Chapter 478 - 478: Gargant!

After that, the rest of the matter resolved itself quickly. Once Inquisitor Trasolh made his intentions clear enough, the remaining Church officials wasted no time getting things sorted.

Lieutenant Colonel Noa and the more than six hundred imprisoned soldiers were released, walking out of the Church spire, free once more.

Up in the hive, still wearing her prisoner's uniform, Noa stood on the street, glancing back at the spire, thoughts churning behind her eyes.

Kian offered her a lit cigarette. "You angry?"

She took it, tucking it between her lips.

"This is my home. Whatever it does to me, I can't bring myself to hate it. Anyone who still has a home is already luckier than most in this universe, by a wide margin."

Kian shook his head. If it had been him in her position, he never could have taken it this calmly.

From Trasolh, he'd learned the full details.

Most of the imprisoned soldiers, Noa included, had been active on the front lines beforehand. The Church, not being a military organization, would normally have had a hard time reaching into the Astra Militarum to make arrests at all.

The only reason they'd succeeded was that the Governor's own people had actively cooperated, deliberately handing these six hundred over as a sacrifice to appease the Church, keeping it placated.

To put it plainly, the Governor and his leadership had knowingly written off these six hundred soldiers, offering them up voluntarily to stabilize the Church's grip on recruitment.

This, right here, was exactly why Kian had set his sights on becoming a Rogue Trader. The Imperium of Man, as a political system, had absolutely no room left for idealism, not a shred of respect for the individual.

The moment competing interests collided, sacrificing people had become basic, unremarkable procedure. Turning someone who'd made a mistake into a mutilated, gutted servitor happened as a matter of routine, every single day.

Given the current state of the Imperium, plenty of people probably wished the whole rotten system would just collapse already and start over.

Regardless, Kian had no intention of tying himself too closely to this empire. It was a regime that used inhuman methods as casually and constantly as breathing, purely to keep itself alive.

Afterward, Noa returned to Kian's side, resuming her role as liaison between him and the Governor.

As for the six hundred rescued soldiers, their faith in the system had been utterly shattered.

Before Kian had come to rescue them, they'd already been publicly humiliated by the Church's tribunal, sentenced to be burned at the stake in a matter of days.

Unlike Noa, they didn't have that same grace to spare. They felt betrayed, used as disposable playthings by the very Governor and Marshals they'd served, then handed over to the Church without a second thought.

None of them wanted to go back to their original units. They wanted to follow Kian instead.

Not one of them had expected Kian would actually come save them, and their loyalty to him now ran deep, practically overflowing.

These six hundred soldiers had originally been hand-picked elites from the PDF, and anyone chosen to take part in the assault against the Gorkamorka Walkers had already been the elite of the elite.

Given they'd volunteered themselves, and given their exceptional quality, Kian waved a hand and took every single one of them into his retinue without hesitation.

Conveniently, he'd already ordered several hundred sets of jump-pack power armour at the Titan Temple, more than enough to outfit this new batch of elite troops.

As for whether the Astra Militarum would have anything to say about him poaching their soldiers, Kian genuinely didn't care.

These men had been dragged straight off a burning stake by his own hand. If anyone wanted to come demand them back, they were welcome to try, and he'd take that opportunity to address a few of the Astra Militarum's own corruption problems while he was at it.

...

Meanwhile, across the planet, humanity's forces were advancing rapidly. By this point, 80% of the planet's landmass had already been reclaimed.

Humanity's army was sweeping forward with unstoppable momentum, while the greenskins had grown noticeably listless and disorganized.

The Governor and his Marshals were genuinely puzzled. This victory had come far too suddenly.

The once-endless, unstoppable green tide had gone strangely quiet, almost distracted, as though the Orks were preoccupied with something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, it was good news regardless. Humanity's forces across the entire planet pressed the offensive as hard as they could, eager to wipe out what remained of the Ork main force before shifting into full purge mode, eliminating the last of the surviving spores.

Everything was trending steadily upward. The Astartes had even begun contacting their strike cruiser, preparing to leave this planet for someplace that needed them more urgently.

But celebrating at halftime is a fool's move, and sure enough, disaster struck immediately after.

...

Meanwhile, at the planet's north pole, hidden inside a scrap heap no sensor array could ever detect, Three-Arm and Blackiron had made their home.

This massive scrap heap was, in fact, the wreckage of one of the very warships the Orks had dropped onto the planet's surface twenty years ago, back when they'd first arrived.

Now, from the very best, most valuable salvage that wreck had to offer, the Orks had assembled a genuine mechanical wonder.

Three-Arm, cradling his good buddy Blackiron, let out a wild, ecstatic roar:

"MY GARGANT!! IT'S DONE!! TODAY, IT'S FINALLY DONE!!!"

At the sound of his roar, several hundred thousand surrounding Mekboys erupted into an equally deafening cheer.

What they were cheering for stood towering at the center of the crowd, a terrifying creation, fifty meters tall. A Gargant.

"Gargant" was the general Ork term for their largest class of war-machine.

No two Gargants were ever quite alike. Their design was shaped entirely by chance, by whatever materials happened to be on hand for the Big Mek building it.

But broadly speaking, any Ork war-machine standing somewhere between twenty and a hundred meters tall earned the name Gargant.

This thing was, quite simply, a walking mountain.

Layer after layer of welded steel plate formed its towering frame, its surface bristling with turrets and close-defense weaponry, giving it the look of a mobile, hulking pincushion.

Given its sheer scale, the Gargant's "arms" barely qualified as arms anymore, resembling instead two colossal heavy-weapon mounts.

Its left arm carried a triple-linked 300mm autocannon, capable of unleashing an absurdly high rate of fire in massive 300mm high-explosive rounds.

Its right arm carried a massive pan-shaped device, a gravity weapon, capable of driving a seventy-to-eighty-meter circular zone into catastrophic gravitational overload, crushing tanks outright.

Mounted at the Gargant's front was a hunched, oversized iron head, sculpted into the snarling, feral image of an Ork.

Its face bore two eyes: one packed with a dense array of complex optical instrumentation, the other a full ship-grade lance battery.

Three-Arm had never fully gotten over Kian's mechanized laser weapons from their last fight, and it had clearly stuck with him. This time around, he'd torn a lance battery straight out of a warship and mounted it directly into the Gargant's eye socket.

Three-Arm had given this weapon a name: "Whoever I Look At Dies."

After celebrating for a good while longer, Three-Arm looked down at the stump cradled in his arms and asked:

"You ready? Pilotin' somethin' dis big ain't somethin' an ordinary Ork could handle.

You're gonna need a whole rig of psychic amplifiers bolted onto ya. Might just kill ya outright."

At once, a dozen or so Ork Mad Docs crowded in around them, the most deranged medical practitioners the Ork race had ever produced, nicknamed "Painboyz," whose entire medical philosophy boiled down to: wherever it hurts, cut there.

They carried an assortment of surgical tools horrifying enough to make anyone's blood run cold, along with psychic amplifier rigs as thick as rebar.

Blackiron stared up at the towering fifty-meter Gargant in the distance, his eyes burning with unmatched fanatical hunger, pure, undiluted desire for revenge.

"HURRY UP! Bolt whatever ya got onto me! I gotta pilot dis monster and go kill Old Fart Kian!!"

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