Twenty minutes later.
Team Alpha had ambushed two small greenskin patrols in succession at two corridor junctions, killing three Ork boyz and more than thirty gretchin.
Team Beta had avoided the marching route of a large Ork tribe and scavenged a massive haul of scrap metal in an abandoned mechanical maintenance bay.
Team Gamma, the team personally led by Lawson, was slowly advancing through a main corridor on Deck Seventy-Four.
Then, a signal came through Shared Awareness that made Lawson stop in his tracks.
It was a warning from Number Three of Team Beta.
Number Three's field of vision streamed into Lawson's mind.
In a secondary corridor on Deck Seventy-Three, Numbers Three and Four were lying atop a thick support beam, looking down into the passage below.
A figure was moving slowly through the corridor.
It was not an ordinary Ork boy.
It stood close to two and a half meters tall, more than thirty centimeters taller than a normal Ork boy.
It wore a suit of heavy armor welded together from layered metal plates, with far better coverage than the junk armor of ordinary Ork boyz, those patchworks of wire and rivets. Thick iron plates protected its chest, abdomen, and thighs. Its shoulder guards were two slabs of armor torn off an Imperial fighting vehicle and fixed in place with thick bolts.
The armor was painted in a rich red.
In greenskin society, only elites who had proven their right to rule through fists and blades were worthy of wearing red.
In its right hand, it held a gigantic choppa nearly as long as an adult human male was tall.
Mounted into the blade was some kind of crude power-field generator.
A Nob, part of the Ork elite caste.
Lawson made a rapid assessment in his head.
An adult Nob's close-combat ability was enough to fight an Adeptus Astartes for dozens of exchanges. Imperial threat-assessment manuals recommended no fewer than a full Astra Militarum platoon, thirty men, concentrating fire to bring one down.
He had nine men.
But he was not Astra Militarum.
"All teams converge on Number Three's position."
Through Shared Awareness, Lawson issued the order to Teams Alpha, Beta, and Gamma simultaneously.
Nine Catachan fighters gathered above the secondary corridor on Deck Seventy-Three.
The Nob was still wandering below, as though patrolling its territory.
More than a dozen gretchin followed behind it, keeping a very respectful distance.
Any gretchin foolish enough to stray within five meters of it risked being kicked away by the Nob on a whim.
Lawson's mind completed its tactical calculation in a heartbeat.
The Nob's heavy armor meant frontal fire from ordinary lasguns and boltguns would be of limited effect.
But every armor had weak points.
Knees.
Elbows.
The back of the neck. No matter how high the armor coverage, the seam between the helmet and the gorget had to allow room for movement.
"Team Alpha, establish an intercept position thirty meters down the corridor. Clear the gretchin. Do not let them interfere with the main battlefield."
"Team Beta, flank from the side. Prepare to cut in from the left once it passes the T-junction below."
"Team Gamma follows me. We strike from above."
Lawson drew in a deep breath.
"Number Five, on my mark, use the power shield to absorb its first attack. Just one exchange."
Number Five signaled acknowledgment.
"Numbers One and Three, the instant Number Five pins it, focus fire on both knees. Boltguns. The armor on the knee joints is thinnest. Two overlapping bolts should punch through."
"I'll drop in from above and hit the back of the neck with the plasma pistol."
Everyone knew exactly where they were meant to be and what they were meant to do.
Lawson waited until the Nob walked directly into the center of the T-junction.
"Move."
Team Alpha opened fire first.
Numbers Seven and Eight swept the gretchin mob behind the Nob with their lasguns. Red beams carved carbonized furrows through the pack, and six gretchin dropped in the first volley.
The rest shrieked and scattered.
The Nob reacted even faster than Lawson had expected. Within half a second of the first gunshot, it had already turned around.
"WAAAAAGH!"
The Nob roared so loudly the metal walls of the corridor vibrated, then raised its power choppa and prepared to charge.
That was when Number Five cut in from the front at an angle.
The moment the field generator activated, the power shield burst into a glaring blue glow.
Number Five did not try to take the Nob's strike head-on. That would have been suicide.
He chose the smarter approach instead. He raised the power shield at a slant and smashed it into the side of the Nob's power choppa at a precise angle.
The shield field's deflection effect combined with the incline of the shield face diverted the Nob's sweep, a strike powerful enough to split open the roof of an armored vehicle, upward by about thirty degrees.
Boom!
The power choppa screamed past over Number Five's head and bit into the metal wall beside him, cutting a gash twenty centimeters deep.
But Number Five had succeeded in trapping the Nob's power choppa in the wall for a fraction of a second.
Less than one second.
But one second was enough.
Boom! Boom!
Numbers One and Three opened fire simultaneously from the flanking firing position Team Beta had taken.
Two .75 caliber bolts hit the Nob's left knee joint almost at the same instant.
The combined penetrative force of two bolt rounds blasted apart the iron plating there, then triggered a mass-reactive detonation inside the knee joint.
The Nob's left knee exploded.
It let out a scream so violent it tore at the ears and dropped to one knee.
Even kneeling, the Nob still stood nearly two meters tall.
It braced itself on the ground with its free left hand while wrenching the power choppa out of the wall, then swung it sideways at the nearest target, Number Five.
Number Five rolled backward to evade.
The blade passed just over his back, shaving off a section of the hilt from the chainsword on his back.
Then Lawson dropped from the beam above.
He caught a hanging cable with his left hand to slow his descent, and his right hand had already drawn the plasma pistol.
A blazing ball of plasma shot from the muzzle at high speed and drove directly into the eight-centimeter-wide seam at the back of the Nob's neck.
The Nob's neck was burned through, leaving a hole the size of a fist.
But it did not fall.
The Nob struggled upright, pushing off with its one remaining good leg as its power choppa flailed wildly through the air.
After landing, Lawson sprang backward to avoid a wild horizontal slash.
"Tough bastard."
Lawson cursed under his breath.
An ordinary Ork boy should have collapsed the instant its spine was burned through by plasma, but a Nob's nervous system had far more redundancy than that of its lesser kin. Even with its spinal cord partially destroyed, the secondary ganglia distributed through its body still allowed it to maintain basic movement.
With the last of its strength, it hauled its upper body upright, opened its fang-lined maw, and roared one final ragged war cry in Lawson's direction.
"Waa... agh..."
Lawson walked up to it.
The Fang of Catachan turned in his hand, point downward.
He lined the blade up with the top of the Nob's skull, the spot its own kind called the "thinking bone."
"The Emperor doesn't take your soul," Lawson said calmly. "But I'll take your Life Points."
The Fang of Catachan punched through the crown of the Nob's skull.
After one final spasm, the Nob's body at last toppled over, and the deck shook faintly under the impact of several hundred kilos of dead weight.
The system prompt sounded:
Native soul energy: 38 points. After purification of the high-density Chaos frenzy factor, actual Life Points gained: 25.
More than three times the yield of an ordinary Ork boy's 7 points.
The rule was confirmed once more.
The stronger the enemy, the greater the return.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, you like the story? Wow, who knew. Go ahead, drop a review and throw some power stones maybe I'll be motivated to keep going.
Want to stay ahead of the game? Advanced chapters are up on my Patron. If you're enjoying the ride, swing by and check them out.
[email protected]/_theon
Change @ to "a"