Simut leaned forward, magnifying the image of the wall as he did so. He saw smoke already rising from several buildings close to the centre of the human settlement. Zozar’s Destroyer-tainted warriors had begun their attack without delay. Zozar led the march, his weapons spitting bolts of gauss fire, his tripodal guard following close behind. Other warriors had transformed themselves into floating monstrosities, eschewing motive limbs altogether. Gauss rifles and cannons crackled disintegrating jade beams through the shuffling mass of the human population, flaying their atoms apart as the beams passed from one target to the next in a near-continuous assault. Behind the most altered members of Zozar’s cabal came a phalanx of slaved skeletal warriors, driven by the same urge to slay as their master but dispossessed of the individual sense of self that drove other Destroyers to modify their bodies away from the necron norm. They split into squads, empowered by the skorpekh lord’s imperative to slay, and roamed at will through the streets and buildings killing everything they encountered.

‘The Destroyers are slaying the general populace, my lord.’

‘It was impossible to translocate Zozar within the energy fields and astromantic bubble of the citadel,’ replied Simut. ‘Some collateral damage was inevitable.’

‘The loss of lower life is no cause of regret, my lord. While King Szarekh has ordered that the lower beings are preserved where that does not place unnecessary delay on the expedition, they are plentiful. My concern is that Zozar’s legion seems to be moving away from the citadel, not towards it.’

Simut saw that this was the case and wondered how he had not realised immediately. Phetos must have distracted him. The general trail of destruction ran perpendicular to the required axis of attack, at best, and in places the Destroyers were getting further and further from their objective.

‘I want a secure communications link with Zozar now!’

He continued to watch while Phetos parted the dimensions to create a nil-space connection between the tomb ship and Zozar’s cortical field. The bigger weapons of the fortress were firing on the Destroyers, but with little effect. Their living metal bodies and the unifying presence of Zozar made them highly resistant to even the heaviest armaments of the humans. Even those that were struck directly only suffered temporary incapacitation. Canoptek attendants moved from casualty to casualty, rebinding shattered bodies, slewing together fragments of living metal to reconstitute the fallen.

The other humans were starting to react in a vague, herd-like way, responding to the threat on a base level that even the overnull effect could not eradicate, driven by unsuppressed chemical interactions in their brain stems. Most reacted too slowly to evade the strobing gauss beams, but as a mass the populace was moving outwards from the site of the attack, like a slow but inexorable ripple from a rock dropped in a pool.

+THE SLAUGHTER HAS COMMENCED. NO SURVIVORS. ALL SENTIENCE WILL BE EXTERMINATED.+