Chapter 424: Extinction-Level Crisis, Part 1
"Yo, what's up my dark brothers! I'm back for another visit!"
Kian bounded into the bunker, all set for a big group hug with his Astartes buddies, and found the place practically empty.
Captain Doron, Chaplain Reisach, Librarian Budas, all the ones who normally lived here, gone. The supply stockpile that once filled the space was down by more than half. A base this size felt genuinely hollowed out.
Kian scratched his head. "Where'd everyone go?"
Just then, a faint noise carried out from one of the bunker's inner rooms. He followed it and found Apothecary Desai, mixing compounds and loading up on weapons and ammunition, gearing up for a deployment by the look of it.
Kian asked, "My lord, what's got you moving this urgently? Where's everyone else?"
Desai, loading bolt rounds into a magazine while strapping on as much weaponry as he could carry, answered without slowing down.
"Something's gone badly wrong. Earlier, a five-man strike team discovered an Ork war-forge deep inside the Ork-held Deathmine region. Sergeant Nor'n's squad went in to hit it and successfully killed a Mekboy. But while they were placing the beacon to guide the nuclear strike that would've finished off the forge, they got hit by Blackiron himself, the Ork leader. That thing is the single most powerful individual Ork on this entire planet, and Nor'n's team was no match for him. They got driven back into a death-trap of a mine shaft.
To pull them out and finish off Blackiron in the same stroke, the Captain gathered three full squads, brought the Librarian and Chaplain along with him, and pushed into the mine tunnels themselves. But the fight went badly. That warboss is far stronger than we expected, with more armour under his command than we accounted for, and now the Captain's own group is pinned deep in the tunnels too."
Hearing the name Blackiron, Kian went quiet for a moment.
"When I first got to this planet, I actually got on a channel with Blackiron once, tricked him into giving me his coordinates, and hit him with a macro-cannon strike. I thought he was dead."
Desai stuffed a few melta grenades into his belt pouch. "He wasn't. Blackiron's cunning, genuinely so. The coordinates he gave you belonged to a different warboss entirely. Your macro-cannons ended up killing that other boss instead. It threw the local Ork forces into chaos for a while, but before long, Blackiron consolidated control over the whole splintered mess. He used you to eliminate a rival for him."
Kian's expression shifted to sudden understanding.
"Blackiron. Sneaky bastard."
Watching the Apothecary practically strap the entire armory to his own body, Kian asked, confused. "My lord, are you planning to go in there alone?"
Apothecaries didn't normally take standard combat deployments. When they went into a battlefield, it was usually to recover gene-seed from the fallen. Watching this man gear up for a personal deployment told Kian the situation had to be genuinely dire.
A flicker of grief crossed Desai's eyes.
"Three of my brothers are already dead. I have to recover their gene-seed before it degrades, so their legacy can carry forward. Beyond that, I need to be out there. With my brothers. Wherever they are."
That's when it hit Kian, the full weight of it. This Astartes company was on the verge of total collapse. A single, extraordinarily powerful Ork warboss and his armoured column had pinned an entire brotherhood of Astartes in a mountain range, on the verge of being wiped out entirely.
The Captain. The Librarian. The Chaplain. And now the Apothecary too, all heading straight into it. If they all died, the entire company's command structure would collapse with them. And a full-scale Astartes company getting wiped out would hit the whole planet's morale like a hammer blow. The remaining forty percent of human-held territory could well fall to the green tide in a single push after that.
In plenty of fiction, Orks got romanticized as cheerful, simpleminded war-loving brutes. The whole Warhammer 40K setting ran heavy on tragedy as its baseline tone, and against that, greenskins stood out as genuinely joyful. They didn't fear death. Every aspect of their biology and psychology existed purely for war, and war was the one thing this universe never ran short of. A race that pure, that purely happy, was easy to love as a reader.
But most people conveniently glossed over one detail: Orks ate people.
This world had several secondary hive cities, each home to anywhere from a million to tens of millions of people. Once the Orks took a hive, there were only two outcomes for anyone caught inside. Anyone with technical skill got kept alive as slave labor. Everyone else became food, eaten raw by the greenskins.
By the Forge World government's own accounting, roughly fifty million people had already died being eaten by Orks on this planet.
If word got out that an entire Astartes company had been wiped out here, the shock to PDF and Guard morale across the whole planet could shatter the front line outright. And if the front line broke, the planet's entire defense would collapse with it.
Desai forwarded a copy of the battle report to Kian. He put his helmet on and pulled it up through his armour's display.
The Deathmine was a massive coal-rich mountain range, roughly four hundred kilometers from the nearest Guard-held front. Once the Orks seized it, they'd used it to mine heavily, extracting coal for smelting steel and refining coking oil.
Humanity had struck the site repeatedly, including with multiple nuclear missiles, and destroyed the Ork war-forges there over and over. Eventually, the Orks moved their forges deep underground into the mine tunnels themselves, out of reach.
That underground war-forge, built directly into the coal seam, had become the beating artery for the Ork armoured forces across the whole planet. The mine complex, stretching dozens of kilometers, was riddled with makeshift coking facilities, coal crudely converted into fuel oil for tanks and war-machines.
Destroy that energy infrastructure, and half the planet's Ork armoured forces would grind to a halt. Over the next five to ten years, total Ork armoured numbers would drop by at least half.
That's what had sent Nor'n and his five-man strike team into the Deathmine facility to sabotage it. After killing a Mekboy, they'd tried to place a precision beacon and pull out, only to run straight into Blackiron himself, already lying in wait on the surface. A brutal firefight followed, one of Nor'n's men killed outright, the remaining four wounded and forced to retreat deep into the mine tunnels for cover.
Blackiron, too massive to physically fit into the tunnels himself, had sent his lesser troops in after them, but none of those could match a full Astartes in a fight, leaving both sides locked in a standoff.
When word of Nor'n's team getting pinned reached Captain Doron, he immediately assembled three full Astartes squads, nine men, plus himself, the Librarian, and the Chaplain, twelve strong in total. With a force that heavily equipped, they'd planned to crush Blackiron outright and pull Nor'n's team out in the same stroke.
But Blackiron proved far too dangerous. Even the combined weight of the Captain, Chaplain, and Librarian couldn't hold him back, and he tore through their line instead. Two dead left behind, Captain Doron pulled the survivors deep into the Deathmine tunnels, barely holding on.
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