The gretchin in the distance finally snapped out of their shock.
"Open fire! Blast 'im apart!"
More than a dozen gretchin raised their ramshackle guns.
Bang! Bang bang! Szzzt!
At once, gunfire erupted through the cramped chamber.
Shoddy red las-bursts, underpowered solid rounds, and jagged rusted metal scraps poured toward Lawson.
Using the terrain and the blind spots created by the gretchin's wild, undisciplined shooting, Lawson crashed straight into their ranks.
A horizontal cut.
A downward chop.
A thrust.
A rising reverse slash.
He made perfect use of biomechanics and the essence of Catachan close-quarters combat, using the smallest possible motions to inflict the deadliest possible damage.
Blood, severed limbs, and chunks of flesh filled the air.
Lawson's blade moved faster and faster.
[Life Point +1]
...
[Life Point +1]
When the final warped scream was cut short, the wreck zone of Deck Seventy-Seven fell silent once more.
The entire massacre had lasted less than a minute.
And in that one-sided slaughter, Lawson had butchered the whole mob by himself.
[Current Life Point Reserve: 41]
"Still more than halfway short..."
The gunfire, or the commotion he had made here, would draw more greenskins soon enough.
Possibly even those two Ork boyz from earlier.
Lawson immediately began searching through the corpses strewn across the floor.
The first thing he picked up was the autogun used by the gretchin that had been firing the hardest.
The moment he got it in his hands, the corner of his mouth twitched.
What the hell was this supposed to be?
This wasn't a gun.
It was basically a length of pipe sawn off from some reactor exhaust line, lashed to a wooden stock with a few strands of rusted wire.
There was no trigger guard, no sights, and even the feed system was nothing more than a crude tube stuffed with low-grade powder and iron scraps.
Under normal physical laws, this thing should have exploded the moment it was fired, blowing off the user's hand and half its skull.
But in greenskin hands, it fired.
And it could even kill people.
Lawson tossed the "gun" aside.
He had no intention of gambling his life on whether he could somehow trigger ork psychic field nonsense.
He kept searching.
Beneath the corpse of a slightly larger gretchin, he caught a different sort of metallic gleam.
A section of scarred gun barrel was sticking out of the tattered sack the creature had been carrying.
On the side of the barrel, he could just make out the remains of a white Astra Militarum skull insignia, half-scraped away.
"Praise the Emperor..."
A Locke-pattern boltgun.
A model designed for elite veteran Guardsmen and commissars. Its caliber was slightly smaller than the standard Astartes pattern, but it still fired .75 caliber mass-reactive shells. The recoil was monstrous, far more than an ordinary Guardsman could handle easily on his own.
But for Catachan muscle, it was just right.
"These damned xenos actually defiled something this good."
Lawson quickly inspected the weapon's condition.
The mechanism was still intact.
"Ammunition. I need ammunition."
He searched through the other thirty-odd gretchin corpses.
After going through more than a dozen bodies, he found what he needed in two crude ammo satchels made of human skin.
Twelve loose, brass-colored .75 caliber bolts.
And two curved magazines, both still fully loaded.
Altogether, fewer than fifty rounds.
Clack.
Lawson slammed one full magazine into the boltgun's feed port and yanked the heavy charging handle.
Now that he had ranged firepower, the next step was solving the system's resource problem.
He began scavenging metal from the wreck zone. A hydraulic landing strut buffer, a crane gear, a chunk of alloy corridor door. If he could lift it, he absorbed it all. Ten minutes later, his adamant steel reserves had reached 1.2 cubic meters.
The adamant steel requirement was met.
As for the remaining Life Points, he would collect them through slaughter.
Catachans were not merely killing machines.
They were also the finest jungle trapmasters in the entire galaxy.
And this tangled wreck zone of the space hulk was not fundamentally different from the death-laden jungles of Catachan.
He chose a narrow choke point where the wreck zone connected to another main passage.
Then he took out the twenty-meter spool of monofilament line.
At a height of roughly thirty centimeters above the floor, he stretched it across the bottleneck and wove three interlocking tripwires, fastening both ends tightly to heavy metal bases.
Next, he fixed the two booby traps onto metal pipes in the blind spots on either side of the choke point, then linked their safeties to the monofilament tripwires on the floor.
To maximize lethality, Lawson dragged over several gretchin corpses and built a small barricade.
Into the gaps between the bodies, he stuffed several shards of scrap metal sharpened to razor edges.
He had just finished setting everything up.
Then came the war cry.
"WAAAGH!"
It came from the direction those two Ork boyz had left earlier.
A vast wave of gretchin came flooding in like a green tide.
And behind the gretchin mob, there were six Ork boyz.
Lawson raised a middle finger.
The greenskins probably did not understand the gesture itself, but the contempt and provocation on his face carried an insult any species could recognize.
"Come on, then, you green-skinned bastards who eat your own shit!"
After hurling the insult, he turned and ran deeper into the passage.
The greenskins erupted in fury.
"WAAAAGH! Tear dat humie apart! I'm gonna eat 'im alive!"
The Ork boyz charged after him in a frenzy.
"Run! Run! Da boss is mad!"
The gretchin at the front bolted ahead for their lives, desperate not to be crushed into paste beneath their bosses' huge boots.
They plunged straight into the narrow choke point.
Lawson had already run past it and taken cover behind a sturdy metal barrier ten meters beyond the trap.
"Ten meters... five... three..."
The dozen or so gretchin at the front never noticed the monofilament line thinner than a strand of hair stretched across their path.
A cruel grin spread across Lawson's face.
"The Emperor sends His regards, filth."
BOOM! BOOM!
The destructive force created by two modified Catachan fragmentation booby traps detonating in a confined space far exceeded anything ordinary physics should have allowed.
The leading gretchin did not even have time to scream before they were ripped to pieces.
The six Ork boyz charging behind them ran straight into that storm of destruction.
"GRAAAH!"
On Lawson's retina, the system notifications practically went insane.
[Life Points +37]
Added to the 41 he already had, Lawson's total Life Point reserve soared to 78.
But that still wasn't enough.
On the system page, the massive soul-energy feedback that should come from Ork boyz had not appeared yet.
"Tough bastards. So tough it's disgusting."
Lawson rose from behind cover.
The six Ork boyz were still not dead.
"Waaagh... gonna... kill you..."
Expressionless, Lawson raised the boltgun.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
After six heavy detonations, the system began processing the soul-energy of the Ork boyz one by one.
Each ork should originally have provided 10 Life Points, but the Waaagh! frenzy factor and warp contamination had to be purified first, resulting in a loss rate as high as thirty percent.
Six Ork boyz.
Seven points each after purification.
Forty-two points total.
[Current Life Point Reserve: 120]
Target achieved.
With points to spare.
At the same time, a new tab lit up.
[Scrap Yard (Unlocked)]
Within the holographic interface, a square, enclosed space was projected.
Inside it floated a small mass of twisting, churning mist.
If he stared at it too long, he could even hear faint little cries of "Waaagh" coming from within.
[Item: Minor Heretical Psychic Residue]
[Source: Byproduct of Life Point purification.]
[Use: Unknown.]
Clearly, this was the polluted waste stripped away when the system refined ork souls.
For now, with not even the most basic tech tree unlocked, this thing was just a useless placeholder.
He closed the Scrap Yard tab and opened the [Deathsworn Page].
[Life Points: 120 / 100]
[Adamant Steel: 1.2 / 1 cubic meter]
[Consume resources and create a Catachan Jungle Fighter using the host's current genetic template as the blueprint?]
"Yes!"
One hundred Life Points and one cubic meter of adamant steel vanished.
Then the space before Lawson began to twist violently, visible to the naked eye.
The one cubic meter of adamant steel melted instantly within the light, transforming into the strongest framework of a human skeleton.
Next came the pure life energy condensed from the extinguished vitality of a hundred living beings. It wove itself over the bones like threads on a loom, crossing and binding in a frenzy.
Flesh began to form.
Veins and meridians linked into place.
Muscle fibers swelled and took shape at an absurd density and speed.
Then skin spread over it all.
Even Catachan's signature red-and-green jungle camouflage uniform, tactical webbing, and a brand-new, gleaming Fang of Catachan were generated at the same time, as though guided by some microscopic physical law.
The entire process lasted less than 0.1 seconds.
A massive man, standing 1.95 meters tall, appeared out of nowhere.
He placed his right hand over his chest and gave a standard Catachan military salute.
"Loyalty!"