Chapter 468: Rising From the Ashes!
"From this day forward, Great Gretchin-ism is officially established!!"
Across the scrap heaps, Gretchin fired wildly on the surrounding Ork Boyz in every direction.
A dozen or so Gretchin operated a Grot Big Gun, firing round after round, cutting down Ork Boyz one after another.
Elsewhere, two or three Gretchin at a time drove Grot-suits converted from captured Ork power armour, swinging oversized choppas or sluggas at their enemies.
Others rode a kind of miniature tankette, roughly the size of a serving platter, hauling a comically oversized cannon on its back.
Every time it fired, the recoil sent the little tankette skidding backward a dozen or so meters, and sometimes it flipped over entirely from the force.
But the massive high-explosive rounds it fired could blast a dozen Ork Boyz clean off their feet in an instant.
The most eye-catching sight on the battlefield, though, was the towering, sixteen-meter Grot-Kong standing dead center of it all.
Grot-Kong was armoured head to toe in heavy plate, with gun emplacements bristling from every gap in its hull, each manned by a Gretchin operator working a heavy machine gun or small cannon.
The countless machine guns and cannons covering its frame poured out a dense, unrelenting hail of fire, mowing down distant Ork Boyz in sweeping rows.
But that was just point-defense. Grot-Kong carried four terrifying primary weapons besides.
First was its head, a mechanical Gretchin face, complete with pointed ears, an oversized nose, and a gaping, blood-red mouth.
Since Grot Marjack was famed among the Gretchin as the cunning, deceitful god who'd secretly whispered lies into the ears of Gork and Mork, egging the two of them into perpetual conflict, the Gretchin firmly believed his mouth held magical power. So they'd fitted Grot-Kong's mouth with a massive flame projector.
This flamer could unleash a promethium fire stream over six or seven hundred meters long, hot enough to melt steel outright.
At that very moment, a swarm of Ork Boyz with heavy guns opened fire on Grot-Kong. In response, its mouth erupted with a terrifying pillar of flame, sweeping in one continuous arc from left to right, carving a two-hundred-plus-meter line of fire straight across the battlefield.
Every Ork caught in the promethium blaze had their skin split open and their bones cooked crisp in an instant, collapsing into charred, screaming husks.
The second major weapon was mounted on Grot-Kong's right hand, an enormous combat knife forged from adamantium, capable of punching straight through the Gorkamorka Walker's armour in a single strike.
Grot-Kong's left hand carried something even more unusual, a wand glowing with pulsing green light, an actual, functioning psychic artifact of considerable scale.
Its function was to bestow happiness upon the Gretchin, projecting a morale-boosting aura that stripped away all fear, urging every Gretchin forward without hesitation.
Its hidden property boosted the luck of nearby Gretchin, subtly lowering the odds of them ever getting hit by enemy fire.
The last weapon was the Gretchin's proudest achievement: the pair of white wings mounted on Grot-Kong's back!
God only knew what these Gretchin had actually been thinking, but they'd somehow managed to build a functioning anti-gravity engine, and the two wings were its emitters!
The Gretchin's original logic had run something like this: Grot Marjack had wings, so obviously he could fly. And in the Warp, Grot Marjack was said to flutter around Gork and Mork's ears, whispering lies. So naturally, Grot-Kong needed to fly too.
The problem was, Grot-Kong was solid metal from head to toe, absurdly heavy, and there was no conceivable way a pair of decorative wings alone could get something that massive off the ground.
So the Gretchin had simply built an anti-gravity engine instead, hoping that would solve the flight problem.
Exactly how a bunch of Gretchin managed to engineer a working anti-gravity system is not something worth questioning too closely. Some things are just baked into the DNA.
The engine's output wasn't quite enough, though, and Grot-Kong still couldn't actually fly.
But the failed flight system did have one unexpected upside: the two wings functioned as a gravity weapon in their own right. Point them at a target, and the local gravity in that spot spiked violently, crushing any Ork Boy caught underneath it flat as a pancake.
The battlefield had descended into a chaotic frenzy, the rebelling Gretchin under Grot-Kong's leadership tearing through the surrounding Ork Boyz without mercy, an event that would come to be known in the history books as the Great Mushroom-Field Scrap Yard Uprising.
At the outer edge of the scrap yard, Three-Arm sat with his own force, staring out at the chaos unfolding in the distance, utterly at a loss for what to do.
After this string of relentless setbacks, even an Ork could only take so much.
Three-Arm was a Mek with genuine ambition, a real vision, someone who'd risen above petty, low-brow greenskin pursuits. He'd devoted his entire life to the craft of building mighty war-machines.
But now, blow after blow, he found himself unable to build anything at all, his life's ambition slipping through his fingers, his sense of self-worth crumbling with no way to reclaim it, his childhood dream fading like smoke.
In short, he was spiraling.
Among Orks, repeated failure or a sufficiently crushing blow to their confidence carries serious consequences, one of which is a physical shrinking of the body itself.
Because Three-Arm had built the Gorkamorka Walkers, the WAAAGH field of every Ork on the planet had once converged onto him, making him a genuine focal node of that power.
But now, weighed down by failure and despair, that WAAAGH field was steadily dissipating, and Three-Arm's hold over the greenskin population was slipping away with it.
The effect was immediate. Of the tens of thousands of Orks who'd gathered around Three-Arm, a growing number suddenly found him... unimpressive. Not tough. Not intimidating. A little pathetic, even.
And an Ork that weak had no business leading them.
More than half of the assembled crowd abandoned Three-Arm outright, charging straight into the mushroom-field scrap yard battle to fight the Gretchin, only to be wiped out in short order.
Blackiron, though, picked up on Three-Arm's collapsing state instantly.
He had, after all, once been the top Warboss on the entire planet, before Kian had reduced him to a stump and stripped that status away entirely. He knew exactly what that slow drain of WAAAGH energy felt like, firsthand.
So the moment he noticed something off in Three-Arm, he roared:
"Wot, ya givin' up already?! Ya gonna be a useless coward now?! We had a plan! Build a BIGGER machine! Go back and get our revenge on Old Fart Kian!!"
Three-Arm slumped, thoroughly defeated.
"It's over. Buildin' a big machine takes a whole crew of Mekboys helpin', and loads of Gretchin scavengin' parts.
We got nothin' left now. Can't build nothin'..."
"SHOVE YER SPIRAL EXHAUST PIPE FART UP YER OWN GORK-DAMNED ARSE!!!"
Blackiron, reduced to nothing but a stump, exploded with a furious roar the second those defeatist words left Three-Arm's mouth, and it actually stunned him into silence.
Blackiron bellowed on:
"You're da most tough, most WAAAGH Big Mek I've ever seen. Everything you've ever built has been amazing.
I ain't never seen another Mek who could build loud, roarin' sluggas, brutal, savage tanks, and a Gorkamorka Walker dis WAAAGH!!
You're da toughest Big Mek there is. You can build da biggest, most unstoppable machine ever, and go kill Old Fart Kian, kill dat shiny gold human machine, and kill dose snarlin' little Gretchin traitors!!"
And somehow, this pep talk from Blackiron actually worked.
The despair in Three-Arm's eyes was replaced, all at once, by a burning, savage intensity.
"YEAH! I'M A TOUGH-AS-HELL BIG MEK!!! I'M GONNA BUILD A MACHINE NOBODY CAN TOUCH!!!"
He let out a wild, roaring shout, and it wasn't just noise. He genuinely, deeply believed it in that moment.
WAAAGH energy is a deeply idealistic force. When an Ork truly believes, with his whole being, that he can accomplish something, WAAAGH energy will step in and help him do exactly that.
In that instant, something clicked into place inside Three-Arm's mind. The steady drain of WAAAGH energy stopped, and began flowing back into him instead.
Three-Arm suddenly felt his mind flooded with a torrent of wild, brilliant ideas. Engineering problems that had stumped him before now seemed absurdly, trivially simple.
"I GET IT! I FINALLY GET IT! I CAN BUILD DA BIGGEST MACHINE THERE EVER WAS!!!"
Three-Arm roared over and over, and his sudden, overwhelming confidence spread instantly to the surrounding Orks, who raised their weapons and cheered in response.
Once the cheering died down, Three-Arm rubbed his chin, thinking it over.
"But no matter wot, we're gonna need scrap. We're gonna need parts. We're gonna need more boyz to help us build.
And we're gonna need somewhere safe, somewhere out of reach of da human warships, somewhere dose traitor Gretchin can't touch us either."
Blackiron, the stump with nothing left but a burning desire for revenge against Old Fart Kian, had no one left to rely on but Three-Arm. Seeing his confidence restored, Blackiron chuckled.
"C'mon, I know a place. Totally safe, and got scrap dat never runs out!
As for boyz to help build, don't worry. Word gets around fast once ya start buildin' somethin' truly WAAAGH. They'll come to us."
Over the following days, Three-Arm led his convoy north, guided by Blackiron.
Along the way, even though Three-Arm never announced anything publicly, word of his ambition to build something truly monumental somehow spread across the entire planet, some kind of instinctive, unspoken call that every Mekboy on the world seemed to feel.
Mekboys everywhere started funding their own vehicles, loading up everything they owned, and setting out to join Three-Arm's growing caravan.
By the time the journey was done, Three-Arm's force had swelled from a mere ten thousand or so Orks to several hundred thousand, and nearly every single one of them was a Mekboy.
This massive convoy pushed north, and north, and north, all the way to Forge World Primo-496a's frozen death-pole.
The planet's polar region was, by any measure, a genuine death zone. Nighttime temperatures plunged to fifty below zero, and by day, the sun baked the surface up past forty above.
That kind of brutal temperature swing was more than even Ork spores could survive, and not a single mushroom field had ever managed to take root in the entire region.
But the polar wastes held something else of value: an enormous scrap heap, packed with an absurd quantity of high-quality parts.
Long ago, when the Orks had first arrived on this planet, they'd crash-landed a warship out here, and its wreckage still lay in the death zone to this day, having gouged a massive crater into the ground on impact.
Three-Arm led his force of over four hundred thousand Mekboys, trekking over hill and dune, until they finally arrived at the base of that crashed greenskin warship's scrap heap.
He pointed at the towering wreck and bellowed at the assembled crowd of Mekboys behind him:
"Take a good look! Tell me, wot do ya see?!"
One Mekboy scratched his head. "I see a big pile o' junk."
Three-Arm backhanded him hard enough to knock a few teeth loose and roared:
"USELESS! ALL YOU SEE IS SCRAP!
But wot I see is a machine, a machine so massive, so mountainous, dat it could crush every human shrimp-tin-can on dis whole planet flat! Da most unstoppable machine dere ever was!!!"
He swept his hand forward in a sharp, decisive gesture.
"ALL OF YOU! GET IN THERE AND TEAR THIS SCRAP HEAP APART! GATHER UP EVERYTHING USABLE!
I'M GONNA BUILD ARMOUR OUT OF DA HARDEST, TOUGHEST STEEL THERE IS, AND ARM IT WITH DA BIGGEST, MOST WAAAGH WEAPONS EVER MADE!!!"
At the sound of Three-Arm's roar, over four hundred thousand Mekboys let out a matching war cry and surged forward in a swarming mass, crawling over the wrecked greenskin warship's remains like ants devouring a carcass, feeding on it in an absolute frenzy...
Meanwhile, over in human-controlled territory, Kian was touring one of the Mechanicus's forge complexes, inside a hive city.
The forge was genuinely astonishing, home to several lake-sized pools of molten metal, entire lava lakes serving as colossal blast furnaces.
Every day, an enormous quantity of raw metal was poured into these furnaces to melt down, while an equally enormous quantity of refined metal flowed out the other end.
That molten output was fed directly onto a production line, stamped and pressed into tank hulls and armour plating.
The finished plating was then routed to an assembly bay, where workers welded and bolted everything together by hand.
Nearly a thousand new weapons or vehicles rolled off the line every single day, but rather than being shipped straight to the front, each one was instead moved into a massive underground storage vault, to undergo prayer.
Right at that moment, Kian, following Tech-priest Boothe, arrived at one such underground vault.
The vault stretched across dozens of levels, each level the size of dozens of football fields combined, and it currently held over eighty thousand Leman Russ tanks.
Kian walked across the vault's steel floor, and as far as his eyes could see, tank after tank stretched out in dense, endless rows.
Curious, he asked:
"The Astra Militarum's out there fighting for their lives against the Orks right now. You've got this many weapons sitting right here. Why aren't they being deployed?"
Tech-priest Boothe, leading the tour, explained as they walked:
"These are all soulless weapons. Fresh off the production line, they cannot simply be deployed straight into battle.
They require a minimum of six months of continuous prayer, so the machine spirit within each one understands what cause it fights for, before it can ever be sent to the front."
Kian noticed that beside every single Leman Russ stood a dedicated worker, doing nothing else at all, murmuring quietly to themselves without pause.
He leaned in and listened closely, and realized it was a Mechanicus litany, meant to soothe and settle the machine spirit within.
He shook his head, exasperated. Out there, the greenskins were on the verge of overrunning the entire planet, and here sat this absurd stockpile of tanks, sitting idle, being prayed over instead of deployed. It was almost comically, painfully Warhammer.
Passing by one particular Leman Russ, Kian noticed the assigned worker, praying nonstop, his throat clearly parched, voice going hoarse from the effort.
An idea struck him, and he said:
"Isn't this whole manual-prayer process incredibly slow? Why not just build a machine to play the litany instead?"
Tech-priest Boothe blinked, and asked back: "And who, then, would pray over the machine responsible for playing the litany?"
Kian blinked back. "Build a second machine to pray over the first machine."
Tech-priest Boothe blinked again. "And who would pray over the second machine?"
"Build a third machine to pray over the second machine."
"And who would pray over the third machine?"
"Build a fourth machine to pray over the third machine!"
Fun fact: this entire exchange was taking place between two human beings...