The roar carried across the battlefield and kept going.
The Orks at the forward edge of the assault had heard a great many things in their long experience of fighting, and very few of those things had caused them to pause. This caused them to pause. Not in fear, exactly: Orks did not process fear the way other species did. But there was something in the sound that their instincts read correctly, which was that the thing making that sound was no longer trying to survive and had become interested in something else entirely.
The mortal fighters came over the trench parapet.
Not in an organized counterattack. Not with any tactical formation. They came because the Black Rage had reached them and turned something in them that had been pointed inward for too long, all of the accumulated weight of captivity and suffering and the deaths of people they had known, and it was now pointed outward with a focus that their improvised weapons did not adequately represent but that their bodies did not seem to notice.
The Ork assault broke its momentum against the counterattack and spent the next several hours recovering it, which bought the Lamenters time to redistribute along the trench line and the mortal fighters time to pull their dead back from the forward positions.
Nolan moved through the aftermath of the charge and said nothing. There was nothing useful to say.
The Black Rage in the Astartes around him had quieted back to its baseline: still present, still accumulating under the pressure of sustained combat, but no longer surging. He pulled the psychic wings back and closed them down. He did not know how long the effect on the mortal fighters would persist, or what it would cost them when it faded. He filed the question and kept moving.
The day cycle turned and turned again.
The Orks reorganized and pressed the line in rolling waves that never fully broke through and never fully stopped. The Lamenters burned through their bolt ammunition in stages, and the Astartes who emptied their last magazines moved to chainswords and held the sections they were assigned to hold. The mortal fighters worked the gaps between them. David's Scyllax units absorbed whatever the mortal fighters could not stop, and the Scyllax that went down took Orks with them in the way that machines without self-preservation instincts can when they choose to.
Nolan functioned as the line's mobile reserve: wherever the eyepiece showed a section failing, he went to it. The Warscythe and the ten rings together could stabilize a section that nothing else available could stabilize, and he used both without pause across the hours.
By the second day the mortal fighters had stopped needing the Black Rage to keep fighting. They had developed something colder and more reliable in its place, the particular steadiness of people who have been doing a thing long enough that it has become what they do. The women who had volunteered for the front on the first day were teaching the others how to use the positions in the trench to maximum effect. Children who were too small to hold a weapon were carrying water from the mine depths to the fighters who could not leave their sections.
The Orks did not stop coming.
Neither did the people in the trenches.
On the morning of the third day, Nolan stood at the edge of the trench line and looked at what was left of the Lamenters and what was left of the mortal fighters, and at the Ork lines still massed beyond the wreckage field, and thought about seven days and how many of them remained.
He turned around and went back to work.