Chapter 428: Tank Battle
The two sides' tank guns opened up across four kilometers of open ground, heavy shells crisscrossing the desert in every direction.
Leman Russ tanks carried three main round types: high-explosive, armour-piercing, and armour-piercing high-explosive. Ork tanks ran absurdly oversized, packed with a bewildering tangle of internal machinery, and unless one got blown apart completely, there was no telling whether it would ever actually stop moving.
High-explosive couldn't punch through Ork armour. Armour-piercing could, but as a solid slug, it just punched straight through and out the other side without doing much real damage inside. That left armour-piercing high-explosive as the ideal middle ground, the single most effective round against Ork armour. Every Leman Russ fired it exclusively, the semi-piercing rounds burrowing into the Ork hull before detonating, either triggering a chain reaction with whatever ammunition the Orks had stuffed inside, or simply turning the tank into a burning metal coffin outright.
Chimeras, meanwhile, worked their forty-millimeter autocannons, firing specialized alloy steel darts that punched clean holes through Ork armour plating. Not enough to destroy a tank outright, but sprayed across an Ork turret's optics and the gap between hull and turret ring, those darts crippled plenty of Ork guns entirely.
The instant the two sides opened fire, the first exchange alone wiped out twenty percent of the Ork tank column. Leman Russ fire was devastatingly precise, every round finding a target with pinpoint accuracy. Not surprising, really. Every Leman Russ came off a rigorous industrial production line, and every crewman had at least a secondary-school level education behind him.
The Orks, by comparison, ran on a chaotic pile of scavenged scrap plating welded into something roughly tank-shaped, ignition handled by giving the engine a good hard kick. Their shells were nothing more than a few steel pipes welded together, packed with as much explosive as would fit, and set off with a bit of Ork faith mixed in for good measure. No two Ork tanks on this entire planet looked remotely alike, since a Mekboy simply built whatever he could out of whatever scrap he had on hand at the time.
Every Ork tank also carried its own Mekboy's personal flourishes, weapon systems bolted on wherever there was space, resulting in absurd multi-turreted monstrosities with paper-thin armour stuffed full of firepower. These multi-gun contraptions fired shells of every caliber imaginable in every direction, most of them landing harmlessly in the sand.
The Orks put on an impressively loud show, cratering the desert with wasted shots, but the actual scoreboard read zero to twenty-one, and not in their favor.
Major Noa, serving as tank commander aboard her Leman Russ, shouted orders continuously from the cupola, marking targets for her gunner. Through her optics, she flagged an Ork tank sporting five separate turrets.
"That big one, blow it apart first!"
"Understood, ma'am!"
The gunner swung the main gun to bear, the hundred-and-twenty-millimeter cannon locking onto the sprawling Ork monstrosity, and fired an armour-piercing high-explosive round.
A thunderous boom, and the Ork tank simply came apart, one of its turrets spinning through the air before slamming into the sand like a grave marker.
"Good shot, soldier, direct hit! Now target this twin-cannon tank I've marked."
The gunner swung around toward the vehicle Noa had flagged, a heavily plated Ork tank running a single turret mounted with two linked cannons.
Those linked cannons suddenly opened fire, and a Chimera in Kian's column erupted into a fireball.
From her cupola, Noa had a clear view of the destroyed transport and roared, "That damned xenos gun's got real teeth! Don't let it get a second shot off, kill it, now!"
The gunner adjusted his aim, sighted the twin-cannon Ork tank, and slammed the firing pedal.
A deep boom, the Leman Russ rocking with the recoil, and an armour-piercing high-explosive round streaked out and slammed square into the twin-cannon tank's frontal plating. To everyone's surprise, the round didn't punch through at all, it simply glanced off.
"Ma'am, no penetration!"
The gunner shouted, tense, watching through his scope as the twin-cannon tank swung both its massive barrels around, now tracking their vehicle directly.
Noa roared, "That armour's too thick! Switch to solid AP, take out the turret! Move it, unless you'd like to die today!"
Under the pressure, the loader yanked out the round already halfway seated and slammed in a solid armour-piercing shell instead. The gunner stomped the pedal again.
Another deep boom, and a faster, higher-velocity solid round streaked out, slamming directly into the twin-cannon tank's turret. Solid AP carried far greater penetration than the high-explosive variant, and this time the round punched clean through, boring into the Ork tank's interior.
Inside the twin-cannon turret, a bewildering tangle of machinery and Ork crewmen packed the space tight. The solid round tore through the outer plating and shredded the turret's traverse mechanism, one gun's breech assembly, and two Ork crewmen outright. The turret's slow rotation ground to a halt entirely.
"Emperor be praised, ma'am! We disabled the xenos abomination's turret, the damn thing can't even swing anymore!"
The gunner shouted, thrilled. Noa let out a breath of relief and ordered, "Three more rounds. Something that size, don't give it a chance to come back online."
The gunner complied, loading three more solid AP rounds, punching four holes clean through the twin-cannon tank until it sat dead and motionless for good.
Back and forth the battle raged, gunfire thundering across the desert. Human losses stayed light, while the Ork tank force was already being ground down toward nothing. Ork tanks had no consistent build standard, some running thick plating, others thin, and the thinly armoured ones had already been wiped out in the opening exchange, leaving only the truly dangerous survivors still standing.
Noa was focused on picking her next target when she felt the ground itself lurch violently, followed immediately by an explosion that sounded like the sky itself tearing open.
BOOM!!!!
A truly monstrous blast erupted off the rear flank of Kian's armoured column.
The sudden explosion engulfed a Leman Russ outright and flipped two Chimeras from the shockwave alone. If Kian's column hadn't kept such wide spacing between vehicles, a blast that size could easily have taken out five tanks at once.
Noa's blood ran cold. "Where the hell did that come from?! Report, now!"
Another Leman Russ crew answered over the channel.
"Ten o'clock! Look at ten o'clock! That shot came from that Ork tank, Emperor above, what the hell is that thing?!"
A chorus of shocked voices flooded the comm. Noa swung her optics to ten o'clock, and the moment she saw it, she echoed the same disbelief.
A monstrous vehicle, over fifteen meters wide, at least thirty meters long, and standing a full ten meters tall. This Ork super-tank bristled with weapons of every size, but one dominated everything else: a short-barreled super-cannon mounted on top, easily over a thousand millimeters in caliber, built vaguely in the shape of an old-world siege mortar.
That was the weapon that had just made a Leman Russ vanish and left a crater big enough to stock a whale in.
Right now, twenty or thirty chattering Ork crewmen swarmed atop the land-cruiser, working a crane, trying to load a shell that looked far too large for any ground weapon into the breech.
This Ork-built land-cruiser ran an open-topped turret. Every time that monster gun fired, the muzzle blast and shock alone were enough to kill most of the thirty-odd Orks working it. Whenever that happened, more Orks would leap off the escort buggies trailing alongside and scramble up to take their place, reloading and firing again. Death by muzzle blast didn't scare Orks in the slightest. They just loved the thrill of firing something this massive, loved it enough to brawl each other over the chance to do it. To make crew rotation easier, the turret had been left fully open on the sides and rear, with only a single, absurdly thick armour plate covering the front.
Right now, a fresh crew had already climbed into the open turret and was working the crane, trying to muscle a thousand-millimeter shell into the breech, a slow, labor-intensive process.
Watching from a distance, Major Noa screamed at the top of her lungs.
"All units, listen to me! Target that Ork monstrosity! Don't let it fire again! Concentrate fire, destroy it, now!!"
Every other Leman Russ crew had already seen the thing and witnessed exactly what its first shot had done. Let it fire a second time, and they'd lose two or more tanks all over again.
Every tank gun on the field switched to armour-piercing and opened fire on the Ork super-tank. Not just cannons, either, heavy machine guns, bolt weapons, laser fire, all of it poured onto the monster in a torrential downpour, the entire battlefield's attention converging on one target instantly.
But the thing's armour was like a wall of pure despair, thick enough to feel suffocating just looking at it. Every weapon that struck it either left a tiny black scorch mark or bounced off outright, nothing punching through.
Sheltered behind that overwhelming plating, the Ork crew ignored the storm of fire entirely and kept grinding through the reload.
Noa's own tank fired three rounds of armour-piercing straight into that massive front shield, and none of them penetrated. She felt her panic rising, watching the Ork loading crew close to finishing while her own fire couldn't so much as scratch the thing.
Then something occurred to her, and she shouted to her loader.
"Forget AP, it won't punch through. High-explosive, we shake their crew apart instead!"
The loader yanked the half-loaded AP round back out and slammed in a red-tipped high-explosive shell instead. Another deep boom, and the round streaked out, slamming into the massive gun shield and detonating in a violent shockwave.
The shield itself, easily a meter thick, wouldn't have yielded to armour-piercing, let alone high-explosive. But the shockwave from the blast rolled straight over the open-topped crew behind it, the overpressure alone dropping most of them dead where they stood.
No way to damage the shield directly, sure, but an open turret meant the crew behind it took the full brunt of every high-explosive shockwave regardless, no cover to hide behind.
Seeing it work, Noa relayed the order to the whole column.
"All units, switch to high-explosive! Keep the pressure on that shield, nonstop, shake every last one of those bastards to death!"
Every Leman Russ complied instantly, switching rounds and pounding the massive gun shield without pause. Multiple high-explosive shells landed every second, clouds of smoke billowing up with each impact, the shockwaves battering the exposed crew behind the shield until they were coughing up blood.
But not every Ork there was unarmoured. Some wore quality power armour, sturdy enough to shrug off blast concussion. Those armoured Orks pushed forward to the gun position, threw the bodies of their concussed comrades overboard, and resumed the reload.
Thirty-odd power-armoured Orks worked the crane together, slowly muscling that thousand-millimeter shell into the breech.
Noa's stomach dropped. She shouted over the comm.
"Brace for impact! Brace for impact! We can't stop that thing from firing, we're taking this shot!"
Right then, her gunner suddenly shouted, startled.
"Ma'am, look! Right beside that thing, that's one of ours, that's a Chimera!"
Noa swung her optics around immediately, and sure enough, somehow, a lone Chimera had crept up right alongside the rear of the Ork super-tank, entirely unnoticed until now.
No idea how it had managed it, but the Chimera had slipped in behind the beast completely unseen. Beyond the Imperial aquila and a black sword painted on its hull, the crew had also stenciled, in bright pink, across the side:
MY FOREVER BELOVED NATASHA!
Circling around behind the Ork super-tank, the Chimera's forty-millimeter autocannon swung up, taking dead aim at the completely exposed Ork loading crew, still focused entirely on the crane.
RATATATATATAT!!!
The autocannon opened up, high-explosive rounds tearing into the open turret, a storm of shrapnel erupting across the crew.
The Orks, so absorbed in wrestling the massive shell into place, never saw it coming. The metal storm ripped through them from behind, shredding the whole crew in an instant.
Inside the Chimera's cockpit, Corporal Nyegorkin gripped the wheel, laughing wildly.
"My Natasha, my valkyrie, glory be yours! Commander, your turn now! Go on, go make your name!"
A hatch atop the Chimera's hull popped open, and Rudolphson climbed out. Standing on the roof of the armoured car, he looked up at the towering Ork monstrosity, weighed the melta bomb in his hand for a moment, let out a furious roar, and leapt straight off.
☆☆☆
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