"Siss was a useless git, couldn't even beat a bug. He deserved to die!"
"Too right, too right!" a Bad Moons Boy agreed, cracking a whip in excitement.
"Wait till Boss Chandler finishes off dis bug, den we charge in and chop dose Humies into meat paste!"
"And scrap dere tanks to build new mechs!"
The Red Boyz of the Evil Sunz Clan revved their space bikes, circling the Gargant and shouting as they rode:
"Red wuns go fasta! Boss Chandler's spinnin' da fastest, so Boss Chandler's da Waaagh!-iest!"
Following Siss's death, a portion of the Orks—those particularly skilled at sensing which way the wind was blowing—immediately joined Chandler's camp. To them, it didn't matter who the boss was, as long as they were Waaagh! enough.
The smoke gradually cleared, and Sarah stood up from the wreckage of the burning armored transport. She flexed her six slightly numb limbs, the cracks on her carapace healing at a visible rate under her powerful regenerative abilities. Her cold vertical pupils locked onto the high-speed rotating Gargant, her expression turning solemn for the first time.
The power of that last strike had far exceeded her expectations. The current "Gargant Top" possessed not only the mechanical strength of the mecha itself but also the collective concentrated will of hundreds of millions of Orks on Karl-2.
But Sarah didn't care. She launched another charge. This time, she tried to bypass the morning star's defensive circle from the right to attack the hydraulic leg joints of the Gargant. However, the Gargant's rotation was simply too fast. No matter which direction she attacked from, she was repelled by the spinning morning star. She attempted seven consecutive strikes, each ending in failure. The best result was a three-meter-long, half-meter-deep gash on the Gargant's armor—nothing more than a scratch for a thirty-meter-tall machine.
Raynor stood on the turret of the Coldfront Super-Heavy Tank, his brow furrowing slightly. He toyed with an empty bolter shell casing, his eyes fixed on the rotating iron giant. He, too, had underestimated the power of this ultimate mecha. To build it, Chandler had nearly exhausted the years of savings of the Deathskulls Clan, even going so far as to scrap his own new flagship for materials. This machine condensed the wisdom of every Big Mek in the Deathskulls on Karl-2 and the imagination of countless Orks regarding the "strongest war machine."
"No... that's not right," Raynor muttered to himself, stopping his hands. "The way he is now, he's clearly operating it unconsciously. Maybe the mecha's rotation has nothing to do with Chandler at all?"
His eyes suddenly lit up as an absurd thought emerged in his mind. Since he couldn't kill Chandler inside or break through the spinning wall of steel, he might as well stop the damn top first.
"Sarah!" Raynor communicated through the mental link. "Stop charging! He's just a giant top now. Whip him in the opposite direction of his rotation. Use force to neutralize his speed and whip him to a halt."
"Understood."
Sarah immediately stopped her charge. She took a deep breath, her brain-organs emitting a blinding blue light pulse as she concentrated all her psychic energy into her right hand. Scattered mechanical debris and scrap metal were drawn by an invisible force, swirling toward her palm. Metal fragments twisted and fused. In a few seconds, a massive metal whip—one hundred and twenty meters long and over one point two meters in diameter—formed in her hand. A layer of pale purple psychic energy coated the surface.
Sarah named it the "Tyranid Whip." It was the perfect fusion of the Hive Mind's will and physical might.
Sarah gripped the whip and swung her arm back. Then, using all her strength, she lashed out in the opposite direction of the Gargant's rotation.
CRACK!!!
The sharp, thunderous sound of the whip echoed through the entire core area. Holding the whip like an angry deity punishing a defiant sinner, Sarah struck. The whip howled through the air and slammed into the side of the Gargant. The tip of the whip caused a sonic boom upon contact.
The massive impact caused the Gargant's rotation to jerk, the entire chassis tilting several degrees to the left. Although the whip was quickly repelled by the centrifugal force and Sarah was knocked back three steps by the recoil, her heightened senses detected that the Gargant's rotation had slowed by at least one-thousandth.
It worked!
Sarah's eyes brightened. She swung the Tyranid Whip again and again, strike after precise strike against the direction of the rotation.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Rhythmic lashes rang out in the core area, landing relentlessly on the Gargant's body. Every strike caused the mecha to tilt and its speed to drop. Any Ork who tried to approach and stop Sarah was casually whipped into meat paste. The purple whip danced in the air, leaving a trail of flying flesh and shattered bone. No one dared stand in its path.
Across the rest of the battlefield, the Orks had fallen into a massive disadvantage. On one side, the well-equipped Brevis Crusade was conducting a one-sided slaughter of the fleeing Orks. The treads of the Leman Russ tanks ground through corpses, and the Hellhound tanks spewed lethal flames from their massive promethium tanks. The veterans of the Crusade harvested the lives of the Boyz without fatigue.
Outside the core area, the Orks who realized something was wrong and tried to return to reinforce were intercepted not only by the human fleet but also by those damn bugs! They had landed in a massive wave from a different direction, their numbers more than ten times greater than before. With their defensive facilities destroyed, the Orks fell into a bitter struggle, unable to return to the core.
Meanwhile, the strongest and most feared war boss of Karl-2, Iron-Claw Chandler, was in the central square of the core area, piloting his ultimate mecha—the pinnacle of his life's work. He was being whipped like a child's toy top by a giant blue-and-white bug.
And after being whipped for so long, Chandler showed no sign of resistance. Not only were there no counterattacks, but there wasn't even a single curse.
Gradually, the fanatical cheers of the Orks died down. Every Ork stared blankly at the bizarre scene in the central square, their expressions shifting from excitement to confusion, then to embarrassment, and finally to an unmaskable disdain.
"Uh, wot's Boss Chandler doin'?" a Snakebites Boy asked softly, scratching his head. "Why ain't he fightin' back? Is he dizzy from all dat spinnin'?"
"Who knows..." a Blood Axe Boy nearby sneered. "Maybe he's chargin' a big move? Maybe if he spins ten thousand times, he releases a world-endin' blast?"
"Big move me foot! He's been whipped over five hundred times. Any more and he'll be scrap metal!"
"Could it be... dat Boss Chandler really is dizzy?"
"Shhh! Keep it down! Do ya wanna get chopped by da Deathskulls?"
An exceptionally bold Grot, hiding behind a pile of rubble, began to hum a small tune:
"I heard ya say~"
The Grots nearby blinked and instinctively followed:
"Aye, wot's dat den?"
"Look at da top in da outside fight~"
"Ah, still lookin' at da top, eh?"
"A pile of dung by da road, gettin' whipped like a top by a bug~"
The tune was simple and the lyrics blunt, striking a chord with every Ork present. Soon, the song spread like a virus through the Greenskin ranks. It started with the Grots and the Boyz at the bottom, then moved to the regular Big Boyz, and finally, even the Deathskulls bodyguards couldn't help but hum it secretly.
As it spread, the lyrics became richer and meaner:
"Git-brained Chandler, everyone's stompin' yer head~"
"No kills, just a temper, gettin' beaten like a ball instead~"
As the song spread, the Waaagh! field that had been concentrated on the Gargant thinned at a visible rate. The faith of the Orks was just that simple, brutal, and pragmatic. If you could fight and make them feel Waaagh!, they would worship you like a god and willingly die for you. But if you couldn't fight—if you just spun in circles and got whipped like a top by a bug—then you were a "git," a joke, and no one would worship or work for you anymore.
Without the support of faith, the Gargant's rotation slowed faster and faster. From a blur that was hard to track, it became slow enough to follow with the naked eye. The chassis began to wobble, becoming increasingly unstable until it looked ready to topple at any moment.
Crack!
Finally, with Sarah's last heavy lash, the Gargant jerked to a sudden halt. A bone-grinding screech of metal friction followed. It could no longer maintain its tilted balance and slammed into the ground with a massive BOOM. Once the rotation stopped, its weapons fell silent. The spinning morning star hit the deck with a heavy thud.
The entire core area fell into a heavy silence. Every Ork lowered their head, not daring to look toward the central hall. It was embarrassing—beyond embarrassing. Their ultimate mecha and their strongest Warboss had actually been whipped to a standstill by a bug like a common toy. If word of this spread, the Orks of Karl-2 would become the laughingstock of the sector.
Sarah tossed aside the Tyranid Whip, which had been shortened by nearly a third, and walked toward the stationary Gargant. She didn't move fast, but the surrounding Orks retreated in waves; not a single soul dared to block her path. She raised her forelimbs, her sharp chitinous blades gleaming coldly as she approached the cockpit.
As Raynor had surmised, once the rotation stopped, the mecha lost all mobility.
SKREEEE-CHAAA!!!
With a piercing sound of tearing metal, Sarah peeled open the half-meter-thick cockpit armor of the Gargant like she was opening a tin can. The twisted metal plates folded back to reveal a chaotic, messy interior. She reached in and hauled Chandler out by the scruff of his neck, lifting him like a wet kitten.
At this moment, Chandler had none of the majesty of a Karl-2 Warboss left. He was covered in engine oil, dust, and his own vomit; his face was smeared with drying tears and snot. His physique had shrunk by a full size, making his once-imposing power armor look ill-fitting and loose. His eyes were tightly shut, and he remained motionless, clearly in a deep coma.
Even as Sarah lifted him, he muttered incoherently in his delirium: "Stop spinnin', Machine Spirit Big Bro... I was wrong... Me head's so dizzy..."
As it turned out, ten minutes into the rotation, Chandler's heart had already turned green with regret. While this Gargant was only two percent away from completion, it was still a prototype. During the mid-stages of construction, Chandler had put all his energy and resources into armor thickness and firepower, completely ignoring basic maneuverability and man-machine integration.
The first time he sat in the cockpit for a test drive, he discovered to his horror that the mecha's "Machine Spirit" was terrifyingly strong. It was a six-meter-tall black Ork shadow that radiated a violent aura of destruction. Its mind held only one thought: battle, endless battle. Even facing Chandler, the master of the mecha, it felt only the urge to fight.
Chandler had tried his best to suppress it with his Waaagh! field, but he couldn't overpower it. He had spent his time frantically trying to compensate for the lack of control and weakening the spirit's intensity. He only emerged from seclusion to check why the Waaagh! was weakening once he could barely manage basic movements under constant suppression.
This was also why he hadn't dared to duel Siss for too long; he was afraid the Machine Spirit would knock him unconscious. But in a moment of reckless heat, he had activated the rotation mode. Once the power core overloaded, the violent Machine Spirit broke free from its suppression and woke up. Meanwhile, Chandler himself was suffering from extreme dizziness, nausea, and acid reflux due to the high-speed spinning.
His state declined while the spirit's rose; he was simply no match for it. After a few mental rounds, he had been knocked out cold by the "elbow" of his own mecha's spirit. He knew nothing of what happened afterward—Siss's death, the human invasion, or being whipped like a top by a bug.
Chandler let out a massive yawn and slowly opened his eyes. He rubbed his throbbing head and said groggily, "Where's me? Why's da Gargant stopped? Did I kill all dem Humies?"
He looked up and met the terrifying Tyranid face of Sarah. Their eyes locked. The confusion on Chandler's face froze. He tried to resist, but he found his strength had withered away. Sarah casually tossed him, and he went flying through the air.
"Damned bug! Wot are ya doin' here?!" He struggled to his feet and ran back toward the Gargant. But without the empowerment of the Waaagh! field, that once-mighty ultimate machine was now just a pile of cold scrap metal. It gave no response.
Sarah gave him no chance for further nonsense. She blurred in front of Chandler, and the chitinous blades in her hands swung down with brutal force.
SHLICE!
There was no suspense. This ambitious Big Mek, who had dominated Karl-2 and dreamed of replacing Ragnar as the strongest Warboss in the Dolido sector, was decapitated before he could even finish a final word. Green Ork blood sprayed across the floor.
The moment Chandler died, the thick Waaagh! field looming over Karl-2 began to recede rapidly like a falling tide. The Ork order, which had been barely maintained by Chandler's hegemony and brute force, collapsed instantly. The combat power and fighting will of every Ork plummeted. They no longer had the heart to fight the Crusade fleet; only one thought remained in their minds: escape.
At the same time, internal strife among the Orks escalated to an irreversible level. Without a common leader, every clan wanted to seize the position of the new Warboss of Karl-2. They stopped attacking humans and instead turned on each other, fighting bloodily over insignificant resources and territory.
But Raynor would not give them that chance.
"All forces advance! Scour Karl-2 completely! Leave no one alive!" Raynor raised the Sword of Valennya and issued the final command for the general offensive.
The Brevis Crusade charged like tigers descending a mountain. Gaus commanded the heavy artillery units to conduct carpet bombing on areas where Orks were clustered. Junior officers of the Genestealer Cult led assault squads, clearing the remaining enemies from every corridor. Fighters circled in the air, harvesting fleeing Orks with their mounted weapons. This was no longer a war; it was a systematic, one-sided slaughter.
And at the moment of Chandler's death, Sarah signaled the swarm for a total withdrawal. All Tyranids lurking across Karl-2 vanished into the shadows, hiding away. They would wait for the right moment to emerge and reclaim the biomass of the entire space station.
Raynor did not want too many people to know about his relationship with the Tyranids yet. This was his greatest secret and his ultimate trump card for survival in the dark and desperate 41st Millennium.