Chapter 398: My One Slide Tackle
"Damn it, this family falls apart without me!"
Kian cursed and led his team straight for the cargo deck.
The cargo deck was stacked with containers, most of it weapons and ammunition, with a smaller portion of premium foodstuffs. If the Orks tore through that, the whole crew would be eating corpse-starch rations for the rest of the voyage.
Over five hundred greenskins had pushed this far, running headlong into a defense force of more than eight hundred anti-boarding troops. The two sides were already locked in a brawl.
The defenders here were equipped to an extraordinary standard: void-rated body armour, basically a full-coverage protective suit worn over the standard void-suit, bolt carbines, high-energy lasrifles, melta grenades, plasma rifles, power swords, power axes. Some even carried servo-skulls for reconnaissance, small floating devices built around a human skull, used to scout and observe.
Troops equipped this well were essentially the ship's white blood cells, and they needed to be armed to that standard to have any chance of holding off an enemy trying to seize the vessel outright.
These elite defenders and the Ork boarding force were locked in a full-scale melee, killing each other in every direction. Plasma rifles flared blue and melted greenskins where they stood. Orks swung massive rotary shootas, spraying heavy-caliber rounds that tore whole squads of defenders apart in an instant.
Back and forth it went, until one Ork stood out from the rest: enormous, ferocious, clearly the warboss. He stood nearly three meters tall, wrapped in power armour of frightening thickness. Almost nothing on the battlefield could punch through it at speed, and whatever could, the warboss dodged with surprising agility. In his left hand he carried a long chainblade, in his right, an Ork-built cannon firing shells roughly forty millimeters in caliber.
"Hahahahaha! I'm the Warboss's right hand! Orders is take dis big flyin' steel thing off da human shrimps! All you shrimp humans surrender now! Da ones dat can build stuff, dey become slaves! Da ones dat can't, dey become food! Wahahahaha!"
The warboss cackled with pure, deranged glee, the long chainblade in his left hand roaring away, its engine noise drowning out everything else on the deck. His right-hand cannon fired again and again, high-explosive shells slamming into the anti-boarding line, blowing men apart where they stood.
Kian arrived right as the warboss finished his speech, processed the situation in an instant, raised his bolt carbine, and put a single round straight into the cannon's ammo feed.
The bolt round detonated the cannon's loading mechanism in a violent blast, tearing the weapon apart entirely.
"Oi, wot da hell!"
The warboss startled, hurled away the wrecked cannon, and spun to face Kian.
Kian holstered the bolt carbine and drew sword and shield, roaring a challenge.
"You there! Massive brute! Dare you face me in single combat, to the death!"
The warboss squinted at him without responding right away.
Kian let out three loud, mocking laughs.
"What, no answer? Twelve feet of muscle wasted on a coward's spine, is that it? A big frame and nothing behind it, too gutless to fight? Then get down on your knees!"
Every Ork mid-brawl froze and turned to look at their boss. A duel. That was proper WAAAGH stuff. No way the boss backs down from that.
The warboss had no intention of backing down, of course, but true to Ork cunning, he sized Kian up first. This little shrimp-tin ain't as buff as me. He can't beat me. His crafty little brain told him to just charge in, jump, and split the shrimp right down the middle in one overhead chop, and it'd be over.
So the warboss surged forward without warning, straight at Kian.
Nearly three meters of muscle in full power armour made for an intimidating charge. Right as he closed the distance, he leapt into the air for a flying overhead chop, aimed straight down at Kian.
Kian watched the warboss leap and felt a jolt of alarm, followed immediately by the certain, unshakable knowledge, courtesy of a mind marinated in years of internet garbage, that if he didn't do the one true thing right now, he'd never forgive himself for the rest of his life.
So Kian let out his own war cry, surged forward to build momentum of his own, raised his greatsword in both hands, activated the disintegration field, and went into a slide tackle.
Two bodies, one airborne, one sliding low, closing from opposite directions at a razor-precise angle, the composition of the moment almost artistic in its symmetry. The power sword met the warboss's crotch with pinpoint accuracy, as clean and deliberate as a docking maneuver at a space station.
The blade opened through the armour plating first, then the servo-linkages beneath, then the flesh itself. A blade one point six meters long, one point four meters of it live edge, split the warboss's groin cleanly in two. Not a millimeter more on one side than the other, as evenly divided as a long-married couple splitting the household assets after a clean, mutual divorce.
The slide tackle finished, and the warboss dropped to the deck, clutching himself and howling in agony.
Orks didn't technically have the same equipment humans did, but getting split down the middle from that angle clearly hurt plenty regardless, and every Ork Nob nearby flinched and instinctively closed their legs.
Kian came to a stop from his slide but stayed exactly where he'd landed, sword still raised, unwilling to move a muscle out of that pose. His eyes welled up. Something in his soul felt, at last, complete. He thought back, hazily, to some half-remembered afternoon from his teenage years, scrolling some forum thread on his phone.
Can a grown adult kill a tiger with a slide tackle?
Today, he'd tested it. Turned out you could kill a tiger with a slide tackle. And apparently an Ork warboss too.
After that, Kian's elite retinue joined forces with the surviving anti-boarding troops and mopped up the rest of the greenskin force on the cargo deck. With their leader down, the surrounding Orks' WAAAGH-fueled momentum collapsed visibly, their aggression draining away almost instantly. Between that and the sheer volume of plasma weaponry in Kian's retinue, the remaining Orks were wiped out in short order.
The boarding forces got cleared out one after another, with no fresh waves arriving to replace them. Trasolh had already scrambled fighter wings to intercept incoming Ork landing pods out in the void, and every one of them got shot down before they ever reached the hull.
The bombardment between fleets dragged on another two hours or so before the Ork scrap-fleet was finally crippled or destroyed outright, the battle winding down at last.
Kian sat crouched in a corner, catching his breath, when the chief maintenance tech walked over.
"My lord, I noticed something interesting you might want to know about. The Orks aboard this ship appear to be in close communication with the Orks on the planet's surface, mostly through video. Some of their power armour even has recording equipment built in, seems like they're capturing footage of their own fighting and broadcasting it down to the ones on the ground."
Kian's interest was piqued instantly.
"A livestream? These Orks are running a livestream? Can we hack into their stream?"
The chief maintenance tech nodded.
"We can, my lord. Their channels are extremely primitive, barely any encryption at all."
"Perfect. Hack into their broadcast right now. And get me a few cameras while you're at it..."