Chapter 297: Killing Orks
The Gretchin pointed back down the corridor it had come from.
"Boss boss! Human shrimp is right there! Super fierce super fierce!!"
The Warboss's eyes went wide. He swung the Gretchin back and forth absently.
"Super fierce, yeah? So it knows how to fight proper?"
The Gretchin nodded so fast its head was in danger.
"Yes yes yes! Big tin-can human shrimp! Already killed forty-plus Boyz! Super tough! Super hard! Super WAAAGH!!"
Every Nob in the room lit up simultaneously.
"Super tough? Super hard? Super..."
"WAAAAGH!!"
The Warboss threw his head back and laughed, then perched the Gretchin on top of his power armour next to the heavy shoota welded to the shoulder mount.
"You done good bringin' this news. You're my new shoota-boy now. Everyone else: follow me!! Find the human tin-can shrimp and KRUMP IT!! WAAAAGH!!"
"WAAAAGH!!"
A thousand Nobz surged to their feet, waving weapons, firing randomly into the ceiling, bellowing with the specific joy of beings who had been bored for weeks and had just been given a reason to stop being bored.
The Gretchin on the Warboss's shoulder worked the heavy shoota's grip with both hands and sprayed the ceiling enthusiastically.
The warband poured into the corridors.
In the psychic sub-layer beneath the material world, the WAAAGH-field that had been fading toward extinction began, very slowly, to strengthen.
In the forward corridors, Kian had run into a new wave: Gretchin mixed with Boys, flooding in from every connecting passage. He worked the twin lasrifles methodically, one target at a time, and threw occasional psychic shockwaves down the tighter corridors to stun entire groups simultaneously. The shockwave cleared roughly one full corridor width per cast. He moved through them without urgency.
Then the quality of the opposition jumped.
The Gretchin and basic Boys disappeared. In their place came Nobz: 2.5 metres, heavy plate armour, most with full-face coverings, each one carrying an oversized cleaver in the right hand and an equally oversized pistol in the left.
He tested the lasrifles against the first few. The armour absorbed everything. Switched to the bolt carbine on his right forearm.
Three-round bursts. Each burst aimed at the head. The bolt-rounds punched through improvised helmets and detonated inside.
He dropped ten Nobz in the first exchange. Any human force would have broken. The Nobz saw their front rank go down and got louder.
"WAAAAGH!!"
The ones with firearms opened up on him all at once.
Ork marksmanship operated on a different principle to most military doctrine: point the gun in the right general direction, pull the trigger, and see what happens. The results were accordingly varied. Pebble shot, iron slugs, copper rounds, and in one case what appeared to be a bundle of nails fired from something that resembled a rifle. A copper slug caught him on the shoulder plate and threw sparks.
He extended a psychic kinetic field in front of himself: not a complete stop, but enough to bleed velocity down to the threshold his armour could absorb passively. The Heavy Reactive Power Armour was rated to ignore everything below Grade 5 entirely, no durability loss, not even paint damage worth mentioning. Ork ammunition quality was inconsistent, swinging unpredictably between grades as the WAAAGH-field fluctuated. Bleeding everything down to Grade 5 and letting the armour handle it was computationally efficient and psychically cheap.
The incoming fire pattered against his chest and shoulders like hail, and he ignored it.
He kept working the bolt carbine in short precise bursts, interspersed with psychic shockwaves for stun coverage. His free hand found a grenade on his belt: a Meltabomb, roughly the size of a man's palm. He pulled the activation pin with a psychic pulse and lobbed it down the corridor into the centre of the Nob formation.
The detonation produced a sphere of superheated plasma approximately five metres across.
Within that sphere: vapour. Complete conversion of organic and metallic material into component gases.
Beyond it: severe thermal burns, the corridor walls and ceiling melting and running as liquid metal, forming a small lava field across the deck plating.
He opened the mission counter.
One Meltabomb, confined corridor, concentrated formation: twenty Nobz eliminated.
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