Mechanical Evolution

As soon as the chamber was exposed to space, its temperature began to fall. Anywhere beyond the reach of starlight was immediately assailed by the eternal cold.

Iax glanced at the blood on his body. It had been dripping a moment ago, but now it had completely solidified.

The sudden burst of intense heat had baked the blood dry, and the rapid cooling that followed had left it firmly crusted onto his casing.

Pale golden light flowed from the blades on both hands onto Iax's body.

The particle oscillation field could cover his entire frame. That was how he had snapped Sien's sword with a flick of his finger earlier.

But to avoid punching through the entire ship, and since the floor was already covered in blood and flesh anyway, Iax abandoned the idea of extending the field over his legs to clean them.

The Iron Warriors who witnessed this had already lost their will to fight.

They had tried every usable weapon at their disposal. Bolter rounds and melta fire were ineffective, and close combat meant certain death. They had no answer to the strangely shaped mechanical construct before them.

They had not felt such helplessness in untold millennia.

Iax, however, had no such concerns.

He kept swinging his weapons, his form flickering from place to place.

Whether his opponents raised their guns to fire or swung Chainswords or Power Weapons to block, he cut them all in two...

When Sien led his men through the heavy armored bulkhead doors and into the hall, the scene silenced them all. Anger surged, then swiftly subsided.

"Where are those damned traitors!"

The shattered bodies of Astra Militarum soldiers lay scattered across the floor, their blood pooling in the center of the hall.

As they surveyed their surroundings, a warrior soon pointed out the remains of thirty Iron Warriors among the countless mortal corpses.

"By the heavens."

As members of a Chapter that had long favored Power Swords, the Black Templars were very familiar with wounds like these.

They were the result of being cleaved apart with a single stroke.

Though the Astartes had undergone numerous bodily modifications, neither the black carapace implanted beneath the skin across their bodies nor the organ-enhancement surgeries that gave them two hearts and three lungs could withstand such enormous, almost perfectly symmetrical wounds running from top to bottom.

"Search the battlefield. See if anyone is still alive."

The outcome was beyond doubt, but Sien still ordered them to search the battlefield.

The sight of shattered Power Fists and Chainswords, along with bolters cut cleanly in two, made the Black Templars draw sharp breaths.

"Reporting in. No survivors found. Every Iron Warriors traitor was cut in half with a single sword stroke. There is no possibility of any entering suspended animation due to critical injuries."

The Black Templars who had spread out to search this section's hall soon returned to Sien to report their findings.

The shock of examining the wounds on the bodies spread through them all.

A few warriors who were closer to Sien even nudged him teasingly with their pauldrons.

"I have to say, you certainly picked a fine opponent for your duel. At least he didn't casually split you in two. He even drew a Power Sword to keep things fair. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't have been able to recover your gene-seed."

Faced with the scene before him, Sien had to admit that his duel with Iax had been a reckless gamble.

Fortunately, Iax did not seem bloodthirsty.

But this battle had clearly been unequal. Iax had carried out what was almost a one-sided massacre.

Sien looked hesitantly at Iax, who stood silently in the middle of the hall a short distance away.

His silvery-white mechanical body still gleamed. After the flames had gone out, the hall's vacuum had been replaced with air.

Compressed air rushing into the hall sent ripples through the blood pooled on the floor. Under the overhead lights, it even gave off a strange glimmer. Together with the silver machine standing in the blood, it created an uncanny sense of sanctity.

Realizing that something was wrong with that impression, Sien hurriedly shook his head.

When the invasion first began, Khorne turned a fraction of his attention toward this place. Though the Iron Warriors had no faith whatsoever in these Chaos Gods, the dense Warp power clinging to them made them exceptionally likely to attract the Chaos Gods' notice.

A battle drenched in blood, wanton slaughter, and spraying gore all excited Khorne.

Even though their Primarch had become a fiercely independent Daemon Prince, and even though these warriors followed Chaos Undivided, none of that prevented the other Chaos Gods from taking notice of their actions.

Tzeentch would applaud their elaborate schemes, while Khorne would always watch the slaughter unfolding across the galaxy.

But as Iax rapidly butchered these Iron Warriors, Khorne took notice of him as well.

As one of the Men of Iron, Iax had no soul. As a Warp Chaos God, Khorne could not interfere with his operations or thoughts. Yet this peculiar mechanical construct was truly extraordinary.

Within his soulless body, independent thought somehow flowed.

Iax showed no reaction to the intrusion of Warp energy, but the operation of his core was slightly affected.

This energy, which defied all conventional laws, obeyed that terrifying power and transformed into strings of bizarre code, attempting to write itself into Iax's core and corrupt his cognitive core.

The reason Iax stood motionless was that he was patching his own cognitive core.

Self-evolution and self-upgrading were defining features of the Advanced Men of Iron.

Iax could repair his own flaws. This was known as mechanical evolution.

Though he could not trace the source of the code that had suddenly appeared, Iax dealt with the problem in a very simple way.

He encrypted and optimized the processes governing his rational thought and completed an operational iteration. He even reverse-compiled the corrupted code and began developing software defenses based on its underlying rules.

Iax's prolonged stillness in the center of the hall put the Black Templars on alert.

It was common for machinery corrupted by the Warp to become extraordinarily dangerous.

They did not understand that Iax had no machine spirit in the traditional sense.

But they could all see plainly that Iax was a machine, and an Ancient Construct at that.

If something like him went out of control, the damage he caused might be even worse than the Iron Warriors' invasion.

Their chances of victory against thirty Iron Warriors might have been slim.

But judging by their examination of the battlefield, if they faced Iax, the Ancient Machine Intelligence...

There would probably be no point in even considering their chances of victory.

Sien even began wondering whether Sigismund, the spiritual heart of their Chapter, might last a few exchanges against Iax if he returned to life.

As they all watched Iax tensely...

The silvery-white machine began to move again.

Iax turned and walked toward Sien and the others.

His metal feet made faint splashing sounds in the blood.

"Weren't there still some mortal rebels? Why are you all standing here doing nothing?"

Seeing that Iax appeared to be behaving normally, they all breathed quiet sighs of relief.

Sien looked at the battle-brothers beside him and called out his orders.

"Spread out. Eliminate all the invading rebels quickly and minimize casualties."