Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

He knew his opponent was not someone who played by conventional rules. Ever since Lin had outmanoeuvred him through pure logic, the Deputy Forge Director had kept his guard up against exactly that kind of trap.

By conventional logic, the obvious move now was to order the Death-Bound Warriors to evade the hammers and instead absorb the paralysis traps — whose effects he had already analysed and accounted for. That way, whatever happened next would remain within his projections. He could execute the next phase from a position of control.

But what if that conventional logic was precisely what Lin was counting on?

Factor in the track record of this Archmagos from Huangquan VIII, and the probability of that being the case was, in fact, quite high.

In less than half a second, the Deputy Forge Director had made his decision.

Three Death-Bound Warriors held the suppressing fire against Lin. The remaining two holstered their guns.

They raised their steel fists. The high-output reactors on their backs and their heavily modified mechanical hearts poured raw power into those fists. Facing the Felynes hurling themselves forward, the Deputy Forge Director chose to meet them head-on.

Death-Bound Warriors were not built for close quarters — but their metal frames, engineered along principles strikingly similar to an Astartes' powered suit, made them formidable even in a melee.

The Felynes lunged in a ferocious charge — but their trajectories had already been mapped by his predictive model. The Death-Bound Warriors threw their calculated punches along those predicted lines, cold and mechanical, and a single volley sent a whole cluster of Felynes crashing to the floor.

But two fists could not hold off four dozen paws. Sheer numbers were not something two Death-Bound Warriors could stop. In the brief moment of rigidity that followed their swings, Tom — who had been hiding among the press of cats — seized his chance and sprang.

He raised his custom-made little hammer high. Brilliant pale-gold psionic energy gathered at the hammerhead — and then he brought it down hard against a Death-Bound Warrior's faceplate.

Nothing.

Beyond a faint tremor in the faceplate, the Death-Bound Warrior's metal frame had not been moved even a fraction. The result gave even the Deputy Forge Director — his entire consciousness immersed in tactical calculation — a moment of genuine surprise.

He had already judged that the Felynes' assault was a feint, and that the real killing blow lay in those paralysis traps. But was a feint really only ever going to amount to this much?

The surprise gradually shifted into a quiet, satisfied pleasure. His emotional suppressors had long since dulled most of what he could feel — yet the Deputy Forge Director found himself drawing a genuine sense of achievement from having correctly predicted Lin's move.

Since the Cath Maximus rebellion began, Lin had stirred far too many of the Deputy Forge Director's already-faded emotions. Before now, every feeling that had crammed itself into his emotional processors had been made entirely of fury and overreaction.

But now, with Lin on the verge of falling at his hands, all those previous negative emotions transformed in this moment into something temptingly, intoxicatingly sweet.

A low laugh rumbled from the Deputy Forge Director, buried beneath the steady rhythm of binary pulses. Without hesitation, he issued a rapid string of orders to the Death-Bound Warrior that had just been struck by the hammer — priority one: execute the Felynes.

He was certain his path to victory ran through those orders.

He wanted to see, once these Felynes were gone, just how Lin intended to keep fighting him.

But the signals he sent vanished without a trace. The Death-Bound Warrior appeared completely undamaged — and yet it gave its commanding Magos Dominus no response whatsoever.

The Deputy Forge Director's brow furrowed. Sensing something was wrong, he issued the order again — only to find the Death-Bound Warrior still completely motionless.

Interference was impossible. He was absolutely certain of his absolute command authority over the Death-Bound Warriors, the prerogative of a senior Magos Dominus. But if it wasn't interference…

As a group of Felynes combined their strength, the seemingly unharmed Death-Bound Warrior crashed to the ground with a thunderous impact. Its supposedly bulletproof faceplate shattered on impact — and through the breach, the Deputy Forge Director glimpsed what lay beneath.

A living human brain. Together with its spinal column, it served as the wetware core of the Death-Bound Warrior. Under normal circumstances it would respond without fatigue to every precise command issued by a Magos Dominus. But now, this brain — one that was never meant to rest — had stopped working.

Not dead. Only sleeping. The Deputy Forge Director could tell the brain was still alive; only its brainwave signal had come to a near standstill.

In human terms, this was called sleep.

The Death-Bound Warrior's wetware had been granted a mercy it should never have received.

"This was caused by that single hammer blow? No — Omnissiah above… this outcome defies all logic!"

The Deputy Forge Director was stunned.

He had contingencies for the Death-Bound Warrior remaining functional. He had contingencies for one being paralysed or destroyed and how to adjust his formation accordingly. What he had absolutely no contingency for was this: believing a Death-Bound Warrior to be fully operational, issuing orders on the assumption it was intact — and then discovering it had already been incapacitated.

The shock and the sheer unexpectedness of it fractured his command coordination. For a brief moment, his control over the Death-Bound Warriors faltered. He had already been deliberately manoeuvring them to avoid the hammer strikes — but in that moment of lapse, the Felynes seized the opening and brought down another Death-Bound Warrior with another Dragonbone Hammer.

Death-Bound Warriors were products engineered right along the edge of what the Crimson Accords permitted. To comply with the Accords' prohibition on true AI, these terrifying all-metal soldiers still relied on a human brain as their central control unit.

The Mechanicus held that this alone was sufficient to classify the weapon as a carbon-based living organism. As it happened, the Felynes who wielded the Dragonbone Hammers with such expertise thought the exact same thing.

A masterwork Sleep Hammer, proficient in physical hypnosis — even Elder Dragons swear by it. What kind of trouble could a Death-Bound Warrior with nothing left but a brain really cause?

The same scene played out before the Deputy Forge Director twice. He was now certain that the Death-Bound Warriors' abnormality was entirely the work of the Felynes and their hammers.

He redirected his firepower, using his remaining three Death-Bound Warriors to drive back the circling Felynes — and then injected both of the sleeping Death-Bound Warriors with forced-arousal stimulants.

But even the most potent stimulants and their accompanying revival protocols had no effect whatsoever. Death-Bound Warriors dragged into sleep by psionic entanglement from the Felynes would not be roused by something as crude as external chemical stimulation.

"How can the glory of the Machine God burn so dim upon these warriors who have given everything in the Omnissiah's service? Even accounting for psionic variables, this cannot be made logical!"

The Deputy Forge Director could not comprehend it. In a daze, he felt as though he had never once escaped Lin's calculations. His attempt to reboot the Death-Bound Warriors had failed. He raised his head — and found that Lin had already worn down his shields.

Lin pumped energy into the thrusters mounted at his back. Facing a Deputy Forge Director powerless to resolve the 'malfunction' before him, Lin posed a question.

"Do you believe the Emperor is the living avatar of the Omnissiah?"

The Deputy Forge Director did not understand why Lin would choose this moment to raise a debate as old as the Emperor's conquest of Mars itself — but considering there was a chance of extracting useful intelligence from the exchange, he ventured an honest answer.

"No."

"Then that truly is illogical by your own standards. But beyond logic, let me teach you one more truth."

"Logic built on probability can guarantee survival…"

The thrusters at his back erupted in a sudden blaze of exhaust. Lin, Solar-Powered Warblade in hand, launched himself into the air and came streaking directly toward the Deputy Forge Director.

"But it takes a gamble beyond logic to win!"

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