The wind howled low across the canyon's jagged rim, whispering promises of death through the shattered bones of old wind towers and rusted pict-signs. It carried the sharp tang of ozone, scorched rockcrete, and the faint, coppery stink of dried blood — the ghosts of battles already fought and lost in this forsaken corner of Perlia. Somewhere below, carrion birds circled on thermals, already anticipating the feast.
Above it all, the sun hung bloated and red over the desert like a half-dead eye, glaring down at the dam with apathy. Its heat pressed like a weight on every exposed surface, baking armor, drying blood, and turning the sand to glassy shards beneath booted feet. It wasn't just hot — it was hostile. Even the weather seemed to want them dead.
Ciaphas Cain stood atop the ancient hydrodam and stared into the killing field below. His boots creaked on cracked plasteel, the surface beneath him warped from centuries of wind and war. His gloved hands rested lightly on the pommel of his chainsword, not out of readiness, but ritual — a habit formed from too many last stands and too few good exits.
He hated the quiet.
It wasn't peace. It was a pause — the held breath before the scream. Cain had lived long enough in the Emperor's name to know that this kind of silence only came before something worse. The universe never gave a man like him calm without violence close behind.
Behind him, the last of the defenses were being assembled by the desperate and the damned. Sandbag walls sagged with shattered rockcrete, hastily filled with desert soil and powdered bone. A few rusted heavy stubbers — barely functional, ammo boxes half-empty — were mounted on scavenged tripods, crewed by trembling conscripts from Perlia's PDF. Their uniforms were mismatched, their boots secondhand, their expressions hollow.
An autocannon, too large for its perch, wobbled atop a water tower repurposed into a firing position. Cain doubted it would survive its first burst — if it even fired at all.
Lasguns were being checked and rechecked by boys who had never kissed a girl or seen a war zone until now. Their fingers shook. Their commanders lied with forced confidence. None of them were ready. No one ever was.
Beyond the regulars stood the last line of defense: civilians. Farmers with sharpened scythes. Factory workers clutching stolen autoguns. Miners holding det-charges meant for rock, not flesh. The faces were sunburned, raw, and set with grim resolve — the remnants of a broken world pretending to be soldiers.
This was no army.
This was a funeral procession with guns.
And Cain, somehow, was in charge of it.
He muttered under his breath, "I should've stayed in orbit."
A low, familiar stink reached his nose a moment before the voice. Burnt socks, old oil, unwashed humanity — uniquely Jurgen.
"You always say that, sir," Ferik Jurgen said, lugging his melta gun to Cain's side like a faithful hound with a flamethrower. "Then you don't."
Cain allowed himself a thin, humorless smile.
"That's because I'm not as smart as I like to pretend."
Jurgen — Emperor bless his rank odor and impenetrable loyalty — had been with Cain through warpstorms, tyranid infestations, and more Ork ambushes than he cared to count. The aide had a grounding effect: not in wisdom or morale, but in sheer, unflinching presence. Where Jurgen stood, Cain found the courage to pretend he knew what he was doing.
And in war, pretending often worked better than the truth.
Below them, the Valley of Daemons yawned wide, its edges jagged like the teeth of some buried predator. A scar of cracked earth, dead brush, and discarded bones. At its far end, a faint dust cloud stirred. It was small now, but it grew with every passing second — a storm of filth and noise and steel.
Orks.
Lots of them.
Cain's grip tightened on the chainsword hilt, not for comfort, but to stop his fingers from twitching. The old familiar voice of survival spoke in the back of his mind: run, now, find a flyer, fake a comms failure—
But he silenced it.
"Jurgen," he said, "vox Tayber. Get me the situation on our left flank."
Jurgen nodded and slung the melta across his shoulder, stomping off with that peculiar, determined gait — like a squat stormcloud in a flak vest.
Cain turned his gaze back toward the valley.
This wasn't a battle they could win. He didn't need a tactica briefing or Inquisitorial insight to see that. The dam wasn't a fortress — it was a crumbling relic, held together by sandbags, wire, and desperation. They had one tank, barely able to rotate its turret. A few light transports, a truck retrofitted with bolter mounts, and no air support whatsoever. Reinforcements? None. The fleet was still fighting for orbital supremacy, assuming any of it still lived.
It was just them.
Him. Jurgen. A thousand stragglers and broken fighters.
Which meant he had two choices:
Run and die tired.Or hold and die famous.
He sighed.
"Looks like I'm dying famous."
Then the vox crackled, sharp and raw in the morning air, as Cain descended from the overlook. Each bootfall rang dully against rusted steel, a hollow echo that reminded him how thin the skin of this place truly was. Below him, the dam's service deck was a hive of tension, a patchwork military miracle barely held together by spit, grit, and the sheer stubbornness of its defenders.
He passed lines of exhausted men and women — most of them too tired to salute, too numb to care. Valhallans, their greatcoats tattered and stained with oil and dust, gripped borrowed lasguns like lifelines. PDF squads, mismatched in gear and age, stared dead-eyed into the rising sun. Their uniforms were more patch than cloth, their belts cinched with makeshift rope. One soldier was missing a boot. Another had tied their helmet on with electrical wire.
Someone whispered prayers in High Gothic, fingering a cracked aquila as they mumbled through verses they half-remembered. The words were meant to comfort, but they trembled in the air like lies. A few meters away, a boy — no older than sixteen — bent behind a supply crate and vomited into the sand, retching dry between sobs.
No one tried to stop him.
Cain reached Jurgen, who held the vox unit like a man offering a noose, and took the headset without a word.
"Report," Cain barked, forcing steel into his voice, because someone had to sound like they weren't about to die.
Felicia Tayber's voice answered. It was tight, breathless — the tone of a woman watching the apocalypse crest the horizon.
"Sir, we've got eyes on the Ork advance. Multiple mob clusters. Estimate—Emperor—easily five thousand bodies, maybe more. Vehicles too. Trukks, buggies, looted armor. They're… they're coming fast."
Of course they were. Orks never just walked. They didn't approach. They charged.
Cain glanced toward the far end of the canyon where a haze of dust now boiled into the air like smoke from a distant wildfire. Beneath it, the glint of sun on jagged metal and shifting green bodies shimmered like a fever dream. The Waaagh! had arrived.
"Position the Leman Russ at grid point Delta-Three," he ordered without hesitation. "If that canyon narrows even a meter, we'll make them pay for it."
He didn't wait for acknowledgment. He didn't need to. These people had stopped being an army weeks ago. They were something else now. Scarred. Filthy. Starving. But still standing. Still fighting.
Somehow — through dumb luck, Cain's yelling, and Jurgen's melta — they'd become a force.
Not disciplined. Not clean. But willing.
And in this war, willing was enough.
The earth itself gave a low groan beneath their feet. It began as a tremor — subtle, like distant thunder. Then it deepened, became heavier, a percussion of war engines grinding forward en masse. It wasn't just noise. It was pressure. A slow, swelling heartbeat of destruction.
The first Ork vehicles crested the canyon ridge — wartrukks of rusted scrap, bone trophies, and glowing glyphs, each one more insane than the last. Cannons bolted to doors. Engines belching black smoke from four different exhausts. A looted Chimera painted bright orange, mounted with a grot-operated klaxon that screamed "WAAAGH!" with every bump in the road.
And behind them... Orks.
Thousands of them.
A tide of green muscle and hate. They didn't march. They surged, weapons raised high, jaws unhinged in laughter and fury. Some fired into the air just for the sound of it. Others beat on their armor, smashing glyphs with chains and axes. Their joy was the kind only monsters could know — the joy of killing.
Cain activated the dam's vox-amplifier, its ancient machine spirit flickering to life with a judder of static and distortion. The speakers cracked and buzzed across the dam, loud enough for every soul on the line to hear.
"This is Commissar Ciaphas Cain. There is no retreat. Not today."
His voice carried with the full weight of Imperial authority — and a lifetime of scraping through impossible odds.
"You fire until you melt your weapons. Then you use your fists. You fall back, you better be dragging someone wounded with you. We hold here… or we drown in blood."
A pause.
"Make it their blood."
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was charged.
Then someone cheered. A single voice, cracked and raw.
Then another.
Then fifty.
Then hundreds.
The dam shook now — but not from the Orks. From the voices of people who chose to fight anyway. Who knew they were going to die, but wanted to take some bastards with them.
The Orks roared in return, drowning out even the wind. The charge came like a hurricane.
They hit the mouth of the canyon with the force of a stampede. Cain's minefields lit the valley with a chain of thunderclaps. Dozens of Orks vanished in plumes of fire and shredded meat, their dismembered limbs cartwheeling into the air. But the rest?
The rest kept coming.
Gunlines opened fire. Lasblasts stitched red-hot patterns across the stone. The few working heavy weapons began chugging, shaking violently with every shot. The autocannon on the water tower finally fired — the recoil snapping the frame but sending three Orks flying in a spray of armor and flesh.
The Leman Russ roared — once, then again — plasma shells arcing like miniature suns, vaporizing entire mobs in mid-sprint.
But still...
They came.
One of the stubber nests went silent — not jammed, not overheated, just gone.
Cain turned just in time to see a looted Ork warbuggy, wreathed in fire, hit the barricade at full speed. It tore through the sandbags like a battering ram and flipped end over end, trailing flame and screaming squigs. The gunners never had a chance — one crushed under the wheels, the other vaporized in the fuel detonation.
The smell hit him first: burning promethium, scorched flesh, ozone.
Through the smoke, a hulking shape staggered from the wreck — an Ork, half-melted and grinning wide, teeth like jagged ivory. Its chest armor was ablaze, but it didn't care. It raised its slugga, bellowing a war cry—
Cain didn't hesitate.
He snatched a fallen lasrifle from the rubble, braced it against his shoulder, and pulled the trigger twice.
The first bolt scorched a hole through the Ork's eye. The second vaporized what was left of its snarl.
It crumpled to its knees and collapsed, the fire still licking at its corpse.
"Jurgen!" Cain roared, casting the rifle aside. "Right flank's folding! Plug it!"
Jurgen responded with a grunt — short, simple, efficient — and swung his melta to bear. A glowing, hissing stream of energy carved through the battlefield, and an incoming Nob, armored in mismatched tank plating, was reduced to liquid slag mid-charge. The roar of his weapon was like the gates of hell opening just long enough to scream.
Cain turned again, scanning the field.
It was working — for now. The canyon, as he'd hoped, acted as a natural choke point. The Orks were forced into a kill zone, their numbers crammed into tight formations that made even lasrifle fire devastating. Minefields had taken their toll. Makeshift barricades held. The Leman Russ was still firing in steady rhythm, its plasma shells vaporizing knots of greenskin every few seconds.
The trap was holding.
But it wasn't a victory.
Because the greenskins just. Kept. Coming.
Cain wiped sweat from his brow, the taste of metal and smoke coating his tongue. His eyes burned from the heat. His lungs ached. And he knew — in that way a man with his kind of luck always knew — that the universe wasn't done screwing him yet.
"This is working too well," he muttered.
Which meant something worse was about to happen.
And it did.
It always did.
A shadow passed overhead.
Then another.
And another.
Cain paused. His instincts screamed before his reason caught up.
He looked up — and his blood turned to ice.
Six green-painted aircraft burst from the cloud cover with a war cry that shook the heavens. Crude, angular silhouettes with oversized engines and excessive guns — like someone had built them using spare parts and unmedicated psychosis.
They weren't flying in formation. They weren't flying right. They weren't meant to.
They were Ork aircraft.
And they were diving.
"...Emperor help me," Cain whispered.
The first Dakkajet screamed overhead like a chainsaw being dragged across iron, its engines howling in joy. The nose guns spun to life — a stream of rounds, each the size of a man's forearm, rained down across the dam. Sandbags exploded. Concrete shattered. Blood misted the air.
A Valhallan gunner didn't even have time to scream. One moment he was aiming. The next, he was gone — replaced by a burst of crimson and a tumbling stubber.
"Skyfire!" someone shouted. "Ork aircraft incoming!"
No shit, Cain thought bitterly, diving behind a stack of crates as another Dakkajet passed low. Its belly cannons opened fire — the roar of them shaking the dam. A PDF logistics truck detonated in a tower of flame, its contents — food, ammo, corpses — scattered in every direction. The concussion flattened two nearby squads and hurled their weapons into the floodwaters below.
Cain's ears rang. His mouth tasted blood and ash. The air was filled with screaming.
Jurgen was already firing. The melta beam tore through the sky like a lance of the Emperor's fury, and a Fighta-Bommer, painted with leering red glyphs, caught the beam across its fuselage. The metal peeled and warped, and one of its wings sheared off entirely.
It wobbled mid-air, smoking, trying to stabilize.
The vox erupted into a storm of overlapping panic:
"Command, we need anti-air on sector fo—""They're everywhere!""Where's the damn Russ—!?"
Cain slammed the headset to his ear, voice cutting through the noise.
"Tayber, report!"
"They came out of the cloud cover, sir!" Felicia's voice was tight, frantic. "Six craft. Dakkajets and Fighta-Bommers. No pattern, no control. Just diving and shooting everything that moves! We've lost four positions already!"
Cain's teeth clenched. He looked up just in time to see a Dakkajet clip a watchtower, its wing slicing clean through the steel supports. The tower tipped with a shriek of metal, and the jet spun out of control — a blazing green meteor that smashed into the canyon wall, erupting into a fireball that shook the cliffs.
A few Orks below paused, shielding their eyes.
Small mercy, Cain thought.
He slammed his fist into the nearest wall, frustration boiling over.
"Emperor's bloody ass, they're trying to make sure we don't win this before they can have their fun."
Jurgen stumbled back to his side, smoke trailing from one shoulder where a glancing hit had scorched the armor through. Blood dripped down his arm. He didn't seem to notice.
"We need to finish this, sir," he said simply.
Cain nodded grimly, wiping his face with a trembling hand.
The dam was rigged. The charges were set. The escape path had been marked.
They could fall back, blow the structure, and bury the horde under a tidal wave of holy water and shattered rock.
But now?
Now they had six flying bastards tearing their lines apart one strafing run at a time.
"Right," Cain muttered, rising from cover. "Let's kill them quick, then drown the rest."
The air was thick with smoke, screams, and the tang of ionized blood. Lasgun beams lanced skyward, glowing red through the haze — most missing, many hitting nothing but the void. A few struck the underbellies of the Ork aircraft and sparked harmlessly off armor plating painted in bright, idiotic glyphs.
The autocannon on the ridge fired once. Then again. The barrel, already warped from heat, gave a high-pitched squeal before splitting like a rotten pipe. It burst in a fountain of metal and fire, spraying the crew with shrapnel. One screamed until his throat was flayed open. The others didn't have time.
A cluster of civilians, mostly miners and scrap-haulers, had scrambled onto an abandoned flak turret salvaged from a ruined outpost. Someone had rigged it to power, barely. The barrel twitched, jerked, then screamed as it tore into life. The first burst jammed immediately. The second never came. The feed mechanism detonated in a contained thunderclap, taking the three men manning it apart like butchered meat.
Cain threw himself behind a shattered barricade and rose quickly, eyes sweeping the battlefield.
From up there, he saw everything: a boiling mass of green bodies below, still pouring through the canyon in maddening, unbroken waves. Trukks ground over corpses. Boyz climbed over wreckage like insects. Even with the chokepoint, even with the mines, the firepower, the kill zones—they just kept coming.
The Orks weren't an army. They were a natural disaster.
And above them, the sky twisted with more murder.
The aircraft turned again, banking in wide, clumsy arcs. This time, they came lower — engines snarling like tortured beasts, guns already glowing.
"They're prepping for another pass," Jurgen warned, wiping blood from his brow. His left arm hung limp, red soaking into the sleeve of his coat. His face was caked in soot, hair burned at the edges. But his eyes were still clear. Still focused.
Cain gritted his teeth.
And then — because it always got worse — the vox sputtered to life, spitting static before Felicia Tayber's voice tore through.
"Sir… they've got jumpers."
Cain blinked, not understanding.
"Say again?"
"They're launching Orks! Jump packs, rocket trukks, whatever the hell it is — they're flying. Nobz in the air!"
Cain turned toward the eastern ridge. His stomach dropped.
There they were — wartrukks, dozens of them, roaring across the cracked terrain with exhaust plumes rising behind them like banners of fire. Their beds were loaded with massive, ramshackle launchers — some cobbled together from gutted artillery, others made from what looked like compressed gas tanks and chains.
And on those launchers… Nobz.
Armored head to toe in jagged metal. Covered in glyphs and trophies. Holding axes the size of men. Their jetpacks screamed and hissed with unstable pressure. A few ignited before launch. One exploded outright, sending parts in all directions.
The rest?
The rest flew.
The wartrukks fired them like missiles — a green rain of armored death, screaming obscenities and battle cries as they arced through the air toward the dam.
"...Of course they are," Cain muttered.
He raised his chainsword on instinct just as the first Rocket-Nob smashed into the deck like a meteor made of muscle and hatred.
The impact sent a shockwave down the southern rampart. Valhallans went flying, some tumbling over the side, others simply collapsing under the sheer force. The Ork landed in a crouch, boots embedded in steel, then stood tall — a monster with a rusted klaw and a jaw filled with metal teeth.
He roared — not in challenge, not in rage — but in sheer, manic joy.
Then he grabbed the nearest trooper and ripped him in half.
The scream was brief. The sound of tearing flesh wasn't.
Then came the second Rocket-Nob. Then the third.
Then ten more.
It became a storm — a downpour of greenskin berserkers, all clad in jury-rigged flight packs, some of which still sputtered and burned as they fell. The sky was alive with warcries and engine sputters. One misjudged the arc and slammed into the canyon wall, exploding in a fountain of gore and shredded metal. Another overshot the dam completely and landed like a comet in the valley below, where a trukk promptly ran over his remains.
But enough landed on target.
And every single one brought murder with them.
"Hold the line!" Cain bellowed, raising his chainsword high. One Rocket-Nob charged him, klaw raised. Cain dodged under the first swing, sparks flying from the impact. He kicked the beast in the knee — a solid boot against malformed bone — and as the Ork staggered, Cain drove the chainsword upward into its gut.
The weapon roared, chewing through armor and sinew. The Nob screamed, high and wet, until Cain twisted the blade and ripped it free. Blood fountained into the air.
It fell.
But Cain barely had time to breathe before another landed ten meters away.
For every one he killed, another landed.
Jurgen was nearby, his melta shrieking again. He caught an Ork mid-jump — the thing vaporized, screaming as it disintegrated in a mist of bone and steam. Jurgen turned, barely ducking as another Rocket-Nob swung a cleaver at his head. He stepped into the blow, slammed his shoulder into the Ork's chest, and fired again.
The beam turned the beast into a puddle of superheated meat.
Jurgen stumbled back, shielding himself with the smoking remains as another attacker lunged. Blood soaked his fatigues. His helmet was gone. His face blistered from the heat.
"Sir," he gasped. "We're being overrun!"
Cain didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
All around them, the dam had become a killing ground. A plateau of fire and fury. The upper deck was slick with blood, bodies piled around every barricade. Valhallans fought shoulder to shoulder with PDF, with factory workers and miners, with mechanics and field cooks. The last line of defense was no longer a line at all — it was a maelstrom.
Lasguns were gone. Power cells spent. Now it was bayonets, crowbars, sharpened tools. A woman in civilian fatigues drove a wrench into an Ork's eye socket and was crushed under its falling corpse. A PDF sergeant stabbed his trench knife into a Nob's throat — and both went over the railing a moment later.
A conscript used a spade as a shield. Another screamed prayers as he fired a flamer point-blank into a mob, setting everything on fire, including himself.
Still they fought.
Still they held.
Because if they didn't, no one would be left to remember they existed.
"Tayber!" Cain roared into the vox, ducking behind a ruined stubber nest as another explosion rattled the dam. "Status of the charges?"
A heartbeat of static answered — then Felicia Tayber's voice crackled back through, ragged but alive, tinged with smoke and panic.
"Intact, sir! But if this keeps up—"
"Prep for detonation on my signal," he cut in. "Begin pulling back the rearguard. We're going to blow the dam."
"Understood."
The vox went dead.
Cain ducked as shrapnel whined past his head — a chunk of someone's turret, or maybe someone's ribcage. He turned to Jurgen.
The aide was limping now, his left leg dragging through pooled blood and debris. His coat was shredded, soaked through with red and black. One eye was swollen shut. But in the other — the good one — there was no fear. Just that steady, unblinking focus Cain had come to rely on.
"We run," Cain said grimly. "We give the order, we blow the valley, and we hope to the Emperor there's something left when it's over."
Jurgen didn't speak. He just nodded once.
That was enough.
But fate — malignant, mocking bastard that it was — had other plans.
It began with a scream from the sky, deeper and angrier than the others. A warcry pitched lower, like a battlehorn ripped from a daemon's lungs. Cain looked up instinctively.
A shadow bloomed above them, growing wider, darker — blotting out the sun like an eclipse.
Something massive was falling.
Correction: something was being launched.
Another rocket-trukk, barely visible through the chaos below, had fired a single payload.
Not a Nob.
Not a Boss.
A God-damned Warlord.
The thing hurtled through the smoke like a meteor wrapped in iron and filth. Rusted plating gleamed with glyphs scrawled in blood. Chains whipped behind him like broken banners. His entire body was encased in patchwork mega-armor, and across his chest were skulls wired into place like medals.
One massive power klaw hung from his right arm, sparking with unstable energy, the blades big enough to tear through a tank hatch like paper.
Gargash Korbul.
The Warlord of the Waaagh. Beast of the northern wastes. The Ork who burned the Perlian capital to the ground with his bare hands and laughed while it collapsed.
He was coming straight for Cain.
The Warlord struck the center of the dam with the force of an orbital impact.
The deck exploded inward, concrete and rebar screaming apart under the strain. Railings and gun mounts were ripped from the structure and hurled into the air. The shockwave blew Cain sideways and slammed two nearby defenders into the railings — which then gave way. They were gone before they had time to scream.
Cain hit the ground hard. His shoulder armor cracked. His head rang like a struck bell. He forced himself to one knee, coughing dust and blood.
From the crater, the Warlord rose.
Steam hissed from the joints of his armor, venting from unseen exhausts. Bits of molten concrete dripped from his boots. Red eye-lenses locked on to Cain like targeting reticles, and when the massive klaw snapped open, it was like a guillotine waking up.
"I'Z FOUND YA, LITTLE UMIE!" the Warlord bellowed, his voice a thunderclap echoing across the dam. "DIS DAM'S MINE NOW!"
Cain spat blood, wiped the back of his hand across his chin, and stood.
Every muscle in his body ached. Every instinct told him to run.
But he didn't.
He thumbed the activation rune on his chainsword, and the weapon roared to life in his grip.
"You'll have to kill me first."
Korbul's grin widened, his massive tusks gnashing together as sparks danced from his klaw.
"DAT'S DA PLAN!"
The world collapsed into noise and fury.
Cain barely heard the screams anymore. Or the gunfire. Or the failing vox units.
The stench of promethium and charred flesh vanished beneath the rush of adrenaline. His vision tunneled — everything reduced to one shape: a walking wall of iron and hate, stomping forward with the weight of a falling thunderhead.
Gargash Korbul.
The klaw opened and shut with a hungry hiss, spitting arcs of power. His boots cracked the deck with every step. Oil leaked from a gash in his torso plating. Blood caked the skulls wired to his pauldrons.
"I'Z GUNNA RIP YER 'EAD OFF AN' STUFF IT IN YER ARSE!" he howled, slamming his chest with the flat of his free hand.
Cain's reply came cool, measured, and without blinking:
"Come try, you pus-oozing bastard."
He didn't wait.
He charged.
So did Korbul.
They met in the center of the dam in an explosion of sparks, stone, and shrapnel, as if the very structure recoiled from the collision.
Cain ducked low, his chainsword roaring to life, teeth spinning with a mechanical scream. He stepped in under Korbul's first swing and carved a deep, ugly line across the Ork's thigh armor. The blade sparked as it bit into crude metal, screeching like it was being tortured. Black-green blood sprayed, thick as engine oil.
Korbul roared, a deep, stomach-churning sound that vibrated through Cain's bones.
The Warlord's power klaw swung in retaliation — wide and brutal, like a wrecking ball on a hinge. Cain barely slipped under it, the air above his head hissing as it passed, and behind him, a whole section of the barricade disintegrated under the impact. Sandbags burst. Rockcrete shattered.
Cain didn't stop. He never stopped moving. He fought like a fencer on fire, darting in and out, blade flashing, never staying still long enough to be caught. The chainsword danced between plates of armor, slashing tendons, biting into exposed hydraulics, scoring gouges across the massive Ork's limbs.
He wasn't fighting to win. He was fighting to survive one more second.
Because every second Korbul focused on him was a second the charges beneath the dam ticked closer to detonation.
And still, for all his size, Korbul wasn't slow. He moved with a brute grace that defied his bulk — each blow a seismic event. He fought like a living dreadnought, swinging that klaw like it weighed nothing. Every impact Cain dodged still sent cracks through the deck.
One strike caught Cain off-balance — just a glancing hit, but enough.
He was thrown across the dam like a ragdoll, skidding over broken metal and shattered bone. He hit a sandbag wall with a grunt, and the wind exploded from his lungs. He dropped to his knees, gasping.
Blood poured from a deep gash in his left arm, soaking the inside of his coat. His ribs throbbed, maybe broken. Maybe worse. He tasted copper. His vision swam.
"Yer quick," Korbul growled, stalking forward, voice like stone grinding in a furnace. "But not quick enuff."
The Warlord thundered forward, leaking from a dozen wounds, limping slightly now. The blood and oil dripping from his armor left a trail behind him. His klaw snapped open and closed with anticipation, crackling with erratic arcs of energy.
Cain rolled aside as Korbul charged, dirt and ash scattering beneath him. He came up fast, faster than Korbul expected, and swung the chainsword low — a brutal, rising slash.
The blade sank deep into Korbul's side, right beneath the ribcage. It chewed through armor and meat alike, grinding on bone. The Ork howled, a deafening, feral sound — then lashed out with a backhand the size of a tank's tread.
Cain took the blow full in the jaw.
Everything spun.
The sky and dam flipped positions as he crashed into another wall of sandbags, flattening it. He felt something crack in his shoulder. His mouth filled with blood. His vision flickered, reduced to streaks of light and static.
Somewhere — distantly — Jurgen's voice crackled over the vox:
"Sir—! Charges ready—! Fall back—!"
He couldn't answer. His jaw wouldn't work. His lungs wheezed.
But he didn't need to speak.
He knew what he had to do.
Korbul advanced like a walking siege engine, massive boots crunching over bodies and debris. His armor was ruined, one eye bleeding, his gait uneven, but he was laughing now — a sick, gurgling laugh.
"DIS'LL LOOK GOOD ON MA WALL, UMIE!" he bellowed, raising the klaw.
Cain rose.
Slow. Shaky. Shoulders sagging. Knees unsteady.
But he rose.
He wiped the blood from his mouth, gripped the hilt of his chainsword with both hands, and thumbed the ignition rune again.
The blade sputtered once — then roared.
"No clever lines left, Commissar?" Korbul sneered, looming over him.
Cain didn't reply.
He just charged.
He ducked the killing blow — the klaw slicing through the space where his head had been a second earlier — and drove the chainsword straight up, full force, into Korbul's chest.
It hit just beneath the sternum — where the armor was weakest.
The blade bit deep, ripping through plating and into flesh.
Korbul screamed, a horrible, choking howl that shook the dam. His free hand thrashed as Cain twisted the blade, pushing harder, deeper, until it buried itself to the hilt in the Warlord's chest.
Teeth and steel sheared away under the blade as Cain drove it upward, carving through muscle and internal machinery. Steam burst from Korbul's back in a shriek.
The Warlord reeled, stumbled.
And then dropped to one knee.
"Izzat…" he rasped, his voice a wet gurgle. "...all you got…?"
Cain stood above him, breath ragged, ribs grinding, blood dripping from his chin.
"No."
He raised the chainsword for the finishing strike—
And that's when the bomber hit.
A sound like the world breaking apart screamed overhead — not a roar, not a scream, but a tearing, cosmic wail, like the atmosphere itself was being shredded.
Cain didn't even have time to turn fully before the source came into view.
One of the Dakkajets, trailing a cyclone of black smoke and fire, spiraled down like a drunken comet. Its stabilizers were gone. Half its fuselage had been slagged by a lucky melta shot. It spun end-over-end in its own suicidal descent — a steel tomb filled with laughing, burning lunacy.
It clipped the upper edge of the dam's western tower.
A wing tore off with a shriek.
The rest of the aircraft tumbled forward, flipping once — then slammed into the center of the deck behind Cain like the fist of a god.
There was no time to scream.
There was only fire.
Thunder.
Light.
The impact hit the detonation charges that had been meticulously placed along the dam's inner supports. The explosives were meant to be remote-triggered — precise, surgical, controlled.
Instead, the bomber's wreckage lit them up like a chain of suns.
All at once.
A split-second passed where the world held its breath.
Then the dam exploded.
Cain felt himself lifted into the air, weightless in the face of annihilation. Everything around him became fragments — chunks of plasteel, concrete, shattered gear, Ork limbs, human limbs. The sky above was a smear of white and smoke.
He saw Korbul's massive corpse, blackened and broken, hurled backwards, swallowed whole by the flood that followed. The Warlord's twisted armor vanished beneath the surge.
He saw the wreckage of the Dakkajet, now nothing but molten slag and scattered, burning debris, tumble backward into the collapse.
He saw Jurgen, far away and impossibly close, arm outstretched — his mouth open in a scream Cain could not hear. His aide's face was twisted in horror, in agony, in helplessness.
And then — nothing.
The dam broke like a titan's spine, fracturing from within, snapping through its own heart. Stone and steel ripped open in a vertical geyser of flame and pulverized support beams. The combat deck — where Cain had made his final stand — was vaporized. Whole sections collapsed into the gorge below with a grinding rumble that dwarfed every gunshot, every shell, every scream.
The blast wave flattened the battlefield.
It hit with a deafening concussion — a wall of sound and force that echoed across the entire valley. For one strange, suspended moment, the war fell quiet.
Even the Orks stopped.
Even the PDF survivors looked up, blinking through blood and soot, stunned into silence by the unholy violence of it.
Then came the flood.
The valley howled like a wounded god as billions of tons of black water surged from the shattered dam. It came not as a river, but as a living force, an unstoppable wall of liquid death. It crashed into the canyon floor like the fist of the Emperor Himself.
Ork mobs — thousands of them — were erased in an instant. Mid-scream. Mid-laugh. Their Waaagh! banners were swept away like forgotten paper. Their warcries were swallowed by rushing water and pulverized bone.
Looted tanks flipped end over end, their gunners flung screaming into the depths. Trukks smashed against canyon walls and burst apart. Whole clusters of Boyz vanished beneath the black tide before they could even turn to run.
The ones smart enough to try?
Trampled by their own kind. Crushed under the desperate panic of the mob. Caught by the curling edge of the flood that clawed and clawed and clawed, tearing everything into a churning grave.
The Waaagh! was over.
In under a minute, Korbul's horde was gone.
Far above, on the northern cliffs, where the survivors had begun to rally, Felicia Tayber stood with one hand on the vox panel, the other gripping the rim of the observation deck so hard her knuckles had gone white.
She was shaking.
Her voice cracked when she spoke.
"Commissar… do you read?"
Only static.
The vox unit hissed in reply, the same meaningless whisper over and over again.
Behind her, Alaric Tayber pulled himself up the ridge, his coat soaked in blood and grit, his face cut and bruised. He looked down over the valley — what had once been a battlefield.
Now it was just mud. Wreckage. Corpses. And water.
"Did… did he make it?"
Felicia didn't answer. She couldn't.
She just looked out at what remained.
The dam was gone. Nothing left but the jagged stumps of support pillars and broken catwalks hanging in the mist.
The battlefield was a ruin — a lake of broken metal and drifting bodies, Ork and human alike.
And Cain?
Nowhere.
No signal. No movement. No chance.
Just silence.