The battleship Fortune began a fierce bombardment, raining Macro Cannon shells and Lance beams onto the surface.
A shell plunged into a Digestive Pool and exploded violently, splashing green fluid everywhere.
A beam struck a fleshy, hemispherical Hatching Chamber seven or eight stories tall. The chamber burst apart, scattering tens of thousands of incompletely developed Tyranid embryos across the ground.
The various Tyranid artillery pieces on the surface fired streams of bio-plasma into the sky as well. They struck the Fortune's Void Shield, sending ripples across it, but failed to penetrate and damage the hull beneath.
Both sides traded fire in a furious, noisy exchange.
Half an hour later, the Fortune's Void Shield could no longer withstand the Bio-Plasma Cannons firing from across the surface, and the ship chose to withdraw.
Its engines fired at full thrust, driving the enormous battleship away from the battlefield to escape the Tyranids' ground-based artillery.
In just over half an hour of bombardment, the Fortune's main guns had devastated roughly one hundred square kilometers of ground, completely destroying every Tyranid structure within that area.
Fluid from the Digestive Pools had splashed everywhere, and the fleshy Hatching Chambers had been blasted apart, carpeting the ground with slime and shredded meat.
For any other species, such a terrifying orbital bombardment would have crippled its cities and factories. Unfortunately, that was not true of the Tyranids.
Smoke blanketed the bombarded ground. Hundreds of billions of Rippers poured in from other Tyranid-controlled areas, covering the land like a rising tide.
The Rippers opened their bloody maws and swallowed the shredded flesh, digestive fluids, and other organic matter.
Some crawled into intact Digestive Pools to recycle their biomass.
Others clustered together in groups of hundreds of thousands or millions. Their bodies secreted slime, mutated, and fused, forming pimples the