Chapter 32: Orks Versus Daemons
Rosen monitored both directions simultaneously through Shared Awareness.
On the trailing force's end, Numbers 3 and 4 were moving their people through one of Deck Eighty's main corridors. Ahead of them, the Ork army's Waaagh roar and the churning noise of thousands of feet pressed forward like a wall of sound.
Back at the camp, the garrison Orks remained completely oblivious, still killing time with listless indifference.
Approximately three hours passed.
The first combat signals came through from the trailing force.
Number 3's perspective feed opened in Rosen's mind.
The deep decks.
This was where Iron Fang Grukk's army had found the daemons.
The corridor had changed.
A dark red substance had begun appearing on the walls — an organic film that looked as though it was seeping through from inside the metal itself.
The temperature was rising.
The warp's essence was bleeding into realspace. When the barrier thinned far enough, the material world began growing things that did not belong to it.
Iron Fang Grukk's army didn't care.
Six thousand greenskins howled and charged into the corridor where the warp had taken hold.
Then the daemons came.
Bloodletters. The lesser daemon warriors of Khorne.
In Number 3's feed, the first Bloodletter tore out of the right-hand wall.
Its body was covered in dark red skin — less like skin and more like seared muscle tissue, the surface webbed with cracks, and through those cracks seeped a dull orange-red glow.
Two curved horns swept upward from either side of its skull. Its eye sockets were empty, and from within them burned dark red fire.
In its hands it carried a Hellblade.
Dark red warpfire burned along the blade's edge — fire that never went out, fire that cut through flesh and tore through souls alike. The souls of anything killed by those blades were drawn into the steel, consigned forever to Khorne's brass halls.
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"
The Bloodletters screamed together.
The cry carried with it the raw psychic pressure of the warp. The dozen or so Gretchin at the very front of the column had no defence against that howl — it hit them at the soul level, and they shrieked and collapsed, bleeding from every opening in their faces, dropping boneless to the deck.
But six thousand greenskins gave as good as they got.
"WAAAAAAAAAGH!"
The two forces hit each other head-on in the corridor.
The first exchange was pure slaughter.
A Bloodletter's Hellblade swept in a single arc and opened up two Ork Boyz at the front of the charge, slicing them from left shoulder to right hip without resistance. The edges of the wounds burned with dark red warpfire that kept eating into the tissue around them, reducing it to char.
But three more Ork Boyz had already closed the distance, ignoring the falling bodies of their companions, screaming as they came.
One drove its crude cleaver down hard onto the Bloodletter's shoulder. The raw muscle force behind the blow was enough to bite through the daemon's dark red hide, and burning daemon blood sprayed outward.
The daemon swept its Hellblade back in a frenzy and took the Ork Boy's head off together with half its shoulder.
But the Orks had numbers in absolute terms.
When a dozen Ork Boyz threw themselves onto a single Bloodletter all at once with no regard for their lives, the accumulated brute force crushed the daemon to the deck. Scores of rusted cleavers came down on it like they were chopping meat.
"Everyone get out of the way!"
A Nob built like a heavy tank shouldered through the pack, planting one foot on a Bloodletter's chest. It raised its massive power cleaver overhead, the power field tearing at the air, and brought it down with everything behind it.
The flash of disrupted matter. The Bloodletter's materialised body, along with the arm it tried to raise in defence, was split cleanly in two.
The daemon had no time for any further struggle. Its severed remains began to collapse and dissolve within seconds, becoming a churning mass of dark red energy residue that some invisible force pulled back into the warp.
The chaos of the battlefield continued to escalate.
And in that chaos, the trailing force under Numbers 3 and 4 found their angles.
Twenty Death Warriors split into four five-man firing teams, each occupying a separate position.
They did not shoot into the mass.
They shot the half-dead Ork Boyz crawling on the ground trying to drag themselves back to their lines, and the wounded Bloodletters pulling away from the fight at the battle's edge.
Bang.
A bolt round from a hundred and fifty metres out connected precisely with an Ork Boy that was on all fours trying to crawl back to its side. The bolt detonated inside its skull and ended its last efforts.
The system notification reached Rosen's mind almost simultaneously.
Life Points +7.
Immediately after, Number 4 locked onto a Bloodletter working its way along the battle's flank to pull back from the fighting. Its left arm had been half-severed by a Nob's power cleaver, dark daemon blood pouring steadily from the stump.
Three bolt rounds struck its torso together.
Mass-reactive detonations inside the Bloodletter's body.
The effect was considerably less dramatic than the same treatment on an Ork.
Daemon bodies did not fully obey the physical laws of the material world. That dark red hide absorbed the majority of the bolts' shockwave energy. But three overlapping shots still blew a fist-sized hole through its chest cavity.
The Bloodletter let out an enraged roar and turned to look toward the direction of the shots.
Number 3 put the fourth and fifth rounds into it without hesitation.
Two bolts in sequence into the head. The first shattered its left horn. The second went into the hollow eye socket.
The Bloodletter's skull came apart in a flash of dark red light.
The headless body swayed for two seconds, then began to break down at an accelerating rate and came apart entirely.
The notification that appeared on Rosen's system panel was a welcome one.
Warp entity detected — Bloodletter, lesser daemon of Khorne. Eliminated.
Soul energy intercepted and purified.
Warp Energy +12.
Twelve Warp Energy from a single Bloodletter.
Twelve times the single point the Warp Imp had yielded.
The corner of Rosen's mouth turned up slightly.
The trailing force continued its methodical work at the battle's edge.
Every few dozen seconds the system pushed out another resource notification.
Life Points +7.
Warp Energy +12.
Life Points +7.
Life Points +25.
That last one was a Nob the Bloodletters had wrecked, finished off by a follow-up shot.
Warp Energy +12.
Life Points +7.
Warp Energy +12.
The notifications came in steadily, one after another, like coins dropping from a machine that didn't stop paying out.
Rosen was satisfied.
The trailing force's execution was clean. They held a consistent hundred to two hundred metres of separation, they only engaged isolated and wounded targets, and they never entered the sightlines of the main engagement. The Orks and daemons were too busy killing each other to give any attention to the occasional gunshot echoing from somewhere distant on their flank.
One direction was running like a tap.
Time to open the other one.