For the next several weeks, the Imperial defenders huddled within the towering yet tottering walls of the Bastion of Resolve, long since steeped in despair, endured days that were both suffocatingly strange and a morbid chance to catch their breath.
The deafening Ork war cries, the roar of shootas, and the pounding of siege engines seemed to have been paused by an invisible hand.
The scorched earth outside the city, once submerged beneath the green tide and filled with savagery and destruction, had now fallen into an unnatural, almost feverish silence—a "silence" filled with countless metallic clangs, crackling energy arcs, excited shrieks, and, more horrifying still, the groans of structures being forcibly torn apart.
The Orks, that green plague whose brains held nothing but "WAAAGH!!!", seemed to have completely forgotten the hive city that was theirs for the taking.
All their energy, all their fervor, swarmed like maggots drawn to rotting flesh toward the depths of the Necron tomb they had named the Bright Iron Hole. It had become their new playground, radiating a deadly allure.
The Orks had long since used brute force to widen the tomb entrance into an enormous, ragged-edged breach, as though the earth had been torn open with a savage wound.
Inside and outside the entrance, the area had become a vast, chaotic open-air workshop, dwarfing any factory in the hive city.
The air reeked of ozone, molten metal, and scorched organic flesh, usually belonging to some unlucky Boy, Gretchin, or even a Squig.
Alongside those smells hung a strange energy signature with a cold, metallic tang—the leakage from Necron technology being violently dismantled.
The Mekboy Boys, that blend of "geniuses" and "madmen" within Ork society, had now taken center stage.
They brandished power wrenches larger than themselves, welding torches spitting electrical arcs, and even