Chapter 9 – Fuck, the Sequel
He had been arrogant. He saw that now.
He'd believed after defeating the orks, after fighting off the dark eldar, that there was no force that could pose so large a threat that he could not, eventually, overcome them through the combination of his industrial might and technology. He had even assumed that he could overcome the dark eldar ship if it ever returned.
He had never been so wrong.
He was also fairly certain the universe hated him. How else would you explain him, not two days after just defeating the orks, finding out the planet he'd been fighting on was actually a NECRON TOMB WORLD.
Addendum: An active necron tomb world.
One of his mining fabricator bots had been minding its own business, digging a new chamber for a bunch of generators, when the ground and given way and sent the unfortunate machine tumbling into a chasm hundreds of meters deep. He'd lost contact with the bot the moment of impact. He hadn't thought much of it, simply sending a Patent down to reclaim the bot and maybe explore the area to see if it could be used for anything neat.
That patent was destroyed in a volley of gauss fire roughly ten seconds ago and he'd spent the subsequent amount of time, days in his accelerated mind, screaming his head off and freaking out because FUCKING NECRONS.
He'd only fought a decisive battle with the orks because they were getting too advanced for his taste and now he had to fight a race that had the technology to make their own gods into pokemon.
FUCK, he was so fucked, fuck, fuck, fuck!
He all but considered the planet to be lost. Orks were one thing, a dark eldar raiding party was simple enough to swarm. But a tomb world was another thing entirely. He didn't even know how many necrons there were. It could have been a tiny fringe world or the heart of an entire dynasty equipped with C'tan shards.
He considered using the halley engines and annihilating the planet via throwing a moon at it, but he quelled his instincts and forced himself to look at the situation logically.
So, necrons. Very advanced immortal robot-skeleton boys from a time immemorial that refused to die even when they were killed. Highly advanced technology, able to trap gods. Their greatest strength and weakness was their inability to feel the warp. In terms of racism and smugness, they held their own against even the likes of the Imperium and the craftworld Eldar. Thought they owned the galaxy and saw everyone else as squatters, not including the eldar who were just their oldest enemies. That said, they did have codes of honor, so they at least weren't entirely unreasonable. At least when it came to dealing with other necrons.
He wasn't sure how they compared to the likes of the Dark Eldar or the DAoT humans. The last he'd heard, those three were the most advanced races, not including the Old Ones, and had all gone down different paths of the tech tree. That said, he was willing to bet the necrons were the most advanced simply because their gods dealt entirely with the material realm and the necrons had, again, trapped shards of said gods in pokeballs. They'd also fought the Old Ones, Krorks, and ancient Eldar to a standstill in the War in Heaven, with the assistance of said gods to the point that they never really lost they just decided to go to sleep for… reasons.
He wasn't too sure about those reasons, they tended to change in the lore if not conflict.
Regardless, he had necrons to deal with. While a part of him was salivating at the idea of getting such advanced technology, especially if they had anything that could counter the Warp, a larger part was absolutely terrified of the idea of having to fight such advanced and intelligent beings. The necrons didn't have the industrial ability he did, he was working under the assumption that they couldn't produce new necrons, at least not easily. The Pariahs were retconned lore, but that didn't necessarily mean shit. That said, they did have the ability to repair themselves even after being destroyed with little-to-no effort. It wasn't always the case, but it happened more often than not as far as he remembered and their chances could be even further enhanced by their leaders. Depending on how far along they were to awakening, they could very well outnumber him in both troops and vehicles, a situation he was neither familiar or comfortable with. It was especially disconcerting since he was certain those troops and vehicles were superior to anything equivalent he had on an individual level.
More than that, many of the advantages he had were also used by the necrons. They could use accelerated thinking the same as him, communicate with one another and receive orders through a central commander allowing them to react instantly to changes all across the battlefield, they could teleport their forces and almost certainly had spacecraft on par with what the Dark Eldar had used to destroy the city and his base. They didn't tire, didn't need sleep or food or recreational time.
Rex was starting to realize just how terrifying he would be to fight for a regular person.
Now, he just needed to figure out what to do.
He needed information. A squad of necrons had destroyed his Patent unit outside what looked like the central entrance to a massive, black pyramid, one on par with his Metro-Rex titan. From his memories of the lore, such monuments were rarely immobile, but it would hopefully take them time to fully get going. He was working under the assumption that this tomb world had been reactivated by his fabricator's fall, hence why the planet wasn't currently held in the grip of a skeletal iron fist.
He sent a swarm of camouflaged Locusts into the tunnel, moving low to the ground or close to the walls to avoid being seen. They entered the chasm and floated gently towards the ground. There were a few dozen of them standing still as statues in front of the entrance, the only mark of their metal life the flicker of fiery green energy within their frames, surrounding the broken frames of his fabricator bot and patent unit. Then, the door to the obelisk slid open, a grinding noise, and another Necron emerged. No, that wasn't right, saying he was just another Necron was like saying a clone trooper was the same as an Arc.
He was decked out in artifacts that would have made Rex salivate with greed if he still had the ability. He wielded an ornate staff that crackled with ancient power and held a black orb in his other hand. A black cloak that was somehow both tattered and majestic billowed from his shoulders.
Rex looked down upon the Necron Lord and the Necron Lord looked up and saw Rex. His eyes flashed with a malevolent light.
Then, he lost contact with his Locusts.
Fuck
Seventy-Two Hours Later
Good news: there were fewer necrons than he'd feared.
Bad news: there were more necrons than he'd hoped.
Over the course of three days, he'd kept up an endless assault through the tunnel upon the pyramid. When his forces began to get bottlenecked by the tunnel, he made a hundred then a thousand more tunnels. When his tanks refused to fit, he made more room for them. His fabricators were hard at work building more factories, more tunnels, more portals, more defenses. He was throwing an entire system's worth of material at these necrons in endless waves, the culmination of his months of battle-experience and technological acquisitions.
And he was still being pushed back.
At the start of the first day, his forces had held the tunnel entrance to the chasm. By the dawn of the second, he'd been pushed back into the tunnel itself and forced to give more and more ground. He'd opened and expanded more tunnels then, but it only slowed the encroaching necrons as they were forced to fight on multiple fronts. By the end of the third day, he'd lost the lengths of all the tunnels to the endless march of necrons and collapsed them all. He'd continued to open new tunnels, but he was close to breaking even on his resource drain. And he was noticing a higher and higher number of necrons arriving on the field with every passing hour, far more than there should have been if they were just resurrecting.
He'd attempted to use his swarm of Dust Locusts, of which he had a massive supply from the previous battle with the orks, but the moment they reached the front lines, the Necron Lord would appear, like the reaper himself, his eyes flashing and all the Locusts in the swarm would explode. He'd tried sending multiple swarms down different tunnels to see if he could overwhelm the Necron Lord, but the bastard had simply teleported from one tunnel to the next, destroying each swarm before it could do more than lightly scar a few necrons. He couldn't figure out why it was happening, whether it was some kind of hacking or a physical attack that was destroying them.
Worst of all was the fact that he couldn't acquire any of the Necron tech from their dead. Every time he destroyed one of them, they either got back up and started fighting again or teleported away. His fabricators couldn't disassemble a living necron fast enough to acquire anything beyond a scan of the target before instantly being destroyed and the scans were basically just dimensions, mass, and other sensory data, not how to build the damn things. Eventually, he'd managed to pin a Necron to the ground with Wolffes and get its gauss rifle away from it via slicing off its metallic fingers. The necron had teleported away, but the gauss rifle had remained and he'd rushed it to the back of his lines for disassembly.
Which brought him to his current predicament: He couldn't manufacture the damn things.
Well, that wasn't entirely true. He could see how the parts worked, he understood the technology, that wasn't an issue. The issue was the necrodermis that comprised it. Or rather, the necrodermis that was required to comprise it. If he didn't use the living metal to create a gauss rifle, it simply wouldn't function. The weapon drew upon the energies of the substance in a way he just didn't understand.
And he had no idea how to make said living metal. It wasn't nano-tech, that was for damn sure, and even after disassembling it he couldn't figure out how to make it. Which was concerning, since he was pretty sure the technological know-how of the things he disassembled was supposed to be instant.
Was it just not possible for him to make necrodermis with nano-bots? He was studying the composition of an atom of necrodermis, trying to figure out if he could at least replicate it, but to no avail. He could make manipulate sub-atomic particles and make a perfect copy of the atomic structure, but there was an energy behind the necrodermis that made it function that he just couldn't figure out how to harness or bestow upon his own materials. He'd expected this kind of thing from warp-related materials like wraithbone, but not from necrons! They were supposed to be the fully material realm techies!
He calmed himself. They were the fully material realm techies. Which meant it should be possible for him to learn to create necrodermis without dealing with the Warp, but just looking at it was pointless. Presumably, the necrons should possess such a device capable of creating necrodermis, he just needed to find and analyze that. Presumably by invading the heart of the pyramid that was still spitting out fresh legions of overpowered robot skeletors. Easy.
In the meantime, he could store and use the necrodermis he harvested to recreate the gauss rifle and presumably other necron tech, he'd just be limited by how much he managed to gain.
Which, given how he was getting his ass handed to him, was not going to be very much. Certainly not enough to turn the tide of this siege.
Throwing the moon at the planet was looking like a better and better option by the day, but the first thing he would do was sending out ships to begin expanding his operations to other star systems. He'd been holding off on it during the battles with the orks out of fear of drawing unwanted attention to his system when he could barely fend off the greenskins, wanting to build up his defenses there first, but these necrons were leaving him with little choice. If he wanted any hope of winning, he needed sources of material to tap into. And, if worst came to worst, he could run from this system and hope they wouldn't follow him.
That was his final resort, however, and he turned his attention to a certain satellite for the one he'd use right before that resort and right after the resort of throwing the moon at the problem to hope it goes away.
Give me your stones ahem your souls