[color=9e0b0f][h3][b]Pentious[/b][/h3][/color]

[color=007236][h2][b]Forge Beta[/b][/h2][/color]

Originally called Forge Beta by its human creators, what was once a bastion of technology and humanity had long fallen into disgrace and defilement. It had been denied the dignity of complete destruction in its final moments of human control, instead having been gutted by under-powered self destruction rituals in a last ditch attempt to take as many of the Greenskins with it as possible and prevent those that came after easy access to its facilities.  

Unfortunately, Orks were nefarious for their ability to 'loot' just about anything they set their minds too. The fact that Forge Beta had been badly damaged wasn't overly that important to them and their Mek Boys descended upon it like scavengers using its corpse as the foundation for their new nest. 

Forge Beta was an abomination, its human origins still poking out in defiance in some places but otherwise bent and twisted to the will of the Greenskins. Spikes, weapons of all variety (almost all of them unleashing a deafening noise when fired) and walls that on the surface appeared to be scrape metal wielded together in some cases... or stuck together with the Orks own dung in others. All of it lambasted with the hideous browns and reds of the Kneekapperz tribe.       

Mere hours ago, an invasion army of orks left the Forge behind in order to march on the overstretched and underpowered Toothbreakerz tribe to stomp 'em good and bring their turf under Kneekapperz' control. 

Mere hours later, five or so damaged trucks with battered and injured orks clinging to the side rolled back up the road in order to return.

There was a degree of confusion among the Greenskins at the main gate, but even as word was sent to the Boss that some of the boyz sent out had come back, the big ork sitting in the shotgun seat in the lead truck leaned out the broken window and shouted up one of the correct pass phases in a voice that sounded a bit like a radio turned all the way up ("[i]OPEN THE BLOODY GATE OR I'LLZ SMAZH YA HEADZ IN!!![/i]") so the gate was opened and the trucks came inside. 

The orks that stepped off the truck were strange to the eyes of their fellow greenskins. They were clearly orks, even if all of them were covered in stitch marks, missing limbs or inflicted with a variety of burns (often in combination with each other), but the stiffened why they moved around, gazing off into the distance as they dumbly walked forward. 

The majority of the veterans of Waargh Kracker'Laker had died with the Warboss himself years ago, but there were still one or two boys around who recognized the look, through had never witnessed it on an Ork before. This was something that happened sometimes to other races when the boys had stomped on them good and were taking slaves, one or two of them might simply be so overwhelmed by defeat that something... broke in them. They generally didn't last long as slaves, but to see such a thing happen to a fellow ork was... unnatural. Unnerving even. These broken orks didn't seem inclined to talk to anyone and they just dumbly walked off... and they were given the space to do so by Orks that honestly didn't want to catch defeat or whatever it was they had.

As the trucks pulled to a stop and the big ork in the front stepped out, it was clear that they had likewise suffered harm in the manner of his fellow survivors. Stitching had clearly been used almost to put all of his limbs and parts of his torso back together, different shades of orkish green flesh suggesting that the parts used might not have all originally been his own. The skin on his face was discolored further, as where his eyes should have been, a glowing red light was all that was in their place. A speaker of sorts was sticking out of his throat, clearly allowing what must have been a very injured ork the ability to speak; Some doc had gotten a field day out of him and he had been in bad enough condition to let it happen.

Even as the big ork was barking radio like orders at his fellow survivors, the air nearby crackled with unnatural energy as, with a flash of light, Mekboss Thumper manifested from his teleportation, causing the stupid gretchen that had been standing there that [i]hadn't[/i] gotten out of the way fast enough to explode as a thick, metal leg suddenly appeared inside of him. No one noticed, or cared beyond the Mekboss shaking some of the gore off as he walked forward. 

"WHY YOUS GROTS BACK ALREADY?! AND WITHOUT THE WARBOSS OF THE TOOTHBREAKERZ SKULL!" The massive ork rumbled as he lurched forward on his mismatched legs, stopping every now and then to shake off some more gretchen meat. Despite the mismatched legs, Mekboss Thumper towered over the ork that had taken over what remained of the broken invasion force, even at the distance between them. The height difference only grew more pronounced as the Mekboss drew closer, as the power klaw on the boss' left hand was almost as big as the ork he was yelling at.

The radio that was pulling duty as a voice box crackled to life as it answered in a grainy tone "HUMANIES SET UP AN AMBUSH WITHIN THE CRAPPY TOOTHBREAKERZ ONE! MAYBE IF YOU WERE ACTUALLY THERE INSTEAD OF SITTING AROUND HERE ON YA FAT ASS LIKE A STUFFED DINNER SQUIG, WE MIGHT HAVE NOTICED IT BEFORE IT WENT OFF!" 

Ork settlements of any kind tended to be loud places and silence was just something that never happened until after the explode that consumed it had faded away, but right then and there the closest thing to stunned silence that could exist around living orks settled in as every greenskin in the vicinity turned towards their warboss and this recently 'promoted' nob. There were some things that Orks didn't say or do unless they were either completely confident they could win the resulting fight or they actively wanted to die; Calling the Boss a stuffed dinner squig to his face in front of all the boyz was a challenge for a fight to the death if ever there was one and regardless of the outcome, this was gonna be good!

Mekboss Thumper blinked several times as he looked at this patchwork of an ork that had dared to yell an insult back at him in stunned silence; Getting insulted by another ork that was challenging him for Boss of the tribe was a very normal occurrence, but normally challengers were bigger and stronger and generally had an actual chance. This was honestly the first time he had ever seen an ork commit suicide by Warboss, but as the rage at the impudence of the little frakker started to boil his blood, Mekboss Thumper stepped forward, his power klaw shooting out and snapping around this unworthy challenger faster then would be believed before....

...The crushing of metal instead of bone?

The explosion that followed was large and consuming in that the ork body in the klaw was completely destroyed as the blasting charges implanted into its body went off. The klaw itself was blown asunder, rendered useless even as the Mekboss' defensive shielding flared to life; While the shield likely hadn't been the difference between life and death since any ork claiming to be a Boss tended to be a rather tanky bastard, it did manage to protect him from the worst effects of having a blasting charge exploding in ones face. 

The orks in the crowd weren't so lucky. 

While they had been far enough away from the Mekboss and his 'challenger' to avoid that explosion, what few if any of them had noticed was a number of 'surviving' orks from the trucks slipping into the crowd about to watch the fight. Confusion and panic surged among the greenskins as a wave of powerful explosions suddenly ripped through their ranks, killing and maiming seemingly at random as attempts to find out what the zorg was going on were failing to get anywhere. 

Then the trucks opened up and the Skitarii inside opened fire on targets of importance as squads of Myrmidons charged in order to get in close. 

From the front truck, Myrmidon Uixien seemed to manifest as he launched himself at Mekboss Thumper. 

The engagement between the two of them lasted a total of 7 seconds. Despite the loss of his klaw and dealing with being knocked off balance by the explosion, Mekboss Thumper had been able to parry the first blow of Uixien's axe with the broken remains of his klaw, endured the blast of plasma to the chest as the barrel was physically shoved through the shield before being fired and managed to get his zap gun up and pointed at his foe because a backhand from Uixien knocked it off target. The struggle ended quickly as the rad-gun was unloaded into his face, destroying his organic eye and causing his mechanical one to freak out before the second and third blows from the axe came down, ending the Mekboss' life. 

The second target that Uixien turned to was a nob that had managed to survive the explosions to the point where he had managed to defend himself against one of the assaulting Myrmidoms by slamming a power klaw of his own into the poor woman's chest and yanking out a lot of her torso, tossing her wounded but still alive body to the ground with the intention of finishing her off. It didn't get the chance to before Uixien was upon it. 

As some of the Skitarii broke from their fireteam in order to pull the badly wounded Myrmidom to the relative safety of the trucks and medical aid, Uixien scooped up her fallen axe in his off hand and proceeded to wield both in a whirlwind of death, striking down any foe that dared to get his attention for any length of time. 

Somewhere else within the former Forge, additional explosions started to go off. Defensive weapons were taken out of commission and the main gate of the stronghold started to grind open again, this time with no intention of closing. As the entrance way to Forge Beta started to run low on orks and begin to look somewhat secured, one of the Myrmidom covered in orkish blood pulled out a flare gun and fired off a blue flare into open sky outside. In the distance, outside of sight from the forge turned orkish stronghold, a variety of transports flared to life as they started to race across the terrain. The reconquest of Pentious by its rightful owners had began! 

............................................

The reconquest of Forge Beta was not done in a single day. 

Purging greenskins from [i]anywhere[/i] tended to take time, no matter how many advantages had been gained going into it. The extermination of the invasion force they had sent out prior followed by the death of their Warboss alongside a respectable number of orks in the opening moments went a long way, but orks by nature were stubborn bastards who didn't know when they were meant to be dead yet and rarely accepted defeat until there were no orks left alive. 

Inciting what machine spirits remained that were willing to listen to the Tech Priests had resulted in a number of Forge Beta's long neglected systems that had somehow survived orkish occupation being employed to help in the cleansing, through it was clear that Forge Beta was going to have to undergone in intensive campaign to cleanse each and every system and restore it to proper function again. So many malware and data daemons created by the ork's savage abuses and mockery of science that would need to be undone and put to rest...

The orkish defenders took their grim toll in quite a number of human lives and ceremonies of mourning had already being scheduled to take place once Forge Beta was properly secured and defensible once again. A sad reality of conflict and war, but the pain of losing those good people was somewhat offset by the balm that they had given their lives for a victorious win. One that came at much less of a cost then predictions had feared. They may have died, but they died retaking a forge that had been lost to humanity for [i]far to long[/i] and they would be honored as heroes for it.  

As the mastermind behind the gambit that opened Forge Beta to reclaimation, alongside the one who felled the Warboss of the tribe holding it and the wholesale slaughter of a number of orkish defenders from the original breach and throughout the operation to reclaim Forge Beta as a whole, Rik Uixien would be granted a great deal of prestige and credit for the success. His plan to take orkish corpses from the original ambush and turning them into makeshift servitors to be puppeteered by tech priests remotely in order to better infiltrate the main gate, give the vanguard as much of an opening advantage as possible and sabotage defenses while forcing open the main gate had been a topic of some debate prior to the operation, but its overwhelming success had vindicated it. 

Success would cause new problems of course; The cleansing and restoration of Beta, purging the lands between Forges Alpha and Beta of orkish life so that logistical networks could be safely organized, patrolling those secured areas to ensure they [i]stay[/i] secured... but as far as problems were concerned they were a pleasure to have.