Chapter 461: Total War, Sky and Ground
Once the five strategic warheads had fallen, humanity launched its counteroffensive against the Orks, an all-or-nothing assault, everything staked on this single throw.
The first wave off the line was humanity's atmospheric fighter corps, thousands of aircraft filling the sky in a dense mass, blotting out the sun completely.
But the Orks, it seemed, had been ready. Their own fighter swarms were already scrambling into the air!
Tens of times more numerous than the human squadrons, the Ork fighters filled the sky, surging up to meet the human formation head-on.
Ork aircraft blanketed the sky from top to bottom like a rolling sea of flying scrap.
Several hundred human atmospheric bombers fired anti-air nuclear warheads, detonating them mid-air right in the heart of the Ork fighter swarm.
Hundreds, thousands of Ork fighters were wiped out in the blast, tumbling out of the sky like discarded junk.
But before the mushroom clouds from the air-bursts had even fully dispersed, more Ork fighters came roaring straight through them, howling war cries as they broke into the clear.
The two fighter forces slammed into each other with everything they had, high-energy lasers and autocannon fire crisscrossing the sky, swaths of aircraft dropping out of formation and crashing to the earth as scrap.
At first, the human air force had the advantage, fighting with room to spare, and it was almost entirely Ork wrecks falling from the sky.
But as the battle wore on, the pressure started to tell. There were simply too many Ork fighters.
And the most absurd part of all was what was happening on the ground beneath the dogfight: swarms of Mekboys were actively scavenging the wreckage as it fell.
Every downed aircraft that crashed to earth erupted in a violent explosion, then caught fire and burned.
Before the flames had even died down, Mekboys were already rushing in to put them out and strip the parts, immediately beginning to bolt together a replacement fighter on the spot.
These improvised, jury-rigged fighters were essentially flying garbage, a fuel tank, an engine, a control system, and an autocannon all bolted onto a bare metal frame.
Grab a random Ork Boy, throw him into a wire-mesh cockpit with no windshield to speak of, and it was ready to fly.
This flying scrap heap didn't even have landing gear. To launch it, it took dozens of Orks hauling it up onto a 45-degree launch ramp and slingshotting it into the air with steel cable.
If the engine caught once it was airborne, the thing joined the dogfight overhead. If it failed and crashed, the Orks would just scavenge the wreckage again, slap it back together, throw in a new pilot, and launch it once more.
This endless stream of disposable flying junk kept flooding into the fight, replenishing Ork numbers faster than humanity could kill them off.
On the ground, tens of thousands of human tanks clashed against hundreds of thousands of Ork tanks, spread across a front line dozens of kilometers long.
Large-caliber tank guns traded fire, joined by plasma cannons, las-cannons, and every other weapon imaginable, with the occasional nuclear artillery shell landing dead center in an Ork armour cluster, blooming into its own small mushroom cloud.
Humanity's burst damage was devastating, and the battlefield quickly filled with wrecked Ork armour. But the Orks had absurdly deep reserves, and an equally absurd regeneration rate.
The higher the intensity of a fight, the more excited the Orks got, and the faster their strength climbed.
Humanity's full-scale offensive had sent Ork heart rates spiking across the entire planet, awakening every last drop of war-instinct buried in their genes.
Wave after wave of Ork tanks charged the human armoured line, only to be wiped out in turn.
To replace their losses, Mekboys in the rear worked in a frenzy, hastily patching together replacement tanks.
Bolt four wheels and a steering column onto a bare cannon, and that jury-rigged contraption got shoved straight onto the front.
But if that ugly piece of junk managed to fire off even a single successful shot, it genuinely had a chance of taking out a Leman Russ.
At the same time, WAAAGH energy across the whole planet was surging in response to the battle. Orks who'd been cycling through combat repeatedly were visibly growing bigger, stronger, and more aggressive by the hour.
Even the mushroom fields in the rear were producing more Ork Boyz than usual, fresh hatchlings desperate to charge straight into the fighting the moment they crawled free, only to get beaten down on the spot by the Gretchin guarding the birthing grounds.
That's right, with the Orks fully absorbed in the fighting up front, none of them had noticed that their total population cap had been quietly locked in place.
Every Ork death now was a permanent loss, and with a battle of this scale raging against humanity, Ork numbers were dropping fast.
Still, their existing stockpile remained massive, with greenskins pouring in from every continent to throw themselves at humanity's spearhead, so for now, no one on the Ork side had noticed anything was wrong.
Human tanks and aircraft kept driving forward, wave after wave, and the hive ruin housing Three-Arm's workshop sat barely fifty-some kilometers from the human line.
Humanity had thrown caution to the wind entirely. The instant the advance slowed even slightly, nuclear artillery shells followed immediately after.
The spearhead, thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of armoured vehicles strong, drove hard into the ruin where Three-Arm's forge sat, and reached the target three hours after the offensive began.
The target was a secondary hive city, now reduced entirely to ruin, its plasteel superstructure collapsed into an enormous field of shattered debris.
Within this vast wreckage, the Orks had built up an equally vast network of fortifications and trenches.
Countless Ork tank-hunter squads moved through the ruins, rocket launchers trained on the human armoured columns.
Every so often, a Gretchin killa-can burst from a hidden corner, swinging a circular saw blade, hacking Astra Militarum infantry apart limb from limb.
Ork Dreadnoughts used their mechanical claws to peel open tank and transport turrets like tin cans.
The massive hive ruin functioned as one giant fortress, shielded by an enormous void shield that rendered every one of the Astra Militarum's long-range strikes useless. There was no choice but to drive straight into the ruins and fight the Orks hand to hand.
At close range, the Astra Militarum held no real advantage.
Tank columns pushing into the ruins found themselves constantly ambushed from every direction by Ork tank-hunter squads.
Both sides' forces tangled together in chaotic close-quarters fighting throughout the ruins, one street changing hands over and over, flipping control every few minutes, the bodies piling up into literal mounds along the roadway.
The fighting began in the morning and stretched on into the afternoon. The Astra Militarum's burst capability was undeniably strong, but their staying power wasn't.
In just those few hours of fighting, Astra Militarum casualties had already climbed past a staggering four million.
That number was climbing exponentially, and the morale they'd carried into the assault was beginning to crack under the sheer, endless green tide bearing down on them.
But their objective had been achieved. They'd successfully fought their way into the heart of the ruined hive.
To finish off the two Ork totem walkers hidden somewhere beneath the rubble, the Astra Militarum had brought a specialized weapon: the melta-drill bunker-buster rocket.
This weapon was, essentially, a rocket built in reverse, its nose pointed straight down into the earth.
The nose housed a melta emitter, capable of sustaining a continuous stream of superheated plasma, liquefying anything in its path.
Once the melta head had bored its way down, the rocket's own engine would ignite, driving the weapon deeper still.
Beneath the surface lay layer after layer of hollow hive infrastructure, and as long as the melta emitter's energy reserve held out, the drill-rocket could deliver its payload, a nuclear warhead, several kilometers beneath the surface, straight into the heart of the Ork totem walkers, and destroy them once and for all.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you