Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

The gap between one Archmagos and another is wider than the gap between a man and a dog. Lin, born of the second-tier Forge World Huangquan VIII, knew this better than most.

From the handful of first-tier Forge Worlds down to the fourth-tier Forge Worlds scattered across every corner of the Imperium, every Forge World had its Archmagi. But could a first-tier Archmagos and a fourth-tier Archmagos ever be spoken of in the same breath? At times, the two were barely the same species.

As a third-tier Forge World, Cath Maximus possessing its own Titan Congregation had already surprised Lin. The Ruststalker squad that came after had been mildly unexpected as well. But now, with the Deputy Forge Director and his Death-Bound Warriors shoved right in his face, Lin felt something he rarely experienced: pure, undisguised envy.

The Deputy Forge Director was sitting on a treasure hoard. Back in his days on Huangquan VIII, Lin had never been this well-equipped.

The Deputy Forge Director sensed Lin's naked greed — though it hardly surprised him. What kind of sane man plots to seize an entire Forge World under cover of chaos? No kind at all.

"I didn't expect you to draw me all the way to you personally," the Deputy Forge Director said, surveying the battlefield Lin had chosen for their final confrontation.

They stood at the deepest level of the underground factory. The central control console was here. And the Titan itself was positioned on the lift that ran straight up to the surface.

Most critically: despite every scan he had run, he had detected no biological signatures beyond Lin and his pet Felynes.

Which meant Lin had genuinely come to face him alone.

A provocation? Or something deeper?

The Deputy Forge Director didn't know — but from where things stood, he was confident he was close to the victory he had been chasing. He stepped onto the battlefield where Lin waited.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the gears of the lift gave a faint mechanical clunk, and the entire platform began to rise — carrying the Titan slowly upward with it.

"It seems you've chosen yourself a convenient grave, Archmagos of Huangquan VIII," the Deputy Forge Director declared, all his cards now on the table, his tone thick with contempt. "I'm sure you have more than this prepared — but no matter how much a biological Archmagos readies himself, this is the ceiling of what he can manage."

Countless probabilities all converging on a one-hundred-percent victory rate gave the Deputy Forge Director the bedrock of his arrogance. The remaining five Death-Bound Warriors fanned out in a line behind him, training their cold muzzles directly on Lin.

"All your preparations amount to nothing but futile struggle. Do you dare defy me — a man who commands the Death-Bound Warriors?!"

Staring down the multi-barrelled laser arrays and lightning guns levelled at him by the Death-Bound Warriors, Lin simply gave a lazy wave of his fingers.

The Felynes fell in behind him with perfect unspoken coordination. Several of them had even donned armour; a few clutched small hunting knives or hammers.

"I think you may have misread the situation," Lin said. "Just to be clear — you're the challenger here."

"Insolent fool!"

Lin's words ignited the Deputy Forge Director's fury in an instant, brushing aside even his emotional suppressors. He had thought himself prepared. He had not been prepared for this — for being treated as though he simply didn't register.

His consciousness slammed into the control feeds of all five Death-Bound Warriors simultaneously. Under his direct command, they opened fire in perfect unison — particle beams and laser blasts weaving together under his guidance, sealing off every possible angle of escape in a single coordinated burst.

Lin wasn't afraid. His Energy Shield was his bedrock. He threw himself through the barrage, dodging the bulk of it, then let his Energy Shield eat two or three laser hits that he simply couldn't avoid. Then he threw open his own weapons and returned fire with equal ferocity.

He had squeezed in some enhancement augmentations for this fight — weapons hastily welded onto his frame — and the torrent of electrical arcs and bolt-rounds that erupted from them briefly threatened to overwhelm the Death-Bound Warriors entirely.

But the Death-Bound Warriors did not fear bolts or arc-discharge. Fully mechanised, hardened against electromagnetic interference, the only thing they needed to protect was the faceplate — the one place a bullet could reach the wetware brain hidden beneath. As long as the wetware survived, they kept fighting.

The problem was that Lin's storm of fire was so dense that moving, shooting, and shielding the faceplate all at once was simply impossible.

The Deputy Forge Director kept his eyes locked on Lin — ducking, weaving, pivoting, yet never once stopping his fire. He had already seen the Energy Shield in action during the failed attack on Lifar. He had seen the Felynes dragging Astartes out from under the Frateris Militia's guns. But he had never imagined the two working in concert would be this much trouble.

Lin used his Energy Shield to absorb whatever he couldn't dodge, never breaking his firing stance. Meanwhile the Felynes took turns raising psionic shields, ferrying bundles of ammunition to Lin's side and reloading for him — keeping his barrage almost completely uninterrupted. Pinned down by the need to protect their faceplates, the Death-Bound Warriors could do little but hold their ground and return fire. The exchange ground into a deadlock.

Would the deadlock hold? Logic told the Deputy Forge Director: no. Impossible.

There was a hard ceiling to how much energy a single body could carry. He had already worked out why Lin was using only solid ammunition rather than energy weapons — Lin had routed every scrap of his personal power budget into that uncanny shield of his.

That approach could keep Lin standing for a long time, yes. But what happened when the energy ran dry? What happened when the solid-ammunition weapons overheated?

A fight that could only sustain a deadlock would inevitably end in Lin's defeat. No Archmagos would throw himself into a battle like this without purpose.

He had to have a trump card — something that could actually cut the Deputy Forge Director's numbers down.

Sharpened to a razor's edge, the Deputy Forge Director maintained his offensive while scanning every thread of information the battlefield offered. Then his gaze caught movement in the corners of the room — a cluster of Felynes had begun to act.

The majority were weaving through the battlefield. Using the cover Lin was buying by suppressing the Death-Bound Warriors, they had started laying paralysis traps across the floor. The rest — armoured, wielding small hammers of bone — had crouched low and were moving fast, agile as shadows, rushing the Death-Bound Warriors directly.

What was this play?

The Deputy Forge Director couldn't pin it down immediately, but his logic-core processed the intent: Lin was engineering an opening for the Felynes.

He didn't know what exactly those weapons were — hammers carved from the bones of some unknown creature, nothing that looked like a power weapon capable of damaging a Death-Bound Warrior. Yet having witnessed the strange Monster Hunter weapons in the hands of those Astartes, he felt an instinctive wariness toward anything that looked out of place.

But to make the Death-Bound Warriors evade the Felynes' hammer-strikes while still under fire from that barrage...

The Deputy Forge Director's gaze settled on the paralysis traps the Felynes had been spreading around the Death-Bound Warriors' feet.

He had already encountered those things during the push deeper into the facility. These traps — capable of briefly locking a Death-Bound Warrior in place — had caused him considerable grief earlier when paired with those peculiar explosive barrels. But compared to taking a hit from those misshapen hammers, the Deputy Forge Director would sooner let his Death-Bound Warriors seize up briefly in a barrage that wasn't lethal on its own.

Of two evils, choose the lesser. The simplest logic. The Deputy Forge Director understood it perfectly.

But what mattered — what he was certain of — was that Lin understood it too.

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