Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Vashtorr studied M'Kachen closely and noticed the daemon's feathers were disheveled, with whip-marks scored across several parts of his body.

"The Warp is our home turf. How did you end up looking like that?"

"An unplanned variable. I never expected a Warp entity would actually step out to shield his fleet. I was one move behind — caught off guard."

"Who was this Warp entity?" Vashtorr immediately thought of the Cold Sun, who occupied the fifth seat he coveted so dearly. "Was it the Accursed One?"

M'Kachen shook his head.

"Not him, and you still lost? Is the gap between your strength really that large?"

"Fifty-fifty... I suppose? Mostly I got ambushed. Otherwise I solo him all the time."

In truth, he'd been sent spinning like a top five times in five minutes, courtesy of a Dragon Rush.

M'Kachen, the memory still painfully fresh, resolved not to mention that part. "Don't worry, I've already factored that variable in. My next plan against them is guaranteed to succeed."

Vashtorr couldn't be bothered to curse anymore.

Looking at this Tzeentchian Greater Daemon — even less reliable than Skarbrand — he demanded, "So what's your plan going forward?"

"My best plan is always the next one. Don't worry, once I've got a better one, I'll come find you."

"And what about this time?"

Vashtorr couldn't hold back his anger. "I've invested this much, and now you're telling me you don't even have a plan, and you're just going to leave?!"

"That's just how startups go — you bear your own risk. Or you could do what I did and find yourself a patron."

"I won't be Tzeentch's dog! And you — you're not leaving either!"

Vashtorr produced a contract bound by true names and invoked its power, intending to bind M'Kachen — who had already opened a portal — in place.

But M'Kachen was unaffected. Vashtorr froze. He hastily inspected the contract, only to find that the Tzeentchian Greater Daemon's signature at the bottom had already begun to blur.

"Your contracts only work on mindless brutes, don't they?"

"M'Kachen, you fucking—"

"Hey, if you're bad, practice more. If you can't take losing, don't play. You keep waving scraps of authority around like royal decrees — why not spend more time improving your own Warp-nature instead?"

M'Kachen strode calmly through the warp gate, glancing back with a grin at Vashtorr, whose face had begun to twist.

Vashtorr could feel the surge of scheming power radiating off him — power swollen from pleasing Tzeentch — and understood that his own contract had become nothing but a stepping stone for the other daemon.

Fucking hell, he'd run into a Warp con artist!

"If my next plan has use for you, I'll come find you. Thanks for the splendid performance on Mars, Vashtorr. Let's meet again on the unpredictable stage of fate."

With no means left to stop the Tzeentchian Greater Daemon, Vashtorr could only watch him go.

Staring at the psychic residue left behind by the portal, then at Skarbrand still bellowing away nearby, a wave of helplessness washed over him.

What kind of teammates had he even picked?

One was the Exiled One, whose head held nothing but the urge to hack and slash, yet who still insisted on flaunting his "world-shaking wisdom." The other was a Tzeentchian Greater Daemon with eight hundred scheming hearts, every single one of them turned against his own allies?!

...Or maybe it wasn't entirely his teammates' fault.

He turned his gaze back toward the city outskirts. He couldn't see Lin from here, but his mind was already full of grumbling about the Priest.

First that brand-new Knight mech, then that Thundergod Mecha — just how many treasures did this Priest have stashed away that even he, a craftsman demigod, had never laid eyes on before?

Compared to the Fabricator General, left with nothing but shock, Vashtorr — who'd been stirring trouble since Cath Maximus — knew Lin a little better. At the very least, he knew Lin hadn't possessed any of this before.

Whether it was the siege tanks, the Tiantu-class Titan, or that Thundergod Mecha, all of it had appeared only after Lin took Cath Maximus.

Even beings on the scale of the Four Chaos Gods couldn't know everything, of course. But Vashtorr's origins reached back to the Dark Age of Technology, and he was quite certain that even in that era of technological explosion, humanity had possessed nothing that matched up to these things.

It was as if they'd sprung suddenly out of the void — mysterious, and utterly out of place.

And the speed at which Lin applied these new technologies was just as strange. Even if he'd developed every bit of it himself, none of it fit any ordinary research and development process...

As a demigod, Vashtorr found himself, of all things, deeply wary of a mere Magos.

He wanted nothing more than to kill Lin outright, yet the technology in the man's hands stirred his curiosity and left him utterly fascinated.

More than killing him, what Vashtorr wanted most now was to capture him and see just how many more wonders were hiding inside that head of his.

That, however, was already an impossibility.

Viktor was still leading his ghoul army in an assault on the city outskirts, but progress was slow against the Exemplary Fists' resolute resistance.

The Plague Scrapcode's corrosion was a specialized weapon against Skitarii — it had no effect at all on mortal soldiers.

The high-value units capable of threatening the defensive line were being hunted down amid the outskirt ruins by Tiantu-class Titans piloted by the Iron Hands.

The remaining ghouls, mere cannon fodder, couldn't use sheer numbers to overwhelm the enemy on a battlefield too cramped to let them spread out.

The Astra Militarum, having secured their footing, were slowly closing in on Olympia Dunes hive city. Vashtorr no longer had any chance to keep this standoff going — once the Astra Militarum arrived and sealed the pincer from both sides, he wouldn't even keep the gains already in hand.

Failure was, by now, unavoidable for Vashtorr.

Good enough, he told himself — at least he'd gotten his hands on plenty of Martian production lines.

True, he hadn't come away with a single one of Lin's creations, nor any technology that might elevate his own essence — but there was always tomorrow. With some capital in hand, he could take his time.

"Take the production lines. We're pulling out," he ordered — the very same command the Fabricator General had given.

As Skarbrand tore the head off the Warhound-class he'd been grappling with, the corrupted Priests who'd fought in Vashtorr's service withdrew from the hive city alongside him.

Only a handful of worthless ghouls were left behind to buy time.

Stripped of their elite backbone, the ghouls no longer posed any threat. With the daemons having effectively abandoned the assault, the Priests inside the hive city breathed a sigh of relief — but the Astra Militarum bearing down on the outskirts kept their hearts in their throats.

Not since the Great Heresy had they faced Imperial forces this directly.

The Magi were confident the Imperium wouldn't come down hard on them, but the Fabricator General's defeat had put them on high alert regardless.

Every Magos put their best-hidden forces on display, and even the distant horizon showed the faint silhouette of an Emperor-class Titan.

They had no intention of actually fighting on a Mars already starved of energy, but they needed to show off these forces beyond the Fabricator General's own, so the Imperials who had just crushed him wouldn't get any ideas they shouldn't.

The Astra Militarum didn't hold back either, training their fleet's guns on the surface. Both sides kept raising the stakes, flexing their muscle, and the atmosphere grew delicate.

But Lin was the one who shattered that delicate balance with his own hands.

Having already relieved the outskirts, he didn't rejoin the Astra Militarum. Instead, he plunged straight into the hive city's core with his Astartes and Deathless. Before the Priests could react, Lin's forces had swiftly seized several factories.

When word reached the Forge Council, the tension there spiked at once. Kubik, just returned to the Forge Council, saw an opening and roared immediately.

"See? This is what your indulgence has bought us! He's already threatening every single one of your interests! There's no more room for hesitation — we must strike hard!"

"Uh... it doesn't seem quite that serious."

The Senior Priest delivering the report hesitated. "He hasn't actually seized any production lines..."

He was a supervisor at one of the factories Lin had taken, and had personally witnessed what Lin did after entering the core district.

Just as they nervously took up arms, bracing to face down these fanatics from Forge World Huangquan VIII who dared defile the Omnissiah's sacred ground, this Magos had actually flashed them a "friendly" smile.

"Rest assured, everyone. We're only here to share knowledge — we won't take so much as a needle or a thread from our fellow colleagues!"

The word "share" was so foreign to the Priests that they simply froze, unsure how to react.

Their hesitation to fight immediately gave Lin all the room he needed. His honeyed words, more seductive than anything Tzeentch could offer, lulled the Priests' guard down. By the time they came to their senses, Lin had already finished copying every scrap of design and production data stored in the factory's cogitators.

But that was as far as he went. Once the copying was done, he left directly, without taking so much as a wisp of cloud with him.

The Magi found it hard to believe. "He cut through three lines of defense with Astartes just to walk off with some production-line data?"

But that was exactly the truth. Aside from that data, and the void shields Kubik had already promised he could freely take, Lin genuinely hadn't taken anything more.

When the Magi inspected the factories Lin had occupied, they found that most of what he'd plundered were basic facilities — promethium refineries and ore-purification plants. This refusal to target high-value assets only confused them further.

"What is he actually doing?"

Lin had dressed up his plundering as "technology sharing," but it genuinely struck at a sore point for the Magi.

Stealing data was still a transgression, of course, but what Lin had taken didn't touch the foundations each Magos relied on for survival.

Measured against Mars's current crisis, the Magi who hadn't lost their own unique technology or production lines found themselves, surprisingly, willing to accept this kind of cut-the-flesh-not-the-root approach.

Everything comes down to comparison, after all. Next to Vashtorr, who'd come to Mars purely to smash, loot, and burn, didn't this Lin start to look better and better the more they looked at him?

The Magi, unwilling to suffer real losses, mostly chose to look the other way once they realized resistance wasn't actually necessary to avoid harm. No matter how much the Fabricator General cursed and cajoled, they remained unmoved.

By taking this approach rather than smashing straight into the core, Lin ended up with even more data than he otherwise would have. While Kubik fumed helplessly, Lin, having thoroughly plundered this trove of digital wealth, led his forces out of the hive city in complete satisfaction.

Though Kubik's Skitarii tried to intercept them on the way out, the siege tanks already set up outside the hive city blew the Skitarii apart without ceremony.

The other Magi's private armies merely watched coldly from the sidelines, letting Lin complete his breakout without a hitch and rejoin the Astra Militarum waiting outside.

At the Astra Militarum's command post, he saw Hays for the first time in a long while. Hays looked startled to see him emerge carrying several large bundles of data-storage drives.

"This is what you came to Mars for?"

"None of this is ready-made yet, but this is what represents the future."

Running through the technologies now unlocked in his head, Lin nodded with satisfaction.

Geothermal hydraulic fracturing, mineral purification technology, and Mars-based ceramite production methods for ceramic-metal composite materials.

Even stripping down every production line on Cath Maximus wouldn't have unlocked technology at this level. As expected, even the most basic components on Mars were the real deal.

In the Warhammer universe, people had always valued only the physical object and its practical use — the end result being that things got swallowed whole without anyone truly understanding them.

Take void shields, for instance. Humanity had long since lost any real grasp of how to make them; they only still knew how to build the production lines that produced them.

Lin understood that his greatest advantage had never been reproducing weapons and equipment from other universes — it was that he fully mastered the manufacturing process behind every technology he unlocked, down to the last detail.

Things like hydraulic fracturing for ore extraction, ore-processing stations for purification, efficient ceramite manufacturing methods, and the solid-state holographic molding he'd already mastered back on Cath Maximus.

Unlike the production methods native to the Warhammer universe, these systematic, fully-matched technologies would become the cornerstone of the unique Forge World Lin meant to build.

Seemingly basic production technologies, combined together, could achieve efficiency far beyond that of an ordinary Forge World. Once the timing was right, Lin, spreading and applying these technologies, was bound to carve out a place for himself in this universe.

Of course, he wasn't about to explain any of this so plainly right now, and Hays didn't press him on it.

More than the data drives, what concerned Hays now was how they should handle Mars going forward.

The Fabricator General, abandoned by everyone, could be overwhelmed by their sudden appearance — but the whole of Mars would be another matter entirely.

Every hive city on Mars had its own void shield, ruling out any quick victory through orbital bombardment. And with an Emperor-class Titan simply standing on the ground, Hays knew this wasn't a fight they could win.

Lin understood the situation just as well, but fortunately, he already had a plan.

"We pull back, away from the hive city, and broadcast that we came to Mars only to 'help' fight off the daemons — fulfilling our duty as allies."

"You're sure they'll buy that?"

"Mars has just been ravaged by the Plague Scrapcode. Nobody wants to take on more losses. They'll talk themselves into accepting it."

Lin's tone shifted. "That said, we can't let the Fabricator General be completely crushed either. If Mars sends someone to negotiate with you, tell them you'll only talk to the Fabricator General — no one else."

Hays nodded, then quickly caught something off. "You want me to handle the talks? Then what about you?"

"I'll leave you enough men to hold your ground. The rest are coming with me — I've got something else to take care of."

"What?"

"Going to find the middleman who fetched our goods for us."

Lin called up several Thunderhawk gunships and Arvus Lighters.

"Thorne, Neos, Evil Sun!"

The elites of the Exemplary Fists and the Deathless were brought forward by the two men and one greenskin. Hundreds of marines clad in CMC powered suits and several dozen Astartes boarded the transports under Lin's direction.

Realizing there was still more fighting to be had, Evil Sun rubbed his hands together with excitement.

"Big Mek, who're we goin' ta smash next?"

"Those daemons. We only got to fish in these troubled waters thanks to them, but now it's time to lick the plate clean."

Future technology, he had. But who ever complained about too much ready-made profit?

He waved a hand, signaling Evil Sun to take the controls.

"Move out. We're headed for Magma City!"

Vashtorr was on the road back to Magma City, in retreat.

Anchored by the corrupted teleportation device, Magma City now served as the channel in and out of the Warp. Vashtorr no longer had the strength to bring more reinforcements out of the Warp, but hauling away his spoils was still within reach.

Though Vashtorr himself considered the operation a failure, since it hadn't elevated his essence at all, the corrupted Dark Mechanicum cogboys saw it very differently.

Amid the chaos on Mars, they sang the praises of Vashtorr's greatness, filled with anticipation of soon reaching the sacred domain of the true Omnissiah.

This faith directed toward him offered Vashtorr some small comfort.

He didn't necessarily need to elevate his essence directly — just like the Accursed One, this faith-power could push him up a level all the same.

"Not a total failure. With this experience, next time I can succeed even better..."

Vashtorr began scheming how he'd start up business once he brought the production lines home, carving out market share from Perturabo. But just as he approached Magma City, the sound of cannon fire echoing in his ears and the thick smoke billowing from within the city stopped him cold.

He recognized that sound.

It was the sound of penetrating shockwave cannons!

"What's going on?" Vashtorr was struck with sudden alarm. "How could Lin's forces be here?!"

He'd been possessing Viktor up until now, but he switched his point of possession, returning to Augustus, stationed at Magma City. For the first time, he saw panic on the Archmagos's face.

He did his best to maintain the dignity befitting the Omnissiah. "Augustus, tell me what's happening."

"It's the Soul Drinkers — they're attacking Magma City!"

That still shouldn't have meant cannon fire, though. Lin's siege tanks had only just been unloaded from the Astra Militarum's transport ships. How could those lumbering Leman Russ tanks possibly cross several hundred kilometers and reach Magma City this fast?

Vashtorr couldn't make sense of it. Following Augustus's gaze toward the edge of Magma City, he caught sight of an entirely new type of tank mounted with penetrating shockwave cannons.

Unlike the Leman Russ, these tanks — stabilized on hydraulic legs — could fire a barrage into Magma City, then immediately retract and lower their raised turrets, switching to standard configuration and racing off at high speed.

Skitarii nearby tried to destroy them, but the Astartes accompanying the tanks cut them down one by one — they posed no threat whatsoever.

The Space Marines, paired with the siege tanks, were racing toward Magma City at speeds exceeding 60 km/h.

Their line of attack looked as though someone inside the city were guiding them — every strike landed precisely on Magma City's weak points, and they even adjusted in real time to match the city's internal troop movements.

Vashtorr weighed the distance and positions, and realized that at this rate of advance, this group might actually break into Magma City before he even got there himself.

The dignity befitting the Omnissiah forgotten entirely, he finally lost his composure.

Fucking hell — am I part of someone else's plan too?

[Author's Note: The reason the Mechanicus lacks tanks and other standard heavy armor is simple — it's not that the Imperium forbids them from having any. Rather, after the Imperium capped the overall size of the Skitarii, the Mechanicus developed into a military system where every Magos maintains his own private army. Each Magos has to fund and raise his own Skitarii, and bear the cost himself. The cogboys already have plenty to feed, and on top of that they have to carve research funding out of the same budget — a complete, systematic armored force is simply too costly for an individual operator. And a Forge World's public spending goes toward maintaining Knight houses and Titans, so conventional tanks end up as a neglected force. There are a few Forge Worlds that do place more emphasis on tanks and maintain their own distinctive armored forces, but the story doesn't touch on that for now — maybe another time.]

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