Once, the Tyranids had relied on brute force to overcome finesse, drowning their enemies beneath the Tyranid Swarm. Though the Orks had numbers to match theirs, the Tyranids often used excellent tactical deployments to achieve local numerical superiority and whittle down the Orks' fighting strength.
These recent encounters had been the exact opposite. Rather than engaging the Greenskins with superior numbers, the Tyranids used small forces to lure them in.
The pursuing Orks rarely ran into ambushes by superior Tyranid forces. More often, the two sides fought limited engagements on remote battlefields.
In these limited engagements, the Tyranid Fleet invariably included a Synaptic World Devourer, whose gathered psychic power blanketed the entire battlefield. It appeared to be strengthening the Tyranid Fleet and the warrior bugs, but Boss Slick believed there was more to it.
He felt these were clearly Tyranid testing grounds. The Great Devourer was having the swarm consciousnesses of its subordinate Tendril Fleets test new combinations of organisms, developing troop mixes and fighting methods better suited to battling the Orks.
On these small battlefields, the Tyranids fielded not only fleets and warrior bugs, but often entirely new organisms, improved from existing forms.
Moreover, whether they won or lost, they never got bogged down fighting the Greenskins. Sometimes, to avoid fighting an Ork fleet, they even plunged straight into a star.
Conversely, the few areas where they did lay ambushes were no longer small battlefields. The Tyranids deployed overwhelmingly superior forces against the Greenskins, then withdrew immediately if they could swallow them in one bite.
If they could not, and the fighting reached a stalemate, they also retreated at once, never lingering.
This really did let them sidestep the Orks' defining trait.
Orks needed to fight. Only constant fighting would make them stronger. They were not afraid of a