Chapter 401: Warboss Blackiron, Part 2
Warboss Blackiron's tribe expanded fast, building up weapons and armour out of the captured human mining site. From there, it followed the standard Ork growth pattern.
Blackiron held the mine with over a thousand greenskins under him. That mine fed raw material to an ore refinery elsewhere, and once the supply dried up, the refinery sent militia out to see what had happened.
They had a rough idea already, since Ork trouble had been popping up in scattered pockets across the planet for a while now, though nothing large-scale yet. If the hive leadership had pooled resources at that point, watchtowers every few hundred meters, armed outposts every few kilometers, patrol squads of a few dozen sweeping the plains regularly, the fresh Orks clawing up out of the ground could've been picked off before they ever adapted to their surroundings, and the whole infestation might have been contained.
But the Orks had already been brutal enough to slam kilometers-long warships straight into the surface, killing five billion people and nearly crippling the entire Forge World. The hive leadership had no spare capacity to hunt down infestation sites, too consumed with just restoring basic order. So the small factories and mines out beyond the hive cities were left to fend for themselves with whatever militia they could scrape together.
The refinery sent over a hundred militia armed with smoothbore rifles to check on the mine. They died badly, and worse, ended up handing the Orks smoothbore rifle technology in the process.
Warboss Blackiron picked through the battlefield afterward, got his hands on the human rifles, and decided they were loud and satisfying enough to count as properly WAAAGH. Every Ork in his tribe started studying the design, and before long, every single one of them carried a smoothbore rifle of his own.
Since the militia never reported back, the humans assumed this particular Ork infestation was unusually dangerous and escalated, sending in a full PDF company. The PDF company got wiped out too, unlocking automatic rifle technology for the Orks in the process.
With even the PDF failing, the humans escalated again, sending in a hundred power-armoured hive elites this time. Blackiron's tribe wiped them out as well, and unlocked power armour technology in the bargain.
From there, the tribe just kept getting stronger with every fight, expanding its territory further and further, eventually linking up with other Ork tribes across the planet. By the time it took humanity over a year to recover from the planet-scale catastrophe and finally turn its attention back to the greenskin problem, the Orks had already claimed thirty percent of the entire surface.
For nearly twenty years after that, humans and Orks fought an unrelenting war across the Forge World. Orks got stronger the more they fought, the excitement of battle feeding directly into their combat capability. The humans, meanwhile, never fully shook off the crushing morale hit from those five billion deaths, and stayed weighed down by it the whole time.
Fortunately, the Forge World's industrial base ran deep. This was a world jointly held fifty-fifty between the Imperium and the Adeptus Mechanicus, a mine every hundred meters, a steel foundry every kilometer. Once the human war machine got moving, tanks and armoured vehicles poured out of the factories like dumplings off a production line.
But naturally, the Orks had claimed plenty of mines and foundries of their own by then. As humanity mechanized, the Orks matched them, cobbling together scrap-tanks out of junk and whatever ore they mined themselves. For every tank a human factory produced, the Orks churned out ten of them.
Of those Ork-built scrap-tanks, about twenty percent stalled out mid-charge, and seventy percent got blown apart by precision human armour before they closed the distance. But that last ten percent made it through, close enough to inflict real losses on the human armoured columns.
The hardest thing about fighting Orks was that they simply didn't care about casualties, didn't care about losses at all. A battlefield littered with wrecked scrap-tank parts meant nothing to a human army. But let the Orks reclaim that same ground, and they'd have a brand-new tank crawling back out of the wreckage in no time.
So beating the Orks meant more than just wiping out their forces in a fight, it meant holding the ground afterward, sending in engineering crews to physically haul away every scrap of wrecked armour and melt it down in a furnace. Otherwise, sooner or later, the Orks would steal the scrap back and rebuild it into another charging tank.
The war between humans and Orks on Primo-496a dragged on a full twenty years, the Orks getting stronger with every engagement, the humans getting weaker. By now, sixty percent of the planet's surface belonged to the greenskins outright, a sprawl of scrap-heap mines and dense mushroom fields.
Fresh Orks poured out of those fields every single day, scavenging junk from the scrap-heaps and trading it to their Mekboys for weapons. Once armed, pure instinct carried them straight toward the nearest fighting.
By this point, humanity was struggling to hold the line at all, and had resorted to nuclear weapons. Hundreds, sometimes close to a thousand nuclear shells were fired at Ork positions every single day. These large-caliber nuclear rounds were cheap to produce and, relatively speaking, reasonably clean. Every impact scoured everything living within three hundred meters off the map.
Right now, the entire human defensive line was propped up almost entirely by nuclear artillery. Whenever a mass Ork charge formed up, the big guns behind the line would shred them with wave after wave of nuclear shells.
Effective, but not without cost. Even the Adeptus Mechanicus's relatively "clean" nuclear rounds couldn't be fired hundreds or thousands of times a day without consequence. The Forge World's surface was already badly polluted, requiring gas masks and basic chem-suits just to walk around outside. Now those suits needed radiation shielding too. The surface had essentially stopped being fit for human habitation at all.
Worse still, from the hive leadership's perspective: firing close to a thousand nuclear shells every single day meant that, sooner or later, one of them was going to malfunction, land in the middle of an Ork horde without detonating, and get captured intact. If the Orks ever got their hands on functioning nuclear weapons of their own, this war would become an entirely different, and far worse, kind of fight.
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