Chapter 33: Clearing Out the Iron Fang Nest
Rosen shifted his attention back toward the camp.
"Little Wrench."
"Here! Big humie boss!" Little Wrench stuck half its head out from behind Number 1's leg.
"Come here." Rosen pointed at the nearest metal bulkhead. "Can you use percussion signals to draw the Ork Boyz out of the camp?"
Little Wrench blinked its large eyes.
"Draw them out?"
"Send a false signal. Make the garrison think there's something worth coming out to see."
Little Wrench tilted its head and thought for a moment.
Then its mouth split open, showing a row of small sharp teeth.
The grin carried a quality that was purely, unself-consciously malicious in a way that only greenskins could manage.
"Little Wrench knows how to draw them!"
It picked up a section of metal pipe from the floor and trotted over to the nearest bulkhead.
Then it began striking the metal in a very specific rhythm.
Dong... dong dong... dong dong dong... dong...
Dong dong... dong... dong dong dong dong...
Rosen couldn't decode the signal, but judging by the gleeful expression on Little Wrench's face, whatever it was sending wasn't a polite invitation.
Sure enough, less than three minutes later.
Through his scout Death Warriors' feeds, Rosen watched a disturbance develop at the northern access points of the camp.
A crowd of Ork Boyz shoved their way out of the camp entrance.
Behind them came over a hundred screaming Gretchin.
The green mass poured directly into Rosen's prepared kill zone.
"Three... two... one."
Boom. Boom boom. Boom boom boom.
Six directional mines and four tripwire grenades detonated almost simultaneously.
In an enclosed corridor, the effect was devastating.
The dozen or so Ork Boyz at the front were shredded by the pre-fragmented casings. The Gretchin mass behind them was ploughed through repeatedly by shockwave and metal fragments.
Before the smoke had cleared, Rosen's voice reached every Death Warrior through Shared Awareness.
"Open fire."
Every Death Warrior behind cover on both sides pulled their triggers at the same moment.
Boltguns, lasguns, heavy boltguns — three different calibres wove a wall of fire across the narrow corridor that left no gap.
The Ork Boyz who had survived the initial blasts hadn't worked out what was happening before the overlapping fire from two directions tore into them.
A few of the faster ones tried to turn and run, but the corridor was already mostly blocked by rubble and bodies from the blasts.
They were trapped in the kill zone.
The entire ambush lasted under a minute.
More than forty Ork Boyz and over a hundred Gretchin, all of them gone.
Life Points +337.
Rosen looked at the number and made the decision immediately.
"Summon three Death Warriors."
Cost: 300 Life Points. 3 cubic metres of Refined Steel.
Three new Catachan soldiers materialised.
"Loyalty!"
Rosen pulled weapons from the Armoury and armed them quickly.
"Attach to the main assault force. Keep up."
His main assault force had just gone from fifty to fifty-three.
The more the better.
"All elements, advance on the camp."
Fifty-three Death Warriors in combat formation pushed simultaneously from three directions against the Iron Fang tribe's base.
Inside the camp, the garrison had collapsed into chaos.
The chain detonations and sustained gunfire told them something had gone wrong, but Orks yanked out of sleep and idleness needed time to organise any kind of response — and Rosen had no intention of giving them any.
Number 1 led fifteen men through the main northern entrance.
They blew a breach in the perimeter wall at the entrance point — two high-explosive grenades brought down a section of the barrier built from scrap iron and salvaged armour plate — and fifteen Death Warriors poured through in a wedge formation.
Number 7 led fifteen men in through a cargo transit access point on the camp's northeast side.
Number 7 had flagged that entrance as a weak point during the earlier reconnaissance.
Rosen personally led the remaining twenty-three in from the northwest to complete the encirclement.
Three assault columns hit the camp simultaneously.
The interior was in worse shape than Rosen had anticipated.
A third of the garrison Ork Boyz were still inside their shelters.
Jolted awake by the gunfire and explosions, they came scrambling out in various states of disarray — some without weapons, others hauling a cleaver and catching it on the shelter doorframe on the way through.
The Gretchin were in full panic.
They scattered in every direction with no purpose — some running north, straight into Number 1's column coming in from the north; some running east, directly into Number 7's column pushing in from the northeast; some trying to crouch in place and play dead, though playing dead requires a degree of discipline and patience entirely beyond a Gretchin's capabilities, and they would typically last no more than three seconds before terror forced them back to their feet and screaming.
When Rosen's column cut in from the northwest, it ran into a group of roughly thirty Ork Boyz putting up a hasty defence.
"Pin them front, flank both sides."
Ten Death Warriors on the centre face laid down suppressing fire that kept the Ork Boyz occupied.
Bolts and las-beams formed a moving curtain of fire down the narrow camp corridor.
The Ork Boyz raised their scrap iron shields and tried to push through it, but at that volume of fire, a scrap iron shield offered about as much protection as paper.
Two flanking elements of six men each threaded through the shelter rows and came up on the Ork Boyz from behind and to the sides.
The moment the crossfire converged, the fight was finished.
Thirty Ork Boyz, all down in under twenty seconds.
Three assault columns drove into the camp like three knives going in at the same time.
The garrison Ork Boyz were split, surrounded, and eliminated. No unified command. No effective communication. Most of them hadn't had time to put on their armour.
The last Ork Boy's skull came apart under a bolt round.
Green blood spattered across Rosen's boots.
He looked down, wiped them twice on the side of an Ork's head, then looked around.
The Iron Fang tribe's camp was quiet now, quiet the way a metal tomb is quiet.
Bodies of Orks and Gretchin covered the floor.
A few shelters were still burning — somewhere in the fighting a las-bolt had caught a pile of oilcloth and scrap timber, and orange fire flickered in the dim compartment.
"Sweep complete. No active targets across the entire area." Number 1 reported through Shared Awareness.
Rosen nodded.
Now came the part that actually mattered.
"All personnel. Strip the camp."
Fifty-three Death Warriors began working through the Iron Fang tribe's base systematically, checking every corner.
The first find was in the supply area on the camp's eastern side.
Rosen looked at it directly, the same cache he had observed at long range through his scouts' feeds during the reconnaissance.
Dozens of standard Imperial ammunition crates.
They were stacked in loose piles on the floor. Some of the lids had been wrenched open by greenskins, and the contents were scattered. But most of the ammunition was in serviceable condition — Imperial military-grade sealing held up even after greenskin handling, and the contents were still functional.
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