Chapter 298: The Warboss Enters
With the bolt carbine down to half a drum, Kian decided the remaining ammunition was worth conserving. Fourteen Nobz left standing. He could finish them in melee.
He drew the power glaive in his left hand and charged a psychic shockwave in his right, then closed the distance at a run.
The Nobz were still shaking off the Meltabomb's aftereffects when he arrived in their faces. He released the shockwave point-blank: lightning, concussive force, and tearing pressure detonating across the front rank. The ones who'd just struggled back to their feet went down again, most of them convulsing from the electrical component. The ones further back took partial hits and went rigid, limbs temporarily locked.
He worked the power glaive through the downed ones methodically, removing heads before they could recover. Five down before the last five shook the paralysis and swung at him.
The first one brought a heavy steel axe down in a two-handed overhead. Kian caught the blow on the glaive, drove it upward, and sheared through the axe head at the base. The Ork stared at its suddenly shortened weapon with genuine confusion. He drove the glaive through its forehead and twisted. The head came apart.
A Nob to his left had timed an overhead strike for exactly when his glaive was still embedded. It was almost clever. He applied gravity manipulation to the falling axe, increasing its effective weight by several dozen times. The Nob found itself suddenly unable to complete the swing, arms straining against a load that made no physical sense. He pulled the glaive free and took the head.
The remaining three he handled with combinations: gravity on the weapon, gravity on the foot, a sudden stumble mid-charge creating an opening, the glaive filling the opening. The fights lasted seconds each.
He stood in the silence of the aftermath and reflected on how useful psychic precision was compared to raw psychic power.
He wasn't throwing arcs of lightning that vaporised everything in a corridor. He was adding thirty kilograms of effective weight to a specific knife hand, or making one boot suddenly heavier than the leg wearing it, at exactly the right moment. The effect was surgical. An Imperial savant observing his technique would have been baffled: his total psychic output was modest, but the precision was something normally achieved only by decades of uninterrupted meditation and practice. What those savants wouldn't know was that his psychic development had occurred entirely free of daemonic interference, sheltered under the Emperor's protection. No static, no corruption, no outside force jostling his concentration mid-development. The result was a psyker who carved with a scalpel rather than swinging a hammer, and who could place that scalpel exactly where he intended it.
He checked the mission counter: 339 of 1,000. A third done. A few more engagements and it would close.
He was still feeling optimistic about this when the bioscan went red across its entire forward arc.
Dozens of contacts. Then hundreds. All converging.
The corridor ahead filled with noise: weapons fire, heavy footsteps, Ork voices layered over each other into a continuous roar. Then they rounded the corner and he could see them, a packed mass of greenskins filling the passage from wall to wall and extending back into the darkness further than the corridor lighting could reach.
At the front of the formation stood something considerably larger than anything he'd encountered so far.
Three metres tall. Improvised power armour welded together from whatever had been available. Right arm: a multi-barrel rotary cannon, the barrel cluster alone wider than Kian's torso. Left arm: a chainsaw-axe, the chain moving continuously. And mounted on the top of the power armour's pauldron, operated by a Gretchin sitting up there like a gunner in a turret, a heavy shoota that was already tracking toward him.
The Warboss filled roughly a third of the corridor's width on its own.
The Nobz flanking him were the ship's elite: every one of them above 2.5 metres, heavier armour than anything Kian had cut through so far, weapons proportionally larger.
The Warboss's eyes found Kian and ignited.
"ANOTHER TIN-CAN SHRIMP!! BOSS LOVES TIN-CAN SHRIMPS!! TIN-CAN SHRIMPS KNOW HOW TO FIGHT PROPER!! I'M GONNA KRUMP THIS ONE DEAD!! WAAAAAAGH!!"
The rotary cannon opened up.
The deck plating shook with each footfall as three metres of armoured Ork came down the corridor at a dead sprint, cannon cycling through rounds at a rate that turned the air between them into a continuous stream of impacts, the Gretchin on the shoulder shrieking and working the heavy shoota with both arms, the Nob escort howling and spreading to fill every available space behind their boss.
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