The Twice-Dead King Omnibus by Nate Crowley

Author:Nate Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FLS
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

MIDNIGHT

CHAPTER EIGHT

RELICS

It looked like nothing so much as a spindled cave arachnid that had curled up and died in the interstellar darkness, only much larger. It was preposterously sized, even by necron sensibilities. For it was a Mephrit weapon, and the Mephrit had ever longed for destruction on a scale that removed stars from the sky.

Each of its eight projector spires – Oltyx could not help but think of them as legs – was an articulated pylon of reinforced noctilith six leagues long, and as the trebuchet lay dormant, they had folded up into a city-wide cage of arcs. Joining them at their apex was an armoured teardrop containing engines of unfathomable power, perhaps the size of a Scythe-class cruiser’s main hull, with a relatively tiny command citadel, studded with enormous targeting lenses, built into its fore.

All of that, of course, was for the generation of the weapon’s force. The actual firing locus was an unassuming point in space one thousand leagues ahead of the trebuchet, marked with an interstitial anchor, but otherwise invisible. The Akrops was decelerating into that locus now. As its gravitic harpax locked on to the anchor point, the ship’s bones flexed with an almighty, ratcheting groan, and at last, the battered warship came to a standstill.

Oltyx watched as Yenekh’s body shimmered with circumspection-patterns, and the admiral scanned the length of the bridge’s viewport with what might once, before biotransference, have been a frown. His trepidation made perfect sense: it felt novel – unnatural, even – not to be under a hail of fire.

But for now, they had respite. As soon as they had completed their last, staggering inertialess transit, the group of cruisers slaved to the Philotomokh, as well as the Ogdobekh cruiser itself, had been released from their service to the Akrops’ labouring drives and freeing them to fight their pursuers. Given Zultanekh’s combat-urge, pent up over days of pacing across their bridge and then his own, there had been no delay, once the yoke had been lifted. The human ships had likely not even registered the capital ships were back in the fight before their fragile hulls had been reduced to shreds of metallic plasma by heavy gauss fire at point-blank range. Clustered together in their hunting pack, and taking care only to avoid the aft guns of the Akrops, they had lost nearly sixty per cent of their numbers in less than a minute. Oltyx had anointed the moment with seals of fidelity as it had been weaved into his engrams, so that he might go back to relish it, in later stretches of eternity.

The survivors of the pack had limped away to a safe distance, where they had regrouped, before beginning a slow circular cruise around them, like wind scorpions prowling at a campfire’s edge. As the trebuchet had been hailed with the dynasty’s library of Mephrit activation protocols, the exodus fleet had formed a protective circle around the Akrops. Because while stopping at last had freed up the most powerful

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