One major reason Tzeentch's guidance had been so effective was that what he said was true: once Octaria fell, Boss Slick's status would rise, and he would become even stronger.
More concretely, the Great Devourer's relentless attacks and efforts had paid off. Boss Slick's fleet had been drastically reduced to fewer than a hundred thousand ships. This proved that continued fighting could potentially isolate Boss Slick, and the Great Devourer intended to press the offensive again.
Yet those hundred thousand Ork warships had lost little of the combat power they had possessed when there were a hundred and eighty thousand, because the Ork bosses who survived the war had grown stronger.
This was especially true of the eleven-meter-tall Boss Slick. The Great Devourer felt that assassination attempts against him were utterly ineffective; every single one had failed. The Tyranid Swarm could not accumulate experience as quickly as Boss Slick grew stronger.
War made Boss Slick happy. Very happy. He had received Trazyn's gift: a suit of close-fitting armor that could change shape at will.
When he first received the armor, Boss Slick had suspected a possible plot. Only after grasping the armor's spherical form and using his own authority to activate the Tek-Soul within had he felt safe wearing it.
This... was a suit of war armor made with Old Ones technology, designed specifically for Krork Orks.
Even setting aside the powerful weapons mounted on it, the armor was immensely valuable simply for improving his affinity with the Waaagh! field and his ability to control it.
Pitch-black armor covered Boss Slick's entire body. Its close-fitting material felt like a second skin, yet that skin could let an infantryman take a direct hit from a macro-cannon without suffering a scratch.
Flying through space, Boss Slick raised both arms, and a thousand-meter-long