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

[b][color=9e0b0f][h2]Forge-Beta[/h2][/color][/b]

Nature abhorred a vacuum. Orks merely saw it as an opportunity.

With the Kneekapperz's effectively destroyed as a tribe, with its leadership beheaded and its power base shattered and taken by the local humans, a power vacuum had been created in the orkish political landscape. While Forge-Beta had been a weaker position of power and production for greenskin kind due largely to the fact that parts of its self-destruct rituals had been triggered in earnest while an utterly brutal defense beforehand and during said rituals had spent most of its stockpiles and likewise damaged more of it in the process while other forges had by comparison been taken with relatively little issue, it had still been a position of power.

One that was, by Greenskin standards, now up for grabs. The fact that the humans had been the ones to take it and were intent on keeping it was more of a bonus in their violence loving, reptile eyes. 

This was to be expected of course. Part of the calculations and plans for retaking Forge-Beta was holding it from those greenskins seeking to claim it for themselves. They had covered their bases in that regard because any campaign in which calculations of the possibilities weren't hammered down to the final 1 or 0 was one that was taking a high degree of unacceptable risk. They had been prepared for anything.

...So in true orkish fashion, they broke reality. 

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Examining the dead post battle was a sadly necessary tradition of humanity from well before they had originally left their homeworld. Normally it was to allow for recognition of the dead so that a life that was cut short for one reason or another could be officially declared deceased and the proper records kept, messages sent home to survivors, ect. Sometimes through, it was to work out just what exactly had killed them, in the hopes that the knowledge would help save others.

As Rik walked along the site of the now ended battle he felt the rage, horror and disgust that his body was producing at the brutal, unnatural things he was seeing. He isolated them, implants assisting with the process because right then and there they were merely a hindrance in performing the task in front of him... but once it was done he intended to allow himself to experience the sensations in full. Failing to experience them at all would have been inhuman after all.  

Some of the dead had been killed in more... conventional manners. Blunt trauma, bullet wounds, blades... typical injuries and causes of death where orks were concerned. Their deaths were unfortunate and those skitarii would be missed, but they weren't the reason for this autopsy in the field.    

Even from a distance, he could feel the warmth radiating from the still molten, still [i]glowing[/i] corpses of the fallen. Even as he observed them, listening to the occasional pop or burst of some piece of cybernetic that had somehow survived being turned to slag finally surrendered to the heat, his mind was processing the combat footage. Those viewpoints that didn't reveal the information he needed were put aside until he had a collection of several feeds, showing an interesting pair of orks.

The first was designated as a 'Weird Boy'. Such creatures had been encountered by the humans of Pentious before, through they were rare. Their abilities were... [i]poorly understood[/i], with the how and why so far being unknown. Their rarity and habit of not dying in one piece (be it via their own unstable power or the effort needed to kill them) made dissection attempts few and far between. 

What he did know was that the vid feeds showed the greenskin shooting some kind of lightning from its glowing eyes that 'chained' between several Skitarii. Despite the fact that the standard implants and kit of the Skitarii included means to ground themselves from electrical discharges, armor being non-conductive and had plenty of systems in place to prevent overheating, within seconds all those struck started to be cooked alive as all the metal in their bodies heated up to the point of melting... and remained in that state over an hour later. The screaming stopped after forty five minutes.        

The second persona of interest was clearly a Mek Boy... and thus one was wielding something that was completely new to the war on Pentious as far as records Rik had access to could tell. 

From the vid feeds, the Mek Boy had some kind of cage on its side filled with the smaller 'gretchen' subspecies and a strange, closed tube like 'weapon' under its other arm. It would take the time to fish out a clearly unwilling and unhappy Gretchen and shove it into a slot on the side of the tube before pointing it towards a target and pulling a trigger. Vid feeds tended to get... glitchy whenever the trigger was pulled, unable to properly record whatever exactly was happening. The aftermath, however...

Watching a gretchen be morphed with someone like what records revealed to be a technological teleport gone horribly wrong was terrible enough, but it seemed that whatever process the ork was using to teleport its 'ammo' also drove them completely insane as their cowardly nature was completely abandoned as they started to recklessly attack whomever they were now fused with or inside of, intent on digging themselves out.

The grand finale of the 'Weird Boy' loudly declaring that "'e could dos t'at too!' before looking towards a Skitarii and...

Well, the vid feeds didn't reveal exactly what happened. Much like the strange ork gun, all the feeds suffered glitches at the time... with those actively seeing what happened having their data corrupted and those moments lost to history. The aftermath could be seen with the naked eye through... 

A popped balloon filled with blood and meat as the cybernetics tailored to be installed inside of a full grown human critically failed to co-exist with the squig that the meat part of the man had somehow been converted into.

The orks had withdrawn after that point. Tactically it had been a probing raid rather then a dedicated attempt at pushing for the Forge. But as Rik gazed upon the carnage and felt goosebumps form on his skin that had nothing to do with temperature, he allowed himself a moment of questioning how mankind was meant to overcome such inhuman madness as this... before he turned his thoughts towards answering that question.