Chapter 435: Showdown with Blackiron, Part 3
The two giants locked into a grapple. Kian's squire-suit had a good meter and a half on Blackiron in height, but Blackiron's frame was thicker, stockier, built like a wrecking ball with legs.
The instant they slammed together, both sides had committed full force, so for the moment neither could budge the other.
Kian kept firing, chest-mounted twin heavy bolter and head-mounted rotary las-cannon both blazing, hoping to catch Blackiron with something.
But Blackiron was too cunning for that. The two of them were pressed body to body now, and the heavy bolter's barrels had been pinned down flat against Blackiron's chest plate, so every round just thudded into the dirt.
The las-cannon on Kian's head couldn't depress far enough to reach him either. Every shot sailed clean over and scorched the ground somewhere far behind.
Locked together, servos screaming and popping with strain, but in the short term neither side was budging the other an inch.
Blackiron's face was practically mashed against the squire-suit's metal skull. In a voice dripping with contempt, he growled:
"In a minute I'm gonna peel dat shiny gold tin can right off ya, drag ya out, and stomp ya flat!"
Kian's left mechanical arm had Blackiron's forearm in a death grip, straining with everything the bionic hand had, trying to snap it clean off.
Under the pressure, cracks spread across the armour plating on Blackiron's left forearm, but it wasn't quite enough to tear the whole limb free.
"That so? In a minute I'm going to snap both your arms off and rip you down the middle like a wishbone."
While the two of them traded threats, a crowd of Gretchin swarmed in around the edges of the raging battlefield.
Thousands of them, wrenches in hand, wrapped in scavenged sheet metal, looking about as dangerous as a junk drawer.
They were the Big Mek's assistants, really, barely armed, but like any Ork they were helplessly drawn to a fight this loud and this WAAAGH.
The little Gretchin scattered behind wreckage and shell craters, eyes wide and gleaming, all fixed on the two titans grappling in the center of the field.
"Da boss is gonna wreck Old Fart Kian! Go on, boss, go on!!"
"Wreck 'im! Wreck Old Fart Kian!!"
The Gretchin shrieked and chattered, their terror of Old Fart Kian and their giddy hope of watching him get flattened braiding together into a surging tide of WAAAGH energy, pouring straight into Blackiron.
Somehow, through whatever cosmic accounting governs this sort of thing, the WAAAGH output from a few thousand screaming Gretchin swelled to something like the equivalent of tens of thousands of full-grown Ork Boyz.
Blackiron felt his strength surge again, let out a booming laugh, and started shoving Kian backward.
Kian's eyes went wide. How the hell was this thing getting stronger, strong enough to actually push a squire-suit off its feet?
"WAAAAAGH HA HA HA, witness me! Bear witness!!"
Blackiron was riding a high, drunk on the rush of raw power. It had been a long time since he'd felt a spike like this.
That was just how Orks worked. The harder the fight, the bigger and stronger they got.
But go too long without a scrap, and the growth stalled out. Might even reverse.
In the span of a few seconds, Kian had already been shoved back more than fifty meters, and goddammit, right behind him was the mouth of the great mineshaft.
A drop of over 1,200 meters. The suit would smash apart on impact, and the pilot inside would be jellied by the shock alone.
"Damn it! And I still owe them the Laxeem Rite!"
Kian swore, wanting to call for backup, but his whole line was on the verge of collapse, everyone pouring everything they had into suppressive fire. Nobody could spare a hand for him.
The one remaining squire-suit on his side was being mobbed by three Ork Dreadnoughts. If those wrecks had actually been carrying powered weapons, it would already be scrap.
Right now Blackiron had a cheering section of thousands feeding him an endless stream of WAAAGH energy, and Kian was alone, being walked steadily backward toward the pit.
Shoved back, step after step, closer and closer to the edge, Kian bellowed out toward the distant crowd of Gretchin through the suit's external vox:
"You little runts, once I'm done with your boss, I'm coming for every last one of you, and I'm stomping you flat one at a time!!"
His threat rolled out across the whole battlefield. The cheering Gretchin froze mid-cheer, and a thick wave of dread rippled through the crowd.
That fear curdled the WAAAGH energy they were feeding into Blackiron, and it started to sputter. Blackiron's push stalled, and the two of them locked up again, dead even.
But Blackiron was sharp. He knew exactly what Kian was doing, and let out a furious roar:
"Don't ya listen to Old Fart Kian, ya lot! I'm gonna cut 'im up into eight pieces right now, and after today ain't nobody ever gonna touch my Gretchin again!
Once I'm done carvin' up Old Fart Kian, I'll have da Big Mek build every single one of ya a killa-can, one each!!"
The Gretchin had already gone quiet, their WAAAGH output cut off cold.
But the moment they heard Blackiron's promise, the excitement came roaring right back.
"Yeah! Get 'im, boss! Kill Old Fart Kian!"
"Don't let 'im off easy! Cut 'im up, eight pieces, eight pieces!!"
"I want a killa-can! I want a big one, a real WAAAGH one!!"
The Gretchin worked themselves back into a frenzy, and the WAAAGH energy came flooding back into Blackiron, who once again started forcing Kian back toward the pit.
He meant to shove him right over the edge and let gravity finish the job.
But just then, Kian let out a short, mocking laugh.
"Cooldown's done."
Blackiron blinked, confused. "Wot's done?"
"This."
The mechanical arm Kian had been keeping hidden behind his back, the one fitted with the plasma cannon, swung around.
Under Blackiron's stunned gaze, both arms carrying the triple-linked plasma cannons opened up in a single volley, aimed straight at the shrieking crowd of Gretchin in the distance.
Six blue flares of superheated plasma slammed into the Gretchin swarm and detonated in a chain of violent blasts.
The Gretchin had no armour to speak of. The heat from the blue flares had nowhere to go but into them.
Most of them never had time to react before they were consumed, turning instantly into burning torches.
Thousands of Gretchin, reduced in an instant to six clusters of charred, smoking husks by the plasma flares.
The ones far enough away to escape the blast stared, eyes bulging, and bolted, screaming, scattering to spread word of Old Fart Kian's terror across the battlefield, and no more WAAAGH energy came Blackiron's way.
Blackiron felt his strength draining fast, and for the first time, a flicker of real panic set in.
Kian felt that panic land, and threw everything the squire-suit had into the push, driving Blackiron backward.
He tried angling both plasma-cannon arms to fire straight into Blackiron, but their faces were still pressed together, and the cannons were too bulky to line up a shot at this range.
So Kian adjusted the angle as best he could and put several rounds of blue flare into the ground behind Blackiron's backside instead.
The angle wasn't steep enough, so the shots traveled a good fifty meters before hitting dirt and detonating.
Wave after wave of shockwave and heat rolled back toward the two of them.
Kian didn't care. The squire-suit was adamantium plate. A little heat wasn't going to bother it.
Blackiron, on the other hand, was in agony. He could feel the heat rolling across his back in sheets, his armour cooking from the outside in.
You could have cracked an egg on Blackiron's back plate right about then and had it fried in seconds.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!
Kian waited a few seconds for the plasma cannons to vent their heat, then let off another six blue orbs.
These six sailed clean over Blackiron and detonated on the ground fifty meters past him, unleashing another string of scorching shockwaves.
This time the heat washed straight across Blackiron's back plating, and smoke started curling up from it. Rubber fittings and cloth strapping began to melt and catch.
Blackiron finally broke and screamed, feeling like someone had pressed a burning iron slab flat against his back and was slow-roasting him alive.
The pain was bad enough that his momentum started to falter.
For an Ork, momentum was everything. Lose it, and your combat power drops by half, just like that.
Kian could feel Blackiron starting to fold, and drove forward hard, shoving him back.
Blackiron staggered, howling, and then did something Kian genuinely did not see coming: he lowered his bare, helmetless head and rammed it straight into the squire-suit.
An Ork skull was never going to out-harden adamantium. A few headbutts later, Blackiron was left dazed and reeling, and the squire-suit's plating didn't have so much as a scratch.
That gave Kian an idea. He immediately drove the squire-suit's own iron skull forward and headbutted Blackiron right back.
CRACK!
First hit. Blackiron: who am I? Where am I?
CRACK!
Second hit. Blackiron's jaw went crooked, his nose caved in, and two of his front teeth snapped off.
CRACK!
Third hit. Blackiron's cheekbone shattered outright, one side of his face collapsing into a hollow, and one of his eyeballs actually popped loose.
With a final, thunderous impact, Blackiron's head could no longer take the vertigo, and he went down flat on the ground.
Kian pressed the advantage, driving a knee down into Blackiron's chest to pin him where he lay.
Then both mechanical arms seized the arm still fitted with the powered claw and wrenched, hard.
There was a shriek of twisting metal, the wet tear of muscle, and the crack of bone giving way, and the massive arm came clean off, ripped away by Kian's own two hands.
The vertigo was instantly burned away by raw pain, and Blackiron let out a scream of pure terror.
He swung his one remaining good hand and started pounding uselessly on the mechanical leg pinning him down.
Kian tossed the severed claw aside, grabbed the flailing hand, and did the same to it, tearing it off just like the first.
With both arms gone, all Blackiron had left was helpless rage.
Kian glanced over at what was left of Apothecary Desai, tossed aside on the ground like garbage, torn in two, and said, low and vicious:
"One thing about me. I follow through."
Both mechanical arms plunged into Blackiron's belly, found the seams in his armour, and started tearing.
Ork power armour was crude work even at Blackiron's tier, and there were always gaps to find.
Kian's mechanical fingers dug into those seams and ripped, peeling away slab after slab of plating until Blackiron's gut was laid bare.
Then the mechanical hand drove straight in, punching clean through skin, muscle, and organ, and closed around his spine.
Blackiron let out the loudest scream of the entire fight. He wanted to fight back. There was nothing left in him to fight with.
Kian kept his grip on that spine and pulled, hard. A wet crackle of snapping bone, and Blackiron's spine came apart in his hand.
From there Kian's mechanical hands went to work, digging and tearing, peeling flesh and armour apart until Blackiron had been torn bodily in two.
The legs stayed on the ground. The armless upper half, limp as a broken doll, was hoisted high into the air by Kian.
"Well then, xenos filth. Time to meet your end."
Blackiron was past ruined at this point, his face caved in, one eye hanging loose, unable to form words, only whimpering, wet, wordless sounds.
Kian held the ruined torso up in one hand, cocked the other into a fist, and swung it down at his head with everything he had.
This was it. Once Blackiron died, every Ork on this world would spiral into panic, and humanity would finally have room to start clawing back what they'd lost.
The thought sped the punch up even further, meant to burst that skull open for good.
But right then, Kian's whole body seized, a jolt like touching a live wire, and he choked out a strangled, gagging cough.
Something had hit him, from some direction he never saw coming, hard enough to roll his eyes back in his head, and it severed the neural link between his body and the squire-suit outright.
The mechanical crown on his head burned out in a shower of electric sparks.
Kian went limp, blacked out cold in the cockpit.
With no pilot at the controls, the gold squire-suit's grip went slack, and Blackiron's ruined body dropped to the ground.
The squire-suit swayed, then toppled over onto its side, its mechanical legs twitching every so often.
Both of them down. Only now did the mystery attacker who'd struck Kian finally step out of hiding.
From behind the wreck of an Ork Dreadnought, a Big Mek climbed out.
Several crude mechanical arms sprouted from his back, his eyes had been swapped out for bionic ones, and in his hands he carried a very unusual weapon.
A closer look revealed it to be a Mechanicus arc rifle, but jury-rigged into a ten-barrel array.
Ten arc rifles, wired together in a circular mount by the Big Mek, forming a makeshift arc cannon.
That was what he'd just used to blindside Kian, the shot that left him choking and gagging on the floor of the cockpit.
The arc cannon had fired exactly once, and every component inside it was already fried, smoke pouring out.
The Big Mek hurriedly chucked it aside, and it hit the ground and went off with a boom like a fragmentation grenade.
Then he dusted off his hands, walked over, and stood above what was left of Blackiron.
Blackiron was already dying, both arms gone, lower body severed, his head cracked open by that headbutting exchange. Even an Ork's iron constitution couldn't carry him through this.
The Big Mek clicked his tongue a few times and said:
"Shame to let ya die out here. Big brain like dat, ya was built fer pilotin' somethin' big.
I'm gonna build ya a big ol' walker, stuff ya inside as da pilot. Gonna be da most WAAAGH Big Mek on dis whole rock!!"
With that, he slung what was left of Blackiron over one shoulder and shambled off, vanishing deep into the battlefield.
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