Orikan's words were supremely arrogant.
What does he mean, he came here "only to give us a chance"? He's offering us the chance to surrender!
Until recently he had been, at best, a moderately learned astromancer; now he was spouting such bombast at a whole chamber of phaerons and lords.
If he had not had the Nameless One backing him,
these rulers and lords would certainly have taught Orikan that wearing the supreme ruler's crown was not so simple.
Unfortunately, there was no such "if".
Orikan, the supreme ruler, had been chosen by the Nameless One.
And the countless star-gods behind him were under the Nameless One's orders to guard him closely.
"Gentlemen, humans have a proverb: 'He who understands the times is the true hero.'"
"My rule over those who feared death, and the restoration of their former glory, is the will of heaven. Do not make a mistake that will cost you your lives."
Orikan calmly surveyed the faces of the phaerons and lords present, radiating confidence and a regal aura.
"You talk big. Do you think we can do nothing to you?" Imotekh rose, his cold eyes sharp and oppressive.
His voice was not loud, yet every word carried great weight and reassured the many phaerons and lords who harboured misgivings.
"Then what can you do to me?" Orikan smiled faintly and stared at the Stormlord provocatively.
Imotekh's face contorted; fierce wrath blazed from his living-metal features.
His fingers clenched the edge of the control panel so hard they left several deep dents.
This is outrageous! Do they think we won't fight?
Just then, heavy footsteps rang out.
Alerted undying guards poured into the hall, gauss rifles raised, advancing on Orikan, Trazyn and their party.
Among the towering undying warriors, some activated phase weapons whose keen blades glowed an eerie green.
"If you're so confident, let us see who laughs last," Imotekh said coldly.
Better to shatter as jade than survive as a tile.
Even if nothing of me remains today, I will never accept dishonour.
"I wouldn't, if I were you." Orikan kept his composure and regarded the Stormlord with calm assurance.
"Even at our peak — before the chaos of the War in Heaven and the decline of the Great Sleep, with every dynasty sworn to the Triarch — we Necrons could only deal with weakened star-gods."
"And every star-god behind me now stands at the very height of its power."
Orikan turned slightly aside, raised his staff, and gestured casually behind him.
"Once battle begins, they will tear you apart in a matter of seconds."
"Your living-metal bodies may be indestructible and immortal before ordinary creatures, but before a star-god they are just cardboard, a little tougher than usual."
The instant he said it, the countless star-gods released their auras to intimidate the undying present.
Terrible energy surged in like a tide, wave after wave, flattening everything around.
On the walls, the Sautekh dynasty's oldest war-banner began to crack and peel at the edges under the repeated battering.
The living-metal framework reinforcing the whole hull groaned faintly under the strain.
Every undying present, phaerons and overlords included, was trembling uncontrollably, terror written across their faces.
That energy signature was all too familiar; the terror had long since become instinct. It was the destructive aura the star-gods had unleashed on the battlefield when they fought the hosts of the ancient saints in the War in Heaven.
They had not felt energy like it for tens of millions of years.
After that war, the star-gods had been shattered and imprisoned.
They had thought the matter settled for good.
Yet tens of millions of years later,
these radiant vampires had been dug up again and restored to their former zenith.
With their immortal bodies of steel, the phaerons and rulers had preserved their memories forever as well.
Every detail of the past lay intact in their living-metal data-cores, ready to be recalled at any time.
Seeing the star-gods unleash their former power once more, they all cowered, faces twisted in terror.
Imotekh's expression darkened at the sight of his subordinates.
We cannot possibly win this fight.
Orikan was surrounded by star-gods of the highest order, in full possession of their powers.
Every one of them had displayed unrivalled might in the War in Heaven sixty million years ago.
Each commanded unbelievable destructive force, enough to destroy everything in the world.
Even if he mustered his entire army, it would not be enough to fill the gaps between their teeth.
And yet he would not surrender.
He was the Stormlord, the ruler who had swept aside every rival with an iron fist and seized the entire dynasty within a single year.
He had always been the one who made others surrender.
He had never imagined he himself would one day be forced to yield.
Besides, Orikan was plainly a lapdog of the Imperium of Man.
Surrendering to him meant becoming a vassal of humanity and accepting the rule of Terra.
Their race had risen from humble beginnings…
Countless ancestors had striven through their short lives to protect the flickering lamp of civilisation.
They had fought countless battles, smashed many xenos empires, and at last defeated even the ancient race that had been their sworn enemy.
That they must now serve a troop of apes was pitiful and despairing.
"Imotekh, do you still think you have a choice?" Orikan looked at the Stormlord and spoke evenly. "Whatever happens today, your age is over. From now on there will be no more Necrons in the galaxy — only those who fear death."
"I will repair the destruction the Silent King wrought. Those who feared death will regain flesh and blood, heartbeat and breath, and the right to breed and to die."
"Flesh and blood are meaningless! A body of steel forged from living metal is the direction our race must evolve in!" Imotekh roared, obsessed and furious.
"By restoring our flesh and blood, you are not advancing our race — you are making it degenerate."
"We paid an enormous price for eternal life. And now you would return us to feeble biological forms that cannot even withstand stellar radiation? That is betrayal!"
"I pity your ignorance and short-sightedness," Orikan said quietly, sighing and shaking his head.
"We cannot see the true nature of the universe. All we can see are the laws of the material world."
"We must understand that the universe is vast and the material world is not all there is. To explore the other side of the universe, we must first rediscover our own souls."
"You are the one deceived by lies, you short-sighted fool!" Imotekh shot back at the top of his voice.
The other side of the universe — does he mean the so-called Warp?
"That is nothing but the empty talk and delusions of the arrogant, utterly meaningless. The ancient saints also tried to fight us with the psychic power of the Warp — and what came of it?"
"They lost. We drove them from the field and annihilated them."
"The Warp was never the key to victory. The laws of the real universe and the power of matter are the eternal truth."
"Imotekh, I have no wish to waste time debating this with you." Orikan lifted his staff and tapped it lightly on the floor.
"You have no other choice right now."
"Stormlord, your rule ends today. The time has come for it all to end."
With that, Orikan turned to the star-gods behind him. "Unleash the power of purification. Lift the biological curse on these fellows and return them to the form of those who fear death."
The star-gods nodded; each waved a hand, and portals of light opened.
In the next instant seawater gushed from the portals and poured down on the undying guards with pinpoint accuracy.
The moment the seawater touched living metal, the cold, hard silver-white shells rapidly peeled away and were replaced by healthy skin and flesh.
Restored to flesh and blood as those who feared death, the guards looked down at their own hands, flexing their fingers over and over.
"Damn you, how dare you do this! A body of steel is our race's future!" Imotekh shouted in grief and indignation.
Flesh is weak and brittle; steel is eternal.
Flesh is weak and brittle; steel is eternal!
Imotekh kicked off hard and lunged at Orikan. Kill this bastard.
In the next instant the star-gods moved one after another, sealing space-time and locking Imotekh firmly in place.
All Imotekh could do was watch, powerless, as his undying guards were drenched with the medicine one after another.
One by one they changed from cold metal skeletons into warm, fragile flesh and blood.
"Enough. Stop shouting." Trazyn stepped out from behind Orikan, holding a hyperdimensional cube that glowed blue.
"Go and keep Szarekh company. The two of you can stare at each other forever inside the time-loop."
With that, he tossed the hyperdimensional Rubik's cube.
The cube rose, spinning into the air and stopped dead right above Imotekh's head.
It emitted a strange blue light and captured the Stormlord along with many of his subordinates.
The Stormlord and many phaerons and monarchs of various dynasties became specimens in Trazyn's Solemnace collection.
The resistance Imotekh had led was crushed by Orikan in an instant.
Most of the Necrons had watched the Stormlord being sealed in the hyperdimensional cube.
And when they saw their kin freed from the biological curse and restored to flesh, they all abandoned any thought of resistance.
They accepted the baptism and became, once again, those who feared death.
The Stormlord's diehard loyalists, and those who firmly believed a body of steel was the true path, were eliminated by Orikan.
With every threat removed, Orikan formally established himself as supreme ruler and truly unified the Necrons.
The first thing he did after unification was sign an order:
the Pariah dead-zones that had plagued the Imperium of Man were to be permanently shut down.
The associated machinery was moved to places prone to Warp rifts and redeployed there,
forming a veil-like barrier that reinforced the material world against the Warp and made it harder for the power of Chaos to reach into the real universe.
With Orikan as supreme ruler, the Necrons changed back into what they had once been — those who feared death — and formally became a vassal of the Imperium of Man.
The Mechanicum gained the chance to absorb all manner of Necron technology and advanced theory.
Living-metal casting techniques, the principles of gauss weaponry, the energy-conduit design of phase blades, the dimensional-folding equations of dolmen gates — all of it was now open to study by the sages of the Mechanicum.
The Nameless One's standing within the Mechanicum rose accordingly, and the voices proclaiming him the true Machine God grew ever louder.
(Emperor: I too believe the Nameless One is the true Machine God.)
"The Necron problem is solved. Next?"
Datch watched Orikan closely for a while. Satisfied that this NPC could handle important missions, he prepared for the next stage of the plan.
His ultimate mission was to destroy the four Warp gods and deal a crushing blow to the forces of Chaos.
Simply declaring war on the four gods, leading the star-gods and the Primarchs into the depths of the Warp, and defeating them one by one would not be very effective.
The Four were not mere enemies. They were aggregates of countless emotions of despair and pain born from life in the material world.
Even if defeated once, they would reappear in the future.
Solving the problem for good would take patience: peeling away layer after layer and exposing every card in their hand.
Datch decided to deal with the other gods of the Warp first.
He planned to eliminate the four gods' allies and potential allies one by one, then find a way to replace them within the system of the gods. In his head, he ran through every known god in the galaxy.
Whether in the material world or the Warp, he lined them all up and assessed each one's threat level and usefulness.
At last, his gaze settled on a small blue point of light slowly spreading at the eastern edge of the Milky Way.
"A T'au goddess born from the T'au race's Greater Good. Let's look into her background first."
Datch had decided to start with an easy target.
The T'au's soul-projection in the Warp was weak, appearing only as a very faint, tiny point of light.
It was so feeble even the lowliest Chaos daemon would not bother tempting them.
If the soul-projection is indistinct, even the strongest faith means nothing.
So although the T'au had long worshipped the Greater Good, no corresponding Warp entity had ever formed.
Not until they took in other races and formed auxiliary units —
human deserters, Kroot, Vespid, and countless frontier xenos races.
These races possessed psychic power and soul-projection far stronger than the T'au themselves.
Once enough subject races had embraced the Greater Good, an echo rang through the Warp, and the goddess Titania was born.
Commander Shadowsun, the T'au Empire's most outstanding commander and wielder of the Sword of the Innocent, had fallen into desperate straits time and again, yet had always received the T'au goddess's help.
When an immature experiment with the AL-38 underground module malfunctioned and whipped up a gigantic Warp storm, it was the T'au goddess's intervention that saved the T'au Empire's Fourth Sphere Expansion fleet.
She had also created the Startide Nexus, allowing the T'au Empire to move freely between regions of the galaxy.
She had helped Shadowsun defeat the Death Guard Legion.
But her power was far weaker than that of the four Chaos Gods, which made her the perfect sparring partner.
"You're the one, then. The T'au goddess." Having fixed his aim on her, Datch prepared to act.
...