28: Chapter 28: The Chief Engineer of Mechanical Engineering spent half a minute confirming the sensor wasn't broken, and then he died.

The leviathan mothership's second salvo was more accurate than the first.

The orbital defense platform's Void Shields had six key nodes knocked out in the first strike, and the remaining eighteen batteries lost the integrity of their interlocking cover.

Their fire control systems were still awaiting authorization from Omicron-7, while Omicron-7 was still deep within his Forge Temple, attempting to verify the authenticity of every piece of sensor data himself.

He did not trust artificial intelligence, he did not trust his adjutants, and he did not trust anything that was not code he had written himself.

When twelve adamantine armor-piercing shells once again tore through the low orbit of Metallis, his authorization command was still queuing in the machine interface, waiting for his neural signal confirmation.

The target of the second salvo was the orbital platform's energy hub.

Three armor-piercing shells simultaneously struck the plasma reactor of the largest orbital defense platform, the 'Steel Temple,' and the projectiles detonated inside the reactor's core chamber after penetrating three layers of ceramite armor.

Digestive fluids reacted violently with the superheated plasma, blowing the entire platform into two pieces.

The broken wreckage, trailing unextinguished flames, plummeted into Metallis's atmosphere, burning dark red trails through the grey-yellow industrial clouds.

After losing the Steel Temple, the remaining orbital platforms began to fight on their own.

Their gunners finally could not wait for authorization—in the face of survival, even the dogmas of the Adeptus Mechanicus had to yield.

But it was too late.

Formations of Brood Lords surged from the shadows of the leviathan mothership, locking onto each isolated platform in groups of eight.

The Tyrants' mono-molecular bone blades sliced through the recharge gaps of the Void Shields, and swarms of parasites followed closely behind, pouring corrosive spores into the platforms' fire control arrays.

The battle in orbit ended completely at the thirty-seventh minute, and Metallis's orbital defense line changed from 'Intact' to 'Annihilated' on the Imperial star chart.

The Brood Queen received all the data from the orbital battlefield within the Hive Mind.

She forwarded the loss assessment to the Overmind: two Brood Lords were destroyed by close-in defense fire while impacting the Void Shields, and one hive ship's side carapace was moderately damaged.

Other than that, the fleet was intact.

She then deployed the first wave of landing forces from orbit, with seven hundred Zerglings and sixty Hydralisks, under the low-altitude fire cover of the Brood Lords, packed into forty landing spore pods and dropped directly onto the largest armored foundry complex on the surface of Metallis—the core industrial zone known in Imperial archives as the 'Steel Forge.'

The defense of the Steel Forge consisted of Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii infantry and several Skitarii armored squadrons, equipped with a large number of modified leman russ tanks and several poorly maintained Knight-class Titans that had been in service for thousands of years.

The pilots of the Knight Titans activated their war machines the moment the spore pods landed, and four Knight-class Titans strode out of the foundry's massive hangars, each step causing metal debris on the ground to jump several feet high.

The Brood Queen did not send the Ultralisks to charge directly, because she had something more efficient in her hands.

The first combat-ready models of Necron anti-psyker weapon platforms were dropped directly from orbit by the Brood Lords to the outskirts of the Steel Forge.

Their appearance was nothing like anything in the Imperial archives—each one resembled a blackstone crystal continuously rotating, standing on an adamantine chitin base, its rotation frequency perfectly matching the energy fluctuation phase of the Grey Knights when they activated their psychic amulets.

When the Knight Titan pilots activated what they considered their most powerful weapon—the ion shield—the anti-psyker platform initiated an iso-frequency anti-phase resonance.

The result was not an explosion, nor an energy beam, but the ion shield beginning to dissolve from the inside in a way that engineers could never understand.

It was not pierced; it was canceled out.

Every energy barrier supporting the ion shield was neutralized one-on-one by the anti-phase waves at the quantum level, and within seconds, the Knight Titans transformed from war machines encased in shields into targets exposed to The Swarm's fire.

The Zerglings and Hydralisks gave the Knights, now stripped of their shields, no time to react.

The Zerglings swarmed up, crawling along the Titan's leg armor to the joint connections, their bone blades piercing the most vulnerable servo-motor bundles of the joints, while the Hydralisks' corrosive spines concentrated fire on the Titan cockpit's observation windows from above.

All four Knight Titans were paralyzed in less than ten minutes after the anti-psyker platforms were activated, collapsing on the transport tracks between the foundry workshops.

The remaining Imperial armored forces began to retreat.

Skitarii infantry organized a temporary defensive line in the foundry tunnels with lasrifles and plasma cannons, fighting as they retreated, attempting to drag The Swarm into urban warfare to buy time, waiting for the Imperial Navy to reinforce from neighboring sectors.

Reinforcements were indeed on the way—the remnants of the Ultramarines 7th Expeditionary Fleet had not completely left the sector after their retreat, and the signal of the hammer of macragge had been intercepted by the Adeptus Mechanicus and was rushing over at full speed.

But the Brood Queen had calculated the possible return time window of the Ultramarines before the campaign; her goal was not to annihilate the Skitarii in urban warfare, but to take the Forge Temple before the reinforcements arrived.

The Zerglings' offensive slowed down in the tunnels of the Steel Forge.

The Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii's plasma cannons were lethal in the narrow spaces—a single melta shot could burn an entire tunnel's worth of creep to ash; although the Zergling carapace had been reinforced against psychic attacks, it would still blister, burn, and burst the instant it came into contact with pure physical high temperatures.

The Brood Queen shifted the first wave of the assault to holding the already occupied foundry workshops, while simultaneously beginning to dispatch Drones into the factory to assess the conditions for taking over the production lines and stabilizing the occupied zone.

Frontline reconnaissance Zerglings brought back an unexpected set of information while advancing: a type of energy signature, previously only seen in archives provided by Nephilak, was detected deep within the Forge Temple—an extremely faint but distinct anti-phase blackstone resonance signal, with a frequency identical to that of the Necron anti-psyker weapon platforms.

This meant that a blackstone device from the Necron Dynasty era was buried deep within Metallis, and it had been running on its own for tens of millions of years.

The Adeptus Mechanicus might have long ago fashioned it into some kind of core artifact, using it all along to stabilize the industrial control systems of the entire Forge World, yet few people truly knew its origin.

After receiving this data, the Overmind immediately adjusted the attack sequence.

The latest order was appended to the top of the tactical panels of all frontline units: 'The priority occupation target has been changed to the Forge Temple core area. The loot value of the Imperial armored production line maintains its original priority. The blackstone device must remain intact. When any tactical decisions conflict, the preservation of this device takes priority.'

Several leviathan motherships projected a second batch of anti-psyker platforms from low orbit deeper into the surface, steadily pushing the front line forward.

The Necron engineering ship Hammer of Silence began low-altitude cruising, using regeneration beams to repair those creep layers burned by heavy fire, preparing the ground for the next phase of deep-penetration Drone advancement.

The cold Adeptus Mechanicus gear emblem atop the Forge Temple in the deepest part of the Steel Forge was now exposed directly in front of The Swarm's air strike corridor, with a corner of its dome smashed, revealing the dim green light within.