The Mekboy clutched the pistol, scratching his head with a jagged piece of scrap metal that served as a wrench.
"I fink dis bit's gonna be real killy," he muttered.
He squeezed the trigger with a thick, calloused finger. For a moment, the weapon did nothing. Then, a puff of acrid black smoke drifted from the casing.
Axion had already calculated a warp-jump trajectory to dodge an incoming blast, but the device appeared to be a total failure. The Mekboy looked puzzled, shaking the smoking, but not yet exploding, handgun. He gave it a sharp thump, adjusted a stray wire, and pulled the trigger again.
The smoke thickened.
He shook the weapon once more, the muzzle drifting carelessly until it pointed directly at Axion.
Zap!
A blinding, oversized beam of energy erupted from the barrel, slamming squarely into Axion's metallic chassis.
In that instant, as if possessed by the spirit of Mork himself, the Mekboy didn't wait to see the damage. Clutching his energy pistol, he bolted toward the nearby Gorkanaut, shouting over his shoulder:
"I knew'd it worked! I's da bestest Mek in da galaxy!"
The Tech-Priests, initially stunned by the sudden discharge, reacted with clinical fury. They hoisted their power axes and lunged at the fleeing xenos. While the martial prowess of a Tech-Priest paled in comparison to the Adeptus Astartes, they were formidable compared to baseline humans, their frames reinforced by extensive cybernetic augmentations.
The standard-issue power axes of the Mechanicus crackled with pale blue energy. The heavy blades hissed through the air, driven by the relentless torque of hydraulic limbs.
The Mekboy let out a cackling laugh, parrying a descending axe-haft with a strip of metal he'd snatched from the dirt, shoving the priest aside. Then, he saw it.
Or rather, he saw himself.
Before his consciousness flickered out, his vision swiveled to see a towering silver figure standing behind his own headless body. A triangular blade, shimmering with a faint golden light, had just completed a clean arc through his neck.
Oi... dat body looks dead familiar...
Darkness claimed him as his vision tumbled. A bolt of brilliant blue plasma shrieked through the air, vaporizing the falling head instantly. The residual energy punched through the collapsing torso and splashed against Axion's armor in a flare of heat.
Through the rolling thermal haze, Axion fixed his glowing ocular sensors on a Tech-Priest standing nearby, who was still clutching a smoking plasma pistol.
Though Axion's mechanical face was incapable of traditional expression, the priest felt the unmistakable weight of a silent, lethal glare. He recognized the unit; this was the same priest Axion had publicly rebuked for vocalizing insults back on the cruiser.
Splendid. The biological is nursing a grudge.
Assuming the shot was, statistically speaking, likely an accident, Axion did not retaliate. He stooped down and retrieved the crude energy pistol from the Mekboy's twitching remains. His logic-cores whirred at maximum capacity, processing the impossibility of the object in his hand.
"Illogical..." Axion murmured.
He scanned the weapon multiple times, his mechanical fingers probing the surface. Comparing the current state to the pre-firing scans, Axion confirmed a harrowing fact: the surge of energy from the battery had literally burned a functional conducting path through the internal junk of the pistol.
The discovery was jarring. Was this a deliberate design by the greenskin, or something else entirely?
Upon closer inspection, the disparate nature of the materials caused the energy flow to be catastrophically unstable, generating massive thermal waste. The initial smoke had been the weapon's internal components literally incinerating themselves to create a circuit.
The battery was now drained, its charge depleted by that single, successful discharge. The interior of the weapon was a honeycomb of heat-pitted slag; the "pistol" was now so structurally compromised it would likely crumble at a touch.
Axion could not reconcile this with any known physical law. The Orks did not utilize technology as he understood it. A Mekboy could never explain why these specific components, assembled in this specific way, produced such a result. They simply had a "fink," decided it would work, and the universe, through some psychic cancer of the Warp, conceded.
Axion crushed the fragile weapon in his fist, turning his gaze toward the Gorkanaut.
If a xenos could fashion an energy weapon more potent than a standard-issue Imperial Lasgun from a pile of refuse, what was the destructive potential of this "God-Engine" they had built with salvaged Federation alloys?
He felt a sudden, dangerous urge to activate it.
However, a quick scan revealed a logistical hurdle: the entry hatch for this machine, which stood taller than a Knight Suit, was barely three meters high. He couldn't fit inside. Furthermore, its "cogitative" interface was laughably primitive. The cockpit was a thicket of crude levers and tangled cables. Whether any of it was actually connected to a functioning system remained a mystery. Even with a technical manual, no sane mind could operate such a thing.
As Axion stood in silent contemplation of the Gorkanaut, a figure approached him from the shadows.
Calanthus looked up at the unactivated war machine, a hint of relief in his voice. "It is fortunate we struck quickly. Had the Orks brought this engine to life, our objective might have been jeopardized."
Axion did not share the Captain's sentiment. "Perhaps the mission would have been simpler had they turned it on. Diagnostic scans suggest this 'construct' is a superlative heap of garbage. The probability of spontaneous combustion upon activation exceeds 88.34%. It is less a war machine and more a localized explosive device."
Calanthus chose not to argue the metaphysics of Ork machinery; he was no Techmarine. He signaled to a squad of Naval Armsmen who moved forward carrying melta charges. Under the direction of a Tech-Priest, they began rigging the giant effigy for demolition.
The servitors had finished reclaiming the last of the viable scrap. High above, the cruiser's sensors had detected Ork warbands from neighboring encampments converging on their position.
The Warboss Black Hammer had realized that his camp had fallen, and while the lack of an immediate counter-attack was strange, he was now sending "da boyz" to investigate the silence.
"Axion, we must extract," Calanthus stated. He stood by, waiting, but did not push.
Axion nodded. In a sudden, fluid motion, he leaped into the air, his arm-blade snapping out. With a single, precision strike, he severed the massive rotary cannon from the Gorkanaut's chassis.
The other materials were too fragmented to save, but this piece, forged from Federation tank barrels, could be smelted and reforged into something worthy.
As Axion marched toward the extraction point hauling the multi-meter-long cannon, Calanthus sighed and signaled a Thunderhawk Transporter to clear a cargo bay specifically for the scrap.