Chapter 415: War-Machine Melee
Dozens of four-meter killer-cans and several six-meter Ork Dreadnoughts came pouring down off the ridge in a dark flood, outnumbering Kian's group more than twentyfold.
"Boss, what do we do? They're all charging down at us!"
Kian shouted back. "Don't panic! Group up!"
The four suits closed in tight, angling their strongest firing arcs forward.
"Full firepower! Bolter and laser fire on the small cans, plasma on the big ones!"
He assigned targets in a heartbeat and opened fire without further pause. All four suits unloaded on his command, laser and bolt fire pouring into the wave of oncoming killer-cans without restraint.
The killer-cans came in overwhelming numbers, but their build quality was garbage. Each one ran four mechanical arms, typically two fitted with massive circular saws and the other two carrying oversized pistols or shootas. As they surged down the slope, tinny Gretchin voices squealed and shrieked over their external speakers, saw blades spinning with a shrill grinding whine, weapons spraying junk-quality rounds.
Those rounds bounced harmlessly off the squire-suits' adamantium plating, doing nothing worse than scuffing the paint. Meanwhile, Kian's group could drop a killer-can in two or three bolter rounds, and a sustained burst of laser fire alone was enough to melt straight through the frontal armour and blow one apart entirely.
The killer-cans dropped in waves, pure cannon fodder. As for the larger, heavier-armoured Dreadnoughts, neither laser nor bolt fire made much of a dent, but that's exactly what the plasma cannons were for. Bolt after bolt of blue plasma punched clean through the war-machines, detonating and reducing them to molten wreckage. The heat and energy bleeding off each blast also caught nearby killer-cans in the radius, cooking them like tin cans on a grill.
Wave after wave of Ork war-machines rolled down the slope, only to be scythed down by the relentless barrage. Human weapons were almost always better than Ork gear, more advanced, more refined, but they could never quite make up for how many Orks there always seemed to be.
Soon the base of the ridge was littered with wrecked killer-cans and shattered Dreadnoughts, but Kian's group was starting to run dry too. The rotary las-cannons were overheating. The heavy bolters had run through their ammunition entirely. The plasma cannons needed nine seconds between shots now, and with how hard they'd been pushed, the cooldown was only getting longer.
Even so, a couple dozen more Ork war-machines, mostly killer-cans, were still charging down the ridge. And through the squire-suit's long-range auspex, Kian spotted something worse: large columns of Ork vehicles sweeping around both flanks of the ridge.
Plenty of tanks in those columns. Caught in the open, at close range, with those guns bearing down, that was a serious threat.
They needed to get back up into the broken terrain of the ridge.
Kian shouted, "Their war-machines are almost done, switch to melee! Their vehicle columns are circling around, we can't get pinned down by them, back up the ridge, now!"
All four acknowledged. Their Hellstrike chainswords roared to life, and they surged forward into the remaining Ork war-machines.
Kian led the charge, straight into a wall of four Dreadnoughts and seven killer-cans.
He raised his left arm's triple plasma cannon and fired all three bolts in sequence, catching three Dreadnoughts and reducing them to shattered, molten wreckage.
By then the leading killer-cans had closed the distance, their huge circular saws raised, aiming for his legs. But Kian's Hellstrike chainsword roared and swung down first, splitting one killer-can clean in half. Against light-to-medium armour like that, a single hit from an adamantium-toothed chainsword shattered it instantly, the Gretchin pilot inside reduced to paste.
He swept left and right, cutting down two more killer-cans as easily as an adult swatting away children. One managed to get in close enough to drag its saw blade across Kian's leg.
The moment the saw made contact with the adamantium-plated leg, sparks exploded outward violently. Against ordinary armour, even ceramite, that hit would've cut clean through. But the squire-suit's entire leg was solid adamantium, harder than whatever scrap steel the saw blade was made of. The saw blade shattered on contact instead.
Kian drove a knee forward, bowling the killer-can flat onto its back, then raised a massive foot and stomped down hard. A crunch of tearing metal, the killer-can crumpling like a soda can under his boot, the mechanical guts and the Gretchin pilot inside crushed together into an indistinguishable pulp.
"WAAAAAAGH!!!"
Kian had barely finished clearing the cannon-fodder killer-cans when another Dreadnought charged in.
The Dreadnought was roughly the same size as a squire-suit, about six meters, and armed with a pair of massive crab-like mechanical claws. No telling whether those were just ordinary pincers or fitted with some kind of disintegration field. A hit from those could conceivably crack a squire-suit open, so Kian snapped fully alert.
His left-arm plasma cannon was still venting heat, unusable, leaving only the Hellstrike chainsword to meet the charge.
The Dreadnought ran four mechanical arms: two ended in massive claws, the other two mounted matching oversized shootas, scaled up in proportion. It charged straight in, both shootas blazing wildly at Kian the whole way.
Since his nervous system was linked directly to the suit, Kian felt every heavy-caliber round slamming into him, violent jolts of impact. Not that it mattered much. Ork-made rounds had poor penetration, and against thick adamantium plating they barely left more than minor dents and scuffed deformation.
Kian angled slightly to the side, tucking the plasma cannon in close to keep it out of the line of fire, and raised the chainsword to shield the suit's head. The adamantium plating wouldn't get punched through, but the head-mounted cameras could still get shattered, and he had no interest in fighting blind.
"WAAAAAAAGH!!!"
Even without visual, the roar and the tremor through the ground gave him a rough sense of the Dreadnought's distance. The instant it closed within striking range, Kian swung the chainsword in a blindingly fast arc straight at one of its claws.
Sparks burst violently off the impact as the chainsword sheared clean through the claw with ease. But the Dreadnought used the opening to swing its other claw hard into Kian's waist, while its remaining two arms drove both shootas point-blank into his chest, firing without pause.
Gunfire and the shriek of tortured metal erupted together. The waist armour caught in the claw's grip began buckling violently under the pressure. The plating taking point-blank shoota fire dented in fist-sized craters, one after another.
By then Kian's chainsword had finished its recovery swing, and he brought it around hard from the left, slamming it into the Dreadnought's own waist section in return.
Both machines dug into each other's midsections, each trying to tear the other apart, but the squire-suit clearly had the edge. Its waist armour and internal structure were built entirely from adamantium. The Dreadnought's claw could deform the outer plating, but that was as far as it could go, no follow-through left in the attack.
The Hellstrike chainsword, meanwhile, kept cutting. The Dreadnought's frame was built from ordinary steel, and under three seconds of sustained sawing, the blade cut straight through, turning the Ork pilot inside into a fine red mist.
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