The war on Lithoeremos-313 had dissolved entirely into an all-consuming maelstrom of chaos.
The Necrons' iron purge, waged at any cost, and the Orks' desperate, tide-turning counterassault collided with savage fury across every inch of the planet's surface, scorching the land with disintegration beams and drowning it in the thunder of Waaagh!!!
Amid this vast, suffocating panorama of war, countless smaller engagements churned like whirlpools in a raging sea, each one a brutal and distinct slaughter all its own.
One such pocket of fighting, set in the scorched zone near where the warlord Scrapjaw had once fallen in the planet's northern reaches, was now dominated by a rising green force that had become impossible to ignore.
At the heart of that force stood the player Eric, username: What the Hell.
He was no longer the bewildered new-spawn who had clawed his way out of a mushroom pit with empty hands and no idea what he was doing.
Nor was he the scrappy nobody running guerrilla raids with a few dozen boys and scavenging for whatever junk he could find.
Relentless, punishing combat in the thickest of the fighting had forged him as if in the cruelest of furnaces, hammering him into a genuine green killing machine built for war and nothing else.
On the battlefield, Eric moved with a mastery that felt instinctive. His Ork body seemed to have fused perfectly with the martial instincts he carried from the real world.
In one hand he swung a monstrous Power Choppa, a tribute paid by a Mekboy boss who had thrown in his lot with Eric's warband.
Its thick, serrated blade crackled with an unstable energy field, and every swing tore the air apart with a shrieking wail.
In his other hand he carried a Slugga that had been "improved" beyond all recognition through countless rounds of tinkering, still brutishly crude in construction but devastating in effect.
Its barrel no longer spat scattered shot but full salvos of explosive metal that shredded everything in their path.
He no longer needed to issue deliberate orders. A glance, a low growl, even the simple act of charging out ahead of everyone else were enough to send the green tide around him surging with several times its normal destructive force.
In his corner of the battlefield, he had become a symbol of invincibility. Necron warrior formations pressing their charge would find him crashing through their flank at the head of his retinue, punching clean through their lines.
Destroyers attempting to suppress him with ranged fire would eat a precisely placed round from his Slugga straight into their energy cores. Even the most heavily armored constructs crumbled and broke apart under the brute force of his Power Choppa.
He was far from alone. The mob gathered around him bore no resemblance to the ragged handful he had started with.
His retinue had grown enormous, well-armed to Ork standards, and composed entirely of the toughest and most ferocious survivors of countless bloody engagements, every one of them fanatically devoted to him.
Among them were individuals who could have led warbands of their own by any reasonable measure, yet who were perfectly content to serve at his side as his blade and his shield.
In raw fighting power and sheer fanaticism, this retinue stood shoulder to shoulder with the bodyguard force that the old warlord Scrapjaw had once used to dominate the north.
Even more dangerous than his military strength was the reputation that had grown up around him almost without any effort on his part. Eric and his northern warband had carved their names into infamy through an unbroken string of brutal fights. Ork Boys and Snotlings passed the legends on by word of mouth:
"You hear about that warband up north? Boss, they fight dirty. Proppa dirty."
"Dirty doesn't cover it. Their boss is something else entirely. Cunning and brutal. Brutal and cunning. Word is his skin's gone so dark green it's almost black, and it's harder than gromril."
"His boys are maniacs too. I heard they rip the metal arms off Necron skeletons with their bare hands."
"Especially the boss's retinue. Throne, that lot is one of the most Waaagh!!! mobs on this whole planet. They go looking for the worst fights and come back out of Necron piles with trophies."
"If I could get in with them, even just as an outer-ring boy, that'd be something worth dying for."
Word like that spread faster than any formal recruitment drive. Eric was fighting in one of the most contested and costly sectors on the planet, losing boys by the tens of thousands every single day, yet his force did not shrink. It grew. It rolled larger and more dangerous with every passing engagement.
Ork Boys hungry for a real Waaagh!!!, Snotlings drawn to strength, veterans and bosses cast adrift from broken or scattered warbands: all of them found their way to him by whatever means they could.
Fresh blood poured in constantly, and the relentless grind of combat stripped out the weak almost immediately, leaving only the most hardened survivors. Eric's core force maintained a consistently devastating level of fighting power and an unshakeable will to keep going.
His name had risen to a peak of renown across the entire planet's Ork society. There was no Ork who had not heard of Boss What the Hell.
The wealth he had accumulated from salvage and raiding now rivaled any Ork warlord operating on the planet.
More importantly, the sheer weight of kills his boys had racked up, mountains of Necron wreckage serving as testament, had made him an undisputed hero and legend in the eyes of every Ork who knew his name.
Experience flooded his character panel like a dam had burst, pouring in without pause through the endless cycle of fighting, leading, and gaining renown. He could feel his strength expanding with it.
His frame seemed to have added another layer of mass. His skin had deepened to a richer, darker green. His command over the flow of battle had reached a level he had never touched before.
Then came the decisive clash.
The Necrons launched a major counteroffensive to retake a critical energy nexus in the northern sector. Eric threw his warband into the line at the very tip of the spear.
The fighting reached a pitch of savagery that went beyond anything that had come before.
Green tide and silver metal tide drove into each other again and again in repeated collisions, and the dead piled up like terrain features.
At the height of the battle, a Necron Monolith tore through the Ork lines, its massive shadow falling across a wide stretch of the battlefield. The particle projector atop its hull began to charge, the killing light locking onto Eric's position.
With no time left and no room to think, Eric let out a roar that shook the ground and charged straight at it.
He ran up a mound of debris and launched himself into the air, clearing the sweep of the secondary guns. At the apex, he brought his Power Choppa around in a full arc and poured everything — every ounce of strength from his body, every shred of Waaagh!!! will he possessed — into a single blow.
"COME APART!"
KRRRRK!!!!!
A sound that set teeth on edge rang out across the battlefield, metal fracturing and energy screaming together in one terrible note.
Before the eyes of countless stunned Orks, Eric's serrated blade, burning with a green energy field, bit deep into the Monolith's heavy frontal armor and kept going, tearing through internal energy conduits and structural framing. Blinding arcs of energy erupted from the split in the plating.
The Monolith locked up. The charged light died in an instant. The enormous structure swayed, shuddered through a series of deep internal detonations, and then toppled, crashing onto its side and throwing a wall of dust and debris into the sky.
Eric stood on the fallen Monolith's wreckage, drenched in blood, chest heaving. The blade of his Choppa had cracked noticeably along the edge, but his grip on it had not loosened by a fraction.
Around him, silence held for exactly one moment.
Then a roar of "Waaaaaaaagh!!!" erupted from behind him, from every point across the battlefield, from Ork positions far away that had watched and waited — a wave of sound that seemed to shake the planet itself.
That single blow had broken the Necron counterattack and settled, beyond any argument, what Eric's place was in this planet's Ork hierarchy.
At the very peak of that victory, at the highest point of that moment of glory, a new panel blazed into existence at the center of Eric's vision, framed in scorching green light and a border that radiated crude, magnificent power:
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!"
"Right then! That was the most Waaagh!!! thing this reporter has ever had the privilege of witnessing, boss! You absolute bloody Waaagh!!! of a greenskin!"
"Look at the size of you! That skin! That sheer bloody-minded nerve it takes to chop apart a piece of Necron machinery that big!"
"Any other corner of the galaxy, with talent like yours, you'd have already pulled together a crew, set yourself up as a regional power, and maybe be well on your way to a cross-system Ork empire. Honestly, probably."
"Your name echoes across every inch of this broken rock. There's not an Ork on this planet who hasn't heard of Boss What the Hell."
"The kill-tally is stacked higher than the hills."
"You are, right here and right now, the greenest, the meanest, and the most absolutely Waaagh!!! greenskin player on this planet."
"So what are you waiting for?!"
"Step up, boss!"
"You are hereby and officially promoted to WARBOSS!"
Below the announcement, the specific effects of the promotion were laid out:
"WARBOSS AUTHORITY AND BONUSES:"
[1. Supreme Rally. Your Waaagh!!! call range and sphere of influence are dramatically expanded. You can now more effectively consolidate and command much larger Ork warbands and, within a defined area, can take a leading role in shaping the overall strategic offensive.]
[2. Experience Feast. All friendly Ork units, both player and AI, within a set radius around you gain a significantly higher chance of receiving experience, and the total experience earned is doubled. Fighting alongside a Warboss accelerates growth enormously.]
[3. Elite Cradle. The Waaagh!!! field radiating from you is intensely concentrated, causing Ork Boys fighting nearby to promote into elite unit types, Storm Boyz, Tank Bustas, Kommandos, and others, at a remarkably high rate. Your retinue automatically gains the Elite template upgrade.]
[4. Leader's Aura. Your own attributes receive a major across-the-board increase, and you unlock a new set of leader abilities.]
Eric stood on the wreckage of the fallen construct and looked at the radiant promotion panel before him, feeling the wave of fanatical devotion and Waaagh!!! energy pressing in from all around him, so thick it was almost something he could reach out and touch.
The sense of absurdity that had never quite left him since the beginning had long since been displaced by something heavier and more real: the weight of enormous power, and everything that came with it.
He was a high schooler who had been dragged into this game by his older cousin. In this virtual universe that was dark and utterly bizarre, he had somehow done it.
Through one brutal fight after another, step by step, he had climbed to the very top of Ork society, and become the Warboss who commanded an entire region and held the power to shape the outcome of a planetary war.
He drew a slow breath and raised his cracked, more-savage-looking-than-ever Power Choppa.
There was nothing to say. The action was the declaration.
He turned to face the retreating remnants of the Necron forces and, beyond them, the prepared positions of the Necron main line further out, and put every bit of strength he had left into the first war cry he would ever make as a Warboss: a cry that would resonate across this entire sector and far beyond it.
"BOYS!!"
"WITH ME!!"
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!"
What answered him was the green tide at his back, swollen to a number that defied counting, armed with everything imaginable and burning with a fighting spirit that nothing could extinguish.
And from across the planet, rising from every direction at once, came the distant echo of Waaagh!!! calling back to him.