Chapter 413: Battle of the Bands
At the head of the Ork convoy rode a wide, elongated Battlewagon, moving with astonishing speed for something that size, having pulled clean away from the rest of the pack.
The Battlewagon roared up to the base of the ridge first, whipped into a sharp fishtail, and swung its rear end to face the hilltop. Inside its cargo bed, a wall of speakers stood stacked row on row, while four or five Orks armed with electric guitars, a drum kit, and assorted other instruments (all of which doubled as weapons) launched straight into a performance.
The biggest, burliest Ork on the rig struck a savage chord and screamed:
"WAAAAAAAGH!!!"
The war cry blasted out through sixty-four linked speaker stacks, amplified into a shockwave that rolled across the landscape like an artillery blast.
Then the whole crew launched into a driving, rhythmic chant, playing and singing in perfect unison.
"Fight! Fight! Fight! Orks love a good fight!
Big shoota! Big choppa! Big slugga! Big kanon!
Little grot! Big boy! Strong boss! WAAABOSS!
Ride da bike! Drive da tank! Fly da plane!
Line up! Sneak attack! One big glorious mess! WAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!"
The sheer terror of Ork heavy metal, boosted through speakers this massive, produced a soundwave brutal enough to rattle skulls, chunks of rock actually shaking loose off the ridge and tumbling down.
The Trio asked Kian, "Boss, we opening fire?"
Kian shook his head.
"Hold off. They opened with a challenge, so let's do this properly. We fight fair first, battle of the bands."
He looked to the yellow suit.
"Link up with me and hand over your amplified vox rig. I'll out-sing this bastard myself."
"Got it, boss!"
Yellow immediately established the link and passed control of his suit's amplified vox system over to Kian.
Kian took a deep breath and belted out, at full volume:
"By the sacred law, mommy baby boom!
All things in this world exist to serve my will!
Peach-wood in hand, I ride forth to war!
Every villain slain, the world at peace once more!"
A heavy-metal rendition of a children's chant, blasted out through the yellow suit's amplified rig.
Down below, the Orks had already reached the ridge, foot soldiers, tanks, and war-machines disembarking and forming up for the assault. When they heard the heavy metal thundering down from the ridgetop, they froze for a moment, then turned to look at their own metal rig in disbelief.
Aboard the Ork rig, the lead vocalist saw someone actually daring to challenge his band and flew into a rage.
The singer roared, "Turn it up! Max volume! WAAAAAAAAGH!!!!"
Every speaker on the rig screamed at full power, the sound itself producing a visible pressure wave that rolled straight toward the four suits on the ridge.
The squire-suits' built-in amplifiers, even maxed out, were no match for a sixty-four-stack rig. Kian's voice got completely drowned out. Round one, lost.
"Boss, what do we do? Their setup's better than ours!"
Yellow shouted, panicked.
"God damn it!"
Kian could barely even hear his own voice over the noise anymore. He cursed, raised his left arm's triple plasma cannon, and unloaded a full volley.
Bwoo bwoo bwoo! Three white-hot balls of plasma streaked out and slammed straight into the Ork metal rig, detonating in a violent blast. The heat vaporized every speaker and every member of the band instantly. The world, at last, went quiet.
By then the Ork force had finished deploying for the assault. Seeing their band wiped out, they erupted in fury.
"Human shrimp cheated! Can't out-sing us so dey shoot instead! Dat's cheatin'! WAAAAAAGH!!!"
A proper band that talented didn't come along every day, and having it snuffed out by a cheap shot sent every Ork present into a screaming rage. They charged the ridge with everything they had.
Roughly two thousand power-armoured Ork infantry, more than a hundred armoured vehicles, a dozen or so tanks mixed in, and nearly a hundred war-machines, all surged up the slope in a furious wave.
Chaotic, deafening, an absolute mess, the kind of scene that gave anyone a headache just looking at it.
"Fire! Wipe them out!"
Kian roared and struck first. His head-mounted triple rotary las-cannons switched to mid-power and unleashed a sea of laser fire. The other three squire-suits opened up in sync, their own rotary cannons sweeping the charging infantry below.
At fifteen hundred rounds a second, it was like turning point-defense guns on infantry, a torrent of laser fire pouring down into the Ork foot soldiers.
The Orks wore power armour, but nowhere near thick enough to stop mid-power laser fire. Wave after wave of beams tore into them, the released energy blowing their armour apart outright. What energy remained bled through as raw heat, cooking their organs from the inside.
Kian and the others held that furious barrage for under ten seconds before the two thousand Ork infantry below were all but wiped out. This was the reality of the Warhammer 40K battlefield: against war-machines a full tier above them, infantry simply had no real answer. A squire-suit's secondary weapons alone were enough to erase an entire infantry force outright.
Under ten seconds, two thousand Orks gone.
But the Orks still down at the base of the ridge used the opening to bring their own weapons to bear, opening fire on the four suits above.
Hundreds of Ork armoured cars and buggies opened up with mounted heavy machine guns and autocannons, spraying fire up the slope. The Ork tanks were far worse. Massive barrels, four, even five hundred millimeters in caliber, swung and elevated under the enthusiastic shouting of their crews, taking aim at the four squire-suits.
Then, with several Ork crewmen working together, they rammed absurdly oversized shells, crudely welded together from scrap sheet metal, into the breech, sealed it shut, and yanked the firing cord hard.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!
RATATATATAT!!!
Rounds of every conceivable caliber rained onto the ridgetop, the ground shaking under the barrage. One heavy shell landed well short of the four suits, blasting out a crater deep enough to stock with fish.
Kian was still mopping up the last of the light infantry when he felt something rattling against his hull. He looked up to see the Ork column had fully deployed at the base of the ridge, every weapon in their arsenal now firing up at the summit. Under cover of that barrage, the Ork war-machines had started clawing their way up the slope with loud, chaotic enthusiasm.
Kian shouted an order.
"Spread out, find cover, fight from position! Remember, fight to survive, don't go toe-to-toe with these things for the sake of it!"
The moment the order went out, the four of them broke from their exposed positions atop the ridge and scattered. They pulled back to gaps along the reverse slope, taking up the best cover they could find, and opened fire on the Orks climbing below.
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