Chapter 469: A Little Head-Swap Number
"Bottom line, it has to be a living being reciting the litany, or there's no soul in it at all!"
Tech-priest Boothe cut the conversation short, before their hypothetical chain of prayer-machines wound up praying to each other in an endless loop.
Once Kian finished his tour of the Mechanicus forge, he headed back to rest, and ran into Lieutenant Colonel Noa on the way.
Noa gave him a piece of news he hadn't expected at all.
"My lord, latest report: we've reclaimed 60% of the planet's surface. We've broken the Ork advance entirely."
Kian's brow shot up. "60%? What's the Ork situation like right now?"
Noa answered: "My lord, their offensive has collapsed considerably. Their front-line troop numbers are dropping, their overall unit quality is degrading fast, and we're even seeing large numbers of Orks fielding nothing but melee weapons now."
Something didn't add up, and Kian started turning it over in his head.
That was strange. Ork numbers were always overwhelming, an avalanche of bodies, usually running something like one Astra Militarum soldier facing off against ten or more greenskins at once.
And their reinforcement rate was absurdly fast, fresh Ork Boyz crawling out of the mushroom fields within a matter of months. There was no reason their numbers should be running dry.
"Wait, could it possibly be—"
It hit him suddenly. He'd stirred up trouble among the Gretchin, hadn't he? Could they actually be pulling something off already?
Right on cue, he felt something, a wave of prayer washing through his mind. Gretchin. It was the Gretchin, calling out to Grot Marjack!
Kian said goodbye to Noa, boarded a shuttle back to Trasolh's flagship, and made his way to his Sanctum.
He pulled out a black needle and jabbed it into his arm. A few seconds later, the roll came back a failure, and he coughed up blood and died.
Right, at this point he was basically using the black needles as a fast-travel reset button.
His body began reconstructing, and his consciousness drifted into the void space, three options laid out before him.
The Sump Sanctum respawn point, the Shrine respawn point, and a ball of green light formed from Gretchin prayer.
Kian chose the green light. The next instant, a wave of dizziness washed through him, and when his vision cleared, he suddenly realized his field of view had shot up dramatically, as high as piloting the Preceptor itself.
"What the hell, where am I now?"
He muttered to himself, and then a burst of cheering caught his attention.
Down below his feet, an ocean of ant-sized Gretchin stretched out kneeling in every direction, hundreds of thousands of them, endless.
Kian froze for a second, looked down, and saw his own feet. A pair of massive mechanical legs.
"HOLY SHIT! I possessed a war-machine!"
Yes, indeed. Kian had possessed Grot-Kong itself. Grot-Kong had become his body, which was exactly why the whole world around him now looked shrunk down to miniature scale.
In front of Grot-Kong, Reform Old Fart, decked out in power armour, shouted up at him:
"Grot Marjack! We need your wisdom!
We have completed the first stage of Great Gretchin-ism! We Gretchin have overturned our fate. The Ork Boyz who once oppressed us have been overthrown, and now WE oppress THEM!!"
The sea of several hundred thousand Gretchin erupted into a wave of cheering, and only now did Kian realize just how far this movement had come.
Scattered through the crowd were Grot-suits, tankettes, Grot Big Guns crewed by pairs, and small cannons operated by squads of a dozen or so.
Damn. They'd actually pulled it off.
Kian was genuinely impressed, and asked, curious: "How exactly are you oppressing the Ork Boyz?"
Reform Old Fart waved a hand. "Bring forward the Ork slave labor!"
A group of Gretchin, whips in hand, drove forward several hundred Ork Boyz.
Their wrists and necks were bound in iron chains, and their backs were loaded down, either dragging plows or hauling cargo.
Any Ork that so much as whimpered got the whip immediately.
Kian's eye caught a particularly bizarre formation among the Ork labor gang, and he asked, "And what's that about? Why are Gretchin riding Snotlings, and Snotlings riding Ork Boyz?"
Sure enough, mixed into the Ork labor procession was an especially strange sight: a fully armed Gretchin, riding atop a Snotling, which in turn rode on the back of a bound Ork Boy, hands tied behind him.
Reform Old Fart said, practically glowing with pride:
"Per the guiding principles of Great Gretchin-ism, Gretchin are first class, Snotlings second class, Ork Boyz third class. So naturally, our cavalry corps has to reflect that same hierarchy: Gretchin ride Snotlings, Snotlings ride Ork Boyz."
Kian very nearly broke into applause.
"Genius! You lot really know how to have fun with this!"
Reform Old Fart bellowed: "Grot Marjack has said we're GENIUS! Our work has been recognized! We must press on, harder than ever!!"
At once, several hundred thousand Gretchin whipped out notebooks and started scribbling furiously.
Kian's expression flattened. These little devils really needed to be more careful, or they'd end up summoning something far worse from beyond the veil.
He asked, "So what exactly did you summon me here for? Looks to me like you don't actually need my help with anything."
Reform Old Fart bellowed: "Grot Marjack! We have completed the first stage of Great Gretchin-ism! We have gone from the oppressed to the oppressors!
Now, we need Grot Marjack's guidance, to lead us into the second stage of Great Gretchin-ism!"
Kian's stomach dropped. Damn it, he hadn't planned out a second stage at all.
Still, he could see how useful these little guys had turned out to be. They'd built a real force and reduced the Orks to a third-class underclass in the process.
He needed them to keep grinding the Orks down, right up until the Astra Militarum fully reclaimed the planet.
With that in mind, he decided to keep stoking the fire.
He cleared his throat and, with all due gravity, declared:
"Since you have completed the first stage of Great Gretchin-ism, it is indeed time to move forward into the second stage."
Reform Old Fart bellowed: "QUICK! Everyone, ears open! Take notes!!"
Hundreds of thousands of Gretchin immediately produced pen and paper, staring up at Kian with wide, eager eyes, waiting for him to speak.
Kian cleared his throat.
"The second stage of Great Gretchin-ism requires a focus on quality.
As the old saying goes, a truly excellent Gretchin must temper his body and harden his spirit.
The early phase of stage two must focus on strengthening the individual capabilities of every Gretchin, so that when future challenges arise, we are not caught without a strong enough body to meet them."
The Gretchin scribbled furiously, and Reform Old Fart asked: "Grot Marjack, specifically, how do we achieve this?"
Kian answered:
"For example, build more war-suits. More Grot-suits. Get every single Gretchin into one. That alone will substantially strengthen every individual Gretchin's fighting ability."
Reform Old Fart looked troubled. "But our Grot-suit production is limited, and new Gretchin crawl out of the fields every day. We simply cannot produce enough suits to outfit everyone."
Heh heh heh.
Kian smirked to himself internally, and voiced his actual idea.
"Haven't you already got control of all these Ork Boyz? Just take their bodies for yourselves!
Ork Boyz have powerful, sturdy frames. If a Gretchin could claim one of those bodies for himself, wouldn't that be effectively the same as wearing a suit of power armour?
Here's how: cut off an Ork Boy's head, cut off a Gretchin's head as well, and sew the Gretchin's head onto the Ork's body. That way, the Gretchin claims the Ork's body for his own."
The assembled Gretchin stared up at Kian, utterly stunned. Could... could that actually work?
As it happened, it genuinely could. Orks were part fungus, part organism, with an absurdly resilient constitution.
There had been documented cases before: an Ork stepped on a landmine and was reduced to nothing but a severed head. A Mad Doc stitched that head onto the body of a dead Ork, and the head came back to life, snarling and eager for a fight in no time at all.
So, the logic followed naturally: if Gretchin bodies were weak, well, here was a fine little head-swap number to fix that, and swap themselves into Ork bodies for an instant power upgrade.
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