Chapter 495 - 495: The Trial of the Mountain (II)

Kian kept climbing, and as he climbed he snarled in a low, rough voice.

"You want to test whether I'm tough? Then let me tell you something. The only way to find out how hard a pane of glass is, is to smash it!"

He kept talking and he kept climbing. His head was spinning worse and worse. His mental reserves were almost gone. Any second now his grip would give, and he would fall into the endless abyss below.

"You've been dormant for twenty years! Twenty whole years, sitting there like a museum piece, locked up in a luxury temple by some mechanical worm!

"He thought he was doing you a favour. He thought this would win you over. But he never figured it out. This isn't what you want!!

"I know what you want. Every one of you colossal god-engines was screaming for war from the moment the molten metal of your bodies cooled!

"Every rivet, every weld seam, every surge of power through your circuits exists for one purpose: destruction!

"And that mechanical worm kept you here like a mint-in-box action figure, so you'd never get your war!

"And at the very end, he'd rather push you into the lava pool and see you destroyed than let you out onto a battlefield to roar!"

Kian's hand climbed three more holds, and then his mental reserves ran dry. He could not lift his hand again. He could not reach the next ledge.

He hung there over the bottomless drop with his head tilted back, staring at the blurred figure at the summit who was watching him.

His hand began to shake. One by one, his fingers slipped from the crack in the rock.

At the end, only two fingers were still hooked into the crack. He kept his head up, glaring with a twisted face at the silhouette above that sat in judgement of him.

Then his fingers relaxed, and his body plunged into the abyss.

As he fell, he poured the very last of his mental strength into one final roar that shook the spiritual world:

"TITAN!!! You coming with me to the front to throw down? Or are you gonna get dumped in the lava pool and scrapped? YOUR CALL!!!"

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The super rotary shoota on the Gargant's arm unloaded a volley of enormous shells. They slammed into the maze of structures inside the Titan Temple and threw up billowing sheets of dust.

The Astartes caught in the barrage took heavy losses. They were still reeling from the blasts when the greenskins came howling out of the dust in a full charge.

Sergeant Nor'n had his bolter up. In one rapid, precise string of shots, he blew the heads off ten Mekboyz.

A Killa Kan came barrelling toward him. He flicked a magnetic meltabomb at it almost casually.

The meltabomb clamped onto the thing's face and detonated, writing it off in a single blast.

But there were too many Orks, and they were too well equipped. Of the fifty-odd Astartes who had started this fight, only thirty-something remained.

Nor'n took one look at the green tide surging toward them and knew the line couldn't hold.

"Everyone fall back! Fall back behind the last wall!!"

The Astartes turned and ran on command, filing through the small gap left open in the wall and into the compound beyond.

Streams of Skitarii and armed workers ran with them.

This last wall guarded the innermost facilities of the Titan Temple.

The Titan pyramid and the Titan itself were here!

The Astartes and the last hundred-thousand-odd surviving Mechanicus Skitarii spread out through the compound and dug in.

They hid in factory windows and behind hastily built barricades, rifle barrels poking out, trained on the great ring of steel wall in the distance.

From beyond the wall came the Orks' bellowing WAAAGH, gunfire, the roar of engines, and every so often the thunder of heavy metal music.

Worse than any of that, worse enough to fray a man's nerves to nothing, was the tremor of the Gargant's colossal feet as it lumbered forward, one ponderous step at a time.

BOOM.

BOOM.

BOOM.

The booming drew closer. Every human inside the steel wall held his breath, finger resting on the trigger.

Inside their helmets, even the Astartes' faces were slick with sweat.

The footsteps came closer and closer, and then they stopped.

Then the world blazed red.

With a hideous, sizzling whine of laser fire, a stretch of steel wall more than three hundred metres long melted before their eyes. The liquefied wall pooled on the ground in a thick, glowing lake of lava.

Beyond it came a single roaring "WAAAGH!", and the Gargant's giant foot came stamping down into the molten slag. Stride after heavy stride, it marched into the heart of the Titan Temple.

The moment its vast, demon-king silhouette came into view, the morale of every soul present dropped to absolute zero.

Some of the armed workers simply broke. Lasrifles clattered to the floor as they fell to their knees, screaming wordlessly.

Even the heavily augmented Skitarii felt their fingers twitch.

Then Sergeant Nor'n stepped forward. He raised his bolter high, levelled it at the Gargant, and roared his defiance:

"If this is the end, then FOR THE EMPEROR!!!"

BANG! BANG! BANG!

Nor'n's bolter hammered away. His courage lit a fire in the other Astartes, and they poured fire into the Gargant with every weapon they had.

Once the Astartes opened up, the terrified workers and Skitarii raised their own weapons and joined in.

But against the Gargant, their small arms did nothing. The void shield swallowed every round without effort. Not a single hit got through.

Blackiron's crazed laughter blared from the loudspeakers.

"Dat's IT? Dat's all ya got? Puny shrimp, dat ain't even a LITTLE bit WAAAGH!!"

The Gargant's rotary shoota slowly lowered, its monstrous muzzles tracking down toward the tiny figures shooting at it.

Blackiron's grin split all the way to his ears. He was about to fire, about to blow away every last one of them below...

In that instant, violent fireballs erupted across the void shield right in front of him!!

Blast after blast went off against the Gargant's void shield. Each was like a kiloton-yield bomb going off, so powerful that the surrounding air compressed and ripped outward in a brutal shockwave.

The sudden barrage stopped the Gargant cold. Its mechanical head reared up and swung toward the source of the incoming fire.

When Blackiron saw who it was, he let loose the most ferocious war cry of his entire life.

"OLD!! FART!! KIAN!!!"

In the distance stood the Reaver Titan, over forty metres tall, atop its transport carriage. Its Gatling blaster, silent for more than twenty years, had just fired its first volley. Pale smoke curled from the barrels.

The colossal Titan stepped down off the transport. One giant foot and then the other struck the ground as it strode toward the Gargant.

Kian's voice came out of the Titan's loudspeakers, dripping with mockery.

"Blackiron. Daddy already told you once: on 496a, you're nothing but a grot~" (delivered in the deepest, most ridiculous vocal-fry croon imaginable)

Fused with the Titan, Kian strode forward. Each time the Reaver's colossal mechanical feet hit the ground, the earth shook.

For reasons he couldn't explain, Blackiron felt a wave of pressure. He let out a bellow and fired his super rotary shoota and the red lasers in his eyes at the same moment.

The dense clusters of bolt-on weapons covering his hull opened up with every kind of bullet and rocket he had, and the giant missiles slung across the Gargant's back launched in unison.

In an instant, thousands of rounds of every description came screaming toward the Reaver Titan on trails of black smoke!

The Reaver kept advancing, unshaken. Its dozens of point-defense weapons fired beams at the incoming heavy missiles, and the fearsome-looking Ork warheads burst apart in midair.

The super rotary shoota's shells and the smaller rockets slammed into the Titan's void shield and were gone in a puff of smoke.

Kian laughed out loud and drove the Titan forward in huge strides, each one covering fifteen or twenty metres!

"Come on, open up for me~" (the void shield, obviously)

The Gatling blaster on the Titan's left arm began to fire. It was a rotary cannon built like an old-fashioned Gatling gun, with a 1,000mm bore and six barrels.

The barrels made one full turn per shell, turn and fire, turn and fire, about one 1,000mm shell every two seconds.

These massive-yield shells hit with devastating force. They burst against the greenskin void shield and threw up towering clouds of black smoke!

The explosions blotted out Blackiron's view for the moment. He roared in fury:

"Old Fart Kian! Ya can't rip open me shield! I'm gonna KILL ya, I'm gonna kill ya DEAD!!"

But Kian wasn't firing on the Gargant to kill it. He was using the shells to kick up smoke against the void shield and blind Blackiron for a few seconds.

While his opponent couldn't see, Kian pushed the Reaver forward in long strides and closed the distance fast!

Both steel colossi had their void shields up. So what happens when the void shields of two different war engines touch?

They merge, like two soap bubbles!

Kian kept striding forward. His void shield shoved Blackiron's aside, and the Ork infantry, Ork tanks, and Ork walkers on the ground lost their protection. They were now wide open to the Titan's heavy weapons!

Kian instantly triggered the Apocalypse missile launcher on the Titan's carapace and unleashed a sea of rockets across the battlefield!!

Mounted on top of the Reaver was an enormous rectangular box, and inside it were more than two hundred rockets, each over 500mm in calibre!

Because the launch tubes were so long, the rockets were long too, every one of them over fifteen metres. That meant each one carried a huge explosive payload.

Each 500mm rocket carried more than a ton of explosives!

Two hundred rockets launched meant more than two hundred tons of explosives delivered!

Once launched, the Apocalypse missiles each picked out a target of their own, whether an Ork battle tank or an Ork walker!

The explosions rolled together into one continuous roar. Small mushroom clouds rose across the ground, and the elite greenskin armour escorting the Gargant was wiped out to the last vehicle!

The ground was pocked with enormous craters and littered with Ork armour blown down to spare parts!

With a single salvo, the Reaver Titan had all but flattened the Orks' doomsday army!

With most of their main force destroyed, the surviving Orks began to panic.

Inside the Gargant, Blackiron could clearly feel the WAAAGH energy flowing through him draining fast!

Big Mek Three-Arm let out a shrill shriek:

"Dis ain't good!! Da WAAAGH-field's gone down by a THIRD!!

"Do somethin'! We can't let Old Fart Kian slaughter da boyz! If all da boyz die, we die too!!"

In a panic, Blackiron turned the rotary shoota on Kian and pumped out round after heavy round.

But Kian was already inside Blackiron's void shield. He immediately shrank his own shield down until it barely covered the forty-metre Titan.

A void shield's coverage could be scaled up or down. At full size it could cover a circle ten kilometres across, and at minimum it could shrink to about a hundred metres.

It could also drop and restore in an instant. When you fired, the shield would open for a split second as your shell passed through it, let the shell out, and then close again.

It was an extremely responsive piece of equipment, not something you switched on and left sitting there.

Now that Kian was inside the radius of the Gargant's void shield, he shrank his own shield right down so it covered only himself.

Then he turned the Gatling blaster on the Ork units that had survived the rocket strike and fired like a madman.

The Titan's dozens of point-defense weapons and high-powered laser cannons, worked by their gunners, poured a sea of laser fire into the greenskins all around.

Every shot from the Gatling blaster could clear the armour from an area the size of two or three football fields, and it never stopped firing.

Shell after shell went out without pause, and the sea of Ork armour turned into a field of corpses!

The Titan's dozens of point-defense lasers were enormously powerful too. Their beams, as thick as a man's thigh, blazed away at more than a thousand shots a minute!

Wherever the high-energy beams swept, any Ork armoured vehicle they touched had its armour melted through and blew apart!

The Gargant's shoota kept firing at Kian, trying to stop him from butchering the boyz.

But Kian ignored it completely. The Titan's void shield stopped every shell the Gargant threw, and Kian focused entirely on gunning down the Ork forces around him!

He knew the Gargant's enormous power came from the WAAAGH-field generated by the Ork boyz. He had to deal with the boyz first, and only then could he take on the Boss!

Until now, the human side had had no strategic asset that could match the Gargant, so the Orks had been pounding them.

But now the Reaver Titan was on the move. It could walk right into the enemy's void shield and shoot the Ork units sheltering beneath it. Kian was about to teach these Orks who their daddy really was!

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