Chapter 2 – Deldar
It took him a few seconds of accelerated thinking to finally calm down enough to start planning again. Dark Eldar, wonderful. He definitely wasn't fucked, yup, definitely not.
One might wonder why a machine felt fear towards the Dark Eldar when his bullet riddled frame (which he'd repaired in the last day) had proven he could not feel pain. Well, if there was anyone in the galaxy that could make a robot suffer, he was one million percent sure it would be a dark fucking eldar.
From what the sensors on his fireflies could gather, there were a few hundred of them, mostly roving around above an empty city on gravtanks escorted by jetbikes. If he had guns, he'd be less worried since he could just drown them in tens of thousands of bots and aircraft. Alas, he had nothing but the Locusts which although they'd been effective, they had also made him sick to his figurative stomach to use against organics. Sure, any given dark eldar probably deserved that slow and horrific death, they were probably the most evil faction in the entire galaxy bar Chaos itself (which was saying something given this was 40k), but knowing someone deserved a painful death was much different than actually giving it to them.
The city itself looked to be Imperium in design. Gothic architecture with lots of pointy bits. That said, there were no humans that he could perceive on the streets. Hiding from the raiders, most likely. Smart, but it shot down his hopes that there were any Imperial Guardsman he could 'acquire' a lasgun from rather than trying to steal deldar tech.
Speaking of getting shot down, why weren't his fireflies? They had no stealth tech, so he was quite certain the dark eldar should have noticed them. Was it because they were unmanned and unarmed? They probably just didn't care about being spied upon as they worked. Probably enjoyed it even.
His theory was soon proven when one of the jet bikes suddenly swooped down, nabbing a screaming woman from her hiding spot in an alleyway. The eldar on the bike rose higher and higher into the air, ignoring the struggles of the woman, until he was well within the sight of one firefly. The eldar waved, almost cheerfully, at the firefly, clearly seeing it. Then, he brought out his knife and opened the woman from her navel to stomach.
Commander and xeno watched as the woman's guts, followed soon by the rest of her, dropped down to the city far below, splattering like a broken egg. Then, the dark eldar looked back up at the firefly, waved once more, and swooped back down to the city, hunting for more prey. He memorized the appearance of that eldar, the specific configuration of the armor he wore, the bike he road, everything.
That one would die to the Locusts.
For the rest of them however, he couldn't be sure what worked against the Orks would work against the dark eldar. The Drukhari were far more advanced and more than likely had countermeasures for such technologies. Knowing them, they probably even used nanomachines themselves as a method of torture.
He needed another kind of killing machine, a more conventional one. He had the tools to design new robots, now he just needed an idea of what he was building.
The knife of the dark eldar stayed in his mind, so he decided to use that as his inspiration.
One Hour Later
He'd completed his new design within a few seconds thanks to his accelerated thinking and his factories were soon producing the newest addition to his list of units, the Wolffe Bot. If he couldn't be put in Star Wars he could at least put a bit of Star Wars into 40k.
Still, designing a bot was surprisingly easy for him or, rather, for his new body. It felt… natural, doing so. He'd never been a mechanic or even much of a computer guy in his old life, but in this one he understood literally everything there was to know about his own technology. Minus how to make a working gun.
The Wolffe was a fairly small bot, a meter in height with a hunched appearance similar to a werewolf from skyrim, making it roughly the same size as a Dox. It was a pure melee bot with the best claws he could give them, five long blades on each hand. Even though they were sharp enough to easily slice through a tree trunk and leave deep gouges in stone in his tests, he wasn't certain they'd be able to go up against anything with decent armor, so he gave them another edge in the form of small fabricators embedded in their palms. They would emit a disassembly stream at the opponent, hopefully weakening or opening gaps in their armor and allowing the claws to inflict greater damage.
Since he lacked range, each unit also had anti-grav capabilities, allowing it to fly. It looked unwieldy, but it was fast and he hoped it'd be enough to allow them to get close to the knife-ears.
In an unassisted factory, each Wolffe took nearly four minutes to build. By this point, however, he had no unassisted factories, each had at least five fabricators that reduced the time to a single minute.
Soon, he had a stream of bots emerging from his factories, marching into a nearby chamber that he was continuously expanding to make more space for them. He already had over a thousand of them stored there and, at the rate he was going, he would have quite the horde when he attacked. He couldn't be sure how effective they would be, so he'd try to outnumber his foes at least a thousand to one. Skaven tactics at their finest.
While this was all happening, he continued to monitor the situation with the dark eldar, as well as scout out the rest of the planet. The dark eldar continued to hunt their prey throughout the city, seeming to be content with remaining in the sky and swooping down when they spotted someone.
He couldn't do anything for them, not yet. He kept telling himself that even as he listened to the screams.
The city was to the northwest of his current base. To the south, however, were the Ork hordes. There were a lot of them, to say the least. He estimated at least a few hundred thousand were roaming around a vast desert that oddly bordered his forest. They were split among three main groups, each of which bore a different symbol and seemed not too pleased with the continued existence of the other two. From what he could gather, it seemed like they were currently trying to figure out who was going to be the big boss by killing each other until someone stopped dying.
That was fine, as long as they were busy killing each other they would be (barring past exceptions) too busy to try to kill him.
There were a few other small towns on the continent he was on, but they were empty and abandoned. Some had groups of Orks living in them, others were little more than piles of rubble. As his scouts ventured further away, they soon came upon the ocean and a few thousand small, uninhabited islands. Those would make good bases to hide out in and he sent a few dozen aircraft fabricators to begin expanding onto those islands. Occasionally, they would pass over a group of Orks, who would take potshots at the aircraft high above them, but these were rarely accurate enough to do more than scratch his paint.
He also sent a group of fabricator vehicles towards the city, using the forest as cover for their journey. If he could get closer, he could build a teleport gate nearby and give his forces a better chance at catching the deldar off-guard.
At first, he'd been worried about using his gates since teleportation in 40k used the Warp and he was even less excited about that particular aspect of reality than he was about facing the dark eldar. However, after an extensive search through his files for all things warp-related, he found in a rare bit of good news that the precursor version of teleportation had nothing to do whatsoever with the hellish realm of the immaterium. The same was true for the rest of his technology, like the pocket dimension that stored his energy and metal until it could be drawn upon and, most excitingly, his faster than light travel.
His ships didn't need the Warp to travel between star systems! Sure, it was kind of slow in comparison to warp travel, it was a little faster than one lightyear per day, but it was also stable, easy to produce and, most importantly, didn't use literal hell as a means of travel.
Still, those implications were something he could think of more in the future when he wasn't trying to survive on this one planet. If he wanted to get off this planet without fear of being destroyed, he'd need guns. Lots of guns. The eldar were the only ones with guns that he could maybe acquire and copy the designs of for himself. True, most of their weapons were non-lethal so they could gather slaves, but he was sure he could modify them well enough so that they killed rather than maimed and tortured.
He had his plan and he'd soon have his army.
48 Hours Later
Archon Draenei chuckled to himself as another jetbike flashed by, sending another Mon'keigh tumbling into his raider, moaning in delicious, if muted, anguish. This last month had been a good harvest for the Kabal of the Severed Hope. After the disaster caused by his predecessor's arrogance, they'd nearly been destroyed entirely by his rivals. It had been Draenei's own cunning that had allowed themselves to rebuild enough that they could once more engage in these raids.
Shyrrek had been a fool using such advanced orks against his foes. He'd been killed just as much by his own hubris as by the ork killsaws when they'd teleported onto his craft.
These orks were far more primitive, their most advanced 'tek' were their firearms, which were barely functional as it was. They had been just advanced enough that they could handily break the planetary garrison. A well-placed bombardment from the orbiting corsair had seen their Boss and their unity both die, along with around half their numbers. True, they'd repopulated as Orks were wont to do, but they were fractured into three tribes, the names of which Draenei hadn't bothered to learn.
As long as they remained fractured, they were of no threat to anyone, least of all him. Even if a new boss emerged from among them, another bombardment would take care of that as easily as the last, he was sure. And all the while, they could continue their harvest of this city, enjoying the anguish of those that remained below before they finally moved on and left them to be overrun by the Orks.
Yes, it had been a good month, one made even better by the presence of their silent observers. They'd appeared nearly three planetary cycles ago, flying high above them. At first, Draenei had simply watched them and had his corsair report their movements. The aircraft were small, unarmed and unmanned, not much of a threat in and of themselves even if they tried to physically ram them in suicide attacks. They'd emerged from the forest, yet there was only a single structure there, some kind of factory that had gone silent for several hours afterwards. It had then produced a few dozen larger aircraft that he'd immediately been wary of, at least until they began flying off towards the ocean and he quickly put them out of mind.
Still, his forces appreciated the fact their work was being watched. It made it much more fun and more than one of them had flown up to show off their captures to the spies. Drazhan, the first one to do this, had immediately killed his prey, much to Draenei's chagrin, but he couldn't deny the pleasure he got from imagining the despair of whoever was watching. Given they hadn't responded to their provocations, it seemed unlikely these hidden watchers would do much more than just that. And the Drukhari loved an attentive audience.
Draenei chuckled again, leaning back into his throne and closing his eyes as he drank in the suffering around him. He only opened them when a low humming noise began to grow louder and louder. He turned his gaze to the south, where the structure had been, and his eyes went wide.
Give me your souls