Nanyte Blaster

The Nanyte Blaster is a dangerous, nanotechnological relic weapon from Humanity's Dark Age of Technology, a relatively common class of potent Dark Age Archeotech used by uncounted heroes and legends of the Great Crusade.

Description
The Nanyte Blaster is a bullet-shaped weapon of gleaming metal that hosts a hive containing many millions of nanoscopic machines. Upon release, they are capable of stripping any target of its constituent atoms in an instant. The Mechanicum understands the principles of on which the nanytes operate, but not how they replicate wothom the hive, for all who have attempted to study the process have been attacked themselves, the machines seemingly nwillling to surrender the secrets of their creation.

When an entity is slain by this weapon, the nanytes replicate uncontrollably to the point of being able to spread to a nearby target with the same effectiveness of the blaster weapons itself; there is no way of knowing how far the chain reaction of ravinous replication can spread from one causualty to the next.

History
The Great Crusade came in the wake of the Age of Strife, a long and terrible era during which Mankind unleashed and was laid lowby the weapons of star-razing destructive power and genocidal scope, many born othe preceding Dark Age of Technology. When the Emperor's Crusading forces pushed back the darkness that had falledn the worlds of Mnakind, evidence of the ancient and terrible artefacts were found and studied by the tech-savant of the Mechanicum, who coveted them greatly. Occasionally, one of these examples of ancient archaeotech would be revoced and taken up by the heroes of the Great Crusade iteself, becoming a potent relic, it's name and legend as widespread and celebrated as the Crusaders who bore it.

As the Great Crusade continued ever onwards, multiple examples of some types of relic were encountered and great effort was commited to catalogueing their class, understanding their nature and replicating their function. Often however, the Mechanicum could fathom the technology underpinning a relic, but could not create a functioning copy. Nonetheless, the effort to decode the ancient techonological foundation of such artefacts continued, with other discoveries made in the process expanding the canon of the machine exponentially.