Chapter 467: Blackiron and Three-Arm
Meanwhile, tens of kilometers from the ruined hive, out in the open desert, an ejector seat lay smashed to pieces in the sand.
Our old friend, the ever-durable Blackiron, lay sprawled in the dirt, limbless, motionless, buried in scrap metal, half-cooked under the blazing sun and drifting somewhere between consciousness and delirium.
After who knew how long, badly dehydrated, Blackiron began hallucinating, or so it seemed, a shape approaching him, pulling him free of the wreckage. It was Three-Arm.
Three-Arm had come down about forty kilometers from Blackiron's landing site. He'd fitted a tracker onto Blackiron beforehand, and had spent half a day jury-rigging a scooter together to come retrieve his cup.
Seeing Blackiron half-conscious and severely dehydrated, Three-Arm poured a mouthful of chilled engine coolant down his throat.
As Blackiron's senses slowly returned, Three-Arm was already strapping him onto the back of the scooter.
Blackiron blinked, dazed for a moment, then erupted with fury.
"I lost?! I lost AGAIN?!"
Three-Arm's own expression wasn't much better.
"Yeah. You lost. I lost too. My big beautiful machine couldn't beat Old Fart Kian. Da bastard fought dirty. Sneaky, sneaky git."
Blackiron wheezed, gasping, helpless rage boiling over.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAH!! OLD FART KIAAAAN!!!"
Three-Arm finished lashing Blackiron to the back seat and drove off, heading north.
The scooter tore across the desert for hours, Blackiron howling the whole way, until he finally settled down enough to ask:
"Wot's next? We gotta get our revenge!!"
Three-Arm, still driving, answered:
"I'm startin' over. I'm buildin' a better machine, this time with even more WAAAGH weapons, and then we go back and kill dat shiny gold shrimp-tin-can machine.
I'm da best mech-builder there is. Da BEST!!"
Blackiron howled in agreement.
"Yeah!! Dat's right! We ain't cowards! Build a better machine! Go back and fight 'em! We start from scratch!!"
The scooter roared on, driving deeper into greenskin territory. Along the way, they crossed paths with countless fleeing greenskins, all of them scattered and running from the Astra Militarum's relentless pursuit.
These fleeing Orks, drawn instinctively to strength, fell in behind Three-Arm as they passed.
Within just a few days on the road, Three-Arm had accumulated a following of several thousand scrap vehicles and tens of thousands of greenskin followers.
But even as his numbers swelled, Three-Arm's expression only grew grimmer, because from what these followers were telling him, Ork-held territory was actively being torn apart by the human shrimp-tin-cans!
Blackiron led the growing convoy toward a ruined human hive over two hundred kilometers from the human front line, a site packed with Ork scrap and Gretchin, where he figured they could rebuild a war-forge from scratch and start over on building a new mech.
But when they arrived at the outskirts of the ruin, what they found instead was an Astra Militarum tank regiment, surrounding the ruin, laying down devastating fire, wiping out every Ork in sight.
Flame-troopers were torching the mushroom fields. Scrap heaps were being reduced to molten slag by high-temperature chemical incendiaries. The entire Ork stronghold was ablaze.
Three-Arm couldn't believe it. The human shrimp-tin-cans had actually pushed this far already.
In the brief moment he stood there stunned, the burning-city Astra Militarum spotted them, and several dozen Basilisk self-propelled artillery units swung their barrels around and opened fire with high-explosive shells.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!
The shells slammed into Three-Arm's convoy, blasting several dozen scrap vehicles apart.
Seeing the Astra Militarum tanks bearing down on him, Three-Arm didn't dare linger and bolted immediately.
They ran for hours, until nightfall finally fell and the human tank regiment lost their trail. Three-Arm's convoy settled down to rest among a stretch of desert dunes.
Three-Arm lit a campfire on the ground and set Blackiron down beside it. Both Orks, having now lost a second stronghold to the humans, sat there in a kind of dazed, lost silence.
As they stared blankly into the flames, an Ork Nob suddenly stood up and bellowed:
"I can't take dis anymore! I'm done runnin'! I'm gonna go find some human shrimp-tin-cans and have a proper scrap! Who's with me?!"
The surrounding Orks all turned to look at him, saying nothing, their eyes flicking, deliberately or not, toward Three-Arm sitting by the fire.
Three-Arm, though technically a Mek and not a frontline combat Ork, stood a full three meters tall, taller even than the average Ork Nob, which was exactly why so many Orks had fallen in behind him in the first place.
Seeing this open challenge to his authority, Three-Arm looked up at the Ork Nob.
"You leave, wot do da rest of us eat?"
Blackiron, the little toy on the ground, murmured along. "Yeah. Wot do we eat?"
The Ork Nob drew the choppa at his hip, fixing Three-Arm with a cold glare, then let out a roar and charged, launching a proper Ork-style coup attempt.
One minute later, the Ork Nob's head was mounted on a stick, roasting over the campfire, Three-Arm slowly rotating it to make sure the heat cooked it evenly.
"Dis'll do. Runnin' a big machine takes a lot outta da brain. Better eat plenty of it."
Three-Arm cracked the roasted skull open, stuffed half the brain into Blackiron's mouth, and ate the other half himself.
Blackiron wolfed his portion down in a few bites and asked:
"Wot now? Our second base got burned by da shrimp-tin-cans. We got no way to build a big machine now."
Three-Arm answered, unbothered:
"Den we go somewhere further out.
Human shrimp-tin-cans get tired easy. Their advance is slow.
Once da boyz recover from da morale shock of losin' da Gorkamorka, they'll push back, and things'll settle into a standoff with da humans again.
Dat's when we can build a proper big machine in peace."
Blackiron roared, frustrated:
"Why'd my Gork Walker feel half a beat slow?! If it wasn't, I coulda beat dat human shrimp-tin-can's poke-poke machine easy!!"
Three-Arm tossed away the empty, cracked skull.
"Because your mental power ain't strong enough. Ya need more psychic amplifiers."
He flicked one of the two magnetic coils still jutting from Blackiron's skull.
"Like dese. Dat's da fix."
Blackiron roared, "Then put more of 'em on me!! I gotta be faster than dat shrimp-tin-can's poke-poke machine!!"
Seeing Blackiron this fired up, something in Three-Arm stirred too.
"Right den! I know a place. Da mushroom-field scrap yard, dat's our real stronghold. Loads of Gretchin and scrap heaps out there. Human shrimp-tin-cans ain't never gonna reach dat far out.
Once we get there, I'll fit ya up with a whole rig of psychic amplifiers, build ya an even bigger machine, and den we go back together and get our revenge on dose shrimp-tin-cans!!"
Blackiron howled with excitement, so worked up he barely slept a wink that night.
But a few days later, when Three-Arm's convoy finally reached the mushroom-field scrap yard, what they found there instead was a fifteen-meter Grot-Kong, flanked by a swarm of Grot-suits, tearing through waves of Ork Boyz in a frenzied slaughter.
Ork heads littered the scrap heaps everywhere, strung up on steel pipes, and the Gretchin were shrieking and chattering with pure, unrestrained glee.
Three-Arm dropped straight to the ground, sitting down hard.
"...We're finished."
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