The war on Lithoeremos-313, after Steeltusk's fall and Hodi's rise, seemed to lock itself into a never-ending, ever-accelerating spiral of madness.
The Necrons, having paid an enormous price for their lessons, had genuinely taken those lessons to heart.
They recognized that the true source of cohesion and destructive power within the Orkz' seemingly chaotic organizational structure was always concentrated in those powerful individuals known as Warbosses. Targeted decapitation strikes appeared to be the most effective tactic available.
So in the battles that followed, Necron players and AI commanders poured vast resources and attention into hunting down each new Ork boss.
Deathmark squads materialized and vanished at will, dedicated to sniping Ork bosses or any powerful unit suspected of being one. Elite Necron Lychguard held the front line to tie up enemy forces, buying windows for ranged fire or specialist teams to land the killing shot. Costly strategic strikes were even committed in attempts to eliminate new bosses before they could get their footing.
Yet all these efforts, measured against the Orkz' peculiar brand of social Darwinism and their near-inexhaustible numbers, amounted to little more than throwing water on a grease fire, and in some respects made things actively worse.
Warboss "Stormchief" Hodi, riding his high mobility and ferocious aerial assault forces, had at one point hammered the Necron defensive line hard. The Necrons found their answer quickly enough: dense layered anti-air fire combined with precision sniping from Deathmarks.
During a raid targeting a Necron rear energy node, Hodi's squadron of rust-bucket gunships was ambushed. He himself was caught in the converging fire of several Triarch Stalkers and a concealed Deathmark, and went up in a brilliant green fireball, man and jump pack together, right there in midair.
Hodi was dead. But barely half an hour later, the Ork faction's announcement rang out again: a new Warboss had risen. This one was a Mek boss.
He lacked Hodi's ferocity and Steeltusk's raw strength, yet his Mekboys worked with startling speed, throwing up solid scrap fortresses and terrifying junk cannons from mountains of salvage in a remarkably short time, and simply blasted the Necron line apart with sheer, unreasonable volume of fire.
The Necrons organized another decapitation strike, paid a significant cost, and finally pulled off a penetration operation that demolished the Mek boss's core workshop and buried him under a mountain of scrap.
The result? Before the Necrons could even catch their breath, the next Warboss had already surfaced: a Weirdboy boss, risen from the ranks of a Snakebite mob. This new boss initially could not begin to control the savage Waaagh!!! psychic energy raging inside him, and regularly set off indiscriminate psyker explosions across the battlefield.
But quickly, through relentless combat and brutal trial by fire, he and his Boyz, who had themselves begun awakening latent psychic potential, gradually felt their way toward something like mastery.
Above the battlefield, thick, writhing, no-longer-entirely-uncontrolled green psychic lightning began to appear, lashing at Necron formations like living whips, disrupting energy shields, and even tearing lighter vehicles apart outright.
The Weirdboyz began learning to channel their savage psychic power into offense, defense, and even short-range teleportation. Waaagh!!! energy, once a dangerous, uncontrollable hazard, was gradually becoming a deployable strategic weapon.
The Necrons ran themselves ragged. They eliminated Warboss after Warboss, yet each successful decapitation produced not an Ork rout, but the emergence of a stronger, better-adapted, more varied replacement, fielding new types of Ork units. It was as though every boss's death was a brutal culling and a rapid evolutionary leap for the entire Ork population.
Blood Axes kommandos began appearing on the battlefield. These Orkz were nothing like the common variety that simply charged in howling. They used cover, performed basic tactical coordination, and could even suppress the urge to charge into melee when a larger strategic objective required it, conducting covert infiltration or precision kills instead.
To other Orkz this looked like outright cowardice, the worst kind of "Humie tricks," yet for the Blood Axes it was simply effective. The tactical variety they brought stretched the Necrons' already strained defensive line even thinner.
Snakebite Orkz rode into battle atop their diverse menagerie of tamed Squiggoth. Some of these beasts were compact and nimble, capable of squeezing through narrow passages to wreck conduits and pipelines.
Others were enormous and near-impervious to small-arms fire, driven by their Boyz like living battering rams against Necron vehicles and fixed emplacements, treated as nothing more than big prey to be hunted down and put to use.
Even more alarming, in certain sections of the battlefield, Squiggoth that had consumed vast quantities of metal wreckage and energy residue began to mutate, bloating to heights of dozens of meters, each one a walking mountain.
Driven forward by their Ork handlers, each footfall sent tremors through the ground, and even Necron monoliths had to respond with care.
Bad Moons flash gits spent their glittering coins and scrap alike to commission from the Mekboys increasingly ornate and increasingly devastating big shootas and super blastas.
Deathskulls Boyz, driven by a near-obsessive love of looting and scavenging, managed to recover usable Necron components from the most unlikely places, then Orkified them into new additions to the Ork arsenal.
The Ork war machine was no longer simply an accumulation of bodies. It was taking on a character of savage yet functional diversification and specialization. Different clan strengths were drawn out under different Warbosses, complemented one another, and coalesced into a combined force that was increasingly difficult to counter.
The intensity of the fighting climbed wildly in this ceaseless, kill-or-be-killed cycle of attrition and adaptation. Death and destruction became the baseline, and that was precisely the kind of environment Orkz thrived in most.
The Global Waaagh!!! Value floating above every player's field of view, as though someone had pumped it full of stimulant, began climbing steadily, relentlessly, without pause. It had long since blown past 20%, crashed through 30%, and finally, driven by countless engagements large and small, by the deaths of old bosses and the rise of new ones, and by an ever-swelling horde, it slammed into 40%.
A 40% Waaagh!!! Value brought noticeably amplified effects: fungal spawning pits sprouted everywhere like mushrooms after rain, and Ork Boyz replenished at a pace that felt nearly impossible to contain.
The probability of elite units emerging increased sharply, and the battlefield was thick with Orkz sporting special abilities. More elite Ork warbands, drawn from across the galaxy by word of the fighting, poured in to join the war. Mekboys converted salvage into weapons with still greater speed.
On the Necron side, despite maintaining strict discipline, advanced technology, and a steady flow of reinforcements from their tomb, the cracks were beginning to show.
Their tactics needed time to recalibrate. Their unit roster was relatively fixed. And their decapitation strategy, though it scored successes time and again, seemed only to be selectively breeding a constantly evolving monster, each attempt producing a more troublesome variant.
Their defensive line, hammered by a green tide that never stopped and grew only more diverse and specialized, began to give ground, steadily and without recovery.
Territory once recaptured fell again. Key energy nodes were destroyed or seized in quick succession. Their great war machines, ground down by endless beast-wave assaults and targeted strikes from new unit types, were accumulating damage faster than it could be repaired.
White Rose stared at the Waaagh!!! Value, already at 40% and still creeping upward, then looked at the map where green encroachment chewed at the lines without pause. The sense of helplessness inside him kept growing.
What they were facing no longer felt like an army. It felt like a natural disaster: a green catastrophe that fed on war, grew stronger on death, hardened with every defeat, and simply never stopped.
"At this rate..." White Rose looked at his own score, recovering slowly and still painfully thin, then at the energy overload warning beginning to flicker again in his status panel from one death too many, and said nothing more.