Chapter 3: The First Death Warrior Arrives!
The nearby Gretchin finally snapped out of their shock.
"Open fire! Smash him!"
A dozen Gretchin with ranged weapons raised their guns.
Bang! Bang bang! Crack!
The narrow compartment erupted with gunfire. Weak laser bolts, low-velocity slugs, and rusty iron shards poured toward Rosen.
Rosen used the terrain and the blind spots in the Gretchin's wild shooting to drive straight into the mob.
Horizontal slash, vertical chop, thrust, upward cut.
Rosen worked through the fundamentals of biomechanics and Catachan close-quarters combat, minimum movement, maximum lethality.
Blood, severed limbs, and pulped flesh filled the air.
His knife strokes got faster and faster.
[Life Point +1]
...
[Life Point +1]
When the last distorted shriek cut off, the Deck Seventy-Seven wreckage zone went dead silent again.
In a one-sided slaughter lasting under a minute, he had wiped out the entire Gretchin mob by himself.
[Current Life Point Reserves: 41]
"Still more than half to go."
The gunfire and the noise he'd made would draw more greenskins soon, maybe even the two Ork Boyz who had left earlier.
Rosen started picking through the bodies.
He picked up the automatic gun that had been firing the hardest during the fight.
The moment he had the thing in his hands, his eye twitched.
This was supposed to be a gun?
It was a length of iron pipe sawed off some reactor exhaust duct somewhere, lashed to a wooden stock with a few loops of rusty wire. No trigger guard. No sights. The feeding system was just a tube packed with cheap powder and scrap metal shards.
Under normal physical laws, striking the igniter on this thing would result in a guaranteed catastrophic rupture that would take the shooter's hand and half their head with it.
But in greenskin hands it fired. It could even kill people.
Rosen tossed it aside. He wasn't about to bet his life on whether he could channel Ork psychic energy.
He kept searching.
Beneath the body of a slightly larger Gretchin, he caught an unusual metallic gleam.
Sticking out of the battered sackcloth bag on the dead Gretchin's back was a length of scratched gun barrel.
On the side of the barrel, half-scraped away but still visible, was the white skull insignia of the Astra Militarum.
"Praise the Emperor."
A Locke-pattern boltgun. The pattern designed for elite Astra Militarum veterans and Commissars. Slightly smaller calibre than the Astartes standard, but it still fired .75 calibre mass-reactive rounds. Recoil that would put a regular Guardsman on the floor. For Catachan muscle, it fit just right.
"These filthy xenos actually had something this good."
Rosen ran a fast function check. The mechanical components were completely intact.
"Ammunition. I need ammunition."
He searched the other thirty-odd Gretchin corpses.
After going through a dozen bodies, he found what he needed in two crude ammo pouches made from human skin.
Twelve loose .75 calibre bolts, plus two curved box magazines still fully loaded.
Under fifty rounds total.
Click.
Rosen drove one of the full magazines hard into the feed port of the boltgun and hauled back the heavy charging handle.
With ranged firepower sorted, the next problem was system resources.
He scavenged metal from the wreckage zone. A hydraulic landing gear damper strut, a crane gear, a section of alloy corridor door. Anything he could lift, he absorbed. Ten minutes later, Refined Steel reserves reached 1.2 cubic metres.
Steel requirement met.
The remaining Life Points would have to come from a kill run.
Catachan warriors weren't just killing machines. They were the finest jungle trap craftsmen in the entire galaxy.
This labyrinthine space hulk wreckage zone was no different from a Catachan jungle full of things trying to end you.
He selected a narrow chokepoint where the wreckage zone connected to a main corridor.
He pulled out the twenty-metre spool of monofilament wire.
At roughly thirty centimetres above the deck, he strung three interlocking tripwires across the width of the chokepoint, anchoring both ends firmly to heavy metal fixtures.
Then he fixed the two booby-traps to metal pipes on each side of the chokepoint in the blind spots, and connected the safety pins to the monofilament tripwires on the floor.
To maximise the kill zone, Rosen dragged several Gretchin corpses over and arranged them into a small barricade.
In the gaps between the bodies, he wedged several pieces of scrap iron with razor-sharp edges.
He had just finished setting up.
"Waaagh!"
The war cry came from the direction the two Ork Boyz had gone earlier.
A green tide of Gretchin came surging forward.
Behind the Gretchin flood, six Ork Boyz appeared.
Rosen raised a middle finger.
The greenskins probably didn't know what the gesture meant, but the contempt and provocation on his face were an insult that crossed any species barrier.
"Come on then! You green-furred mongrels who can't stop eating your own waste!"
He turned and ran back into the corridor.
The greenskins exploded with rage.
"Waaagh! Tear that humie apart! I'm gonna eat him alive!"
The Ork Boyz charged at his back in a frenzy.
"Run! Run! The boss is going mental!"
The Gretchin scouting ahead sprinted for their lives to avoid being trampled flat by their boss's feet.
They funnelled straight into the narrow chokepoint.
Rosen had already cleared the kill zone and was sheltering behind a solid metal barricade ten metres from the trap.
"Ten metres... five metres... three metres..."
The dozen Gretchin leading the charge never noticed the monofilament wire, thinner than a human hair, stretched across the floor.
Rosen smiled without warmth. "The Emperor says hello, you lot."
Boom! Boom!
Two Catachan frag booby-traps, augmented with packed scrap iron, detonated in a confined space. The destructive force was well beyond anything the physics of an open field could produce.
The Gretchin at the front of the pack didn't even have time to scream before they were shredded apart.
The six Ork Boyz charging close behind took the full blast.
"Argh!"
The system notifications lit up in Rosen's vision like they'd lost their minds.
[Life Point +37]
Combined with the 41 he already had, his Life Point reserves shot up to 78.
Not enough yet.
The massive soul energy feedback characteristic of Ork Boyz still hadn't registered in the system.
"Disgustingly hard to kill."
Rosen stepped out from behind the barricade.
All six Ork Boyz were still alive.
"Waaagh... I'm gonna... kill you..."
Rosen raised the boltgun without any expression on his face.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Six heavy detonations later, the system began processing the Ork Boyz soul energy one by one.
Each Ork would normally yield 10 Life Points, but the Waaagh frenzy factor and warp contamination in each soul required purification, cutting the yield by thirty percent.
Six Ork Boyz, 7 Life Points each, 42 total.
[Current Life Point Reserves: 120]
Target reached.
With reserves to spare.
At the same moment, a new tab lit up.
[SCRAPYARD (Unlocked)]
In the hololithic interface, a square void was projected into his view.
Inside it floated a small mass of churning, twisting vapour.
If you stared at it long enough, you could almost make out a faint "Waaagh" echoing from within.
[Item: Minor Heretical Psychic Residue.]
[Origin: By-product of the Life Point purification process.]
[Use: Unknown.]
Obviously this was the contaminated waste the system had stripped out while refining the Ork souls.
With no tech tree unlocked yet, this was just a useless placeholder for now.
He closed the Scrapyard and opened [DEATH WARRIORS].
[Life Points: 120 / 100]
[Refined Steel: 1.2 / 1 cubic metre]
[Consume resources and exchange for a Catachan Jungle Fighter, using host's current genetic template?]
"Yes."
100 Life Points and 1 cubic metre of Refined Steel disappeared.
Then the space in front of Rosen began to visibly, violently distort.
One cubic metre of Refined Steel was flash-melted in a surge of light and reshaped into the strongest bone framework a human body could have.
Then the pure life energy, condensed from the fading of a hundred living souls, wove itself across that framework like thread across a loom, crossing and binding at tremendous speed.
Flesh spread outward. Veins and sinews connected. Muscle fibres expanded and solidified at a density and pace that shouldn't have been possible.
Skin covered everything. Then, as if following some microscopic law of physics all its own, Catachan jungle camouflage in its signature red and green pattern assembled itself, along with tactical webbing, and a brand new gleaming Catachan Fang.
The whole process took under a tenth of a second.
A man, 1.95 metres of solid muscle, appeared from nothing.
He placed his right hand over his chest and executed a precise Catachan salute.
"Loyalty!"