With dull impacts and tremors that shook the earth, nearly a thousand Drop Pods bearing Nurgle's mark plunged like fangs deep into Pedetia's surface.
The hatches burst open with a teeth-grating screech of twisting metal, and thick, putrid gas spread outward alongside the Death Guard warriors emerging from within. In the experience of Typhus and these ten-thousand-year veterans, an orbital assault of this scale was enough to throw any undisciplined xenos army into chaos. Orks might be brave and unafraid of death, but against the Death Guard, reckless courage usually only got them killed faster.
Yet when the smoke and poisonous mist cleared a little, the sight before the Death Guard left even these Plague Marines, who had long since abandoned emotion, bewildered.
The Orks had not broken.
Not only had they held, they had performed what amounted to textbook evasive maneuvers almost immediately-while those thousand meteors were still drawing trails of fire across the sky, the Orks below had already instinctively sought cover, spread out, or simply hoisted nearby Gretchin over their heads as shields.
This was not because these Orks were particularly clever or rigorously trained. It was purely because-they were used to it.
On this planet called Pedetia, throughout those long years of trading blows with the humans known as the Death Seekers, the Orks had witnessed far too much destruction falling from the sky.
Whether it was the Imperial Guard's artillery saturation, the Adeptus Astartes' drop assaults, or even those human Kamikaze Corps pilots crashing straight down in shuttles packed with explosives-to the Orks here, things falling on their heads were simply
as natural as breathing.
Surviving these sudden, devastating strikes and grabbing a weapon to retaliate the very next second was no longer a tactic. It had been successfully etched into the DNA of every