“Cough, cough, cough.” The younger sister broke into a harsh fit of coughing, her voice unsteady.
“Brother, what do we do now?”
“We follow them.
He said we’re human.
He’ll protect us.”
The older brother instinctively pulled his arms tighter around his sister.
There was something about that man’s gaze that drew you in.
Just being looked at by him was enough to feel, somehow, safe.
“Ow…
brother, you’re squeezing me…”
“Are you alright?” He loosened his grip in a panic.
“I’m…
I’m fine…”
The two of them wobbled to their feet, eyes fixed on the soldiers ahead, feeling a sense of reassurance.
Something about the sight settled the fear in their chests.
Maybe it was the full standardized equipment.
Maybe it was the man whose face seemed too perfect to be real.
Maybe it was what he had said.
The Federation protects all of humanity.
We are human too.
Follow them!
WAAAAAAGH!!
The orks’ war cry shook the entire tunnel.
They surged at the broken defensive line like something had unhinged them.
Past the line, the ground dropped away into the mine pit.
Once they crested it, the orks’ massive bodies would tear through any unarmored defender in seconds, pouring downward like a flood.
The underground tunnel was a three-way junction.
The human defenders were holding one tunnel mouth with everything they had, while orks flooded in endlessly from another.
The tunnel where Aldric stood had already been more than half overrun.
At the junction itself, the space opened wide.
The rubble barricades were buried under a carpet of ork corpses.
The defenders had been getting squeezed from two sides, and the pressure was immense.
Then Aldric’s clone army arrived, and the scales tipped back.
“Open fire!”
*Bang!
Bang!
Bang!*
The orks’ charge broke the moment the clone soldiers hit them from the flank.
The clone army carried standardized rapid-fire kinetic rifles, each loaded with sixty-round drum magazines.
Their firing lines swept through the orks like a row of scalpels, clearing everything in their path.
“They’re strong.
Are they Astra Militarum?”
The defenders belonged to the Planetary Defence Force.
The Astra Militarum ranked above them, and the PDF’s equipment depended entirely on whether their governor had any sense.
The orks’ thrown explosives had missed the defensive line, but explosions still went off inside it.
Nothing unusual.
Just standard Imperial quirks.
Their lasguns sometimes needed a full magazine to drop a single ork.
On a good day, the weapon jammed.
On a bad one, it exploded.
Federation rifles were another matter entirely.
A burst to an unarmored section punched clean through.
Three headshots in a row, avoiding the armor, and an ork went down.
The defenders watched the display of firepower and felt hope for the first time.
It only confirmed what they already suspected: these had to be Astra Militarum.
The players moved in three-man formations, pushing forward while using cover.
Three squads naturally formed a larger triangular arrangement, a shape that maximized their firing angles and drove a wedge straight into the ork lines.
There were a lot of orks.
But once the players’ fire tore open their formation, the charge lost its shape and its momentum bled out almost instantly.
“A good opportunity!
Take the position in one fell swoop!”
The PDF captain raised his weapon and charged through the gap in the barricade.
A dozen soldiers ran with him.
The junction was a three-tunnel crossroads.
Aldric’s Federation forces and the defenders had naturally fallen into a flanking arrangement, each covering the other’s blind spot.
Whoever controlled two of the three tunnels held the upper hand in this fight.
“Gretchin?”
Aldric’s gaze swept the battlefield.
Mixed in among the hulking orks were smaller creatures, wiry and scrawny, built like goblins.
They scrambled around shrieking, clutching picks and wrenches.
One shot was enough to put any of them down permanently.
The orks were still the main threat.
They wore thick chest plates hammered out of scrap iron and filled the tunnels with their WAAAGH.
“Holy hell, there are so many of them.
Is this a horde mode?”
It felt like one, but the viewers watching the streams couldn’t get enough of it.
The combat was dense and the action never let up.
“The gun feel is incredible.
There’s no hit feedback like other games, but the way they burst when you hit them looks so real.”
The semi-immersion experience was something else.
Drool was an FPS streamer at heart, and once he had settled into the combat rhythm, his natural talent started to show.
“These orks aren’t as dumb as AI bots, but they’re not exactly tactical geniuses either.”
They just locked onto a target and charged.
That was it.
The orks were also carrying weapons of a sort, cobbled together from scrapped parts and wreckage, the kind of thing that made you wonder whether they actually fired.
Drool shook his head.
“Come on, it’s still a game.
Are those even guns?
Can those pipe-weld contraptions actually shoot?”
Drool’s squad was the furthest forward of any player group.
He also had the highest kill count by a wide margin.
And his aim kept getting better.
With the players’ support, the PDF defenders reclaimed the gap the orks had punched through the line.
From the high ground, they could see most of the battlefield laid out below them.
“Captain, look at that soldier in the reinforcements.
His aim…”
“That can’t be right.”
But it was.
You could see it clearly.
From spraying rounds like he was watering a garden, to dropping an ork with three shots, to snapping between two targets in under a second and putting both down with a handful of bullets.
He moved like a raw recruit, but one who was adapting at a frightening pace.
And he wasn’t the only one.
On average, one in every three soldiers in the reinforcement group was visibly improving in real time.
What kind of outfit was this?
Even Astra Militarum didn’t produce results like that.
Some of the orks noticed the attack coming from the side, abandoned their push against the defensive line, and turned toward the players instead.
The players had broken the orks’ momentum.
They had also made themselves a target.
A deep, thunderous roar rolled out of the passage.
The players’ tunnel had no fortified position, no barricade, nothing.
It was wide open.
The only thing holding the line was the players themselves, arranged in their three-man cells across the corridor.
“Am I imagining things, or are they coming for us specifically?” one player said.
“Drool, pull back!
They’re targeting us!”
Drool blinked.
He had the highest kill count in the group.
He was also the furthest forward.
The orks came on like a wave.
Dakka dakka dakka…
“They’re…
they’re coming…” The two siblings had crept to the edge of the battle, tucking themselves behind a rock not far behind Aldric, barely a meter away.
They clung to each other, watching the ork charge with wide, frozen eyes.
Aldric paid no mind about the two filthy humans behind him.
Human was human.
He could tolerate a little dirt.
What he could not tolerate was betrayal.
Drool ran dry after his fifth consecutive kill.
“Wait, I’m out!
Oh no!”
Bang.
A shot connected with Drool square in the chest.
The orks had ranged weapons too.
Calling it a bullet was being generous.
The caliber was roughly the size of an infant’s arm.
The impact sent him flying two meters back.
“What the hell, that thing hits like a cannon!”
His chest plate was wrecked by the single shot, but he himself seemed intact.
Still moving, though his vision was swimming.
The defenders stared in disbelief.
“He took a direct hit from that thing and didn’t get turned inside out?”