Chapter 135: War Makes Orcs Evolve
On the other side, the Imperial Fists had reached a fortified zone spanning over a hundred kilometers, where several imposing bastions held fast against the endless Ork armies that besieged them.
The thunder of explosions rolled without cease across the landscape, and the green tide stretched unbroken for a thousand miles in every direction.
Within the fortress, Rogal Dorn received Omega's communication with visible surprise.
After confirming the intelligence repeatedly, the Praetorian turned his gaze toward the endless sea of greenskins beyond the walls.
The Imperial Fists, masters of siege warfare, found themselves with no effective countermeasure against an enemy that could reshape terrain itself. Surrounded and unable to disengage, Dorn recognized the necessity of Omega's proposed solution: deep-drilling operations and a strategic hydrogen-bomb deployment.
Rogal Dorn opened a secure channel, his voice carrying the weight of the situation. "Alpharius, my brother. You possess extensive air assets capable of reaching any location on this world. I entrust this operation to your Legion."
Omega found himself momentarily at a loss for words. He'd intended to foster collaborative strategic planning among all forces, but the responsibility had been placed squarely on his shoulders.
Still, he responded without hesitation. "Understood. I will keep you informed of developments in real-time."
Rogal Dorn approved the response, noting that this brother had proven reliable when it mattered. The Imperial Fists would provide whatever support the operation required.
After a brief exchange, Omega discovered that Dorn's reputation for dependability was well-earned.
In an Ork-held city consumed by fierce combat, the Warmaster paused in his slaughter to receive the same intelligence. Horus immediately dispatched observers to monitor surrounding terrain patterns. Upon learning the specifics of Omega's tactic, he assigned Garviel Loken to lead a reconnaissance team for geological surveying operations.
Torgaddon, one of the four captains comprising the Mournival, watched Loken depart on his drilling assignment.
From his vantage on a high balcony, he surveyed the chaotic battlefield where countless Orks and humans clashed across hundreds of kilometers. He couldn't suppress a dark chuckle.
Every warrior was locked in desperate combat. Who had the luxury of conducting geological surveys?
His vox crackled. "Torgaddon, status report. Are we observing terrain alterations in our vicinity?"
Abaddon's voice carried its characteristic directness.
"Explosive damage has reshaped some areas, certainly," Torgaddon replied. "But nothing matches the Alpha Legion's claims of systematic terrain modification across a thousand miles. If the Orks possess that capability, it defies all tactical logic."
"The Alpha Legion does not traffic in false intelligence," Abaddon stated firmly. "Maintain vigilance. The planet beneath our feet may have been fundamentally altered by xenos technology."
"Acknowledged. I'm monitoring the situation." Torgaddon agreed; he'd reached similar conclusions himself. The implications seemed impossible to accept.
Elsewhere, the Emperor's forces engaged millions of Orks across a vast plain. The combined armies numbered in the tens of millions, with combat raging across thousands of miles. The cacophony of las-fire and detonations created an unending symphony of war.
Upon receiving Omega's report, the Emperor, like Dorn before him, delegated the operation to Omega's capable hands with instructions for continuous updates. Then the Master of Mankind returned his attention to the war against the greenskins.
Days blurred into one another. The intensity of battle across all fronts never diminished for a single moment.
The Ork hordes infesting the northern wasteland's ten-thousand-mile expanse showed no fear despite hydrogen bombardments and orbital strikes. Every Legion faced the same inexhaustible reality, an endless green tide that refused to break.
The Alpha Legion's three massive fortress-bastions maintained relentless fire against the surrounding enemy formations.
The Orks, demonstrating their characteristic adaptability, began congregating their forces to construct mobile siege towers hundreds of meters tall. These colossal, ramshackle assemblies of scrap and salvage sent ripples of enthusiasm through the Ork armies across the entire battlefield.
The greenskins felt visceral excitement at the thought of creating such massive war machines.
From the high command tower, Omega observed the Orks' reaction to their improvised super-constructs.
The aliens displayed complete indifference to the mounting casualties among the Ork Boyz and Gretchin. War instilled no fear in Orks, triggered no negative emotions whatsoever. War was their natural state; it made them excited, joyful, alive.
A lascannon discharge lanced out from the base, striking one of the hundred-meter-tall monstrosities. With a thunderous detonation, the beam liquefied the target, reducing the Orks' bizarre creation to slag and vapor.
The Imperial forces celebrated the kill.
...
Three days later, the Orks unveiled upgraded versions.
Fully armored Gork and Mork-pattern Mega-Gargants, hundreds of meters tall and equipped with kustom force fields, lumbered onto the battlefield from distant staging areas. Their numbers multiplied rapidly, from a single prototype to over a hundred operational units within days.
Orks maintain an instinctive obsession with size. The larger an Ork grows, the more powerful it becomes, and the higher its status within the warband hierarchy. By extension, larger war machines carry greater prestige and perceived strength.
Through this campaign, the Orks had engineered hundred-meter-tall Mega-Gargants, and the achievement sent waves of euphoric energy coursing through their collective psyche.
The colossal constructs housed unknown numbers of Ork Boyz, Nobs, and Gretchin, bristling with Mek-work that defied all rational principles of engineering.
The Alpha Legion watched in shock as the greenskins fielded dozens, then hundreds of these titanic walkers. Missile strikes proved ineffective; the Waaagh energy fields surrounding each construct absorbed the impacts with ease.
The Mega-Gargants advanced ponderously under sustained Imperial bombardment. Despite their ponderous gait, their firepower proved devastating. Each carried an arsenal of autocannons, las-weapons, and makeshift batteries.
Omega studied the heavy assault machines, his initial surprise giving way to grim realization.
"Something's wrong," he said quietly. "The Orks are evolving. They're adapting to our tactics too fast in real-time."
At that moment, the massive weapon mounts on hundreds of Mega-Gargants began gathering psychic energy of incredible magnitude.
Waaagh power built like overloading reactors, dazzling and terrible to behold.
Three to four hundred psychic beams, each dozens of meters in diameter, erupted skyward and hammered into the Alpha Legion's void shields. All three fortress-bastions shuddered simultaneously. Energy barriers flickered and wavered under the psychic onslaught.
The display of raw power sent millions of Ork Boyz into a frenzy of excitement. Psychic energy from every greenskin on the battlefield flowed toward the four hundred-plus Mega-Gargants in rivers of emerald power.
The convergence of so much gestalt energy granted the Nobs piloting the walkers transcendent strength, some seemed on the verge of ascending to full Warboss status.
Guttural Ork bellows emanated from the machines. Psychic howls reverberated across thousands of kilometers in mere moments. The void shields protecting the three bases fluctuated wildly. Even designed to withstand tremendous psychic assault, the defenses couldn't fully protect the soldiers within.
Thousands of Astra Militarum troopers collapsed with splitting headaches as Ork psychic power assailed their minds directly.
Supersonic bombers screamed overhead.
A hydrogen bomb detached from its mounting, plummeting toward the concentration of Mega-Gargants. This time, the Orks refused to accept the attack passively.
The four hundred-plus war machines, channeling the accumulated Waaagh energy of millions, brought their weapons to bear on the descending warhead, psychic power condensed at every muzzle, focusing with unnatural precision.
Four hundred beams of psychic annihilation lanced skyward simultaneously, converging on the hydrogen bomb with impossible accuracy.
The warhead detonated prematurely in a thunderous roar, engulfed by a maelstrom of psychic energy.
Nuclear fire and psychic detonation occurred simultaneously at high altitude. The explosion light was blinding, the shockwave catastrophic. The blast effects radiated outward, covering thousands of kilometers within moments.
Within seconds, brilliant white light dominated the sky for ten thousand miles. The glare forced countless observers to shield their eyes or turn away entirely.
When the explosion's roar finally faded, and the light dissipated, witnesses looked skyward to find... nothing.
The high atmosphere stood empty. The detonation had been completely negated.
Shock rippled through the Imperial forces as realization dawned.
Outside the fortress-bastions, millions of Orks erupted in unified triumph, bellowing "WAAAGH!" with savage glee.
Their fighting spirit surged to unprecedented heights. Through collective psychic will alone, they had neutralized a hydrogen bomb.
"That actually worked?" Omega stood on the command platform, disbelief evident in his voice. "This race is completely unreasonable!"
A report scrolled across his data-slate; even background radiation had dropped to safe levels. The psychic detonation had somehow purified the nuclear fallout.
In response to the Alpha Legion's shock, countless Orks across the entire front roared as one and surged forward in berserk assault.
Waves of scrap walkers and Ork Boyz crashed against the defenses like a green tide.
During the massive charge, the hundred-meter-tall Mega-Gargants revealed their critical weakness: abysmal mobility.
Omega, tense throughout the engagement, watched as the base's heavy lascannons acquired targeting locks. The massive constructs proved too sluggish to evade. Sustained fire pierced the void shields and detonated the walkers in sequence, reducing each to scattered debris.
Despite their momentary triumph, the Ork assault broke against the three Imperial fortifications. The pattern continued: attack, slaughter, temporary Ork retreat.
Within days, the Orks adapted again.
They abandoned impractical super-heavy constructs in favor of numerous fast-attack vehicles. Guerrilla raids against the fortress-bastions began in earnest.
The grinding conflict between the Alpha Legion and the Orks continued without respite.
Ork corpses accumulated across ten thousand miles of wasteland, forming grotesque hills of the dead.
...
One month into the campaign, encouraging intelligence arrived from the Data Repository. The Ork population on Celestian Star had declined to under one billion.
Operations across all Legions proceeded with acceptable efficiency.
The Alpha Legion and Imperial Fists, committed to defensive doctrines, maintained manageable casualties.
The Emperor's forces and the Sons of Horus, pursuing aggressive offensive strategies, suffered catastrophic losses among their mortal auxiliaries.
The Emperor Himself, the Custodians, the Primarchs, and the Legiones Astartes all possessed transhuman capabilities that ensured their survival. The mortal auxiliary regiments, despite courage beyond question, remained terribly fragile.
Omega had maintained intermittent orbital bombardment operations throughout the past months. No single bombardment on a given day qualified as large-scale, yet ordnance and hydrogen warheads fell continuously within ten thousand miles of the fortress-bastions.
What left the deepest impression across all Legions was the sheer scale of the aerial bombardment sustained for months of continuous operations.
Rogal Dorn, Horus, and the Emperor all understood that Omega had expended over one hundred million missiles on this campaign. Faced with the horrific attrition of the Celestian Star War, many came to accept, even appreciate, the artillery support.
The intensity of combat drove even the Sons of Horus to adopt orbital bombardment and hydrogen bomb deployment doctrines. The Imperial Fists maintained their fortress positions without yielding a single meter; two more months of high-intensity warfare ground past.
Finally, Ork numbers on Celestian Star dwindled below one hundred million.
The surviving greenskins were scattered across the planet's vast surface rather than concentrated in defensible positions. On various battlefields, Ork corpses lay piled hundreds of meters high, some formations reaching over a thousand meters into the sky. Standing atop these mountains of the dead, one might reach upward and touch the clouds themselves.
Smoke and fire choked the atmosphere. By this stage of the campaign, the mortal auxiliary forces of multiple Legions stood nearly depleted.
The Alpha Legion in the northern wasteland retained the highest percentage of surviving troops, a direct result of Omega's unstinting use of orbital bombardment and strategic nuclear weapons across ten thousand miles of front.
The war's savage intensity demanded constant reinforcement. Imperial fleet elements arrived bearing fresh regiments to feed into the grinding war machine.
The Alpha Legion had expended its stockpile of over three hundred million missiles and incalculable quantities of conventional munitions.
Forge Worlds in the rear sectors worked ceaselessly to ship replacement ordnance and green recruits forward to the front.
[End of Chapter]