While Iax was busy dealing with the various units covered by the Watcher Protocol, war across the galaxy was growing ever fiercer.
More and more Imperial Worlds were struggling to repel the Necrons' attacks, while the many worlds that received no reinforcements from the Men of Iron could only rely on the Imperium's own strength.
Anvil VII, a Forge World on the edge of the Ultima Segmentum, had been reduced to burning ruins. The local Planetary Defense Force had long since collapsed, and even the two regular Astra Militarum regiments stationed there had been shattered.
Cold steel covered the entire planet. Vast foundries stretched like metal mountain ranges, and countless massive smokestacks belched endless smoke and flame into the lead-gray sky, twisting the star's light into a sickly orange-red. The air was scorching, thick with ozone and the stench of molten metal and charred organic matter.
There was no soil on the surface, only hardened slag, cooled flows of molten metal, and bottomless mine pits. The spires of the Gear Cathedral pierced the smoke, the enormous cog emblem of the Adeptus Mechanicus looming through the firelight above the vast industrial hell driven by gears, pistons, and conveyor belts.
Now, that hell had been awakened by a death far older and colder.
The tomb fleet of the Necrons' Maynarkh Dynasty tore through the orbital defense network on the outskirts of the star system.
There was no warning, no declaration of war, only the will to destroy coursing through cold logic circuits.
The green light of Phase Teleportation brutally folded and tore space itself, engulfing several Secondary Forge Districts on the fringes of the Forge World in an instant.
As the blinding light stabilized, the Necrons' war machines set foot on that polluted ground.
Phalanxes of the Maynarkh Dynasty's necron warriors emerged