An ork leapt high into the air, iron axe swinging straight down toward him.
“I’m about to die!
Hurry up and reload already!”
The two siblings looked toward Aldric, their hearts clenched with anxiety.
He just stood on the rock, completely composed.
“He…”
“Exoskeleton, activate!”
A thud, and someone stepped in front of Drool.
Drool looked up.
It was one of his clone soldiers, riot shield already raised and braced in front of him.
“My guardian angel!”
If he got hacked to death, his beta test score would tank.
He might even get kicked out of the test entirely.
It had happened before.
During the first Stellaris: Interstellar War closed beta, players with scores too low had been removed from the program.
He didn’t have time to think further.
Another wave of force slammed into them.
Bang!
Both of them were sent flying.
The impact rattled Drool from head to toe.
A hand appeared in front of him.
“Sir, get up.
Prepare to fight back!”
The other clone soldiers had already drawn their shields and locked together into a shield wall, pushing forward.
Drool really was drooling now.
A negative status had kicked in.
Between the gunshot and being thrown across the room, he was coughing up blood.
Whatever had broken inside him wasn’t small.
“Damn, this battle is brutal.”
Drool stared at his chest plate, wincing at the damage.
“My armor…”
A medic knelt beside him, pulled out a canister, and sprayed it across his chest.
A thick layer of foam expanded over the crumpled, deformed plate.
Then came a needle, jabbed into his arm.
The negative status cleared.
Every player’s clone squad had been assembled by Aldric with a purpose in mind.
One combat engineer, one medic.
Both there to keep the player alive.
Every clone he had selected was chosen for function over firepower.
And it showed.
It had to be admitted that the orcs were powerful, but their charge was immediately disrupted by the engineers’ defensive formation.
Drool shook himself off and rejoined the fight.
The players opened up together, pouring rounds downrange without stopping.
“For the God-Emperor!
Charge!”
From the defensive line above, the PDF garrison came storming down.
Caught between two forces, the orks couldn’t hold together front and back at the same time.
“Something’s wrong.”
“Their morale has collapsed!”
It had.
In Aldric’s display, the morale indicator on every ork had flipped to red.
That meant they had dropped below the threshold.
Orks in full rout were a different kind of terrifying.
They screamed and thrashed, raised their oversized guns, and opened fire on the soldiers standing right next to them.
The orks were killing each other.
“Have they gone insane?”
The players were baffled.
“Is this a bug?”
Viewers watching the streams shook their heads.
“The Stellaris dev team should have kept polishing the main game instead of rushing out a new mode.
Now there are bugs showing up already.”
“WAAAAGH!”
A roar rolled out of the tunnel behind the ork line.
*Clank Clank Clank Clank*
Like an enormous rusted machine grinding back to life.
“Something’s wrong!”
“Fall back!”
In Aldric’s display, every ork ahead of him lit up green across the board.
Forced morale surge.
That meant a boss had entered the field.
WAAAAGH!
A massive metal shape came crashing out of the dark.
It was a heavy mech that looked like an enormous iron barrel, standing at least seven or eight meters tall, a giant mechanical claw mounted on one arm.
The moment it landed, it came down straight into the middle of the PDF troops.
The soldiers who had just launched their charge were scattered like leaves.
The mechanical claw swung out on a length of iron chain, sweeping through the tunnel in wide arcs.
The uneven terrain worked against it.
The claw’s range and momentum were severely limited by the cramped, jagged space.
“Open fire, open fire!” The PDF captain shouted, his voice cracking with panic.
“Demolitions, get up there, take that thing down!”
Several soldiers carrying explosive charges rushed forward.
The chain saw caught them on the way in, but they managed to throw their charges onto the mech before they went down.
*BOOM BOOM*
The blasts shook the tunnel.
The shockwave knocked dozens of soldiers off their feet.
The captain shoved aside the fallen soldiers on top of him and looked toward the mech.
A mechanical roar cut through the smoke, half WAAAGH and half grinding metal.
The mech’s paint had been blasted off.
Some of its frame had warped.
Nothing fatal.
If anything, it was angrier.
He forced out three words, barely a whisper.
“Deff Dread.” (t/n: the original direct translation is killing can, this is where the tittle gets the Killing canned goods)
His face had gone white.
But his eyes only grew steadier.
Something rose through the exhaustion in his body, a force he couldn’t name.
He looked at the explosives beside him.
He picked them up and faced the mech.
“For the God-Emperor!”
Fwoosh.
A wall of flame swept across the corridor, cutting off the soldier before he could complete his charge.
“What is that thing?”
The players had all gone still.
It was a killing machine in the truest sense.
Chainsaws, claws, and pincers covered every surface.
And mounted somewhere on its frame was a flamethrower.
“Bullets aren’t doing anything to it!”
Aldric glanced back at the two siblings trailing behind him.
Two small, dark shapes trembling against the wall.
“You stay here, don’t run away.”
They were too scared to argue.
Too scared to run.
The orks alone had already been terrifying enough.
This thing had removed whatever was left of their will to flee.
“Only enough for one use?”
The currency of the mod system was Reputation, and a battlefield was the fastest place in the world to earn it.
He still preferred directing combat from a distance.
Better returns that way.
But the PDF soldiers were about to be wiped out.
If he waited any longer, returns would be the least of his problems.
No people, no Reputation.
“Load game mod.”
Psychic Surge!
A burst of psychic force detonated outward from Aldric’s body.
Then he vanished from his spot.
Left flank, low!
Aldric dropped into a light jump.
A chainsaw blade came down exactly where he had been standing.
Then…
Here!
The laser sword snapped out.
Aldric drove it upward in a single diagonal sweep, punching straight through the mech’s armor and into the cockpit.
BOOM!
The massive machine collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, crashing to the ground.
A long gash ran from the lower left all the way to the center of its frame, and fierce flames poured from the wound.
Aldric landed softly on top of the wreck.
The entire battlefield went silent.
Everyone stared.
When had he gotten there?
The captain tilted his head back and looked up at Aldric.
That man.
Standing on the broken mech.
A crack had split the tunnel ceiling above him, and a shaft of pale light fell through it, catching Aldric where he stood.
The captain sank to his knees, staring up.
The image overlapped with something in his memory.
A statue he knew well.
His lips barely moved.
“God-Emperor…”
“You haven’t shamed the name of humanity.”
“I recognize your courage.”
The captain pulled himself to his feet, raised his weapon, and nothing remained in his eyes but the will to fight.
“For the God-Emperor!
Charge!”
“They’ve mistaken me for the God-Emperor?”
It wasn’t the first time someone had taken him for a divine being.
It still annoyed him.
He had never liked being treated as a god.
Probably the mod’s fault.
The Modeling Optimization mod worked on all human perception.
It made Aldric feel, to whoever was looking, like the most complete version of the person they considered perfect.
It came loaded with an almost unreasonable degree of charm and approachability.
And the version of Aldric each person saw was just slightly different from the next.
It seemed trivial.
It was anything but.
The mod had been generating him enormous Reputation bonuses all along, and quietly laying the groundwork for every promotion he had ever received.
After all, handsome people and ordinary people simply experience the world differently.
Put an unremarkable face in front of a group and they might be indifferent and aloof to unattractive people.
Put a striking one in front of the same group and suddenly everyone wants to make a friend.