The war for Lithoeremos-313 lasted exactly seventy-two standard days.
Throughout that long and bloody cycle, every inch of the planet's surface was contested, bombarded, and trampled over and over again. The Ork Waaagh!!! value peaked on the forty-seventh day of fighting, reaching the 100% full-release threshold.
In that moment, the entire planet seemed to come alive.
Spore craters erupted like volcanoes, belching out tons of spores and newborn Orks. Scrap heaps, catalyzed by the frenzied "reckons" of Mekboys, assembled themselves into war machines without any hand to guide them.
The Ork reinforcements surging up from beneath the earth reached astronomical numbers. More critically, a global Waaagh!!! value of 100% triggered the ultimate effect:
[COSMIC SIGNAL PROPAGATION]
Effect: The Ork spores throughout the current star system have resonated with this "Epic Waaagh!!!," and have begun drifting toward Lithoeremos-313. Combat instincts of all Boyz have evolved by +300%.
...
White Rose held the southern front for fifty-three days.
His identity as a Necron Overlord had indeed worked miracles. At peak efficiency, his personal retinue, coordinating with the dynasty's main forces, had pushed back and compressed Ork-controlled territory in the south from 40% down to 12%. His role as a tactical anchor cost the Orks in that sector three times as many casualties as any other front.
But war has never been purely a game of tactics.
On the fifty-fourth day, the Warboss himself led his largest warband, the Iron Scrap Tide, alongside three Super Stompas subjected to countless "improvements," and launched a general assault on White Rose's defensive line.
It was a twelve-hour battle of attrition.
White Rose's retinue burned through the energy reserves of three Resurrection Protocols.
He personally used Phase Shift to dodge four waves of targeted scrap-rocket saturation bombardment, and tanked a direct stomp from a Stompa head-on with his Energy Shield. His command was precise: for every Ork elite unit destroyed, ten more berserk ones surged forward.
The kill ratio held at an astonishing 1:50.
But the Orks outnumbered them 500 to 1.
---
On the sixty-seventh day, the last fully functional tomb spire in the southern sector had its energy core destroyed in a suicide charge by Ork "Bommerz." White Rose lost his stable resurrection node and command uplink.
He was forced to go guerrilla.
In territory the Orks completely controlled, that amounted to a slow death. Mekboys began laying "spore suppression fields," crude but effective devices that disrupted Necron units from drawing energy out of the tomb network.
By the seventy-first day, White Rose's personal retinue was down to three battered Lychguard.
Their gauss weapons had seized from overheating, leaving them to fight with nothing but their close-combat phase blades.
At midday, they were intercepted in a dry riverbed by a hunting party led personally by Eric.
The Warboss rode a converted Squiggoth, twenty well-armed Nobs at his back. No words were exchanged. The Orks didn't need any. Neither did the Necrons.
The final battle lasted seven minutes.
The three Lychguard traded precision coordination for the lives of six Nobs.
White Rose unleashed a perfect burst of all his Overlord abilities: Phase Shift to cut into the flank, targeting locked on the Warboss, Command Aura at full output, Energy Shield absorbing blows from every direction, his Gauss Disintegrator unloading into the Squiggoth's head joints with continuous fire.
The beast screamed and went down.
But in the instant his mount collapsed, Eric leapt clear. The weapon in his hand, a crudely welded fusion of a Necron phase blade and Ork power claw, carved a fouled arc through the air.
White Rose tried to fall back. His Phase Shift was still on cooldown.
The weapon drove through the Overlord's metal chest, destroying the core energy node.
[SYSTEM NOTICE (Visible to White Rose Only): Your "Necron Overlord" identity has been slain. Resurrection Protocol energy reserves are insufficient. Reactivation at the nearest available tomb node will occur in 72 hours.]
---
The seventy-second day. The final hour.
Every player's view was forcibly expanded to orbital altitude.
What they saw:
A tide of green had completely swallowed the surface. The silver-black pyramids and tomb structures had either been torn down for scrap and fed into Ork junk piles, or painted over with crude red markings and Greenskin glyphs. Spore craters, like green sores, covered the entire continent.
Scattered Necron units were still holding out in a handful of deep underground bunkers, but control of the surface had changed hands completely.
Two utterly different system announcements rang out simultaneously in the interface of every player who had taken part in the war.
---
Ork system voice (coarse, feral, with reverb and a backdrop of explosions and roaring):
"WAAAAAAAGH!!!"
"By Gork! By Mork! This fight was bloody BRILLIANT!!!"
"Those iron-boned skeletons got scrubbed right off the face of this planet! Their pyramids are our Snotlings' latrines now!"
"Listen up, every Boy, Nob, Warboss, Mek, and Weirdboy who fought here! Your names ring out across this rock from today on! Orks on other worlds will smell the smoke of this battle in their dreams!"
"But it ain't enough! Not by a long shot!"
"Remember today! Remember what this Waaagh!!! tasted like! When we've scrounged more scrap, grown more Boyz, and built bigger guns..."
"The next Waaagh!!! is gonna be loud enough for the other side of the galaxy to hear!!!"
"For Gork! For Mork! For WAAAAAAGH!!!"
The audio faded into a chorus of ten thousand roaring Orks.
---
Necron system voice (cold, smooth, carrying faint electronic static and suppressed fury):
"Silence Protocol terminated. Battlefield assessment complete."
"Lithoeremos-313, Tomb World designation T-77, confirmed lost."
"Enemy unit identification: Ork Greenskin population. Tactical evaluation: primitive, chaotic, inefficient. Victory attributed to numerical supremacy and regenerative rates that defy logical modeling."
"Participating dynasty units, the record reads as follows:"
"You have let metal gather dust, and let honor rust."
"Awakened after ten million years of slumber, bearing the technology and fury of the Necrontyr age, you were defeated by creatures that reproduce via fungus, wage war with refuse, and whose cognitive logic has not advanced beyond a primitive tribal stage."
"Were the Silent King to learn of this, how would he judge the 'worth' of this dynasty's generation?"
"Final orders are now being executed: all surviving units, withdraw into the deep tomb corridors.
Initiating planetary-scale Scorched Protocol, triggering all remaining tomb cores for detonation, ensuring no viable technological specimens are left behind."
"This planet is ceded to them. For now."
"But remember: the dynasty's memory is eternal. Shame must be cleansed by purgation ten times over."
"Withdraw."
The audio faded into a sequence of encrypted tomb command codes and fell silent.
---
In orbit above the planet, the Necron fleet began to turn, their translocation engines stirring silent ripples through the vacuum.
On the surface, surviving Necron units receded into the rift lines and deep craters like a withdrawing tide, and moments later, a series of muffled detonations rolled up from underground. The Scorched Protocol had activated.
The Orks paid none of it any mind. They had already begun a grand celebration across the ruins: blowing into gauss weapon casings like horns, hammering Necron warrior limbs against scrap metal as drums, while still more Orks busied themselves seeding fresh spore craters and debating which direction the next "bigger, louder Waaagh!!!" ought to go.
The war was over.
The Orks had won the planet.
And the Necrons, carrying cold shame and an oath of inevitable return, withdrew for now into the shadows.