This was the second month since Leo St. Gallus had arrived at the Frost Forbidden Wall.
The wind on the ice plains was eternally bitter, and snowflakes pounded relentlessly against his ceramite armor. Leo stood at the edge of the watchtower, his hands gripping the freezing alloy railing. Two months had passed.
He remembered the day he left St. Gallus Castle. The old man had been sitting on the throne, the fluids in his life-support tubes flowing in a constant, rhythmic pulse. They had a massive argument, and finally, Leo had kicked open the welded gate and left the main spire without looking back. He led hundreds of noble scions who had volunteered to follow him, along with five million private soldiers.
At that time, he wore a neatly ironed aristocratic uniform, looking glamorous and dashing. Now, his power armor was covered in oil and bloodstains, with a deep gouge scarring his left shoulder pauldron—left by an Ork Warboss's power claw three days ago.
But a new light shone in his eyes. He finally knew what he was fighting for and was willing to give everything for it.
"Sir," came his adjutant's weary voice from behind. "The repair work in sector C8 is complete, but the engineers say the load-bearing capacity is less than a third of what it was."
Leo didn't turn around. "Understood."
He looked to the east, toward the camp of the Brontë Longsword Regiment, marked by neat rows of blue camouflage tents. On the eve of Raynor's arrival in Brevis, Leo had reached the Forbidden Wall with his five million reinforcements.
The composition of this force was diverse, with decent equipment and discipline, but they lacked combat experience. Less than a tenth of them were truly qualified combatants. When they arrived, the Brontë Longswords had just suffered a crushing defeat. Their previous Commissar, Marcus, had been killed in action, their numbers were reduced to a mere ten thousand, and their ammunition reserves were nearly dry.
Leo's reinforcements had quickly turned the tide. The first two weeks went smoothly, as the Ork attacks were sporadic and probing. Leo learned the art of command under the guidance of Hammond Walker, the newly appointed Commissar of the Brontë Longswords. At that time, the attacking Greenskins were fewer in number than the humans, and victory came easier than Leo had imagined.
The soldiers began calling him "General St. Gallus," not because of his PDF rank, but because he actually slept in the trenches with them, ate the same canned corpse-starch, and was always at the forefront of the charge. For a few days, Leo even believed they could sound the horn of a counterattack and drive the Greenskins back into the depths of the ice plains.
But everything changed twenty days ago.
It was a night as dark as ink. The sentries in the watchtower were the first to notice something amiss: a strange, green meteor shower falling from the northern sky. Then, violent tremors rose from the depths of the ice field—continuous, relentless vibrations that shook the snow from the fortified walls in rustling sheets.
The tremors lasted for six full hours. During that time, communications were severely disrupted, and the sanctioned pskers reported a "sharp increase in Warp background noise."
At dawn, the first reconnaissance reports reached the command post. Leo would always remember the feeling of seeing that data; he felt as if he were looking at a forgery.
The number of Orks had increased at least fifty-fold overnight.
Footage captured by recon aircraft showed the ice plains densely carpeted in a green swarm—so many that they trampled one another, turning the white snow into a shifting green rug. The bright red banners of the Evil Sunz and the blue totems of the Deathskulls appeared in massive numbers.
But what bothered them most were the yellow flags representing the Bad Moons. The "Slop-boys" among them could cook vast quantities of stew that effectively fueled the Orks' combat frenzy.
The battle immediately shifted from "easy" to "hell" mode. The Orks were no longer harassing in small groups; they were launching a true green tide. They stormed the walls day and night, piling up their own dead to create ramps and attempting to blast breaches with suicide-rigged vehicles.
Leo's coalition forces quickly exposed their flaws: insufficient heavy firepower, a shortage of transport, and a fragile fighting spirit. The most fatal flaw was the command system; the five million troops came from more than two hundred noble families, each with its own agenda. Leo's orders had to pass through layers of relays, and by the time they reached a front-line company, the intent was often completely distorted.
The Orks didn't have this problem. They only had one command: "Waaagh!!"
A week ago, the first vanguard regiment from Brevis arrived—Raynor's men. Three million soldiers carrying the ammunition and supplies Leo desperately needed. However, they arrived without heavy artillery, tank formations, or air support; to save time, they had marched light and fast.
The addition of the First Army Corps helped the defenders stabilize their lines, if only by a hair's breadth. The vanguard soldiers weren't necessarily better equipped than Leo's nobles, but the efficiency of their junior officers was astonishing. Moreover, they were resolute and ruthless. Under their leadership, the combat effectiveness of the vanguard far surpassed that of Leo's aristocratic coalition.
"Sir." The adjutant's urgent voice snapped Leo back to the present. "The Greenskins from Sector C8 are back."
Leo turned and donned his helmet. "Scale?"
"Massive."
Leo froze the moment he opened the data panel handed to him. On the screen, the map outside the Forbidden Wall was almost entirely blotted out by a dense cluster of red icons.
"By the Emperor..." Leo murmured to himself. He closed the screen and stepped into the lift.
The metal elevator screeched along its tracks. When the doors opened, the passageway inside the wall was packed with soldiers. Leo pushed through the crowd, and the men automatically made way for him. They looked at him with expectation, but also with a despair they couldn't hide.
"Move it! Out of the way!" a gruff voice barked.
Hammond Walker approached from the opposite direction. His blue-grey Brontë uniform was caked in grime. A new scar ran diagonally across his face from forehead to chin, the stitches resembling a centipede crawling over his skin.
"You see that?" Hammond walked up to Leo and patted his pauldron with a heavy hand. "This time, they're serious."
"When aren't they?" Leo forced a smile.
They climbed to the top of the wall where the wind howled. Leo leaned over the crenellations to look out. The vanguard of the green wave had come into view. There were no orderly lines, only a chaotic, noisy red tide.
Thousands upon thousands of Ork warbikes, painted a glaring red and welded with spikes and scrap metal, roared across the ice. Each vehicle carried two or three Greenskins brandishing choppas and sluggas. These were the "Speed Freak" youngsters of the Evil Sunz, craving nothing but velocity.
These "Mek-spawn" built bikes that were dangerously unstable, but they didn't care. As long as it was fast and loud, they were happy to charge. More than a third of them were lost before they even got in range; because their driving was completely haphazard, some sped straight into each other or spun out and exploded into fireballs.
But for every bike that crashed, more surged from behind. The supply of Ork vehicles seemed endless.
"Hold steady," Leo's voice broadcasted over the vox-channel. "All companies, listen up! Do not fire without my order! I repeat, hold your fire!"
But the sight of the fearless Orks was already etched into the soldiers' minds, and panic began to spread. Leo switched channels and found the coalition's vox-net filled with panicked static:
"How many are there?!" "I'm out of ammo!" "I don't want to die..."
The veteran Hammond sensed the shift and immediately bellowed an order: "Anyone who deserts their post will be executed without exception!"
Hammond's voice boomed through the loudspeakers across Sector C8. "Company officers, maintain discipline! Now!"
Then, sporadic gunshots rang out from the wall. In this battle, humanity's first casualties came from their own ranks. When it came to cowards, the Imperium had only one solution.
Summary execution.