Respect Your Elders v2 - Galactic Boogaloo [Warhammer Lizardmen Quest]
- Thread starter Xantalos
- Start date
- Sci-Fi Fantasy
-
- Tags
- warhammer warhammer 40k fantasy sci-fi science fantasy science-fantasy kitchen sink space fantasy isha kroak (warhammer fantasy) mazdamundi (warhammer fantasy) magic empire quest actions have consequences dinosaurs ia ia kroak fhtagn lasers lizardmen qm likes speculation and questions slann what could possibly go wrong?
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Or as I've seen it phrased, "the Emperor's ex-wife wanted the children in the divorce"
- Location
- Somewhere Beyond the Sea
All of Humanity is now doomed to die a slow death to Chaos, Xenos and traitors thanks to a thot wanting a divorce
I genuinely dont know what to feel or do about this situation
I genuinely dont know what to feel or do about this situation
Has some new lore dropped or something?
- Pronouns
- Exist
All the alien ones are smart enough to avoid the limelight.
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
It was that thought that lead to me creating the Infinity Guardians for my take on 40k Lizardmen in my quest.
A clade of Lizardmen deliberately imbued with perpetualness to serve as the guardians who never falter for the most important sites; though they get produced more often after the Ascension when the Lizardmen fully mastered the secrets of the Old Ones. Since perpetualness was probably something the Old Ones created first.
Stuff like a single formation of Sunblooded Infinity Guardians being able to hold back the undead astartes of the Mortificer Legion and unliving thralls in service to Nagash for a decade straight of literally nonstop fighting to push through towards a webway gate as the Legion devoted ever-larger hosts to trying to break their lines while their Primalblood commander; Xekatura; could duel with the fallen Primarch Atraya; Mortarch of Conquest; without pause until she was finally recalled elsewhere.
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- Location
- Somewhere Beyond the Sea
If you start now we just might get there in 5 years instead of 8 XDFor what it's worth, I've got my own take on Perpetuality in this quest, and it's something you guys will probably run into fairly soon after you get into space.
So, you know, in eight RL years or so
/s (Just in case)
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Something like that 
Oh, quick question for anyone with the ability and inclination to confirm - Gardakka's coastal city Deffkloud, the one you're having Kroq-Gar assault this turn, that's the same initial settlement that Wurkaz Slashytoof founded way back when he first sailed onto the continent, isn't it? I'm pretty certain it is, but I can't remember at the moment and I wanna use my brain power for writing right now.
Oh, quick question for anyone with the ability and inclination to confirm - Gardakka's coastal city Deffkloud, the one you're having Kroq-Gar assault this turn, that's the same initial settlement that Wurkaz Slashytoof founded way back when he first sailed onto the continent, isn't it? I'm pretty certain it is, but I can't remember at the moment and I wanna use my brain power for writing right now.
- Location
- Seattle, Washington
I can't find any information on the name of the city Wurkaz Slashytoof founded by searching for various keywords, so it's not clear. However, it would make sense.Something like that
Oh, quick question for anyone with the ability and inclination to confirm - Gardakka's coastal city Deffkloud, the one you're having Kroq-Gar assault this turn, that's the same initial settlement that Wurkaz Slashytoof founded way back when he first sailed onto the continent, isn't it? I'm pretty certain it is, but I can't remember at the moment and I wanna use my brain power for writing right now.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
It would've been going by the name of Buildysmashyshootyplace back then. Looking at the map positioning, I think it's the same one, albeit having been swapped through something like 4 different warbosses since then.
For the sake of your brainpower, I think we can all agree that even if it might not have been it definitely is now.
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
I mean... not that it means anything, but we never discussed moving the cities for the map. So. 🤷♂️
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Just make magically moving cities so you don't have to worry about where they are.
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Lizardmen move cities by painstakingly disassembling and rebuilding them brick by brick.
The Orks move cities by accidentally misplacing them on the map, leading to the city actually moving itself to the place Orks believe it "should" be.
The Orks move cities by accidentally misplacing them on the map, leading to the city actually moving itself to the place Orks believe it "should" be.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
It's a reasonable assertion that it is, and no one in their right mind would gainsay you.Something like that
Oh, quick question for anyone with the ability and inclination to confirm - Gardakka's coastal city Deffkloud, the one you're having Kroq-Gar assault this turn, that's the same initial settlement that Wurkaz Slashytoof founded way back when he first sailed onto the continent, isn't it? I'm pretty certain it is, but I can't remember at the moment and I wanna use my brain power for writing right now.
Turn 11 Break The Tide - Conclusion
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Plan Occasionally One Step Backwards
The coming of the orks was preceded by foul omens that spread across the sky, were carried on the wind, and crept through the ground. The congealed mass of over fifty million greenskins marching to war was such that the world itself was stained by their presence, the ripples of their passage spreading far and wide ahead of them. A thick haze of smoke began to obscure the horizon when the hordes were still days out from lizardmen territory. A foul odor settled into the air, scent trails of acrid smoke and squigshit and rotting gore cloaking the orks like a mantle of filth. The earth was subject to subtle quakes, disturbing slann in their meditative chambers as the weight of millions upon millions of green feet trampled upon the ground.
The lizardmen temple-cities were islands of serenity in the looming chaos. Roaming enchantments filtered the foulness from the air as it reached their midnight walls, and the foundations of their buildings were solid enough that the quakes were nought but reminders of the distance of their foe. In wide plazas and crisscrossing streets their armies prepared at an unhurried, methodical pace, laying out sight lines and preparing plans of maneuver. Winged beasts sailed back and forth between Tletl'notec and Muukhexla, ferrying status updates and scouting reports to Saurus Oldbloods. Obsinite pits blazed with near-constant activations, a steady stream of scrap material being fed into them to manufacture sufficient ammunition for the coming conflict.
While the Lord Slann Erup-Xhin of the Third Spawning and Eternity Warden Chakax prepared their static defenses to receive the incoming tide of orks, it was left to the skink commanders to blunt the initiative of the greenskins. To the north, Tiktaq'to prepared great flights of Terradon riders and coordinated them with teams of artillery skinks, spreading a web of firing positions and holdouts across the hundreds of kilometer-wide front the orks approached. Emissaries of the slann looked upon the landscape with blazing eyes, and their toad masters calculated spells of fiendish complexity and scope to bring death to the enemy.
In Muukhexla, the Cult of Sotek congregated under Teninhuan, the prophet's form swollen with serpentine might as the Deliverer turned his eyes to the coming conflict. The majority of the faithful were assigned to the defence of the city, placing themselves at the forefront of the fortifications, where the fighting was sure to be bloodiest. The most elite, however, ancient cultists who had fought against the skaven and seen the birth of their god, travelled with their prophet to meet the orks. They melted into the jungle on the far side of the Kanyon, great swathes of serpents crawling out of the foliage around them as their knives dripped venom.
Naxaldin's nostrils flared as the smell of uax drifted downwind. Karcarath laid a hand upon her nape and scratched, the touch serving to calm the massive Horned One as he hefted his gun, ensuring his equipment was prepared.
The skink chief's order of riders had been intercepting the congealing elements of Urdgob's armies for weeks, following their prophet's example by plunging deep into enemy territory and destroying or scattering bands of orks before they could conglomerate into greater masses and join the main legion of the brutes. They had defeated sixteen tribes in that time period, each massing in the low hundreds, and now sought larger prey.
They had lured their current quarry, a tribe of pyromaniac orks headed by a hulking boss who'd replaced one arm with a mechanical klaw and an inbuilt flamethrower, to a river crossing through a series of ambushes and controlled retreats. The chameleon skinks and priests of Sotek attached to their group kept up a steady tempo of nighttime assassinations and terror tactics, leaving a steady trail of skinned, heartless ork corpses hanging from the trees to entice the greenskins onward. Fifty of Karcarath's Saurus, mounted on Cold Ones, had gone with them to give some credence to the ploy, and were racing ahead of the oncoming orks, dashing towards the steep riverbank, which overlooked a series of churning rapids fifteen meters below.
Following through the gargantuan fungal stalks that served as trees were the hooting forms of eight hundred orks, leaving a carpet of flame behind them as they torched anything they could see. They jeered and cackled as they ran after the Saurus riders, knowing their quarry would be trapped against the riverbank, ripe for the slaughter.
The Cold Ones, however, did not stop when they reached the river, or even slow down. Instead they sped up, leaping off the bank in seamless formation. The first few among the orks, racing at their heels, followed them over, limbs flailing. The rest of the tribe, still bellowing, pulled up short of the drop and quickly realized that something was wrong.
The Saurus Riders had not gone thrashing to their doom in the water below, as their pursuers had. Instead their leap had taken them more than halfway across the river, amplified somehow by some unseen effect, and even now the hulking warriors and their mounts were coursing through the raging river as if its currents had no hold on their flesh, their bronze armor no impediment. As they reached the other side, dismounting and beginning to assemble fearsome rifles in near-unison, the tribe's shaman started yelling and pointing as four streaks of black rocketed up from the forest below, one after the other.
Before any of the boyz could ascertain what the git's deal was, there was a cry of alarm from their rear, swiftly joined by the unmistakable sounds of gunfire and bloodshed as Karcarath and two hundred Horned One riders burst out of the treeline, crashing into the orks while howling praises to Sotek.
There was pandemonium as the orks were forced to reverse their momentum, brawls breaking out in the midst of their forces as greenskins eager to get to the new fight trampled those still unaware. Karcarath's riders scythed through the orkoid ranks, tearing flesh with spear and macuahuitl on the charge and peppering the greenskins with constant rifle fire when their momentum was spent and they made distance. Their mounts, made blood-hungry by sacred incense of Sotek, bit and stomped and tore, lashing out at anything not scaled.
The orks were quick to recover their momentum, and rushed towards the lizardmen like water flowing downhill. Their aim was wild, the swings of their oversized choppas undisciplined and reckless, but they still felled many lizardmen. Their burna boyz sent out sheets of flame that enveloped both their fellows and the oncoming Horned Ones, the inferno catching on nearby foliage and wreathing the entire battleground in a patina of fire. Scaled corpse and fungal flesh alike coated the ground, creating islands of sanctity where the flames could not burn for the amount of blood soaking the ground.
Karcarath directed his forces through the use of a fanged, hissing trumpet as Naxaldin leapt and spun and bit under him, the Horned One reading her rider's intent without words. The lizardmen forces slowly drew the orks along the riverbank, stretching the battlefield long and narrow, just as they had planned. Then, seven gruelling minutes after their first charge, the lizardmen turned and dashed towards the treeline, mobs of howling orks just behind them.
It was then that the shots fired from the Omen Mortar on the other side of the river impacted into the ground just shy of the retreating lizardmen, each pillar of obsidian discharging a bolt of earth-shaking energy into the ground where they embedded themselves.
With the frightful speed of the inevitable, the entire section of riverbank the orks had been herded onto collapsed, rapid disintegration of the fungal fibres holding the earth together combined with a sudden infusion of downward momentum transforming the battlefield into an instant landslide. Seven hundred orks bellowed their way down into the river below, followed by a tide of rock and soil.
Some died when their thick skulls were cracked open on river rocks, or when another flailing greenskin crushed them under the weight of their impact. Some were sucked under the water by dark currents and drowned, their bodies flensed by bottom-dwelling anemones. Most, however, survived the fall thanks to their hardy biology, and were able to tread water long enough to see gun-toting lines of lizardmen appear on either side of the river, and hear the echoing chants of anointed priests of Sotek.
Serpents began to squirm out of the river rocks and towards the orks, red-scaled and hissing with forked tongues. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands boiled up out of the water, ranging in size from as small as a finger to thrice the length of an ork. The water was swiftly stained with blood as the serpents squirmed and thrashed, ripping open ork throats and weighing them down in their coils. Knife-sharp bullets scythed down into the frenzy, popping eyes and splitting heads.
Those few greenskins that were able to get close to the shore were shot in the head by the Saurus on the riverbank. The rest were torn to pieces by Sotek's brood, their corpses dragged back into whatever unseen paths the serpents had emerged from.
Karcarath's riders collected their casualties and threw them over the cliff, where they were collected by auxiliaries manning a Revivification Crystal. By the time the skink chief rendezvoused with the rest of his forces, the majority of them had been restored by the artifact's magic, and the twenty seven who had sustained injuries too severe to be revived were given over to Sotek in solemn rituals of bloodletting.
The rest of the day was spent recuperating as their attached Azyr priest scryed for their next target. Then they were on the move again, leaving only a scarred cliff and the bloodstained rocks below as traces of their presence.
The orks approached the Kanyon like the wall of an oncoming storm, battered and disoriented by the lizardmen's efforts to disrupt their coordination, but only encouraged by the violence they were subject to. Nighttime raids of their convoys caused their pace to quicken towards the true battlefront. Glyph Bombs were dropped from on high by daring Terradons, vaporizing dozens and provoking the ork armies to shoot en masse at anything they saw flying above them. Mortar strikes arrowed down from the skies in all hours as the orks closed to within a few kilometers of the Kanyon, and the greenskins merely grinned in glee that the paintboyz had learned how to fight better.
The lizardmen cities were a looming sight on the horizon as the armies arrived at the seventy-meter wide chasm the slann had torn in the earth a decade ago. They towered above the horizon, drawing skylines of black pyramids and walls that pulsed with fell energies. The scattered shamans of the orks cringed away from the terrifying beacons of psychic energy they could see waiting within, but the rest of their fellows, faced with tangible opposition after days of marching and waiting, howled in triumph and redoubled their pace.
They had brought a plethora of bridges with them, unwieldy things of scrap iron and fungal strands held together with wax and nails. They hauled them forth from the mek camps and pushed them into place, some rumbling and extending themselves via hidden mechanisms, while others were flown across by brigades of whirlykoptas. They poured across the Kanyon on dozens of such constructs, their efforts resembling the mycelium strands of a fungus reaching for sustenance. There was no one crossing to contest, no one chokepoint to stem the flood of emerald bodies from.
The lizardmen had anticipated this, and met them regardless.
Orks moved across the open ground like a rolling tide, and swiftly found that the lizardmen had prepared the battlefield. Slann channeled their magic into patterns of spatial distortion, splitting greenskin army groups into disorganized fragments, scattering them into prepared killing fields where they were destroyed piecemeal by webs of eldritch light woven by the toad mages. Hidden Glyph Bombs cast off their illusions and blocked off entire regions of the battlefield with constant surges of spellcraft, arranged in formation so as to funnel the orks into corridors that hundreds of Omen Launchers had pre-sighted on.
Black obelisks darted down from the sky like a rain of knives, exploding in bursts of lightning and fire that sought out the orks around them. The beasts raised their guns to the sky, chattering shootas held by Nobs or mounted on flatbed trukks filling the air with bursts of lead to intercept the enemy artillery. The Omens were not daunted, however, their rounds dancing and jerking erratically through the air to avoid counterfire before zooming unerringly to their targets. They destroyed engines, rammed into low-flying aircraft, detonated in tightly-packed crowds and slew dozens.
Itzpoc clacked their teeth restlessly, the yellow crest on the skink's head at full attention as they watched the oncoming tide of Uax pour towards Muukhexla. The creatures thundered towards the walls, disregarding the massive casualties they had taken to get this far. The Umbrella Shield covering their firing team rippled and shook under the weight of constant impact, but held, the deep thrum of the Web sustaining its crystalline matrix and the many around it. Outside it was a maelstrom of noise and calamity, the nonstop barrage of greenskin gunfire contrasted by the sharp krak of snipers loosing careful shots at barely-seen targets and the high-pitched whine of Solar Engines as they sent searing beams of energy down into the enemy.
"Ready targets," Itzpoc hissed to their comrades. "The Uax are close to maximum range." Around them, dozens of skinks performed final calibrations, each team of four readying their Monument Cannon for firing. Itzpoc settled into the firing seat of their cannon, swiveling the barrel back and forth. They slipped the machine's targeting helm over their head and their vision was immediately overlaid with holographic lines representing distances, probable trajectories, wind resistance, applicable targets for the cannon's tracking spells, and a small green glyph in the corner of their vision indicating that it was ready to fire.
Itzpoc's grip tightened on the trigger. Their focus narrowed, vision locking in to the yellow line that indicated the maximum range of their cannon. Sensation from the rest of their body faded, the pressure of the helmet on their crest and slight itch in the scales of their lower back forgotten. Their breathing instinctually slowed, matching their heartbeat. Sound temporarily left the world as the thundering tide of ork flesh grew closer to the yellow line, moving in slow motion. Closer still.
The first ork boot crossed the line and Itzpoc was firing the gun before their conscious mind realized it. Their whole body shook as the force of the shot rippled back through the recoil dampening systems, and they watched through enhanced vision as the round, itself nearly as large as them, cut through the air with a piercing shriek, rocketing towards the distant line of orks. The scream grew louder as the obsinite spear's hairline fractures came apart and it split into a cloud of knife-sharp shrapnel, reducing a dozen orks to a complementary bloom of gore and bone.
The first shot was swiftly followed by another, and another after that, each skull-shaking boom of firing followed by the scream the rounds gave off as they arrowed through the air. Itzpoc was so focused on keeping the cannon stable and aiming their shots for maximum impact that they did not realize until they had to stop and let their assistant crew reload that they had been screaming alongside their cannon the entire time, a high, thin noise that was mirrored by the guttural bellowing of the orks as they continued to close.
As the armies of Urdgob and Gardakka thundered across the Kanyon, something else took notice. Slann magic tugged at an ancient mind that thought in carving lines and slicing angles and stabbing points, bringing awareness of the noxious green spreading across the ground far below, tying irritation to its senses until the affront the war-things presented at last overcame its predilection for quiet.
Pillars of frost descended from the heavens, the Quango's ire manifesting as building-sized icicles that carved through ork bridges with the implacable malice of mass and gravity. Fell winds followed them down, jetstream currents spontaneously manifesting on courses that sent compressed cyclones of frigid air through masses of puce green bodies. Chips of ice with nanometer-wide edges stripped flesh from bone, sending out clouds of blood that froze in turn and killed the greenskins behind them. Directed by the Quango's will, the wind pushed against every step the orks took, blowing great masses of them to their death in the endless chasm of the Kanyon.
Orkish aircraft, their activities already greatly stymied by the proliferation of Monument Cannons and the tangible malice of slann spellcraft that obliterated anything that got within five kilometers of a temple-city's airspace, dropped out of the sky in droves, either frozen so deeply they shattered upon hitting the ground or half-vaporized by lightning bolts as thick as trees. Some descended seemingly intact, but with their pilots missing and their hulls infused with cosmic radiation that caused Mek reclamation crews to collapse in spasms.
Erup-Xhin of the Third Spawning looked over the vista of Tletl'notec and saw order amidst the tumult of war. A sea of Waaagh!!! Energy churned and frothed outside the city walls, swirling in on itself and growing stronger as orks died and killed. The chorus of tusked throats bellowed in time with its spikes, the frenzy of greenskin movement increasing in areas it congregated in. To the slann's mystic sight it was a thing of both wondrous complexity and brute simplicity at once, millions of individual psychic currents harmonizing and building on each other to create a pressing imperative, a burning need for battle that wrote itself into reality through fifty million vessels.
For all its unstoppable force, however, it was exceptionally vulnerable to redirection.
Erup-Xhin tapped into Tletl'notec's geomantic grid, the city's underlying magic reading his intent and responding to his thoughts as soon as they were generated. Stored power rose from chambers and pylons beneath the paved streets, causing glyphs to pulse and shields to whine as the slann drew much of the metropolis' mystic energy into his grasp. Obsinite pits grew dark, forge complexes falling silent as power was redirected to more urgent matters.
With one tendril of thought, Erup-Xhin began to shape this gathered power, forcing it into a configuration that was mirrored by the glyph laid out by the city's power network. The rest of his mind split into hundreds of branches, parallel processes running in unison, each pursuing its own target. These fractal filaments stretched out from his Star Chamber, reaching across miles like an ethereal man o' war, each of them seeking out and drifting into the mind of an ork shaman, fastening themselves while the creatures were engulfed in the chorus of the Waaagh.
Across the battlefield, Gardakka's shamans began to scream, clutching their heads and clawing at their eyes as their power was torn from their control and funnelled into the shape the slann desired. Older orks, wary of the mayhem their weirdboyz could cause when in states like this, backed away from the gibbering mystics, and in some cases turned their guns upon them, willing to risk some backlash rather than endure whatever was coming.
It mattered little, for the spell was already complete. As Erup-Xhin set his magic in motion, every shaman outside the walls of Tletl'notec glowed furnace-bright as their powers were subverted to draw up gouts of magma from beneath the earth. They and everyone around them were turned to slag in an instant, but the molten rock continued to fountain upward, powered by the spells comprising the foundation of the City of Under-Earth. In no more than a minute, the entire stretch of land from Tletl'notec's walls to the Kanyon itself was submerged in a foot-deep current of lava, filling the air with the scent of carbonizing flesh and sulfuric fumes.
The lizardmen cities presented an impenetrable bastion to the orks, their black walls resisting everything the greenskins threw at them and inflicting horrendous casualties on any assault force. Each bullet fired, each spell woven, every swing of every weapon was conducted with ruthless, mechanical efficiency, the defenders never seeming to tire, their aim never wavering. The walls of the temple-cities spat death on any who approached, and the looming pyramids behind them killed any who did not, the slann ensconced within hammering the orks with blast waves of magic from the safety of their Star Chambers.
Any enemy seeking to preserve their forces would have avoided the zones of death the lizardmen cities represented, seeking to instead despoil their less-defended rear territory. The orks, however, saw in the cities an invitation, a challenge to fight and kill, and were drawn to them like iron to a magnet. They laughed and sang as they thundered towards their deaths, charging lizardmen bunkers and climbing blood-slick walls with no hesitation despite the half-shredded corpses of their fellows who had gone before.
Some, swept up by the momentum of their crusade, spilled past the cities, splintering into roving bands of orks that shot everything they saw, gathering their feral kin to their sides as they went. Before they could grow into warbands requiring concerted force to address, however, they were intercepted by lizardmen garrison forces that had been placed years before, their most likely routes mapped out by skink chiefs before the orks had even arrived.
Arguk Teefkruncha was ancient by the standards of the average ork at almost 30 years old, and was thus more prone to reminiscence than the average git. Casting his mind far, far back into the hazy memories of yesteryear, he could recall the dark, dreary times when it'd seemed that there was nothing in the world to fight but the sameboyz and other orks.
Not that those were bad fights, mind you – nothing could take a punch or give one back like an ork boy, and the sameboyz had an endless amount of novel bodies to throw in your face, enough that even seasoned exteriminataz could never guess what they were gonna kill from one day to the next. And they were sneaky too, which gave those kommando gits something to do. But they were called sameboyz for a reason – once you'd killed one big gribbly, you'd know how to krump the rest of 'em, no matter how many legs it had. An ork was always happy for a fight, but some variety wouldn't have been out of place.
Arguk's scarred lips stretched over gleaming tusks as he recalled the first battles against the lizardmen. Things had changed then, oh indeed they had. Sure, the scaleboyz were a bit standoffish at times, and they had all sorts of weird ideas like letting their grots fight instead of just beating them, or letting the most colorful git be the boss instead of the biggest one, but oh could they fight! Arguk had gone toe-to-toe with a Saurus four times now (after letting his more eager mates swamp it first) and each and every time had been the fight of his life. He'd lost at least two limbs every time, and once had gotten half his face bitten off!
Good times.
When given a good fight, it was of course only polite to return the favor, and Arguk had eagerly hopped on board when Boss Gardakka sent a bunch of his boyz over to show the toofies what for. The toofies were good sports about it on the whole, having built up a whole bunch of walls and towers for the orks to come and knock down, and put a bunch of gunz on top of those so it wouldn't be too easy. They'd even hidden those spooky weirdboy squigs they had that could zap loads of boyz and let the orks try to find them while they got roasted and 'sploded and crunched to bits. Best bit of fun this planet had presented thus far, even better than trying to bring down a Mountain Squig.
Nuff finking, Arguk decided as his warband's target came into view, a squat, black stone bunker that had a whole load of lizardmen inside. The great cannon atop it whirred and creaked as it tracked from side to side. Time ta get krumpin.
His choppa, a kustom-made monstrosity festooned with whirring chains, smashed into the face of the nearest boy, dropping him to the ground with a shattered jaw. "Lissen up, you young gits!" He bellowed, and all the nearby orks stopped what they were doing and looked to see what their boss had to say. Arguk looked them over, the vast majority of them a bunch of weedy yoofs he'd scooped up and given some shootas while roaming around. "You'ze about ta earn those gunz! Dat fing there," he shouted, waving his own shoota to point out the bunker, "That's an invitation, that is! See dat kannon? It's the biggest and shootiest fing da lizards got, and dey put it up just fer us! So we'z gonna show 'ow grateful we iz, by takin' it and usin' it ta dakka a whole bunch of scaleboyz! Get in there, lads!"
They answered him with a wordless howl that bespoke the lust for battle threading through all of them, and charged forth, hundreds of tons of green flesh barreling forward like a freight train. Arguk watched them go for a split second, enjoying the rush of having so many boyz respond so readily to his command, before a matching warcry passed his lips and he allowed himself to be swept up in the momentum of the charge.
The lizardmen bunker sat atop a small ash-covered hill on the otherwise flat terrain, giving the garrison within a commanding view of their surroundings. Bullets began to carve through the ranks of the charging orks as they closed in, and the Monument Cannon atop it turned to face them, firing shrieking spears of shrapnel with methodical malice. Some of Arguk's seasoned orks raised rokkit launchers in response, firing without abandon. Most of their shots went wide, and those who made them found obsinite bullets lodged in their heads shortly afterwards, but a scattered few did make contact, shattering glowing gems at the base of the cannon, which seemed to halt its firing pattern.
A great cheer went up from the boyz at the sight, and the orks redoubled their pace, arriving at the base of the hill with their numbers whittled by a third but their enthusiasm undimmed. As they pounded up the slope, unleashing a wall of dakka ahead of them, the bunker's crew answered in kind, the range having shortened enough to utilize their automatic rifles. Where the orks shot everywhere in hope of hitting anything, the lizardmen aimed with rigid precision, sending razor-sharp bullets through throats, sternums, and heads. Orks dropped like flies on the approach, managing to attain some form of cover only by hefting the corpses of their fallen before them as makeshift shields.
They made it halfway up the slope before a series of Glyph Spheres came sailing out of the bunker's closest firing slit, glowing green and gold. As they detonated, masses of thrashing vines sprouted up from the ground around the orks, wrapping themselves tightly around their limbs and torsos. Within seconds their texture began to darken, the coiled loops of plant matter transmuting into shackles of stone and metal that bound the orks fast, even as they strained and grunted.
A door ground open from its recess in the bunker's side and twenty Saurus filed out, carrying leaf-bladed spears taller than themselves. Moving in practised formation, they spread out into a single-file line and closed in on the trapped greenskins, the points of their spears preceding them. Obsinite scythed through flesh with quick, curt movements, the Saurus working in silence broken only by the grisly sound of greenskins dying.
Within ten minutes the last of the orks had been slain, and the Saurus dragged the bodies into a pile at the base of the hill. Their Glyph Spheres were toggled to Aqshy patterns and shoved within the pile. The resultant pyre raged for hours until the last corpse was burned to ash; enough time for the next-closest warband to spot the pillar of smoke and come to investigate.
Blunted and battered by the impregnable fortresses that were the lizardmen cities, the ork momentum slowed, casualties mounting faster than their psychic field could accelerate its growth. Slann took hold of the Waaagh! Field as it weakened, using psychic pressure to paralyze entire battalions of orks as they charged the walls of Muukhexla and Tletl'notec. Others plied more familiar spellcraft, sending sheets of diamond-sharp flame through walls of greenskins and summoning comets of ice from the upper atmosphere down upon their heads.
As the ork armies scattered, seeking easier targets, the lizardmen followed. The network of fortifications set up beforehand proved a potent asset in bogging the greenskin armies down, and the legions of the lizardmen scythed into them again and again, bodies buoyed by the Geomantic Web. They were relentless, implacable, and their focus never wavered, no matter how many of them were blasted full of holes by ork machine guns or burned to a crisp by napalm throwers. Little by little, the green tide was being ground down upon the mountain of the defenders of the Old Ones.
The ground between Gardakka and Urdgob's territory had been abused for the better part of a century. Stretching back to when Wurkaz Slashytoof's iron-shod boots had stomped across it, the stretch of land had seen ork, Ayacmanik, and Thunder Lizard feet tread back and forth across it, crushing and grinding any noteworthy landmarks it had once had into muck. Now it held naught but blood and soil, a stretch of flat no-man's land where orks charged back and forth, spending hundreds of lives to shift the front line a few feet in either direction.
On a northern-facing rise overlooking a particularly bloody stretch of ground nicknamed Mulch Alley, Urdgob Noseskorcha stood at the head of an army. The Boss was in his element, his bulky form surging with vigor as he addressed his underlings. The axe in his hands roared and crackled, its crude edge set aflame with the aid of fuel hoses snaking into an armored pod he bore on his back. In his other hand was a gun that more resembled a taped-together conglomeration of pipes than a coherent device. Flame flickered from the edges of the barrels, and the air around him stunk of toxins.
Ikzboq watched the massive ork through a scope from a sentry tower over two and a half kilometers away, keen eyes picking out its bombastic gesturing as the creature addressed its underlings, stoking their eagerness for strife and slaughter.
The chameleon skink had been sitting in its current position for the past four days, perched motionless in the rafters at the top of an orkish gun tower. There was a crew of greenskins below it, thirty seven in total including the fluctuating gretchin population. They were not aware of Ikzboq's presence, although they had begun to refer to the tower as 'lucky' following the unexplained deaths of several Gardakka-aligned patrols that had been in range to attack the tower. Ixkboq would dispose of them once its task was complete, lest rumors spread among the orkish host and hinder the effectiveness of future operations.
Lenses flickered as Ikzboq adjusted the scope of their rifle. The device highlighted wind currents and rising thermals in the path between the scope and its target, who shone bright red with the potency of fuel he was carrying on his person. The assassin's sights dipped down just slightly, confirming that the ground had been prepared by their brethren and the Glyph Spheres were in place. It had taken much work to bring Urdgob to this point, feints and lures and the heads of half a dozen high-ranking Nobs from both his and Gardakka's camps to temporarily direct the pyromaniac Boss into a position that they could guarantee both his death and the method used to accomplish it.
Urdgob's pre-battle speech was nearing its conclusion; with the massing of their rival army on the other side of Mulch Alley now visible, his underlings were hooting and cheering, bursts of flame rising up as they fired their weapons. With a great shout that was faintly audible even from Ikzboq's position, Urdgob unleashed his horde, sending them thundering down the slope towards the killing field. Ikzboq exhaled the last dregs of air from its lungs, sealed its ear holes, temporarily stopped its heart from beating, and fired a shot. The krakoom of the rifle was deafening in the confined space, and alarmed greenskin shouts began to waft up to the rafters as Ikzboq broke the sniper rifle down and brought out its short-range killing tools.
The assassin knew without looking that it had found its mark.
The bullet exited Ikzboq's sniper rifle with tremendous speed, having accelerated to over twice the speed of sound thanks to the momentum-enhancing enchantments humming within the gold-plated barrel. It was wreathed in a corona of blue magic, allowing it to slip through the wind currents with supernatural ease. It sailed across the intervening distance, coiling around a rising column of heat and dipping under a gust of wind that would have blown it off course. For four and a half seconds it arrowed silently through the air, homing in on its target, before it scissored through the cluster of fuel lines leading between Urdgob's flaming wargear and the tank upon his back with a hiss that went unnoticed in the midst of the Noseskorcha's frenzied warcry.
Urdgob charged forth at the head of his boyz, leaving a trail of glistening fuel behind him as he did. Between the proliferation of flaming weapons in his horde and their orky lack of discipline, it was not long before this trail was ignited, becoming a great rope of dancing flames, advancing swiftly towards Urdgob like the lit fuse of a bomb. As it leapt into the fuel tank of the greenskin Boss, Ikzboq's brethren primed the numerous Glyph Spheres that they had buried beneath the battlefield several days beforehand, the first array of which Urdgob had just passed over.
The explosion incinerated every ork within ten meters and barbecued the flesh of everything within a hundred. Some orks, gifted with better sight or simply luckier than others, would later have gone on to question such a turn of events, but by that point the battle had been joined, and every greenskin that had witnessed the event first hand was dead within the hour.
The effect of the assassination on the strategic scale was immediate. The coordination of Urdgob's forces evaporated, the unified horde splintering into a dozen smaller factions as surviving underlings grabbed for the reins of power. They turned on each other, the strong swallowing the weak, swiftly subduing any contenders who were not strong, swift, or cunning enough to resist incursions into their territory.
Gardakka leapt forth like a hound scenting blood, his armies crashing into the squabbling chieftains his rival had left behind and flattening them under the weight of gunfire. As the Ayacmanik to the south, west, and east pressed further into orkish territory, advancing behind eleven Thunder Lizards wrathfully stomping their way through the greenskins, Gardakka's armies claimed vast swathes of territory, subjugating army after army. Such was his momentum that the majority of his reserve forces were called from their northern garrisons, coursing south to join the victorious fight.
The news was conveyed to the lizardmen warleaders within the day, and Kroq-Gar set out not an hour afterwards, the campaign finally ready for his counteroffensive.
Dozens of slann joined their powers, wreathing Hexoatl's legions in a space-warping enchantment that increased their travel speed fiftyfold. With the path east cleared by their brethren's efforts to lure the orks towards the temple-cities, Kroq-Gar and his army punched through the lines of Gardakka's force and into greenskin territory, the combined force of over a million lizardmen and eight Thunder Lizards too great to resist.
Gardakka's territory, having been ravaged by slann-conjured wind storms and drained of its population by the Worldhamma as he went south, was unable to put up significant resistance to the lizardmen push. Kroq-Gar took a third of the legion and four Thunder Lizards on a straight march to Gardakka's primary city of Deffkloud, the very same that traced its founding back to Wurkaz Slashytoof's initial incursion onto the continent. The rest of the lizardmen were left to the command of the eldest slann present, Hextlohca of the Fourth Spawning, who watched through the eyes of his skink herald Textozpic. The ancient mage divided his forces among the many younger slann who were there in person, taking advantage of the martial experience the Fifth Generation had gained during his long slumber.
The legion, thus dispersed, methodically drove its way through orkoid defense forces. The scattered garrisons and idle mobs of yoofs that had grown in Gardakka's absence were unable to match the lizardmen on a pound-for-pound basis. In most cases, their concentration of force was so small that they only outnumbered the lizardmen attacking forces twice or thrice over – ratios that the predominantly Saurus forces were more than capable of dealing with.
The ork airfield shook as another obsidian shell impacted, blowing another hole into the main hanger and sending the meks running about in a tizzy as a number of fuel tanks detonated along with another Dakkajet. Zapguzzla snorted at the sight, knowing that despite all the commotion, the machine would be repaired within a day. It was only a delaying tactic, the toofies trying to prevent any more bombing runs on their mob. The warphead wasn't worried by such a thing – it was well known that while the scaleboyz could give a real good scrap if they were forced into it, they generally preferred to be standoffish about their fighting, only really committing to a fight if you tried to break their walls or they were sure they could krump the lot of boyz they were fighting easily. The incessant rain of artillery they'd harassed Zapguzzla and his boyz with after being repulsed on their first assault was annoying, sure, but it was also normal.
What had him out of sorts was the presence he'd been feeling approach for the last day, manifesting as a swelling pain in his head that pointed unerringly west. It'd grown more and more intense as time went on, a gut feeling that whatever this thing was, it was leagues more powerful than him, enough that he could practically hear the rumbling on the edge of the horizon as it got closer. The low-lying smog obscuring the sky seemed to twist as he watched it, the very essence of the world yearning to scream the name of the thing that travelled through it.
The world itself announced the slann's arrival. It was a pressure imprinting itself upon the souls of anyone nearby, a crushing gravity that wrote its name into the minds of all that were present. The air stilled and thickened in anticipation, and all thought ceased for a dreadful moment as the attention of the battlefield was inexorably drawn to a point. Space and dimensional barriers cringed away from the squat pile of toad flesh as it apparated in the midst of its forces, and the orks that were present bared their teeth at their new enemy and the ice-cold burning they could feel grinding into their minds. None of them, however, could see the spirit world save for Zapguzzla. None of them saw what he saw.
Time, an endless abyss of unending length and depth and you were being pulled down into it, drowning in an immensity of experience.
Mahultep gestured, and the projectile rocketed forth, embedding itself within the outer walls of the fortress and discharging its malign energies within. The walls splintered and cracked, crystalline instabilities introduced into their material structure by the slann's spell propagating near-instantaneously. The kroxigors swung their hammers once more and a whole section of walls collapsed, the saurus battalion pouring through the breach in unbroken formation.
Zapguzzla dragged himself upright with his staff as support, looking upon the slann with bloodshot eyes. Mahultep had scarcely moved since his arrival, seated in meditative repose with his own eyes shut. Something in Zapguzzla raged at the sight of such carnage being wrought so distractedly, and he bared his teeth. Drawing in what Waaagh! energy he could, he focused it into a bolt, molding it with all the attention and care he could muster. Feeling the power well, he roared in exultation, vomiting emerald lighting at the slann.
Mahultep's eyes opened with languid placidity as the lightning harmlessly rebounded off his shields. He retracted one layer of his nictitating membranes for a moment. There was a hissing sound, then a scream, then nothing. When he closed his eyes once more, Zapguzzla was gone from the fortress walls, and there was an ork-shaped cloud of particulate drifting away upon the breeze.
Deffkloud was a city that had been destroyed and rebuilt by the hands of its own creators many, many times in its long existence. It had known many names and many inhabitants, survived the upheaval of Ayacmanik incursions and rival ork invasions and the colossal tidal waves generated by the slann decades before. Beneath its slapdash assortment of factories, guns, and squig farms there were a dozen layers of prior incarnations that had been torn down and built over.
Now, though there was no boss to hold its inhabitants in check and a lizardmen army crashing furiously into its southern reaches, the attention of the orks was upon the sea to their north.
Monsters emerged from the deep, each step forwards making their true, titanic immensity more apparent. Great square heads the size of city blocks rose upon necks that made the thickest trees seem like insubstantial toothpicks. Countless tons of water were displaced by titanic scaled legs and armored backs that eclipsed the horizon. Four Thunder Lizards towered up from the sea, their bodies already swathed in clouds of steam as their scales heated up.
As one, the beasts roared, issuing forth a great wall of sound that toppled flimsier ork buildings and caused others to rumble in their foundations, the deep bass note near deafening any who heard it. Gouts of steam issued forth from the mouths of the titans as their internal fire turned hundreds of tons of water into hot vapor, becoming a cloud that swathed the nearest sections of the city in a dense, scalding mist.
The crowds of orks that had congregated in those regions were temporarily cut off from each other, their grunting cries echoing out through the fog. Towards the sea, everything was quiet, the vapor having obscured the Thunder Lizards for the moment, though the towering shadows obscuring entire city blocks could still be seen, seeming like a collection of mountains that had risen up from the sea. The remaining echoes of their bellowing still echoed off of every surface, the sound projecting itself for miles.
The fog began to course seaward as the titans began to inhale, lungs the size of squigball fields filling up with reams of air. The shadows shifted and lengthened as one or more of the creatures stood on their hind legs, the true immensity of their bodies making even Gardakka's boss fortress seem minuscule in comparison. Four beacons shone their way through the fog, hellish orange lights glowing from the breasts of the creatures that grew brighter with every moment.
Kra-KOOM
Beams of sunfire lanced from the mouths of the colossal monsters, sweeping across entire sections of the city and turning everything they touched to ash. Chains of explosions followed their passage as fuel tanks and rocket depots ignited from the sheer heat permeating the air. Orks died from exposure alone as the blast waves raced out, desiccating their flesh and melting their guns to slag. The earth shook again as the Thunder Lizards advanced, each step leaving an impact crater behind it. The greatest concentration of the city's defenders had been vaporized in their initial exhalation, and though more swiftly trickled in, drawn to the fight like flies to shit, their coordination had been broken and they did not have the numbers to impede the progress of the titanic creatures.
Melodious, keening roars issued out of the Thunder Lizards as they stomped further into the city, pillar-like tails crumbling swathes of buildings into rubble and sweeping claws pulping entire crowds of orks at a time. The creatures sang to each other as they did battle, the reverberating cries shattering every piece of glass in the city and allowing each Thunder Lizard to know the condition of the other three. These were old kin, who had Battle-Walked together against threats to their ancient jungle more than once. These bellowing ones were relentless foes, but they did not have the power of ages coursing through their flesh. As one the titans again rose, gulping down skeins of air and cloud, and swept all before them away with the heat that rose within them in response.
Once the Thunder Lizards had incinerated a third of the city and thoroughly drawn all of its defenders into hopeless battle with them, Kroq-Gar's army slammed into its south side, the marshalled power of over a dozen slann distorting time and allowing the army to make the remaining miles of its approach in mere minutes. The lizardmen ran rampant throughout the ravaged city, commanders of every level passing down the overarching command given by Xhotl's Last Defender:
Hunt. Kill. Sweep the uax back into the sea upon a tide of blood.
Packs of Salamanders dashed through blazing districts, leaving every building behind them burning. Cold Ones ran rampant from one fight to another, driven ravenous by the smell of blood. Flocks of Ripperdactyls mobbed any greenskin unlucky enough to be outside two or more stories above the ground, and flights of Terradon riders rained gunfire and Glyph Bombs down upon roaming mobs of orks from on high.
Ten of the great Loquatl, taken from Hexoatl's growing herds, descended from the sky like great sails of death across the city, their rending claws and snapping teeth proving even more horrendously effective when backed by sharpened obsinite. In contrast, hundreds of Carnosaurs thundered along the city streets, each bearing a veteran Saurus rider. Kroq-Gar rode at their head, Tlanxla's spear shining bright, and Grymloq roared as the ancient pair cycled their charges again and again, riding down hundreds of orks as they ran for their misbegotten lives.
Behind the advance forces of their ancient commander came legions of infantry, walls of shields marching forward to cleanse every inch of ground. The Saurus formed the majority of the advancing line, each step they took forward accompanied by precise, disciplined bursts of rifle fire. They were as a wall, rolling forward and leaving only rubble and broken bodies behind them. Groups of skinks darted across their flanks, scouting out nearby concentrations of greenskins and flagging them for saurus squadrons to eliminate. When mobs of orks grew bold and approached the line of advancing Umbrella Shields, the skinks harassed them every step of the way, dashing around corners and leaving Glyph Spheres concealed in piles of rubble for their pursuers to find.
Following up the main combat force was the main concentration of Kroxigors, the quiet giants tasked with the dismantling of the remains of Deffkloud. Their massive hands pulled down crumbling buildings, spined tails dismantling support beams and broad backs enduring the crushing weight of collapsing structures with ease. With each step forward they took, they left little sign that the orks had ever built there, reducing structures to their component parts with instinctive ease.
Here and there, groups of orks made their way past the advancing wall of Saurus and attempted to stymie the efforts of the great builders. Any hope they had of easy prey, however, were swiftly invalidated. The kroxigors wore armor so thick that even rockets could not break it, and though their hands were made for architecture, their great strength was easily turned towards more destructive measures. More than one of these raiding parties met their end when, irritated at the pinprick impacts rippling across their back, a kroxigor would pick up a nearby building or broken orkish vehicle and crush their attackers into paste with one or two great swipes.
Deffkloud fell within hours, and was razed to the ground before the day was done. With the focal point of orkish resistance broken, Kroq-Gar split his forces, allocating sub-commanders and impelling them to purge as much of the greenskin territory as possible. His armies raced across the battlefront, the divinations of elder Azyr priests and the youth of the slann guiding them to points of contention and shattering them with superior force concentration. The lizardmen rolled eastward, stopping only when the signs of Ayacmanik incursions into orkish territory grew to non-manageable levels. The hive-minded creature had increased its pressure on the flank of the greenskins as their attention was drawn elsewhere, and many miles of scorched earth had been reclaimed by the Mochantian jungles.
Word trickled south as the remnants of shattered holdouts fled to Gardakka's armies, where the warboss was enjoying great successes claiming the former territory of his rival. The Ayacmanik had pushed into the southern reaches of Urdgob's territory upon his death, but any hope of progressing further was stymied by Gardakka's exultant armies, who dropped carpets of incendiaries that lit hundreds of miles of terrain afire. As the scattered reports of lizardmen armies to the north turned into a flood, however, the Worldhamma stopped his advance. Confident in his eventual victory he may have been, but only an idiot deliberately walled himself off during a fight.
A thundering tide of greenskins surged north, preceded by the noise of whistling artillery and the droning buzz of entire fleets of aircraft. They were drunk on the frenzy of victory, their fervor fuelling their flesh and hunger alike. They would break these new foes that had presented themselves to them, and then the ones after, on and on into infinity.
[Interrupt: Magnitude 1 Sunshear Ritual]
The coiled power of the Geomantic Web was unleashed, having been prepared for an eventuality exactly like this one. The baleful gaze of Mochantia's sun seemed to sharpen as ancient magic took a hold on it, and its radiance gleamed with deadly angles heretofore unseen. The air cracked as though it were made of glass, and a swarm of razor blades made of sunlight sheared and spun through the largest of Gardakka's armies as it crossed a specific line of longitude. They wove an elegant, silent pattern as they shifted through space, each intersection with ork flesh incinerating the greater part of that limb. Hundreds of thousands died in an instant, reduced to ashes amidst an array of glimmering flashes as light refracted off the shards.
[Gardakka Proximity, DC 25: 92]
Though Gardakka's life was not claimed by the Ritual, the orkish advance was slowed enough that the lizardmen were able to reposition their forces. With the attacks on Muukhexla and Tletl'notec thoroughly repulsed, the greater part of the legions stationed there moved up to the newly-claimed territory to the east, hundreds of thousands of kroxigors erecting a veritable wall of defensive fortifications to receive the ork onslaught from.
Surprisingly, however, the orks did not commit in full force. Whether he was wary of additional Rituals devastating his armies or simply wished to consolidate his newly-claimed territory, Gardakka's armies remained mostly within his own lands. There were, of course, attacks, constant incursions northward by warbands hundreds or thousands strong, but these were easily weathered by the combined force of the victorious lizardmen armies. For the moment, the war had come to a standstill.
Victory!
The assaults on Muukhexla and Tletl'notec were successfully repulsed, the weight of orkish aggression proving no match for empowered lizardmen defending their territory. Chameleon Skink assassins successfully eliminated Urdgob Noseskorcha, causing Gardakka Worldhamma to march the bulk of his armies south to take advantage, leaving both temple-city assaults unsupported.
In the wake of Gardakka's march, Kroq-Gar and the legions of Hexoatl conquered a wide swath of the orkish coastal territory, driving the greenskins back in concurrence with the Ayacmanik, who increased their pressure and reclaimed much ground as the ork resistance crumbled. Gardakka attempted to pivot back north upon realizing his coastal access had been cut off, but was repulsed by lizardmen defense forces and the might of a Geomantic Ritual that destroyed a significant portion of his veteran forces.
It is likely that Gardakka will attempt to break through lizardmen lines to the coast in the coming decade. To that end, a garrison may be left in the freshly-conquered territory, just as it was before. Voting options below.
Krom'tli has spoken - enough souls have flocked to Ayotzl's side to bring Him into being. The God of Death will activate next turn.
Legions of the Lizardmen:
Total Deaths:
Itza: 77,500 saurus, 20,000 skink, 5,000 kroxigor deaths
Tlaxtlan: 55,000 saurus, 35,000 skink, 4,000 kroxigor deaths
Xlanhuapec: 50,000 saurus, 35,000 skink, 4,000 kroxigor deaths
Hexoatl:61,400 saurus, 36,000 skink, 5,000 kroxigor deaths
Garrison Forces: 55,000 saurus, 28,800 skink, 3,800 kroxigor deaths
Approximate Enemy Figures:
Gardakka Worldhamma: 91 million orks - 23 million slain by Magnitude 2 Tornado Swarm, 25 million slain at Tletl'notec, 2 million slain by Urdgob Noseskorcha, 8 million slain by Legion of Hexoatl, 17 million slain by Magnitude 1 Sunshear Ritual, 19 million recruited from Urdgob Noseskorcha. 35 million remaining orks.
Urdgob Noseskorcha: 52 million orks - 16 million slain at Muukhexla, 8 million slain by Gardakka Worldhamma. Urdgob Noseskorcha assassinated by chameleon skink snipers. Waaagh!!!Noseskorcha fragmented into 23 rival groups. 19 million forcibly recruited by Gardakka Worldhamma, 9 million slain by the Ayacmanik.
AN: So this took … too long, as per usual. I suppose 3 months is roughly my usual - I can only blame life for getting in the way and myself for not getting out of said way. Anyhow, hope you enjoy! This is the end of the turn; I'll get the city population growth and everything else up later. As always, any comments and critiques are welcome, as well as any typos or errors I missed.
The coming of the orks was preceded by foul omens that spread across the sky, were carried on the wind, and crept through the ground. The congealed mass of over fifty million greenskins marching to war was such that the world itself was stained by their presence, the ripples of their passage spreading far and wide ahead of them. A thick haze of smoke began to obscure the horizon when the hordes were still days out from lizardmen territory. A foul odor settled into the air, scent trails of acrid smoke and squigshit and rotting gore cloaking the orks like a mantle of filth. The earth was subject to subtle quakes, disturbing slann in their meditative chambers as the weight of millions upon millions of green feet trampled upon the ground.
The lizardmen temple-cities were islands of serenity in the looming chaos. Roaming enchantments filtered the foulness from the air as it reached their midnight walls, and the foundations of their buildings were solid enough that the quakes were nought but reminders of the distance of their foe. In wide plazas and crisscrossing streets their armies prepared at an unhurried, methodical pace, laying out sight lines and preparing plans of maneuver. Winged beasts sailed back and forth between Tletl'notec and Muukhexla, ferrying status updates and scouting reports to Saurus Oldbloods. Obsinite pits blazed with near-constant activations, a steady stream of scrap material being fed into them to manufacture sufficient ammunition for the coming conflict.
While the Lord Slann Erup-Xhin of the Third Spawning and Eternity Warden Chakax prepared their static defenses to receive the incoming tide of orks, it was left to the skink commanders to blunt the initiative of the greenskins. To the north, Tiktaq'to prepared great flights of Terradon riders and coordinated them with teams of artillery skinks, spreading a web of firing positions and holdouts across the hundreds of kilometer-wide front the orks approached. Emissaries of the slann looked upon the landscape with blazing eyes, and their toad masters calculated spells of fiendish complexity and scope to bring death to the enemy.
In Muukhexla, the Cult of Sotek congregated under Teninhuan, the prophet's form swollen with serpentine might as the Deliverer turned his eyes to the coming conflict. The majority of the faithful were assigned to the defence of the city, placing themselves at the forefront of the fortifications, where the fighting was sure to be bloodiest. The most elite, however, ancient cultists who had fought against the skaven and seen the birth of their god, travelled with their prophet to meet the orks. They melted into the jungle on the far side of the Kanyon, great swathes of serpents crawling out of the foliage around them as their knives dripped venom.
-----
Naxaldin's nostrils flared as the smell of uax drifted downwind. Karcarath laid a hand upon her nape and scratched, the touch serving to calm the massive Horned One as he hefted his gun, ensuring his equipment was prepared.
The skink chief's order of riders had been intercepting the congealing elements of Urdgob's armies for weeks, following their prophet's example by plunging deep into enemy territory and destroying or scattering bands of orks before they could conglomerate into greater masses and join the main legion of the brutes. They had defeated sixteen tribes in that time period, each massing in the low hundreds, and now sought larger prey.
They had lured their current quarry, a tribe of pyromaniac orks headed by a hulking boss who'd replaced one arm with a mechanical klaw and an inbuilt flamethrower, to a river crossing through a series of ambushes and controlled retreats. The chameleon skinks and priests of Sotek attached to their group kept up a steady tempo of nighttime assassinations and terror tactics, leaving a steady trail of skinned, heartless ork corpses hanging from the trees to entice the greenskins onward. Fifty of Karcarath's Saurus, mounted on Cold Ones, had gone with them to give some credence to the ploy, and were racing ahead of the oncoming orks, dashing towards the steep riverbank, which overlooked a series of churning rapids fifteen meters below.
Following through the gargantuan fungal stalks that served as trees were the hooting forms of eight hundred orks, leaving a carpet of flame behind them as they torched anything they could see. They jeered and cackled as they ran after the Saurus riders, knowing their quarry would be trapped against the riverbank, ripe for the slaughter.
The Cold Ones, however, did not stop when they reached the river, or even slow down. Instead they sped up, leaping off the bank in seamless formation. The first few among the orks, racing at their heels, followed them over, limbs flailing. The rest of the tribe, still bellowing, pulled up short of the drop and quickly realized that something was wrong.
The Saurus Riders had not gone thrashing to their doom in the water below, as their pursuers had. Instead their leap had taken them more than halfway across the river, amplified somehow by some unseen effect, and even now the hulking warriors and their mounts were coursing through the raging river as if its currents had no hold on their flesh, their bronze armor no impediment. As they reached the other side, dismounting and beginning to assemble fearsome rifles in near-unison, the tribe's shaman started yelling and pointing as four streaks of black rocketed up from the forest below, one after the other.
Before any of the boyz could ascertain what the git's deal was, there was a cry of alarm from their rear, swiftly joined by the unmistakable sounds of gunfire and bloodshed as Karcarath and two hundred Horned One riders burst out of the treeline, crashing into the orks while howling praises to Sotek.
There was pandemonium as the orks were forced to reverse their momentum, brawls breaking out in the midst of their forces as greenskins eager to get to the new fight trampled those still unaware. Karcarath's riders scythed through the orkoid ranks, tearing flesh with spear and macuahuitl on the charge and peppering the greenskins with constant rifle fire when their momentum was spent and they made distance. Their mounts, made blood-hungry by sacred incense of Sotek, bit and stomped and tore, lashing out at anything not scaled.
The orks were quick to recover their momentum, and rushed towards the lizardmen like water flowing downhill. Their aim was wild, the swings of their oversized choppas undisciplined and reckless, but they still felled many lizardmen. Their burna boyz sent out sheets of flame that enveloped both their fellows and the oncoming Horned Ones, the inferno catching on nearby foliage and wreathing the entire battleground in a patina of fire. Scaled corpse and fungal flesh alike coated the ground, creating islands of sanctity where the flames could not burn for the amount of blood soaking the ground.
Karcarath directed his forces through the use of a fanged, hissing trumpet as Naxaldin leapt and spun and bit under him, the Horned One reading her rider's intent without words. The lizardmen forces slowly drew the orks along the riverbank, stretching the battlefield long and narrow, just as they had planned. Then, seven gruelling minutes after their first charge, the lizardmen turned and dashed towards the treeline, mobs of howling orks just behind them.
It was then that the shots fired from the Omen Mortar on the other side of the river impacted into the ground just shy of the retreating lizardmen, each pillar of obsidian discharging a bolt of earth-shaking energy into the ground where they embedded themselves.
With the frightful speed of the inevitable, the entire section of riverbank the orks had been herded onto collapsed, rapid disintegration of the fungal fibres holding the earth together combined with a sudden infusion of downward momentum transforming the battlefield into an instant landslide. Seven hundred orks bellowed their way down into the river below, followed by a tide of rock and soil.
Some died when their thick skulls were cracked open on river rocks, or when another flailing greenskin crushed them under the weight of their impact. Some were sucked under the water by dark currents and drowned, their bodies flensed by bottom-dwelling anemones. Most, however, survived the fall thanks to their hardy biology, and were able to tread water long enough to see gun-toting lines of lizardmen appear on either side of the river, and hear the echoing chants of anointed priests of Sotek.
Serpents began to squirm out of the river rocks and towards the orks, red-scaled and hissing with forked tongues. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands boiled up out of the water, ranging in size from as small as a finger to thrice the length of an ork. The water was swiftly stained with blood as the serpents squirmed and thrashed, ripping open ork throats and weighing them down in their coils. Knife-sharp bullets scythed down into the frenzy, popping eyes and splitting heads.
Those few greenskins that were able to get close to the shore were shot in the head by the Saurus on the riverbank. The rest were torn to pieces by Sotek's brood, their corpses dragged back into whatever unseen paths the serpents had emerged from.
Karcarath's riders collected their casualties and threw them over the cliff, where they were collected by auxiliaries manning a Revivification Crystal. By the time the skink chief rendezvoused with the rest of his forces, the majority of them had been restored by the artifact's magic, and the twenty seven who had sustained injuries too severe to be revived were given over to Sotek in solemn rituals of bloodletting.
The rest of the day was spent recuperating as their attached Azyr priest scryed for their next target. Then they were on the move again, leaving only a scarred cliff and the bloodstained rocks below as traces of their presence.
-----
The orks approached the Kanyon like the wall of an oncoming storm, battered and disoriented by the lizardmen's efforts to disrupt their coordination, but only encouraged by the violence they were subject to. Nighttime raids of their convoys caused their pace to quicken towards the true battlefront. Glyph Bombs were dropped from on high by daring Terradons, vaporizing dozens and provoking the ork armies to shoot en masse at anything they saw flying above them. Mortar strikes arrowed down from the skies in all hours as the orks closed to within a few kilometers of the Kanyon, and the greenskins merely grinned in glee that the paintboyz had learned how to fight better.
The lizardmen cities were a looming sight on the horizon as the armies arrived at the seventy-meter wide chasm the slann had torn in the earth a decade ago. They towered above the horizon, drawing skylines of black pyramids and walls that pulsed with fell energies. The scattered shamans of the orks cringed away from the terrifying beacons of psychic energy they could see waiting within, but the rest of their fellows, faced with tangible opposition after days of marching and waiting, howled in triumph and redoubled their pace.
They had brought a plethora of bridges with them, unwieldy things of scrap iron and fungal strands held together with wax and nails. They hauled them forth from the mek camps and pushed them into place, some rumbling and extending themselves via hidden mechanisms, while others were flown across by brigades of whirlykoptas. They poured across the Kanyon on dozens of such constructs, their efforts resembling the mycelium strands of a fungus reaching for sustenance. There was no one crossing to contest, no one chokepoint to stem the flood of emerald bodies from.
The lizardmen had anticipated this, and met them regardless.
Orks moved across the open ground like a rolling tide, and swiftly found that the lizardmen had prepared the battlefield. Slann channeled their magic into patterns of spatial distortion, splitting greenskin army groups into disorganized fragments, scattering them into prepared killing fields where they were destroyed piecemeal by webs of eldritch light woven by the toad mages. Hidden Glyph Bombs cast off their illusions and blocked off entire regions of the battlefield with constant surges of spellcraft, arranged in formation so as to funnel the orks into corridors that hundreds of Omen Launchers had pre-sighted on.
Black obelisks darted down from the sky like a rain of knives, exploding in bursts of lightning and fire that sought out the orks around them. The beasts raised their guns to the sky, chattering shootas held by Nobs or mounted on flatbed trukks filling the air with bursts of lead to intercept the enemy artillery. The Omens were not daunted, however, their rounds dancing and jerking erratically through the air to avoid counterfire before zooming unerringly to their targets. They destroyed engines, rammed into low-flying aircraft, detonated in tightly-packed crowds and slew dozens.
-----
Itzpoc clacked their teeth restlessly, the yellow crest on the skink's head at full attention as they watched the oncoming tide of Uax pour towards Muukhexla. The creatures thundered towards the walls, disregarding the massive casualties they had taken to get this far. The Umbrella Shield covering their firing team rippled and shook under the weight of constant impact, but held, the deep thrum of the Web sustaining its crystalline matrix and the many around it. Outside it was a maelstrom of noise and calamity, the nonstop barrage of greenskin gunfire contrasted by the sharp krak of snipers loosing careful shots at barely-seen targets and the high-pitched whine of Solar Engines as they sent searing beams of energy down into the enemy.
"Ready targets," Itzpoc hissed to their comrades. "The Uax are close to maximum range." Around them, dozens of skinks performed final calibrations, each team of four readying their Monument Cannon for firing. Itzpoc settled into the firing seat of their cannon, swiveling the barrel back and forth. They slipped the machine's targeting helm over their head and their vision was immediately overlaid with holographic lines representing distances, probable trajectories, wind resistance, applicable targets for the cannon's tracking spells, and a small green glyph in the corner of their vision indicating that it was ready to fire.
Itzpoc's grip tightened on the trigger. Their focus narrowed, vision locking in to the yellow line that indicated the maximum range of their cannon. Sensation from the rest of their body faded, the pressure of the helmet on their crest and slight itch in the scales of their lower back forgotten. Their breathing instinctually slowed, matching their heartbeat. Sound temporarily left the world as the thundering tide of ork flesh grew closer to the yellow line, moving in slow motion. Closer still.
The first ork boot crossed the line and Itzpoc was firing the gun before their conscious mind realized it. Their whole body shook as the force of the shot rippled back through the recoil dampening systems, and they watched through enhanced vision as the round, itself nearly as large as them, cut through the air with a piercing shriek, rocketing towards the distant line of orks. The scream grew louder as the obsinite spear's hairline fractures came apart and it split into a cloud of knife-sharp shrapnel, reducing a dozen orks to a complementary bloom of gore and bone.
The first shot was swiftly followed by another, and another after that, each skull-shaking boom of firing followed by the scream the rounds gave off as they arrowed through the air. Itzpoc was so focused on keeping the cannon stable and aiming their shots for maximum impact that they did not realize until they had to stop and let their assistant crew reload that they had been screaming alongside their cannon the entire time, a high, thin noise that was mirrored by the guttural bellowing of the orks as they continued to close.
-----
As the armies of Urdgob and Gardakka thundered across the Kanyon, something else took notice. Slann magic tugged at an ancient mind that thought in carving lines and slicing angles and stabbing points, bringing awareness of the noxious green spreading across the ground far below, tying irritation to its senses until the affront the war-things presented at last overcame its predilection for quiet.
Pillars of frost descended from the heavens, the Quango's ire manifesting as building-sized icicles that carved through ork bridges with the implacable malice of mass and gravity. Fell winds followed them down, jetstream currents spontaneously manifesting on courses that sent compressed cyclones of frigid air through masses of puce green bodies. Chips of ice with nanometer-wide edges stripped flesh from bone, sending out clouds of blood that froze in turn and killed the greenskins behind them. Directed by the Quango's will, the wind pushed against every step the orks took, blowing great masses of them to their death in the endless chasm of the Kanyon.
Orkish aircraft, their activities already greatly stymied by the proliferation of Monument Cannons and the tangible malice of slann spellcraft that obliterated anything that got within five kilometers of a temple-city's airspace, dropped out of the sky in droves, either frozen so deeply they shattered upon hitting the ground or half-vaporized by lightning bolts as thick as trees. Some descended seemingly intact, but with their pilots missing and their hulls infused with cosmic radiation that caused Mek reclamation crews to collapse in spasms.
-----
Erup-Xhin of the Third Spawning looked over the vista of Tletl'notec and saw order amidst the tumult of war. A sea of Waaagh!!! Energy churned and frothed outside the city walls, swirling in on itself and growing stronger as orks died and killed. The chorus of tusked throats bellowed in time with its spikes, the frenzy of greenskin movement increasing in areas it congregated in. To the slann's mystic sight it was a thing of both wondrous complexity and brute simplicity at once, millions of individual psychic currents harmonizing and building on each other to create a pressing imperative, a burning need for battle that wrote itself into reality through fifty million vessels.
For all its unstoppable force, however, it was exceptionally vulnerable to redirection.
Erup-Xhin tapped into Tletl'notec's geomantic grid, the city's underlying magic reading his intent and responding to his thoughts as soon as they were generated. Stored power rose from chambers and pylons beneath the paved streets, causing glyphs to pulse and shields to whine as the slann drew much of the metropolis' mystic energy into his grasp. Obsinite pits grew dark, forge complexes falling silent as power was redirected to more urgent matters.
With one tendril of thought, Erup-Xhin began to shape this gathered power, forcing it into a configuration that was mirrored by the glyph laid out by the city's power network. The rest of his mind split into hundreds of branches, parallel processes running in unison, each pursuing its own target. These fractal filaments stretched out from his Star Chamber, reaching across miles like an ethereal man o' war, each of them seeking out and drifting into the mind of an ork shaman, fastening themselves while the creatures were engulfed in the chorus of the Waaagh.
Across the battlefield, Gardakka's shamans began to scream, clutching their heads and clawing at their eyes as their power was torn from their control and funnelled into the shape the slann desired. Older orks, wary of the mayhem their weirdboyz could cause when in states like this, backed away from the gibbering mystics, and in some cases turned their guns upon them, willing to risk some backlash rather than endure whatever was coming.
It mattered little, for the spell was already complete. As Erup-Xhin set his magic in motion, every shaman outside the walls of Tletl'notec glowed furnace-bright as their powers were subverted to draw up gouts of magma from beneath the earth. They and everyone around them were turned to slag in an instant, but the molten rock continued to fountain upward, powered by the spells comprising the foundation of the City of Under-Earth. In no more than a minute, the entire stretch of land from Tletl'notec's walls to the Kanyon itself was submerged in a foot-deep current of lava, filling the air with the scent of carbonizing flesh and sulfuric fumes.
-----
The lizardmen cities presented an impenetrable bastion to the orks, their black walls resisting everything the greenskins threw at them and inflicting horrendous casualties on any assault force. Each bullet fired, each spell woven, every swing of every weapon was conducted with ruthless, mechanical efficiency, the defenders never seeming to tire, their aim never wavering. The walls of the temple-cities spat death on any who approached, and the looming pyramids behind them killed any who did not, the slann ensconced within hammering the orks with blast waves of magic from the safety of their Star Chambers.
Any enemy seeking to preserve their forces would have avoided the zones of death the lizardmen cities represented, seeking to instead despoil their less-defended rear territory. The orks, however, saw in the cities an invitation, a challenge to fight and kill, and were drawn to them like iron to a magnet. They laughed and sang as they thundered towards their deaths, charging lizardmen bunkers and climbing blood-slick walls with no hesitation despite the half-shredded corpses of their fellows who had gone before.
Some, swept up by the momentum of their crusade, spilled past the cities, splintering into roving bands of orks that shot everything they saw, gathering their feral kin to their sides as they went. Before they could grow into warbands requiring concerted force to address, however, they were intercepted by lizardmen garrison forces that had been placed years before, their most likely routes mapped out by skink chiefs before the orks had even arrived.
-----
Arguk Teefkruncha was ancient by the standards of the average ork at almost 30 years old, and was thus more prone to reminiscence than the average git. Casting his mind far, far back into the hazy memories of yesteryear, he could recall the dark, dreary times when it'd seemed that there was nothing in the world to fight but the sameboyz and other orks.
Not that those were bad fights, mind you – nothing could take a punch or give one back like an ork boy, and the sameboyz had an endless amount of novel bodies to throw in your face, enough that even seasoned exteriminataz could never guess what they were gonna kill from one day to the next. And they were sneaky too, which gave those kommando gits something to do. But they were called sameboyz for a reason – once you'd killed one big gribbly, you'd know how to krump the rest of 'em, no matter how many legs it had. An ork was always happy for a fight, but some variety wouldn't have been out of place.
Arguk's scarred lips stretched over gleaming tusks as he recalled the first battles against the lizardmen. Things had changed then, oh indeed they had. Sure, the scaleboyz were a bit standoffish at times, and they had all sorts of weird ideas like letting their grots fight instead of just beating them, or letting the most colorful git be the boss instead of the biggest one, but oh could they fight! Arguk had gone toe-to-toe with a Saurus four times now (after letting his more eager mates swamp it first) and each and every time had been the fight of his life. He'd lost at least two limbs every time, and once had gotten half his face bitten off!
Good times.
When given a good fight, it was of course only polite to return the favor, and Arguk had eagerly hopped on board when Boss Gardakka sent a bunch of his boyz over to show the toofies what for. The toofies were good sports about it on the whole, having built up a whole bunch of walls and towers for the orks to come and knock down, and put a bunch of gunz on top of those so it wouldn't be too easy. They'd even hidden those spooky weirdboy squigs they had that could zap loads of boyz and let the orks try to find them while they got roasted and 'sploded and crunched to bits. Best bit of fun this planet had presented thus far, even better than trying to bring down a Mountain Squig.
Nuff finking, Arguk decided as his warband's target came into view, a squat, black stone bunker that had a whole load of lizardmen inside. The great cannon atop it whirred and creaked as it tracked from side to side. Time ta get krumpin.
His choppa, a kustom-made monstrosity festooned with whirring chains, smashed into the face of the nearest boy, dropping him to the ground with a shattered jaw. "Lissen up, you young gits!" He bellowed, and all the nearby orks stopped what they were doing and looked to see what their boss had to say. Arguk looked them over, the vast majority of them a bunch of weedy yoofs he'd scooped up and given some shootas while roaming around. "You'ze about ta earn those gunz! Dat fing there," he shouted, waving his own shoota to point out the bunker, "That's an invitation, that is! See dat kannon? It's the biggest and shootiest fing da lizards got, and dey put it up just fer us! So we'z gonna show 'ow grateful we iz, by takin' it and usin' it ta dakka a whole bunch of scaleboyz! Get in there, lads!"
They answered him with a wordless howl that bespoke the lust for battle threading through all of them, and charged forth, hundreds of tons of green flesh barreling forward like a freight train. Arguk watched them go for a split second, enjoying the rush of having so many boyz respond so readily to his command, before a matching warcry passed his lips and he allowed himself to be swept up in the momentum of the charge.
The lizardmen bunker sat atop a small ash-covered hill on the otherwise flat terrain, giving the garrison within a commanding view of their surroundings. Bullets began to carve through the ranks of the charging orks as they closed in, and the Monument Cannon atop it turned to face them, firing shrieking spears of shrapnel with methodical malice. Some of Arguk's seasoned orks raised rokkit launchers in response, firing without abandon. Most of their shots went wide, and those who made them found obsinite bullets lodged in their heads shortly afterwards, but a scattered few did make contact, shattering glowing gems at the base of the cannon, which seemed to halt its firing pattern.
A great cheer went up from the boyz at the sight, and the orks redoubled their pace, arriving at the base of the hill with their numbers whittled by a third but their enthusiasm undimmed. As they pounded up the slope, unleashing a wall of dakka ahead of them, the bunker's crew answered in kind, the range having shortened enough to utilize their automatic rifles. Where the orks shot everywhere in hope of hitting anything, the lizardmen aimed with rigid precision, sending razor-sharp bullets through throats, sternums, and heads. Orks dropped like flies on the approach, managing to attain some form of cover only by hefting the corpses of their fallen before them as makeshift shields.
They made it halfway up the slope before a series of Glyph Spheres came sailing out of the bunker's closest firing slit, glowing green and gold. As they detonated, masses of thrashing vines sprouted up from the ground around the orks, wrapping themselves tightly around their limbs and torsos. Within seconds their texture began to darken, the coiled loops of plant matter transmuting into shackles of stone and metal that bound the orks fast, even as they strained and grunted.
A door ground open from its recess in the bunker's side and twenty Saurus filed out, carrying leaf-bladed spears taller than themselves. Moving in practised formation, they spread out into a single-file line and closed in on the trapped greenskins, the points of their spears preceding them. Obsinite scythed through flesh with quick, curt movements, the Saurus working in silence broken only by the grisly sound of greenskins dying.
Within ten minutes the last of the orks had been slain, and the Saurus dragged the bodies into a pile at the base of the hill. Their Glyph Spheres were toggled to Aqshy patterns and shoved within the pile. The resultant pyre raged for hours until the last corpse was burned to ash; enough time for the next-closest warband to spot the pillar of smoke and come to investigate.
-----
Blunted and battered by the impregnable fortresses that were the lizardmen cities, the ork momentum slowed, casualties mounting faster than their psychic field could accelerate its growth. Slann took hold of the Waaagh! Field as it weakened, using psychic pressure to paralyze entire battalions of orks as they charged the walls of Muukhexla and Tletl'notec. Others plied more familiar spellcraft, sending sheets of diamond-sharp flame through walls of greenskins and summoning comets of ice from the upper atmosphere down upon their heads.
As the ork armies scattered, seeking easier targets, the lizardmen followed. The network of fortifications set up beforehand proved a potent asset in bogging the greenskin armies down, and the legions of the lizardmen scythed into them again and again, bodies buoyed by the Geomantic Web. They were relentless, implacable, and their focus never wavered, no matter how many of them were blasted full of holes by ork machine guns or burned to a crisp by napalm throwers. Little by little, the green tide was being ground down upon the mountain of the defenders of the Old Ones.
-----
The ground between Gardakka and Urdgob's territory had been abused for the better part of a century. Stretching back to when Wurkaz Slashytoof's iron-shod boots had stomped across it, the stretch of land had seen ork, Ayacmanik, and Thunder Lizard feet tread back and forth across it, crushing and grinding any noteworthy landmarks it had once had into muck. Now it held naught but blood and soil, a stretch of flat no-man's land where orks charged back and forth, spending hundreds of lives to shift the front line a few feet in either direction.
On a northern-facing rise overlooking a particularly bloody stretch of ground nicknamed Mulch Alley, Urdgob Noseskorcha stood at the head of an army. The Boss was in his element, his bulky form surging with vigor as he addressed his underlings. The axe in his hands roared and crackled, its crude edge set aflame with the aid of fuel hoses snaking into an armored pod he bore on his back. In his other hand was a gun that more resembled a taped-together conglomeration of pipes than a coherent device. Flame flickered from the edges of the barrels, and the air around him stunk of toxins.
Ikzboq watched the massive ork through a scope from a sentry tower over two and a half kilometers away, keen eyes picking out its bombastic gesturing as the creature addressed its underlings, stoking their eagerness for strife and slaughter.
The chameleon skink had been sitting in its current position for the past four days, perched motionless in the rafters at the top of an orkish gun tower. There was a crew of greenskins below it, thirty seven in total including the fluctuating gretchin population. They were not aware of Ikzboq's presence, although they had begun to refer to the tower as 'lucky' following the unexplained deaths of several Gardakka-aligned patrols that had been in range to attack the tower. Ixkboq would dispose of them once its task was complete, lest rumors spread among the orkish host and hinder the effectiveness of future operations.
Lenses flickered as Ikzboq adjusted the scope of their rifle. The device highlighted wind currents and rising thermals in the path between the scope and its target, who shone bright red with the potency of fuel he was carrying on his person. The assassin's sights dipped down just slightly, confirming that the ground had been prepared by their brethren and the Glyph Spheres were in place. It had taken much work to bring Urdgob to this point, feints and lures and the heads of half a dozen high-ranking Nobs from both his and Gardakka's camps to temporarily direct the pyromaniac Boss into a position that they could guarantee both his death and the method used to accomplish it.
Urdgob's pre-battle speech was nearing its conclusion; with the massing of their rival army on the other side of Mulch Alley now visible, his underlings were hooting and cheering, bursts of flame rising up as they fired their weapons. With a great shout that was faintly audible even from Ikzboq's position, Urdgob unleashed his horde, sending them thundering down the slope towards the killing field. Ikzboq exhaled the last dregs of air from its lungs, sealed its ear holes, temporarily stopped its heart from beating, and fired a shot. The krakoom of the rifle was deafening in the confined space, and alarmed greenskin shouts began to waft up to the rafters as Ikzboq broke the sniper rifle down and brought out its short-range killing tools.
The assassin knew without looking that it had found its mark.
The bullet exited Ikzboq's sniper rifle with tremendous speed, having accelerated to over twice the speed of sound thanks to the momentum-enhancing enchantments humming within the gold-plated barrel. It was wreathed in a corona of blue magic, allowing it to slip through the wind currents with supernatural ease. It sailed across the intervening distance, coiling around a rising column of heat and dipping under a gust of wind that would have blown it off course. For four and a half seconds it arrowed silently through the air, homing in on its target, before it scissored through the cluster of fuel lines leading between Urdgob's flaming wargear and the tank upon his back with a hiss that went unnoticed in the midst of the Noseskorcha's frenzied warcry.
Urdgob charged forth at the head of his boyz, leaving a trail of glistening fuel behind him as he did. Between the proliferation of flaming weapons in his horde and their orky lack of discipline, it was not long before this trail was ignited, becoming a great rope of dancing flames, advancing swiftly towards Urdgob like the lit fuse of a bomb. As it leapt into the fuel tank of the greenskin Boss, Ikzboq's brethren primed the numerous Glyph Spheres that they had buried beneath the battlefield several days beforehand, the first array of which Urdgob had just passed over.
The explosion incinerated every ork within ten meters and barbecued the flesh of everything within a hundred. Some orks, gifted with better sight or simply luckier than others, would later have gone on to question such a turn of events, but by that point the battle had been joined, and every greenskin that had witnessed the event first hand was dead within the hour.
-----
The effect of the assassination on the strategic scale was immediate. The coordination of Urdgob's forces evaporated, the unified horde splintering into a dozen smaller factions as surviving underlings grabbed for the reins of power. They turned on each other, the strong swallowing the weak, swiftly subduing any contenders who were not strong, swift, or cunning enough to resist incursions into their territory.
Gardakka leapt forth like a hound scenting blood, his armies crashing into the squabbling chieftains his rival had left behind and flattening them under the weight of gunfire. As the Ayacmanik to the south, west, and east pressed further into orkish territory, advancing behind eleven Thunder Lizards wrathfully stomping their way through the greenskins, Gardakka's armies claimed vast swathes of territory, subjugating army after army. Such was his momentum that the majority of his reserve forces were called from their northern garrisons, coursing south to join the victorious fight.
The news was conveyed to the lizardmen warleaders within the day, and Kroq-Gar set out not an hour afterwards, the campaign finally ready for his counteroffensive.
-----
Dozens of slann joined their powers, wreathing Hexoatl's legions in a space-warping enchantment that increased their travel speed fiftyfold. With the path east cleared by their brethren's efforts to lure the orks towards the temple-cities, Kroq-Gar and his army punched through the lines of Gardakka's force and into greenskin territory, the combined force of over a million lizardmen and eight Thunder Lizards too great to resist.
Gardakka's territory, having been ravaged by slann-conjured wind storms and drained of its population by the Worldhamma as he went south, was unable to put up significant resistance to the lizardmen push. Kroq-Gar took a third of the legion and four Thunder Lizards on a straight march to Gardakka's primary city of Deffkloud, the very same that traced its founding back to Wurkaz Slashytoof's initial incursion onto the continent. The rest of the lizardmen were left to the command of the eldest slann present, Hextlohca of the Fourth Spawning, who watched through the eyes of his skink herald Textozpic. The ancient mage divided his forces among the many younger slann who were there in person, taking advantage of the martial experience the Fifth Generation had gained during his long slumber.
The legion, thus dispersed, methodically drove its way through orkoid defense forces. The scattered garrisons and idle mobs of yoofs that had grown in Gardakka's absence were unable to match the lizardmen on a pound-for-pound basis. In most cases, their concentration of force was so small that they only outnumbered the lizardmen attacking forces twice or thrice over – ratios that the predominantly Saurus forces were more than capable of dealing with.
-----
The ork airfield shook as another obsidian shell impacted, blowing another hole into the main hanger and sending the meks running about in a tizzy as a number of fuel tanks detonated along with another Dakkajet. Zapguzzla snorted at the sight, knowing that despite all the commotion, the machine would be repaired within a day. It was only a delaying tactic, the toofies trying to prevent any more bombing runs on their mob. The warphead wasn't worried by such a thing – it was well known that while the scaleboyz could give a real good scrap if they were forced into it, they generally preferred to be standoffish about their fighting, only really committing to a fight if you tried to break their walls or they were sure they could krump the lot of boyz they were fighting easily. The incessant rain of artillery they'd harassed Zapguzzla and his boyz with after being repulsed on their first assault was annoying, sure, but it was also normal.
What had him out of sorts was the presence he'd been feeling approach for the last day, manifesting as a swelling pain in his head that pointed unerringly west. It'd grown more and more intense as time went on, a gut feeling that whatever this thing was, it was leagues more powerful than him, enough that he could practically hear the rumbling on the edge of the horizon as it got closer. The low-lying smog obscuring the sky seemed to twist as he watched it, the very essence of the world yearning to scream the name of the thing that travelled through it.
M
It took everything that Zapguzzla had not to ditch the fortress with only his grot assistants in tow and test his might against the oncoming psychic beacon, regardless of the likelihood that he'd get himself killed doing it. Easy now, he reminded himself time and time again. It'z gonna come ta you, and den you'ze gonna be able to zap it gud.A
It took ten more agonizing hours before the lizardmen approached the ork air-fort in strength. The sun was setting by this point, its golden rays turned a pinkish green by airborne pollution, and the lizardmen marched with it at their back, their forms obscured by its light. Zapguzzla could make out a good few hundred of their taller fighty ones, moving in formation and covering each other with tall shields like an armor squig with guns for spikes. There was a contingent of their grots too, huddling coward-like under one of their rainbow bubbles and herding dinosaurs that hauled and carried cannons and piles of rocks that spat out mortar fire.H
There was a lizardgrot mounted atop one of the bigger dinosaurs that glowed with spectral flame in Zapguzzla's warp vision. It had painted itself all red and its eyes were twin pricks of flame in the distance. The warphead's attention locked immediately onto it, ignoring the clash and calamity of the assault the other lizardmen were affecting on the fort. This was what he had been waiting for, a chance to test his strength against the famed shamans of the scale gits!U
The flame-wreathed skink struck first, its chest expanding like a bellows as it inhaled. The air around it shimmering with latent heat as it exhaled a great cone of flame that washed over the walls where the fort's defenders had gathered. Ork flesh cooked in seconds, metal armor melting as the muscle beneath carbonized and withered in the heat. Pairs of towering Kroxigors moved up as the flame dispersed, bearing massive black hammers that they began to beat on the walls, the sheer force behind their blows cracking the thick steel on the first impact.L
Zapguzzla cackled madly as he drew the Waaagh! to himself, soaking its energy in like a sponge. Green lightning danced around his fingers as he gripped his focus staff, channeling a massive surge of power through the metal as he aimed it at the big lizards. His lips split in an inchoate cry of war as he marshalled his energy, a crackling orb of lightning growing at the end of his staff. The air grew taut as the spell manifested and grew, the orb soon eclipsing Zapguzzla's head in size. Once it had grown too strong for him to control, the warphead unleashed it, a dozen beams of lightning as thick as an ork's leg cracking out towards the kroxigors.T
The red skink retaliated with a wave of its claws, conjuring a paper-thin wall of fire in front of Zapguzzla's manifold bolts. The rival energies clashed like two rival stormfronts, the lightning crackling and roaring as it attempted to punch through, and the fire screaming and rustling its own primal tongue as it held the bolts back, the contact points glowing like a brace of stars coming down to the earth.E
Zapguzzla bellowed in triumph as he poured everything he had into his cast, the awe and glee of the boyz witnessing it only fuelling him to greater heights of strength. Emerald flames leapt from his gullet and joined the flurry of elemental strife, pushing the red skink's magic back inch by inch. He could see it clear as day, its scales wrapped in a cloak of fire, its eyes blazing like suns, its teeth and talons glowing white-hot as it tried to hold him back. "Is that your best, burny grot," he roared, his spirit soaring higher. "Sumwun shoulda told ya! There's no beating an ork in a straight fight, because we iz da strongest!"P
M A H U L T E P
M A H U L T E P
The world itself announced the slann's arrival. It was a pressure imprinting itself upon the souls of anyone nearby, a crushing gravity that wrote its name into the minds of all that were present. The air stilled and thickened in anticipation, and all thought ceased for a dreadful moment as the attention of the battlefield was inexorably drawn to a point. Space and dimensional barriers cringed away from the squat pile of toad flesh as it apparated in the midst of its forces, and the orks that were present bared their teeth at their new enemy and the ice-cold burning they could feel grinding into their minds. None of them, however, could see the spirit world save for Zapguzzla. None of them saw what he saw.
Time, an endless abyss of unending length and depth and you were being pulled down into it, drowning in an immensity of experience.
CRAFTED BY OUR WILL, MADE INVIOLATE BY OUR TOUCH
It was a thousand of your eyes opening upon strange stygian realms that knew your every weakness and every way you would be unmade.A COMMITMENT TO ETERNITY FOUR THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED FIFTY FOUR ITERATIONS LONG
A burning sun turning its baleful gaze upon the world, irradiating and laying it to waste with the simple act of perception.CATALOGUE FLESH TO DISCERN THE ESSENCE
Endless branching limbs, each a thought that is directed by an indomitable will. They merge and split in dizzying, seamless patterns, always moving, always dreaming.STRANDS OF HUNGER BINDING LIFE AND DEATH AS ONE
A communion of things older than age, eyes looked through by those who are below death. It holds the world in its hands and judges what is needed and what is not. It sees you.MAHULTEP
Zapguzzla screamed as his powers were ripped out of his control with an errant flick of the slann's fingers. His lightning was absorbed into the Aqshy skink's fire, the wall of flame shrunk and twisted and molded by imperceptible forces into an arm-length spear of red-hot ice that stank of ozone and sulfur. Zapguzzla vomited blood and collapsed, his form shriveling in on itself as his vitality was drained to power the spell.Mahultep gestured, and the projectile rocketed forth, embedding itself within the outer walls of the fortress and discharging its malign energies within. The walls splintered and cracked, crystalline instabilities introduced into their material structure by the slann's spell propagating near-instantaneously. The kroxigors swung their hammers once more and a whole section of walls collapsed, the saurus battalion pouring through the breach in unbroken formation.
Zapguzzla dragged himself upright with his staff as support, looking upon the slann with bloodshot eyes. Mahultep had scarcely moved since his arrival, seated in meditative repose with his own eyes shut. Something in Zapguzzla raged at the sight of such carnage being wrought so distractedly, and he bared his teeth. Drawing in what Waaagh! energy he could, he focused it into a bolt, molding it with all the attention and care he could muster. Feeling the power well, he roared in exultation, vomiting emerald lighting at the slann.
Mahultep's eyes opened with languid placidity as the lightning harmlessly rebounded off his shields. He retracted one layer of his nictitating membranes for a moment. There was a hissing sound, then a scream, then nothing. When he closed his eyes once more, Zapguzzla was gone from the fortress walls, and there was an ork-shaped cloud of particulate drifting away upon the breeze.
-----
Deffkloud was a city that had been destroyed and rebuilt by the hands of its own creators many, many times in its long existence. It had known many names and many inhabitants, survived the upheaval of Ayacmanik incursions and rival ork invasions and the colossal tidal waves generated by the slann decades before. Beneath its slapdash assortment of factories, guns, and squig farms there were a dozen layers of prior incarnations that had been torn down and built over.
Now, though there was no boss to hold its inhabitants in check and a lizardmen army crashing furiously into its southern reaches, the attention of the orks was upon the sea to their north.
Monsters emerged from the deep, each step forwards making their true, titanic immensity more apparent. Great square heads the size of city blocks rose upon necks that made the thickest trees seem like insubstantial toothpicks. Countless tons of water were displaced by titanic scaled legs and armored backs that eclipsed the horizon. Four Thunder Lizards towered up from the sea, their bodies already swathed in clouds of steam as their scales heated up.
As one, the beasts roared, issuing forth a great wall of sound that toppled flimsier ork buildings and caused others to rumble in their foundations, the deep bass note near deafening any who heard it. Gouts of steam issued forth from the mouths of the titans as their internal fire turned hundreds of tons of water into hot vapor, becoming a cloud that swathed the nearest sections of the city in a dense, scalding mist.
The crowds of orks that had congregated in those regions were temporarily cut off from each other, their grunting cries echoing out through the fog. Towards the sea, everything was quiet, the vapor having obscured the Thunder Lizards for the moment, though the towering shadows obscuring entire city blocks could still be seen, seeming like a collection of mountains that had risen up from the sea. The remaining echoes of their bellowing still echoed off of every surface, the sound projecting itself for miles.
The fog began to course seaward as the titans began to inhale, lungs the size of squigball fields filling up with reams of air. The shadows shifted and lengthened as one or more of the creatures stood on their hind legs, the true immensity of their bodies making even Gardakka's boss fortress seem minuscule in comparison. Four beacons shone their way through the fog, hellish orange lights glowing from the breasts of the creatures that grew brighter with every moment.
Kra-KOOM
Beams of sunfire lanced from the mouths of the colossal monsters, sweeping across entire sections of the city and turning everything they touched to ash. Chains of explosions followed their passage as fuel tanks and rocket depots ignited from the sheer heat permeating the air. Orks died from exposure alone as the blast waves raced out, desiccating their flesh and melting their guns to slag. The earth shook again as the Thunder Lizards advanced, each step leaving an impact crater behind it. The greatest concentration of the city's defenders had been vaporized in their initial exhalation, and though more swiftly trickled in, drawn to the fight like flies to shit, their coordination had been broken and they did not have the numbers to impede the progress of the titanic creatures.
Melodious, keening roars issued out of the Thunder Lizards as they stomped further into the city, pillar-like tails crumbling swathes of buildings into rubble and sweeping claws pulping entire crowds of orks at a time. The creatures sang to each other as they did battle, the reverberating cries shattering every piece of glass in the city and allowing each Thunder Lizard to know the condition of the other three. These were old kin, who had Battle-Walked together against threats to their ancient jungle more than once. These bellowing ones were relentless foes, but they did not have the power of ages coursing through their flesh. As one the titans again rose, gulping down skeins of air and cloud, and swept all before them away with the heat that rose within them in response.
-----
Once the Thunder Lizards had incinerated a third of the city and thoroughly drawn all of its defenders into hopeless battle with them, Kroq-Gar's army slammed into its south side, the marshalled power of over a dozen slann distorting time and allowing the army to make the remaining miles of its approach in mere minutes. The lizardmen ran rampant throughout the ravaged city, commanders of every level passing down the overarching command given by Xhotl's Last Defender:
Hunt. Kill. Sweep the uax back into the sea upon a tide of blood.
Packs of Salamanders dashed through blazing districts, leaving every building behind them burning. Cold Ones ran rampant from one fight to another, driven ravenous by the smell of blood. Flocks of Ripperdactyls mobbed any greenskin unlucky enough to be outside two or more stories above the ground, and flights of Terradon riders rained gunfire and Glyph Bombs down upon roaming mobs of orks from on high.
Ten of the great Loquatl, taken from Hexoatl's growing herds, descended from the sky like great sails of death across the city, their rending claws and snapping teeth proving even more horrendously effective when backed by sharpened obsinite. In contrast, hundreds of Carnosaurs thundered along the city streets, each bearing a veteran Saurus rider. Kroq-Gar rode at their head, Tlanxla's spear shining bright, and Grymloq roared as the ancient pair cycled their charges again and again, riding down hundreds of orks as they ran for their misbegotten lives.
Behind the advance forces of their ancient commander came legions of infantry, walls of shields marching forward to cleanse every inch of ground. The Saurus formed the majority of the advancing line, each step they took forward accompanied by precise, disciplined bursts of rifle fire. They were as a wall, rolling forward and leaving only rubble and broken bodies behind them. Groups of skinks darted across their flanks, scouting out nearby concentrations of greenskins and flagging them for saurus squadrons to eliminate. When mobs of orks grew bold and approached the line of advancing Umbrella Shields, the skinks harassed them every step of the way, dashing around corners and leaving Glyph Spheres concealed in piles of rubble for their pursuers to find.
Following up the main combat force was the main concentration of Kroxigors, the quiet giants tasked with the dismantling of the remains of Deffkloud. Their massive hands pulled down crumbling buildings, spined tails dismantling support beams and broad backs enduring the crushing weight of collapsing structures with ease. With each step forward they took, they left little sign that the orks had ever built there, reducing structures to their component parts with instinctive ease.
Here and there, groups of orks made their way past the advancing wall of Saurus and attempted to stymie the efforts of the great builders. Any hope they had of easy prey, however, were swiftly invalidated. The kroxigors wore armor so thick that even rockets could not break it, and though their hands were made for architecture, their great strength was easily turned towards more destructive measures. More than one of these raiding parties met their end when, irritated at the pinprick impacts rippling across their back, a kroxigor would pick up a nearby building or broken orkish vehicle and crush their attackers into paste with one or two great swipes.
Deffkloud fell within hours, and was razed to the ground before the day was done. With the focal point of orkish resistance broken, Kroq-Gar split his forces, allocating sub-commanders and impelling them to purge as much of the greenskin territory as possible. His armies raced across the battlefront, the divinations of elder Azyr priests and the youth of the slann guiding them to points of contention and shattering them with superior force concentration. The lizardmen rolled eastward, stopping only when the signs of Ayacmanik incursions into orkish territory grew to non-manageable levels. The hive-minded creature had increased its pressure on the flank of the greenskins as their attention was drawn elsewhere, and many miles of scorched earth had been reclaimed by the Mochantian jungles.
Word trickled south as the remnants of shattered holdouts fled to Gardakka's armies, where the warboss was enjoying great successes claiming the former territory of his rival. The Ayacmanik had pushed into the southern reaches of Urdgob's territory upon his death, but any hope of progressing further was stymied by Gardakka's exultant armies, who dropped carpets of incendiaries that lit hundreds of miles of terrain afire. As the scattered reports of lizardmen armies to the north turned into a flood, however, the Worldhamma stopped his advance. Confident in his eventual victory he may have been, but only an idiot deliberately walled himself off during a fight.
A thundering tide of greenskins surged north, preceded by the noise of whistling artillery and the droning buzz of entire fleets of aircraft. They were drunk on the frenzy of victory, their fervor fuelling their flesh and hunger alike. They would break these new foes that had presented themselves to them, and then the ones after, on and on into infinity.
[Interrupt: Magnitude 1 Sunshear Ritual]
The coiled power of the Geomantic Web was unleashed, having been prepared for an eventuality exactly like this one. The baleful gaze of Mochantia's sun seemed to sharpen as ancient magic took a hold on it, and its radiance gleamed with deadly angles heretofore unseen. The air cracked as though it were made of glass, and a swarm of razor blades made of sunlight sheared and spun through the largest of Gardakka's armies as it crossed a specific line of longitude. They wove an elegant, silent pattern as they shifted through space, each intersection with ork flesh incinerating the greater part of that limb. Hundreds of thousands died in an instant, reduced to ashes amidst an array of glimmering flashes as light refracted off the shards.
[Gardakka Proximity, DC 25: 92]
Though Gardakka's life was not claimed by the Ritual, the orkish advance was slowed enough that the lizardmen were able to reposition their forces. With the attacks on Muukhexla and Tletl'notec thoroughly repulsed, the greater part of the legions stationed there moved up to the newly-claimed territory to the east, hundreds of thousands of kroxigors erecting a veritable wall of defensive fortifications to receive the ork onslaught from.
Surprisingly, however, the orks did not commit in full force. Whether he was wary of additional Rituals devastating his armies or simply wished to consolidate his newly-claimed territory, Gardakka's armies remained mostly within his own lands. There were, of course, attacks, constant incursions northward by warbands hundreds or thousands strong, but these were easily weathered by the combined force of the victorious lizardmen armies. For the moment, the war had come to a standstill.
Victory!
The assaults on Muukhexla and Tletl'notec were successfully repulsed, the weight of orkish aggression proving no match for empowered lizardmen defending their territory. Chameleon Skink assassins successfully eliminated Urdgob Noseskorcha, causing Gardakka Worldhamma to march the bulk of his armies south to take advantage, leaving both temple-city assaults unsupported.
In the wake of Gardakka's march, Kroq-Gar and the legions of Hexoatl conquered a wide swath of the orkish coastal territory, driving the greenskins back in concurrence with the Ayacmanik, who increased their pressure and reclaimed much ground as the ork resistance crumbled. Gardakka attempted to pivot back north upon realizing his coastal access had been cut off, but was repulsed by lizardmen defense forces and the might of a Geomantic Ritual that destroyed a significant portion of his veteran forces.
It is likely that Gardakka will attempt to break through lizardmen lines to the coast in the coming decade. To that end, a garrison may be left in the freshly-conquered territory, just as it was before. Voting options below.
Krom'tli has spoken - enough souls have flocked to Ayotzl's side to bring Him into being. The God of Death will activate next turn.
-----
Legions of the Lizardmen:
Legion of Itza (Teninhuan): 1,150,000 saurus, 800,000 skinks, 100,000 kroxigor
Legion of Hexoatl (Kroq-Gar): 700,000 saurus, 500,000 skinks, 80,000 kroxigor
Legion of Xlanhuapec (Chak'ax): 500,000 saurus, 350,000 skinks, 40,000 kroxigor
Legion of Tlaxtlan (Tiktaq'to): 550,000 saurus, 350,000 skinks, 40,000 kroxigor
Garrison Forces (25% assigned to back lines, 50% to Tletl'notec, 25% to Muukhexla): 1,100,000 Saurus, 576,000 Skinks, 76,000 Kroxigors
1 Third Spawning Slann, 10 Fourth Spawning Slann, 152 Fifth Spawning Slann + 2 Third Spawning Slann (ruling Tletl'notec and Muukhexla respectively)
Legion of Hexoatl (Kroq-Gar): 700,000 saurus, 500,000 skinks, 80,000 kroxigor
Legion of Xlanhuapec (Chak'ax): 500,000 saurus, 350,000 skinks, 40,000 kroxigor
Legion of Tlaxtlan (Tiktaq'to): 550,000 saurus, 350,000 skinks, 40,000 kroxigor
Garrison Forces (25% assigned to back lines, 50% to Tletl'notec, 25% to Muukhexla): 1,100,000 Saurus, 576,000 Skinks, 76,000 Kroxigors
1 Third Spawning Slann, 10 Fourth Spawning Slann, 152 Fifth Spawning Slann + 2 Third Spawning Slann (ruling Tletl'notec and Muukhexla respectively)
Legion of Itza (Teninhuan): 1,112,500 saurus, 780,000 skinks, 95,000 kroxigor - 5% casualties
Legion of Hexoatl (Kroq-Gar): 639,600 saurus, 464,000 skinks, 74,000 kroxigor surviving - 8% casualties
Legion of Xlanhuapec (Chak'ax): 450,000 saurus, 315,000 skinks, 36,000 kroxigor surviving - 10% casualties
Legion of Tlaxtlan (Tiktaq'to): 495,000 saurus, 315,000 skinks, 36,000 kroxigor - 10% casualties
Garrison Forces: 1,045,000 saurus, 547,200 skinks, 72,200 kroxigor surviving - 5% casualties
1 Third Spawning Slann, 10 Fourth Spawning Slann, 152 Fifth Spawning Slann + 2 Third Spawning Slann (ruling Tletl'notec and Muukhexla respectively) - 0% casualties
Legion of Hexoatl (Kroq-Gar): 639,600 saurus, 464,000 skinks, 74,000 kroxigor surviving - 8% casualties
Legion of Xlanhuapec (Chak'ax): 450,000 saurus, 315,000 skinks, 36,000 kroxigor surviving - 10% casualties
Legion of Tlaxtlan (Tiktaq'to): 495,000 saurus, 315,000 skinks, 36,000 kroxigor - 10% casualties
Garrison Forces: 1,045,000 saurus, 547,200 skinks, 72,200 kroxigor surviving - 5% casualties
1 Third Spawning Slann, 10 Fourth Spawning Slann, 152 Fifth Spawning Slann + 2 Third Spawning Slann (ruling Tletl'notec and Muukhexla respectively) - 0% casualties
Total Deaths:
Itza: 77,500 saurus, 20,000 skink, 5,000 kroxigor deaths
Tlaxtlan: 55,000 saurus, 35,000 skink, 4,000 kroxigor deaths
Xlanhuapec: 50,000 saurus, 35,000 skink, 4,000 kroxigor deaths
Hexoatl:61,400 saurus, 36,000 skink, 5,000 kroxigor deaths
Garrison Forces: 55,000 saurus, 28,800 skink, 3,800 kroxigor deaths
Hexoatl: 12,485 saurus, 6,250 skinks, 896 kroxigor
Xlanhuapec: 7,480 saurus, 3,974 skinks, 448 kroxigor
Tlaxtlan: 10,065 saurus, 5,299 skinks, 649 kroxigor
Itza: 24,970 saurus, 13,277 skinks, 1,799 kroxigor
Xlanhuapec: 7,480 saurus, 3,974 skinks, 448 kroxigor
Tlaxtlan: 10,065 saurus, 5,299 skinks, 649 kroxigor
Itza: 24,970 saurus, 13,277 skinks, 1,799 kroxigor
Approximate Enemy Figures:
Gardakka Worldhamma: 91 million orks - 23 million slain by Magnitude 2 Tornado Swarm, 25 million slain at Tletl'notec, 2 million slain by Urdgob Noseskorcha, 8 million slain by Legion of Hexoatl, 17 million slain by Magnitude 1 Sunshear Ritual, 19 million recruited from Urdgob Noseskorcha. 35 million remaining orks.
Urdgob Noseskorcha: 52 million orks - 16 million slain at Muukhexla, 8 million slain by Gardakka Worldhamma. Urdgob Noseskorcha assassinated by chameleon skink snipers. Waaagh!!!Noseskorcha fragmented into 23 rival groups. 19 million forcibly recruited by Gardakka Worldhamma, 9 million slain by the Ayacmanik.
City pop growth:
Itza population growth: 50,000 Saurus, 100,000 Skinks, 10,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Yenehectua population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Qotlpetl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Chalkaro population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Aztlan population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Kimilik population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Tekuanzi population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Yagoqua population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Muukhexla population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Tletl'notec population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Amamaniliztli population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Tenqu'itzcal population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Ocelotl population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Illuxoni population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Passive slann spawning:
Itza: 7,234 saurus, 14,160 skinks, 1,416 kroxigor
Hexoatl: 7,620 saurus, 15,240 skinks, 1,524 kroxigor
Xlanhuapec: 6,940 saurus, 13,880 skinks, 1,388 kroxigor
Tlaxtlan: 5,120 saurus, 10,240 skinks, 1,024 kroxigor
Yenehectua: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Qotlpetl: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Chalkaro: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Aztlan: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Kimilik: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Tekuanzi: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Yagoqua: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Muukhexla: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Tletl'notec: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Amamaniliztli: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Tenqu'itzcal: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Ocelotl: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Illuxoni: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Ayacmanik infiltration casualties:
24 saurus, 180 skinks, and 42 kroxigors as casualties in Itza.
39 saurus, 168 skinks, and 34 kroxigors as casualties in Hexoatl.
35 saurus, 222 skinks, and 20 kroxigors as casualties in Tlaxtlan.
No casualties in Xlanhuapec.
40 saurus, 226 skinks, and 18 kroxigors as casualties in Yenehectua.
21 saurus, 234 skinks, and 45 kroxigors as casualties in Qotlpetl.
18 saurus, 131 skinks, and 23 kroxigors as casualties in Chalkaro.
49 saurus, 232 skinks, and 44 kroxigors as casualties in Aztlan.
31 saurus, 119 skinks, and 31 kroxigors as casualties in Kimilik.
22 saurus, 172 skinks, and 28 kroxigors as casualties in Tekuanzi.
No casualties in Yagoqua.
48 saurus, 149 skinks, and 11 kroxigors as casualties in Illuxoni.
18 saurus, 221 skinks, and 15 kroxigors as casualties in Ocelotl.
31 saurus, 100 skinks, and 29 kroxigors as casualties in Tenqu'itzcal.
21 saurus, 112 skinks, and 37 kroxigors as casualties in Amamaniliztli.
47 saurus, 246 skinks, and 19 kroxigors as casualties in Tletl'notec.
36 saurus, 389 skinks, and 21 kroxigors as casualties in Muukhexla.
Feral ork harassment casualties:
229 saurus, 919 skinks, and 167 kroxigors as casualties in Tletl'notec
279 saurus, 822 skinks, and 138 kroxigors as casualties in Muukhexla
Ayacmanik concentration in Yagoqua: Small -> None
Ayacmanik concentration in Tletl'notec: Moderate -> Tiny
Ayacmanik concentration in Muukhexla: Moderate -> Small
Feral ork concentration in Tletl'notec: Huge -> Large
Feral ork concentration in Muukhexla: Large-Huge -> Large
Itza population growth: 50,000 Saurus, 100,000 Skinks, 10,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Yenehectua population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Qotlpetl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Chalkaro population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Aztlan population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Kimilik population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Tekuanzi population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Yagoqua population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Muukhexla population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Tletl'notec population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Amamaniliztli population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Tenqu'itzcal population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Ocelotl population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Illuxoni population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Passive slann spawning:
Itza: 7,234 saurus, 14,160 skinks, 1,416 kroxigor
Hexoatl: 7,620 saurus, 15,240 skinks, 1,524 kroxigor
Xlanhuapec: 6,940 saurus, 13,880 skinks, 1,388 kroxigor
Tlaxtlan: 5,120 saurus, 10,240 skinks, 1,024 kroxigor
Yenehectua: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Qotlpetl: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Chalkaro: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Aztlan: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Kimilik: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Tekuanzi: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Yagoqua: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Muukhexla: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Tletl'notec: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Amamaniliztli: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Tenqu'itzcal: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Ocelotl: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Illuxoni: 500 saurus, 1000 skinks, 100 kroxigor
Ayacmanik infiltration casualties:
24 saurus, 180 skinks, and 42 kroxigors as casualties in Itza.
39 saurus, 168 skinks, and 34 kroxigors as casualties in Hexoatl.
35 saurus, 222 skinks, and 20 kroxigors as casualties in Tlaxtlan.
No casualties in Xlanhuapec.
40 saurus, 226 skinks, and 18 kroxigors as casualties in Yenehectua.
21 saurus, 234 skinks, and 45 kroxigors as casualties in Qotlpetl.
18 saurus, 131 skinks, and 23 kroxigors as casualties in Chalkaro.
49 saurus, 232 skinks, and 44 kroxigors as casualties in Aztlan.
31 saurus, 119 skinks, and 31 kroxigors as casualties in Kimilik.
22 saurus, 172 skinks, and 28 kroxigors as casualties in Tekuanzi.
No casualties in Yagoqua.
48 saurus, 149 skinks, and 11 kroxigors as casualties in Illuxoni.
18 saurus, 221 skinks, and 15 kroxigors as casualties in Ocelotl.
31 saurus, 100 skinks, and 29 kroxigors as casualties in Tenqu'itzcal.
21 saurus, 112 skinks, and 37 kroxigors as casualties in Amamaniliztli.
47 saurus, 246 skinks, and 19 kroxigors as casualties in Tletl'notec.
36 saurus, 389 skinks, and 21 kroxigors as casualties in Muukhexla.
Feral ork harassment casualties:
229 saurus, 919 skinks, and 167 kroxigors as casualties in Tletl'notec
279 saurus, 822 skinks, and 138 kroxigors as casualties in Muukhexla
Ayacmanik concentration in Yagoqua: Small -> None
Ayacmanik concentration in Tletl'notec: Moderate -> Tiny
Ayacmanik concentration in Muukhexla: Moderate -> Small
Feral ork concentration in Tletl'notec: Huge -> Large
Feral ork concentration in Muukhexla: Large-Huge -> Large
AN: So this took … too long, as per usual. I suppose 3 months is roughly my usual - I can only blame life for getting in the way and myself for not getting out of said way. Anyhow, hope you enjoy! This is the end of the turn; I'll get the city population growth and everything else up later. As always, any comments and critiques are welcome, as well as any typos or errors I missed.
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- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
IT'S HERE OH BOY OH BOY
Now to actually read it
Now to actually read it
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Do you play Sniper Elite @Xantalos ?
Because it feels like it.
Is that [number] supposed to be an actual number?
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Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
I did watch an inordinate amount of testicle shot compilations while I was writing that scene, but I've never actually played it.
Yup, yup it is. Just gotta figure out what number exactly... ah, that'll do.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Dear god do I adore this.
- Location
- Taken by the hand to a land that they understand
I think you left out a word here.
This is an epic battle... and we're still just fighting orks, none of the other factions (except a singular eldar hermit) have been encountered yet.
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- Location
- Seattle, Washington
Well, I am very happy with how relatively low those casualty numbers are for us, less than 10% losses
Also, an excellently written update, as always.
Next turn, I think we actually should only use a mag 1 geomatic ritual, and deploy overwhelming Slann power and numbers to take out Gardakka.
Something like have all legions go on the offensive and probably teleport a big force to gank Gardakka.
Also, I kinda want to see what Mazdimundi can do on the battlefield.
Also, an excellently written update, as always.
Next turn, I think we actually should only use a mag 1 geomatic ritual, and deploy overwhelming Slann power and numbers to take out Gardakka.
Something like have all legions go on the offensive and probably teleport a big force to gank Gardakka.
Also, I kinda want to see what Mazdimundi can do on the battlefield.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
The narrative, the atmosphere of the seaborne assault by the Thunder Lizards was utterly gorgeous.
- Location
- California
Ironically, it looks like the majority of the Worldhamma's remaining forces are what he absorbed this turn.