Chapter 410: Range Test
The gold squire-suit walked out to the range at a slow, steady pace. The range itself was massive, a stretch of desert several kilometers wide.
Scattered across it sat a graveyard of Ork vehicles and war-machines, nearly every type currently fielded by the Ork forces on the planet. The more intact wrecks had been hauled in from the front by tech-priests specifically for weapons testing.
Kian brought his squire-suit into firing position and looked out over the dense field of Ork scrap-vehicles, ready to start picking targets.
Boothe gestured toward a cluster of Ork bikes, buggies, and troop trucks.
"My lord, these are light Ork vehicles. You can engage them with the twin rotary las-cannons mounted on the head."
The squire-suit's head carried two Gatling-style rotary las-cannons, each with three barrels, thirty-five millimeters in caliber. They ran directly off the suit's plasma reactor, which supplied virtually unlimited power. Even if the cannons themselves melted from overuse, the reactor's own reserves would never run dry.
The rotary las-cannons had three fire modes. Mode one fired thirty-five hundred rounds a minute, a bit stronger than a standard infantry lasrifle, ideal for cutting down unarmoured infantry. Mode two dropped to fifteen hundred rounds a minute, meant for light-armoured targets. Mode three, the highest-power setting, fired at six hundred rounds a minute, genuine cannon-grade beams, thick and powerful, primarily used for anti-air work.
Kian's view now ran through the suit's own optics. Ahead of him stood a field of empty Ork power armour shells, over three hundred of them staked into the ground.
He switched the rotary las-cannons to mode two through pure thought and opened fire.
Bwoo bwoo bwoo bwoo bwoo bwoo bwoo bwoo bwoo! At fifteen hundred rounds a minute, a solid sea of laser fire erupted instantly. Heavy weapons like these packed staggering energy per beam, and every empty Ork suit caught in the barrage melted and detonated on contact.
Boom, boom, boom! Explosions swept across the target field, kicking up clouds of dust and smoke.
Kian held the trigger for barely ten seconds before easing off. The twin cannons wound down slowly, their overheated barrels hissing with steam. Cooling fans kicked in with a low whir, venting the heat.
He looked out over the range again. More than three hundred Ork armour shells had been reduced to little more than scrap.
It felt incredible. Boothe spoke up.
"My lord, look at twelve o'clock, that Ork light vehicle. It's a scrap-built junker, typically thirty to sixty millimeters of armour. The highest laser setting will destroy it cleanly."
Kian complied, switched the cannons to max power, and fired on the vehicle.
At six hundred rounds a minute, beams thick as an adult's thigh streaked out and slammed into the wreck. Every hit punched a glowing red hole straight through the plating, chunks of armour blowing apart from the released energy, parts of it beginning to melt.
He fired for another ten seconds or so before stopping. What was left of the vehicle looked like a chunk of honeycombed coal, its hull riddled edge to edge with glowing holes.
"Now THAT'S satisfying!"
His voice boomed through the vox, genuinely thrilled. Firepower on this scale, humanoid and this devastating, wasn't remotely comparable to anything infantry could bring to bear. Kian in full power armour, decked out with every weapon he could carry, still didn't match the output of a single barrel on this thing.
Boothe continued.
"My lord, maximum power on the rotary las-cannons is normally reserved for Ork aircraft, their armour is thin enough that a single hit is usually lethal. It's also effective against ground armour, but efficiency drops once you're dealing with plating over sixty millimeters. For that, you'll want the heavy bolter mounted on your chest. It carries a five-hundred-round magazine and is effective against armour between seventy and a hundred and twenty millimeters."
He pointed to a heavier Ork vehicle nearby.
"That one's carrying over ninety millimeters of plating. The heavy bolter is your most efficient option against it."
Kian shifted control to the chest-mounted heavy bolter, took aim, and fired a burst of bolt rounds. Each round punched through the Ork vehicle's hull and detonated inside. From the outside, it looked like nothing more than a scattering of small, unremarkable holes, but inside, anything alive would've been torn apart instantly by the internal blasts.
Finally, Boothe walked him through the twin-linked plasma cannon on his left arm.
"My lord, the plasma cannon can fire both barrels together or one at a time. It's fitted with advanced capacitor and heat-dissipation systems, requiring roughly ten seconds to recharge and cool between shots. Alternating fire between the two barrels lets you get a shot off roughly every five seconds. It's rated for armour between five hundred and a thousand millimeters thick."
He pointed toward a steel plate a meter thick, set up downrange.
"Punch through that, my lord."
Kian raised his left arm, lined up a rough aim, and fired.
Fwoosh, fwoosh! Two bolts of blue plasma tore out, struck the meter-thick plate, and punched straight through. The metal liquefied into slag the instant the plasma touched it. Both bolts kept traveling past the plate and slammed into a massive Ork tank parked behind it.
Boom!
The tank went up in a violent explosion, half its hull melted away in a flash like a small sun going off, the other half left partially molten.
Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying firepower. A handheld plasma rifle could already deal with armoured targets on its own, and this was an entire cannon's worth of that same power, scaled up massively.
Kian looked out at the pooling slag downrange and let out a wistful sigh. Back when he'd single-handedly cleared out twenty thousand Orks aboard that Ork hulk, dragging things out, using every trick he had. If he'd had this squire-suit back then, he could've cleared the whole thing solo in minutes.
Afterward, Kian tried out the Hellstrike chainsword mounted on the right arm, ran the suit through sprints, jumps, and sharp turns in every direction. Smooth. Completely smooth. Controlling the squire-suit felt no different from controlling his own body.
He asked Boothe about it, and Boothe explained.
"My lord, piloting a larger frame demands proportionally greater psychic strength. The fact that you're experiencing zero lag controlling a squire-suit tells me your mental fortitude is exceptional. In fact, that means we could fit your frame with considerably more weaponry before you'd start to feel the strain of controlling it."
Kian kept the suit moving through drills as he asked, "So as long as I can handle it, you can just keep loading on more weapons?"
"That's right, my lord. How much weaponry a frame can carry comes down to two factors: structural load capacity and the pilot's mental fortitude. Don't worry about load capacity, the squire-suit's power plant is more than capable of handling additional weight. The real limiting factor is your own psychic strength. The more weapons you add, the more mental bandwidth it takes to operate them all. My recommendation would be to keep adding weaponry right up to the point where it starts placing a real strain on your mind, and stop there."
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you