Chapter 142: Emergence of the Men of Iron

The warships stationed in System #12 had already engaged their Dimensional Drives, vanishing in streaks of distorted light as they translated to the next system.

Moments later, something new split the void. In the cold dark a brilliant flash ripped open reality and a colossal vessel tore into being, braking into high orbit above the system's second planet.

This ship bore little resemblance to any standard vessel of the Talon Voidfleet. It looked like a colossal logistic drone, scaled up to the size of a capital ship. Its disk-shaped hull spanned twenty kilometers in diameter, with dozens of titanic mechanical tendrils drooping from its underside like the limbs of some slumbering leviathan.

This gargantuan non-combat logistics vessel was known as the Leviathan. It was not designed for direct warfare; its armament was sparse, limited to only a few particle-lance emitters and point-defense grids, weapons not for conquest but deterrence. The Leviathan's true purpose lay elsewhere.

Until today, the existence of Leviathan had only been rumor. In the corridors of Talon High command, it was whispered about in fragments, a ghost project, an experimental warship, or the personal ark of the Lord of Talon himself. All anyone knew was that the orbital shipyards had been constructing a "next-generation" capital ship, another addition to the Talon fleet, or so it was assumed.

But now, Leviathan had translated directly from Talon's shipyards into high orbit of System #12. Its mission: to cleanse this plague-infested death world, not through boarding drops or bombardment, but through a far more terrifying, industrial finality.

Leviathan's mechanical limbs unfurled toward the asteroid belt surrounding the planet below, each limb telescoping and whirring as integrated scanners and extraction arrays came online.

Each limb was equipped with the most advanced subterranean detection systems, as well as a terrifying device known as a Matter Extractor, a reverse-application of Talon's matter-printing technology, first developed for deep-mining operations on Talon-III.

Chunks of rock from the belt were methodically scanned, grappling beams locking onto high-density targets. Buried mineral veins were rapidly mapped and forcibly ripped from the asteroids by precision energy tethers. Ore, stone, and even frozen gases burst from fractured bodies, slowly levitating skyward toward Leviathan's processing bays.

The natural gas was refined onboard and converted into weapons-grade materials. Raw ores were immediately smelted and fed into automated alloy forges, and the finished alloys were transported to the massive fabrication complex, which occupied over 80% of Leviathan's internal space.

There were no lights in the fabrication complex. No walkways for humans. No control panels. No command centers. Only row upon row of endless, automated production lines, each one outfitted with towering matter-printing monoliths, suspended drone gantries, and powered by energy fields that manipulated matter at a molecular level.

Every corner of every line was fitted with teleportation stabilizers, allowing materials to be instantly inserted into the printers without delay.

Once fed the necessary alloys, the machines went to work.

Drone arms whirred overhead as streams of data and light assembled forms from raw energy. Suspended in anti-grav fields, fully-formed war machines began to materialize.

One after another, hulking constructs emerged, Iron Men, just like the kind that Magos Vick had once seen: mechanical warriors with heads embedded into their shoulders, their red eyes glowing with synthetic wrath.

The production lines never printed the same thing twice.

Some Iron Men resembled infantry-class warforms: tall, humanoid, heavily armored, designed to press and hold ground. Others became quad-limbed artillery platforms with massive spinal cannons. Still others were orb-shaped support units, self-righting and modular, capable of deploying micro-drones to repair fallen Iron Men.

And then there were the Knight-class constructs, towering war machines equipped with chainswords the size of tanks, multi-barreled rotary cannons, and murder-tools beyond reckoning.

One of these constructs resembled a walking Matter Extractor, its mission was to teleport onto the planet's surface and extract the surrounding matter before returning it back to Leviathan.

Each warform, once completed, underwent a full system diagnostic, followed by immediate activation. Their hunched chassis straightened, and the glow of scarlet optic relays ignited.

Then, they were teleported directly to the planet's surface.

Leviathan consumed and processed resources without pause.

Its assembly lines produced tens of thousands of Iron Men every three minutes. The rate was not an estimate; it was a programmed constant calibrated to planetary mass and mission urgency. As soon as a batch activated, it was deployed to the surface and the cycle began anew.

If nothing intervened, the world's entire mass would be transformed into machines of war.

In just thirty minutes, tens of thousands of Iron Men had already descended.

....

From orbit, the planet's atmosphere appeared a sickly green, dense with plague spores. Its toxic hue pulsed faintly, as if the very air throbbed with infection. It was obvious, no living humans remained. Only a world overrun by plague zombies, wandering the wastes without purpose.

Charred cityscapes stretched like necrotic veins across the surface, towers half-collapsed, roads buried beneath the rot of untold corpses. Even from low orbit, the stink of decay seemed to radiate through sensor feeds, foul enough to trigger cautionary alerts in Leviathan's olfactory threat database.

As Leviathan's AI-controlled teleportation grid initialized, it didn't bother with detailed terrain analysis. It simply designated the planetary capital as the mass-deployment zone.

The consequence?

Some Iron Men arrived fused into rock or building structures. Some were telefragged into one another.

This would have been instantly fatal for organic soldiers, but the Iron Men were not bothered.

Each entangled warform initiated its own detachment protocol, calculating which limbs or components were compromised, then activating precision energy cutters to amputate the fused portions.

Even those Iron Men who lost major limbs simply dragged themselves forward, firing on incoming plague swarms as they crawled. Before long, repair drones descended to restore their frames, allowing them to rise again and rejoin the assault.

None of them knew pain. None of them hesitated. Even in ruin, they advanced.

Across the surface, the Iron Men began to fulfill their designated combat roles.

Some climbed high ground to establish long-range artillery positions. Others charged directly into the heart of the plague hordes, their mass and momentum shattering the ranks of the undead. Infantry-class Iron Men waded into the tide without hesitation, fighting until overwhelmed, then detonating themselves.

Each detonation calculated to send kinetic shockwaves through surrounding clusters, maximizing disruption and secondary kills.

The plague zombies fought with an animalistic desperation. They hurled themselves forward in endless waves, shrieking, frothing, their bodies already half-rotted and leaking viral pus. Fingers snapped off in armored plating. Teeth shattered on cerametal. It didn't matter, they kept coming.

To the zombies, death was meaningless. They threw themselves onto Iron Men in suicidal frenzy, clawing, biting, vomiting black filth, trying to find a seam in the armor, a gap in the metal. Sometimes they succeeded in clogging joints, swarming over a unit until it staggered and fell. But it did not matter.

Where Iron Men fell, more arrived.

The plague zombies' attacks were utterly ineffective against reinforced cerametal exo-frames. They latched onto the Iron Men in futile rage, but it was meaningless, until the internal heat-based incineration weapons of the Iron Men's charged, turning all surrounding organics into charred husks in seconds.

This ruthless forward advance was no mere brute tactic, it was the result of calculations made by Leviathan's central AI core, which micromanaged each and every Iron Men unit.

It parsed thousands of battlefield variables per second, biomass concentrations, terrain density, structural integrity, all processed into adaptive kill orders.

The Iron Men ignored most surface-level undead. Unless they directly obstructed movement, the Iron Men let them be.

Their goal was clear: advance to every known underground access point, and purge whatever lay beneath.

Part of the AI's processing power was allocated to teleportation logistics, but the majority was focused on computing advanced weapon effectiveness models.

This included live calculations on release frequency, chemical dispersion, and planetary coverage algorithms for maximum kill ratios.

Once complete, the AI activated the final phase.

The refined gases, harvested earlier and converted into weaponized chemical compounds, were loaded into canister-based delivery systems, each equipped with trajectory-correction flight packs.

Billions of these canisters were deployed.

Each was calibrated to adjust course mid-fall, ensuring pinpoint impact locations across the planet, precisely based on AI targeting models.

When the weapons struck, they released catalyzed chemical clouds, igniting them moments later.

The result was instantaneous.

The atmosphere itself burned. The sickly green was replaced by white-hot firestorms as oxygen and contagion alike were consumed in planetary-scale combustion.

The entire surface of the planet became an inferno.

Everything organic was reduced to ash.

And through the wall of fire and endless rain of soot, the Iron Men continued their advance, descending into the underworld, tasked with their final directive:

Exterminate all remaining organics.

Leave nothing alive.

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