Chapter 44: Surrounded on All Sides

The sheer volume of Mekboyz under Darrius's command was an absurd luxury, and it meant that every single Ork in his horde possessed an enviable tier of wargear. Even the most basic Slugga and Choppa Boyz marched to war equipped with standardized, heavy-grade Choppas and thick plates of scrap-armour.

Then there were the Big Gunz with their terrifyingly wide bores, the sprawling motor-pools of mechanized armor, and the lumbering Squiggoth war-beasts, every single asset was armed to the teeth.

This mechanical abundance was precisely why the human Expeditionary Force had been so utterly overwhelmed during the initial clash. The first wave alone featured a staggering diversity of specialized greenskin elements.

Truth be told, Darrius had slightly underestimated his own industrial output. His Boyz were too numerous, and their kit was entirely too good.

The terrifying agricultural efficiency of the modified Big Diggas meant that the subterranean fungus fields stretched out into a seemingly infinite darkness. Every single day, new Boyz sprouted from the spores in numbers too vast to count.

Even if he lost this initial wave of twenty thousand greenskins, treating the assault as a mere trial run to let his Boyz blow off some steam before pretending to retreat and drawing the enemy deeper inland, it was a perfectly acceptable deficit on his ledger.

Wargear this lavish was a rare sight across the galaxy. Aside from a dedicated atmospheric air wing and a few Titan-scale war machines, Darrius's horde possessed almost every branch of the greenskin military caste.

With this level of martial strength, they could easily square off against some of the Astra Militarum's most decorated regiments, or even trade blows with a lesser Adeptus Astartes Chapter.

Suddenly, a lance of crimson light pierced right through the thin atmosphere of Oronia IV, vaporizing the hazy clouds in a split second. The orbital beam struck the center of the greenskin mass advancing on the eastern front with catastrophic violence.

The surging emerald tide ground to a violent halt. Hundreds of Orks, along with their crude vehicles and heavy weaponry, were instantly erased from existence beneath the blinding, thermal back-lash of the beam.

No matter how resilient a greenskin's physiology was, it remained a creature of meat and bone. A particularly scarred Nob or a heavy war-beast could shrug off conventional high-explosive shells, but against a tactical orbital bombardment of this magnitude, they were reduced to drifting atomic ash in an instant.

The column of crimson death dragged itself across the eastern plain, carving a semi-circular trench of boiling, incandescent slag into the bedrock. The existential crisis threatening the eastern flank of Forward Base was temporarily averted.

Up in the void, Pex's expression remained grim. The reactor banks of the Guardian had drained a significant portion of their reserves to unleash that localized bombardment; the lance weapons would require a prolonged recharge cycle before firing again. Yet he had been forced to authorize the strike prematurely, otherwise, those towering Squiggoth war-beasts would have punched a hole clean through the heart of the forward base.

However, a rushed orbital strike could never fully halt a Waaagh!

To any baseline mortal species, a yawning chasm filled with bubbling, white-hot magma would be an impassable barrier. To the Orks, it was merely an entertaining obstacle.

The Speed Freeks, in fact, found the molten ditch incredibly stimulating. They slammed their boots onto their accelerators, gunning their ramshackle engines to their absolute limits to leap the fiery gap. Those who cleared the trench landed on the far side with earsplitting roars of triumph; those who fell short detonated spectacularly against the sheer rock walls, drawing mocking bellows of laughter from the watching Boyz.

The greenskin infantry were even more reckless. Relying on their heavy, jury-rigged plate armor, entire mobs leaped directly into the chasm. Their heavy combat boots stamped down onto scorched stone and liquefying rock; some were cooked alive where they stood, but others actually managed to forge ahead.

If an observer looked closely at those crossing the molten expanse, they would see a faint, flickering aura of green energy rippling beneath their boots, protecting them from the worst of the thermal heat. The Orks were so completely swept up in the psychic fervor of the attack that as long as they collectively believed they could cross the fire, the reality-warping power of the Waaagh! field ensured they did.

While the eastern greenskins were busy navigating the molten trench, the hordes enveloping the remaining three sectors broke through the Astra Militarum's defensive grid, throwing themselves directly at the perimeter walls.

The southern front was the first to suffer direct breach. Here, the greenskin offensive was dominated by roaring columns of Trukks and heavy Battlewagons.

The unarmored Trukks cared nothing for their lack of defensive plating, tearing across the dunes at suicidal speeds. Perched upon the chassis, the Burna and Shoota Boyz clamped their fingers down on the triggers of their heavy weapons, maintaining a continuous, deafening wall of dakka.

Despite sustaining horrific casualties, the Trukks closed the distance. As they neared the walls, heavy mechanical catapults welded to the flatbeds fired, catapulting fully armed Boyz and bundles of high explosives directly over the ramparts and dropping them straight into the defensive lines of the Expeditionary Force.

Once they hit the dirt, the Choppa Boyz, empowered by the thick psychic resonance of the Waaagh!, ceased to be ordinary infantry. As long as they possessed the absolute, simple conviction that their blades could cleave steel, their crude, heavy iron cleavers were capable of shearing through ceramite and plasteel armor alike.

As the Choppa Boyz tore the Imperial trenches into a bloody shambles, the greenskins' heavy Battlewagons rolled into optimal firing solutions.

The engineering logic behind these massive tanks perfectly mirrored the Ork psyche: big, loud, and bursting with raw power. Their armor plating was merely adequate and their hulls were remarkably fast, but their turrets were absurdly oversized.

After several synchronized salvos from these heavy macro-cannons, the forward base's reinforced perimeter walls were punched through with gaping fissures. The Battlewagons continued to advance, relentlessly pouring high-explosive shells into the breaches as they rumbled forward to crush the defenders beneath their heavy tracks.

In stark contrast to the mechanized blitzkrieg on the southern front, the western sector faced an assault that was far more primitive. Here, the vanguard consisted of an endless, swarming carpet of Grotz driving packs of predatory Squigs.

The Squig was the ultimate biological swiss-army knife of the greenskin ecosystem. The most ubiquitous variant was the Squighound, a bounding sphere of red flesh dominated by a cavernous, tooth-lined maw designed to tear flesh from bone. There were also fat, docile variants bred purely for consumption, and multi-colored, parasitic hair-squigs used by Nobs to decorate their bald green scalps.

When mineral veins were scarce and metal was unavailable to forge weapons, the Orks simply weaponized their fauna.

Gretchin riders straddled large squigs, driving a massive, chaotic menagerie of predatory beasts forward as if the gates of some hellish zoo had been thrown wide. The squigs were a roiling mass of mismatched shapes and sizes, but they all shared a singular, terrifying trait: absolute, bloodthirsty ferocity.

This snapping tide of teeth and muscle ignored the concussive shock of heavy artillery and the lethal cutting power of lasgun fusillades. They slammed bodily into the lower bastions of the base, climbing over their own dead to scale the vertical walls.

The moment they breached a redoubt, they poured into the Imperial trenches like an unstoppable torrent of red meat, snapping through flesh, bone, and vehicle fuel lines with equal frenzy.

Finally, the northern front, the last sector to engage, offered the most straightforward, brutal display of greenskin warfare. The vanguard here was a massive, block-like phalanx composed entirely of standard Shoota and Choppa mobs. They advanced across the flats like a shifting sand dune, trading disciplined fire with the Imperial troopers lining the parapets.

Ordinary Boyz were cut down by the hundreds, but interspersed within the green ranks were Killa Kans piloted by manic Gretchins and towering Deff Dreads crewed by hardwired Orks. Trailing thick plumes of oily black smoke, these armored walkers ignored the heavy las-fire, tramping forward with inexorable, mechanical strides.

Behind this moving wall of iron, the greenskins had unlimbered their heavy artillery. An assortment of Big Gunz of every conceivable caliber and design maintained a relentless, drum-beat bombardment, systematically pulverizing the interior structures of Forward Base.

Tactical concepts like 'leaving an escape route' did not exist in the Ork lexicon. If a war was to be fought, it had to be brought from every vector simultaneously. Every sector was hit with equal, unrelenting ferocity, for no Ork was willing to cede the glory of the scrap to another mob.

It was impossible to tell which sector fell first. Within thirty minutes of the opening shots, all four defensive perimeters of the Imperial base collapsed in unison. The green horde spilled into the interior compounds, and the battle dissolved into a frantic, close-quarters meat grinder.

Judging by past military precedents, it was mathematically impossible for the human forces to organize a cohesive counter-offensive within the base. It was now only a matter of time before the greenskins methodically slaughtered every living thing within the perimeter.