Vraxos-Kam confronts two orks on a gantry.

“In the embrace of great Nurgle, I am no longer afraid, for with His pestilential favor I have become that which I once feared: Death.“— Kulvain Hestarius of the Death Guard

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Continued from Part 1 . . .

Blood and Gore

Kneeling behind the gantry railing, so as to avoid a lucky xeno shot,  Vraxos-Kam pulled a frag grenade from his belt, activated it, and tossed it across the gantry to the open ladder hatch to his right. It slid across the plasteel decking and disappeared down the hatch.

The explosion that followed—and the outraged bellow of the orks below—was quite amusing.

Yet, the Death Guard warrior doubted that a frag grenade was likely to kill the greenskins. Their constitutions were impressive. Not nearly as tough as those who bore the gifts of Nurgle, of course, but he had little doubt that the two orks were clambering up the ladder as he pondered the situation.

Indeed, despite the screams and roar of gunfire, he could heard the orks heavy boots as they climbed.

Vraxos-Kam rose, drew his chainsword, and strode toward the ladder hatchway. The first greenskin was pulling himself through the hatch. As he rose to his feet and raised his choppa, the traitor Astartes charged.

The two warriors met with a clash of choppa versus chainsword.  As Vraxos-Kam expected, the momentum of both weapons instantly cancelled one another out, and he spun 360 degrees and severed the greenskin’s head from his shoulders.

As the ork fell dead, the second greenskin rose through the hatch and charged. This beast was larger and stronger, and it took almost 45 seconds for Vraxos-Kam to slay him.

More Slaughter

Behind him, the two running orks on the deck below had met their fate at the hands fo the other Death Guard warrior. One had his face destroyed by a boltgun shell; the second died with a combat blade buried in the xeno’s blazing red eye.

The fighting below was coming to an end, with the Death Guard naturally the victors. A warlord was somewhere in the chamber, ordering everyone to rally to him. When Vraxos-Kam reached the gathering force of Death Guard, he was told that 12 boarding torpedoes had penetrated the Plagueclaw‘s hull, and more than 2,000 orks were running wild through the ship.

The greatest threat nearby was a starboard power-transfer node, and Vraxos-Kam was ordered to join a band of 20 warriors to clear away the xeno force there.

What followed were two bloody hours of fighting, much of it hand-to-hand combat. Surely, Vraxos-Kam thought, a Khorne warrior would have been in his element.  Even with the durability of his Nurgle-gifted body, the Death Guard warrior could barely stand at the end of the fighting.

He’d lost half his festering guts when an ork power klaw had ripped open his belly. After killing his xeno opponent, Vraxos-Kam had had to severe the string of guts that had spilled onto the decking, if only so he could move without tripping over his intestines.  What’s more, an ork shoota had blasted away a chunk of his upper arm, and three shoota shells had penetrated his armor and buried itself in his chest.

More orks attempted to join the fighting, but the Plagueclaw‘s captain managed to power up the ship’s engines and pull free the Death Guard vessel. Then he’d order the ship’s remaining weapons batteries to batter the ork vessel until there was nothing left but a lifeless hulk.

The Aftermath

Vraxos-Kam

Once the last ork was hunted down, it was determined that 70 Astartes and 8,000 slave crew members had died in the fighting. The starboard hull was stoved in, although the ship was, just barely, capable of void flight

After two weeks of effort, the Death Guard found that, despite the ork raid, the planet’s devastated cities still could provide the food and raw materials that the Plagueclaw needed. Thousands of prisoners also were seized and brought aboard–new slaves to replace the crew losses.

As for Vraxos-Kam, he spent several hours under the scalpel of a Plague Surgeon, who sewed up the warrior’s open gut and dug out the xeno shells embedded in his chest.

There was no need for further treatment. The gift of Nurgle ensured that, with time, his wounds would fester and restore him to a semblance of “health.”

Finally, the Plagueclaw  left Aroria II, dropping several virus bombs onto the surface in honor of their Chaos God. The traitor warship entered the Warp once it

reached the system’s Mandeville Point, and it disappeared into the Immaterium, heading to a  repair facility hidden away in the isolated region known as the Burning Frontier.

Click here to return to the battle’s beginning.

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The Corvus Cluster is a Warhammer 40K blog documenting our gaming adventures in the fantastical sci-fi universe of Games Workshop.