Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

"Magma City's a nice place, isn't it?" Lin asked Thorne suddenly.

"Geographically, perhaps," Thorne said noncommittally. "But this place is a bitter memory for me — and for the entire Seventh Legion."

From the Thunderhawk gunship, he could already make out Magma City's silhouette. Gazing at the city before him, his thoughts drifted back to that distant battlefield of the Horus Heresy — the battle that had nearly plunged him and ten thousand of his Imperial Fists brothers into despair.

Ordered to reinforce the loyalist forces on Mars, they had fortified Magma City — but when an enemy appeared that could simply ignore every defense they'd built, all their efforts came to nothing.

It had been an entire Titan Legion.

The Storm Lords Titan Legion garrisoned in the city had still been arguing over these Astartes setting foot on the Omnissiah's sacred soil without permission, refusing to coordinate with the Imperial Fists. The Death's Heads Titan Legion, already turned to Chaos, struck while they were still bickering among themselves.

Neither the Imperial Fists nor the Storm Lords were braced for it. All three hundred of the Death's Heads' Titans surged forward at once, and in an instant, nearly half of Magma City was reduced to ruin.

The Storm Lords, scrambling to counterattack, discovered mid-battle that nearly half their own Legion had already turned to Chaos. Caught between enemies within and without, both the Storm Lords and the Imperial Fists were routed by the Death's Heads.

The Storm Lords were all but annihilated, and Magma City lay in ruins. Only Sigismund, with a handful of salvaged production lines and equipment, managed to escape the city and return to Terra.

Imperial Regent Malcador had counted the operation a victory, for the logistics it had recovered. But even now, Thorne could still taste the bitterness of that defeat.

That bitterness made the war-torn Magma City beneath his feet seem to overlay itself onto the one from fifteen hundred years ago. Lin saw the conflict in him and offered reassurance: "This time, we will succeed."

Thorne nodded and said nothing more.

The gunships and landers touched down in the sections of Magma City already seized by the Soul Drinkers. Evil Sun, at the controls, grabbed Neos the moment they landed and excitedly hauled him off the gunship.

"Go go go! C'mon, kid, I'll show ya where the good loot is!"

Lin didn't stop them. The task he'd assigned Neos was exactly this — leading the marines in CMC powered suits to sweep through Magma City and scavenge whatever was worth taking.

The rest, of course, was left to him and the Astartes.

"Move fast — we need to take Magma City before the daemons come back!"

At Lin's call, everyone moved into action.

The Exemplary Fists hadn't yet been enhanced, but for a battlefield already cracked wide open, they were more than enough.

The Soul Drinkers, who'd lacked the manpower to press their advance further, now had fresh reinforcements — and their push through Magma City turned sharper still.

With the situation now firmly tipped in Lin's favor, there was no longer any need for the Excommunicated Warband to lead the assault. So Occam sought Lin out.

"I think it's time we settled up payment between us."

"I'll settle everything once the job's finished."

"What, it's not over yet?"

"Of course not. Your next task is to protect the Fabricator General."

Occam thought he'd misheard. He asked Lin to confirm, and got the same answer again.

"Remember those assassins on Mars at the very start? Kubik's failure will cost him the position of Fabricator General, and no one knows when the next one will be chosen. If the Officio Assassinorum wants to make an example by killing the Fabricator General, they'll have to strike while Kubik still holds the title."

"Which is now," Occam said, catching Lin's meaning. "Does keeping him alive help your plans?"

"Think it through, Occam. Until then, all I can tell you is — think it through."

Occam, lost in thought, led the Excommunicated Warband out of Magma City.

Progress in Magma City was going smoothly enough that Lin no longer needed to fret over it, and he finally had time to stop and examine the corrupted Skitarii and rogue Servitors.

The manner of their corruption struck him as intriguing.

The way this digital virus specifically targeted Skitarii and Mechanicus hardware, along with the symptoms of infection, reminded Lin of the Necrons' Flayer virus.

Of course, the Flayer virus — cursed into being by the Star Gods themselves — was practically an immutable meme within the physical universe.

This Plague Scrapcode, which turned Servitors into shambling husks, wasn't nearly as potent as the Flayer virus — but whoever had made it had clearly drawn plenty of inspiration from it.

"It looks like a digital virus, but it spreads through the Warp. That's not something the bird-headed one could manage — his machine-spirit daemons aren't nearly this sophisticated."

Come to think of it, he still didn't know who was pulling the strings behind all this.

All Four Chaos Gods could corrupt machine-spirits, but their methods were all brute force — like taking a sledgehammer to a problem, pounding the target straight into pulp.

If even the bird-headed one couldn't manage delicate work like crafting scrapcode, what other entity of the Warp could possibly have that kind of skill?

Thinking of the Dark Mechanicum cogboys chanting about "the true Omnissiah," Lin had a vague suspicion forming — though he wasn't ready to be certain of it.

He gave the order to the Astartes: "Pick up the pace. I need to test a theory."

The intensity of the fighting climbed another notch.

Buffed by the Felyne, the Soul Drinkers advanced unstoppably. Warriors wielding Great Swords and cleaving axes held the front line, hacking one Battle-Automaton after another to pieces.

Admidel led the other veterans in a flanking encirclement, shattering the Battle-Automata's defensive formation entirely.

"Chapter Master, we're almost to the teleportation device!" Theodore shouted excitedly.

Admidel nodded, but unease was gnawing at him.

The resistance in Magma City had suddenly thinned, as if every Battle-Automaton had turned into a headless fly with no one left to direct it. Something about it put him on guard.

"Stay sharp once we're inside the testing grounds. I suspect they still have something in reserve."

The warriors around him nodded, and a siege tank was brought up to the front. They used it to smash straight through the outer wall of the testing grounds, intending to breach from the flank.

The wall came down in a shower of rubble, and through the swirling dust, their helmet sensors caught a silhouette.

The warriors hadn't expected to run into an enemy even on their unorthodox approach. Admidel rapped on the tank's hull and shouted an order to Tech-Sergeant Gamas inside:

"Keep moving — run it down!"

The engine roared, and the surging power of its reactor sent the siege tank shooting forward like a loosed arrow, seemingly a heartbeat away from grinding that silhouette into dust.

But the figure merely gestured lightly, and the once-unstoppable tank came to an abrupt halt. Its engine kept roaring, yet it was as if it had struck an invisible wall — unable to advance another inch.

Everyone was startled. Only once the dust cleared did they realize that this figure standing against the tank, like a mantis raising its arms before a chariot, was none other than Archmagos Augustus.

With the real target now before them, every hand tightened around its weapon.

Vashtorr swept his gaze across the warriors, lingering especially on their weapons.

"Interesting."

He made no move to seize the weapons themselves. Instead, he reached out and laid a hand on the siege tank. His power flowed in through that touch, pouring into the tank in an attempt to twist and corrupt its machine-spirit and turn the war engine to his own use.

Alarms erupted throughout the siege tank's interior. Gamas tried to fight off the intrusion, but the method being used against him was beyond his comprehension.

"The machine-spirit is howling — that Archmagos is trying to seize control," he reported to Admidel.

"Then trigger the self-destruct! We can't let this tank fall into his hands!"

"Uh... that shouldn't be necessary. I don't know why, but it looks like the most he can do is disable it."

As if to prove the tech-sergeant's words, Vashtorr abandoned his attempt to corrupt the siege tank. He stepped back, his eyes clouded with uncertainty and suspicion.

"What in the world is this tank?"

Machine-spirits that resisted conversion weren't unheard of — much like how, ten thousand years later, Huron Blackheart would capture the Macragge's Honour yet be unable to turn it to his own use; a sufficiently powerful machine-spirit could resist Chaos corruption on its own.

But that was exactly the strange part.

Vashtorr could sense that this tank's machine-spirit wasn't particularly strong — it had taken only a light effort to paralyze it in place. But when he tried to push further, the corruption process ran into wall after wall.

No matter what method he used, his power could barely penetrate it at all.

It felt like a data cable that didn't match its port — his very nature simply didn't correspond to this tank's core.

How could that be? He was a demigod of the Warp!

Everything in the physical universe had a corresponding concept within the Warp — that was precisely why beings of the Warp could, in theory, know all things.

Even the Four Chaos Gods themselves couldn't truly achieve that in practice. Still, so long as something belonged to this universe, there was always some thread of commonality linking one concept to another.

Not like this — where even he, who held sway over a fair portion of the concept of the artisan, found the very nature of this creation utterly foreign.

It wasn't even as if it had simply sprung from the void — it was as though it didn't belong to this universe at all...

It was, on the surface, nothing but an unremarkable tank — and yet it had just upended everything Vashtorr thought he knew.

He had expected a small display of his "divine power" would be more than enough to bend the tank to his will. Now, forcing down his shock, he put distance between himself and it.

He badly wanted to just brute-force his way through the corruption and drag the tank off to study properly. But the current situation left Vashtorr no room for that.

He simply wasn't strong enough as it was — every scrap of power he manifested into the mortal world was precious. He needed to spend his strength on the blades before him and turn the overall tide first.

The Soul Drinkers, recovering their wits, rushed to press the attack — but an assault of this caliber still wasn't enough to trouble Vashtorr.

The mechanical tendrils on Vashtorr's body unfurled, unleashing firepower far beyond that of an entire Astartes squad — all from him alone.

The unrelenting barrage pinned down the veterans, now without their tank support.

One Soul Drinker tried to time a counterattack by calculating the enemy's remaining ammunition, but Vashtorr's onslaught showed no sign of letting up at all.

The Soul Drinker who exposed himself was quickly riddled with rounds and went down, only to be dragged back to safety by the Felyne.

"Even an Archmagos can do this? Does he never run out of power?" Gamas found the whole thing baffling.

"Because he isn't Augustus at all."

The answer came from someone outside the fray. The warriors turned toward the voice and found that Lin had already arrived, unnoticed.

He gripped his own Plasma Pistol, an array of weapons deploying from his body just as they had from Vashtorr's, and cut into the battle from the flank!

Blazing plasma bolts forced Vashtorr to turn his attention to Lin. He sidestepped and redirected part of his fire toward him — but shielded behind his Energy Shield, Lin traded shots with him without a trace of hesitation.

Freed from suppression, the Soul Drinkers rose and joined Lin's assault on Vashtorr. Bound within Augustus's body, Vashtorr could no longer gain any advantage in a straight confrontation. He abandoned the exchange of fire, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Lin.

"Magos Lin..."

It was Vashtorr's first direct encounter with this unpredictable Magos. "You truly do have no small amount of skill."

"I'm surprised too."

Lin studied "Augustus" in turn, realizing his earlier suspicion had indeed been correct.

"Vashtorr. I didn't expect you'd already be out here stirring up trouble at this point in time."

"?!"

Vashtorr froze in place, momentarily at a loss.

Oh hell — I've been outed!

He'd been lying low in the Warp all this time, and even his current scheme against Mars had been kept quiet. How could this Magos just rattle off his identity the moment they met?

He steadied himself. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Drop the act. Your ghoul-corruption ripping off the Flayer virus already gave you away."

Lin spread his hands. "Steal a few table scraps from the Star Gods and suddenly you think you're the Omnissiah? You can't even rummage through the Chaos Gods' trash bins properly, and you actually think you've earned a seat at the table?"

Why couldn't I have thought of something that scathing myself?

Vashtorr's eyes went wide. For one strange moment he felt something like admiration, and only after that did the fury follow.

The trouble was, no matter how he turned it over in his mind, he couldn't come up with a single rebuttal.

A carefully laid scheme culminating in raiding production lines on Mars might sound impressive, but standing before that siege tank, all this thoroughly worn-out technology really did look like little more than junk.

Worse still, he might not even manage to carry off this pile of junk!

The humiliation of having no comeback curdled into fury. Vashtorr stopped hiding his identity and began unleashing the full extent of his power.

"And who do you think you are, Magos Lin? Just because you know a few secrets and have some peculiar toys on hand, you dare spout such arrogance before a god?

Vashtorr's mechanical arm swept out, and a Psychic barrier snapped into being, holding back the Soul Drinkers' attacks for the moment.

Shielded behind it, he began to retreat slowly. The ground beneath his feet began to rumble with a low groan, as if something colossal were stirring awake beneath the surface.

"Since you're all so eager to witness the might of the true Omnissiah, I'll be happy to oblige."

A wave of Warp-touched presence swept over the whole of Magma City, and even the Astartes felt a wave of sickness at it.

Lin himself wasn't affected, but soon enough, fissures splitting open across the ground forced him to find his footing too.

"I'll show you just how foolish it is to challenge a god!"

Vashtorr raised both arms high, and at his roaring command, the steel wreckage slumbering beneath the earth began to stir.

Enormous metal skeletons ground against each other with an ear-splitting screech as Warp energy corroded through them, like the wailing of countless lost souls. The wreckage tore free of the earth, rising slowly into the air, trailing decay and twisted shapes.

Vashtorr's Warp energy worked like invisible threads, dragging the wreckage together, fitting it piece by piece, fusing it into one.

Massive Titan heads, shattered mechanical arms, cracked plates of armor, even long-rusted weapons — all of it was reforged under his power. Wherever metal met metal, a blinding red light flared, as if the fires of the Warp itself were welding the pieces together.

As the final piece of wreckage locked into place, a monstrous colossus, a full hundred meters tall, rose to stand over the ruins of Magma City.

Its body was warped and grotesque, as though forced together from the ruined remains of countless different Titan patterns. But at a hundred meters tall, no one present could doubt its capacity for destruction.

Everyone in Magma City was shaken by the sudden appearance of this Chaos Titan, but Thorne — out sweeping the city's outskirts alongside Neos — felt the shock hit him harder than anyone else.

"Storm Lords?!"

Thorne recognized the markings on the wreckage — the emblems of that long-annihilated Titan Legion — and the memory of defeat, fifteen hundred years old, surged up within him. He stared at this Titan of ghosts, unable to shake his mounting worry for Lin.

Was this all fated to end in defeat again, no matter what?

While everyone else worried, Lin was coolly assessing Vashtorr's actual strength.

Not very strong, honestly.

Compared to Sadistic Terror, who could corrupt an entire expeditionary fleet with a single strike, Vashtorr's "kitbashing" trick was several tiers lower in every sense.

Lin could sense that this M32-era Vashtorr was nothing like the the Soul Forge King of later ages, the one who would one day assault the Dark Angels' fortress, the Rock.

But this Titan still wasn't something they could handle at present.

Lin's grim, calculating expression was read by Vashtorr as something else entirely. Standing atop the Titan's shoulder, looking down at this Magos who now seemed at a loss for what to do, Vashtorr felt a satisfaction he hadn't tasted in a long while.

Sure, the way he'd assembled this Titan still amounted to scavenging garbage — but so what?

Whoever laughed last would be the true winner.

And he, Vashtorr —

Even if his methods weren't fit for polite company, he was going to win!

"This is the true power of the Omnissiah! How does it feel now, Lin? How does it feel?"

He gestured, and the Titan surged forward at his will. The ground shook wherever it stepped, and no one could get out of its way fast enough.

Lin had no choice but to pull the Soul Drinkers back from the testing grounds for now.

"Is our capture operation over, then?" Admidel asked, feeling the situation had passed well beyond what they could handle.

Vashtorr's twisted creation matched an Emperor-class Titan in scale — only Mars's own Fire Wasps Legion could deal with a threat like this.

Bringing in the Thunder God might buy some time against the behemoth too, but there clearly wasn't enough time for it to arrive.

Lin shook his head at Admidel. "There's always a way."

He'd thought he'd never need to use the last trump card he'd set aside for Mars. As it turned out, every piece of it had fallen perfectly into place.

He reset his transmitter, redirecting it toward the Shanzheng, tuning the wavelength to a specific channel he'd arranged with someone in advance.

"Let's show them, Dorn!"

Aboard the Shanzheng, a crimson comet blazed forth!

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