Chapter 128 The Triarch

Back when he was still breathing, Trazyn had been an extremely renowned scholar among the Necrontyr. Naturally, he knew the real reason the War in Heaven broke out.

After the Necrontyr took to the stars, their territories expanded at a breakneck pace. As a result, the Triarch’s grip on the various dynasties started slipping. Wars of independence flared up constantly as different dynasties fought tooth and nail to break free from the Triarch’s control and gain true autonomy.

Desperate to maintain their iron-fisted rule, the Triarch didn’t bother looking inward or trying to reform. Instead, they just manufactured an external enemy: the Old Ones.

The Old Ones refusing to share the secret of immortality was nothing but a convenient excuse. Even if they hadn’t used that one, they would’ve found another. Refusing to share the Webway, refusing to hand over administrative rights to the network, refusing to open up the Black Library… if you want to start a war, you can always find a reason.

Unsurprisingly, the Necrontyr got their asses kicked. But the Old Ones didn’t wipe them out completely.

However, for a Triarch desperate to maintain absolute control, the defeat was an apocalyptic nightmare. Multiple dynasties wanted to secede from their rule and join the new galactic order established by the Old Ones.

Staring down the barrel of a complete political collapse, the Triarch frantically searched for a way to maintain order. Right at the peak of their desperation, they stumbled across Aza’gorod the Nightbringer, a C’tan busy feeding on the energy of a local star. At the time, the C’tan were purely beings of energy, incapable of communicating with the Necrontyr.

So, the Triarch made an absolutely insane decision: they built physical bodies for the star gods.

The moment the Nightbringer got its new body, it went on a massive killing spree, slaughtering the Necrontyr and gorging itself on their life energy. In the end, it was only by begging for mercy and swearing an oath of eternal servitude that the race avoided total annihilation.

The War in Heaven was literally just the Triarch holding the entire Necrontyr race hostage and dragging them into a suicide war against the Old Ones, all just to keep their grip on power.

“The fate of the Necrontyr rests with the Triarch! Whatever we decide, who dares to defy us?!” Hapthatra glared daggers at Trazyn.

“The fate of our race rests with the people, with the newborn generation. It is not up to a king who abandoned his own people,” Trazyn mocked, his synthetic tone dripping with sheer disdain.

“You dare insult the Triarch?! Do you want to test the might of our armies and the sharpness of our blades?!” Hapthatra bellowed.

Both the Silent King and Phaeron of the Blades fixed Trazyn with murderous stares.

“My armies aren’t exactly weak, and my blades aren’t exactly dull either,” Trazyn shot back without missing a beat.

When you’ve got a powerhouse backing you up, it’s easy to talk tough.

“You will regret those words, Trazyn.”

The moment Hapthatra finished speaking, the transmission cut out. Seconds later, the Necron fleet launched their assault.

A dense barrage of artillery and energy beams tore across the void. Terrifying explosions erupted, their brilliant fireballs illuminating the freezing darkness of space.

The Necron warships were lightyears ahead of humanity in terms of technology. But the second the battle kicked off, massive waves of Imperial ships constantly translated from the Warp, flooding the battlefield. At the same time, the Void Dragon and the Outsider threw themselves into the meat grinder, relying on their overwhelming power to literally crush Necron cruisers barehanded.

“I came, I saw, I obliterated!”

Sanguinis warped directly into the combat zone. She had arrived on the battlefield right alongside Sanguinius. Wielding a massive ship-cleaving broadsword, she cheered wildly as she charged straight into the enemy formation.

As the literal humanification of a Gloriana-class battleship, her individual combat power was absolutely terrifying. The ship rigging mounted on her back unleashed an apocalyptic storm of firepower, pulverizing any Necron ship dumb enough to get in her way. And the massive blade in her hands was ridiculously sharp. With a single swing, she cleaved a Necron warship perfectly in half, sending it up in a massive void-borne explosion.

Watching Sanguinis bulldoze through his invincible fleet, the normally stoic, metallic face of the Silent King Szarekh contorted into an expression that practically screamed, I am questioning my entire reality right now.

The two Phaerons beside him had similar reactions, completely unable to believe their mechanical eyes. A little girl, lugging around a weapon bigger than she was, was literally tearing highly advanced Necron warships apart with her bare hands.

The void war raged on with insane intensity. It didn’t take long for the sector to be completely littered with burning wreckage. Countless corpses were jettisoned into the vacuum, and a steady stream of souls flew directly into the Pantheon.

Unlike humans, who returned to the Pantheon after death, destroyed Necrons were supposed to phase out and return to their reanimation crypts to be rebuilt. But with their warships getting systematically dismantled, the number of available crypts for them to respawn in was dropping fast.

“You actually think you can use my own tech to respawn? Keep dreaming, you metal freaks!”

The Void Dragon cursed Szarekh out while ripping apart every Necron ship it came across. At the same time, it began flexing its cosmic abilities to actively sabotage the Necron reanimation protocols. A huge chunk of the Necrons’ advanced technology originally came from the Void Dragon. Back when it was sealed away, it couldn’t do anything about the ungrateful metal skeletons. Now that it was off the leash, it was fully prepared to repo everything it had given them.

Under the Void Dragon’s interference, the reanimation protocols started failing left and right. Destroyed Necrons couldn’t teleport back to their crypts; instead, they just turned into burning piles of slag. The same went for their warships and fighter craft. Without the reanimation protocols to repair them, once they were destroyed, they stayed dead. They turned into scattered, blazing debris, completely unable to auto-repair.

The Outsider, functioning as a fully intact C’tan, also weaponized its reality-bending powers to jam the Necrons’ phase-shifting tech. It made it completely impossible for them to use their signature phase-teleports and hyper-maneuverability.

Historically, whenever an Imperial fleet ran into a Necron armada, their biggest headache was always that bullshit phase-shifting evasion. It didn’t matter how much firepower you packed if you couldn’t actually lock onto the target.

With two C’tan actively running interference, the previously dominant Necron fleet rapidly started losing ground. A massive number of warships and soldiers were completely wiped out, left burning in the cold void.

Watching his armada get pushed onto the back foot, pure fury radiated from Szarekh. These damned C’tan were actually teaming up with the humans to screw him over. The moment he won this war, he was going to flay both of them alive and chain them to his throne right next to the Burning One. He’d make sure they wallowed in agony and despair until the absolute heat death of the universe.

Unfortunately for him, his seething rage didn’t do jack to change the battlefield situation.

More and more Imperial fleets kept dropping out of the Warp from other sectors, joining the massive furball. Meanwhile, the Necrons’ reinforcements were pathetically low. Part of it was because the Primarchs were actively blocking them, but it was also a direct result of Szarekh’s shaky grip on the throne.

Back in the day, if he hadn’t used the command protocols to force obedience, the moment they finished backstabbing the C’tan after the War in Heaven, the very next person on the chopping block would have undoubtedly been the Silent King himself. He had turned the entire race into metallic undead, stripping away any ability to reproduce. Even his grand promise of galactic domination had been snatched right out from under them by the rising Aeldari Empire.

Rebels like Imotekh the Stormlord hadn’t just suddenly decided they hated Szarekh after taking a sixty-million-year nap. That resentment had been simmering for sixty million years. It was only when they woke up and saw Szarekh waltzing back in from outside the galaxy that they finally exploded.

Szarekh knew damn well that he couldn’t afford to lose this fight. The second he took an L, his entire Triarch regime was completely finished. Imotekh and the rest of the opposition would swarm him in a heartbeat and permanently end his rule.

Desperate for a win, Szarekh made an absolutely wild play. He ordered the Song of Oblivion to lock onto the flagship carrying Vane and Big E, directing the entire fleet to launch a suicide push toward it. Once they closed the gap, he had his Crypteks use phase-tech to rip open a direct boarding tunnel.

His plan? Pull off a desperate decapitation strike against the masters of humanity to instantly flip the board.