The three Ork boyz were killed before they could even react.
Lawson and Number One remained in constant mental sync through Shared Awareness.
[Keep going.]
[I take the left. You take the right.]
[Fall back in three seconds.]
Lawson pulled the trigger on the Locke-pattern boltgun.
Boom!
The .75 caliber bolt struck the left side of the Ork boy's neck with perfect accuracy.
Green blood and shattered bone sprayed in all directions.
[Extracting native soul energy: 10 points.]
[Initiating underlying-law purification process... Purification complete.]
[Actual Life Points gained: 7.]
Almost at the same instant, Number One's lasgun beam punched into the left eye of the Ork boy on the right.
An Ork boy's skull was incredibly thick. A frontal assault usually required two or three concentrated shots to achieve meaningful penetration. But the eye socket was the exception, the only soft point on the whole face not covered by heavy bone.
The two Ork boyz dropped almost simultaneously.
"Humies are up there! WAAAAAGH! Smash 'em!"
The remaining Ork boyz finally reacted. Roaring upward, they aimed every crude firearm they had at the mouth of the duct.
Lawson flattened himself backward and retreated. Number One pulled back in perfect sync.
Gunfire exploded into the spot they had just left behind.
Bang! Bang! Bang! KLANG!!
Then that section of duct collapsed, filling the place they had been lying in moments ago with metal shards and ceramite dust.
If he had been half a second slower, he would already be in pieces.
Following the map marks Number One had left during exploration, Lawson turned right, passed through a narrowed section of ductwork, and dropped down at the third branching point into their second fallback position.
Number One followed right behind him.
The greenskins below showed no sign of calming down.
To them, losing two big lads was not a reason to retreat.
Quite the opposite. In ork logic, retreat did not exist as an option. The remaining Ork boyz and gretchin charged toward the duct entrance with a kind of shrieking enthusiasm no normal intelligent species could ever understand.
They had no climbing tools.
That did not matter. Ork boyz had brute strength.
The biggest of them stepped directly onto two gretchin and used them as footstools, digging his fingers into the corroded hollows on the outer wall of the duct and hauling himself upward.
In the middle of the climb, his feet crushed in the ribs of the two gretchin beneath him, but that was not important. Gretchin were born to be stepped on.
He forced his bulky body into the ventilation duct.
Then he stepped on exactly what Lawson had prepared in advance.
A section of ductwork that had been scored with more than a dozen deep cuts. Its structural integrity had already been weakened to the breaking point. Anything heavier than one hundred and fifty kilograms stepping on it would cause it to snap instantly.
An Ork boy weighed more than four hundred kilograms.
Crack. BOOM!
The duct section exploded apart under the Ork's weight, and the creature dropped in complete surprise, vanishing down a vertical shaft a hundred meters deep into the darkness below before landing with a heavy, dull impact.
[Life Points +7]
"Chase 'em that way!"
The thunder of greenskin footsteps surged again.
The second marker trap had been set at the right-hand turn of the main corridor.
Number One had left a temporary tripline there, the far end connected to a heavy steel bar suspended overhead at a carefully calculated angle.
Bang! KLANG!
The sound of bones breaking and the furious cursing of greenskins blaming one another rang out at the same time.
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
[Life Point +1]
Three gretchin were swept away by the steel bar and smashed into the bulkhead in a variety of poses.
But the Ork boy at the front only swayed slightly after taking the impact. He lowered his head to glance at it, shoved the steel bar aside, and kept moving forward.
Green blood ran from the gash torn open across his stomach. With his free hand, he casually pinched the skin together over the wound, forcibly sealing it, then kept walking.
Watching from behind cover farther off, Lawson's mouth twitched slightly.
That was the real headache.
An Ork boy's vitality was never just a matter of being "low on health." They were the kind of species where you could break its arm, and it would use the broken arm to beat you to death.
In his mind, Lawson issued the next order to Number One.
[I take the front. You take the rear.]
[Confirmed.]
The two of them fired at the same time.
The mass-reactive bolt entered through the bridge of the leading Ork boy's nose, then detonated inside the skull cavity.
This time, green brain matter sprayed nearly two meters.
[Life Points +7]
Number One put his second, third, and fourth las-shots into the neck of the Ork boy beside it just as it was bending down to retrieve a weapon. The stacked thermal effect of three beams carbonized the entire section of neck tissue, and the Ork toppled sideways.
[Life Points +7]
There were several hunks of iron nearby, and Number One casually absorbed them into the system.
[Adamant Steel Reserve +0.4 cubic meters]
Once that was done, Lawson and Number One turned left and crossed a relatively intact corridor section.
They had to move faster, or the pursuers would catch up.
But this galaxy had never once cared about anyone's plans.
Just as the two of them were about to reach the end of the corridor and round a ninety-degree corner, a shrill chorus of "WAAAGH!" and a mess of approaching footsteps suddenly came from the other side of the bend.
Lawson and Number One ran headfirst into another wandering greenskin mob.
More than a dozen fully armed Ork boyz, leading over a hundred gretchin, were coming straight at them carrying crude loot.
Enemies in front.
Pursuers behind.
"Punch through."
Lawson gripped the Fang of Catachan in his right hand and the boltgun in his left. In half a step, he completed an exquisitely tight sidestep, slipping out of the frontal kill zone of the oversized Ork at the front while jamming the muzzle of the boltgun up beneath the jaw of the Ork boy on the left.
Boom!
Firing at point-blank range was completely different from firing at medium range.
At that distance, the bolt's explosive force was released almost entirely inside the target's skull cavity.
The Ork boy's head exploded. Its remaining torso flew backward under the tremendous shock, knocking down two gretchin behind it.
Lawson's body had already carried through the momentum of that sidestep into a turn to the right. The Fang of Catachan rolled in his hand and slashed upward, severing the gun-wrist of the Ork boy on the right cleanly through the joint as it tried to raise its weapon.
The Ork's howl was deafening, but Lawson was no longer there.
Without breaking stride, Lawson planted his left foot on the corpse of the fallen Ork, used it as leverage, and launched himself upward. In midair, he made a short, vicious diving strike and drove the Fang of Catachan straight down into the crown of the oversized Ork's head.
The blade stopped at the edge of the skull.
It did not penetrate.
The oversized Ork's cranium was even thicker than he had expected.
"HAAH!!"
Instead of staggering back, the massive Ork snapped its head up and swung its huge chain-toothed war hammer sideways. Lawson abandoned the Fang of Catachan and sprang backward. That thick iron-shafted weapon swept past less than three centimeters from his waist, trailing a blast of wind.
The instant he landed, he had already shifted his grip on the boltgun. Aiming at the giant Ork's eye socket, Lawson pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession.
Boom! Boom!
The first shot missed, grazing the cheekbone and tearing off half an ear.
The second shot went straight into the eye socket.
[Life Points +7]
The giant Ork's chain-toothed war hammer gave one unconscious swing and smashed down into a panicked cluster of gretchin beside it, flattening three of them in a single blow.
The corpse crashed down.
The floor shook.