Chapter 397: Anti-Boarding Operations
Kian raised his shield to block. A hail of heavy-caliber rounds slammed into it from the Orks ahead, sparks bursting with every impact.
He was in his heavy power armour now, the Lumberer-pattern stubber mounted on his head firing without pause. But the stubber's rounds weren't doing much against the armoured Orks ahead. Every one of them wore plating over twenty-five millimeters thick, each one built like a small, sprinting tank. It took a dozen or more direct hits from the stubber just to bring one down.
Fortunately, Kian had a bolt carbine in his other hand, firing controlled bursts. Bolt rounds punched through armour cleanly, and a single hit to the head or chest was enough to drop an Ork outright.
Kian held the front line as a living shield, the Orks ahead charging and screaming as they fired. He dropped them one after another with the bolt carbine, shouting back over his shoulder to his elite squad.
"Plasma rifles up front! These bastards are too tough, only plasma's going to put them down for good!"
Rudolphson rushed forward with a plasma rifle and set up firing position behind him.
Bwoo, bwoo, bwoo! Balls of blue plasma streaked out, punching into the wave of Orks flooding the corridor.
A plasma rifle could put a hole through a tank. Against Orks whose armour was weaker than a tank's, it was overkill. The blue orbs slammed into thick chest plating, detonated inside the body, and vaporized the Ork outright. The power armour they wore melted into slag and pooled on the deck.
Rudolphson fired off ten plasma bolts in a row, burning through his entire fuel canister, and the rifle overheated, forcing him to fall back. Little Joel stepped up to take his place, ducking in behind Kian and opening fire with a second plasma rifle.
Kian ran a well-funded operation these days. Every one of his elite retainers carried either a plasma rifle or a plasma pistol. And once a fuel canister ran dry, nobody bothered reloading it on the spot, they just tossed it back to the tech-priests trailing at the rear of the formation, who handled the reload.
Plasma weapons were genuinely dangerous to operate. A poorly seated fuel canister could vent and vaporize the user on the spot. Only a tech-priest could guarantee a safe reload every single time, and Kian happened to have about a hundred of them following along at the back of the column.
Spent plasma rifles got passed hand to hand back through the formation, and the tech-priests at the rear would strip them down, swap canisters, vent excess heat, anoint them with sanctified oil, and chant the proper rites over them. A few moments later, each rifle came back fully loaded for another ten shots, sent right back up to the front.
Full sets of power armour, heavy lasrifles, bolt weapons, carbines, plasma projectors, rocket launchers, nobody was short of anything. Only Kian could afford to fight a war this extravagantly.
The armoured greenskins ahead took a merciless pounding from the continuous plasma barrage, casualties mounting fast. Wave after wave of blue flares streaked out from Kian's flank into the Ork mass, detonating in rolling waves of heat. Bodies vaporized outright, armour melting down into puddles of slag spreading across the deck.
Kian's group traded fire with the Orks for a little over two minutes, and by the end of it, most of the three hundred armoured greenskins were dead. With only a handful left standing, Kian called a halt to the ranged fire and led the charge in with his power sword instead.
The Orks might've been wearing power armour, but against a power sword's disintegration field, they went down like cattle at the slaughter. He cut down ten Ork Nobs in under a minute. These things looked plenty intimidating on the outside, tall, broad, built like walking siege towers in their power armour. But the moment it came down to close combat, it became obvious just how bad their armour actually was, the lag on it was enormous.
The armour had clearly been Mekboy-built. Primo-496a was a Forge World with a massive industrial output, and its garrison forces probably fielded plenty of power armour of their own. Somewhere along the line, in the fighting against the greenskin invasion, the Orks had gotten their hands on some and started copying it. Their manufacturing quality was rough, though, and the resulting armour reacted sluggishly.
Fighting them up close, Kian found the big greenskins had plenty of raw strength but painfully slow reactions, like they were operating on a delay. He cleared ten Ork Nobs in under a minute.
They were weak enough that killing them felt almost effortless, but every single greenskin he killed triggered a small notification in the corner of his vision: quest progress plus one. He pulled up his status and, sure enough, there it was: Khorne's quest, sacrifice 888 valuable enemies. The counter was already climbing. Fifty-three logged so far.
Kian's teeth ached at the sight. He genuinely didn't want anything to do with Chaos, but the damned thing kept clinging to him regardless, thoroughly obnoxious.
He was still grumbling about it when Trasolh's voice cut in over the comm, urgent.
"Count! Bridge Gate 1, get to Bridge Gate 1 immediately! An Ork boarding party is assaulting the bridge's primary entrance, the Astropath is right behind it! You have to stop them!"
Kian acknowledged and led his group toward Bridge Gate 1. A column of roughly eighty men, his handful of core elite retainers, their own retainers in turn, and a tail of over twenty tech-priests bringing up the rear, surged forward through the narrow corridors.
Before long, they arrived to reinforce the position. In front of Bridge Gate 1 stretched a wide, open chamber, where several hundred Ork boarders were locked in chaotic melee with the bridge's defenders.
The troops holding the line near the bridge were Trasolh's own elites, nearly all in power armour, and among them fought his Ogryn bodyguard. Standing three meters tall, the Ogryn wielded a solid iron sledgehammer and wore heavy, unpowered armour plating. The armoured Orks fired straight at him, and every round simply bounced off his thick hide of plating. He'd charge in and bring the hammer down, flattening an Ork Nob into a smear of metal and meat with a single blow.
Two, three hundred combatants locked together in the melee, gunfire and blades everywhere, the whole scene an absolute mess. Kian didn't want to risk his elite retinue in the thick of it, so he had them hold position and provide covering fire while he charged in alone with shield and power sword to meet the Orks in close combat.
One of him was worth ten of anyone else. He tore through the chaos, cutting a swath through it, and within moments every Ork that had breached the position was dead.
No sooner had he cleared it than Trasolh's voice came through again, more urgent than ever.
"Count! The cargo deck! Get to the cargo deck now! A boarding force of over five hundred Orks has broken through onto the cargo deck! We cannot lose that hold!"
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