Chapter 304: The Old Bull
"WAAAAAAGH!! Get the new Boyz armed up! Send 'em into every corner, every pipe, every gap in dis ship! FIND DA TIN-CAN HUMIE!
And don't none of you fight him! He's MINE! Wait for me t' do da killin'!!"
Deep in the hulk, in a cavernous open hold, the Warboss bellowed orders at his assembled mob.
The freshly-spawned Boyz — half an hour old, no idea what was happening, just handed scrap weapons and shoved forward by the Nobz — were pushed toward the ship's interior in a confused, eager wave.
The hulk was full of chattering, screaming Orks now, morale high, searching every corner with single-minded determination. Find the human. Then everyone gets out of the way so the boss can have his fight.
If anyone had been paying close attention, they'd have noticed something: these Orks looked fuller than they had when Kian first arrived. Healthier. More solid.
Before he'd shown up, this warband had been drifting through the void for months. No war. No fighting. No WAAAGH. The whole lot of them had gone slack and listless, the field weak, bodies shrunken and undernourished.
A day and a half of fighting Kian had changed that completely. The dormant field was waking back up. Muscle mass returning. Every Ork in the place howling with renewed appetite for violence.
The Warboss sat on his throne — welded together from scrap and salvage — and shivered with anticipation.
Kian was the second-strongest human he'd ever faced.
The strongest had been a giant green can of a man. That one had killed hundreds of Boyz before the Warboss — then just a Nob — caught his moment, rushed him, and put a chainsaw-axe through his chest. A dozen more swings after that, just to be sure. The kill had earned him the adoration of every Ork watching.
He'd felt something powerful surge through him in that moment. His body had grown. He'd become a Warboss. Eventually, his own ship.
The Warboss turned and looked at his throne again.
Welded into the scrap structure, fully integrated into the metal: a Space Marine.
Orks collected trophies. Some wore them on their armour. A Warboss with a settled power base preserved his properly.
Back on the Forge World, this Warboss had fought an Astartes. Green armour. Three metres tall. The Astartes had killed several hundred greenskins before going down — out of ammunition, exhausted, simply outnumbered past the point where skill mattered. The Warboss had taken the opening, swung the axe through the ceramite breastplate, and ended it.
That single kill had drawn enough WAAAGH-field attention to elevate him from Nob to Warboss. Leader of his own warband, from that day forward.
He looked at the helmet protruding from the scrap — the only part of the dead Astartes left visible — at the crimson lens behind the green visor, and murmured:
"I killed you. Dat's how I became Warboss. Now I'm gonna kill dat tin-can humie too. Wonder what I'll become next..."
The green-armoured figure said nothing. Dead men generally don't.
Then, from somewhere above — deep in the tangled pipework overhead — a voice rang out, dripping with contempt:
"You? Kill me? Sit down, loser."
The Warboss's eyes went wide. His head snapped up. Every Nob and Boy in the chamber, hundreds of them, looked up at the same instant.
There — perched in a gap between two layers of broken armour plating, high above the chamber floor — stood Kian, looking down at the assembled Orks with the specific expression of a man who has chosen exactly this position for exactly this reason.
The mob below erupted. Every weapon in the chamber swung up and opened fire simultaneously — shootas, sluggas, even a stray rocket.
Kian dropped back into the gap behind him.
A few seconds of metal-on-metal chaos and scattered detonations later, he poked his head back out and addressed the crowd.
"You guys are pathetic. Absolute losers. Cowards, every one of you.
Big as you all are, and you can't even hit one guy standing still. How do you people get anything done?"
The Warboss stamped his foot in fury, raised his power axe toward the ceiling.
"SHRIMP! Get down here and fight me like a real Ork! Hidin' up dere ain't honourable!!"
Kian grinned, cranked the volume on his helmet's vox-amplifier to maximum, and made sure every Ork in the chamber could hear him perfectly.
"Don't bother pretending. I already know everything.
You're the Coward Fleet, aren't you? Got chased off your home turf by some genuinely tough Ork, didn't you? You're all just a pack of stray dogs. Cowards, the lot of you."
The chamber went dead silent, then erupted into noise.
These Orks had fought humans long enough to understand the language fluently. Every word landed exactly where it was meant to.
The older Orks flinched visibly, faces twisting with something like shame. A few of the senior Nobz glanced around nervously, like men who'd been caught at something they didn't want known.
The newly-spawned Boyz had no idea what was happening and looked around in confusion at their elders' reactions.
Kian grinned wider and kept going for the throat.
"You were doing fine fighting humans on that planet. But your cowardice stat was off the charts — even by Ork standards, you people were the bottom of the barrel.
So the rest of the Orks on that world didn't want anything to do with you. Wouldn't fight alongside you, wouldn't even fight you for sport. They ran you off the whole planet.
And here you all are. No war, no fights, nothing to do — like a Gretchin who got his toe stepped on, crying and running off into deep space.
Just absolutely pathetic. Pathetic~ pathetic~. Big and scary on the outside, total cowards on the inside~. Bullied by your own kind and ran away crying. So sad. So pathetic~ pathetic~."
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