The Hammer of War, Chapter 36

Before I trampled and torched the Riverside Lodge and tore down every vampire and witch-thing that called it sanctuary, I figured I ought to test something. A theory. Or maybe just a gut instinct.

The Orkoids. My [Ork Nobz] and the lone [Squiggoth]. They were the only units I had with explicit mention of growth through violence. Said they got bigger. Meaner. Tougher. The more they fought, the stronger they got. Which, if true, meant they weren’t just weapons. They were investments.

I needed to know how fast they grew. How much. How far.

I didn’t plan on throwing myself into another meatgrinder like the Slaaneshi Dungeon again. That place still haunted the cracks in my skull. No, I wanted controlled conditions. Something manageable. Something I already understood. So I picked the first dungeon I’d ever conquered. The [Nurglite Dungeon]. Filthy. Rotting. Predictable. Mostly shambling corpses and the occasional demon that looked like it had been sneezed out of a god’s tumor.

I opened the dungeon and stepped through.

The sky turned green above me. Sickly clouds hung low like they’d been nailed to the firmament. The streets festered. Portland, but ruined. A copy of the real world painted with the bile of old gods. Buildings leaned. Bricks wept pus. Cars melted at the wheels and were overgrown with fungus like graveyard stones forgotten by time. The air stank of rot and warm phlegm.

Same as I remembered it.

I stood on a street corner. Asphalt cracked and lined with worms. A fire hydrant was belching steam in regular bursts like a dying lung. The ground squelched underfoot. I took a breath and called out the Orks.

With a thought, the [Ork Nobz (Power Klaws)] materialized first—two of them. Broad, brutish silhouettes with tusked jaws and jaws within those jaws. Both were over nine feet tall with arms as thick as the torsos of men, rippling muscle beneath their green skins. Their Power Klaws buzzed with power. Thick hydraulic pistons hissed as they flexed their oversized gauntlets. They looked around and bared their teeth.

Then came the [Squiggoth].

It appeared with a heavy tremor that cracked the street under it. Ten meters tall at the shoulder, covered in green-gray hide like a moving slab of war-meat. Its back was armored with slabs of iron hammered flat and riveted in place. Bone spines jutted out between the plates. And atop its back sat a crude cannon, a barrel the length of a truck, mounted on a wheeled platform that tilted as it moved. The beast snorted. Its nostrils flared wide. Its small eyes blinked in different directions.

I looked up at it and nodded.

This wasn’t an artillery platform like the [Exocrene]. It wasn’t meant to obliterate from afar. This was something else. This was a fortress with legs. Something you parked between you and whatever wanted you dead.

“Go kill everything you see,” I said aloud. “But stick together.”

The Orks grunted and barked and started marching without fanfare. The Squiggoth followed, lumbering after them like a landslide in slow motion.

I kept my distance. No need to get too close. This wasn’t my fight. Not today.

The first thing they found was a pack of Poxwalkers that staggered out of a sunken alley, their bodies riddled with pustules and sores. One dragged a rusted pipe. Another had a head that split open down the center when it screamed. There were maybe twelve of them. A dozen dead men with worms in their guts.

The Ork Nobz didn’t slow.

The first one drove his Power Klaw straight into the chest of the nearest walker, snapping bone and spine like twigs. The claw ignited with a sharp burst of blue light, and the corpse split in half. The second Nob swung low, tearing two more in half at the waist. Limbs flew. Blood sprayed. The Nobz roared, gleeful, stomping through bodies like they were grass. They moved like they were born for it. No tactics. No formations. Just noise and slaughter.

The Squiggoth barreled in behind them.

It crushed one Poxwalker underfoot with a wet pop. Another it gored on a tusk the size of a lamppost. The cannon on its back belched fire once, and a corpse was reduced to paste. Fungal growths that clung to nearby walls curled away from the sound. The beast let out a roar that shook broken glass from the windows of a nearby building. The Poxwalkers didn’t flee. They didn’t feel fear. But it didn’t matter.

They were all dead in less than a minute.

The Orks didn’t pause. They stomped onward, smashing doors and windows, searching for more. The Squiggoth followed, each step leaving a crater in the ruined street. I trailed them at a distance, unseen and mostly forgotten. I didn’t need to give orders. Not yet. I just needed to see how they fared. How fast they grew.

More mobs came.

Bloated zombies that exploded into gas. Nurglings by the swarm, chittering like rats, clawing at ankles. A Herald once, riding a floating stool of bone and fat, shrieking in a dead tongue. The Nobz tore him in half before he could finish his curse. The Squiggoth trampled the rest beneath its bulk. Even when a mob managed to surround them, it didn’t change much. The Orks bled, yes. But they bled like sharks. With joy. And the Squiggoth… it didn’t care. Its hide was too thick. The pus-coated blades of Nurgle’s children barely scratched it.

And then more enemies came and the same thing happened.

I skipped the Boss Fight. As it turned out, I could configure a Dungeon after beating it, allowing me a measure of control as to the number of enemies that spawned, including if I wanted a boss fight or not. I didn’t. I set the Dungeon to spawn an infinite number of basic mobs. Killing these wretches would do nothing for me–no rewards, nothing. Though I received a hundred War Points for every single day that passed within the dungeon, it did not matter much to me, because the true benefit lay in the growth of my Orkoid units.

They fought for an entire week.

Not in shifts. Not in bursts. But in an unbroken crawl of violence that stretched through the ruined streets and over the festering hills of this false city. No sunrise. No change of light. The sky above stayed the same shade of rotting green. The clouds hung heavy and unmoving like mold nailed to the heavens.

I sat atop the rusted shell of a delivery van, half-melted into the curb. The tires long gone. The windows opaque with dried bile. It groaned beneath me every now and then, but never collapsed. I leaned against a bent exhaust pipe, watching. Listening. The air was thick. Too thick. Choked with the stink of plague and the sweet reek of death made rich with time.

Time, though, had little meaning here.

I don’t know how long I truly watched. An hour. A day. A lifetime. The [System] said a week had passed. But the sky disagreed. The sun never rose. The wind never changed. The light was always sick and the shadows always shallow.

The Orks never stopped.

The Nobz grew broad and tall. Their skin visibly thickened and darkened, as if their blood had congealed beneath the surface. Their heights went from 9 feet to a staggering 11 feet, their muscles growing larger and filling up their enhanced frames. Their claws hissed louder with every swing, arcs of blue-white lightning crackling out with greater fury. That was an interesting thing to note. The technology that bound their weapons seemed to improve as they did, the metal claws becoming longer and longer, and appearing less ramshackled. 

They hunted and fought like beasts built from war and thunder.

The Squiggoth was harder to read. It had no words. No warcries. Just the steady pounding of its steps and the scream of its cannon as it fired. The cannon itself was no longer crooked. Its recoil no longer staggered the beast. The Squiggoth braced naturally now, without hesitation or adjustment. Its muscle memory had become instinct. How it actually took aim and fired with its weapon, I had no idea, since I didn’t see operators or crewmen. The armor that hung over its back had sunk deeper into the flesh, the plates now rooted like bone. Its skin had become a forest of scars. Its tusks shone with black stains and dried meat.

And it moved faster. Not fast. But faster. Enough to trample more enemies before they could scatter. A car could still easily outrun it.

They had changed.

They were growing. Slowly. Surely. Not in bursts, but in layers, like rings on a tree or the slow settling of sediment. I estimated a twenty percent increase in their total capability—size, strength, speed, endurance. Nothing dramatic. Not yet. But enough to be noticed. Enough to be measured. Enough to be feared.

I hadn’t lifted a weapon since stepping into the dungeon. I hadn’t fired a single shot. 

I simply watched and occasionally lept to another building when too many of the Poxwalkers and Zombies started shambling towards me.

And boredom crept in. A dull thing. Not sharp like panic or dread, but steady. The Orks did the same thing over and over, because the enemy never changed. Poxwalkers. Nurglings. Corpse-things that fell apart in the claw and tusk. They came in droves and they died the same way. It was challenging for them in the beginning. They struggled. Now, they still struggled, but nearly as much as before. In time, they cease to struggle at all. 

I rose from the van, boots sliding on dried ichor. I followed the Orks as they lumbered down a wide street that used to be Commercial, before the infection. The windows of the shops were broken. The blood had dried brown. A thing of the past. Even in this false world.

The Nobz shoved over a bus and crushed the things inside without slowing. The Squiggoth stepped over a fallen billboard that advertised new shoes for a world that no longer wore them.

They kept moving. And I wondered:

How much longer would they grow?

There had to be a point where the challenge ended. Where the fight no longer taught them anything. I saw that moment creeping closer each day, marked by the way the Nobz handled their kills. Early on, they still grunted and strained—grew irritated if a zombie's bony claws tore at their flesh. But they learned. Grew. By the end, their kills felt casual, as though swatting flies from their faces.

It took another week of constant violence to reach that threshold. A week in which I did little but watch and wait, my [Blank] aura at full strength to keep the shambling hordes from crowding me. Whenever the diseased things drifted my way, they simply fell apart under the null zone, their dead flesh peeling like old paint. It felt like a grim vacation in a place where the sun never rose or set.

The Nobz changed first. They weren’t just [Ork Nobz] anymore; the System now listed them as [Greater Ork Nobz]. I saw them, day by day, gain mass and height. Their muscles stretched tight across new bulk, skin darkening to that deeper green. In the last hours of that second week, they stood thirteen feet tall, shoulders broad enough to press through alley walls. They moved faster than their size allowed, their weight hardly slowing them. Each one had grown a chest full of scars and trophies. Their laughter boomed in the rank air, echoing through the husk of the city.

Their Power Klaws evolved along with them. Bigger. Louder. The steel plating swelled to fit giant hands. Hydraulic joints hissed and spat sparks with each flex. They wore them like second skins—natural extensions of their brutish arms. I’d watch from a rooftop, or behind a ruined bus, as those claws sheared through whole packs of plague-walkers in a single slash.

The [Squiggoth] changed too. It was never small, but now it looked positively monstrous. Its back bristled with thicker armor plates that blended into flesh. Its steps carried thunder. When it fired the mounted cannon, the recoil barely rocked it anymore. The thing moved as though the fluid in its veins had turned molten. Each stomp rattled windows. Buildings crumbled if it leaned against them. In the end, it stood far taller, the hide a labyrinth of scars and patches where its muscle had adapted to hold on more plating.

They had reached a place where the dungeon’s hordes posed little threat. Poxwalkers that once caused them to grunt and curse now found themselves smashed apart in instants. The vile demons that lurked deeper in the infected blocks stood no chance. A blow or two, and they were gone.

They had outgrown this rotten realm. I knew then our time here was done.

I sent them back into the [System] and promptly closed the dungeon. 

It was finally time to make a vampire cry.