Chapter 1 – The Covenant Reborn
The viridian tide of Orks stretched out nearly beyond the horizon, flowing over metal mountains and through the ancient ruins that covered Decrepa's irradiated surface. Outside of roving bands of nomads, who had almost certainly perished to the greenskin hordes by now, the only humans who eked out a living upon the world did so in the bastion city of Sovera, the very same city those hordes had surrounded for months.
The city's governor looked out upon the hordes that spelled doom for them and sighed, even as he turned to the sound of clacking hooves. The beastman colonel in charge of the city's defense approached, any semblance of decorum having been left behind long ago. This was a different one than the colonel who'd reported for the last three weeks. He didn't need to ask to know what had happened.
"They're getting ready for a push through the main gate," the colonel said, a grim expression on her animal-like features.
"Our defenses are strongest there," the governor noted, but there was little hope in that. Even their strongest defenses had been diminished. Their scrap-suits had almost all been demolished and they had more artillery guns than they had shells to fire from them. Decrepans had always had a knack for 'discovering' ancient weapons from the endless salvage of their world's rad-deserts and metal mountains. Yet, even their most capable weapons, the ones that really had been discovered and were dated back millennia or more, were all but expended now.
"We'll hold," the colonel stated. "Any word?"
Any word. The same question he had been asked every day for months now. Any word from the Imperium. Had their choir of Astropaths received any replies to their calls for aid.
So, he told the same lie he'd told for months. "No word," he said, shaking his head. "But the Great Rift's opening seems to have made communications difficult. Their answer may simply not be getting through."
"I see," the colonel said blankly. She turned to leave. "I'll be heading to the front then."
"Yes," the governor said, nodding. "As shall I."
The beastman stopped, bovine eyes going wide in surprise. "Sir, I don't know if-."
"When-," the governor began, only to stop and start again. "
If the orks get through the main gate, the city will be lost. I would rather die on the battlefield with the Emperor's name on my lips than be butchered in my home."
The beastman paused and for a moment the governor really thought she might fight him on this, rank be damned. Then, she nodded and allowed him to lead the way. He did not head straight to the frontlines, however.
Instead, he headed towards his family's secret armory.
The governor's family scrap-suit was an ancient but rarely used one and the best kept secret of all Decrepa. While he knew how to pilot it, he was not a warrior and had rarely wielded the product of his ancestors' blessed genius. However, the scrap-suit's machine spirit welcomed him back with a bloodlustful eagerness and he nestled inside of its cybernetic sarcophagus, feeling modified neural links sliding into ports in his spine and skull, sending tiny shocks through his brain that made him wince. He could feel the machine spirit's old fury still burning as hot as its power core, the hatred that would consume everything if he let it, and it took him a moment to grapple with that, to bend it to his will.
Across the armory, the colonel was coming to understand the second scrap-suit his family kept for their own use. Normally, no one outside the governor's family would be permitted to touch the device except the most trusted of Tech-Priests, let alone pilot it. But times changed. Tech-Priests that looked more cobbled together than the suits they worked upon scurried and scuttled about, making final preparations and enacting rites.
With the hiss of escaping air, tubes and latches released, sending the tall machines to the floor, their leg servos whirring to a crouch as they absorbed the weight of the fall. Attached to his scrap-suit's left arm was a crackling lightning claw. On the other arm was a plasma cannon. The suit was older than Sovera itself, supposedly having been left by the God-Emperor of Mankind himself when he visited Decrepa and blessed it with the endless scrapyards after the Ruining and the Angel War. Since that time the nearly five meter tall machine had carried the name
Contemptuous and the only marking of its old self, before it had come into the possession of his family, was an eblazoned symbol on its right pauldron of a fanged maw forming a spiked circle.
The colonel's machine, for it was as good as hers now, was a taller and squatter device than his own and slower, but far more heavily armed. Atop its mighty frame were a pair of munitions launchers, filled with weapons of death blessed in the forge of Mars, the God-Emperor's mightiest servant. It lacked arms entirely, instead replacing them with powerful autocannons capable of firing similarly blessed munitions. It too had existed within his family's care since the God-Emperor's light guided his ancient ancestors to this world and had carried the name
Derision and held the mark of a skull-shaped helmet upon its own pauldron.
Both had seen some service in this war already, but the governor had been wary of sending such divine creations to fully engage in battle. Perhaps that had been a mistake. Perhaps they could have bought more time.
But then, what would have been the point?
When the governor spoke, his voice was translated through the machine's vox speakers, making far deeper and booming.
"Are you ready, colonel?" He didn't know her name, he realized. He hadn't asked. It didn't matter.
"Yes, sir." The colonel's reply was equally deep and booming.
"Then we shall let His flame purify these xenos filth."
The gates of Sovera had held fast for three thousand years without being breached. The last time they had been broken down had been during the last of the great wars fought between Sovera and the other scrap-city that had once dwelled on Decrepa, whose name had been lost to time or perhaps purged intentionally. In those days, the gates had been void shielded and it had taken successive tactical nuclear strikes for them to buckle. Such technologies had been lost in the destruction and so Decrepa's new gates had been crafted of wrought adamantium.
They buckled after only a single blast from some Ork weapon that they'd constructed over the course of weeks purely for the task which had expended itself upon firing, flash cooking its circuits and mechanical components, as well as all of its operators and several mobs of Orks who'd had the ill-fortune of being nearby when its viridian energies had melted through the gates. Nonetheless, those self-inflicted casualties did nothing to inhibit the fervor of the other Orks, who charged in through the gap with insane glee, shouting strange war cries in their foul tongue. One in particular rose up above all the others.
"WAAAAAAAAAGH!"
That war cry barely dimmed as the first Orks stepped through the still smoking hole that had once been Sovera's gates and were incinerated instantly in a storm of fire and death. In fact, it seemed to only grow louder and more gleeful as scores of Orks were slaughtered by massed lasgun fire, autocannon shots, and plasma explosions.
Yet, despite the sheer noise caused by the Orks, an even greater noise boomed, the result of hive-linked voxcasters all coming together to speak with one voice. It was the governor's voice.
"FOR THE EMPEROR!"
The five-meter-tall scrap-suit waded into the mass of Orks as they spilled past the chokepoint, lightning claw crackling. Each slash cut through a dozen Orks, each shot from his plasma cannon consuming another twenty. Behind him, the colonel and the ten remaining scrap-suits of Sovera, some only half a meter taller than a man, others nearly of the same size as the ancient relics, laid down a torrent of flame and death along with gathered city militia, conscripts, and Tech-Priests.
"FOR DECREPA!"
The Orks had created scrap-suits of their own, crude mimicries of the glorious warriors of Decrepa and even more ramshackle in appearance and function. Nonetheless, their lethality was on par with the majority of what Sovera had been able to field… and they were far more numerous. They followed the first Ork mobs, stomping across the corpses of their allies and more than a few of the breathing ones as well, their own weapons readying to fire or already discharging into the backs of the Orks who had been foolish enough to exist in that moment in front of the enemy. The governor was more than pleased to meet them head-on.
"FOR SOVERA!!!"
Contemptuous' claws sung through the air a harsh note of doom, slicing through welded metal and bone, cutting down the first vile machine to cross his path, a four-armed monstrosity with limbs ending in whirling circular blades. His plasma cannon lined up a shot against the next Ork scrap-suit, one with eight arms that each ended in a different kind of cannon. The armor was strong enough to not melt under the heat of the blast, but the Ork inside was a different story and the machine toppled over as its pilot was charred to naught but ash in an instant.
The colonel's autocannons barked, shells nearly the size of a curled-up man taking another Ork scrap-suit through the torso and exploding it apart. Missiles launched and balls of flame consumed nearly a hundred orks and another five scrap-suits.
The governor continued to shout cries for the Emperor's glory, for Decrepa's, for Sovera's. Again and again,
Contemptuous committed new kills to its name, took new scars for its story. Even as the other scrap-suits loyal to the Throne fell under the endless horde, the governor never stopped. He could hear the colonel in his ear, telling him they were falling back to the final bunker and he needed to as well, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that he would take as many of these xenos with him as he damn well could. The machine spirit delighted in his eagerness to spill blood and roared in his mind louder and louder.
He slashed and blasted away with no thought to himself, to his inevitable demise, to his world's doom. Nothing else seemed to matter and the machine spirit was pleased by how little he cared about anything else in that moment.
Finally, an Ork scrap-suit larger and stranger than the others and armed with a hammer took him from the side, the blow managing to topple him over and he let out a cry of pain as the inertial dampeners inside his scrap-suit suddenly failed and one of the neural ports embedded in his nervous system came loose. Fire lashed along his body for an instant, shocking him from his frenzied bloodlust and cutting off the roar of the machine spirit, even as his visual sensors began to flicker and distort as they failed to take in something occurring above him and only allowed some flashes of vaguely purple light to leak through.
When those sensors were restored, they were just in time to see an Ork hammer swinging down onto
Contemptuous' head, smashing the proud head of the ancient relic into scrap and cutting off the governor's visual feed for good. The governor heard armor crumpling and tearing then and suddenly a metal hand was reaching into the scrap-suit's chest cavity. He was pulled from the sarcophagus, screaming in pain as the neural link was fully severed.
An Ork scrap-suit of larger size than even the
Contemptuous and holding the hammer that had felled him lifted him with a clawed hand that could have twitched and sliced him into four bloody chunks of meat. He struggled in the vile machine's grasp, trying to get one arm free to go for the las pistol at his waist. The Ork scrap-suit was of a strange design, where most like it had the 'head' of the device being fitted on the torso, this one's was mounted atop it more like one of Decrepa's scrap-suits.
"You'z skrap pretty good fur a humie," the Ork inside the thing said in a voice that was low yet loud enough from the booming machine's voxcasters to make the governor cry out in pain.
"Krumped lotz'a my boyz. Shud make a good snack!"
And with that, the top half of the Ork scrap-suit's 'head' flipped open, revealing a large amount of 'teeth' that were simply sharpened pieces of jagged metal that looked like they had been hammered into place. Bone and bloody chunks of meat from previous 'meals' were stuck between the teeth. Most of it looked human.
The top began to slam up and down in rapid motion in mimicry of how a child might eat and the Ork inside the machine began to laugh as it lowered the governor towards his doom. Around him, those few Orks who had gathered to watch their Boss eat the human who had slaughtered so many of their own, joined in the laughter. Yet, once more, their voices were not so great that they could block out all other noises.
Because in the distance, perhaps by chance, perhaps by His will, the governor could hear a whistling noise growing louder. The whistling of drop pods.
His descent towards the gnashing metal maw paused as the Ork holding him suddenly was distracted by something above and behind the struggling governor. The other Orks took notice as well and many turned to look up, confused.
In the next second, many things happened in rapid succession.
The first thing to occur was for something that seemed like it were made of light to pop into existence around the governnor, wrapping around and under the claw that held him. Thinner than an atom's width in some places, yet stronger than void-shielded adamantium, he was sufficiently protected from what occurred next. The falling drop pod sliced through the air over the governor's head, decapitating the Ork scrap-suit as it struck downwards like a lightning bolt, moving so fast that it would have killed any unprotected living being within a meter from the wind pressure alone and slamming into the rockrete.
The last thing to occur before the second had fully elapsed and the scrap-suit had toppled to the ground was for the doors of the drop pod to blow open and for its occupants to emerge. They numbered four in total, each human shaped and over two meters in height, wearing armor similar to the smallest scrap-suits leftover by His Angels from the Ruining, yet lither and they moved with a grace and speed beyond that of the best pilots of Sovera. Each one was crimson red and silver, with visors that gleamed orange. In their hands were weapons unlike anything the governor had ever seen, even on those rare occasions when they'd been visited by the Tech-Priests of Novarus seeking archaeotech in the irradiated deserts and metal mountains and beneath the toxic oceans.
The impact had barely tossed dust and rubble into the sky before the newcomers launched outwards. Other pods began to slam down into the Ork lines, unleashed other and stranger warriors and vehicles, some of which were familiar, others utterly alien, but all moved with uncanny speed and grace. Yet, the governor was no longer there to see them. One moment he was present, about to face his end. In the next, he was lying on the dirt.
No, not the dirt. Sand. Above him, the sky was a strange and clear blue rather than green. The clouds were a pure white, rather than a dark grey, and the air was clear and crisper than anything he'd ever known. He heard the gentle lapping of waves and he sat up, finding himself at the edge of a blue ocean that stretched on past the horizon. Above him, the sun, strong and gentle, warmed him down to his bones.
"Where-?" He asked as he stood up. He was still in the bodysuit needed to operate a scrap-suit, it was still stained with blood from where the razor-sharp claws of the Ork's scrap-suit had cut into his flesh while grabbing him, yet the wounds themselves were gone. Strangely, so was the exhaustion and sleeplessness that had pained him for weeks.
"Governor?"
The familiar voice made him turn and he saw with growing confusion the beastwoman colonel standing nearby, looking similarly confused. A moment later, he realized he saw more and more people standing on the beach, a growing number who seemed to just appear as if from nowhere.
His people.
Was this the afterlife? The priests had promised the God-Emperor would accept the souls of all who perished doing His will, but they had also promised that afterlife would be an eternal battle against the forces of darkness, to serve Him even after death. This… did not seem like a battlefield.
"How typical of humans. I give you paradise and you're
still disappointed."
An amused voice spoke from behind him and he turned, only to be further confused. A tree of ash-white bark rested there, yet it was shaped like a man and stood at a height on par with what
Contemptuous had. Four eyes like onyx gemstones sat in what could be considered its otherwise featureless face, crowned by branches of orange and red leaves. Its voice was odd, like if the wind itself were speaking, yet more solid than that and strangely good at conveying tone.
"And, to answer your question, dear governor, no, you're not dead," the strange xeno – for what else could it be but a xeno? – said, sounding
almost apologetic. "I hope you don't mind."
Warboss Grugnik Deffstompa was more than a bit annoyed at this turn of events.
First was the fact that he'd already gone too long without a skrap, about seven hours. More than that was the fact that he'd gone too long without a
good skrap. He couldn't even remember how long it had been, so he knew it was a while. The humies had holed up behind their big metal gates, grotz that they were, and refused to budge. Of course, that had resulted in the Orks building the
Eye'o'Mork. Or was it the
Eye'o'Gork? Didn't matter, he supposed. It was skrap again, same as the gate it had blown up.
Second was that he'd barely gotten a fight out of the beakie dread with the flashy klaw. The grot had been doing well but hadn't seen the hammer coming from the side and just… went down. It didn't help that Grugnik's hammer had slammed down on the beakie dread's head, but that wasn't his fault and he'd krump anyone who said otherwise.
However, greatest among this long list (at least in his mind) of grievances was the fact that the humie his Deff Dread had been about to munch on had disappeared about the same time as some inconsiderate git had landed a drop pod on him and taken off the top half of his dread's head. The irony of having his own vehicle's head crushed so soon after crushing the human's was entirely lost upon him.
All around him, more drop pods landed, many with pinpoint accuracy, some slamming down atop Deff Dreads and Killa Kans, others atop the fewer number of battle wagons and a few atop unfortunates Orks. Most of those who emerged were not humies or any other of the runty grotz that Grugnik had fought over the course of his life. They were about as tall as a Nob, but thinner, with weird, backwards legs that ended in hooves and hands that had two thumbs each and their faces were all split-like. There were other unfamiliar ones as well and more humies like the ones who had dropped before him. Grugnik would normally be pleased to have someone new to fight, but that was only when the top half of his mek hadn't just been neatly crushed by four gitz who weren't even all bothering to stick around. Three of them had already headed off, weapons in hand, to fight others among Grugnik's Waaagh!
"OI, WOT WUZ DAT FER?!?" Grugnik demanded angrily.
"WUZ 'BOUT TA GET GOOD!"
"Sorry," the remaining armored… humie? called up to him. No, not humies… Maybe? Grugnik tried to make sense of what he was seeing and smelling. He had always had a rubbish nose, but his machine's sense of smell was great. Too good, some might say, but he'd krump anyone he smelled doing so, along with anyone who asked how he could smell sound. "But we thought you might enjoy an actual fight? If you'd like, we have a way for you to fight eternally."
Grugnik had stopped listening after 'Sorry' and responded by slamming his hammer down onto the little git. Or at least, he
would have gotten the tiny grot had it not nimbly dodged out of the way with far greater speed than any normal humie had. It sidestepped his hammer blow, then backflipped to avoid the sweeping cut of the whirling saw of Grugnik's other arm. It landed in a crouch and let out an exaggerated sigh.
"Fine, fine," it said, even as Grugnik drew up for another swing. "I suppose I can turn you into spare parts first."
Grugnik let out a roar and swung his hammer down again with actual fury this time. The shiny git just sidestepped again, leaping up as it did so and catching onto the back of the hammer with one hand as it connected with the ground, the force of the momentum drawing its metal boots onto the weapon where they stuck fast.
Grugnik swung around with the buzzsaw as the shiny git rushed forward, sprinting up his mek's arm with astonishing speed, trying to slice neatly through the waist of the git. In that moment, however, the git leapt up again and Grugnik realized there was some kind of hilt in its hand. There was a snap of air and a crackling hiss as an energy blade ignited and sliced neatly through the wrist of Grugnik's Deff Dread. The buzzsaw, still spinning at rapid speed, flung itself through the air, slicing through the legs of a Killa Kan who'd been fighting nearby, much to the annoyance of the half-insane Ork inside it.
Grugnik swung his whole mek around again, angrily trying to throw off the tiny grot, but it managed to hold fast to him, clambering onto the main body of the mek. Grugnik suddenly found himself face to face with the orange visor, peering down through the lens that made up the Deff Dread's 'eye', though given the unique shape of Grugnik's machine, it was more like the device's belly button. Naturally, Grugnik attempted to swat away the gnat.
Unfortunately, he was still holding his hammer in the hand he was using to do so.
The git leapt up and over the swing, flipping through the air and landing once more in an dancer's crouch. Grugnik's machine crumpled under the force of his self-inflicted blow and he howled in anger and pain as his Deff Dread toppled over, even the engineering of Ork Mek-Boyz, partly genius and mostly insane, being unable to maintain its functionality with such damage.
The shiny git stood over him, energy blade slowly carving him out of his machine. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Grugnik's pale, green face greeted unfiltered air. He gnashed his teeth, screaming impotently as he tried to force his machine to function, to make its hand reach up and crush the git that was now crouching in front of him, completely ignoring the skrap going on all around them.
"So, you want to go to that big eternal fight I offered now?"
Grugnik's roared in lieu of a reply.
"I'll take that as a yes."
