It is a wretched thing to stand upon the grave of a magician.

When a priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus is alive, she might be anything. The imagination alights at the possibilities concealed within those crimson robes and the lights dancing within. Might she be a beautiful young maiden, soft and curved, body patterned with the hexagonal grafts of silica and nanofiber? Might she be a demon, body twisted and malformed, blinking lights the eerie gaze of wicked flies rather than electronics? Perhaps that limp concealed four legs, or three, perhaps there were two hands or eight, perhaps she had always been smiling like the Saints, or maybe the skin and fat of her face had been peeled back to a skull made of steel. 

So many of these questions will never be answered. Even for her clone, the specifics of Archmagos Toros' physical structure were kept classified. All that secrecy did not save her: The mass-reactive bolt entered her face just below the left eye, penetrated, and then detonated. The skull ruptured, the interlaced mesh of brain matter and neural interface shattered, and that masterpiece of cybernetic design splashed across the altar of the Omnissiah before dripping down to pool on the wiry blue carpet. It was an incredible shot.

In death, all the tricks she had up her sleeves spilled out. Hidden pistols and digital weapons fired blindly, still performing their functions even as their body staggered and slumped. Scorch marks, bullet holes and tiny silver bladed discs scatter wildly around the shattered doorway the assailant had entered through. A displacement field belatedly fired, teleporting the headless and still-shooting body of the Archmagos five meters west, whereupon two additional bolt rounds to the armoured center mass and sent what was now just the incomplete body of a sedentary middle-age lady sprawled across the floor. 

Then the assassin had begun their work. They had approached the inwards-facing circle of archaic white cogitators the Magos had been working on. Some had been pushed aside, some had been smashed, and some had been taken, their absence marked only by lonely cables that drifted like an octopus carved by a blind itamae. 

The room - archaic, with framed circuit boards and eerie gadgets upon white-painted walls. A singularly bland blue carpet. A small personal shrine to the Omnissiah upon the north wall, flanked to either side by huge arched windows with a spectacular view of the Hive rising like a mountain's nightmare. The west window's glass is shattered entirely, large enough for a giant to fit through, and the stink from the endlessly churning petrochemical smokestacks creeps into this ivory tower like a burglar.


You have initial assessment from the Skitarii Marshal November. The chain of events as far as she can determine goes like this:
- Assailant arrived at tower door, guarded by two Skitarii
- Assailant incapacitates both Skitarii with a Webber. This non-lethal takedown prevents their flatline monitors from triggering an alarm.
- Assailant places a grenade on a timer by the two Skitarii. It soon detonates, killing both of them, but only after the danger of their flatline monitors alerting the Archmagos has passed.
- Assailant bypasses the security door somehow
- Assailant proceeds to the Archmagos' office.
- Assailant kicks open the reinforced metal door to the Archmagos' office
- Assailant kills the Archmagos with a single Bolt round to the head.
- Archmagos' Displacer Field activates, teleporting her five meters to the west.
- Archmagos' automated defense systems begin to fire blindly even as the corpse collapses
- Assailant responds with a burst of automatic gunfire. Some of these shots miss and shatter the glass window behind the Archmagos' new position.
- Archmagos ceases fire.
- Assailant proceeds to the cogitator station. Rips out multiple electronic devices and stores them in a heavy backpack.
- Assailant departs through the open window.

From this logical chain, Marshal November drew the conclusion that the motivation was at least partially robbery - the data on those cogitators must have been extremely valuable. In response she dispatched her Legion to form a perimeter around the Isohedron, block anyone from entering or leaving, and then start a slowly consolidating grid-search, tightening the noose bit by bit until she had reduced it to blockades of the six Forges. At that point - who knew what she'd do?

But all of this data is now out of date. The data point that the assailant has a modified Displacer Field of their own, potentially allowing for directed teleportation, throws the whole timeline into chaos. Everything needs to be re-evaluated from scratch to account for this new capability. But even that does not solve the murder. The evidence from the boot indent on the outside of the door, and the arcs of fire and return fire seem to point conclusively towards that most bizarre of conclusions:

Here, in this cathedral to the human intellect, atop this spire made of bioengineered ivory, an ork kicked in the front door and shot the Archmagos of the Isohedron in the head. 

It is too stupid to be true. There has to be something you are missing.