Chapter 302: Escape
The Lumberer had, functionally, enjoyed itself to death. Just shy of a thousand confirmed kills before the barrel gave out — and now it was a butt stock. That was it.
Kian couldn't bring himself to throw it away.
He stripped the ammo box off to reduce the bulk, lashed what remained to his thigh with a weapon strap, and decided he'd take it back to see if it was salvageable. Sentimental value, at this point.
He'd barely finished securing it when the corridor filled with Orks again — a fresh wave, screaming, choppers raised, coming to finish what the last several hundred had started.
Left arm up. Twin heavy-barrel lasrifles, semi-auto, picking off unmasked heads.
Without the Lumberer's wall of fire, his output dropped considerably. The Orks started pushing forward again, step by step, the weight of numbers doing what individual courage couldn't.
He fell back, trading ground for shots, weaving through the ship's tangled corridor network and keeping the Orks chasing him in circles.
Then — from somewhere ahead — a single enormous WAAAGH.
The Warboss hit the corridor like a battering ram. He cleared a path through his own Boyz with the rotary shoota and the chainsaw-axe in a display of casual fratricide that opened a lane of bloody wreckage straight toward Kian.
"TIN-CAN!! YOU'RE MINE!! COME FIGHT WIV ME!!"
Right. Kian reached back, pulled the rocket launcher off the mag-mount, aimed at the Warboss's chest, and fired.
The 150mm hollow-charge rocket flew true — straight at the armour plate, exactly where a shaped-charge jet would punch clean through —
The Warboss reached out with one hand and grabbed the nearest Nob off the ground. Single-handed. Held the Nob upright in front of his chest like a meat shield.
The rocket hit the Nob square. The shaped-charge jet burned through the Nob's front armour, cooked everything inside, punched through the back armour — then crossed a gap of open air and hit the Warboss's actual breastplate with maybe a third of its original penetration. It drilled a small hole.
That was all.
"Oh come on," Kian snarled, slammed a fresh rocket into the tube, and fired again.
The Warboss picked up a second Nob.
Same result.
Kian made a tactical assessment — specifically, that he was losing this tactical assessment — narrowed his eyes, and ran.
The Warboss howled at his retreating back and opened fire with the shoota, more out of outrage than any expectation of hitting.
Kian spun around mid-stride, dropped a gravity field on the Warboss's feet.
The Warboss face-planted again.
The same scene played out as before: the Nobz and Boyz behind him simply ran over him in their rush to chase Kian, iron boots ringing off his armour, the Warboss pinned under the stampede, too furious to form coherent words.
Kian kept moving. Lasrifles firing back down the corridor as he retreated, punctuated by periodic psychic shockwaves to scatter pursuit clusters when they got too tight.
Then he turned into a single-lane passage.
Behind him: Orks, closing fast.
From ahead: the unmistakable sound of charging footsteps.
Oh no.
He processed this instantly. Pinned in a corridor section, Orks converging from both ends.
Worst case scenario.
The group coming from the front was mostly Gretchin and unarmoured Boyz. Which meant — Gretchin idea. Classic. The little runts couldn't fight worth anything individually, so they compensated by talking the disposable Boyz into flanking manoeuvres while the main engagement tied down the target. Any higher-tier Ork would have just come straight at him. These were the bottom rung — no armour, no real weapons, just choppas and bad intentions, following the Gretchin scheme because they weren't important enough to ignore it.
"EEEEE!! HE'S TRAPPED!! GET HIM!! KILL HIM NOW!!"
One Gretchin was especially excited about this. Presumably the architect.
Two thousand monomolecular discs. Ten seconds of fire, filling the corridor wall to wall.
The shuriken pistol's output in a confined space was essentially a blender. The unarmoured Boyz and Gretchin went through it the same way anything unarmoured went through monomolecular wire — in pieces, sprayed evenly across the available surfaces. The reference that came to Kian's mind was the laser corridor from that old horror film. Same energy.
He cleared the front group in seconds.
More came. The Gretchin's flanking force was deeper than it had looked.
And behind him, the Warboss had finally clawed his way out from under the Nob-stampede and was bellowing toward him at full charge.
Both ends closing. No exits in the wall. The rational move was to accept the respawn.
He glanced at the sensor suite.
The deck plating directly beneath him: less than 20mm thick.
Below it: a massive open void space.
There it is.
He pulled two melta grenades from his belt, linked them in series, yanked the pin, and dropped them at his feet. Then he sprinted forward fifteen metres, went flat against the deck in the corner, and wrapped a psychic barrier around himself as tight as it would go.
The detonation hit like a physical wall even through the barrier — heat and overpressure rolling over him, dissipating against the field.
He got up.
Behind him, where the grenades had been: a large hole in the deck plating, surrounded by a ring of cooling magma.
"TIN-CAN!! DON'T YOU RUN!! STAND AND FIGHT!!"
The Warboss had seen the hole being made. He knew exactly what was happening. He was furious in the specific way that only comes from being made to feel ridiculous multiple times in quick succession.
Kian turned, looked directly at him across the length of the corridor, and raised one finger.
The middle one.
Then he stepped off the edge and dropped through the hole.
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