Thank you for 100 Chapters. This one is a bit special as a celebration. I hope you enjoy it.
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The interior of the descending Ork Rok was a deafening symphony of randomly tuned combustion engines, sparking cables that had no right to still be functioning, and stolen Imperial tech.
Ever since Gerhard had violently usurped the Waaagh! and become the Warboss 'Dakkamasta,' these greenskin followers had developed a highly unorkodox method of adoration. They wanted to be the same as da boss, so they tried to improve in both tactics and firepower, mostly firepower, to be like him.
Deep in the belly of the Rok, Boss Mek Rivet-Smasha stood before a massive, crude iron chalkboard. He was a terrifying slab of muscle and scavenged cybernetics, sporting a glowing chest plate painted with their new sacred symbol: a gear-toothed heart with a middle finger thrust proudly upward. He was more machine than Ork, but unlike with the Tech Priests, that didn't make him less orkish at all.
He smacked the chalkboard with a heavy spanner.
"Right, listen up, ya gits!" Rivet-Smasha bellowed.
He had to shout over the roar of the Rok's retro-thrusters.
"Da Dakkamasta krumped us good last time! But we's survived, and we took orky amounts of notes on 'xactly how he krumped us, so we can build bigga, betta, and more orky-engineered walkers!"
The assembled Nobz and Boyz, some of which sported sleek bits of diamantine plating looted from previous encounters with Gerhard, nodded sagely. A few were chewing on squigs; others were desperately trying to read the crude wisdom on the board... which were just scratches from a power claw.
"Now, wot did we learn from da last scrap?" Rivet-Smasha asked, pointing his spanner at a particularly scarred Nob.
The Nob scratched his head with a Power Klaw, cutting into his head. "Uh... da blue shiny blasts are no fun?"
"Zoggin' right!" Rivet-Smasha cheered.
He tapped the chalkboard, where a list of 'Orkykool Notz' was carved into the metal:
Taktik 1: Don't run in a straight line if da Boss is shootin' da blue dakka. Jump, 'is betta.
Taktik 2: Put more strong bitz on da Deff Dreads so they don't melt so fast. Maybe put more squigs, to make 'em run fasta.
Taktik 3: Fly in da middle of da fightin' wif da Rok. Is quicker than runnin'.
Taktik 4: More dakka!
"Da target is just down!" Rivet-Smasha said, feeling the Rok begin to violently shake as it breached the atmosphere. "Da humies built a big, spiky battlement down dere. Dat means da Dakkamasta is somewhere dere as well! He wants us to test our new bigga shootas! Is we gonna disappoint 'im?!"
"NOOOOO!" "WAAAAAAGGHHH!" the horde roared back.
"DAT'S RIGHT, LADS! WAAAAAAAGH!"
.
On the surface of the ashen planet, the towering Obsidian spire was fully garrisoned by a brutal warband of the Black Legion. Chaos Space Marines manned the parapets, their heavy bolters and lascannons trained on the horizon, ever vigilant for the encroaching forces of the Imperium in the distance, where reports had come from.
They did not expect the sky to open up and a literal meteor to fall on them.
"My lord, there's--"
KRROOOOOOOM!
The Ork Rok slammed directly into the centre of the spire. The kinetic force of the impact instantly vaporised the central command bunker, sending thousand-ton chunks of ferrocrete and shattered Chaos-infested armoury flying through the toxic sky.
Before the dust had even settled, the heavy iron ramps of the Rok blew open with explosive charges.
"WAAAAAGH! FOR DA DAKKA MASTA!"
The Black Legionnaires, veterans of the millennia-long war, immediately rallied. Their old racism resurfaced immediately when they saw the Orks emerge from the massive crater.
"Xenos filth!" a Chaos Sorcerer shrieked, rallying a squad of Rubric Marines. "Slaughter them in the name of the Dark Gods! Show them the true meaning of dread!"
But the Chaos Marines were about to learn that dread was a two-way street. In a sense, they were akin to Buicks driving forward, while the incoming traffic was filled with aircraft carriers.
Did that make sense?
No. But that's what it was like fighting these Orks.
The Orks that poured out of the Rok's remains were not a totally disorganised, screaming mob of feral beasts. They were a slightly less totally disorganised, screaming mob of feral beasts armed with firepower far beyond anything the Orks could usually create.
And they were bloodlusted.
They bounded down the ramps in something that horrifyingly resembled a tactical wedge formation. Their crude armour had been replaced with thick slabs of overlapping metal with sometimes thin pieces of diamantine, and their weapons hummed with a frightening, unstable energy that tried to mimic Gerhard's mana.
Rivet-Smasha stepped off the ramp, his bionic eye whirring as it scanned the Hive spire and those around it. He looked at the spiky, black-armored Chaos Marines, who had started to fire at them. He looked at the annoying screaming Sorcerer and looked around for the pristine white-and-blue Lancia, or the towering Hulkbuster suit.
However... there was no blue Dakkamasta firepower, which meant only one fing... There was no Gerhard.
Rivet-Smasha's face fell into deep disappointment.
"Oy," the Boss Mek grumbled, lowering his massive kustom-kombi-weapon. "Where's da Boss? Dese ain't da Dakkamasta's beakies. Dese are just sum spiky gits."
A Chaos Terminator Champion charged forward, with his chainaxe roaring as he shouted.
"Glory to the Warmaster!"
Rivet-Smasha grunted, completely displeased. He raised a single finger and pointed it at the charging Champion.
"Ya see dem spiky gits?"
"Ya. What about 'em?"
"I don't wanna."
"Huh?... ohhhh..."
BOOOOOOMM---
The Orks had landed on the wrong planet. Not only had they somehow missed Gerhard's battlefront, but they also missed the entire campaign and landed on the wrong planet. No one told them that navigation was necessary.
.
It didn't matter.
What followed was not really a battle as the Chaos Marines were used to. It was a one-sided, brutally inefficient-efficient extermination. It was akin to a green tsunami crashing into a powerful wall. Sure, the wall was powerful and chaotically enhanced. But the green tsunami was endless and had no regard for its self-preservation.
The Black Legion expected the Orks to charge blindly into melee range. Instead, the Dakkamastas deployed heavily armoured, mobile barricades and amalgamated trukks, shaped like giant middle fingers. From behind these barricades, Ork Lootas unleashed a chaotic volley of hyper-accelerated scrap metal and volatile plasma.
The Chaos Space Marines were ripped to shreds, despite doing major damage to the Orks as well. Their corrupted ceramite armour, which could withstand standard Imperial las-fire and sometimes even bolter rounds for days, simply caved in under the unending, over-engineered firepower of Orks who had spent months trying to figure out how to out-ork da Dakkamasta.
A squad of Chaos Havocs tried to pin down the Ork flank with heavy bolter fire, while Forgefiend and Maulerfiend Daemon Engines fired at the incoming Deffkoptas, Killa Kans, Deffkilla Wartrikes and Deff Dreads.
The Forgefiend's Hades autocannons roared to life, shredding a squadron of Deffkoptas out of the sky and raining flaming scrap metal down on the green tide. Nearby, a massive Maulerfiend bounded forward on all fours, its magma blades tearing a Killa Kan in half with a loud screech.
But the Orks knew no retreat. That wouldn't be enjoyable at all.
A Deffkilla Wartrike, whose engine was screaming in excitement, used the destroyed Killa Kan as an impossible ramp, launching its entire chassis directly onto the Maulerfiend's back like a weird missile.
As the Daemon Engine thrashed and bellowed, three Ork Deff Dreads, who sported sleek bits of diamantine plating looted from previous encounters with Gerhard, crashed into it from the flanks.
The massive Ork walkers jammed their buzzsaws and power klaws into its joints, actively trying to rip its chaos power generators out, crushing the screaming daemon spirit as an afterthought.
On the ground, a veteran Black Legionnaire stood his ground against the green tide. He raised his bolter, blowing the head off a charging Slugga Boy. Without missing a beat, he sidestepped a sweeping choppa and drove his power sword through the throat of a second Ork.
A third massive Nob barrelled into him, but the Legionnaire fluidly used the Ork's momentum to throw him into the ferrocrete, stomping his ceramite boot through the Nob's skull, despite the height difference. He was magnificent. A perfect, lethal instrument of what Chaos wants to be.
And then... it all turned to shit. Six Orks hit him at once.
They literally jumped on him like drunks in a pub brawl. A Burna Boy strapped a modified, unstable blue-plasma rokkit directly to the Legionnaire's chest plate, yelled "'Ere we go!", and detonated it point-blank.
The blast vaporised the Chaos Space Marine and three of the Orks, who all died with massive Orkish grins on their faces.
The Chaos Sorcerer watched in horror. Orks were supposed to be wild, clueless, and so very simple to deal with for Chaos undivided... or so he told himself. But these Orks were different.
A group of Lootas had cornered a hulking Chaos Dreadnought, trying to rip off a piece of scrap and melt through its corrupted sarcophagus before a designated "goodbye-boom Ork" happily interrupted them, strapped himself to its legs and blew them all to oblivion.
"What is this!" the Sorcerer screamed, channelling warpfire into his staff. "Disgusting Xenos!"
Rivet-Smasha suddenly stood in front of the Sorcerer. The Ork Mek wiped a splatter of gore from his gear-toothed heart insignia.
"Mindless?" Rivet-Smasha grunted, highly offended. "We's doin' exp-orkimentation, ya git."
The Boss Mek swung his personally modified, heavy Waagh-infused power spanner in a brutal backhand. Rivet-Smasha was a big Ork. He had surpassed 5 meters, and it was no wonder that if he went a few months or years without meeting Gerhard, he would become the biggest, the baddest, and the most powerful Ork in this day and age.
The impact shattered the Sorcerer's warp-shield, caved in his helmet, and launched his broken body halfway across the courtyard.
Within thirty minutes, the Obsidian spire was eerily silent, save for the sound of Orks happily looting the ruined Chaos weaponry. The entire Black Legion garrison had been completely smothered under the endless Ork assault, and the Orks had barely broken a sweat. Sure, their numbers had dwindled, but what did that matter?
They had grown stronger through it and gotten new ideas on how to deal with the strange spiky beakies.
Rivet-Smasha kicked the decapitated head of the Chaos Champion into a rubble pile and crossed his massive arms, looking thoroughly annoyed.
"Well, dat was a zoggin' waste of time," the Boss Mek complained to his Nobz. "No real propa dakka. No Boss. Not even a propa scrap an all da useless weak beakies. Bah!"
A smaller Ork scurried up, holding a sparkling, semi-broken data-slate looted from the spire's command centre.
"Boss! Da spiky gits had a map! Dere's a big red sign two sectors over! Red means fast and fast is da Dakkamasta, right?"
Rivet-Smasha's bionic eye whirred, glowing brighter. A terrifying, tusked grin spread across his face. The logic was flawless in his mind. So brilliant in fact, that it could have come from him.
"A big red sign? Wiff big shiny humies? Now dat sounds like where da Dakkamasta would be waitin' for us!"
Rivet-Smasha raised his spanner high into the air.
"Load da loot back into da Rok, Boyz! We's goin' to da red dot! WAAAAAAAGH!"
.
In an entirely different sector of the galaxy, Gerhard arrived at the command centre where Guilliman was waiting for him. He had spent the last forty-eight hours creating a spell that could capture the Warp mites, dissecting them, analysing the Warp-signatures of the infected, and mapping the spread of the disease.
When he finally cornered Guilliman in the strategium, he didn't sugarcoat his findings.
"You need to stop, Roboute," Gerhard said, dropping his personal display onto the massive table. "Right now."
Guilliman looked up, his exhaustion evident even through his transhuman biology. However, it was only evident to someone like Gerhard who could read the Primarch as if he were another man.
"Wherever I walk, the plague recedes."
"You aren't healing anyone," Gerhard replied bluntly, leaning over the table. "Look at the data. This isn't a biological infection, as you might have encountered 10,000 years ago. This has all the hallmarks of the grandpappy. It's Warp-crafted, designed specifically to prey on your greatest weakness: your compassion."
Guilliman frowned, his jaw tightening. He hated being played, and made it one of his strengths. He had taught his sons that while you could be fooled or tricked, outmanoeuvred and outthought once, you absolutely couldn't be defeated or caught off guard by the same things more than that.
It was for this reason that the Ultramarines were so good at what they did. If you didn't adapt your strategy, you would eventually lose to them. So hearing himself played like this didn't sit right with the blue boy.
"Explain."
"Nurgle is playing you," Gerhard said, tapping the map where the plague had mysteriously re-emerged behind Guilliman's path. "The Plague Bum is simply pulling his 'blessing' away the moment you set foot in a camp. It makes you look like a saviour. But the second you leave, he gleefully drops it right back onto them. You aren't curing the disease; you're just acting like a cat chasing a laser pointer."
The Primarch stared at the map, the terrible realisation sinking in.
"It's a trap of entropy and despair which the granddad is very proficient in. In fact, that's what he stands for in the first place," Gerhard continued. "Nurgle knows you're the only one who can organise the Imperium's defence on a galactic scale. And the four don't want you leaving Ultramar for some reason.
So, he's using your desire for a neat, perfect solution to keep you contained here, like a wasp in a jar. I mean, look at my side of the war effort. I realised this was a problem until you told me about it, because for one, all the Anathema Psykana are with me and I would be able to identify it quite quickly and shut it down."
Furious, but ultimately pragmatic, Guilliman exhaled a heavy breath. He knew Gerhard was right. He was repeating the same mistakes he'd made millennia ago, focusing so intensely on his own empire that he was blinding himself to the needs of his father's Imperium.
"So, what is the strategy?" Guilliman asked.
"You need to leave," Gerhard said without hesitation. "Go to Terra. Go to the Golden Throne, speak to your father, and take command of the Imperium's war effort throughout the wider galaxy."
"And what of Ultramar?"
"I'll handle the plague and Ultramar," Gerhard promised, his eyes looking into the Primarch's. "I'll work with the Apothecaries and the Chaplains. This is a Warp-based affliction. Give me a day, and I'll find a way to break it. You focus on the macro and let me handle the micro."
Understanding the reasons and the implications of Gerhard's data, Guilliman nodded. The Celestinian Crusade was over.
The Terran Crusade was about to begin.