In orbit, the main batteries of the Ark of Doom locked onto the densest Ork concentrations and mushroom-pit hive clusters.
There were no deafening explosions, only silent, utterly destructive torrents of pure energy descending from the heavens, like a deity's fingertip brushing lightly across a canvas.
Every zone struck, whether iron-scrap fortresses, dense mushroom-pit clusters, or surging Ork hordes, was instantaneously vitrified, reduced to smooth, dead, eerily reflective plains of scorched crystal.
Life, metal, even the very structure of the earth itself was completely rewritten and purified.
Close behind came the grinding advance of the ground forces.
The Necron Legions, empowered by the "Resurrection Protocol" running at full capacity, saw their replenishment rate surpass the Orks' spore regeneration for the first time on a local battlefield.
Fallen warriors began recongealing their forms in nearby energy fields almost the moment they hit the ground. Tomb Spider swarms swept forward like green tides, harvesting energy from Ork scrap fortifications, crude vehicles, and the residual essence of fallen greenskin corpses.
The freshly committed reinforcements from Trazyn the Infinite brought a host of unexpected tactical surprises.
Ancient war machines and creatures belonging to no current era appeared at critical junctures, alongside ancient Astartes, disrupting the Orks' crude offensive rhythm.
The urgently reactivated Wolfhunt Lords tore across the battlefield with staggering martial force, hunting down powerful Ork warbosses and war machines with singular purpose.
The Necron advance became efficient, cold, and utterly unforgiving. Each zone they seized was subjected to thorough "vitrification" treatment by rear-line purification units, scorching every inch of ground with extreme heat and energy fields to ensure no spore remained, that no Ork could re-emerge from the rear.
This was the true expression of systematic extermination, designed to sever the Orks' capacity for regeneration at the root.
Under this combination of blows, the Ork offensive collapsed into a full-scale, widespread rout for the first time.
What had seemed like an endless green ocean was swiftly divided, encircled, and evaporated in the face of absolute firepower, technological supremacy, and ruthless purification.
The balance of surface control shifted in a staggering reversal, the Necrons' controlled zones expanded rapidly, seizing over 70% of the planetary surface.
The scales of victory seemed to have tipped entirely toward the side of order and cold steel.
Yet just as the Necron faction began to recover its confidence, believing it had at last found the method to suppress the Orks and was on the verge of completing its at any cost purification directive, a far deeper and more fundamental transformation stirred silently within the Ork camp, rapidly erupting into a torrent of unstoppable fury.
Pressure, extreme, unprecedented pressure, the humiliation of defeat, and the existential crisis of having their very roots torn out, did not break the Orks. Instead, it was like hurling a white-hot brand into a vat of boiling oil.
The social ecology of the Orks, that traditional cycle of rallying strength around a powerful warboss and dissolving into brief chaos and infighting upon the warboss's death, was shattered.
No new, unified warboss emerged from the rout to consolidate the scattered remnants.
Instead, every single Ork, from the lowliest Ork Boy or Snotling, to the bosses of each warband, the Mekboys, and the Weirdboyz, seemed to have their deepest, most savage survival and combat instincts ignited simultaneously.
They no longer needed any particular "head" to tell them what to do. Every individual Ork, every warband, plunged into a collective, spontaneous, terminal frenzy.
"Waaagh!!! Kill! Kill these iron gits!!"
"Can't let 'em burn the ground! Our mushroom pits!!"
"Charge! For the Mekmob! For the Warboss! So we can crawl outta the ground again and keep the Waaagh!!!"
They no longer retreated, no longer waited for orders. Even a lone Ork Boy would grab a satchel of explosives and howl his way into the Necron lines.
Between warbands there was still brawling, but it had transformed into a competitive slaughter-frenzy, a race to see who could kill more iron skeletons, who could charge harder.
The entire Ork society had transformed from scattered sand in need of a boss to bind it, into a pot of self-boiling, mutually inciting, catastrophically focused molten fury.
Even more alarming was the rate of their technological evolution. Under the extreme pressure of survival, the Orks' "Waaagh-field" seemed to have been pushed to unprecedented heights.
Mekboys, working with scrounged, scavenged, and even shattered wreckage of their own forces, "cobbled together" super-Gargant mechs in an extraordinarily short time capable of trading blows head-on with Necron Colossi.
These war machines remained crude, belching black smoke, joints groaning with every movement, yet their firepower output and armor thickness had reached a level that even the Necron forces were compelled to take seriously.
On the battlefield, brutal aerial slaughter erupted between Ork super-scrap gunboat squadrons and Necron Night Scythe wings; Ork suicide trucks and Rokkit Boyz hurled themselves in kamikaze assaults, slamming furiously into Necron heavy unit formations.
The Waaagh!!! was no longer merely a battle cry or collective emotional surge. It seemed to have become the core engine driving the entire race to rapidly evolve and savagely claw its way up the technological tree in the face of annihilation.
And the global Waaagh!!! value, that index representing the Orks' collective momentum and martial potential, experienced only a brief dip before, rather than crashing due to the rout and the loss of a unified warboss, it surged upward with even greater, more unstoppable momentum.
50%... 55%... and then, defiantly, it smashed through the 60% threshold.
60% Waaagh!!! value triggered a qualitative transformation. The Orks' replenishment speed, elite emergence probability, and "attraction" toward outside kin all reached an entirely new level.
And this "attraction" now manifested in the most direct, most violent manner imaginable, green reinforcements from across the stars.
Though the Necron fleet maintained a tight orbital blockade, weaving a death-net of concentrated fire, innumerable crude, smoke-trailing meteors adorned with bizarre markings and savage graffiti crashed through the atmosphere regardless, slamming into the surface of Lithoeremos-313.
These were Ork warbands from every other corner of the galaxy, drawn by the planet's sky-reaching, near-warp-barrier-shattering Waaagh!!! resonance, converging from all directions like sharks scenting blood, eager to join this unprecedented "Ultimate Waaagh!!!" feast.
While many Ork drop-pods and battered warships were shot down and turned to burning wreckage breaking through the orbital cordon, great numbers still made successful landfalls. As they arrived, ever more brazen, ever more thunderous Waaagh!!! announcements detonated across every Ork player's field of vision:
"Oi! Oi! Hear that! That's our lot! Bonecruncha's advance boyz 'ave arrived! Let these tin cans see what a real Waaagh!!! looks like!"
"A mob from the big Waaagh!!! pit on Octarius made it 'ere too! The fightin's proper vicious!"
"Look at the sky! That's Mekboss 'Red-Eye' and his Snotling fleet! They fly all crooked-like, but them guns ain't nothin' to laugh at!"
"And Beastboss 'Orta'! He's brought every Beastboy in his tribe and the meanest Squigs he's got! Let the iron gits taste gettin' eaten alive!"
"...More! Still more warbands on the way! Pushin' and shovin' just to get a piece of it!"
Ork reinforcements from different star systems, different warbands, and different clans converged like a hundred rivers rushing to the sea, flooding madly into this wasteland planet that had become the hottest warzone in the Warhammer 40k universe.
They had no unified command structure, they might even clash with each other over territory or over who was more Waaagh!!!, but their goal was unified to an unprecedented degree: kill every last iron skeleton that wanted to burn everything to glass.
The green tide that had been on the verge of "systematic extermination" erupted in its moment of desperation into a sky-drowning fury, calling forth the savage response of the Ork community from across the entire galaxy.
The war, once a localized struggle of purification versus resistance to purification," escalated in an instant into a micro-galactic conflict entangling the core will and survival space of two great factions.
The iron order of the Necrons no longer faced the savage creatures of a single planet, it now faced the reflection of the entire Ork race's chaotic, tenacious, and ever-stronger-against-stronger endless warrior nature.
White Rose stared at the map, watching the blinding green dots of newly arrived Ork warbands lighting up from every direction, then looked at the Waaagh!!! value, already at 60% and still fluctuating upward, and fell silent.
His tactical successes earlier had seemingly... opened a Pandora's box far more terrifying than anything he had imagined.