How could they beat a Skaven nest with what they had?
One Orc, thirty-odd Goblins, sixty Snotlings who only knew how to throw rocks.
The Skaven had hundreds down there, maybe thousands.
Marcus’s tribe wouldn’t even be a snack for them.
For now, there was only one thing to do – block it.
“Move rocks!
Big rocks!
Block da rat-hole!
NOW!”
The Goblins and Snotlings scrambled, dragging stones, broken beams, and dirt, piling them into the Dwarf tunnel until the entrance was a crude, ugly wall.
It wouldn’t stop Skaven for long – they could dig through anything – but it would buy time and stop the green smoke.
Then he counted the cost.
Eleven Goblins dead, gutted by Clanrat claws.
Five Snotlings dead, bitten in half.
Thirty-eight Skaven dead, their black blood soaking the rocks.
Spoils: Five rusty but real iron knives, eight spears with actual iron heads – Skaven-made, crude but better than sharpened wood.
No armor worth taking.
Skaven leather is tainted with warpstone and disease, even Snotlings won’t wear it.
You’d get a rash that makes your skin fall off.
And five Dwarfs.
Alive.
He had his tribe drag everything back – the dead Goblins, the dead Skaven, the iron.
The living Goblins stared at the dead Skaven with hunger.
Marcus stopped them.
“Don’t eat da rat-things!
Their meat is poison!
Burn ’em on da fungus field!”
This was important.
Skaven corpses are full of warpstone residue, but burying them on the fungal field would still release nutrients, and more importantly, burying his own dead Goblins would seed the field with their spores.
In a month, new Snotlings would sprout where they fell.
That was the Ork way of honoring the dead – recycling them.
He had them plant the dead Goblins deep in the richest part of the mushroom field, faces down.
The Skaven corpses he had thrown into a pit and covered with dung and dirt, away from the good fungus.
Then he took the five Dwarfs on a tour of his “great tribe.”
It was embarrassing.
A dozen lean-tos made of rocks and bones, a half-built lumber camp in the eastern woods, and his own hut, which was just bigger rocks.
The Dwarfs’ faces, already pale from being underground, went grey.
Firebeard’s beard actually trembled with rage.
He thought he had been captured by a mighty Warboss.
This was a beggar tribe.
Marcus pretended not to see.
He crouched and drew in the dirt with his choppa.
“Listen, Stunties.
You iz children of da mountain.
You know rock.
We have lumber camp now.
Now we need stone.
I want quarry.
On east mountain.”
The Dwarfs scoffed.
Greenskins?
Quarry?
Greenskins just picked up rocks and threw them.
But Marcus kept drawing.
He wasn’t drawing a human city with wide streets and pretty houses lining a river.
He was drawing an Ork settlement.
A big wall of trash and rocks.
A pit for Squigs.
The fungus field along the river because it needs water.
A big pile for scrap.
And fortifications – not neat Dwarf walls, but jagged, ramshackle walls with spikes.
It was crude, but it had a plan.
No Greenskin had ever shown Dwarfs a plan.
Firebeard stared, despite himself.
“You…
you draw like a Dawi engineer with a head injury, Grobi.
But…
you have a quarry in mind?
And streets?
Grobi don’t have streets.
They have trampled mud.”
Marcus pointed his choppa at the east ridge, where the rock was grey and striped.
“I know there is iron there.
My nose smells it.”
He was lying.
He couldn’t smell iron.
But he knew from Warhammer lore that the Worlds Edge Mountains were full of iron, and the east ridge looked like ironstone.
The Dwarfs exchanged glances.
They could indeed find iron.
Their ancestors had mined these mountains for three thousand years.
Firebeard spoke.
“We can find your iron, Grobi.
But we have a condition.”
Marcus already knew.
“You want me to destroy da rat-nest.”
Firebeard was shocked.
“How you know?”
Marcus thought, *Because every Dwarf has a Book of Grudges thicker than my thigh and Skaven are page one.* He didn’t say it.
He just nodded.
“Once I have iron choppas for all my boyz, we go kill rats.
Not more than one year.
But until then, you help me build.
You obey.
That is da debt.”
Firebeard slammed his hammer against his chest.
“I, Gram Firebeard, Ironbreaker of Karak Azgaraz, swear by my hammer and my ancestors!
I will help you build your dung-heap tribe until iron is found and rats are dead!
Then our debt is paid!”
Marcus grinned and slammed his own choppa against his chest, mocking him.
“And I, Marcus Ironhead, swear by Gork and Mork!
I will not eat you until then!
Deal!”
It was the most unholy alliance in the Badlands.
Five Dwarf Ironbreakers, bound by oath to help an Orc build a quarry.
Marcus immediately assigned twelve Goblins and thirty Snotlings to the Dwarfs.
“You work with stunties!
You do what they say!
If you disobey, I eat you!
If stunties hit you, you deserve it!”
The language barrier was real.
Dwarfs shouting in Khazalid, Goblins shouting in half-Reikspiel.
But Goblins are clever mimics.
Iron Egg was already repeating Dwarf words, badly.
The priority now was housing for the Dwarfs – not because Marcus was kind, but because Dwarfs would die if they slept in Goblin filth.
They needed stone walls and a roof that didn’t leak.
And they needed meat, not mushrooms.
Greenskins can live on mushrooms and sun, Dwarfs can’t.
Meanwhile, Gaptooth’s story was unfolding in his tiny Goblin head.
Gaptooth was only six months old.
In Goblin terms, he was a teenager.
Since he sprouted from the fungus in the Southern Badlands, he had heard one name whispered with awe: **Grom, da Paunch**.
A Goblin, fatter and bigger than most Orcs, who led a WAAAGH!
so big it marched all the way to Ulthuan and ate Elves.
That was Gaptooth’s dream.
To follow a boss with a big WAAAGH!
and become big himself.
So when his old boss fell asleep, Gaptooth stole his boss’s prized Jumpy Squig, jumped on it, and rode north, across half the Badlands, to join Grom’s WAAAGH!
He never made it.
Grom was already gone.
And he was captured by this weird Orc who had a strange name – Marcus Ironhead.
What kind of Ork name is Marcus?
It sounds like a human.
Not enough Dakka.
These past days, Gaptooth had planned to escape every hour.
But that annoying Goblin Iron Egg followed him everywhere, asking questions.
“Where you from?
How many boyz?
What da south like?
You have Squig boss?”
Gaptooth wanted to punch his other teeth out and make him Gaptooth Two.
Then Marcus put him in the fighting mob.
A wooden spear and a wooden lid as a shield.
And the nightmare training began.
Every day, stand in mob, run around tribe, stab straw man.
Gaptooth was too tired to escape at night.
But today, in the fight against the Skaven, he understood.
When the rats came, the Goblins who had trained didn’t die.
They put shields up together, like a wall.
They stabbed together.
The ones who didn’t train – the ones from the lumber camp who were still lazy – died.
After the fight, Gaptooth felt…
bigger.
His arms were thicker.
The system would have said he leveled up, but for him, it was just WAAAGH!
energy.
And then the boss called him.
Marcus tossed him a real iron knife, taken from a dead Clanrat.
Rusty, but iron.
“Cut da rat tendons.
Do good, dis knife is yours.”
An iron knife!
In his old tribe, only Orcs got iron.
Goblins got sharp rocks.
Gaptooth forgot about escaping.
For an iron knife, he would follow this weirdly named boss to the end of the world.
Marcus, meanwhile, was not happy like Gaptooth.
The battle had terrified him.
Thirty Skaven almost killed his tribe.
What would three hundred do?
He watched his Goblins digging stone with bare hands, bleeding fingers.
It was too slow.
He grabbed Iron Egg.
“Go to forest.
Find vines.
Long, strong vines.”
He was going to make baskets.
Not a human biogas plant, just baskets.
So Snotlings could carry stones on their backs, and Goblins could carry more wood.
Productivity.
He spent the whole afternoon teaching a few clever Goblins how to weave vines.
They were terrible at first, then their fungal brains clicked and they made baskets better than his.
By sunset, every Goblin in the lumber camp had a crude vine basket on his back.
It was a small harvest.
Five iron knives, eight iron spearheads, a blocked Skaven tunnel, five grumbling Dwarf engineers, and baskets.
But it was a harvest.