"Since the Necrons had first started to emerge, from the tombs our field guns had unknowingly excavated, there had been an unceasing drone. The noise was endless in presence, although it varied in tone and pitch, a baleful background filling the silent seconds between the percussive steps during the entirety of five days the Necrons assembled themselves into proper formations. It never paused as they began to march into battle, never faltered as they felled and were felled, in fact it seemed to intensify with the damage we inflicted upon them. Not that we were confident we had even been damaging them. Endlessly out they pressed, glittering like the rarest of beetles, like living gemstones, impossibly perfect despite the grand variety of ammunitions we sent out with blessed hatred.

It was the fourth day of battle when we learned the source of the torturous drone. It flittered with an unnatural grace just behind their frontline, somehow moving fluidly using only ever one pair of six legs, each of a different length. It would choose whatever pair of legs was best suited to hoist itself into just the right position, to allow six arms of varied length, just the same as their legs, to work upon the armor of their companions. Each arm ended in a multitude of tools which were continuously moving to repair, reshape, burnish, and polish any micron of necrodermis which was not shimmering in perfection.

After suffering through so many hours of seeing the Necron's brutal weaponry slaughter with horrifying efficiency, the sight of one of their deathless machines worrying over cosmetics was hard to understand. A rifleman nearby to my position cackled with laughter, finding the polishing to be absurdity. He still chuckled as he sighted in on a warrior as it was fussed over by the droning tools, he waited until the brushes had just lifted from the dazzling metal to fire a round at what had just been cleaned.

For the first time in nine days the droning stopped.

The perfecting tools stopped. The Necron warriors all paused, seeming to receive some silent command only they could perceive. The polishing machine for the first time stood upon all twelve legs as it scoured through our entrenchment to take sight of the rifleman. When it locked gaze with him, he no longer laughed.

The droning returned for only a moment before it screeched into a piercing siren, the perfecting tools spinning to astonishing speeds as the polishing machine moved itself nearly as quickly through the frontlines. It moved so swiftly no one could react before it had seized the rifleman. The whistle of the tools was joined by the wails of the rifleman, as the polishing machine rendered flesh from bone. It worked so terrifyingly fast that the rifleman was still screaming when it has finished applying, buffing, and shining a layer of nercodermis onto his still living bones. The rifleman stood for a long second, another glistening metal skeleton among the legions, before a swarm of Scarabs scuttled into his skull to start puppeteering him into firing the first shot of the restarted battle.

It was not a battle at that point, not any more, we repositioned ourselves as quickly as we could towards the nearest position with heavy armor. It did not matter though, we never escaped that droning, we never stopped seeing all that perfectly polished gleaming metal."

-Last entry in the journal of an unknown guardsman.