29: Chapter 29 Beneath the temple lies an engine that has been running since before the birth of humankind.

The dome of the Forge Temple was pierced in the fourth hour of the battle by the third round of precision bombardment from the leviathan mothership.

The adamantium armor-piercing shells did not hit the main structure directly; instead, they grazed the edge of the dome, using the shear force of the projectile's rotation to tear open a fifty-meter-wide hole in the entire dome.

Omicron-7's proudest defensive fortification—the ceramite composite dome said to be able to withstand the full-force strike of a Warlord-class Titan—did not last even a single round longer than an eggshell against the directed strikes of the living railguns.

The Zergling poured in through the breach.

They did not use the main entrance—the main entrance had already been collapsed by the Skitarii using melta bombs, blocked by twisted rebar and solidified ceramic armor fragments.

The Brood Queen changed the infiltration route to a vertical assault; the Zergling climbed along the giant pipes on the inner walls of the temple, burrowing into the core area of the temple from the breaks in the ventilation system and cooling towers.

Omicron-7 witnessed it all from his command throne.

The extent of his cybernetic augmentation was fully revealed at this moment—his face was expressionless, with only two cold red optical sensors in his eye sockets.

His fingers tapped rapidly on the command console, each finger a precision mechanical tentacle, but his neural signals had to pass through a 173-year-old legacy mechanical interface to be transmitted to the defense systems.

The Brood Queen had analyzed this latency before the battle; a time difference of a fraction of a second was enough for the Zergling to breach three lines of defense before his commands could take effect.

"Xenos." Omicron-7's voice came from his vocalizer, raspy and mechanical, "You will die here. The Forge World Metallis will not fall. The machine will never lose to flesh."

The Zergling's answer was bone blades.

A Zergling leaped out from the ventilation duct, lunging straight for the command throne.

Omicron-7's protective field blocked the first strike, the energy barrier exploding into a ball of blue-white sparks upon the impact of the bone blade, but there was not just one Zergling—there were twelve.

The second Zergling leaped off the corpse of the first, its bone blade piercing into the charging gap of the protective field—that gap was only a fraction of a second, an experience accumulated from the countless engagements between The Swarm and Imperial Void Shields, the breathing rhythm of the tattered shields that the defender's database had taught the Brood Queen.

The bone blade pierced through Omicron-7's chest cavity.

The adamantine-chitin edge severed his mechanical spine, severed his power bus, and severed his link to all the defense systems of the Forge Temple.

His red optical sensors flickered one last time before going dark.

Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Director Omicron-7, having served for 173 years with 97% cybernetic augmentation, died under the bone blade of a Zergling.

Until his death, he did not believe that a bug the size of a dog could cut through his protective field.

The Brood Queen forwarded Omicron-7's death signal to the Overmind, then took over the main control system of the Forge Temple.

The control interface was the Adeptus Mechanicus's encrypted data stream, but the Brood Queen did not need to crack it—the Necron quantum link bypassed the encryption directly, projecting the entire system architecture of the Forge Temple into the Hive Mind, with every layer of data labeled with its corresponding function.

After reading the system, the Brood Queen confirmed the status of three key facilities: the armor production line was running automatically, the power core was still outputting at full power, and there was an anomalous structure beneath the temple's foundation that had never been recorded in any Adeptus Mechanicus database.

"There is something underground." The Brood Queen forwarded the scan data to the Overmind, along with the energy signature comparison results, "Its energy signal matches the blackstone resonance frequency of the Necron anti-psyker weapon platform perfectly."

The Overmind's command arrived within a fraction of a second after receiving the data: "Drone. Dig. Do not touch it."

The Drones burrowed underground from the cracks in the foundation of the temple.

Their calcified excavation fluid did not encounter any of the rock layers recorded in the Adeptus Mechanicus archives upon contact with the stratum—those archives recorded a three-layer adamantium-reinforced foundation, but the Drones hit a layer of blackstone harder than adamantium after digging less than ten meters.

This type of stone can absorb almost all forms of energy radiation in the universe; its atomic structure actively absorbs light, heat, electromagnetic waves, and even psychic energy.

The Drones' bone blades could not even leave a scratch on its surface.

Deeper down, the Drones discovered the complete outline of the blackstone device.

It was not enshrined on a pedestal like a temple relic—it was the pedestal itself; the entire temple had been built around it later, like an iron bucket fitted over a heart.

The device was equivalent in size to a Knight-class Titan, with countless Adeptus Mechanicus cables extending from its base interface, connecting to Metallis's industrial control system, converting its output into high-energy currents used to drive the Forge production lines.

It had been operating here quietly for who knows how many millennia; even the Adeptus Mechanicus themselves no longer remembered its origin, knowing only that it was "useful"—a silent, forgotten heart that sustained the pulse of the entire world.

Meanwhile, in high orbit above Metallis, Nephilak's Eternal Echo received a quantum pulse from the blackstone device.

There was no expression on the Necron Overlord's face, but the cold green light in his eye sockets brightened.

He turned to look at the main console, his voice echoing quietly on the bridge.

"Metallis. This name means 'Black Stone' in our language. When the Necron Dynasty abandoned the blackstone at this coordinate, there was no Metallis. No Imperium. No Adeptus Mechanicus."

His metal cloak flowed slowly under the bridge's dim green lighting, "This was not forged by them. They have merely spent thousands of years building an altar they thought was theirs atop the wreckage we discarded."

The Overmind received Nephilak's statement in the Hive Mind.

There was something he had overlooked before—a military factory of the Forge Imperium, why was the equipment so sophisticated yet the defense so weak that it made him suspicious?

Why did the Adeptus Mechanicus not initiate any emergency protocols in the face of an external threat, or even destroy the production lines?

It was not a delay in the person in charge's decision-making—Metallis's industrial control was never built by the Imperium from the start.

It was supported by this blackstone device.

The Imperium merely welded some armor plates onto it.

They had to protect this device intact before the Ultramarines arrived.

He immediately issued a new order, distributed to all Brood Queen frontline nodes: "Expand the meat shield blockade outward from the temple core area. The countdown to the Ultramarines' landing has begun. Buy me every second."