The Scyllax Guardian Automata did not fight cleanly.
They were not built to. Their serpentine frames twisted and coiled around the blue giant's limbs and torso in a continuous, overlapping press, each one driving its chainsword into whatever surface presented itself, regardless of angle or purchase. Blue flesh parted. Blue blood spattered across the broken ground, carrying its gamma charge with it, pooling in the craters left by the earlier bombardment. The cuts closed almost as fast as they were made, but the Scyllax did not care about that either. They simply cut again.
The blue giant roared and threw them off in handfuls. Each impact sent a unit skidding across the rubble for dozens of meters, limbs gouging furrows in the earth. It did not matter. Before the thrown unit had landed, three more had closed the gap from another angle, claws and saw-teeth finding new purchase, wrapping their frames around whatever they could reach.
Nolan worked the perimeter, the Ten Rings cycling in tight, continuous passes, each loop adding another point of pressure to the creature's constantly regenerating body, keeping it turned, keeping it reactive, preventing it from settling into any single sustained offensive. Two hundred meters back, the Knight Dominus suits had reloaded and were walking their fire across the gamma monster's flanks in deliberate, measured bursts.
Then the tank engines became audible through the pink haze.
The mutant armored formations had closed on the battlefield, their hulls moving through the gamma-saturated air with the stubborn momentum of vehicles crewed by people who had decided the radiation was someone else's problem for the moment. Turrets traversed and settled, and then the artillery opened up.
The sound of it was total. The rounds came down across the blue giant's position in a concentration that churned the surrounding ground and threw up a continuous curtain of fire and displaced earth, and for a moment the creature was entirely obscured inside it.
Under the combined weight of the artillery, the Scyllax swarms, and the Knight bombardment, the blue giant slowed. The roaring became less frequent, then less coherent. The enormous body took on the posture of something being worn down, shoulders dropping, movements losing their previous explosive quality. One knee descended to the scorched ground. The thick arms hung lower.
Then the gamma radiation shifted.
It moved with the deliberate, purposeful quality of water draining toward a hole, the visible pink wash that Nova had spread across the entire exclusion zone drawing inward from the perimeter and concentrating on the kneeling figure at the center of the battlefield. The radiation density within tens of kilometers of range collapsed toward the blue giant as if being summoned, and the barely-standing skeleton of flesh and exposed bone drank it in.
The wounds sealed. The mass rebuilt itself. The creature rose.
Seven meters. Then taller.
It opened its empty eyes on the Scyllax surrounding it and screamed.
Nolan was already moving.
He activated the vibranium wings in propulsion configuration, driving himself forward and upward in a controlled burn, and opened the simulator's inventory page mid-flight. His hand closed around a cluster of melta bombs, pulling them into his palm, his fingers finding the detonation switches by touch.
Below him, the Scyllax received their order.
They stopped trying to cut. They wrapped themselves around the blue giant's limbs instead, every available unit locking its frame to an arm or leg or section of torso, converting themselves from combatants into restraints, anchoring the creature's movements through the sheer weight and grip of accumulated metal bodies.
Nolan dove.
He pulled the detonation switches on all of them simultaneously and released the cluster at the apex of his dive, then drove the propulsion hard to change direction, the power armor shuddering with the abrupt reversal.
The melta bombs went off in sequence, each detonation a point of light that merged with the next, the combined thermal output rising in a column of incandescence that had no interest in distinguishing between what had been living and what had been metal. The shockwave from the overlapping blasts traveled outward in a ring, fast enough that the Astartes within a hundred meters went for cover on instinct, dropping behind chunks of collapsed wall and shattered foundation slabs. The Knight Dominus suits turned their backs to the blast and took long strides away from the epicenter, their systems logging thermal spikes at the edge of their operational parameters.
Nolan stabilized his altitude and looked down.
Where the blue giant had stood, there was a lava pit approximately thirty meters across, its floor dark red and still moving in slow, viscous currents. Half-submerged in the cooling metal was a large and partially melted skeletal structure that had been the size of a building. A faint trace of pale pink radiation drifted upward from the bones in thin wisps.
Not the ambient gamma of the exclusion zone. The radiation was coming from the skeleton itself. Whatever Rick Jones had become in the depths of that transformation, the energy was bound to him at a level that melta heat had not entirely resolved.
But he was not moving.
Nolan descended.
The casualty count was brief and relatively contained, given what the last hour had involved.
The Scyllax Guardian Automata that had locked onto the blue giant at the moment of detonation were gone entirely. Several hundred units, absorbed into the same thermal event that had ended the fight. Nolan noted it without ceremony. They had done exactly what they were designed to do.
Of the seven Astartes who had fought alongside him, one White Scars battle-brother had taken a direct strike from the blue giant that had compromised his armor's structural integrity and transmitted enough force through the ceramite to cause serious internal damage. He had received treatment and was stable, his body doing the work that Astartes physiology was bred for. He would recover.
Nolan exchanged a few words with the Raven Guard champions, then crossed to where the mutant tank formation had stopped its advance.
The commander was already climbing down from his vehicle, a heavyset man wearing a thick radiation suit that had seen considerable use, the faceplate smeared with condensation from the inside. He pulled it up as Nolan approached, revealing the catlike hair, the deep lines around the jaw, the cheap cigar that appeared to be a permanent fixture.
General Logan extended a hand. Nolan took it.
They stood for a moment in the cooling air of a battlefield that had just finished being a battlefield, two people on opposite sides of several significant political and philosophical distances, shaking hands over a shared piece of work.
Logan offered the cigar case.
Nolan declined with a brief shake of the skull helm.
Logan did not appear surprised. He put the case away and looked toward the lava pit, then back at Nolan, and asked the question with the directness of a man who wanted a straight answer: what was the weapon that had produced that result?
Nolan considered for a moment.
Diplomatic alliance was the correct approach here. That much had already been settled in his thinking before Magneto had demonstrated exactly why it was the correct approach. Extending a degree of goodwill was not a strategic weakness; it was the foundation of a workable relationship.
He reached back into his armor's storage space and produced a single melta bomb, its casing intact, its detonation assembly disengaged.
He handed it to Logan.
Whether the mutant technical staff or any number of superhuman intellects could reverse-engineer it was not a concern that kept him awake. The Warhammer universe's manufacturing tolerances and material sciences were not something that yielded easily to examination. Even Reed Richards, arguably the most acute scientific mind this world had produced, had required a significant period of study under Doom before he had managed anything approaching a working understanding.
A melta bomb was a gift. What they chose to do with it was their own affair.
Logan turned the device over in his hands with the careful attention of a man who respected things that could kill him, and the expression on his weathered face suggested he had already decided he liked Nolan.