Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Jeanne d’Arc couldn’t escape this nightmare.

Whenever she closed her eyes, she dreamed of what they’d been through before — the Proletarian Crusade trapped between two mountain-walls that closed in on them, fusing everyone together indiscriminately in some horrific way.

She screamed in terror, flailing her arms wildly, before realizing it had only been a dream.

“Nightmares again?” a comrade beside her asked.

Jeanne gave a low grunt of acknowledgment and looked at her comrade, noticing his face was just as haggard as hers.

She was no longer caught in that meat grinder, but everyone here was like her — none of them had recovered from their earlier defeat.

Fear and dread clung to them, leaving no room for real rest.

“I want to go back,” she said.

“There’s no going back.” The man gave Jeanne some water. “Get up. It’s your turn on watch.”

Jeanne mechanically took the lasgun he handed her — they’d long since run out of enough weapons for everyone.

Not everyone here was a fervent, devoted cultist. To swell the ranks of the Proletarian Crusade, the Adeptus Arbites had rounded up plenty of civilians from the lower hive as well.

Jeanne was one of them.

She didn’t know who the God-Emperor was. She only knew the Adeptus Arbites’ whips really hurt.

She wondered why those Arbites enforcers, who’d never once cared what happened to people like her, had suddenly come shouting that day, ‘How could the Adeptus Arbites possibly lose to civilians!’ before hauling them all away.

She’d assumed this was some decree of that God-Emperor, but the commissar told her it was actually because Commander Macht Udo had raised the Arbites’ pay and meal allowances at the same time he’d issued the order.

What were pay and meal allowances, anyway?

Jeanne never got the chance to find out, because the commissar was gone now.

He’d died in the earlier fighting, and the task of keeping the Proletarian Crusade’s morale unified had fallen to an Imperial Creed Tech-Priest who’d been traveling with them.

Lasgun in hand, Jeanne made her way to the trench they’d dug, only to find hardly anyone in it.

Most of them had abandoned the rotation schedule the commissar had set before his death. People like her, who could barely hold a lasgun steady, had discarded their weapons entirely. They’d gathered around the Tech-Priest instead, kneeling and praying to something or other.

“Aren’t they going to hold the line?” Jeanne asked, unsettled by what she saw.

“What’s the point? We can’t stop them anyway!”

These Crusaders — or what remained of the Proletarian Crusade — were already a candle guttering in the wind.

Everyone knew they were still alive only because the orks across the line enjoyed killing them slowly, savoring every moment of it. That knowledge had drained them of all fighting spirit.

“But… if we don’t fight back, what do we do?” Jeanne asked, lost.

“Pray to the God-Emperor. He’ll come save us — save all of us!”

Swept along by the numb crowd, Jeanne stumbled toward the Tech-Priest.

The moment her knees touched the cold ground, a strange calm settled over her. The noise around her seemed to fade away, leaving only the low drone of the Tech-Priest’s chanting in her ears.

She bowed her head, her hands coming together unbidden, and her trembling lips followed the people around her in murmuring prayers she didn’t recognize.

“The God-Emperor protects, the God-Emperor protects…”

But could the God-Emperor’s protection alone really save them?

What was left of her will to resist gnawed at that calm, curdling into doubt inside her.

She stole a glance up at the Tech-Priest. The man wore a tattered holy robe, his face gaunt, but his eyes burned with a sickly fervor.

His voice was like a dull blade, slowly whittling away the last of everyone’s will to resist.

“Lay down your weapons, brothers, sisters!” The Tech-Priest spread his arms wide as if to embrace them all. “How can flesh and blood stand against the savagery of the greenskins? Our resistance is nothing but futile struggle — it is the God-Emperor’s trial for us! Only wholehearted faith can earn His mercy!”

Jeanne’s fingers unconsciously stroked the trigger of her lasgun. She thought of the commissar screaming at them to hold the line before he died, and looked at the discarded weapons all around.

Something churned inside her chest, but the Tech-Priest’s words wrapped around her thoughts like spider silk.

“Look at the sky!” The Tech-Priest suddenly pointed at the cloud-choked heavens. “He watches over us! If we pray with true devotion, His angels will descend!”

As if to confirm his words, countless streaks of fire suddenly lit up the horizon.

They were Dreadclaws deployed by the Ultimate Wall around the gravity weapons, tearing through the clouds like burning meteors.

The crowd erupted in ecstatic wails. Some fell to their knees; others raised their arms high, as if those drop pods dozens of kilometers away had come just for them.

“Keep praying! Pray harder!” The Tech-Priest’s voice turned shrill with excitement. “The angels have heard our call! If we’re devoted enough, they’ll come to us!”

The sound of prayer grew louder, as though in answer to the Tech-Priest’s words. A batch of drop pods changed course and slammed into the wasteland in front of their position.

“A miracle! It’s a miracle!”

The Tech-Priest leapt up in a frenzy. “The God-Emperor has heard our prayers! He’s sent us angels!”

The once-numb survivors suddenly burst into a sickly kind of energy. Wailing and shoving, they surged toward the drop pods like a tide, as though that spot marked the very end of salvation.

Caught up in the crowd, Jeanne stumbled forward with them, the lasgun in her hands her only anchor.

But the orks had already set an ambush along the only path there.

“WAAAGH!!!”

These orks, newly strengthened by their earlier victory, were far more than a match for civilians who carried no weapons at all. As she watched the people around her fall like wheat before a scythe, Jeanne — the only one still armed — tried to fire back, but the Tech-Priest sharply stopped her.

“Don’t resist! This is the God-Emperor’s trial! The faithful will surely be saved!”

The slaughter went on, blood staining the scorched earth.

—Until the whine of gauss rifles tore across the battlefield.

“Open fire!”

The Deathless burst from the smoke and dust. Leading the charge, Neos cleanly severed the ork boss’s head with the Black Sword, sending the remaining boyz scattering.

The Tech-Priest dropped to his knees in excitement, tears streaming down his face. “Angels! The God-Emperor’s angels have descended!”

Neos frowned and opened the helmet of his CMC powered suit, studying these unarmed Crusaders carefully.

“Why don’t you have weapons? Why aren’t you fighting?”

The Tech-Priest tried to answer, but when he looked up, he realized Neos wasn’t the angel of the God-Emperor he’d imagined.

It was an ordinary middle-aged man’s face — resolute, weary, but nothing like the transcendent presence of an Astartes.

The Tech-Priest’s expression froze. “You’re not angels — you’re just mortals!”

“Does that matter? Even mortals should pick up weapons and fight back, instead of kneeling here waiting to die.”

“Ignorant! Do you think we never fought back?”

The Tech-Priest snapped, “Look at those orks! You can kill ten, a hundred, but you’ll never kill them all! Only the God-Emperor’s angels can save us! Mortal resistance means nothing!”

He turned to the survivors. “Keep praying! True salvation is coming!”

“There’s no saving them,” the comms trooper Faraday said quietly.

Back when Port Sanctus was struck by the plague, people had waited for the Emperor’s angels the same way. But at least back then, they hadn’t given up the fight — they’d kept struggling on.

But the people here had been broken by their own faith. They’d marched into battle with devotion to the Emperor, certain His glory would shield them from the orks. But when the greenskin tide proved far worse than they’d imagined, when death shadowed their every step, their faith twisted — from a flame of defiance into a numbing poison.

From certainty to doubt, from doubt to despair, from despair to blind submission. They’d given up thinking entirely now, pinning everything on some intangible ‘miracle.’

“Captain, what should we do?”

Faraday asked Neos. As the comms trooper responsible for reporting back to Colonel William, he needed to know Neos’s stance.

“Colonel William tasked us with bringing these people back as reinforcements, but the state they’re in now would only slow us down.”

Neos fell silent for a moment, his gaze sweeping over the crowd praying in the God-Emperor’s name, before finally settling on the one girl still clutching a lasgun — Jeanne.

Her finger was still curled tight around the trigger, and a flicker of struggle remained in her eyes.

In the distance, the orks whose boss Neos had beheaded earlier had already found themselves a new one, and now came howling forward again, choppas swinging. But the Crusaders, kneeling under the Tech-Priest’s admonishment, showed no reaction at all.

Neos strode over to Jeanne and crouched down to look her in the eye. “Do you know how to shoot?”

Jeanne’s lips trembled. She nodded, then shook her head.

“It’s not hard.” Neos gripped her wrist, helping her raise the barrel to aim at the ork charging in front. “Slow your breathing. Steady.”

Guided by his hand, Jeanne’s finger pulled the trigger. The las-bolt punched precisely through the ork’s eye socket, and the massive greenskin body crashed to the ground.

“Again.” Neos’s voice was calm and firm.

A second shot. A third…

Jeanne didn’t know why she could suddenly shoot so well. The lasgun that had never worked this reliably before now took down a greenskin with every shot. With Neos’s help, she alone, with a single weapon, held off every ork that tried to get near her.

“Stop! You’re interrupting our prayers!” the Tech-Priest shrieked hysterically. “The God-Emperor will not forgive this blasphemy!”

Neos turned and gave the Tech-Priest a cold look. Under the man’s astonished gaze, he raised his pistol.

“Bang!”

A bloody hole appeared in the Tech-Priest’s forehead, and his body toppled backward.

To the Crusaders, that gunshot sounded like a clap of thunder.

Left without their spiritual anchor, they descended into chaos — some screamed, some wept, and even more just stared blankly at the scene, as if even fear had been drained out of them.

“Watch closely!” Neos barked, pointing at Jeanne. “Look at her, then look at yourselves!”

Jeanne kept firing, moving through the fight as if guided by some higher power. Meanwhile, those still praying were being torn apart mercilessly by the orks.

“Faith won’t save you. Resistance will. Your hands shouldn’t be folded in prayer — they should be gripping weapons!”

He strode toward the weapons scattered across the ground, picked up a lasgun, and held it high for everyone to see.

The weapon that everyone had thought broken had somehow started working again. Neos scanned the faces slowly loosening from their stupor, then tossed the gun to one of the Crusaders.

“We don’t need faith! Because we already hold the means of resistance in our own hands!”

Everyone understood — the means of resistance was the weapon in their hands.

Trembling, they picked up their weapons and began firing tentatively at first. Though nowhere near as accurate as Jeanne, they soon killed quite a few orks.

Something had been rekindled.

These people, their fighting spirit reignited, began laying down volleys to suppress the orks. With the Deathless’s help, they soon wiped out the entire ork band.

The crowd cheered. Neos said to Faraday, “Take them back. They can fight now.”

The main ork force was already pinned down by the Astartes and the Astra Militarum. As long as they kept tight formation, the remaining greenskins wouldn’t be able to stop their return.

Neos walked over to Jeanne and asked the girl, whose eyes now shone with new light, “Can you take temporary charge of leading them?”

“My God… no, Lord, I mean — yes, I can.”

“You’re saying Neos gathered up nearly all the remaining Crusaders?”

Lin sounded surprised.

On the other end of the comm, William nodded emphatically, his brows lifting with delight.

“Things are going a lot better than we expected. The surviving Crusaders together number nearly two million. With them joining us, we might even have the spare capacity to go on the offensive.”

The first wave deployed to the Attack Moon had numbered around one million. Lin had only expected them to hold the line — he hadn’t thought they’d have the strength to spare for an offensive.

The siege tanks had played no small part in making that possible.

William only needed to send a few units on a quick strike to pinpoint the orks’ heavy weapons and gun emplacements, then withdraw. The penetrating shockwave cannons would then saturate those positions with beyond-visual-range fire.

Using this tactic, the Astra Militarum had knocked out a good number of high-threat heavy units and anti-air emplacements.

“That’s good news…” Lin mused.

The orks weren’t without a response, either. They’d set Kommandos to ambush, inflicting no small number of casualties on the Astra Militarum in turn.

Their bombers had also started striking the areas where the siege tanks were stationed, and some sectors had even reported sightings of Gargants.

The orks’ earlier boarding attempts had, of course, been thwarted by the Ultimate Wall. But these evolved orks were cunning — boarding had never been their true goal. While the fleet was busy repelling boarders, the orks on the Attack Moon had shifted strategy.

The Attack Moon had now given up entirely on its gravity weapons, pouring everything into maintaining its bubble shield instead.

It was hard to imagine the Beast making any decision besides attacking. Fed by an entire moon’s worth of Waaagh! Energy, even the Nova Cannon could do nothing against it.

Any further gains from the fleet engagement were already out of the question.

With anti-air defenses weakened, Lin began planning a new wave of drops, ready to escalate operations on the Attack Moon’s surface.

Right at that moment, Occam, who had long been lying low on the Attack Moon, finally sent word back.

“I believe I’ve found the Ork warlord’s location.”

“Where?”

“They’re not even hiding. He’s in the largest palace on the surface, right above the power core that supplies the whole Attack Moon. But the warlord has massed heavy forces there — unless you can draw those orks away, any decapitation strike is impossible.”

Lin nodded in understanding. “All the more reason for a decisive main-force battle, then.”