The battlefield abruptly fell silent.
Witnessing their Warboss suffer such a grueso and brutal death right before their eyes, the suicidal frenzy in the eyes of the Ork Boyz rapidly dissipated, replaced by a much clearer, terrified lucidity.
As Lucia slowly stood up atop the crushed vehicle, her cold, indifferent gaze sweeping across the surroundings, many of the previously ferocious Boyz collapsed onto their rear ends in terror before scrambling away on all fours in a desperate rout.
This was the fatal flaw inherent to the Ork species.
Once the Warboss—the focal node of their Waaagh! energy—was killed, the Boyz would entirely lose their will to fight. They would instantaneously shift from fearless berserkers to cowardly runts, their combat resolve shattering as they cared for nothing but frantic escape.
This catastrophic vulnerability made the Orks one of the races most susceptible to decapitation strikes in the entire galaxy.
Then again, is there a single race in this universe that actually enjoys decapitation strikes? Rowan mused inwardly.
However, adhering to the principle of striking while the iron is hot, the Rubric Astartes imdiately advanced their firing line, rcilessly gunning down the fleeing xenos.
Bolters and assault cannons unleashed torrential barrages. Plasma beams and lta rays carved through the air, slaughtering the retreating enemies with an efficiency vastly surpassing their prior engagent.
Naturally, the Greenskins were not entirely without a response.
Behind the Ork lines, atop a colossal Battle Fortress bristling with an absurd assortnt of mismatched artillery pieces, the supre commander of this campaign—a massively built Warboss nad Galiya—stood up and peered out the observation slit.
He scratched his chin with a thick, aty finger and asked the Boyz around him, "Wot's goin' on out dere?"
But after listening to the chaotic, overlapping reports from his subordinates, the expression on his face only grew more bewildered.
"Wot d'ya an? Wot d'ya an Zariya got squished by a golden humie usin' a Trukk?!"
The claim sounded so profoundly absurd that even by the chaotic, nonsensical standards of Ork logic, it was entirely too abstract to process.
Suppressing the imdiate urge to swing a fist the size of a boulder and krump the Boy who delivered the report, Galiya began to formulate a solution.
Gork and Mork above...
They still hadn't dealt with that humie voidship in the sky. He had been busy trying to figure out how to evade its lance strikes—those massively thick beams of light that could effortlessly tear through anything.
When he saw the humies actively drop down for a ground fight, he had actually thought they were quite honorable, quite Waaaagh!-worthy, and made for good opponents. He just didn't expect them to be this good at fighting.
However, Galiya quickly made a decision.
"You! Get over 'ere!"
He casually pointed at an Ork. "Yeah, you... whatever yer na is, don't care. Go rally dem panicked runts and counter-attack! Pin dem humies down, form a line, block 'em!"
As he spoke, his gaze swept across the horde outside until his eyes lit up, and he yanked a kboy out from the crowd: "And you! Yeah, you! Get dat super-kustom loud-hailer of yers! I want ya to shout real loud, gather up all da biggest, brawniest heavy unitz! All da Killa Kans, Deff Dreads, and every tank ya can find—group 'em all up!"
"Dat Zariya, he weren't fit to be a Blood Axe! Spendin' all day finkin' up weak, sneaky tricks, or just blindly chargin' in to fight—not proper Waaaaagh! at all!"
"Today, I'm gonna form up a super-killa, super-invincible, super-Waaaagh! formation! Gonna clench it all into one big fist and crush dose stinkin' humies flat! Once our 'Fist of Gork' smashes right into their lines, it won't matter 'ow shiny their voidship's sky-lasers are, dey won't dare shoot into the lee!"
"Dat's right! Dat's how ya do it! I is da kunningest of 'em all!"
On the other side of the battlefield, Rowan—who had been advancing alongside the firing line of his Astartes company, his ears ringing with the deafening roar of bolters—abruptly halted.
He turned his head to Cybia and asked, "Is the intelligence accurate?"
Cybia nodded, a pale azure psychic light glowing within her eyes: "It is accurate. I have detected the xenos amassing their armored assets, attempting to maximize their force density to overrun us in a single, concentrated push."
"Oh? Is that so?"
Rowan mused slightly. "That does seem a bit problematic."
He quickly deduced the enemy's tactical intent.
The Orks intended to use the lives of the Boyz to stall his advance, buying ti to mass their armor before launching an apocalyptic, overwhelming charge to shatter his forces in one blow.
After all, the fundantal reason the Custodian and the Living Saint were able to carve through the enemy lines with impunity was that the heavy vehicular weaponry—the only things capable of truly threatening them—simply could not traverse their turrets fast enough to track the transhumans' terrifying velocity.
And the "peashooters" wielded by the Ork Boyz escorting the tanks posed absolutely zero threat to them, not even requiring evasion. Thus, they were able to weave through the enemy horde with absolute freedom.
However, if the enemy concentrated all their armored assets into a hyper-dense formation and executed a wall-of-steel charge, slamming down like an iron fist... the situation would indeed beco sowhat precarious.
After all, even Greater Daemons—entities capable of effortlessly corrupting entire planets and plunging whole sectors into apocalyptic war—were not entirely immune to vehicular threats. The most infamous example being a certain Great Unclean One (who shall remain naless) who was notoriously banished back to the immaterium after being run over by a reversing Leman Russ battle tank.
"Still, what in the world are they thinking?"
Rowan muttered speechlessly as he drew the Ceremonial Sword of Solomon and pointed it toward the heavens.
Tracing the tether of the Emperor's psychic might, he re-established a crystal-clear connection with the machine spirit of the strike cruiser in orbit, ready to initiate a fresh orbital bombardnt at a mont's notice.
True, Rowan was highly reluctant to utilize orbital strikes.
But that did not an he wouldn't use them.
Just as Rowan was about to issue the command, a chorus of sharp whistles tore through the sky, interrupting his thoughts.
Incoming artillery!
Rowan's guard instantly went up, and he imdiately wove another layer of kinetic shielding around himself.
"Didn't I already obliterate the vast majority of the Ork artillery batteries from orbit before we teleported down?"
However, he quickly realized that the rolling thunder of the artillery was not aid at them, but rather at the Greenskin horde.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!!
High-explosive shells detonated amidst the newly rallied Ork formations as if guided by supernatural eyes. Shrapnel violently sheared through bone and flesh, blooming into flowers of blood within the xenos ranks and mowing down swathes of Greenskins like a scythe through wheat.
This artillery barrage was terrifyingly precise. It instantaneously shattered the montum the Orks had just managed to scrape together, throwing their formations back into absolute disarray.
Consequently, the advance of Rowan's vanguard multiplied in speed several tis over.
"...What an incredibly precise bombardnt," Rowan and Cybia murmured in simultaneous astonishnt.
Anyone with even a cursory understanding of the Astra Militarum knew that due to the Imperium's hopelessly rigid bureaucracy and catastrophic logistical managent, the vast majority of Imperial Guard Infantry Regints consisted strictly of infantry, while Artillery Regints consisted strictly of artillery. The departntal divisions were agonizingly inflexible.
Compounded by endless interstellar deploynts resulting in horrific attrition rates for both personnel and materiel, the Astra Militarum generally suffered from a severe lack of heavily integrated indirect-fire support on a tactical level. Furthermore, many of their officers were fundantally unaccustod to coordinating rapid-response, dynamic artillery barrages.
It was honestly no wonder that in most engagents, they were played like fiddles and spun around like tops by the T'au Empire.
When one side was stubbornly employing World War I trench warfare, and the other had long since embraced fully networked, information-integrated combined-arms tactics, it would be a miracle if the forr actually won.
"It seems this Astra Militarum regint... actually knows exactly what they are doing."
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