Warhammer: Echoes of Divinity

Chapter 149: Superweapon – The Celestial Engine

"It's here," Shapeshifter whispered, raising its hand and pointing toward the shifting illusion it had crafted.The Nightbringer shard had penetrated deep beneath the surface of the blackened planet, into the vaults of a long-slumbering Necron Tomb Complex.

The tomb appeared to have suffered degradation over millennia. When the Nightbringer stepped into its depths, it found nothing but rubble. What had once been an impenetrable bastion of necrodermis alloy and hypershielding now lay fractured.

Ancient stasis fields and defense grids flickered intermittently, barely functioning. Gauss flayer turrets sat inert in their housings, and the once-lethalscarab swarmshad disintegrated into corroded scrap. Even the tomb's dimensional lock fields groaned under entropy's bite.

Its form melting into shadow, the Nightbringer passed through the ruins unhindered.

Here and there, dormant Necron constructs aimlessly wandered the halls. They did nothing, showing no reaction to the arrival of a C'tan Shard.

To a mortal eye, they were lifeless. To the Nightbringer, they were. Machines built to last eternity, now reduced to twitching echoes of their creators' arrogance.

As the Nightbringer passed each Necron, their necrodermis bodies began to fracture and collapse. Their living metal writhed and quaked, unable to self-repair.'s upper atmosphere began to swirl with radiant blue energy, forming a containment shroud. The atmosphere vibrated with a harmonic frequency eerily similar to the ancientCelestial Orrery.

....

Aboard the Leviathan.

Qin Mo stood over the Nexus Firmament, eyes shut, immersed in the device's sensory field. The Shapeshifter's true body hovered quietly beside him, its ever-shifting form pulsing with faint starfire, vaguely humanoid but constantly in flux.

"You're not going to erase a C'tan shard with that thing," the Shapeshifter observed. It had already deduced the Firmament's limitations.

"I know," Qin Mo nodded. "Just like it can't kill us with a glance."

Still, Qin Mo reached deeper, extending his senses across the entire world below. He could feel the heat of rocks, the sway of winds, the smallest granules of dust...

But not the Nightbringer.

He opened his eyes and stared at the towering figure on the surface. He could see it, all ten meters of it, but not sense it. It was like trying to feel the presence of a shadow.

Shapeshifter shook its head. He really didn't know when to quit.

"Doesn't matter," Qin Mo said flatly, removing his hands from theFirmament's surface. "I didn't build the Nexus Firmament to kill it. I built it to create a battlefield."

He turned and spoke aloud to the ship's AI: "Bring in the Celestial Engine. Commence orbital bombardment."

The Leviathan's command AIs were already standing by. The moment the order was given, they executed emergency dimensional-vector calculations.

In the very next second, the Celestial Engine arrived in orbit.

Two massive metallic moons, each 500 kilometers in diameter, emerged from teleportation stasis, orbiting a half-constructed artificial planet.

Each moon was a superweapon platform, their surfaces bristling with tens of thousands of particle lance arrays.

An eerie thrum echoed through the ship's hull as the arrays charged, rising in pitch like a chorus of stars screaming.

The lances fired simultaneously.

Thousands of converging beams merged into singular superblasts from each satellite. The two titanic beams met, then fused, striking the surface with a force beyond any Imperial Exterminatus-class strike.

Reality blurred. The atmosphere ignited. Clouds were torn apart by raw energy. The ground vaporized on impact, the planet's crust boiling like water under a welding torch.

The Nightbringer shard, caught mid-flight, was enveloped in light.

From the Leviathan, Qin Mo and Shapeshifter saw only its scythe vaporize instantly. The rest of the body was lost beneath the continuous inferno of energy.

Lightning sparked across the feedback feeds. Data distortion flared as space-time itself warped under the force.

Localized gravity wells collapsed. Even the Nexus Firmament struggled to maintain anchor-locks.

"It's not dead," Shapeshifter said. It could still feel the presence.

Qin Mo nodded, eyes locked on the Nexus Firmament's data feed.

The Celestial Engine continued firing, for ten full minutes.

Ten minutes of planetary annihilation.

The beams pierced the crust, the mantle, the core. The blackened world cracked apart like brittle glass.

Fragments of planet drifted in orbit, still glowing with residual heat. The bombardment ended. The Celestial Engine's lances cooled, beams fading into red sparks.

"Send the Celestial Engine to a nearby star for recharge," Qin Mo commanded. At the same time, he activated the Nexus Firmament's restoration function.

Beneath their feet, the planet began to reassemble.

Continents reversed their disintegration. Mountains reformed. Oceans poured into place in reverse cascades. It was like watching time play backward.

The Nightbringer still clung to existence. Its form was shattered, fragmented but held together by sheer force of will, like bone shards bound by a psychic field.

A hollow scream of hate made manifest, trembling in the bones of the reformed planet.

"FORGEMASTER!" it roared toward the void.

Its voiceshredded the vacuum, vibrating through the hull of the Leviathan.

"I'm here," Qin Mo said calmly. He activated the Nexus Firmament again.

In the next instant, wave after wave of Iron Men were teleported from the Leviathan's storage bays directly to the planet's surface.

The first units materialized in perfect formation, their feet slamming into reformed stone, weapons already raised.

Infantry units surrounded the Nightbringer, firing as they advanced salvo after salvo of directed energy fire. Artillery and Knight-class Iron Men unleashed indiscriminate bombardment.

The air filled with the shriek of beamfire and the seismic drum of plasma mortars.

Chunks of necrodermis were peeled from its form under the onslaught, yet it kept coming, flowing like liquid horror, lashing out with tendrils of living void.

Shapeshifter watched and understood Qin Mo's strategy immediately.

A war of attrition.

The Celestial Engine would bombard. Then recharge. While it did, the Iron Men would engage, occupy, and wear the Nightbringer down.

The Nexus Firmament's role? To ensure the battlefield could not be destroyed, restoring terrain, conditions, and geography no matter the devastation.

An immortal enemy. An immortal arena.

"Why not let me recharge at the star and power the Celestial Engine instead?" Shapeshifter asked.

"You've been trapped in a labyrinth for ages. Your connection to stellar energy is weak," Qin Mo replied. "And you've got a more important job. Save your strength."

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