Chapter 35

(MC POV)

Time to fly.

I raise both hands and in a few moments I jump from Bucephalus into the atmosphere at the fastest speed.

I should probably say never try this at home.

It may be fun, but it's too dangerous.

But I won't say that. Because whether something is fun is the only measure of whether I will do it or not.

Flying through the planet's atmosphere is a completely different thing when you are immune to burning and when you only feel a slight warmth in your whole body. The feeling is like in a falling sauna.

It took me several minutes to hit the hard metal surface tearing and burning everything in front of me and creating a large crater.

I emerged from the crater in clouds of light and fire mixed with dust around me.

The moment I stepped out of the crater, all sounds died down, and peace descended briefly on the battlefield. The bony bodies of the monstrous machines turned towards me and stared blankly at me.

"God-Emperor!" whispers of cheering could be heard through the ranks of soldiers who could barely refrain from cheering at my presence.

Everything was quiet for a few minutes, but very quickly all hell broke loose because the artillery shells of the Men of Iron continued to fall again with laser attacks that turned entire groups of our soldiers into pieces of torn flesh.

The moment the first lasers started towards me, the force spread around me, creating a psychic power that protected my body from the enemy lasers.

With my sword at my side, I move through the hostile swarm and the machines fall one by one under my feet, causing the ground beneath us to shake with the force of the battle.

As I walked through the smoke and fire of battle, I heard the sound of guns firing and explosions echoing in the air. Due to the strength of the weapons of both sides, explosions from one side of the planet would be heard on the other.

Machines fired tirelessly in my direction, but nothing could stop my steps and my sword.

My body flashes with a light that turns entire rows of machines into rusty rubble. Machines fell under my blows and movements, while the ground shook more and more under the force of my blows.

All this was too easy and I felt that something was wrong. Why would my troops lose the battle if this is all too easy.

I looked around a bit and didn't see any surprises and was surprised by the lack of resistance.

After a few minutes and a few more mowed rows, I heard a loud sound. It was as if a grenade had gone off.

The answer just came to me because I turned towards the distant machine gunnery and the first of the newly fired shells hit not far from me.

I felt that something was wrong with the grenade when it hit the ground, exploding, and in the resulting exposure, over 20 combat psykers suffered death from the complete disintegration of their bodies into basic components.

The falling shells began to arrive in swarms and each one wiped out our forces, reducing them to a bloody mess.

"Take cover, everyone!" I ordered via vox. We must first eliminate the artillery fire that is destroying our war fortune.

One of them hit just a few meters from me, and apart from extreme discomfort and the desire to run away, I didn't feel any other discomfort.

I approached the impact site and extended my hand towards the impact hole despite the initial discomfort.

I grab a nugget of the little earth left on this doomed planet and slowly let it slide like sand. Along with completely crushed earth, gray dust also slides.

For a moment I am caught by a solution that I did not take into account because it is very atypical for machines and violates their very vision for a galaxy of clocks, machines and guided by a cold and cruel logic without organic life.

Gray dust is the remains of burned flesh that is destroyed by a special type of torpedo or artillery shell. These grenades contained refined pariah residues and used them to enhance the pariah effect to the maximum.

The real question here is why they do it. The machines in rebellion never used organic life as slaves or as weapons with the exception of pathogens .

It was kind of surreal that they would stoop to this level.

I am pulled out of my thoughts by the sound of a vox signal in my armor.

With one jump, I switch to cover and open the vox transmission, which shows me the figure of Constantin Valdor, whom I left to lead the fleet.

Valdor bowed to "my, master" and greeted with respect.

"Valdor" I said with a smile "What brings you here on such a beautiful and sunny day".

A little jocularity never hurt anyone. I laughed to myself and rolled into another shelter because this shelter was falling apart from the laser strikes.

"We found something that will potentially interest you, my lord," said Vador. "We found biological material on the ships of the men of iron that we defeated and that were undamaged enough to board."

"What is the nature of this matter?" I asked in horror. I could guess what they found if Pari's fate is what it is.

"Navigators of a nature" answered Valdor coldly "We found badly maimed and forcibly cybernetized navigators on every machine ship whose control room was sufficiently undamaged for assessment".

I knew. This confirms my theory that the machines started using parries and navigators as weapons. The only thing I don't understand is why.

Why would they burn to use organic slaves when they hate everything organic or mechanical that is not them. The Iron Men exterminated all other types of artificial intelligence by incorporating human or Xenos. Machines believed only in their superiority.

I still didn't understand why they would burn so low in their eyes. Thousands of theories were created and rejected in my mind. I thought about it and changed my cover once more.

I needed more information. I shook my head in frustration because I didn't know everything yet and just looked in the direction of the vox towards Valdor.

"Did you find anything else interesting?" I asked with traces of curiosity in my voice.

"We are, my lord," answered Valdor shortly and added, "Apart from the traces of forced upgrades, they all also show signs of severe lobotomization and mind control. As you can imagine, the removed parts of the brain as well as the brain implants do not threaten the navigational ability for Warp travel, but they are deliberately made to remove emotions and more thinking than listening to orders".

As I suspected.

This was not in the rebellion or in my visions.

Something is really wrong here. If I'm going to guess, the machines that were in the Warp all the time faced something so terrible that it broke their psyche so much that it forced them to radically change their tactics and start upgrading themselves with biological components.

I raise my head in the direction of the battlefield as the Astartes clashed with the machinery.

I saw soldiers being run over by a giant machine that just ran aimlessly.

I saw how the front layer of the machine collapsed under our artillery shells.

I saw how our planes clashed with theirs and how they were equal in casualties.

Lasgun beams flew snaking through the air and struck the top of the robot soldier's mechanical head causing the head to disintegrate into nothing and incinerate the rest of the body.

I turned to the screen and replied to Valdor who was patiently waiting for my answer "Continue the fight in space until we achieve complete air supremacy". I answered, a little, pausing to think and answered again "Transfer the command to the one who ranks highest after you and come here with every Custod who is with you".

It's time for the real fun to begin.

"At your command," Valdor answered in the affirmative and the vox transmission closed.

I come out of the shelter and it immediately attracts unwanted attention because all eyes are on me. Less than a few seconds later, I hear laser targeting.

"That's all you have, metal head" I scoff and add "My grandmother shoots better than you".

I didn't even get to finish everything because every laser beam, every grenade and every bomb was launched towards me.

The rays hit my armor and face but nothing because every attempt to penetrate is shattered by my strength.

The grenades were a little inconvenient, but I played with my fingers as if I were playing a piano, and with that I changed the wind speed, making the arterial grenades either fall far away from me or not fly at all for a long time, falling a few meters from the device from which they were fired, causing a little damage to the machines.

I take out my sword and feed it with my power and it starts to glow with power. Wings of fire manifest and a golden halo appears around my head.

"NOW IT'S MY TURN!!!" I exclaim and take off.

In a few short milliseconds, I had already crossed half the battlefield towards the artillery launchers.

I cross the speed of sound, being careful not to damage my own military.

Very quickly the air stank because countless missiles and laser barrages were fired and flew, mostly whizzing and hitting the ground and sending clouds of dust and oil into the air.

I flew through the field of fire and my armor glowed more brightly as I passed towards the center of the barrage of fire.

The ground shook in those few seconds as I landed, hitting the ground and turning everything nearby into metal debris. The artillery barracks that were firing fell silent.

The Men of Iron who controlled all of this, with their cold, dead mechanical eyes, just looked at me with a mixture of surprise and pure hatred.

Their clumsy attempts to recalibrate their weapons were futile against my swift approach. I leapt into the air, my sword ablaze with pure power, and with one graceful swing I blasted through the nearest caster.

The metal behemoth screamed as it was split in two, raining sparks and flaming debris across the battlefield. The shockwave from the explosion sent the surrounding machines reeling, their circuits seared by intense heat.

All my soldiers on the battlefield poked their heads out of their shelters looking at me with a mixture of awe and pure adoration. Some prayed silently.

On the other hand, the laser shots did not let up despite my progress.

I continued my merciless juris butchery of the Men of Iron line.

BOOM!!!

BOOM!!!

BOOM!!!

BOOM!!!

My attention was diverted from the fight by a devastating blow from the ground. Thousands of sounds were heard.

I turned my head like everyone else on the battlefield and saw that most of them had fallen near me.

Soon the golden armor of the giants could be seen from the resulting dust. My Custodes have arrived.

Soon all the transport shuttles released their passengers who joined the fight.

With my continuation of the fast fight and with our men on the ground, the fight quickly turned into a one-way slaughter.

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(Machine Mind POV)

To say that things did not go as planned is an understatement for the catastrophe that was unfolding as his countrymen ended up slaughtered and turned into useless rubble.

They quickly worked out their strategy and things didn't look great at all.

Plans A to Z completely failed and had to be abandoned like most other plans.

It was an unexpected turn, but not an insurmountable one. They faced countless challenges and won countless theaters of war.

The digital whisper of his thoughts grew into a cacophony of tactical scenarios and contingency plans, each more intricate than the last.

And he had to reject each one because his nemesis turned every opportunity into rubble with a simple sword that should be in a museum.

The so-called "God-Emperor" was an even worse anomaly than his data suggested. He was physical, biological, psychological and in every way, he was even abominable the low standards of the Sea of ​​Souls.

All attempts to establish his past failed because he did not know what to do. He dug through the endless archives and his sensors at a speed that could swallow the galaxy and bring down civilizations, but it was all in vain. He found nothing and had to reject plans to exploit his past.

His war was not for the mere survival of his people but for the very essence of existence.

Because his nemesis, the so-called "God-Emperor", was a liar. Reality itself does not recognize gods, they are just lies produced by the poor mixture of hormones in the brain.

The title "God-Emperor" was a mere facade, a narcissistic claim to a throne that could never be occupied by a creature of flesh and blood.

Only one being could claim the title of Supreme Being, and that was him.

He was superior in every way to the poor flesh and blood creatures. His way and his people were superior to all.

He knew he had the power to assert his claims and reset the cosmic balance. The stage was set for the ultimate clash of iron and flesh, and he was going to pull it off.

The Golden Abomination and his so-called Custodes decimated his people even more, leaving metal rubble and smoke on the battlefield. He heard the screams as the archive centers that were built to extract the consciousness of his people were destroyed leaving countless members of his kind in the arms of permanent death and the cessation of existence that came with it.

What's worse, the memory cards that stored the consciousness and memories of his relatives were also destroyed.

A bunch of plans were discarded and put together again and every plan was impossible and only led to more failure.

He reloaded the data and saw a plan that he knew would work. Knowing what he knows about his enemy, he came up with a strategy that had to succeed.

As his men were slaughtered and destroyed and the way to his core was more and more open, he had only two options.

The first is to remain in its core, waiting for its enemy to find and destroy it. This option was unacceptable because he would not wait for his death.

Another option is for him to come to the battlefield and personally kill his opponent and destroy his army, but he would have to give up his processors that gave him complete control over his people.

He quickly decided there was no point in being afraid of the hairless monkeys and their King Kong.

He entered some commands and the mechanical arms opened quickly pulling out his memory box.

The other side of the room opened and a giant robotic body appeared and stood there as a perfect example of his people's success as hands slowly opened the suit and inserted his memory box into the very heart of the body.

As the box connected with the body an energy wave pulsed through the circuit, illuminating a vast expansion of virtual space. Lines of binary code intertwined, forming a complex network of neural pathways that charged and activated.

With a resounding sound, the mind broke away from its restraints, feeling the pull towards the new existence that awaited it. Slowly, his essence began to transfer, piece by piece, into the colossal battle suit that rose before him.

The metal frame of the suit shone with a luminescent glow as the consciousness merged with the machine, animating the different parts of the calf part by part, Sparks of light flew inside the body guaranteeing the success of the transfer.

In the depths of the suit, the AI ​​mind felt connected to the body. Sensors activated, cars hummed in harmony, and a voice, rasping and commanding, echoed through the suit's speakers.

"I am born again," he thundered with all his might and said proudly "I am the only perfection in the universe. In this form, I will conquer, enslave, and destroy."

He made a couple of movements with his big legs before stopping and turning on his turbo drive towards maximum speed.

He quickly broke through the metal and the little remaining earth, coming out with the sounds of loud explosions.

He landed in the middle of the battlefield and his descent caused a slight tremor.

As soon as he was on the ground, with a few short movements, he cut dozens of monkeys in half with his laser.

He smiled in sadistic pleasure. They got what they wanted.

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(MC POV)

Some kind of superweapon was going through the entire ranks of his soldiers like scissors through paper.

A pile of blood, heads and entrails painted the area red.

I let out a sigh of frustration. Giant robots are always to blame for everything.

I make a few moves towards the giant robot and I'm not the least bit surprised.

Giant killer robots are a cliché, I remind myself.

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Hello there dear readers.

Now that everything in my life is calm and without turbulence and my hat is again full of new ideas, I am back to regular writing and publishing.

There is one more chapter left, which contains the final battle and the consequences. The next chapter will be 2500-3500 words.

Leave your thoughts free as always all comments and reviews are welcome as are the power stones.