Above the orbital tracks of Lithoeremos-313, a cold synthetic voice continued to echo, announcing the full awakening of the Necrontyr Dynasty and the order for indiscriminate purification.
For players in the Necrontyr faction, the mission they received was concise and direct:
[Main Quest: Systematic Extermination]
[Objective: Eliminate all detected unauthorized life forms on the surface of Lithoeremos-313, restore absolute tranquility to the tomb world, and ensure the dynasty's eternal slumber remains undisturbed.]
[Quest Note: Annihilate, disassemble, purify. Leave nothing alive, permit no disorder. Let silence reclaim this place.]
The player known as White Rose was one such participant. Unlike the Ork players who had come crawling out of mushroom holes with nothing to their name, he had respawned with the cold, measured weight of technological precision.
His consciousness came together inside a freshly risen tomb obelisk. He was already wearing a standard Necron warrior's alloy frame, a regulation gauss flayer gripped firmly in hand.
The weapon was ice-cold, perfectly balanced, its energy core humming with steady readiness, primed to discharge disintegrating beams at a moment's notice.
"Straightforward enough." White Rose skimmed the quest description, then fell into step with the silent AI Necron warriors around him, marching in mechanical lockstep through the tomb entrance and out into the open.
Outside, the world had already come apart since the Christmas Event went live. But this wasn't like the scattered skirmishes from before. What his sensors swept across now was a full-scale disaster unfolding in every direction at once.
Crude Ork rockets and lunatic aircraft traced erratic arcs across the sky overhead. On the ground, green tides and silver-black metal floods were slamming into each other at multiple points simultaneously.
Explosions, Waaagh!!! war cries, the sharp shriek of gauss weapons, and the grating screech of metal being beaten out of shape all tangled together into one thunderous wall of noise.
White Rose locked onto the nearest engagement. A squad of Necron warriors had taken cover behind several large boulders and the outer tomb fortifications, trading fire with an Ork warband several times the squad's size.
The Orks surged forward screaming, swinging every weapon imaginable: rusty cleavers, sticks packed with explosives, improvised guns cobbled from bundled iron pipes, and one Ork who had torn a half-panel of metal door from somewhere and was using it as a shield.
"Targets acquired. Commencing purification." White Rose raised his gauss flayer. He was methodical by nature, the kind of player who valued precision above all else. With sensor-assisted targeting, he squeezed the trigger in a slow, controlled pull.
Fzzt! A green beam lanced out and hit the leading Ork Boy square in the chest, the one holding the battered door panel, dead center.
No scream, no thrashing. The Ork Boy and the door panel in his grip dissolved together, broken down to their base molecules and scattered into a wisp of vapor and drifting metallic dust. Gone without a trace. All that remained was a small, clean-edged crater on the ground, the only proof he had ever been there.
White Rose calmly shifted his aim to the next target. His AI squadmates kept up a steady rhythm alongside him, gauss beams weaving a net of death, Orks evaporating one after another mid-charge.
"These Orks have poor individual combat ability, garbage equipment, and zero coordination. Outside of their numbers, they're not much of a threat. This Systematic Extermination quest shouldn't be too hard."
But as the fighting dragged on, something started to feel wrong.
These Orks… why weren't they running out?
He and his squadmates had already disintegrated at least twenty or thirty Ork Boys, plus a heap of Gretchin on top of that.
By any reasonable measure, this assault should have broken and scattered a long time ago. But the green figures in front of him hadn't thinned out at all. If anything, there were more of them.
New Orks kept clawing their way up from mushroom holes at the edge of the battlefield, from cracks in the rubble, even from the smoldering patches left behind by Orks who had just been disintegrated moments before.
They came back quickly, barely needing any time to recover. They grabbed the junk weapons of fallen comrades or charged empty-handed, howling as they threw themselves back into the fight.
Equipment seemed to matter almost nothing to them. An Ork would dissolve, and the rusty cleaver he dropped might be scooped up by the very next one to crawl out of the ground. A weapon blew up in an Ork's hands?
That Ork might go down for a bit, or just get trampled by the ones behind him, while the scraps of the destroyed weapon were already being picked up by someone else and hammered into something even stranger.
What bothered White Rose most was the attitude of these things. They had no concept of fear or retreat, none whatsoever. Seeing their comrades vanish in the strangest possible way, right in front of them, the Orks only seemed to get more fired up. Death wasn't an ending for them.
It was just the opening act of the next fight. They came in waves, relying on sheer numbers and completely irrational intensity to hammer away at what should have been an unbreakable Necron firing line.
"These organisms have an unusual replenishment cycle." White Rose pinpointed the problem. He pulled up the battlefield briefing and skimmed it quickly, finding the condensed notes on Ork spore reproduction and Waaagh!!! rating. "So that's how it works. Killing them outright might actually be making things worse. The more violent the battle, the faster they come back?"
That completely gutted the basic tactical logic of attrition warfare. Against Orks, the more you killed, the richer the battlefield became with nutrients, the more widely the spores spread, and the larger and faster the next wave bursting from the ground could be. This wasn't a war of attrition. Every kill was planting the next wave.
Then a fresh wave of Waaagh!!! howling erupted from the flank of his position.
A larger warband, led by what looked like a boss, greener than the rest and packing two cobbled-together wheel-lock guns, came sweeping around from the side and rear. The boss charged straight in while unloading both weapons in a wild, indiscriminate spray.
The bullets, which were really just assorted metal shards fired with terrible aim, clattered and pinged off alloy frames and rock faces, but the sheer volume of it was hard to ignore.
White Rose swung his aim and put a beam through the Ork boss's shoulder, taking off the arm and the gun it was holding in a single shot.
The boss stumbled but didn't go down. He raised the remaining gun with his other arm and came on screaming even harder, and the Orks around him caught fire from the sight of it, pushing forward faster than before.
"This is a problem." White Rose felt the bind closing in. The Extermination quest required him to kill Orks, but the killing was feeding their momentum and pumping up their numbers.
Meanwhile, the enemy's complete disregard for casualties and the relentless assault pace were steadily grinding down his AI squadmates.
What he had expected to be a clean, orderly purification run had turned into a grinding war of attrition, his forces stuck in an endless, ever-growing green flood that only got nastier with every kill.
White Rose checked the progress bar at the top of his field of view, the one tracking the Necrontyr faction's mission completion. It was crawling forward at a maddening pace. The Waaagh!!! Rating bar, by contrast, ground relentlessly upward.
"This approach isn't going to hold." He ran through the logic with cold clarity. "Something different is needed. Maybe focus on destroying their spawn points, or go after whatever passes for leadership."
But on a battlefield that was getting more chaotic by the minute, greener by the second, and louder with every passing moment, executing anything resembling precise tactics was a lot easier to think about than to actually pull off.
The grand clusterfuck had only just begun.