The air froze.
Six Ork boyz stood at the far end of the corridor, gripping a collection of twisted, ugly weapons.
Forty or fifty gretchin were packed together behind them, pointed ears sticking straight out. A moment ago they had been shoving and bickering. Now every last one of them had gone silent.
Lawson was crouched at this end of the corridor.
Behind him, his five Deathsworn held their Fangs of Catachan. Half-roasted Ork thigh meat still rested on their legs, and grease still gleamed at the corners of their mouths.
Time seemed to stop for about three seconds.
Three seconds was enough for a bolt shell to leave the chamber, bury itself in a target, and complete a mass-reactive detonation.
It was also enough for an Ork boy's brain to carry out the most complicated piece of logic it would ever perform in its life.
Ork brains might be crude and brutal, but when it came to recognizing the flesh of their own kind, they possessed astonishing accuracy.
After all, mutual cannibalism among juvenile Orks was practically everyday life when growing up in a spore-breeding pile.
"Dem... humies..."
"Are eatin' our lads?"
A wave of sharp inhales rose from the gretchin behind them.
In greenskin culture, eating the flesh of one's own kind was no taboo.
Quite the opposite. Big Orks eating small Orks, strong ones eating weak ones, was one of the most basic laws underpinning greenskin society.
But humans eating Orks?
That, they genuinely had never seen before.
Lawson raised the Fang of Catachan level, its point aimed straight at the scar-faced Ork boy opposite him.
With his left hand, he crooked his middle finger and index finger twice.
Then he laid his thumb across his throat and slowly drew it sideways.
Come on.
One-on-one.
Numbers One through Five mirrored the gesture at the same time.
Five Fangs of Catachan rose in unison, and five hulking men delivered the challenge.
Then the scar-faced Ork boy grinned.
The corners of that broad green face split wide, revealing two rows of jagged fangs.
"Heh heh heh..."
In the shared instincts of all Orks, any creature bold enough to eat greenskin flesh, whatever species it belonged to, was automatically classified as hard prey.
Because only true predators treated their quarry as food rather than as a threat.
The scar-faced Ork boy looked down at the heavy shoota in his hand, then looked back up at the knives in the hands of the six humans opposite him.
Clang!
The shoota hit the floor.
The scar-faced Ork boy reached behind his back and dragged out a massive chainblade choppa.
"WAAAAAGH!"
When an Ork threw aside its ranged weapon, drew a melee weapon, and answered an opponent's challenge head-on, it meant it acknowledged that opponent's worth as a warrior.
The other five Ork boyz saw what their boss had done.
One after another, six shootas and other crude firearms hit the floor.
In their place came all manner of absurdly oversized melee weapons.
The gretchin exploded into a frenzy.
"Fight! Fight! Fight!"
"Kill dem humies! Boss! Smash their bones!"
"Make new hats outta their skin!"
"I bet boss kills the biggest humie in three chops!"
"I bet two!"
"What're you bettin' with? You ain't even got pants!"
A few of the bolder gretchin had already started wagering among themselves, with stakes ranging from a human tooth to half a rusted iron pipe.
To Orks, combat was not merely a means of survival.
It was something close to a religious ritual.
A fight that was good enough, brutal enough, would make the Waaagh! energy gathering over the battlefield almost visible as a green field of force.
Deep down, Lawson quietly let out a breath of relief.
If the enemy on the other side had not been Ork boyz but some treacherous skinny black-hearted bastards instead, he would already have led his men into the vents and run for it.
But Ork boyz were different.
Their brains only ran on one rule: whoever fights better is the boss.
If you dared provoke them, they dared answer.
If you used a blade, they used a blade.
If you stripped to the waist and fought bare-chested, they would practically want to tear off their own pants and come at you the same way.
And that was exactly what Lawson could exploit.
Because he had never intended to have a fair duel with six green monsters over two meters tall.
There was no such word as fair in his dictionary.
The six Ork boyz started marching forward.
Their heavy iron boots thudded against the metal floor.
Four to five hundred kilos of bodyweight, plus all that scrap-metal armor, made the whole corridor tremble faintly.
"WAAAAAGH!!!"
Their pace quickened.
Walk became run.
Run became charge.
Six green mountains of flesh hurled themselves forward at once, and the corridor rang with a roar like an armored column advancing at full speed.
Lawson also lunged forward a single step.
His right foot kicked with perfect precision against what looked like an ordinary metal railing on the left edge of where he stood.
He and Number One had tampered with that railing an hour earlier when they passed through.
This fifteen-meter stretch of corridor ahead was, in fact, a suspended structure hanging over a vertical shaft more than forty meters deep. The floor's entire load-bearing strength depended on four support arms welded into the side walls.
The weld joints of those four support arms had already been cut to the threshold of failure an hour earlier by the serrated back edge of the Fang of Catachan. The instant the locking pin was kicked free, the structure lost its final mechanical restraint and could no longer bear any additional weight.
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE!
The fifteen-meter corridor floor gave way at the exact moment the six Ork boyz charged into its center.
Their own several tons of combined weight, plus the force of their headlong rush, shattered the last surviving welds.
The whole corridor collapsed downward like a bridge stripped of its foundations.
Dozens of tons of metal decking, along with the six Ork boyz still mid-charge, plunged together into the shaft more than forty meters below.
"WAAA..."
They did not even finish shouting "Waaagh" before the jagged wreckage of support beams and sharp metal projections at the bottom of the shaft ended them.
[Extracting native soul energy: 10 points.]
[Detected Chaos frenzy factor within soul energy.]
[Initiating underlying-law purification process... Purification complete.]
[Actual Life Points gained: 7.]
[Life Points +7]
[Life Points +7]
[Life Points +7]
Six Ork boyz.
Forty-two Life Points gained.
On the far side of the broken corridor, the surviving forty or fifty gretchin had watched the entire thing.
"Cheaters! Sneaky humie cheaters!"
"They killed da boss! Dat humie cheated!"
"Shoot 'im! Shoot dat humie!"
Bang! Bang bang bang! Szzzt! Szzzt szzzt!
Forty or fifty gretchin opened fire almost at once.
Shootas, bad autoguns, slingshots, and one gretchin who somehow produced a crude pipe bomb with its fuse still smoking and hurled it toward Lawson as hard as it could.
Lawson and the five Deathsworn all pivoted and withdrew at the same time, retreating into the dead angle of safety on this side of the broken floor.
The gretchin kept shooting for about fifteen seconds, which was already the limit for their shoddy weapons.
Several shootas jammed from sustained fire, and two of them blew apart outright, leaving their wielders howling in agony.
Lawson was just about to order Numbers Two and Three to circle around through the side passages and flank the other side.
Then, from deeper in the opposing corridor, a greenskin army came surging forward like a green tsunami.
At least forty or fifty heavily built Ork boyz marched at the front of the horde.
Among them was one greenskin so large it stood out even from the others.
The gretchin that had arrived first saw their reinforcements and instantly had their morale explode.
"They're here! Da big mob's here! Kill dem humies!"
Lawson lunged first toward a vent entrance in the left wall that had already been marked during earlier scouting.
"Everybody fall back! Into the ducts!"