Chapter 10: Come On Then, One on One!
The air went solid.
Six Ork Boyz stood at the far end of the corridor, weapons of various warped shapes hanging in their fists.
Forty or fifty Gretchin were packed in behind them, ears sticking out sideways. A moment ago they had been shoving each other and arguing. Now every one of them had gone quiet.
Rosen crouched at the near end of the corridor.
Behind him, five Death Warriors held Catachan Fangs in their hands, rested three-quarters-cooked Ork thigh across their legs, and had grease around the corners of their mouths.
Time stopped for roughly three seconds.
Three seconds was enough for a bolt round to travel from barrel to target and complete its mass-reactive detonation. It was also enough for an Ork Boy's brain to complete the most complex logical chain it would manage in its entire life.
An Ork's brain was crude and blunt, but when it came to recognising the flesh of its own kind, its accuracy was remarkable.
It made sense. Growing up in the spore cultivation piles, young Orks eating each other was a routine occurrence.
"Those... humies..."
"Are eating our brother?"
A wave of sharp indrawn breath rippled through the Gretchin at the back.
In greenskin culture, eating the flesh of your own kind wasn't a taboo.
Quite the opposite. Big Orks eating smaller ones, the strong eating the weak, that was one of the most fundamental operating principles of greenskin society.
But humans eating Orks?
That was something they had never actually seen before.
Rosen raised the Catachan Fang level, blade pointing across the corridor at the scarred-face Ork Boy.
With his left hand, he crooked his index and middle fingers in a beckoning gesture, then drew his thumb slowly across his own throat.
Come on. One on one.
Numbers 1 through 5 made the same gesture in unison.
Five Catachan Fangs swung up to point across the corridor. Five large men issued the challenge.
Then the scarred-face Ork Boy grinned.
That wide green face split open on both sides, showing two rows of uneven tusks. "Heh heh heh..."
In the collective understanding of all Orks, any creature that ate the flesh of its own kind, regardless of species, was instinctively classified as a hard target.
Because only a genuine predator treated prey as food rather than a threat.
The scarred-face Ork Boy looked down at the heavy slugga in its hand, then looked across at the knives in the six humans' hands.
Bang.
The slugga hit the deck.
The scarred-face Ork Boy reached behind its back and pulled out an enormous chain-toothed cleaver.
"Waaagh!"
When an Ork dropped its ranged weapon and drew a close-combat blade in direct response to a challenger's provocation, it meant the Ork had recognised that challenger's standing as a warrior.
The other five Ork Boyz saw what their leader had done.
Six sluggas and assorted crude ranged weapons hit the deck one after another.
What came out in their place was an assortment of close-combat weapons in shapes that made no structural sense.
The Gretchin erupted.
"Fight! Fight! Fight!"
"Kill those humies! Boss! Smash their bones!"
"Make a new hat from their skin!"
"I bet the boss drops the big humie in three swings!"
"Two swings!"
"What are you betting with? You don't even have trousers! What've you got?"
A handful of the bolder Gretchin were already placing wagers among themselves. Stakes ranged from a human tooth to half a rusted iron pipe.
For Orks, combat was not simply a means of survival. It was something close to a religious ritual.
A sufficiently spectacular fight could cause Waaagh energy to condense above the battlefield into a green energy field nearly visible to the naked eye.
Rosen let out a quiet internal breath of relief.
If the other side had been a pack of cunning Ratlings rather than Ork Boyz, he'd have already pulled everyone into the ducts and run.
But Ork Boyz were different.
Their thinking ran on exactly one track: whoever fights better is the boss.
You dared to provoke them, they dared to accept. You used a knife, they used a knife. You stripped your shirt off to fight bare-chested, and they'd tear their trousers off too before they let you outdo them.
Which was exactly what Rosen could work with.
Because he had never once intended to fight six two-metre-plus green monsters in a fair duel.
The word fair wasn't in his vocabulary.
The six Ork Boyz began to advance.
Heavy iron boots struck the metal deck in dull, rhythmic impacts.
Several hundred kilograms of body weight plus all that crude scrap armour set the entire corridor trembling with each step.
"Waaagh!"
The pace accelerated. Walking became jogging, jogging became a full charge.
Six green mountains of muscle drove forward together, filling the corridor with a roar like a tank column coming up to speed.
Rosen stepped forward too.
His right foot kicked precisely at a metal support bar on the left side of where he was standing, one that looked entirely ordinary.
That support bar had been dealt with when he and Number 1 had passed through an hour ago.
The fifteen metres of corridor floor ahead of them was actually a suspended structure floating above a vertical shaft over forty metres deep. The entire weight of the floor section rested on four support arms welded to the shaft walls.
The welding points on all four support arms had been cut down to their breaking point by the serrated spine of a Catachan Fang an hour earlier. When the locking pin was kicked free, the last mechanical anchor was gone, and the structure could no longer bear any additional load.
Crash!
At the exact moment the six Ork Boyz hit the middle of the fifteen-metre span, their combined weight of several tonnes plus the momentum of a full charge snapped the remaining welds completely. The entire floor section dropped like a bridge with its foundations pulled out.
Tens of tonnes of metal plating, along with six Ork Boyz in mid-charge, plunged together into the shaft forty-plus metres below.
"Waaaa—"
The Waaagh never finished. The sharp support beam remnants and metal protrusions at the bottom of the shaft ended all six of them.
[Extracting base soul energy: 10 points.]
[Chaos frenzy contaminant detected in soul energy.]
[Initiating deep law purification... complete.]
[Actual Life Points gained: 7.]
[Life Point +7]
[Life Point +7]
[Life Point +7]
Six Ork Boyz. 42 Life Points credited.
On the far side of the gap, the surviving forty-odd Gretchin had watched the whole thing.
"Cheater! Filthy humie cheater!"
"They killed the boss! That humie cheated!"
"Kill him! Kill that humie!"
Bang! Bang bang bang! Crack! Crack crack crack!
Forty-odd Gretchin opened fire almost simultaneously. Sluggas, crude automatic guns, slings, and one Gretchin that had somehow produced a crude pipe bomb with the fuse already burning, which it hurled toward Rosen with everything it had.
Rosen and his five Death Warriors stepped sideways and pulled back in unison, into the safe dead angle on their side of the collapsed floor.
The Gretchin kept firing for roughly fifteen seconds, which was about as long as their improvised weapons could sustain it.
Several sluggas jammed after sustained fire. Two of them ruptured entirely, causing their owners to howl in pain.
Rosen was just about to send Numbers 2 and 3 to loop around through a side passage and flank the Gretchin when something came through the deeper corridor on the far side.
A green tsunami.
At least forty or fifty heavily built Ork Boyz were leading the way.
Among them, one greenskin was considerably larger than the rest.
The Gretchin who had arrived first saw their reinforcements and their morale spiked instantly.
"They're here! The main force is here! Kill those humies!"
Rosen went straight for a ventilation duct entrance on the left wall, one he had marked during their earlier scouting.
"All units fall back! Into the ducts!"