Editing Story:Warhammer 60K: The Age of Dusk (section)

==Additional Background Section 5: The War-Race Tempered: The Ork Risen==

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In the opening years of the Second Age of Strife, the orks as a race battled their nemesis, the New Devourer, and in doing so were destroyed in that titanic struggle which raged across hundreds of sectors. Though they had not been aware of it, their actions had inadvertently saved the entire galaxy from the New Devourer. While their war had been futile, it had delayed the hybrid Tyranid-Ork menace, which eventually found itself drawn away to fight some unseen foe beyond the galaxy. In the midst of the horrors of the strife age, people dared to hope that perhaps the orks themselves were made extinct in this great conflagration.
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The audacity of hope is so easily quashed, for the Orks yet lived.


Minute spores and fungal helixes were left behind on the millions of abandoned greenskin worlds. However, it would take many thousands of years before the spores could fully recover, and spread like a bacterial plague through the undergrowth and organic matter which flourished on their former worlds. One such planet was the world of Lexin Fidorich. The humans there had come from the nearby Feudal Technocracy known as ''Shunter-Beerne'', who had eagerly captured this nearby world, which was impossibly fecund and fertile. By M52, Lexin was a flourishing world of diverse environments made tame by the sterile crop-science of the cybernetic humans who tended this veritable garden. However, the Feudal Hyper-Lords of the Shunter-Beerne soon found their woods and forests infested with strange red beasts with ugly tusks, and a belligerent attitude. This was intolerable, and long-limbed game keeper constructs cleansed the biomes of these beasts with gunshot and flame.


This was a mistake. Smaller green creatures began to appear in the woods. They watched and scurried through the woods. Occasionally they would steal children or set fires, and stole massive quantities of metal sheeting and cut down sections of woods. Again, the long-striding machines killed most of them; but not all. Those who were birthed afterwards filled in for their fallen, and the building of crude settlements began.


Within the space of a decade, Feral monstrous warbands were roaming across the planet. Tranquil glass cities were smashed by the tread of hundreds of vast squiggoth beasts, and the crude firearms of their riders. Throughout the now-infested woods, an ancient cry not heard in millennia rang out; ''waaaaaaaaagh!''


More and more powerful constructs were deployed on the surfaceby the Shunters, with ever deadlier weapons, but this only speeded the advance of their foes. Soon they had to abandon their planet. They did not possess exterminatus grade weaponry however, and thus they could not prevent the feral ork's spread.


This story reoccurred on dozens of sectors and systems across the galaxy, followed by hundreds upon hundreds after that. In particular feral orks tended to thrive just on the cusp of the various inter-power struggles which were ongoing across the galaxy; there were veritable masses of feral orks on the border with Grand Sicarium and the Kassars, as well as the unruly space between the Thexians and the Tau, and on the fringes of maelstrom space. One of the Demiurge Brotherhoods (''The collective of Hashut'') even began to enslave feral ork bands for use in their schism against their rival Brotherhoods. As the shattered galaxy had no singular authority to recognize this building force, every lesser faction assumed these were localized threats and barely contained them.


However, these feral bands of barbarians were naught but the wisps of powdered snow before an avalanche. At the close of the 52nd Millennium, there were signs across the galaxy. Feral orks were driven into fits of prophetic madness, and weirdboys chanted and babbled insanely. Something churned up the warp, and the powers realigned, for they could sense what was coming back.


The orks were returning. But not simply orks...


It began on the planet of Galgoroth, a rich mining world which had the protection of a coalition of minor xenos and human enclaves. The year was 999.M52, and the world reported fearsome warpstorms; the biggest seen since their records had begun (''in practice, their records hadn't begun until M50, during its founding''). It was then that they detected that a space hulk had translated into the system, a hulk known as ''St. Jollepur's Bane''.


Their Managing Governor-Director was not pleased. Hulks were dens where minor xenos (''perhaps even an isolated gang of feral orks had managed to survive in the warp upon the hulk''') and pirates infested the hideous amalgams of vessels and asteroids. He had experienced hulk-drift while on another core-wards world centuries before, and he disliked what they promised. The world's PDF and system ships would have to be diverted from guarding his planet from real threats, to mop up the degenerate scum that would surely be squatting within its haunted depths.


So, reluctantly, he unleashed his large fleet to engage the hulk on its brief incursion into his planet's local area. His fleet was composed of old mass produced Tau cruisers re-fitted for human use, Vulkanian vessels traded with the rising human power, and even some antique Mars Cruisers were amongst this diverse and lethal armada. On board the transport vessels, Krieg Serf Soldiers, Kroot and Fremen were hired on Galgoroth's ruling Corporation's expense, alongside a Free Company of Obsidian Falcon Astartes and as much of the local PDF forces he could afford to send in support.


Eventually, the fleet reached the hulk. Initial scans and intel gathered by the fleet showed that the hulk was like nothing they had ever seen before. The hulk was no longer merely a mass of weaponized ruins drifting through space; it was a warship. Uniform, sturdy armour covered its colossal flanks, alongside thousands of rows of vast weapon batteries and gun emplacements. And jutting from its shark-like sides were great spurs and towers, from which it seemed an entire fleet was at dock. That was when the firing started, and communication was lost with Galgoroth. The skies were aflame as the battle raged for almost three days. Ships were blown apart, or pulled open by tractor beams and high explosive ordnance, as well as more arcane and strange weaponry deployed by the new foe. Enemy soldiers were teleported directly into the stricken human vessels, and proceeded to massacre everyone with extreme efficiency, barely a sonorous growl escaping the butchers' lips as they killed.


Only a handful of vessels returned to the mining world, including the utterly-mauled Strike Cruiser of the Obsidian Falcons. Their leader, Captain Eregious, immediately deployed one of his squads to the surface of Galgoroth. The Governor demanded to know what was attacking them. Was it xenos, pirates, enemy marines, orks?


Eregious responded with a simple phrase. ''"Those are not Orks..."''


His squad attacked and broke into the treasure vaults of the world, securing their payment before deploying back to their Cruiser. Eregious refused to stay and defend the world, because he wished to preserve his brothers. For the foe arrayed before them was too powerful and too numerous to defeat; not with such depleted resources.


So, the Galgorothans waited and fortified their planet as the bulky, well-constructed warships of the enemy hurtled towards them. The Kill Cruisers and huge battleships of the enemy easily swatted away the System Defence Ships, and deployed their ground forces after a bombardment of all the centres of military resistance. City-scale factories were dropped directly upon the planet, and began to work as soon as they slammed to the ground with a thunderous rumble that resounded across the mountains themselves. The few pockets of resistance remaining were dealt with by hulking armoured figures that deployed right at the heart of their battlelines, stepping through warp portals with ease. They wielded weapons like bolters, but far more destructive, alongside strange weapons, such as a device which teleported not gretchin, but miniature plasma warheads inside the bodies of their opponents. After barely two days, the planet was conquered, and those humans not slain in the bombardments were rounded up and used as slave labor in the mining districts, which were expanded and enhanced by the mysterious foe, who deployed huge titan-scale excavators and walking machines to heft out vast quantities of raw material for the hundreds of factories deployed by the orbital fiends.


This was the galaxy's first taste of the new greenskin race. Ten hulks at least were reported with similar modifications, but that first hulk remained the largest of this new phenomenon. These creatures did not call themselves the orks, but rather merely called themselves 'War', or at most 'the War of the Krork'. Few people have subsequently breached the armoured hides of the War-Hulks, but it is claimed that the Krorks are in fact the commanders and driving force behind this new breed of elite Ork. It is theorized that these new creatures are in fact modified gretchin or grots, altered to be tacticians and schemers beyond the ken of the larger breeds; it has to be noted that no smaller greenskins have been sighted within the battle-hosts of 'the War'. Who manipulated them or remade these intelligent creatures remained unknown for many millennia, during the ''Age of Intertwining Fates'', but we shall get to that in due course...


The warriors of the Krork were a distillation and perfection of previous ork concepts and natural abilities. Each warrior wore flexible powered armor, which captured the spores released by them and sealed them in flame-proof canister inside the suits. These canisters were collected after a battle, and were taken to their manufacturing shops or their hulks, and dozens more generations of orks were thus spawned, or the spores were carefully cultured and spread upon worlds deemed perfect for ork-forming. The powered armor also further enhanced each ork's strength, and was flexible enough to expand as the ork expanded.


Each soldier ork was first forced to fight against hundreds of its peers inside the war-hulks, and this swelled each beast to vast scales. Most were taller than even an Astartes warrior when they were finally allowed to construct their armor and weaponry, which each and every ork instinctive knew how to build, unconsciously building their gear according to the exact specifications of higher authority, tailoring their weaponry to be optimized for whatever battlefield they found themselves on.


Though the unseen '''brainboys''' of the numerous hosts were never seen on the battlefield, powerful War-Bosses led the armies of each Hulk, and were brilliant tacticians, as their size naturally made them more intelligent, each war making them more efficient and more intelligent. Each Hulk, though separated by lightyears, had some means of psychic communication with their fellow Hulks, due to either the psychic might of the brainboys, or their manipulation of psyker Orks placed upon modified warp-reading thrones as a form of telepathic network.


Needless to say, these Krork hosts spread quickly, and created numerous huge empires. The thirsting Bloodknights of Baal were fought to a standstill around the Juerellian Warp Gate by the Krork, denied their prize of a whole world of mortals which they could taint and then drain to stave off the black rage. A task force comprising of two whole Commanderies had to be deployed to drive off an armada of krork who had managed to cripple the logistical supplies of dozens of Vulkan's systems. That war was known as the ''War of Renewed Vengeance'', and eventually the forces of Vulkan (''only after the sacrifice of the legendary hero Lord Captain Hexatrin of the Silent Panthers Commandery'') prevailed, but the Krork could not be finally defeated, as they divided their fleet and began a guerrilla campaign which lasted for five hundred years. Numerous battles and wars were found against krorks across the Western and Eastern Chaos Imperiums, and both factions lost dozens of worlds to the disciplined invaders. Abaddon managed to defeat a Krork force by utilizing the planet-killer's awesome firepower to destroy a war-hulk, which seemed to be the only method of permanently crippling a Krork Armada.


The Krork had a surprisingly special hatred for their feral brethren, and often accelerated asteroids into planets they were on, or made a special effort to exterminate the entire population of feral greenskins on the ground, before burning the mountains of corpses.


The Krork were a menace to all factions, for they seemed to have declared themselves to be a war against all elements of the galaxy. From the Star Father's dread Angyl-Worlds, to the blasted ruins of the Shatter-Wake and their bone-feeders, the Krork were fearsome opponents. In particular, they seemed to lose some of their cold demeanour when fighting the Necrons. On some instinctual level, they knew what their eldritch function was, for it was encoded into every fiber of their green, war-forged, flesh.


Their faith is unknown. All that the world at large could decipher of their brutal, complex language spoke of ''awaiting the two, the facets of the god-mount''. Some claimed, in those early years, that they were merely referring to their primitive ancestor gods, Gork and Mork.


Alas, if only it had been that simple. The true relevance of their creed would not become evident until it was too late to stop what had been started. But that conflict shall be documented in a later section, once these chronicles have been properly reinforced to withstand the telling of the tale of the Nex-


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