. There's no need for concern. Also, Magos Ferrocore has responded to your request. He'll see you now, if you'll follow me."
"Oh, that fast?"
Kian found it a little strange. He'd submitted the request only the day before and already had a response. That wasn't exactly typical Imperial bureaucratic speed.
He put his helmet back on and followed Boothe out of the quarters, heading deeper into the Titan Temple. Along the way, Kian probed a little.
"How'd it go last night? Looked like you fired off a lot of nuclear shells."
Boothe answered as he led the way. "The situation wasn't good, Count. Last night's assault involved a full three hundred thousand Orks, including a large contingent of armoured vehicles and war-machines. The nearest front line sits just two hundred and thirty kilometers from the Temple, and it seems the Ork mechanized column used the cover of the sandstorm to punch through the defensive line and push all the way to our doorstep. This isn't the first time this has happened, either. Nearly every week now, we see a large-scale Ork assault directed specifically at the Titan Temple."
Kian mulled that over. "Every week? Feels less like a coincidence and more like these Orks are specifically after the Temple."
Boothe nodded. "That's exactly right, Count. Of every defensive line on this planet, the pressure around the Titan Temple is by far the heaviest. What you may not know is that Blackiron, the greenskin leader, is unusually technically capable for an Ork. Whenever his forces capture humans, he keeps the useful ones as slave labourers. In the process, those human captives inevitably let slip that there's a divine machine housed here, which is exactly why the Temple has become his primary target."
Kian let out a knowing sound. That made perfect sense. Orks loved anything big and impressive, and a towering, walking metal fortress like a Titan hit every note in an Ork's idea of beautiful.
Boothe led Kian aboard a small cargo train, which carried them the rest of the way to the Temple at speed. Along the route, they passed a striking sight: a river of molten slag, over eighty meters wide and more than five hundred meters long, glowing white-hot.
Kian watched as heavy cranes and transport vehicles hauled a stream of bizarre Ork war-machines and scrap-tanks to the edge of the molten river and dumped them straight in, one after another. Every wreck sank into the glowing current and dissolved into liquid metal.
Whenever the river rose too high and threatened to overflow, floodgates at the far end opened and released the excess. That molten alloy, a chaotic blend of every metal the Orks had scavenged, flowed straight into the surrounding factories, where it was forged into steel plating. Most of the finished plate went straight to reinforcing the walls ringing the Temple's perimeter.
Layer upon layer of those thick steel ramparts encircled the entire Titan Temple complex.
Seeing Kian's fascination, Boothe explained further. "Ork salvage capability is a serious problem. Destroying an Ork tank isn't enough on its own, we also have to haul the wreckage back from the front and dump it in this river to guarantee it's actually destroyed for good. This river exists purely for that purpose. Every day, our forces bring back a hundred or more wrecked Ork vehicles from the front to be melted down here. The quality of Ork metalwork is too poor to reuse for our own weapons or equipment, so instead it gets recast into plate steel and used to build these walls."
By then, their transport had already rolled into the Titan Temple itself. The five-hundred-meter pyramid served as both a mega-factory and a place of religious worship. Inside, a full twenty void shield generators stood ready. Even a full enemy fleet bombarding the Temple from orbit would find its attacks rendered a joke, the twenty overlapping shields providing constant, layered protection against anything fired from space.
Kian had expected to meet Magos Ferrocore in some suitably formal setting. Instead, he found the Magos waiting for him inside the elevator itself.
Magos Ferrocore stood over three meters tall, and barely resembled a human being at all anymore, more a hulking mass of mechanical worm-limbs than anything else. He moved on a full twelve mechanical legs, and a massive hump rose from his back, housing an extraordinarily complex bank of processing cores. The only remotely human feature left on him was his head, a mechanical approximation of one, barely humanoid in shape. Even that was mounted, absurdly, not on a human neck but on a series of universal joints, letting it extend and retract like an articulated mechanical arm.
Kian stared at the hulking mass of machinery, genuinely startled. What the hell, did this thing even still count as human?
Magos Ferrocore seemed to be en route to some other business, and the moment Kian stepped into the elevator, he skipped any greeting whatsoever and simply issued an order.
"Retainer of the Inquisitor. I will devote whatever resources are necessary to repair every Knight suit in your possession. In exchange, until the greenskin crisis here is fully resolved, every one of your Knight suits will serve under me. They will be temporarily inducted into the militant forces, defending this Forge Temple and ensuring no divine machine here is ever defiled by the xenos."
Just then, the elevator arrived at its destination, doors sliding open onto the Temple's upper levels.
The view opened up dramatically ahead of them. Surrounded by a forest of heavy lifting cranes and repair rigs stood a towering, magnificent divine machine, forty meters tall, standing like a god made manifest.
Beneath it, ranks of tech-priests stood arrayed in formation, bent low, censers swinging in hand, murmuring endless binary litanies. Nearly a thousand voices, chanting in perfect unison, their combined sound rising into genuine resonance.
The entire hall rang with sacred binary prayer, the godlike Reaver Titan bathed in that devotion, a blessing it had been born to receive as its rightful due.
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