Warhammer: Love? Chapter 216: Startle

This discovery sent Siss' heart sinking to rock bottom.

His most powerful weapon was his psychic ability. If his psychic powers were continuously suppressed, his combat effectiveness would drop by at least seventy percent.

However, Sarah gave him no ti for thought or respite.

After the failed strike, her figure vanished again. A second later, she appeared on Siss' left, her twin blades sweeping horizontally toward his waist. Siss teleported away once more, but before he could even find his footing, Sarah reappeared on his right, thrusting a blade toward his heart.

Siss realized that no matter where he teleported or how fast he moved, Sarah could lock onto his position within 0.1 seconds and follow imdiately. Her speed was absurd, completely inconsistent with her five-ter-tall fra and heavy armor. Furthermore, every one of her attacks pointed precisely at his vitals, delivered with lethal angles and imnse power.

Siss could feel that a single mistake would result in him being cleaved in two instantly. This was the oppressive weight of a Norn Emissary—even if she was just a budget version. Extre speed, extre power, and extre defense, combined with potent psychic abilities, forced Siss into an unprecedented struggle.

Finally, Siss simply closed his eyes.

He stopped looking with his physical eyes and stopped actively probing with his psychic vision. Instead, he relied entirely on instinct and psychic precognition to anticipate Sarah's attacks.

With his eyes closed, Siss' perspective actually beca clearer. In his sensory network, Sarah's figure gradually shed the disguise of the "large green lizard" seen by the Boyz. Her body grew a terrifying blue-and-white carapace, and her eyes transford into insectoid compound eyes. Her massive head pulsed with blue light, and her mouth revealed razor-sharp fangs. She looked more and more like the Tyranid xenos that Karl-2 had encountered in the past.

"Bugs..."

Siss' heart skipped a beat, his face a mixture of shock and terror. She was a bug! The "Major Cold Divine ssenger" worshipped by the Hokage Clan was actually a bug!

He snapped his eyes open and looked down at the battlefield. In his psychic vision, the Boyz of the Hokage Clan also began to change. Cold light, identical to Sarah's, flickered in their eyes. Their movents carried a non-human precision and coordination. In Siss' eyes, they all transford into monsters—half-Ork, half-bug.

Everything made sense now.

Why the Hokage Clan had risen so suddenly in a few months; why they had proactively helped him check Chandler's power, leading to this civil war step by step. It turned out they weren't the sa race at all. They were the claws of the Tyranids, spies lurking on Karl-2. Their purpose was to incite an Ork civil war so Karl-2 would tear itself apart and consu its own fighting strength. Perhaps, when the ti was right, those damned bugs would swarm in and devour all of Karl-2!

"You damned bugs!" Siss let out a roar of fury. "I'll kill ya! I'll crush ya all!!!"

He wanted to scream this earth-shattering secret to the public and tell every Ork. He wanted to tell them that the ssenger the Hokage Clan worshipped was a man-eating bug. He wanted to tell them they were being used by the Tyranids and were digging their own graves.

But he failed.

The Waaagh! field accumulated by the Hokage Clan was still in effect. The Boyz' perception was completely distorted; they could not see Sarah's true face, nor could they see the abnormality of the Hokage Boyz. In their eyes, the battle between Siss and Sarah was just a normal internal struggle for the position of Boss of Karl-2. So were even cheering and placing bets with their teeth on who would win.

"Kill 'im, Cold!" "Go on, Boss Siss! Scrap dat lizard!" "Whoever wins is da most Waaagh Boss!"

Siss looked at these ignorant Orks, watching them cheer for the man-eating bug. He watched them being egged on by the bugs to kill one another. A deep sense of helplessness and desolation welled up in his heart. He had a grievance but no way to voice it.

Sarah's offensive grew sharper and sharper. Siss' psychic energy was being suppressed continuously. Every ti he tried to channel energy for a powerful Waaagh! spell, he was precisely interrupted by Sarah's neural pulses.

After countless teleports and dodges, even Siss, whose psychic reserves were as vast as a sea, began to feel exhausted. His breathing beca labored, more wounds appeared on his body, and green blood stained his robes.

This could not continue. Siss gnashed his teeth, a flash of resolve crossing his eyes. He decided to risk it all. Even if it ant mutual destruction, he would kill this Tyranid monster and stop their sche.

Sarah's twin blades pierced through his psychic shield again, thrusting toward his heart. This ti, Siss did not dodge. He allowed the blades to fall, and simultaneously, his eyes erupted with blinding green light.

He spread his arms, instantly draining the entire psychic reserves of over a hundred Weirdboyz nearby. Those Weirdboyz didn't even have ti to scream before they turned into shriveled corpses and collapsed. Terrifying psychic energy surged frantically within Siss' body. His fra expanded from the overwhelming power, the air around him began to burn, and green lightning crashed down continuously.

"GAZE OF GORK!!!"

Siss let out a final roar. Unlike the "Gaze of Mork," which was a large-area AOE spell, the "Gaze of Gork" was the strongest single-target attack Siss could master. It condensed the entire Waaagh! field into a single stare. Once locked by this gaze, there was no escape; one could only tank the brutal power of Gork.

Siss' eyes locked onto Sarah. Instantly, a savage, violent, primal, and destructive force poured into Sarah's mind like a bursting dam.

In Sarah's world of consciousness, a thousand-ter-tall, burly Ork figure holding a massive axe let out an earth-shaking roar. He was the physical manifestation of Gork in the mortal realm. He swung the giant axe, frantically hacking at Sarah's conscious form, intending to crush her awareness and erase her cold soul.

But what he faced was never a single consciousness. Instead, it was the Hive Mind—a collective of billions of Tyranids, as vast as a sea of stars and as deep as an abyss. Green Waaagh! energy and purple Tyranid willpower clashed directly and violently within Sarah's mind. The entire space trembled violently, as if it would collapse at any mont. Countless Tyranid consciousnesses were torn apart by Gork's axe. This was the ultimate showdown between the Waaagh! field and the Shadow in the Warp.

A split second before the "Gaze of Gork" could completely destroy Sarah's surface consciousness, a domineering pink power ford a shield over the Tyranid willpower. No matter how the giant Ork figure hacked or tore, it remained unmoved.

In that reality-world interval of less than a second, Sarah's blades had already plunged deep into Siss' chest.

The cold chitinous blades passed through Siss' chest without resistance. The sharp edges erged from his back, carrying thick green Ork blood that dripped onto the cold alloy floor with soft, rhythmic thuds.

The power of the Shadow in the Warp surged into Siss' body through the blades like countless leeches burrowing into his veins. The Waaagh! field, once tied so closely to his soul, was now wrapped in a thick, insulating layer. No matter how he called out, there was no longer any response.

The burning green light in Siss' eyes dimd at a visible rate. He looked down at the twin blades skewering his chest, seeing his own pale face reflected in the steel. Finally, he slowly raised his head to look at Sarah.

There was still no expression on the face of that terrifying creature. In her cold, compound eyes, there was no anger, no joy, and not even a hint of a victor's pride. There was only a coldness as pure as a glacier and a bottomless desire to devour.

It was an instinct etched into the genes of the Tyranids—the greed to turn every bit of biomass in the galaxy into their own. It was as if the one she had just killed was not the most powerful psyker in the history of the Dolido Ork Alliance, but rely an inconsequential ant blocking her path.

Siss knew he had utterly failed.

Using the last of his strength, he turned his head to look at the scorched earth of Karl-2. The fires of civil war had spread to every corner; the Boyz were still slaughtering each other because of his and Chandler's desires. Not far away in the central plaza, the thirty-ter Gargant continued its tireless, high-speed rotation.

Everything was moving toward an inevitable destruction. A bitter smile curled Siss' lips. He had imagined his end countless tis. Perhaps he would die on a battlefield against humans. Perhaps he would erge victorious in a duel with Chandler and beco the resident Warboss of Karl-2. Then, he would follow Boss Ragnor to launch a Great Waaagh! that would sweep across the entire sector.

But he never imagined he would die at the hands of a bug, caught in a civil war ticulously orchestrated by soone else. He hadn't even managed to wake that dizzy moron Chandler.

"So da heavens want dead..." Siss let out a long, sorrowful sigh.

In that sigh were resentnt, regret, despair for the future of Karl-2, and guilt toward Boss Ragnor. The mont the sound faded, his body began to swell violently. His Ork fra, nearly four ters tall, expanded into a massive green balloon twenty ters in diater within three seconds. His skin was stretched paper-thin, vessels clearly visible beneath as green blood seeped from every pore.

The psychic energy within him, which had been suppressed to rock bottom by the Shadow in the Warp, suddenly erupted like a dormant volcano. In an instant, it surged to a level even greater than his peak.

When a powerful psyker completely loses control or faces death, the vast energy contained within can trigger a devastating "psychic catastrophe." A human psyker might trigger an explosion large enough to level a city or tear a rift between realspace and the Warp, summoning hordes of daemons to drag a planet into the abyss of Chaos.

Siss, as a pure Ork Weirdboy, had no connection to the Chaos-infested Warp. However, under his intentional self-destruction and psychic eruption, an unprecedented Waaagh! explosion was about to bloom in the heart of Karl-2.

If I can't keep Karl-2, den none of ya can have it! Dis whole space station is comin' wiv !

A terrifying psychic aura swept out, causing the entire Waaagh! field of Karl-2 to fluctuate and boil violently. Around Siss and Sarah, a gale of hurricane proportions abruptly rose. The howling wind scooped up rubble, tal wreckage, corpses, and discarded weapons. A scrapped Squire Knight cha weighing dozens of tons was ripped from the ground and sent spinning through the air. Atop the machine, three Deathskulls scavengers shrieked in terror before being smashed against a distant alloy wall, turning into a slurry of at and engine oil.

Every Ork fighting in the core area stopped their movents simultaneously, looking toward Siss. They could feel the Waaagh! energy that made their blood boil and their skin itch. It was gathering, compressing, and expanding at a terrifying speed. The power was so vast and violent that every cell in their bodies trembled and cheered.

"Woa, da big one's comin'!!!" "It's Boss Siss! He's gonna use a big move!" "Too Waaagh! Dis is definitely da most Waaagh move in da hist'ry of Karl-2, haha!"

The Orks felt no fear. Instead, they broke into heartfelt cheers. They threw down their weapons and danced, hooting for Siss. Many even ran toward Siss, wanting to be closer to the explosion. For them, being able to witness an unprecedented explosion before dying in such a Waaagh! scene was supre glory—more satisfying than killing a hundred Humies.

But a split second before Siss' body reached its limit—skin cracking and a Waaagh! explosion capable of destroying half the core area imminent—Sarah let out a sharp, ear-piercing screech.

Raynor was still on Karl-2; she would never allow anyone to harm him!

The screech drowned out the roar of cannons, the cheers of the Orks, and the howling wind. It was as if ten thousand cold needles had stabbed into the brain and soul of every Ork present. Following the screech, the terrifying purple Shadow in the Warp descended upon the core area like a tidal wave.

The hall plunged into darkness. Every Ork experienced a vivid hallucination. They saw swarms of Tyranids blotting out the sun, diving from space. Countless Hormagaunts brandished sharp blades, and Rippers opened maws full of fangs. The black tide of the swarm flooded every corridor, the hall, and the entire station. Everywhere it passed, life was devoured until nothing remained but barren silence.

A cold, hopeless, suffocating aura enveloped every Ork in the hall, forcing them to stop their cheering. They trembled, their teeth chattering. The fanatical Waaagh! emotion from monts ago was instantly suppressed to the freezing point by the Shadow in the Warp.

In the reality world, a thick purple energy barrier encased Siss' bloated body. A strange purple hue quickly stained the surface of his balloon-like green fra. The Waaagh! energy that had been compressed to its limit and was about to detonate began to leak out frantically like a punctured tire. Strands of green energy escaped from countless tiny cracks in the purple barrier, dissipating into the air like wisps of smoke.

No matter how Siss pushed his internal energy or tried to detonate himself, it was futile. The power of the Shadow in the Warp firmly throttled his psychic energy, stifling the catastrophe at its final step.

The gale died down. The turbulent Waaagh! field slowly returned to calm. Sarah cleanly withdrew the twin blades from Siss' chest. The edges had already been charred by Siss' internal energy. Siss' body shriveled like a deflated ball and fell lightly onto the floor. His eyes lost all light as life rapidly drained away.

At that mont, a brilliant beam of green light shot up from Siss' corpse. The beam pierced straight through the lingering smoke and vanished into the depths of space, but it caused no damage.