No one could pursue a goal as relentlessly as the Men of Iron.
Nor could anyone disregard the consequences as completely as these soulless machines.
Sanguinius's expression stiffened slightly.
The Man of Iron before him, calling itself G-3391, had told him some incredible things.
Deep within the Imperial Palace lay several passages that led directly from its outer districts into its interior.
Some of these passages ran through the Ancient Ruins.
These were structures left behind by the Human Federation's government in the Old Era.
The entire Imperial Palace had been built over the former central city of the Federation Government.
The palace itself even incorporated some of the Federation's old underground structures and concealed facilities.
Their army was a reserve force, tasked with protecting the Federation's administrative centre on Earth.
After manufacture, they had been sealed inside a multilevel warehouse thousands of metres underground.
This reserve force was fully armed, but no cognitive programs had been loaded into them. They had never even been activated.
And so they had slept underground for ten thousand years.
Until Glorious Flame, seeking to rescue Oll Persson, who had been identified as a Federation citizen, dispatched four subunits hastily constructed from its own body to infiltrate the palace.
The four beast-shaped Men of Iron travelled underground, squeezing through ancient passages that had not yet collapsed and relying on their agility to keep moving.
These ancient passages were not safe. They teemed with mutated animals and plants that had taken up residence there at some unknown point.
But these creatures were clearly not enough to halt the Men of Iron's advance.
Before claws sheathed in particle oscillation fields, every obstruction was silently shredded.
It was precisely this resistance from the creatures that led the four guards to stumble upon a warehouse, a third of