The Necrons seized the opportunity, tightened their defensive lines, swept away the last pockets of resistance, and for a brief window held a clear advantage across the battlefield.
But for the Orkz, "defeat" was never really a conclusion. It wasn't even worth brooding over. Chaos was their cradle, fighting was their instinct, and swapping out a Boss was just the most natural part of the Waaagh!!! cycle.
For most Orkz, Steeltusk's death didn't bring fear. It brought opportunity. Oi, the 'ardest Boss is gone, so ain't it my turn now?!
The scattered Orkz hadn't truly "disappeared." They fell back to the familiar wastes, ruins, and fungus-pit settlements scattered across every corner of the planet. Spores kept germinating. Fresh Boyz kept crawling out in a steady stream, bringing new chaos and new energy right along with them.
Scrap got gathered again. Weapons got modified again. Countless skirmishes, large and small, broke out quietly all over the planet, each one a fight to decide who'd be the next Boss.
Barely two or three hours of game time had passed before the surface of Lithoeremos-313 felt that familiar restless green energy surging back up, converging with renewed violence.
The defeat in the northern theater and Steeltusk's fall had interrupted the rhythm of the Waaagh!!! but hadn't ended it. Stronger claimants, ones better suited to current battlefield conditions and more thoroughly Waaagh!!! at their core, were already rising from the chaos.
Just as the Necron players exhaled and started planning their next push, that rough, raucous faction-wide announcement came crashing back across every Ork player's interface, thundering with the echoes of the Waaagh!!!:
[Waaagh!!! Emergency Broadcast! All ya gitz, ears up and listen good!]
[That 'ard nob Steeltusk up north got done in by the bonehead skeletons' sneaky tricks! But so what?!]
[A new, meaner, more righteous Warboss has already shown up!]
[Right there on the eastern side of the planet! That Storm Boss called 'Horde' just smashed every git in the east who thought they could mouth off! Now his Boyz are thick as rocks on the ground, his big shootas are too numerous to carry, and the sky up there is full of his own Scrap Gunboats!]
[Boss Horde says: every Boy, Grot, and Mek that can still move, stop beatin' on your own ladz! For now, everyone answers to Boss Horde! Follow him and launch a real, planet-sweeping Grand Waaagh!!! Crusade! Drag them skeleton frames outta their iron coffins, smash 'em flat, and shove 'em back underground!]
[Same as always: fight alongside Boss Horde or his top ladz, loot hard, kill harder, and you'll grow fast yourself!]
The announcement flashed up, and the eastern region of the map lit up instantly. A brand-new icon, a jetpack crossed with a lightning bolt, began pulsing, marking the position of Warboss Horde and his Storm Warband.
This time, Eric didn't choose to stay away from the main theater.
Because Horde, this new Warboss, had risen in the eastern part of the planet, and Eric, drifting with his small warband after Steeltusk's death and running a loose guerrilla campaign, had wandered into the eastern region almost without noticing. He'd watched this new Boss emerge almost firsthand.
It had happened on a stretch of open, wreckage-strewn wasteland dotted with ancient energy nodes. At first it was nothing more than a few modest Ork factions scrapping over territory and salvage. Eric kept his crew tucked back in a distant ruin, watching and picking off stragglers.
Then he saw the one who would come to be known as Horde.
Unlike most Orkz who grabbed leadership through raw muscle or sheer volume of bellowing, Horde's most striking feature was the crude but powerfully built jetpack strapped to his back.
The thing was clearly a Mekboy's pride and joy: its casing plastered in patches and rivets, exhaust vents belching smoke and sparks, yet when it fired it was startlingly wild and fast.
Horde's fighting style matched the jetpack perfectly. Savage, swift, and completely reckless with his own life.
He rarely touched the ground, using the jetpack for short explosive charges and sudden drops, attacking from angles that seemed flat-out impossible. The weapon in his hand was an oversized Choppa, its blade shrieking as it cut through the air at speed.
Eric watched Horde move like a bolt of green lightning through a tangle of brawling Ork factions. First, he used the jetpack's mobility to sidestep the frontal rushes of several bruiser Bosses, then dropped from above and split one bellowing upstart clean in two, crude armor and all.
Then he swung around behind a gun-toting Boss and, before the other could react, sheared off his weapon arm at the shoulder.
His fighting had no fixed pattern, but it was loaded with brutal precision and an uncanny sense of timing. What really stood out was this: during one fierce exchange, Horde took a devastating hit from a Boss swinging a power claw. His leg was almost destroyed outright.
Horde didn't cry out. He let out a roar of pure rage, held himself upright on his one good leg and the jetpack's thrust, and in the same motion swept his blade around to take his opponent's head clean off.
When the fight was over, Horde's wrecked leg was immediately grabbed by his Mekboy, who used salvaged metal and energy conduits to rebuild it, roughly but fast, into a nasty bionic limb.
The new leg didn't just replace what he'd lost. It seemed to have an auxiliary power system built in, making his already explosive movements even more punishing.
Through that style of fighting, reckless, highly mobile, and getting meaner with every setback, Horde tore through a series of brawls across the eastern region, defeating and absorbing one rival after another.
He had a particular knack for pulling in fighters who shared his taste for high-speed assaults and heavy firepower. Stormboyz flocked to his banner in large numbers, forming a distinctive airborne strike force. Mekboyz were just as eager to serve a Boss with that kind of style and appetite for risk, cranking out bigger shootas and increasingly unhinged aerial vehicles from mountains of scrap. Scrap Gunboats started filling the eastern sky.
When Horde finally brought the last serious rival in the east to heel and stood atop a throne built from salvage and the wreckage of his enemies, letting out a Waaagh!!! roar that shook the whole warzone, Eric knew it: a new Warboss had arrived.
This time, Eric didn't hesitate. He brought his small warband forward into Horde's sphere and was quickly folded into one of the new Boss's outer warbands.
"Following this Boss is going to be one hell of a ride," Eric thought, watching the distant figure, one leg a snarling bionic, standing atop a hastily bolted-together smoke-belching Gunboat, Choppa swinging as he roared down at the massed green horde below. Horde's style had something in common with Eric's own guerrilla approach, but cranked up to a far larger scale and with far more aggression behind it.
Before long, under Warboss Horde's forceful push to unify the eastern forces and the call of the Waaagh!!! Crusade, the scattered Ork factions across the region were rapidly pulled together into a single, unified fist.
Internal fighting got shut down hard. Every resource tilted toward war. Stormboyz checked their jetpacks. Boyz wiped down freshly looted Choppas. Mekboyz hammered furiously at piles of scrap, and more Gunboats and crude war engines rolled off the makeshift production lines.
The green tide, after its brief rout and scatter, came surging back with renewed ferocity and a very different character. This time its edge was aimed squarely at the Necrons, who had barely caught their breath.
A new Grand Waaagh!!! Crusade had officially begun, led by Storm Boss Horde, built around high-speed assault and overwhelming firepower.
What the Necrons were about to face was nothing like Steeltusk's grinding faith in brute force and raw endurance. This was a green storm: fast from the air and from the ground, with speed and explosions at its heart.