Chapter 7: Cutting Through the Green Tide
At the same time, Number 1 cut in from Rosen's other side, his lasgun levelled at the densest cluster of Gretchin.
Lasgun beams punched carbonised holes through the small green bodies. Three Gretchin were skewered by the same shot and folded over to the same side.
But Gretchin had numbers to spare.
The remaining dozens of Gretchin and the Ork Boy with the severed wrist all lunged at Number 1 together. The Ork Boy used the stump of its wrist to knock Number 1's lasgun off-target, then rammed into his shoulder.
Number 1 was driven back into a pipe support bracket on the wall.
He hit the ground, corrected the lasgun's aim, and put a shot into the Ork Boy.
Not lethal, but it pushed the thing back a step.
In that opening, Rosen planted a boot on the skull of a Gretchin that had lunged for his legs, pressed it down into the deck, and wrenched the Catachan Fang free from the top of the large Ork Boy's head.
He swung the boltgun stock across into the face of the wrist-severed Ork Boy as he came back up.
The Ork Boy's nose bridge snapped in two. It stumbled backward. In that brief gap, Rosen extended the blade forward and the point slid cleanly into its throat.
[Life Point +7]
With the Catachan Fang now held in a reverse horizontal grip, he took out three more Gretchin.
Before his transmigration, Rosen had commanded forces on Earth for several hundred years. Even in peacetime after unification, with no large-scale wars to fight, the Swarm Mind had never stopped forging his death warriors through combat. From the narco-cartels of South American jungles to the open sewers of the Indian subcontinent, his warriors had been tested in every conceivable environment.
Through countless engagements and desperate last stands, every muscle memory, every nerve response, every scrap of tactical cunning had been fed back through the Swarm Mind, processed and refined across billions of iterations.
Rosen, as the holder of supreme authority over that network, had absorbed the combined combat experience his warriors had built in the most extreme conditions imaginable.
His fighting ability and tactical instinct were, by any measure on Earth, at an absolute peak.
Now he moved fluidly through the Orks, killing as he went, with Number 1 working alongside him.
When Rosen finally kicked away the last half-corpse of an Ork that had tried to grab his leg, there was nothing left standing in front of them.
They had cut all the way through.
System notifications were firing off like a string of firecrackers. Life Points climbing fast.
And at that moment, the pursuing green tide came crashing around the bend and caught sight of them.
"Waaagh!"
"Run!"
Rosen grabbed Number 1, who was bleeding from multiple wounds, and they sprinted hard for the far end of the corridor.
At the end of the corridor was a heavy blast shutter.
The kind used to physically seal off compartments when a warship took hull breaches. One metre thick, solid alloy casting.
Rosen hit the control panel, drove his fist through the corroded glass cover, and slammed the red emergency lockdown button.
Clunk, clunk, clunk...
Age and zero maintenance had made the shutter's hydraulic system sluggish. The massive metal plate had barely descended a third of the way before it let out a grinding metallic shriek and seized in mid-air.
"For the love of..."
The green tide behind them was less than twenty metres back and closing. The leading Orks had already raised their sluggas.
Rosen and Number 1 both jumped.
They grabbed the bottom edge of the half-descended shutter like two enormous geckos, every muscle across both their bodies surging at once.
"Come down!"
Crash!
Under their combined frantic pull, the jammed hydraulic rod finally snapped.
The blast shutter, weighing tens of tonnes of solid alloy, dropped like a guillotine with the full force of its own mass behind it.
Bang.
One Gretchin that had been fastest off the mark, trying to slide under the gap at the last moment, didn't even get a chance to scream. The shutter came down and reduced it to a flat green smear.
The shutter seated hard into the floor channel and locked, cutting off the green tide on the other side.
Bang! Bang bang bang!
Crash!
The Orks on the far side, with nowhere left to run their aggression, opened up on the thick alloy shutter with every large-calibre weapon they had.
The shutter was built to take a lot more than that.
Then a notably loud explosion went off on the other side of the door.
Several Life Point income notifications appeared in the system.
"Ha."
Rosen let out a short laugh.
One of the Orks had accidentally shot out a section of abandoned piping during the wild fire. The pipe had dropped and landed on several Gretchin.
The system had credited him for it.
He didn't interrogate the system's reasoning.
Dead was dead.
They needed somewhere to stop for a moment.
About forty metres ahead was a small storage bay with an independent interior space and a single entrance.
"Skip it. If they block the door we have nowhere to go."
He kept moving and found a folded-down platform tucked inside an abandoned corridor section, physically cut off from both the deck above and the deck below.
The two of them climbed up.
Number 1 leaned against the far side. His left arm had taken on a shape it wasn't supposed to have.
His right knee had a cut roughly four centimetres long, deep enough to show bone.
Number 1's expression didn't change.
Rosen opened the Death Warrior interface.
A prompt sat beside Number 1's status entry:
[Spend 10 Life Points to restore designated Death Warrior to full health.]
Rosen didn't hesitate.
[Spend 10 Life Points: Number 1 fully restored.]
The fractured left arm and the knee wound knitted back together under some force operating at a level too small to see.
Number 1 flexed his left arm, confirmed full range of motion, and raised his hand in a salute.
Rosen acknowledged it, then looked back at the Death Warrior interface.
Current Life Point reserves were just over four hundred. Refined Steel had just cleared two cubic metres. Enough to build two more Death Warriors, though the Refined Steel was still a little short.
[Spend 200 Life Points and 2 cubic metres of Refined Steel: exchange for 2 Catachan Jungle Fighters.]
Two Catachan soldiers, identical in build to Number 1, materialised on the platform. They looked around briefly, taking in their surroundings, then both placed their right hands on their chests.
"Loyalty!"
Rosen looked at them and gave his orders.
"You're Number 2. You're Number 3."
"Number 1, stay here and hold watch. Number 2, Number 3, get out there and keep collecting scrap. Fill the Refined Steel reserves."
Numbers 2 and 3 acknowledged and left.
Rosen settled back against a machinery base, rested the boltgun across his legs, and started working through the situation in his head.
This space hulk was one hundred and twenty kilometres across. They had explored a small corner of it.
No way of knowing how many greenskins were still aboard.
No way of knowing whether any other survivors from the 88th Strike Force were still out there.
No way of knowing whether the Emperor's Unyielding Will had waited for them in the void outside, or was already long gone.
Rosen let out a quiet breath.
"Take it slow. It's not like we can leave anyway."