"Drop-ships landed within 1 degree of accuracy of target. Total displacement from target landing zone is 500 meters south." The command bunker, stiflingly hot and cramped, was nonetheless silent except for the voice of the magos' voice and the quiet whirring of her mechadendrites. Troop numbers, pict-capture replays, and status updates filled a holoprojection behind her. "Initial landings were on top of an ork raiding party taking shelter in the abandoned bunker network. Force Beta engaged, beginning combat Epsilon-001. Friendly losses are 3 dead and 5 wounded, enemy losses 67 dead, 1 captured. Combat Epsilon-001 ends. Combat Epsilon-002 began…"

Shinji, bored, tuned out from the reports prior to the tactical briefing.


"WAAAAAAAAAAAGH!" The ork burst from the tree line, brandishing a crude, rusted metal axe. A combat servitor pivoted, almost effortlessly, and placed a stream of auto-rounds directly between the greenskin's piggy, red eyes. It went down, head vaporized. The servitor, detecting no further xenos life forms, powered down its weapons and returned to passive scanning.


"-servitor returns to passive scanning. No xenos life forms detected, ending combat Epsilon-344. No further combats recorded for the past 13 minutes."

Shinji blinked, his eyes returning from their glazed-over state. He sat up in his chair a little straighter, knowing that what was to come would require his full attention.

"Thank you, Magos Akagi." Inquisitor Katsuragi strode into the room, accompanied by her retinue. She took a place next to the hologram projector. "If you wouldn't mind, I will take command of this briefing."

Asuka rolled her eyes. "Go ahead, Inquisitor."

The corners of Misato's mouth tightened, but she said nothing. Instead, she flicked her wrist at the hologram, dismissing the data-reports and bringing up a map. A bright dot pulsed in an area right in the middle of a large valley.

"We, currently, are here. The Shrine of Saint Basileus is six kilometres east, and Volumnus, the capitol city of…" she broke off and leaned over to whisper to Asuka. Asuka whispered back quickly. "…Emperor-Knows-Where, as I believe people are calling it, is a further fourteen kilometres east from that. To the west, we have a ravening ork horde. We don't know exactly where, as orbital imaging is undergoing maintenance, but previous shots have given the impression that it is getting closer."

She paced back and forth.

"Interrogation of captured orks have given us very little information. It seems they are led by a Warboss Gulzcruncha, who will lead them to a mighty WAAAGH across the stars. We must, must, stop them before they can leave the planet. No sacrifice is too great to stop this."

"As such, we are going to stop their rampage here, before they get to the spaceport at Volumnus. If possible, they must also not touch the shrine of Saint Basileus, or they Ecclesiarchy will not be pleased."

"Therefore, we will stop them at this point, where the valley is thinnest. A set of bunkers has been there for a long time, from the Saccharisian Crusade. They will need to be dug out, and trenches will need to be dug between them."

"The trenches should be dug in straight lines, rather than as directed by standard regulations, due to the lack of significant ork ranged weapons. They should run here and here."

Two glowing lines were created on the map.

"In addition, these two bunkers here," she flicked her wrist, and two pulsating points on the map appeared, "Are essential to our defence. If the orks breach either, it's game over."

Misato clapped her hands, bringing attention to herself. "In terms of firepower, we have very few tanks. I believe we have five Ry za-pattern Leman Russ tanks, as well as two Mars-Alpha Leman Russ punishers, and an ace up our sleeve just in case. We also have Basilisk support from the PDF forces."

A round of muttered hisses and curses swelled in the room.

"Alright, I get it. You don't trust the PDF to hit the side of a barn from its inside. It is the best thing we have for artillery support though."

The hissing died down somewhat.

"We mobilize at midnight. Daylight cycle is 10 hours daytime, 12 hours night-time. We should get a guaranteed six hours of entrenching, plus whatever we can get before the orks get to our position. Remember that orks are diurnal and will refuse to attack at night."

"If this goes well, we can stop this Warboss Gulzcruncha before he gets off-world. Ave Imperator."

A half-mumbled "Ave Imperator" came from the assembled officers as they filed out of the tent. Their chatter slowly faded into the distance until the command tent was quiet, and empty apart from Asuka and Misato.

"Why are we really here, Misato? An Inquisitor of your standing does not come to some backwater Agri-world and a random shrine on a whim."

The purple-haired Inquisitor began petting PenPen idly. The pysber-eagle let out a soft "Wark!" of appreciation. "That is… classified, Asuka. Classified at a high level," she said, looking into the distance. "Maybe in time I could tell you, but right now your priority is killing that warp-cursed Warboss and slaughtering his following."

She paused briefly. "Go. Your forces await your command… Princess"

"Ah, go slag yourself"

"Or is it just captain-commissar now? I can barely keep up with all the callsigns now."

"Captain-commissar is sufficient."

"Take care of them, Asuka."

"I will."

Misato nodded. "Dismissed."


Shinji Ikari sat in a chimera, head bent down, listening to his audiosten over the thrumming of the engine. (A/N: You know the pose). The tracks clattered as they traversed the rocky soil of Emperor-Knows-Where. No-one else in the APC bothered with the vision slits, despite the landscape being bathed in dim light reflecting off the large moon. What was there to see, apart from low shrubs and rocks?

Time passed slowly. The ten-kilometre troop movement only took twenty minutes at a Chimera's top speed, but every second felt like a minute, every minute an eternity. Every moment was stretched out, felt by guardsmen that knew that they could readily die in the coming hours.

Eventually the transport slowed to a halt and the rear ramp clanged down. Shinji climbed out. A man, sitting in the cupola of the chimera, touched his forelock briefly, saluting the footsloggers sent into battle. Countless other soldiers were filing out of nearby vehicles, reforming into squads. Senior commanders organized squads into work teams, sent to clear out the bunkers and trenches.

They worked for a long time, digging in the moonlight.


Shinji struggled to move his entrenching tool through the hard, rocky soil. The trench was deep, but not deep enough. The bunker was intact, however overgrown it was, but the trenches that had once existed were long gone, filled in naturally over centuries of neglect and abandonment. Around him, others were doing much the same. Toji was also digging, having a much easier time than Shinji was. Kensuke was setting up a heavy bolter emplacement while simultaneously chanting the prayers to the machine spirit that the weapon demanded. Mari was…

Shinji looked around. Trooper Illustrious-Makinami was conspicuously absent from the proceedings. She had definitely been there earlier, but he had not seen her for over an hour. He was about to report this to his superiors when she ran out of the nearest bunker, something clutched in her fist.

"Look what I found!" she said.

"Uhh-"

"Look! An old power cell, dating from the Saccharisian Crusade. Still has power too!"

She threw the cell to Shinji. "Catch!"

The blocky cell flew in a lazy arc. It hit Shinji in the face.

"Keep it. You might need it…" Mari trailed off, and ran back into the bunker, obviously scrounging around for more remnants of the last occupation.

"Hey lieutenant."

"Yes, Kensuke?" Shinji turned to face him

"Do you want the mortar out here, or in the bunker?" A mortar was lying in the dirt behind him.

Shinji furrowed his brows. "How do you fire a mortar out of a bunker?"

"Easy. This is a K258 Gryphonne-pattern fire support bunker. The default schematics, which this one sticks to, give it a sliding roof which, I may add, still works."

Shinji though for a moment. "I guess it can go in the bunker then."

Kensuke smiled as he dragged the mortar away. "I'm really gonna do this! At war with the enemies of the Emperor at last," he was muttering under his breath, voice rising in pitch until it was a squeal of joy.

It was scant minutes later when the final member of his squad approached him and saluted. "I would like to formally apologize, sir!"

"…what for, Toji?" Shinji said, awkwardly.

"My behaviour, sir, during that lesson on the Victoria Mortis, sir, was inappropriate, sir!"

"Apology accepted, I guess."

"That's not enough, sir. I want you to hit me."

"What."

"He's a little weird like that!" Kensuke called out from inside the bunker.

"I won't feel right until you do, sir!" Toji's hands were white-knuckled fists by his side, and his gaze rested a few centimetres above Shinji's head.

Shinji bought his hand around in a weak slap.

"Not like that, sir! A real punch!"

A meaty THWAK of flesh on flesh was audible clearly for quite some distance. Toji fell to the ground with a thump.

"…"

"…"

"…"

"…"

He and Shinji looked at each other.

"Frakking ow. Good punch, lieutenant."

"T-Thanks…"

Toji climbed to his feet. They stood in silence for a while longer. Distant chatter and motor engines were audible.

"So, uh… I'm going to report our section as entrenched."

Toji looked up and pointed. "No time for that, lieutenant."

He was pointing at the distant forest, visible out of the mouth of the valley. Trees moved ominously. Engine noises grew louder. Toji looked at Shinji, who closed his eyes and nodded once.

Toji stood up, inflated his chest, and bellowed a warning.

"Frakking incoming!"


They came in a horde, shoulder to shoulder, and undulating tide of bodies. Their skin was a deep green-brown and was as hard as leather even without the excessive scar tissue that the majority of them were covered with. Weird and ramshackle constructions burst from the tree line, painted red "Cooz red wunz go fasta!" A palpable smell rolled off them, the musky stench of unwashed bodies and the strong odour of the fungus beer that they drank and used to power their vehicles.

But one noise overrode all these observations in the minds of the defenders. A war cry so powerful it shook the very bones of the earth.

"wwwwwWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGH!"


Shinji stood still, frozen in shock, eyes wide open. It was Kensuke who saved his life, launching a mortar shell into the encroaching horde. He flinched reflexively, ducking slightly, just as a bunch of crudely taped-together ork rokkits whistled through the space that his head had occupied mere milliseconds before. Shinji convinced himself he could feel the rush of displaced air and the heat from the backwash of the propellant.

Toji crawled over to the heavy bolter. He opened up on it, spitting a tongue of fire and metal that shredded ork flesh and a light buggy that slewed through his arc of fire. It exploded in a lurid fireball, whatever liquid it had in its fuel tanks cooking off all at once.

Yet the orks pounded forwards, absorbing losses with an almost insane glee.

A screaming hiss, the terrible, distinctive sound of earthshaker rounds, flew overhead, following the supersonic artillery shells in flight. They overshot their targets by hundreds of meters, landing in the forest with a distant boom that made the pebbles on the ground skip.

Most of the ork vehicles were naught but smouldering wrecks by then, carved out by the ruby kiss of a lascannon beam or the percussive explosions of a Leman Russ' main battle cannon. Yet the orks were almost within lasgun range now, spurred on by bounds of their powerful legs.

Hold…

Hold…

Hold…

The vox-bead in Shinji's ear crackled. ++Fire at will++

The Imperial guard had many powerful weapons at its disposal: The titan-hunting volcano cannon, the infantry annihilator that was the Vulcan mega-bolter, the portable thermonuclear missile of the Deathstrike missile.

Yet all these weapons of mass warfare pale in comparison to the power and versatility of the massed lasgun.

A veritable wall of dirty orange light flashed out, rank upon rank of guardsmen adding their own shots as the orks entered effective range. Orks went down by the hundreds, their natural toughness overcome by sheer weight of fire. For a moment, it was all over.

Then the ground began to move


Asuka relaxed outside of the Angelus Mortuus, a Stormlord recovered from the 98th Starltins after their defeat on Renian Primus. There was no need to risk the tank, with the battle taking place easily under control.

Suddenly dozens of vehicles bored out of the ground, right on top of and behind imperial trenches. "Diggas. Frak, frak, frak, frak, frak." She sprinted onto the Stormlord and yelled at the driver.

"Go! Get to the front lines."

With a juddering roar, the engines started to propel the tank forward. Asuka ran back to grab her weapon: a black-bladed halberd with twin plasma guns slaved to a trigger on the haft. She ignited the disruption field with a twist of her hand, and the ancient power weapon hummed into life. She raised it up to her eye level. A cold smirk came to her lips.

"Let's see how orks like the taste of death."

The veterans around her checked their own weapons and nodded in satisfaction.


The digga rose out of the ground in front of Shinji like some kind of warped, metallic worm, the four crude drill bits at the front showering dirt and gravel over a large area. A ramp clanged into the dirt, and orks disgorged from the dark, cavernous hold, spilling out into the heart of the imperial defence line.

Shinji heard screams from distant parts of the trench, and correctly assumed that there were more diggas assaulting other imperial fortification. The orks saw him and bounded toward him, a bare twenty meters away. From behind him, he could smell something burning and the roaring crackle of flames.

It was only when the orks charging at him were engulfed in a searing sheet of flame did he realise that someone had a flamer. When he heard the faint singing, he knew that Mari had found a flamer in the bunker. He turned, saw her, and smiled. We can win this, he thought.

Then Mari imploded.

It was sudden, abrupt. Her singing turned into a brief scream as her head and chest distended, then collapsed violently. Her bones came out through her skin in a shower of blood and then snapped, leaving nothing but a sack of bloody meat and pile of broken bones.

Shinji stared on in horror at the remnants of Mari's body. He turned around slowly.

An ork clambered out of the digga. It was half a head taller than the orks around it, and its piggy eyes gleamed with insanity. A faint aura of crackling green power surrounded it, along with the faint smell of ozone.

It grinned, showing rotten, browned fangs. It gestured at Shinji, bringing its hand into a tight fist, manipulating the psychic field around it. Shinji felt his chest constrict, then the world went black.


The body she was in was not hers, but it always had been hers. She had never been in this body before, and she had spent her whole life inside the body. Impossible contradictions warred in her mind as she came into being.

She stood up. The body ached as if it had been put through the Sororitas entry test. She ignored the pain; it did not matter to her now.

She was surrounded by humanoids. She recognised them from her studies as orks. Their psychic type, one of the weirdboyz, was standing in front of her. It grunted in annoyance, and gestured at her, bringing its hand into a tight fist. Nothing happened. She was vaguely aware of invisible tendrils of power sliding off her, attempting to grip her soul but gaining no purchase.

The ork gestured again, to no avail. She looked around herself. A lasgun lay next to her, casing cracked, and wires knocked out. The bayonet also was unattached and broken. She grabbed the closest thing available that could pass as a weapon.

The entrenching tool passed through the weirdboy's psychic shield like it was nothing, collapsing it. Basically three kilograms of edged metal on a thick rod, it smashed into the ork's chest. The ork struck back at her, but the fetishized staff it wielded bounced off her flesh. She attempted to laugh, but it came out as a low roar.

The entrenching tool impacted on the weirdboy's chest over and over again. Eventually, its toughened flesh gave up the struggle and yielded. She pushed the edge of the tool through its heart.

She looked up from her kill.

A huge tank was smashing through waves of orks, frontal cannon blazing. The frontal ramp opened to release a small squad of humans, lead by a woman in the uniform of the commissariat. She was wielding a halberd of ancient design, disruption field crackling along its onyx blade. It spat bolts of pure light, melting the orks in front of her to slag.

Two of the veterans went down, overwhelmed by numbers, but the woman at the front was unstoppable, unbeatable. Her halberd flashed in the sunlight, and with it she scourged the Emperor's foes from this world. She rallied the broken elements of the regiment, and she punched a hole through the orks, slaying all that got in her way.

One ork, slipping in the spilled blood and cauterised entrails of its fellows, scrambled onto its feet and ran. Another one followed, shouting "Leggit, boyz!"

One more ork followed.

Then another.

Then a dozen.

Then every ork was fleeing for their lives, running from the battered, bloodied but victorious regiment of the Imperial Guard.

She felt her control over the body leaving her. She laid an ork low with a throw of the entrenching tool, burying it into the beast's back. The corners of her vision dimmed.

She sank back into the void.


A/N I didn't want this chapter to be a 'let's have everyone talk to each other' chapter, but here we are. Hope the battle scenes weren't too bloated.

There's a conflict of conventions in 40k literature with vox messages and psychic messages. They vary between ++(message)++ and symbols that won't let me use. For clarity, vox messages will be the first, using ++(Message)++, and psychic messages, telepathy, using ==(message)==.

Thanks IllusoryMist for beta reading this chapter.

Edit: Yes, Doc43Souls is right. Sorry. I've made the changes to the vocabulary section


Vocabulary:

Magos: A term used to describe high-ranking members of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the ruling priesthood of the tech-cult. Not to be confused with magus, which is used for psychically-capable genestealer cultists, but that isn't in this story. Yet anyway.

Mechadendrites: A catch-all category used for the tentacle-like and robotic arm limb prosthetics used mainly by the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Warboss: A leader of orks. Due to orkish nature, orks who fight a lot and survive become bigger and stronger, making them more likely to survive other battles. An ork who grows large enough eventually bashes a lot of heads together and takes control and leads other orks onward. Ork society, if you can even call it society, is very 'might makes right'

WAAAGH: An ork crusade. They travel, invade other planets, grow stronger and move on. Other orks will be attracted to the violence and join in. Eventually, it gets too big to stop or the Warboss dies, and the WAAAGH breaks down into on giant scrap between every ork around. It goes without saying that they love both options.

PDF: Planetary Defence Force. Not Portable Document Folder.

Chimera: The mainstay APC (armoured personnel carrier) of the Imperial Guard.

Leman Russ: The MBT (Main Battle Tank) of the Imperial guard. Has multiple loadouts, including the default with a battle cannon, the executioner with a heavy plasma cannon, and the punisher with a gatling cannon.

Stormlord: A superheavy battle tank with a Vulcan mega-bolter, designed to kill massed infantry. Also has a small infantry carrying capacity.

Ecclesiarchy: The church of the Imperium of Man. Has an excessive amount of control over most branches of the Imperium.

Weirdboy – Psychic ork.

Basilisk – Self-propelled artillery unit. Fires earthshaker rounds.