Chapter 301: The Furious Lumberer
Kian's motivation went from zero to maximum in about half a second.
He sat down cross-legged in the shuttle right there and spent half an hour in meditation, bringing his focus back up to full. Then he drank an energy drink, reapplied his anointing oil, and topped off every weapon and ammunition load he was carrying.
This time he brought two additions.
Across his chest, he slung the Lumberer — specifically that Lumberer, the one he'd repaired back at the Sanctum, the one with the Wrathful Machine Spirit and its unlimited ammunition draw from the Immaterium.
On his back he fitted two mag-lock mounts. Right side: a rocket launcher tube. Left side: three spare rockets, hollow-charge armour-piercing warheads. One of those hits the Warboss square and he's gone — Kian was confident of that.
Ready. He piloted the shuttle around to the top of the hulk's stern section, docked, dropped out onto the hull, and moved inside.
The Emperor's mission was already complete. The rockets earlier had pushed him past a thousand xenos kills. What came next was purely personal.
That ship. The human ship buried under all that garbage. That was his.
"FULL ASSAULT!!" he bellowed, dropping into the exposed Imperial hull section through a breach in the outer layers. "CLEAR THE MAP!!"
The moment he landed inside, his armour chimed: atmospheric readings nominal, gravity nominal.
Right. Of course. The gravity plating and atmosphere systems were Imperial Navy standard — built into the ship underneath. That explained why the outer Ork layers had neither, while the interior did.
He got his bearings and moved forward.
He hadn't gone far before the corridor ahead filled with Orks.
They registered the black-armoured figure. Paused for about half a second.
Then went absolutely berserk.
"TIN-CAN!! DA SHRIMP TIN-CAN'S BACK!! WAAAAAAGH!!"
They surged toward him.
Kian raised the Lumberer and pulled the trigger.
BRAKKABRAKKABRAKKA!!
The Lumberer was a piece of work. He'd repaired it back at the Sanctum, and the Machine Spirit inside had come back angry — a genuine Wrathful Spirit, the kind that thirsted for slaughter, that reached into the Immaterium between shots and pulled fresh rounds from the void rather than draining a conventional feed. It would fire until it fired itself to death. Barrel melted, rifling ground smooth, and it still wouldn't stop. If the enemy ran out, the Spirit would keep pulling the trigger at empty air just to feel something.
A complete nightmare to manage under normal circumstances.
Here? He had as many targets as he'd ever need.
Kian swept the muzzle in controlled arcs, walking 20mm fire across the mass of Orks, aiming for heads. At this range, in this narrow corridor, there was nowhere to go.
Head after green head detonated.
Orks were fundamentally hard to kill — part fungus, part animal, built to absorb punishment. A large-calibre round through the chest opened a hole and they kept coming anyway. The only reliable kill was brain destruction. Kian knew that. His marksmanship let him do it consistently, muzzle tracking left-right across the advancing tide, and the corridor filled with falling bodies.
The noise brought more.
He was standing at a four-way intersection. Orks started pouring in from the front and the left simultaneously — Boys mixed in with Nobz, two directions at once.
He swept back and forth, managing both angles, burning down everything that got close.
Then a third tunnel opened up.
Nope.
He retreated, Lumberer pointed at the ceiling since it flatly refused to stop firing, a continuous stream of 20mm rounds punching craters in the overhead plates and raining sparks as he jogged backward through the passage.
At the next intersection, he stopped. Turned around. Set his feet.
The three-directional Ork surge had funnelled into a single corridor chasing him, exactly as intended. He aimed into the bottleneck and started killing again.
His method settled into a rhythm: hold a position, shoot until Orks started flanking from multiple directions, immediately relocate, find a new single-vector approach, repeat. He pulled the Ork mobs through the ship's corridor network like he was walking a very angry dog on a very short leash.
And the Lumberer was having the time of its life.
The Machine Spirit screamed with joy. Hundreds of confirmed kills in a matter of minutes, more warm meat arriving faster than it could process — it was intoxicating. Kian could feel the Spirit's mood through the grip like a current, and it translated directly into performance.
Rate of fire climbed from around 700 rounds per minute to 1,000. Then past 1,000.
Muzzle velocity spiked with it. The 20mm rounds left the barrel with so much energy that he barely needed to aim at heads anymore — the rounds found their own path through flesh, tearing Ork bodies apart on contact rather than punching clean through.
A Nob — a big one, heavy-built, no armour — took a round to the chest. His head and all four limbs separated simultaneously, as if a demolition charge had gone off inside him. An unarmoured Boy took a hit and simply ceased to exist as a coherent object, replaced by a mist of organic material coating the corridor walls.
The Lumberer had completely lost its mind. This was the greatest moment of its entire existence.
BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!!
The corridor ahead was packed — Orks shoulder to shoulder, wall to wall, screaming and charging — and the Lumberer's fire was pushing the entire mass back. Hundreds of bodies stacking against the tide of hundreds more still trying to push forward, the whole column grinding against itself under the weight of fire.
But there's a limit to everything.
Ten thousand-plus rounds in a sustained burst. The barrel was glowing. The water-cooling jacket around it had been hissing steam for the last thirty seconds — now the hissing stopped, the valve ran dry, and the jacket began to glow faintly at the seams.
"HEY — stop!! You're going to cook yourself!!"
Kian shouted at the gun. He genuinely shouted at the gun.
The Lumberer heard him, assessed his concern, and increased its rate of fire to 1,500 rounds per minute.
Muzzle velocity took another step up.
Kian stared, genuinely speechless, as the corridor ahead became a tapestry of dismemberment. A Nob hit centre-mass at the new velocity simply evaporated from the neck down. An unarmoured Boy caught a grazing round and lost the top third of his torso.
There's a saying: a little indulgence is pleasant. A lot will hurt you. Way too much will kill you outright.
The Lumberer held 1,500 rpm for exactly five seconds.
Then it exploded.
A single sharp bang. The barrel failed at the receiver junction, the dried-out cooling jacket tore apart at the same moment, and the whole front assembly dropped to the deck and began immediately melting into a puddle of slag. The remaining receiver in Kian's hands poured molten iron from the breach like a tiny volcano.
He stood there holding the butt stock.
Just the butt stock.
He looked at it. He looked at the corridor.
The corridor looked like something had thrown several hundred Orks into an industrial shredder and then distributed the results evenly across every available surface. Floor, walls, ceiling — all of it, in every direction, thoroughly painted.
Hundreds of pieces of former Ork arranged in a rough line stretching back to the distant junction.
Kian looked at the butt stock again.
He set it down very gently.
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