Necrons

Although Chen Xi had decided to conduct a preliminary exploration of the Necron tomb—put more bluntly, grave robbing at a pile of metal bones—it was not something he could just set off and do on a whim.

At the very least, Chen Xi needed time to gather a small grave-robbing team and prepare weapons and equipment for himself.

A Necron grave was not the sort of maze found only in 3K Era tomb-raiding novels, the kind that would never exist in reality outside fiction. Unless the tomb's owner had some bizarre fetish, no normal person would ever build a tomb like that.

A tomb was a place where the dead could rest in peace. The principle was to serve the dead as one served the living, with every utensil and necessity no different from those used by the living!

A living person would have trouble getting inside, so how could the tomb's owner possibly live comfortably in there?

And damn it, for a tomb that huge, had anyone considered the construction workload?! People could hang on wires in a tomb, and several people could wander through the passageways for hours!

What you had dug up was not some ancient tomb, but a Necron grave world!

Necron graves really were that outrageous. Their predecessors, the Necrontyr, had such short lifespans that they had genuinely built their cities into graveyards. Their entire species had lived in cemeteries.

The layout of a Necron tomb was also incredibly intricate, because it was a colossal grave capable of holding an entire dynasty's armies, citizens, and all manner of vehicles.

For particularly powerful Necrons, their grave might even be a Tomb Ship dozens of kilometers long, comparable to an Imperial battleship.

One could imagine that if it were a Necron grave of that scale, trying to rob it without making thorough preparations would probably mean not even getting through the door.

After taking stock of the forces at his disposal, Chen Xi discovered that he truly did not have enough people to go grave robbing.

Other than himself, a Psyker Inquisitor, the only personnel he could deploy were the Kasrkin Guard and Sisters of Battle squad at his side, along with four special Sister units.

Magos Ovilia herself could also be counted as combat power. If she were willing to spend some time preparing, she could cobble together a few Combat Servitors to at least fill out their numbers.

There would be no problem handling ordinary situations, but grave robbing in a Necron tomb?

He might as well wash up and go to bed. Even professional Adeptus Ministorum troops would not last long down there.

The Planetary Defense Force would fare even worse. Astra Militarum troops could only last minutes against Necrons, let alone ordinary Planetary Defense Force soldiers, whose equipment and training were a full step below theirs.

If they wanted to rely on conventional forces to resist a Necron army, then aside from burying them beneath mountains of corpses, their only hope was deploying all kinds of heavy weapons and armored vehicles.

Necron Gauss Weapons could tear matter apart on a microscopic level. Even a mighty Primaris Space Marine would, once hit solidly, be torn apart bit by bit along with his Power Armor, reduced to the most basic atoms.

The Sisters of Battle, on the other hand—especially that Sister of Battle from the official animation who could resist Gauss Weapons through prayer—were genuinely incredible. It made people cry out that Big E had manifested his power.

So if they really went tomb raiding, given that Chen Xi did not intend to alert the entire tomb, the only ones he could bring would probably be his Sisters of Battle and Magos Ovilia.

At most, he could have Rachel and General Gregory select a few reconnaissance experts from the Planetary Defense Force.

As for anyone else? Too many people would alert the owner of this tomb.

Although the items Ovilia had provided so far suggested that this tomb had likely been eroded by time over the long years and had begun to decay,

given that Flayed Ones had still been active here more than eighty years ago, Chen Xi was worried that there were still active Necrons inside this tomb.

If they were merely ordinary Necron Lords, Chen Xi could simply mobilize an army and roll straight over them, filling this Tomb World with human lives if necessary.

But if what slept in the tomb was a Cryptek, or someone on the level of a Necron Overlord, then all Chen Xi could do was quickly call for reinforcements.

After all, a full Necron formation was not something he could handle. Without committing eight hundred thousand to a million Astra Militarum troops, they probably could not even budge a single Necron Overlord.

Necrons were called Necrons not merely because they looked like metal skeletons, but because the Living Metal in their bodies was a special material that could repair itself, even regenerate, so long as it had sufficient energy.

As long as any Necron was not completely killed, it could lie on the ground long enough and, with an adequate energy supply, repair itself.

And when, after exhausting every effort, you finally completely destroyed a Necron—sorry, Reanimation Protocols activated!

This was a special technology developed by the Necrons, specifically for uploading their consciousness data when they were destroyed.

This thing was a robot. Blowing it up merely made it upload its program, and eighteen minutes later it would be back in action.

There were only two ways to deal with Necrons permanently.

First, destroy their Reanimation Protocols. Send an elite decapitation team to teleport into the enemy tomb's core and destroy the data-storage core of the Reanimation Protocols, preventing all those metal bones from uploading and resurrecting themselves again.

Though that sounded simple, the Reanimation Protocols were the most crucial part of a Tomb World. Naturally, they would be heavily guarded.

There was also one critical issue: humanity had conducted very little research into Necrons. Precisely destroying the Reanimation Protocols was extremely difficult. It was questionable whether the elites teleported there would even recognize the thing.

Moreover, Necron territory was generally vast. So long as a Necron Dynasty had not declined too badly, it usually controlled at least several Tomb Worlds, and the Reanimation Protocols...

might not be on the planet you were attacking at all, but on the Necron Dynasty's Crownworld—its headquarters.

Do not find that strange. For Necrons, it was perfectly normal. With their technology, they could easily establish a portal between two planets, then dispatch reanimated Necrons from the Crownworld to the Tomb World.

So, could Necrons be defeated this way? It was not impossible, but it was truly difficult.

The other method was relatively easier to execute, though it was hardly easy to accomplish.

It required you to stop playing fancy tricks and solve the problem with the simplest form of violence: directly blow up every Necron, then kill them repeatedly in a short period, leaving them without the energy needed to reanimate.

This worked rather well against smaller Necron tombs or dynasties, since the Imperium had always been abundantly martial in such matters.

But against powerful Necron Dynasties, it fell short, because those dynasties possessed Shards of the Star Gods with energy supplies that were practically infinite.