A Few Days Later…
Well...
The news had finally reached us.
Big E had officially begun his Great Crusade.
No, seriously.
What a magnificent troll.
A human Cegorach.
How, just how, could someone preach militant atheism while looking like a pagan god and then call his galaxy-spanning conquest a Crusade, for Terra's sake?
And this winner of the Father of the Millennium Award still expected people not to worship him as a deity while simultaneously stamping out every religion he encountered.
What could I say?
A model representative of h-h-humans...
"Seriously..." I groaned, burying my face in my palms. "Hooow could he possibly call his conquest campaign that...?"
My companion merely shrugged with complete indifference.
Of course.
She had been born an Aeldari.
There was simply no way she could understand the overwhelming secondhand embarrassment I felt whenever I watched the antics of my former species.
Thank Cegorach I'd become an Aeldari.
I never would have survived the atmosphere of militant atheism during a freaking Crusade.
"Fine. Enough self-reflection."
I let out a long breath and resumed walking through one of the Webway tunnels as we continued the mission Cegorach had assigned us.
"We've got Orks coming up, and they're ten times stranger than all of this."
Unfortunately, this particular passage was far too narrow for either a spacecraft or even anti-grav jetbikes. It felt less like traveling through the legendary Webway and more like participating in a cave expedition. Unlike most sections of the ancient network, its supposedly indestructible ceiling hung surprisingly low above our heads.
Three meters at most.
Sadly, it was also the only route into the Telon Reach.
A region currently occupied by the most powerful Ork empire in existence, ruled by... who would've guessed...
A relic from ancient times.
A genuine Krork.
One of the last surviving members of his species who wasn't currently sitting inside one of Trazyn's display cases.
As we continued our monotonous march through the endless tunnel, everything I had learned about the Krorks resurfaced in my thoughts.
Like my new race, they had been another superweapon created by the Old Ones specifically for the battlefields of the War in Heaven.
They were the literal embodiment of warfare itself.
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Naturally, none of that knowledge had survived within humanity's historical records.
The Black Library, however, remembered.
If one took the modern Orks, themselves nothing more than degenerated descendants of the Krorks, multiplied their technological sophistication and martial prowess ten or twentyfold, then added a touch of genuine aesthetic refinement to everything they built...
The result was a Krork.
They had been monsters.
The Necrons had preferred exterminating them through planetary annihilation and stellar detonations rather than meeting them in either ground combat or fleet engagements.
Based on the records I'd read, the entire situation was almost hilariously absurd.
The Old Ones had simply run out...
Before the Krorks did.
Then, when the Necrons finally decided they had no desire to continue fighting enemies that had grown impossibly powerful over the course of the War in Heaven, they devised an astonishingly elegant solution.
They exploited the Krorks' greatest weakness.
Their need for constant warfare.
The Necrons simply...
Stopped fighting.
Then entered the Great Sleep.
Their calculations were straightforward.
During the countless millions of years that followed, deprived of worthy enemies, the Krorks would inevitably regress.
When the Necrons finally awakened...
Their terrifying opponents would no longer exist.
Meanwhile, the Krorks retained their ancient programming never to attack their allies among the Aeldari.
The galaxy simply no longer offered conflicts on the scale they required.
"Smart."
I folded my hands behind my back as I walked.
"Very smart..."
Ha!
Back in my previous life, fans had spent years arguing over why the Necrons had chosen to sleep.
The answer turned out to be astonishingly simple.
And frighteningly logical.
The Orks couldn't wait forever for another great war.
Eventually, they regressed.
The immortal metal skeletons, meanwhile, couldn't have cared less about the passage of time.
Much like us while traveling through the Webway.
Time flowed differently here.
Far more slowly than it did in realspace.
As a result, Aeldari aged even more slowly while traveling through it, while journeys spanning hundreds of light-years required laughably little time.
That was how we reached the Telon Reach far sooner than seemed possible.
"The influence of the Ork gods is strong here..."
I shivered slightly as strange, unnatural urges to pick a fight with someone began stirring inside me.
Killing Mockery answered with her usual indifferent nod before activating her camouflage field.
A heartbeat later, I did the same.
This mission was extraordinarily dangerous.
Orks.
That alone explained everything.
Stealth was absolutely essential.
Especially within this star system, a place the greenskins had occupied continuously since prehistoric times.
It wasn't the largest concentration of Orks, or formerly Krorks.
The Aeldari's interest in the system stemmed from an entirely different reason.
It served as the technological heart of the entire Ork race.
Before us drifted a monstrous asteroid roughly the size of a small moon.
Gorro.
Yet even the asteroid itself was overshadowed by what had been built upon its surface.
A colossal fortress.
An entire mountain range encased in armor forged from the greenskins' impossibly bizarre alloys.
Engine arrays stretching for kilometers had been drilled directly into the stone.
Its jagged surface bristled with orbital batteries, gargantuan howitzers, and massive mortars, some so enormous they remained visible even from the planet where we currently stood.
The monstrous construct drifted lazily through the system.
Not in any stable orbit.
Not according to any rational law of celestial mechanics.
It wandered wherever it pleased, dragging additional asteroid fortresses behind it on immense chains while gargantuan greenskin battleships escorted it through space.
"To put it in Ork terms..." I whispered as quietly as possible while continuing forward. "Gorro is really big."
Killing Mockery looked toward it and nodded solemnly.
Together, we slipped into one of the countless greenskin fortress-cities.
Our objective was simple.
Infiltrate one of the local vessels.
Travel to a nearby junk world.
Complete our assignment.
Disappear just as quietly as we'd arrived.
What assignment?
Oh...
It revolved around one simple fact.
Only Gorro produced Red Plasma.
A technology dating all the way back to the War in Heaven, born from the impossible genius of the Krorks and inherited by their degenerated descendants.
The Orks genuinely believed that because it was red...
It was faster.
And because it was faster...
It was stronger.
Please don't ask me how that works.
At all.
The important part was that the Orks had believed it for more than sixty million years.
Which meant that, inside the vast psychic field generated by enormous concentrations of greenskins, Red Plasma became one of the most devastating weapons in galactic history.
Fully aware of what the future held, Cegorach intended to ensure that this technology would not vanish during the Great Crusade.
And we...
Were the ones tasked with making sure of it.
Later, it would be rediscovered and recreated during a future Waaagh!