Andrallo suddenly realized these war-bodies were better at using psychic power than he was.
Cold fusion cores supplied the war-bodies with tremendous energy, while their psychic engines granted them power that defied reality itself.
These six-meter steel giants tore across the battlefield at speeds the naked eye couldn’t follow, shifting back and forth between realspace and the Warp.
The Warp’s own nature, where time and space no longer held together in any continuous way, made their movement look like nothing short of teleportation.
Faced with the war-bodies closing the distance at blinding speed, the Astra Militarum’s artillery let out a deafening roar, tens of thousands of shells raining down around them.
Concussion charges and laser cannons set up along the line fired in continuous bursts, throwing up sheet after sheet of scorching flame, while countless lasgun beams wove together across the battlefield into a curtain of light bright enough that even the Imperial Navy up in orbit could see it clearly.
But none of it could actually hurt the war-bodies at all.
Their bodies flickered back and forth through the Warp, existing in something like a Schrödinger’s state, and even the handful of bolt rounds or lasgun hits that did land did nothing more than scratch their armor.
“Significant laser energy dispersion.
Rocket-assisted rounds carrying insufficient effective payload.
Poor charge efficiency in the artillery shells.
Assessment: low-tier firepower.”
The war-bodies silently assessed the Astra Militarum’s arsenal.
After comparing notes among themselves, they found the whole thing baffling.
How was an interstellar civilization’s army still fielding equipment like this?
Baffling or not, there was no question of holding back.
Twin cannon barrels extended from behind each war-body’s back and locked into position over its shoulders, a crimson glow gradually building within them.
To the Astra Militarum, all they saw was the enemy suddenly flaring with red light.
They’d already faced down every kind of horror imaginable, though, so a threat like this didn’t seem to fall outside anything they’d already braced for.
“Perdition Beams!
Kaides, you can miniaturize that too?”
Watching the battle unfold from within the violet mist, Andrallo suddenly recognized what he was looking at.
Back in the game, the ground forces he’d built had absurdly overpowered splash damage, but he hadn’t expected it would come from this.
“Chief, the technology itself isn’t difficult.
It’s just that mounting it on infantry-scale units is too inefficient.
The war-bodies’ sheer size makes up for that shortfall, though.”
As Kaides finished speaking, the war-bodies unleashed nearly a hundred crimson beams at once.
Networked and calculated together, each ray fired independently of the others, striking every single Astra Militarum position with pinpoint precision.
The miniaturized Perdition Beams didn’t travel entirely through realspace.
Their psychic engines disturbed the firing trajectory, letting the beams move faster than light, anchored directly to their targets, striking straight out of the Warp itself.
Unless a target could deflect the beam psychically, it would find its mark regardless, even if the target tried to dodge at faster-than-light speed.
Their bodies were annihilated in an instant, the beam’s energy scattering evenly outward the moment it struck.
In a single exchange, the curtain of light and the roar of bolt rounds fell silent, replaced by a sky full of red light.
The Astra Militarum’s flesh, the soil underfoot, the dug-in fortifications, and their armor were all torn apart, then pulled back together again.
The ground itself turned into an ocean, black waves rolling and churning, sweeping outward like a tide and swallowing every soldier in the rear who hadn’t already died.
For a moment, the Imperium’s countless guns fell silent.
“Artillery!!
Blow those blasphemous machines to pieces!!”
The colonel commanding the artillery regiment in the rear bellowed the order, having finally grasped just how far out of their depth they were.
The gun crews froze for a moment at the sight in front of them, then scrambled to work their guns the instant they heard the colonel’s order.
But before they could finish loading, a silver six-legged mechanical spider suddenly darted out right beside them.
“Wha—!”
The explosion was instantaneous.
The Astra Militarum’s artillery position went up in a chain of secondary detonations, the single most important firepower capable of suppressing the war-bodies wiped out completely.
The Astra Militarum artillery colonel was left utterly stunned.
How had the enemy reached their rear-echelon gun positions?
A moment later, the ground itself began to shudder violently, and a massive drilling rig burst up through the soil, a swarm of machines of every kind pouring out of the tunnel behind it.
Well, that explained it!
That explained it after all.
…
With the artillery no longer standing in their way, the war-bodies teleported to the Astra Militarum’s front line in an instant, opening up with every weapon they carried.
Triple-barreled rotary cannons, disruptor cannons, flamers, plasma assault cannons, and miniaturized Perdition Beams all opened fire in turn.
The Astra Militarum sent Leman Russ tanks to meet them, but it wasn’t until the war-bodies actually closed to point-blank range that the soldiers truly understood what they were up against.
The sheer size of the six-meter frames and the dense array of weapons mounted across them bred despair almost instantly.
Every soldier in the Astra Militarum found themselves wondering the same thing: could they actually win against monsters like this?
A few of the weaker-willed among the Astra Militarum turned to flee, but the commissars shot the deserters down on the spot, brain matter and still-warm blood spraying across the faces of the grunts around them, driving the reality of the situation home.
In the end, the Astra Militarum’s fear of their own commissars won out over their fear of the war-bodies.
The grunts roared and opened fire on the machines.
“For the Emperor!!”
And then the war-bodies tore the Astra Militarum in front of them to pieces with everything they had. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“Unfortunate.
Slogans don’t provide any material advantage.
You should have brought more reinforcements.”
What happened next, though, fell outside anything the war-bodies’ central processors had anticipated.
As the Astra Militarum and their attached priest cried out the Emperor’s name, golden light began to shine from a handful of them.
Heavy rounds, energy weapons, even laser beams, all of it was deflected or absorbed by that golden light.
The soldiers glowing with that golden light fired with pinpoint accuracy, their bullets and lasers punching straight through the war-bodies’ psychic shields and energy barriers alike, striking home and throwing off sparks with every hit.
The war-bodies’ processors ran at full speed and immediately worked out the underlying principle.
“Anomalous psychic fluctuation, and it isn’t coming from the soldiers themselves.
Something within the Warp is answering their call.”
No hesitation.
No alarm.
No restraint.
The war-bodies’ psychic engines began to output at full power, violet psychic lightning crackling to life along their mechanical arms.
The temperature around them plummeted.
Frost spread across the ground, mud and blood freezing solid where they lay, and the Astra Militarum soldiers nearby felt a bitter wind claw its way into their bodies, their own blood seeming to freeze in their veins.
Violet lightning burst from the war-bodies’ hands, spreading outward in a fan across the field, and the instant it made contact with the golden light, the whole thing erupted into a sky full of blazing fire, golden psychic flame sweeping across the entire battlefield.
The very power that should have protected the Astra Militarum detonated out of control instead, becoming a catastrophe for every human present.
Every soldier the golden flame passed over was reduced to nothing but scattered ash, their souls destroyed right along with their bodies in an instant.
“A strange power.” Kaides murmured to himself, eyes fixed on the readout.
“What’s wrong, Kaides?
What’s off about this psychic power?” Andrallo had sensed the unusual energy too.
“Chief, this power carries both destruction and hope at once, but neither one is pure.
It’s not like your own cycle of destruction and creation either.
This is too extreme, one or the other, with nothing in between.”
Andrallo and Kaides were left thoroughly puzzled by the golden power, but by then the fighting in the distance had already ended.
This entire Astra Militarum line had been utterly shattered by the war-bodies regardless, and the intelligence core sent word.
“Chief, Science Officer Kaides, we’ve taken the surviving Astra Militarum prisoner.
Where would you like them taken?”