Chapter 488: Priming the Odds
Out in the desert beyond the Titan Temple, the greenskins' mobile mountain range was tearing across the sand at full speed!
The towering Gargant's back-mounted booster, salvaged straight off a warship, flared a fierce red glow.
Riding that thrust, the Gargant charged across the desert at sixty kilometers per hour, each footfall pounding the earth in a series of continuous, ground-shaking blasts, like a machine dedicated purely to generating earthquakes.
Inside the Gargant, Blackiron, now fully fused with the surrounding machinery, addressed every Ork present through the war-machine's vox array:
"I CAN FEEL IT! OLD FART KIAN'S IN THAT RED-ROBE LITTLE MEN'S PYRAMID!!
BOYZ! CHARGE FORWARD! PIN 'IM DOWN! DON'T LET A SINGLE FLYER LEAVE DA GROUND! I'M GONNA KILL OLD FART KIAN MYSELF! WAAAAAAAAAGH!!!"
The Ork mountain range roared back in unison, and a wave of faster vehicles, jeeps, motorcycles, broke off from the main body and charged ahead toward the Titan Temple.
Moving at incredible speed, it didn't take them long to reach the Temple's outer defensive wall.
The wall's perimeter had been seeded with a dense field of melta mines. Ork motorcycles and jeeps that hit them were sent flying, bodies scattered in the blast.
But there were simply too many Orks, and too few mines to go around.
Some Ork jeeps carried mortars of their own, and their crews fired heavy shells into the desert ahead, detonating whole stretches of the minefield remotely.
Once the minefield was largely cleared, the greenskins reached the outer wall itself, circling it at high speed in a relentless drive-by assault.
As they circled, they opened fire on the Mechanicus personnel manning the wall with heavy sluggas.
The templar-guard, combat servitors, and every Mechanicus-affiliated worker who could hold a weapon fired back down at the greenskins.
The Orks, riding the wave of WAAAGH energy now saturating the battlefield, had grown terrifyingly resilient. What once dropped an Ork with a single high-energy round now took three or four hits.
Their own weapons had spiked in raw power correspondingly. A pistol now hit like a submachine gun. A submachine gun hit like a rifle. A rifle hit like a heavy stubber.
The two sides traded fire in a frenzy, and the templar-guard, incredibly, were losing the exchange.
A templar-guardsman fired a superheated radium round that punched clean through an Ork motorcyclist's body, blowing a massive hole through him and releasing a surge of radiation.
The struck Ork barely registered it, and simply gunned his motorcycle to full speed instead.
Still charging forward, still WAAAGHing, he swept his submachine gun across the wall in a spray of fire.
The templar-guardsmen struck by that spray, rounds that should have been little more than an inconvenience, were torn apart as though hit by a heavy machine gun, their half-metal, half-flesh bodies shredded to pieces.
The Ork motorcycle and jeep squads, circling the Titan Temple's outer wall, were somehow winning the exchange of fire, at the exact discipline the templar-guard were supposed to specialize in.
Half a day into the fighting, the slower-moving Ork tank column finally arrived.
Over ten thousand Ork tanks tore across the desert, kicking up a sandstorm-sized disturbance that could be seen for miles.
The Titan Temple fired strategic nuclear missiles immediately, hoping to wipe out the incoming tank column.
But the moment those warheads cleared the atmosphere, the Ork tank column launched its own missiles, colliding with and destroying the human warheads mid-flight.
Left with no choice, the Mechanicus switched to nuclear artillery shells instead.
Those couldn't be intercepted as easily. A wave of nuclear shells slammed into the Ork tank column, blasting up thick clouds of smoke and debris.
But the next instant, the Ork tanks scattered wide, encircling the massive Titan Temple from every direction.
Overhead, a swarm of Ork deathcopters and Rippa fighters appeared, thick as locusts.
The aircraft wheeled overhead the Titan Temple, strafing and bombing the artillery positions below.
The Temple's flak-laser batteries raised high, unleashing a dense curtain of anti-air fire skyward.
But there were simply too many Ork aircraft. The flak batteries couldn't keep up.
After several hours of continuous fighting, every artillery position inside the Temple had been destroyed.
With the nuclear artillery threat neutralized, the Ork tanks regrouped and began indirect-fire bombardment on the Titan Temple, using every oversized cannon they had.
Massive shells arced overhead, sailing clean over the thirty-plus-meter steel walls, detonating inside the interior facilities.
Personnel were killed in droves, infrastructure torn apart, and when a storage tank of chemical compounds took a direct hit, it detonated violently, setting a huge swath of the complex ablaze in roaring chemical fire.
That wasn't all. Ork Kommandos, seemingly capable of vanishing at will, infiltrated deep into the Titan Temple itself, sabotaging fixed gun emplacements and picking off senior templar-guard officers one by one.
Explosions. Chaos. Screaming. And beyond the horizon, a demonic, mountainous shape, the Gargant, advancing steadily toward the compound. The Titan Temple was staring down a genuinely world-ending crisis.
That was when, atop the pyramid-shaped Titan Temple, the great bronze bell tolled.
Dong!!!
Dong!!!
Dong!!!
The deep, resonant peal echoed across the entire Temple. Magos Ferrocore, the towering, worm-like construct, stood beside the great bell himself, ringing it personally.
Standing at the very apex of the pyramid, he looked out over the burning, war-torn battlefield, watching the Gargant's slow, inexorable approach, and felt not a shred of fear. Only release.
"I shall ring the bell for you three times. And when the third toll fades, we shall walk into the void together."
Mushroom clouds bloomed one after another in the distant desert, lighting up the whole sky.
Ferrocore watched them rise, as though bidding the world one final, silent farewell.
He found himself thinking this wasn't such a bad way to go, after all. Himself and the sacred Titan, stepping together into eternal silence amid the roar of a battlefield this magnificent, this... romantic!!!!
Just then, his internal comm chimed with a connection request from Boothe. He felt no desire whatsoever to answer it.
He reached a mechanical arm into his own chassis, tore out a comm module, crushed it in his grip, and hurled the ruined pieces off the edge of the pyramid.
Deep beneath the Titan Temple, in the cogitator vault, Boothe had been trying desperately to reach Ferrocore, growing increasingly frantic.
After several failed attempts, he turned to Kian:
"My lord, what do we do?! I can't reach Magos Ferrocore!!"
Drenched in sweat, eyes glassy and unfocused, Kian pulled out a Regen-Bolt with trembling hands and jabbed it into himself.
Something sharp and decisive flickered through his exhausted eyes.
He staggered to his feet, then his legs buckled, nearly sending him to the floor, but Boothe lunged forward and caught him.
After twenty-four straight hours withstanding the psychic shock of five thousand cogitator arrays, Kian's mind felt like an absolute wreck.
All six black needles had rolled successful, and now his four limbs were each losing six points of vitality per second.
Fortunately, the Regen-Bolt's effect, one point of regeneration per limb per second, offset the black needle's side effect precisely, canceling it out.
Right now, Kian felt terrifyingly, unbelievably powerful.
Having successfully cleared six separate death-roulette rolls, he was, functionally, a walking superhuman.
Every single one of those earlier failed rolls, all that dying and respawning, it had all been priming the odds toward this exact moment.
Kian roared:
"Forget reaching that Titan-obsessed freak! He's completely lost it, treats that thing like his own lover, he's never going to let me anywhere near it!!
Contact the Astartes! Contact Captain Doron! Get every single one of his Astartes over here, right now, to escort and guard me while I ascend to that Titan!!"
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