Shipping goods from the game to the World of Warhammer

Casal propped himself up and sat up.

The replacement spine welded onto by the SCV emitted an unpleasant, rattling metallic sound with every movement. The large hole in his chest was mostly sealed with several crooked scrap plates, but tiny sparks of electricity still leaked from the gaps. He tried to start the servo motor in his right leg, and after a delay of nearly two seconds, the leg moved slightly.

It's barely usable.

"Let's go, let's get back up first." Rhodes grabbed Casal's mechanical arm and pulled him up from the ground.

The skull cannon accelerated again, its tracks crushing the debris on the ground, the chains on both sides of the fuselage swinging wildly, and a dark red glow emanating from the inside of the cannon muzzle once more. It was still searching for its next target to be used as a shell.

The remaining raiders formed a rearguard formation, and the grenade launchers took turns firing. The force field distortion generated by the gravity shock grenades caused the skull cannon's tracks to slip, and each deceleration lasted for about three to four seconds. However, the demon engine adapted very quickly, and the time it took to recover to full speed after each deceleration was getting shorter.

"Hurry! It's adapting!" Rhodes, supporting Casal, kicked aside a collapsed roof panel blocking the entrance to the passage, and the group frantically climbed along the vertical passage from the abandoned furnace to the surface.

The soldiers of the Guardians took turns providing cover, throwing a grenade down into the passageway below with each retreat, collapsing a section of the corridor to slow the skull cannon's pursuit. But the collapsing metal rubble could only buy them a few seconds against the Demon Engine; the spikes on the tracks and the ram at the front of the fuselage crushed and smashed through the obstacles, barely slowing them down.

When Rhodes helped Casal climb out of the surface exit, he had never felt the gray sky of Mordax so welcoming.

The surface reinforcements had already formed a formation around the exit. Several mechanical priests, along with two Domita fighter soldiers, guarded the outermost perimeter. The Domita soldiers' heavy rotary cannons had been preheated, and the barrels were rotating at a low speed.

Closer still were Rhodes' own marines, soldiers in power armor holding Gauss rifles, kneeling behind a makeshift roadblock made of scrap metal. Several medics had already set up their lines behind them. Of course, these soldiers were all produced by the barracks that Mordax's Mechanic had generously invested in.

"Attention all units, target is the Demon Engine, the first non-humanoid thing to emerge from that hole. Shoot it dead!"

Rhodes handed Casal to the mechanical priest behind him, then walked to the rear of the fire line, pressed one hand to his temple, and connected to the command system of all barracks units.

The entrance to the furnace floor began to shake.

The Skull Cannon burst from the underground tunnel entrance, kicking up a cloud of rubble and dust. Its spiked front wheels carved two deep ruts into the grey ground of Mordax. Several craters from its blasted fuselage were now visible, but the pulsating tubing continued to rhythmically contract and expand, and dark red liquid seeped from the seams of the armor, leaving a trail of smoke on the ground.

The cannon was aimed at the direction where the crowd was most concentrated.

"Fire."

Two Domita heavy rotary cannons unleashed a barrage of bullets, the dense hail striking the frontal armor of the skull cannon, sending sparks and metal fragments flying in a curtain of orange. Marauders' grenades bombarded from the flanks, gravity-sensing rounds precisely hitting the tracks, the demon engine's charge speed plummeting. Marines' Gauss rifles concentrated fire on the seams between the tracks and the armor, the hypervelocity projectiles severing the pulsating pipes one by one, dark red liquid gushing out like a fountain.

The skull cannon let out a roar that no machine should have, and the red light at the muzzle suddenly lit up. A skull cannonball wrapped in dark red flames shot towards a Christian soldier on the left flank of the line.

It hit, exploded, and the soldier, along with half of the roadblock behind him, was engulfed in flames.

But this was also the last time the skull cannon fired.

Taking advantage of the brief gap after it fired, four grenades hit its fuselage simultaneously. The overlapping force fields caused the internal gears of the demon engine to emit a dull cracking sound. Under Rhode's command, a Marauder circled around to the side and rear of the skull cannon and fired a grenade directly into the underside of its belly, into the barbed opening used to devour its prey.

A muffled thud came from the abdomen of the demon engine, the fuselage convulsed violently, and the pulsating tubes finally stopped contracting, going limp like blood vessels that had lost their blood supply.

At the seam of the armor plates, a blurry, dark red shadow struggled to break free from the machine—that was the warp demon that was controlling the engine.

It failed to break free completely, and almost everyone's attention was diverted, shattering the struggling dark red shadow and the upper part of the skull cannon into fragments.

Metal debris and some rapidly evaporating dark red substance scattered into the air, accompanied by a shrill sound like glass being crushed, before everything fell silent.

The skull cannon lay askew on the gray ground of Mordax, its tracks turning slowly and unconsciously a few times. Then, all the dark red lights went out at the same time, and the seeping liquid quickly turned black, dried, and turned into powder upon contact with the air.

The demonic engine hidden in Mordax has completely shut down.

Rod released his hand from his temple and let out a long breath. The psionic command network had been operating at high intensity, causing his temples to throb. Most of the people had survived.

Well, the most important thing is that he survived.

He glanced again at the wreckage of the overturned demon engine, making sure there was no possibility of it reviving, before turning and heading back to the rear of the battlefield.

"Father Casal! Your body—Om Messiah above, what is this?"

The first to arrive at Casal's side was a mechanical priest named Graeme. He had come to check Casal's injuries, but when his visual array swept over the shocking "repair" marks on Casal's chest, all his mechanical limbs froze.

Those crooked welds, clearly not replacement parts for any standard model, and scrap alloy plates welded directly to the load-bearing structure without any consecration ceremony—every single one of them was a blatant affront to the mechanical priest's faith and aesthetics.

"Who did this? Which madman used... used this thing to fix you?" Gryphon extended a mechanical finger, almost trembling, pointing at Casal's auxiliary spine, which was the scrap alloy pipe that had been bent and welded on in a few quick strokes.

"This replacement part hasn't even undergone any stress testing! God of Machines, it doesn't even have the most basic blessing on it!"

Another mechanic priest, who had rushed over upon hearing the news, peeked out from behind Gryphon, glanced at the hole in Casal's chest, then looked at the marks sealed with scrap metal, paused for three seconds, and then whispered a string of words in binary language, which roughly translated to:

"This is blasphemous to the creations of the Mechanicus."

Casal glanced down at the haphazard but still functional patch on his chest. His logic processor raced through the system, deciding on the most advantageous option for the current situation between "reporting truthfully that it was repaired by the traveling merchant's STC" and "giving a vague answer."

"...Emergency battlefield repairs," he said.

Grion's gaze lingered on Casal's face. If a face almost entirely replaced by metal could still make expressions, it would be filled with a complex emotion that said, "I know you're not telling the truth, but I don't want to pursue it now, because doing so might overload my logic processor."