While Lin Fan and the others caused chaos in the rear and the Space Marine squad rooted out the Orks' artillery fortress, what was the situation like on the frontal battlefield?
The God-machine Titans had vanished from sight. In the wilderness beyond Hades Hive, only the Imperial forces and the Ork army remained, exchanging fire.
A new defensive line stretching across the entire subcontinent had been constructed. To prevent Ork counterattacks, these lengthy trench positions had been built in three full layers.
Tens of thousands of regiments with different designations had gathered, with over a hundred million soldiers clashing against a roughly equal number of Orks.
Now that they had left the complex hive city behind, there were no sturdy fortresses or gun towers with excellent fields of fire—only pockmarked ground full of steaming shell craters, accompanied by bones long buried underground and vehicle wreckage dug up by shells.
In this war, neither side still possessed the apocalyptic weapons they had brought at the beginning. Neither side had those mountain-like Titans. Only a small number of Knight Titans and Gorkanauts, over ten meters tall, appeared on the battlefield.
But these creations, so few they could be counted on one's fingers, were not the protagonists of the battlefield.
The true strength behind this counteroffensive across the entire subcontinent lay in the countless Astra Militarum soldiers, the cheaper and more expendable Chimera transports, and the rugged, reliable Leman Russ tanks.
And the various artillery pieces unleashing deadly bombardments: Basilisks, Manticores, Medusas, quadruple siege mortars. Every last piece of reserve equipment had been hauled out.
This desperate counterattack had to drive the Orks completely out of the subcontinent.
"Damn it, Berkman! Turn the gun! Turn the hull! We have to face the hull forward!"
An armoured unit had already been almost completely wiped