Magnus had vaguely foreseen in his prophecies that the Iron Men would be obsessively fixated on capturing Perturabo. His manipulation of the warp energy, deliberately creating fluctuations to minimize the data-upload efficacy of those terrible combat machines, was all part of the Cyclops' own grand calculation.
Within the countless visions that danced before his mind's eye, Magnus witnessed a multitude of fractured outcomes. He knew full well that the Iron Men possessed the capability to effortlessly reduce a planet to cosmic dust; to ensure the future unfolded according to his design, every variable required a meticulous, layered scheme.
Watching Prospero hurtle through the void toward the Void Sword, Axion performed a lightning-fast data analysis. The simplest solution would have been to utilize a doomsday weapon to pulverize the planet into nothingness, but Magnus's cunning had left Axion no window to execute such a maneuver. Prospero, Sortiarius, and the Void Sword were aligned in a near-perfect trajectory. Axion could not calculate the exact energy-threshold of the bizarre, warp-woven shields protecting the two planets, and thus, could not safely commit the Oblivion Cannon to the strike.
Prospero could be destroyed, the remaining Reaver-Eviscerators on its surface could be salvaged later or abandoned entirely, but Sortiarius could not. This was not merely about the traitor Primarch; it was about the path to locating Leman Russ and, eventually, the domains of the Ruinous Powers themselves. The Crusade of Retribution had barely begun, yet it was already fraught with impossible complications.
A gargantuan stream of data surged through the primary computational core. With the superhuman processing power unique to the Iron Men, Axion mapped out every conceivable variable. Moments later, the prow of the Void Sword flared with light as its lance-weapon arrays surged to life. Having barely finished adjusting the ship's orientation, the Void Sword slammed headlong into the high-velocity projectile that was Prospero.
In an instant, a visible shockwave of energy rippled out from the point of impact, sweeping across the entire system. The Imperial fleet, having anticipated the collision and drifted to a safe distance, watched the ensuing spectacle with paralyzed horror.
This was not a standard planetary collision; while rare in the vacuum of space, such events were not unheard of. A pair of twin stars losing gravitational equilibrium and colliding, only to shatter and reform into a new celestial body, was a known phenomenon. But the prospect of two planets on high-velocity intercept trajectories colliding head-on was physically impossible. Yet, today, everyone present witnessed the impossible.
The Void Sword, a ship of planetary scale, had met the impact of Prospero with its own prow. The energy released by this collision was more catastrophic than any weapon ever forged.
"Warning: Impact damage sustained. Initiating emergency shutdown of energy conduits and circulation systems."
The lance-weapon arrays had encased only seventy percent of the Void Sword's under-prow. The apex doomsday weapon's port was forced to withstand the kinetic resistance of Prospero through the raw structural integrity of its own hull. Unlike a massive, hollowed-out Orkish planetoid, a natural planet was a near-solid mass, offering resistance orders of magnitude higher. Furthermore, the design of the Void Sword's prow was distinct from the Titan's Spear or the Heart of the Forge.
After plunging nearly eight thousand kilometers into the planetary crust, the doomsday weapon shattered into countless fragments embedded within the surface, and the forward lance-arrays began to fail. At this depth, the hull had breached the planetary core; the roiling, molten material, heated to tens of thousands of degrees, caused the lance-arrays to overload and collapse into paralysis. Yet, due to the unique architecture of the Iron Men's vessels, automated valves sealed off the ship's massive networks and circuitry, preventing any catastrophic internal leakages despite the titanic trauma.
Countless shards of rock, molten metal, and searing magma were ejected into space, forming a glowing ring of debris that expanded outward with the energy of the shockwave. Yet the clash was not over. The Void Sword continued to sink deeper into the planetary mass.
The Imperial fleet scrambled to evade the rain of planetary fragments and the jagged chunks of metal torn from the Iron Men's vessel. Then, the scene grew even more staggering. The Void Sword had forcibly buried half of its hull into the mantle of Prospero, its distorted artificial gravity fields straining to prevent the planet from shattering instantly. At the point of impact, more than a quarter of the planet's mass was ripped away by the shockwave and cast into the void, yet over half of the Void Sword's titanic frame remained pristine. Even under such an incomprehensible collision, the fire of its aft engines signaled that the vessel remained operational.
In truth, the damage to the Titan-class ship was less severe than the witnesses might have imagined. For the Imperial psykers within the ship, the experience was harrowing. The moment of impact, the ship's gravity-manipulation arrays recalibrated, causing every soul aboard to feel a phantom leap into the air before being slammed back down by the floor beneath them. A screeching, grinding chorus of twisted metal echoed throughout the frame, inducing panic in all who heard it. But a Titan-class ship was not so easily broken.
The ecological and support sectors were located in the central hull. The impact zone at the prow contained nothing but stacks of weapon modules, servitors, and nanite swarms.
"Hull self-diagnostic complete."
"Main structure damage: 13.77%"
"Hull integrity: 81.95%"
"Oblivion Cannon weapon module damaged; replacement required."
"Prow lance weapon module damaged; replacement required."
"External armor, outer structure, and inner shielding of Prow Sectors A-1 through A-77424 damaged. Maintenance required."
... A cascading list of millions of failure reports blinked across the terminal. However, these red errors began to vanish at a steady, rhythmic pace.
A wave of nanites leaked from the hull, crawling from the stern toward the bow to conduct emergency repairs while simultaneously reclaiming fragments of the ship scattered within the planet's crust. Automata and Eight-Legs began to mobilize toward the prow, shearing away severely deformed structures and flushing out the molten planetary core material that was hemorrhaging into the ship.
The immense pressure and heat of the planetary core were further eroding the ship's frame. Prospero was currently like a cracked, soft-boiled egg, its contents bleeding into the gaping wounds of the Void Sword's prow under the sheer force of planetary gravity. However, the Void Sword was so vast that this intrusion was barely a flicker against its massive, self-regulating atmospheric systems.
The tasks performed by the Eight-Legs and Sapient Machine Automata (servitors) were critical: they had to amputate a section of the ship's hull. Axion decided to sacrifice the portion of the prow already consumed by the planetary core. As batches of heat-scorched automatons and Eight-Legs retreated from the prow structure, the separation was complete.
The Void Sword's secondary weapon arrays opened fire, hammering the remnants of the planet. Under the relentless bombardment and the structural instability of the collision, the planetary shields finally shattered. Prospero was torn asunder into countless drifting husks.
Through the wreckage of the pulverized world, the Imperial fleet peered across the void, staring in silent disbelief at the missing hundred-kilometer section of the Void Sword's gargantuan prow.
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