Chapter 456: ←→↑←↓←
"Nah-na-nah-na-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah..."
Humming some tuneless little War Thunder jingle to himself, Kian gunned the Chimera-hull engine and drove straight toward the front of the fighting.
His neural signals fed through the cabling straight into the cogitator array, which handled every mechanical system in turn, letting him operate the entire tank single-handedly.
Right now his field of view kept cycling between the gunner's sight, the commander's periscope, and the side-viewer, adjusting angles constantly.
He floored it, closing fast on the fighting ahead.
By now the battle had already started up front. Kian's own force was small, and the Orks, having already been thinned out badly by the air strikes earlier, weren't left with much armour either. Combined, the two sides had barely a couple dozen tanks fighting it out.
Kian pulled up behind the wreck of a Leman Russ, using it as cover, and started sniping at range.
He carefully edged the hull out from behind the wreck, loaded an armour-piercing high-explosive round, and fired on an Ork tank six hundred meters out.
The auto-loader began chambering the next round, a process that took seven or eight seconds, and he immediately pulled back behind cover to wait it out.
The round punched straight through the Ork tank's front hull and detonated inside, a violent blast.
The Ork tank's turret went sailing skyward like a homemade rocket, while the hull went up in flames.
Once the round was loaded, Kian pulled the periscope up high, poking it out from cover to check the position of the next Ork tank ahead.
The moment the reload finished, he rolled the hull out into the open, exposed the barrel, and fired again, taking out a second Ork tank in a single shot.
Just then, behind Kian, a Gretchin killa-can that had been playing dead among the wreckage suddenly sprang to life, charging at his flank with a chorus of shrieking, along with a swarm of Ork infantry who'd also been faking death nearby.
Ever alert, eyes and ears open in every direction, Kian spotted them immediately and swung his roof-mounted weapons station toward them, opening fire.
RATATATATAT!!
The 20mm Lumberer stubber spat fire, and the rounds tore clean through the flimsy, thin-skinned killa-can with ease.
The thing sparked and jerked from a dozen impact holes, collapsing to the ground, twitching helplessly.
Behind the killa-can came a swarm of ambushing Ork infantry, armed with rocket launchers and satchel charges, howling as they closed in on Kian's tank.
They were closing fast, too fast. His stubber only had time to pick off a couple of the rocket-launcher-carrying Orks before he ran out of window to handle the rest.
The remaining Orks were already right in front of him, closing in to blow him up with their satchel charges.
Kian quickly swung the main gun toward open ground, fired off his loaded armour-piercing round, and started chambering a high-explosive shell instead.
During those few seconds of reload, the Orks howled and closed the gap, ready to detonate their charges right on top of him.
Fortunately, the round finished loading in time, and he swung the barrel back toward the wrecked Leman Russ he'd been using as cover, and fired directly into it.
The high-explosive round slammed into the wreck and detonated with tremendous force.
The Ork infantry who'd just closed the distance were caught in the blast wave, flattened in a wide arc, coughing up blood on the ground.
With the infantry cluster wiped out by the improvised proximity blast, Kian reloaded with an armour-piercing round, but just then, two more Ork tanks had noticed him.
Both of their long-barreled guns were now locked dead on Kian's position, and he could see it clearly through the commander's periscope.
So he started baiting them. He rolled his tank in and out of cover, in and out, over and over, trying to bait them into wasting a shot.
Ork tank crews weren't exactly patient. Watching Kian bob in and out of cover, their nerves gave out, and they both fired at once.
Two shells screamed past. Both missed.
Kian gunned the engine and burst straight out of cover, swung the barrel toward one of the Ork tanks, fired, then immediately reversed back into cover.
BOOM. The armour-piercing round struck home, and the Ork tank went up in flames, wrecked.
The other Ork tank got spooked and stopped firing wildly, locking down on Kian's position instead, waiting for a clean shot.
This time, Kian bobbed in and out of cover for a long while, and the Ork never took the bait.
He got an idea, adjusted the turret behind cover, and fired a full spread of smoke grenades out in front of him.
On the Ork tank, the gunner was practically pressing his eye into the sight, dead-locked on Kian's position, when the sudden wall of smoke rolled in and blinded him, throwing him off completely.
Didn't matter, though. Just keep the barrel locked on and wait.
And then the Ork gunner watched a shell come screaming straight out of the smoke, right at his face.
BOOM!!
The second Ork tank went up. Emerging from the smoke, Kian switched his thermal optics back to standard visual and went back to scanning the battlefield through the periscope.
Just then, a burst of panicked shouting came through the comm channel:
"Look at the hilltop, oh god, what the hell IS that?!"
Kian followed the marked position and saw, on a hill ten kilometers out, several massive Ork artillery vehicles had appeared.
The hulls on these things were enormous, but even more terrifying were the guns mounted on top, absurdly oversized bores.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!
The Ork artillery unleashed a terrifying salvo, the massive shells screaming across the intervening ten-plus kilometers, the sound overhead like a freight train tearing through a mountain tunnel.
The shells came down into the valley where Kian's force was positioned, detonating with earth-shattering force.
Fortunately, at that range, Ork artillery accuracy was poor, and the first volley did no damage at all, mostly just blasting craters into empty dirt.
But the sheer sound and scale of it was terrifying enough. Nobody wanted to bet their life on the next volley missing too.
Panicked shouting erupted across every crew's comm channel. Some crews wanted to charge the dunes and take out those artillery pieces directly.
But at ten kilometers out, by the time anyone got there, the Orks would already be on their third volley.
As for returning fire, every tank on-site was carrying a cannon, not a howitzer, and simply couldn't reach that far.
Kian shouted urgently over the comm:
"Don't panic! Stay focused on the enemy in front of you, I've got the Ork artillery!"
He immediately switched channels, reaching out to the Fury Interceptor still holding pattern in low orbit.
"Crew, crew, I need fire support, can you see, southwest of my position, those big Ork artillery vehicles up on the dune?"
The crew's reply crackled back.
"Sorry, my lord, industrial haze has rolled in, we can't see anything on the surface!"
Kian pulled up the feed from his own camera and looked skyward, and sure enough, a thick bank of industrial smog had somehow rolled into the airspace above without him noticing.
But the crew had another option for fire support.
"My lord, we can drop rockets from orbit in low-speed mode, that keeps them airborne for at least a full minute. We can hand off guidance control to you, and you can steer them straight onto the target yourself!"
Kian's face lit up, and he told them to go ahead.
The Fury, still holding low orbit, fired off several rockets, which plunged straight down toward the surface.
Once each rocket punched through the smog layer and its nose-mounted guidance camera picked up the ground below, Kian immediately took manual control.
His view switched to the rocket's falling perspective, and he could steer it left, right, up, and down, guiding it precisely toward a target of his choosing.
And so, Kian began guiding the rockets in.
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BOOM!!
One rocket struck home, dead center on an Ork artillery vehicle atop the dune, blasting it into a rain of scrap.
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BOOM!!
A second rocket came down right on top of the second Ork artillery unit, wrecking it in turn.
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BOOM!!!!
The last Ork artillery unit went down too, its onboard ammunition cooking off in a chain detonation, blasting the distant dune into a massive crater.
☆☆☆
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