9. Gladiatorial Combat

It was time.

Steve did not consider himself an indecisive man. The only reason he had kept the Crimson Fists from taking too large a role before was to preserve as much of their effective strength as possible.

After all, if they kept fighting the Orks to the end, they would inevitably have to meet their Ork boss. Sending ordinary soldiers into that kind of battle was no different from sending them to their deaths—unless he immediately dropped twenty Valiant Blades down there. In that case, forget one Ork boss; even five more would get chopped to pieces.

But if he did that... he could just wait for one of them to suddenly have a flash of inspiration and start cobbling together metal shells into a mech of the same size. There was precedent for it. No one knew what strange things they were capable of making. No one knew how they managed it, either.

Orks were even more bizarre than the damned Warp Evil Gods. At least the Demons of those Evil Gods were willing to follow the laws of physics when they manifested in the material realm.

Thinking of this, Steve could not help but feel a headache coming on. There was no helping it. The disgusting thing about Orks was not limited to that; there was also the postwar cleanup of the ground. Their flesh and blood could spread spores. If left alone, more Orks would soon grow from them.

Before long, the warriors of the Crimson Fists had assembled before the fortress. They were not many in number. A Chapter's standing establishment was only one thousand men. After that damned disaster, they had lost six hundred in one blow, and now they had only just recovered to five hundred.

The entire Chapter deployed—if their opponent had