Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Orks really were a tricky breed of foe.

No matter how you prepared, in the end they always managed to pull some massive stunt on you in the very place you least expected.

Admidel, his Death-Bound Warriors in tow, came to Lin's side and helped him to his feet.

"You all right?"

"At least I can still move."

The fight just now had been no duel. The Ork warlord had kept summoning his boyz to come to his rescue—fortunately, Admidel and the Death-Bound Warriors had blocked them all.

As Admidel helped him up, Lin noticed that only a single Death-Bound Warrior remained.

The Death-Bound Warriors had been a windfall to begin with, so losing them caused Lin no real pang.

But such attrition laid bare how brutal this battle had been. He looked around and found that of the five hundred-odd Astartes who had charged in alongside him, only a little over four hundred now remained.

They had lost another hundred Astartes.

The four hundred-some Astartes who were left, under the command of Kurande and Sorn, formed a protective ring around Lin. Weapons in hand, they kept a wary watch on the Orks who still had not dispersed.

The battle had drawn to a close the moment Lin slew the Ork warlord. Strangely, though, the elite Orks Gadda had brought in did not scatter at once. Though they had stopped fighting, they still crowded around the place.

Lin could feel their gazes passing over the Space Marines to settle upon himself.

Even with the Ork warlord dead, the Orks still held an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Sorn tightened his grip on his Power Sword; something about this felt off to him.

Over a thousand five hundred years of combat experience told him that Orks whose Warboss had been slain would simply rout. But the reaction of this lot before him defied his expectations.

Then again, Orks this highly advanced could not be judged by common sense—perhaps a new Warboss had already arisen from among them.

To win this chance at a decapitation strike, they were already spent, a crossbow drawn to its last. If these Orks could still keep fighting…

His mind had already begun working out a plan to break out afterward. No matter what, he had to at least get Kurande clear of the encirclement.

But even as his thoughts raced, Lin had already come up to the Astartes.

"No need to be tense," he said to Sorn. Sorn noticed that in his hand he was carrying the headless corpse of that Ork warlord.

"But these beasts don't look like they mean to withdraw." Sorn did not relax his guard. "I saw the Titan go down—when will He come back online?"

"Soon. But we won't need the Titan."

Lin hoisted the Ork warlord's body onto his shoulder, crossed the Astartes' battle line, and slammed the headless corpse down hard in front of everyone.

What was he doing?

Sorn did not understand what Lin was up to. He knew that a certain faction among his former cousins liked to sow terror within a given species using flayed skin and bone, but he did not think such a tactic would work on Orks.

That, however, was not Lin's aim either. In full view of them all, he planted his foot upon the corpse. Then he hammered his chest with his fist and, like a beast, loosed an earth-shaking roar through his vox-amplifier.

"WAAAAGH!!!"

The greenskins boiled over all at once.

Although Lin had seized the attention of every greenskin present from the moment he declared war in the Orkish tongue, none of the Orks had thought he could win before now; all they had wanted was the novelty of some runty git daring to challenge them greenskins.

Among the Orks, the bigger something was, the mightier it was.

A three-meter runty git wanting to challenge their six-meter boss?

Even a Gretchin wouldn't reckon the runty git could win!

But this runty git—he had gone and bashed their Big Mek to death by brute force, in a mech only half as tall as their boss!

This runty git—dead 'ard, 'e woz!

"Skullcracker! Skullcracker!"

"Mega Mek! Mega Mek!"

One mob of greenskins had given Lin two different nicknames, and they soon split into two factions over the disagreement and started brawling with one another. Yet their core sentiment was perfectly unanimous.

"Runty git, we love ya!"

They would never pick a runty git as their boss, of course, but that did nothing to stop them from worshipping this exceptionally, exceptionally hard-fighting runty git. That worship turned into respect and fear toward Lin.

Perhaps some greenskin would want to challenge Lin later on, but certainly not now, with their boss having just been killed by him.

Faced with the seething greenskins, Lin—his roar finished—was in no mood to humor them. He raised his Plasma Pistol and casually shot dead one capering Ork boy.

"Clear off!" he roared again in the Orkish tongue.

The Orks scattered in an instant, though their cheering did not cease. The dumbstruck Space Marines did not even think to open fire. Only when Lin gave the signal did they snap out of it, as if waking from a dream, and pull their triggers.

Cheering even as they were cut down, the Orks fled in disarray toward the outer edge of the defensive line.

The Titan that had gone down now powered up once more, an angry red glow flickering in the cockpit viewports that resembled a pair of eyes. Even unable to commune with its machine-spirit, Lin could taste the obvious fury of this God-Machine.

Down to a single arm, He strode forward; though He had lost that Volcano Cannon, the Vulcan Heavy Bolter remained a deadly tool for clearing out infantry.

Christina's comm cut in, her tone breezy, seemingly unaffected by the machine-spirit's wrath.

"You manage to get yourself into such a sorry state every single time, Magos Lin."

"Oh, come off it—you didn't fare much better this time either."

Lin shot back at Christina, his temper short. He meant to simply cut the comm, but just as he was about to, something occurred to him, and he instructed the Titan captain: "Don't kill them all—let a batch of greenskins go, let them get out."

Although they were far outnumbered by the greenskins, the impact of a single God-Machine on the course of battle was beyond doubt. The Orks, who now could not strike back, were living targets. The greenskins assaulting the line on the outer perimeter wanted to retreat, and there was no power to stop them—but this band of greenskins trapped in the middle, hemmed in by the encircled line, ought to be annihilated to the last.

Christina did not understand why Lin—whose plan from beginning to end had been precisely to wipe out as many greenskins as possible—would now make such a decision. But she chose to do as he said.

Lin handed the task of mopping up the greenskins to the Titan and the Astra Militarum troops, while the Astartes, exhausted from the decapitation strike, began to rest and regroup where they stood.

Kurande came to Lin's side, still cradling the body of a brother in his arms.

Lin recognized the warrior; he was the leader of the Imperial Fists honour company that had arrived earlier alongside Hays. Only now a great hole had been melted through his chest—plainly, he had already been called to the Golden Throne.

"How did he fall?" Lin asked.

"Brother Eljer—he took an Ion Cannon shot for me."

Even though Kurande understood that death was the inevitable fate of each and every one of them, grief still showed on his face when he thought of how this warrior had fallen.

The Imperial Fists had little blood left to bleed…

"Eljer's glory ought to be carried on by someone. The shot did not strike his Gene-Seeds. Magos Lin, could you help us perform the surgery to extract the Gene-Seeds?"

Lin would not refuse, of course. In fact, together with the Apothecaries of the Exemplary Fists, he would have to repeat this act nearly two hundred more times.

Their sacrifice was but a microcosm of this war.

This victory was of vital importance, but to win it, the price Lin had paid in elite forces was considerably greater than he had anticipated.

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