Chapter 267: Iron Men vs. the Swarm (Patreon)

The Hive Mind faced two options.

One: retreat.

Two: press the assault until the objective was achieved.

For a fleeting moment, the gestalt intelligence that spanned the entire swarm entered a state of hive-wide hypercognition. Every synaptic creature, from the smallest relay drone to the greatest Norn-Queen, each node in its sprawling neural web, joined the deliberation of survival and conquest.

In the end, the Hive Mind chose the latter. It would not yield. The war would continue.

The battle over Baal had yet to reach a decisive outcome. The conflict raging in the Infernis System, between the Tyranid swarm and the Iron Men was destined for failure, yet even in the Great Devourer’s mind, a localized defeat did not mean strategic extinction.

To retreat now, to allow these inorganic predators to cow it into withdrawal, would be true defeat. Even if the swarms on Baal and within the Infernis system were annihilated, to withdraw entirely would be to lose more than biomass, it would be to lose the chance to adapt. Every death, every autopsy of its foe’s weapons and warforms, would be preserved within the hive’s genetic memory. That knowledge would feed future evolution, allowing future broods to evolve in answer to these new threats.

Thus, to retreat was illogical. To persist was enlightenment. So the Hive Mind pressed on. It was not yet time to withdraw. Every second of battle meant more information, more adaptation, more potential.

Decision made, the Hive Mind focused its colossal will upon the Infernis System. Before its synaptic nodes were devoured by attrition, it would glean every possible datum about this new foe.

The war between the Iron Men Legions and the Tyranid swarm began in earnest.

Across the system, bio-ships, vast as mountains and alive with instinctive rage, turned their organic prows toward Infernis I. The void rippled with the scent of burning spores and dissolving hulls as mycetic spores rained like meteors upon the world below. Every digestion pool redirected its nutrients into birthing war-beasts. Only the smallest feeder organisms were left to harvest biomass on other planets; everything else was converted into fresh broods for war.

Meanwhile, hidden between the folds of realspace, the Leviathan Mothership began forging more of its metallic offspring.

The Primary Command Intelligence aboard, an AI core of impossible sophistication, sought not immediate extermination of the Tyranids, but comprehension. Understanding. Data.

The greatest of Infernis I’s northern landmasses, its drained ocean trench and the vast polar plains, became the killing fields.

Ranks of Iron Men advanced in perfect formation. Their gait was heavy and mechanical, their movements deliberate yet unstoppable. Nothing could delay them even for a moment.

The first to open fire upon the tide of Hormagaunts and Termagants were the Iron Men wielding Arc Weapons, a class of anti-organic energy arms.

These designs had been developed Qin Mo, Lord of Talon. While fortifying his Hive-Fortress in the underhive of Talon I, he had predicted that the Genestealer Cults’ rebellion might one day lure a Tyranid Hive Fleet. To prepare, he devised a weapon capable of annihilating living organisms at the molecular level.

The weapon matured only after the construction of the Celestial Engine, a megastructure of impossible power. When the Leviathan received the schematics, the weapon was designated the Arc Array, Celestial Engine Prototype.

When an Iron Man fired, a cascades of white-blue lightning erupted from the muzzle. Arcs leapt and branched through the air, flaying everything within range. Thousands of Tyranids were torn apart instantly, their carapaces exploding like shattered ceramics under the storm.

A single Iron Man could kill thousands of lesser Tyranids in seconds, and the Iron Legions were as endless as the swarm itself.

From orbit of Infernis I, the advancing formations would have looked like ordered lines of metallic silver devouring a spreading stain of black.

The rate of slaughter was limited not by firepower, but by the walking pace of the Iron Men themselves.

Eighty percent of the Tyranid vanguard was annihilated within minutes, an outcome even the Hive Mind had anticipated.

The Iron Men advanced through oceans of shredded flesh. The ground was a mire of steaming gore, precious biomass the Hive Mind could not afford to lose. 

From the carcass sea, Ripper Swarms emerged, small, rapid, and bred for reclamation. They scurried to reclaim the nutrient-rich remains before they could be lost. Every morsel mattered. In this war of attrition, biomass was life, and no waste was tolerated.

But then the Iron Men unleashed a countermeasure: the nanophages Storm, a cloud of white nanophagess once driven off by the Tyranids’ bio-electric fields. It returned now with vengeance.

The nanophages blizzard swept across the battlefield, disassembling every organic particle into smoldering molecules. The Hive Mind watched as even the biomass it had hoped to recover turned to vapor. To the Hive Mind’s dismay, its precious biomass reserves dwindled further.

The Iron Men continued their relentless march.

Soon they entered range of the Tyranid Bio-Artillery Beasts, Exocrines, Biovores, and stranger bioforms, each with massive monstrosities whose weapon-symbiotes rivaled tanks in scale.

Their symbiotic weapons spat green bioplasma shells that burst among the Iron ranks, each detonation releasing clouds of microscopic feeder-organisms. These organisms gnawed at the Iron Men’s armor plating, chewing into the machine’s fleshless bodies. They could not digest the metal, but they could burrow to short-circuit their inner workings.

The Primary Command Intelligence registered this anomaly, lifeforms barely larger than a human hair capable of eroding alloys forged by atomic transmutation.

The Iron man’s synthetic adamantium transmutation from lower minerals was inferior to natural adamantium, but for biological matter to digest it at all was... astonishing.

Although the Tyranids were biological, their energy efficiency and ability to convert organic matter into weapons were remarkable.

The AI recalculated its assessment.

[Biological Hive Entities. Assessment: Advanced Predators.]
[Data Revision: Required.]
[Reclassification: Precision-Engineered Bio-Warfare Constructs.]

The Primary Command Intelligence uploaded the new classification to its databanks. Instantly, countermeasures were deployed.

The Iron Men turned their weapons upon each other, arcs leaping from construct to construct, forming chains of lightning that danced across their ranks. Every burrowing parasite was atomized.

Seeing this, the Hive Mind shifted tactics. To conserve biomass, it ordered its bio-artillery to cease fire. Instead, it deployed Purestrain Genestealers, the most refined of its infiltrators.

From the tunnels carved beneath the planet’s crust, once used for shallow-layer biomass harvest, Genestealers erupted beneath the Iron Man formations.

In a storm of claws and chitin, they struck. Their talons shimmered with bio-disruption fields, slicing through composite armor. Each blow dented the Iron Men’s carapaces deeper and deeper until one finally cracked open, allowing talons to rend the circuits within.

The Hive Mind directed every Genestealer to attack without regard for self-preservation. For every one that fell, two more took its place, heedless of death, driven by the Hive Mind’s cold determination to find a weakness.

But the Iron man constructs adapted yet again.

At the command of the Primary Command Intelligence, Titan-class Iron man Warforms activated their auxiliary systems.
From their shoulders, jets of grey vapor vented out, spreading rapidly across the battlefield.

When the first spark ignited within the haze, the world turned to fire.

The Genestealers burned in silence, their psychic screams echoing faintly through the Warp.