Sceluant

Warhammer enjoyer - He/Him

[sceluant]

I was enthralled by the hijinks of Trazyn and Orikan in The Infinite and The Divine, and I'm excited to see how they manage to be the even gayer in the sequel.

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[sceluant]

For a person in the Warhammer 40k universe fighting against the Necron must be horrifying. They're a seemingly infinite hoard of skull faced robots wielding incomprehensibly advanced weaponry. All perfectly coordinated and unfeeling, not reacting even as scores of their comrades are shot down. Supporting the legions of undying skull face soldiers are elite soldiers who have honed their skills over many millennia. In the sky are misshapen things who can bend time and space with a wave of a staff.

But outside the universe, they could appear to some to be just another endless army of mindless robots akin to the droids from star wars. But there's something that separates the Necron from other robot armies in media. The Necron aren't endless.

There's a finite number of Necrons, this number may be in the trillions or higher. But not a single more will ever exist. When a human dies they will quickly replaced, the Imperium's countless hive worlds birth thousands of humans a second. If a planet falls the worry of the Imperium won't be for the people but for the resources lost.

When a Necron is wounded and unable to repair itself, it will be beamed away to a Necron tomb complex or warship. Where its mind will be uploaded into a tank filled with other minds, all waiting for their body to be replaced or repaired. Most of the time nothing extraordinary will happen. The mind will be uploaded, the body replaced, and the Necron sent back out to war. But rarely something will go wrong. The upload will fail and the Necron's mind is lost. Other times the failure is more external, the tanks will fail or be destroyed and those thousands of Necron minds inside with them.

The Necron have no hope of replenishing their numbers. A dynasty will not be stronger than when it first awakens. Each battle they fight in the name of reclaiming their empire or purging the unclean costing the dynasty irreplaceable lives. Attrition is a guarantee. Their only hope is to lessen the losses.

But the Necrons dynasts don't, they carelessly spend their limited troops. Killing those that displease them and waging war with other dynasties. Treating each life as disposable as they did when they were an empire of flesh. But they're not, a lesson they will learn far too late. When their dynasties are depleted and all they have left are the remnants of their wasted legions and the scheming aristocrats still vying for power as their empire collapses around them.

My friend had a good metaphor for Necron dynasts. They are children with a bag of candy, only realizing how little they have when they reach the bottom of the bag.

(If you're interested in more like this, there's a two part Necron book series that gave me this brain rot called 'twice dead king' I highly recommend it!)