The walls were dark, cold black metal etched with incomprehensible hieroglyphs and energy circuits that pulsed with a faint luminescence, and the air was dead silent — all of which lasted about three seconds before several thousand Ork Boyz came flooding in and buried it under a thick coat of savage, howling green.
"Waaaaaagh!!!"
"Charge! There's shiny stuff inside!"
"Out of my way! I saw that hunk of scrap first!"
Eric led the charge with the green tide surging in behind him like a burst dam. Nobody had any concept of tactical formation or scouting ahead. They picked a direction, aimed for whatever looked the most complicated and most likely to have good stuff, and ran straight at it.
The Necron tomb's defense systems came online all at once. Hidden panels slid open in the walls, extending gauss turrets; the floor split apart into kill-traps that spat disintegration beams; energy barriers snapped into place across corridor mouths; and squad after squad of Necron Warriors materialized from concealed teleportation points, moving to block the intruders.
Against an Ork philosophy of "more dakka solves everything" and "there's always more of us," those sophisticated defenses turned out to be somewhat inadequate.
The moment a gauss turret cut down a row of Ork Boyz, even more surged forward to jam the barrel with scavenged scrap metal, or simply piled on top of each other to reach it and tore the whole precision assembly off by brute force.
Floor traps? The boys at the front fell in and got disintegrated. The ones behind didn't even glance down. They leaped over the pits where their mates had just vanished, or grabbed a nearby Grot and hurled it in to plug the gap, then kept running.
Energy barriers? A dozen Ork Boyz lined up shoulder to shoulder, screamed, and hit them at a full sprint. The barrier flickered, overloaded, and burst apart with a sharp pop. The ones who hit hardest maybe had sore arms afterward, but to an Ork that barely registers.
Necron Warrior battle lines? Those were the reefs the green tide loved smashing against most. They swarmed from every side, from above, from below, coming in so thick that the Necrons' precision point-kills became nearly useless at arm's length.
Once it got that close, those sleek metal bodies were set upon by rusty blades, iron bars, fists, and in at least a few cases, teeth.
There was no technique to it. It was pure attrition, throwing an endless wall of bodies and sheer unhinged fury at every obstacle until it broke.
Eric was at the very tip of that tide and felt it most directly. Boys who had been charging right beside him a second ago were vaporized by sudden bursts of gauss fire, and new ones, somehow even more worked up, immediately filled their spots.
The phase blade he had taken off a high-ranking Necron warrior was not easy to use. It was a pure energy blade with no real sense of weight, and it took some getting used to.
But between his Ork body's raw strength and the instincts for timing and distance he had carried over from his martial arts background, he managed to cut through several Necron Warriors who tried to stop him, and along the way grabbed a second energy weapon with an even stranger design.
The cost had been steep.
Of the several thousand Ork Boyz who had flooded into the pyramid with him, after grinding through layer after layer of defenses, splitting off at every fork in the corridors, and taking steady casualties the whole way, only a few dozen of the toughest and most loyal boys were still clustered around him.
Scrapjaw was one of them. He had somehow found time to scavenge another pile of junk and bolt it onto his already busted choppa, making it longer and heavier. He was swinging it with terrifying momentum, still hollering encouragement at Eric and the rest of the boys without stopping.
Deep in the pyramid, the corridors opened into something vast, like a massive burial chamber or an energy nexus. The walls were covered in intricate conduits and glowing crystals, and at the center of it all stood a huge spherical structure that pulsed with waves of unstable energy.
The Necron Warriors stationed here were visibly a cut above the rest: faster, tougher, and carrying deadlier weapons.
The fighting turned brutal. Eric led the surviving few dozen in a grinding close-quarters brawl against an elite Necron guard unit. Phase blades rang against gauss spears, energy sparks flew everywhere, and the roaring of Orks stood in sharp contrast to the cold silence of the Necrons.
At the far edge of the chaos, completely unnoticed, an Ork Boy who had been trailing at the back of Eric's warband the whole time was curled up in the shadow of a thick energy conduit. He looked utterly unremarkable, even downright scrawny. Right now, his whole body was shaking.
Both hands were clamped to his helmet. His eyes were wide open and his pupils kept flaring with bursts of erratic green light. Whatever he was perceiving had diverged horrifyingly from the actual battlefield around him.
Through his eyes, the killing field was blanketed in a dense, churning green aura. Every Ork Boy, Eric included, was steaming with it, varying only in how bright. The Necron Warriors, by contrast, were wrapped in cold silver and lifeless grey.
He wasn't seeing it in any normal sense. It was more like some bizarre force acting directly on his mind.
What was worse was what happened when he turned that gaze toward Eric, who was locked in combat with a Necron warrior. He saw more than just Eric.
Around Eric's blurring figure, which burned at an almost blinding intensity of green, he could make out two enormous phantom Ork skulls made entirely of savage energy, silently roaring as they slowly rotated behind Eric.
One had eyes blazing with a deep, crushing red — jaws gaping wide like it wanted to swallow the world whole, radiating pure strength, fury, and the will to destroy everything in reach.
The other was different in a way that felt somehow worse: its blue-white eyes danced with something between a grin and a leer, cold and calculating, and genuinely dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with strength.
The two skulls loomed behind Eric like something between a pair of guardian spirits and a pair of threats, surging in rhythm with every move he made. The energy rolling off them was so intense, so hideously real, that the scrawny Ork Boy's mind was barely holding together.
"Ugh... ahhh..." He let out a low, strangled groan, feeling like the top of his skull was about to come off. Chaotic images, raw savage emotion, and strange whispering voices flooded through him all at once, as if his mind were a pipe that had finally burst.
He saw green lightning leaping across the battlefield, connecting every Ork to every other. He heard the war cries of countless Orks merging into a single Waaagh!!! that seemed to echo across time and space.
He even dimly sensed the ancient, dread power sealed inside the great energy sphere at the heart of the tomb.
For an ordinary Ork Boy, that kind of overloaded, uncontrolled warp-sight was nothing short of the cruelest torture.
He couldn't make sense of any of it. He could only sit there and absorb the flood, his grip on sanity growing looser by the second.
Out on the battlefield, Eric had just punched his phase blade through the energy core of the last Necron guard with a thrust that had come uncomfortably close to failing. The red light faded from the Necron's eyes and it crashed to the ground. For a moment, the burial chamber went quiet.
Eric caught his breath, looked over what was left of his crew and the massive pulsing sphere at the center of the room, and started working through what to do next.
He paid no attention whatsoever to the unremarkable corner where, at that exact moment, something was happening to an Ork Boy that could not be undone.
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