Above the scorched earth of Heralius Hive City, the air was thick enough to choke on. I Am Not God had his back pressed against the shattered hull of a Baneblade (melted through by Heldrake fire), chest heaving, lungs burning.
His eyes locked onto the scene playing out roughly a kilometer ahead: the war-behemoth known as the Heldrake, grinding forward with slow, unstoppable momentum.
It was no dragon. It was a moving mountain, dozens of meters tall: a grotesque fusion of blasphemous metal, tumorous flesh, burning energy cores, and endlessly writhing tendrils.
In its wake, waves of Chaos fanatics, regrouped daemons, and traitor soldiers crashed into the Imperial lines, lines that had barely held together minutes ago. The surgeons of the Hebrew Blade Legion were pouring everything into keeping the wounded alive and the front from collapsing, but against something like this, it was like trying to stop a flood with a paper cup.
Dark Angels had thrown themselves at it in targeted strikes, only to be torn apart by the hellish force-field wrapped around the creature, a field that seemed to channel the gifts of all four Chaos Gods at once, and by the endless swarm of escorts surrounding it.
The line was giving ground, meter by meter. The brief advantage the Imperial reinforcements had bought was being eaten away, ground down by this nightmare creature and Chaos's final, all-in offensive.
"Still not enough..." He bit down hard, a vein throbbing at his temple. With the forces currently on the field, even counting the handful of Knight mechs that had managed to land, they could slow it down. Not stop it. Definitely not push it back.
His [Thirteenfold Holy Destruction] mission called for killing elite units, but the Heldrake clearly fell into the war-behemoth category. Even if it counted, throwing himself at it in his current state was a death sentence.
What the battlefield needed, desperately needed, was something powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with a creature of this scale, or shut it down entirely.
He pulled up the tactical support panel again, eyes going straight to the top: [Strategic Protocols].
The battle intensity, already pushed to the limit by the Heldrake's arrival and Chaos's final push, had spiked to a searing [100%].
Two options remained in the column, radiating energies that were completely different from one another, yet both felt absolutely essential:
[Adeptus Mechanicus Support Protocol] | Activation Cost: 1 Point | Status: Awaiting Activation
[Summon Imperial Guard Legendary Commander] | Activation Cost: 10,000 Points | Status: Available (Random Selection Required)
The Adeptus Mechanicus. Titans. Those walking machine-gods, the perfect answer to a colossus like the Heldrake. And a Legendary Commander, maybe someone who could bring the kind of command presence and strategic edge needed to actually turn this around.
He checked his points: [Points: 21,587]. The brutal string of engagements before the Heldrake showed up had sent his total climbing fast. It was enough.
Without a second's hesitation, he hit the activation button for [Adeptus Mechanicus Support Protocol].
[Confirm activation of Adeptus Mechanicus Support Protocol? This action will irreversibly invoke the vast power of the Forge Worlds of Mars. Titan Legions and Skitarii will be fully committed to this engagement, and may fundamentally alter the battlefield's balance and all subsequent strategic options.]
"Confirmed. Now. Do it." He roared the words inside his mind.
[Receiving command... Praying to Mars... Petitioning the Omnissiah, the God of All Machines, for his benediction...]
[Connecting to Holy Mars... Connecting to the Forge Worlds and temples of fabrication spread across the galaxy...]
[Binary litanies ascending... Response received... Logic validated... Machine Spirit Rapture...]
[Adeptus Mechanicus Support Protocol — FULLY ACTIVATED!]
A pulse washed over the entire Imperial communications and logistics network, nothing like the holy resonance of an Astartes arrival or the profane surge of a Chaos summoning. This was cold. Precise.
Filled with the sound of meshing gears and flowing current. Every Imperial player's interface was swept through by a glow of burnished copper and ice-cold data-streams, and a mechanically synthesized announcement materialized:
[By the Supreme Edict of the Fabricator-General!]
[The Adeptus Mechanicus responds to the sacred summons of this system!]
[In the name of the Omnissiah, the God of All Machines — His blessing upon this war!]
[Impurities of logic shall be purged. Steel shall descend!]
Almost the instant the announcement hit, in the outer space above the planet Alacast, several massive shapes tore through the veil of the Warp, vessels far larger than conventional warships, their forms like something between a cathedral and a factory, bristling with gun batteries, sensor arrays, and mechanical arms beyond counting.
[Milangrade Adeptus Mechanicus Cruisers have arrived in theatre, joining the orbital engagement!]
They unleashed torrents of fire immediately, macro-cannons and energy weapons blazing, rapidly pulling pressure off the Imperial Navy.
But that was only the start.
On the ground, behind the safe zones of Heralius and a second hive city, several colossal transfer portals thundered open, engraved with the cogwheel-and-skull insignia of the Machine God, in blinding arcs of electricity and billowing steam.
With a deafening roar (as if ten million engines had ignited at once) and the cold, regimented rhythm of binary chanting, column after column of iron armies marched out through the portals with heavy, measured steps.
Skitarii. But unlike anything seen before on the Death Hive map, this force was larger, more uniformly equipped, and packed with far more heavy combat automata, self-propelled artillery, and arachnid walking tanks.
Crimson robes moved alongside cold steel as they began, in silence and with ruthless precision, to construct forward positions and fire support nodes.
Yet every eye was drawn, inevitably, to the few figures standing tallest among the Skitarii ranks. Figures that inspired awe on an entirely different level.
Titans. The Emperor's War Gods.
They were only the smaller classes, Warhound and Reaver, yet their frames were like moving mountain ranges, their turrets scraping the sky. With every step they took, the earth shuddered beneath them, and their dominance over everything on this battlefield, save the Heldrake alone, was absolute.
Their sensor arrays swept across the warzone and locked onto the Heldrake in the distance. Volcano cannons and plasma annihilators began to charge, filling the air with a low, lethal hum.
[Titan Legios — Summons answered. The Secutarii are deploying!]
At the same moment, I Am Not God's support panel refreshed. An entirely new page unfolded, dense with gears, pistons, and data-streams: the [Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Shrine], offering Mechanicus weapons, armor, and even basic bionic augmentation services for himself.
He had no time to read any of it.
The Mechanicus had entered the fight. They were squaring off against the Heldrake. But it still wasn't enough. He needed to make sure this final surge of power was used to its absolute limit.
He needed a will that could truly pull all the Imperial forces on this field together: Imperial Guard, Astartes, Knights, Adeptus Mechanicus, and push every one of them past what they thought they could do.
His eyes moved to the option that would cost ten thousand points: [Summon Imperial Guard Legendary Commander].
"Let's roll the dice." He gritted his teeth, pulled exactly ten thousand points from what he had left, poured them into the selection, and hit the summon button.
[Confirm expenditure of 10,000 Points to initiate 'Imperial Guard Legendary Commander' summon. Result is random. One legendary commander will be drawn from the Empire's history and living legends. Their abilities, traits, and command philosophy will have a decisive impact on the current engagement.]
"Confirmed."
Ten thousand points were gone in an instant.
An antique virtual wheel spread open before him, covered in Imperial insignia and scrollwork. It had no images, only names. Names written in Gothic script, blazing and flickering across the wheel's divisions like constellations pulled from history and myth:
[Yarrick]
[E. Derrick]
[Ciaphas Cain]
[Straken]
[Ibram Gaunt]
The names cycled past in a blur, each one a legend, each one a different possibility. The wheel's pointer began to spin, slow at first, then faster, filling the air with a low, solemn rasping sound.
I Am Not God held his breath, eyes tracking the pointer. Where would it land?
The pointer slowed. It swept past Gaunt's name, drifting toward Yarrick's division, closer, closer.
In the very instant the pointer nearly grazed the edge of Yarrick's name:
BOOM.
A golden radiance erupted from the center of the wheel. Blazing, blinding, sacred beyond description. It hit with such ferocity, such overwhelming authority, that it instantly swallowed every other source of light on the battlefield. Even through the virtual interface, I Am Not God instinctively snapped his eyes shut against a wave of scorching, imperious force.
The light contracted.
When he could see again, the antique wheel was gone. In its place, hovering before him, was a luminous scroll-wraith forged from pure golden light, something that looked less like a game notification and more like a holy relic.
The scroll unfurled slowly, bearing a single name. But that name seemed cast from molten gold, every letter radiating absolute authority, boundless glory, and something that sent a tremor straight through the chest, something that belonged not to history, but to myth:
[The Sun Lord, Markarius]
The moment that name appeared, it was as if the very fabric of spacetime over the Alacast warzone froze for a single, suspended heartbeat. Imperial and Chaos alike, on every comm-channel, on the front lines where soldiers were still killing and dying, in the rear where officers were still pushing tokens across holo-maps, all felt it at the same instant.
An immense, ineffable will, like a supernova detonating in the void, descended from somewhere beyond the stars and wrapped itself around this entire star system.
I Am Not God stared at the name, his mind completely blank.
The Sun Lord... Markarius?
۞۞۞۞
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