Legends of the Smoke Jaguars chapter 211
Ajax's leg came away with the wet popping of sinews and the arteries splitting. Thick blood cascaded from the stump as Orkamemnon tossed the limb to his waiting minions, listening with amusement as they tore the armour from it and fought to rip chunks away to stuff into their gobs. The Warboss didn't turn his eyes away though, more interested in watching Ajax suffer. The paralysed Marine struggled in his grip, clawing at the arm holding him aloft with charred fingertips. His struggles were futile but all the more enjoyable for it. Orkamemnon wanted this to take a long time.
"I'll kill you!" Ajax snapped.
"Wot, not like ya needed dat leg no more!" Orkamemnon chuckled.
"Wretched Xenos dung-eater, I'm going to rip your eyeballs out and shove them so far up your rear you can see your tonsils!"
"Say... dat's not bad, I'm gonna do dat to da next berk I'z catch."
Ajax's response was a fist to the jaw. It was a good blow, it would have crushed a man's skull, but Orkamemnon barely felt it. His mind was filled with the potential of his kin, the Waaagh feeding him and strengthening his body. He effortlessly reached down and tore the other leg away, then tossed it over his shoulder for his underlings to devour. Ajax's pain was writ over his face, beneath a mask of anger.
Orkamemnon drew back his free hand and then backhanded Ajax across the face. He pulled his punch, so as not to end it too quickly, but it surely hurt. Ajax's head snapped back so hard his scalp bounced off his backpack, just in to meet Orkamemnon's clenched fist. The Warboss was relentless, pounding Ajax's face over and over, reducing his features to mush. Teeth spilled out, the nose deformed, one eye swelled shut, cheekbones shattered and the jaw dislocated so wide it seemed it wrap free. Still he was careful not to kill Ajax, not yet, not until he had experienced every last morsel of pain.
Orkamemnon paused to reset the jaw with an almost gentle action, "Ya had enuff?"
"Frak..." Ajax slurred, "You..."
"Gud, I'z ain't ready ta kill ya yet. Wanna see ya beg before I take me crown."
"You'll have to kill me first you putrid crapbucket!"
"Big words, for a measly grot with no limbs!" Orkamemnon snarled.
Orkamemnon made to rip off one of the arms next but from nowhere a streak of blue appeared. A flash in the corner of the eye and a sharp pain as a burning axe cut a slice off the Warboss' bicep. Orkamemnon's head snapped about and he beheld a single remaining Beakie attacking him, lashing out with a red-hot axe. A backhanded blow sailed overhead as the hoomie ducked, sweeping low to tear a chunk of leg away. Orkamemnon was annoyed, this foolish git was interrupting his fun.
"Dis one's mine!" Orkamemnon barked as his entourage made to intervene. He dropped the truncated torso of Ajax and reached for the impudent wretch with both hands. The Beakie tried to dodge again, slicing upwards as he did so, but the burning axe could not break the mechanisms wrought into the Ork's body. A clang of metal on metal, then Orkamemnon had him. He wrapped one hand about the shoulder bearing the axe, crushing a pauldron in his palm as he hoisted the hoomie aloft.
"I am..." came a defiant cry.
"I dunt care!" Orkamemnon snarled as he punched the hoomie in the chest so hard momentum carried the challenger away, soaring high to smash through the stained-glassic window and disappear into the night.
Orkamemnon kept his eyes on the window as he stooped to pick up Ajax muttering, "One dun, one ta go."
"Hey ass-face!" Ajax snapped.
"Wot?!" Orkamemon started as he looked at the Marine dangling in his grip.
"You want this crown so much... you can Frakking have it!" Ajax roared as he struck.
In the moment of distraction he'd pulled the crown from his belt and inverted so the points angled downwards. Before Orkamemnon could react Ajax drove the spiked circlet into his scalp, punching razor-sharp points through metal and bone. Transhuman strength drove it deep, fracturing the dense skull and penetrating the grey matter beneath. All Ajax's might saw the crown burrow deep into Orkamemnon's head, its many spikes lodged in the warboss' brain. Ancient technoarcana met Orkoid neurons and the results were explosive.
"Get it off! GET IT OFFFF!" Orkamemnon screamed as his brain was subjected to forces greater than he'd ever imagined were possible. The brief touch he'd experienced before had expanded his mind, expanding his connection to the Waaagh and forced new neurons to grow within his skull. This was as akin to that experience as a candleflame is to a supernova. The crown's antediluvian processes went into overdrive, blasting Orkamemnon's tiny brain with a tsunami of eldritch power. The Warboss threw back his head and screamed as his mind was taken apart and shoved back together in new forms, growing beyond the bounds of sanity, beyond the scope of mortal understanding. Orkamemnon opened his eyes, then he opened them again.
Intellectual vistas unfolded as his mind grew to encompass the hidden folds of reality. The thin barriers of sight and sound fell away as thought and perception became his primary senses. Everything was made plain to him, all the contours of the Materium and endless depths of Immaterium etched out for him. He could see the stones of the Sanctum in the past and the future, their formation in geological epochs long forgotten and their crumbling into dust as entropy took its toll. All things were impermanent, and none more so than living beings. They were ghosts wandering a foggy moor, barely perceptible in the vast scope of the universe, brief collections of atoms that would inevitably scatter. And yet within each flickered a tiny morsel of psychic power. It was his to own.
Orkamemnon's mind expanded through the Sanctum and communed with every Black Ork left. Their minds were simple things, crude sketches of intelligence, not the genuine article. He could sense their genic potential, degraded by the passing of millions of years and then bodged into new configurations by Tvos' fumbling hands. How simple they were, how far they had fallen. The adept had been right about one thing, the Orks were pale shades of their former glory, degenerates scrabbling in the dust that gathers under the feet of their forebearer's mighty works.
Further his mind expanded, brushing the minds of every Ork in Coronam. Feral raging brutes, their ferocity undirected and mindless. They were dying in great numbers, shot off the rude bridge by scything crossfires, while those already across being boxed into a kill zone and decimated. It mattered not, the coursing Waaagh energy only increased as the violence intensified, growing geometrically with every death. Orkamemnon rode that cresting wave, gorging himself on raw power. He wanted more. He reached out and began exploding Orks heads across the city, randomly and without care for the battle itself. Scores he culled, hundreds, thousands, without rhyme or reason, feasting upon the brief blooms of Waaagh power that resulted.
Orkamemnon was no longer a mere Greenskin, no longer mortal in any sense of the world. His mind swept outwards, covering plains and mountains, reaching into orbit where the ramshackle dregs who manned his ships dwelt. He beheld a whole planet bathed in violence, out of so many. The galaxy beckoned and his mind flooded outwards, sweeping across systems and sectors, everywhere the Orks walked he was there, his spirit and the Waaagh no longer distinguishable from each other. War, all was war, the galaxy drowned in it even as the Orks thrived. The hoomies had no idea, they thought their Imperium ruled the heavens but they were wrong, the stars belonged to the Orks and always had. The hoomies only existed because the Orks permitted it, so they would always have someone to fight. The Krork had failed because there was no war worthy of them, the Ork would never fall into the same trap.
Orkamemnon held the galaxy in the palm of his hand, and realised he was not alone. There were other minds in the Waaagh, great and terrible minds. One brutal but kunnin, the other Kunnin but brutal. Gork and Mork, the gods of the Ork, born out of the species lust for battle and furious need for violence. The savage heart of every Ork made manifest. He was becoming like them; he was becoming the third Ork god. Gork and Mork noted his rising potential and prepared to welcome him to an eternity of carnage. An unholy trinity of violence without rival.
Orkamemnon's mind had forgotten his mortal vessel, but it had not forgotten him. Far below, below the plane of gods and the scope of galactic affairs his brain swelled and swelled. The neurons of his flesh had been reworked into mightier configurations, but the implants bored into his skull had not. Pulsing power flooded through the crude implements Tvos had hammered into place, surging through circuits and wires in torrents he had never anticipated. The adept's fumbling efforts had been primitive and slapdash, even he admitted his early work had been a mere essay in the craft. The transformation proved too much, implants broke under the strain, shattering into shards one by one. In one moment Orkamemnon's brain was pulped, shredded into mush by jagged shards, burned to ash by melting wiring.
On the plane of Gods Orkamemnon screamed in denial as the foundations of his might collapsed under his boots. He was so close, he was the Waaagh and it was he, but for all that his existence yet rested upon a bit of gristle lodged between two ears. He fell, an Icarus tumbling from the sky with wings burning. Gork and Mork laughed in scorn as this pretender tripped over his own hubris, cast down by the smallest pebble in the road. They spared a single instant to convey their contempt for his weakness, then returned to their eternal battles.
"Nooooo! It waz mine, all to be mine!" Orkamemnon's spirit howled as he was dragged back into his prison of meat and bone. The vast mind compressing as sectors shrank to systems and then one planet, a continent, a city, a Sanctum. He fought it every inch of the way, struggling to remain, struggling to be. It was futile, the slide into banality was inexorable, his vast mind was being compacted into the failing neurons of his skull, but no one brain could contain such vastness.
Orkamemnon's eyes exploded into plumes of fire, even the artificial one as energy vented from every opening. His maw let loose a blech of multi-hued flame as his skull expanded like a balloon filled to bursting. Galactic power was being forced into one tiny skull and it was too much, nothing could contain such might. Tvos' failing mechanisms sparked once and the matter of Orkamemnon's head detonated like an artillery shell going off. Searing waves of fire swept outwards from his brain, bathing everyone and everything in an inferno. The Sanctum's walls dripped molten stone, the floor was fused into glass and the windows blew out in burst of razor-sharp glassic.
Black Orks burned alive as the explosion consumed them, erasing their kind from existence. Flaming candles of flesh toppled to the ground and moved no more, the glimpse of greatness they had offered the Orks wiped out forever. Nothing in the Sanctum escaped the conflagration, no one, not even Ajax. The fires embraced him too and melted his armour to slag, boiling his eyeballs and burning his tongue to ash. When the flames blew themselves out all that remained was a charred fusion of Ceramite and wet meat, barely even alive. Ajax could not see, he could not speak, and certainly could not move. Ajax, the fierce and indomitable spirit of murder, was lost in his own personal hell as silence reigned over Orkamemnon's grave.