Chapter 429: Tank Battle, Part 2
Rudolphson wore standard reactive power armour, a melta bomb strapped to his back.
He landed the jump clean, sticking his landing on the rear of the Ork super-tank. The hull was studded with handholds, and he scaled the ten-meter frame like a man climbing a cliff face.
His movement drew immediate attention. Like any proper land-cruiser, the thing was packed full of Orks, and a swarm of them climbed out of hatches across the hull, weapons raised, converging on him.
"WAAAAAGH!!"
An Ork crewman charged with an axe raised. Rudolphson brought up a bolt pistol in one hand and a bolt carbine in the other, firing both at once. The Ork exploded in a burst of gore and dropped, but more kept pouring out of the hatches behind him.
"WAAAAAAGH!!"
A dense wave of Orks swarmed toward him. Rudolphson kept advancing toward the turret while firing, bolt round after bolt round dropping Orks one after another, their bodies tumbling off the hull to be crushed under the massive treads below.
But the greenskins just kept coming, and before long both his pistol and carbine ran dry. He tossed the empty pistol aside and started reloading the carbine.
Mid-reload, an Ork closed the last few meters and swung a massive wrench straight down at his head. With no time to finish reloading, all Rudolphson could do was watch it fall, praying his helmet would hold.
Then a burst of gunfire tore through the air, a whip of flame lashing out from the flank of the super-tank and shredding the charging Ork mid-swing.
Rudolphson snapped his head toward the source. Below, tucked in tight against the hull, rode a Chimera, and up on the roof-mounted stubber sat Corporal Nyegorkin, laying down covering fire.
"Comrade! Keep moving! Blow this xenos abomination sky-high!"
Nyegorkin laughed and swung the stubber toward a fresh cluster of Orks scrambling out of a hatch, cutting them down where they stood before they'd even fully emerged.
"Thanks!"
Rudolphson called out and pushed forward under the cover fire, closing the distance to the turret. Inside, the compartment was a mess of Ork gore and a few wounded, groaning survivors, all courtesy of the earlier autocannon strafing run. The thousand-millimeter shell sat half-loaded in the breech.
He finished off the survivors with his carbine, then pulled the melta bomb off his back, armed it, and hurled it hard into the breech, right up against the loaded shell.
The timer began counting down. Rudolphson sprinted for the edge of the hull and leapt, landing cleanly on the Chimera's roof.
"Go, go, go!!!"
Nyegorkin whooped and dove back into the driver's hatch, kicking the brick off the gas pedal, shifting gears fast. The Chimera's engine roared and it lurched forward, tearing off at speed.
"Move, move! It's gonna blow!"
Rudolphson shouted, magnetic clamps locking him to the hull's roof. No time left to climb inside. The Chimera hit eighty kilometers an hour in short order, screaming across the sand like a startled hedgehog.
A handful of Ork buggies gave chase, drawn in by the commotion, spraying heavy fire that sparked off the transport's rear plating.
By the time the Chimera named Natasha had put seven or eight hundred meters behind it, the melta charge went off inside the Ork super-tank's turret.
Melta bombs were practically a conceptual weapon in the 40K universe, powerful enough to make even the Emperor Himself wince taking a hit.
The bomb detonated, melting straight through the thousand-millimeter shell's thick casing and setting off the propellant charge inside.
BOOM!!!!
The explosion looked like a small nuclear detonation, entirely engulfing the Ork super-tank in a single, catastrophic blast. A mushroom cloud shot skyward, and the ground itself shook like an earthquake.
The shockwave whipped up a fresh sandstorm across the desert, and every unit still fighting on either side found itself suddenly blind, visibility dropping to nothing.
Major Noa let out an ecstatic whoop.
"Got it! The xenos monstrosity is destroyed, hahahahaha! Quick, switch to thermal, wipe out every last one of these bastards!"
The sandstorm left both sides blind to each other, but the Leman Russ ran advanced optics capable of switching between multiple visual modes. The blinding storm actually worked in humanity's favor, letting them fight through thermal sights while the Orks were left effectively helpless. Their scrap-built tanks carried nowhere near that level of sensor gear, some didn't even have targeting optics at all, relying on crude mechanical sights, and got picked apart in the blind.
The panicked, blinded Orks fought for another five minutes or so before their entire tank force lay wrecked across the desert, the battle over.
From inside his transport, Kian called out. "All crews, report losses!"
The reports came in, and the tally was clear: three Chimeras lost, two Leman Russ lost, minor crew casualties. Losses stayed light overall.
Kian let out a breath of relief. Not bad. Could've been much worse.
"Bring the shuttles down, recover our wrecked vehicles, and resupply ammunition while you're at it."
Human wreckage couldn't be left behind for the Orks. Partly for salvage value, but more importantly, human vehicles carried advanced systems that, in Ork hands, could get reverse-engineered fast, thanks to a bit of Ork faith and a Mekboy's unpredictable genius. This sandstorm fight had left the Orks essentially unable to fight back at all, but hand them a working human tank to strip down, and pretty soon Ork tanks would have every capability human ones did.
Kian's order had barely gone out when a handful of shuttles descended from orbit, all from the Titan Temple. Waves of little red-robed militants rolled up in recovery vehicles, hauling fresh ammunition to resupply the column and dragging away the wrecked Leman Russ and Chimera hulls.
The red-robed troops also fanned out among the Ork wrecks, tossing incendiary charges that melted metal outright, leaving the Orks with nothing to salvage but pools of molten scrap. The Ork super-tank especially, its massive hull still sitting wrecked from the secondary detonation, got hit with several hundred incendiary charges, reduced entirely to a lake of molten metal spreading across the sand.
The resupply took roughly twenty minutes. Once the shuttles lifted off, Kian's column pushed forward once more.
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