Thunderstorm over Dommoc

This article is about a battle in the /tg/ Heresy project, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40k universe.

Thunderstorm over Dommoc
Date	M36
Scale	Planetary
Theatre	Dommoc
Status	Pyrrhic Death Smiths victory
Belligerents
Death Smiths	Stone Knuckles Clan
Commanders and Leaders
Jove Ampere	Zorbo Da Zundera
Strength
100	500
Losses
Second Forge heavily damaged	Stone Knuckles Clan nearly wiped out
Outcome
Jove Ampere gave himself a new title

Vain beyond measure, High Ferromancer Jove Ampere truly rejoices in granting himself numerous flattering titles: the Thunderer, the Cloud Gatherer, the Storm Compeller, and tens of others. He is followed to all meetings with fellow Chaos Lords by an apprentice whose sole role is to introduce his master by listing all of his grandiose self-assumed styles and honorifics in a chronological order, and Gods help him if he makes a single mistake or omission - the pettiness and cruelty of the Electrarch are second only to his narcissism. It is, therefore, not hard to imagine his fury when he found out that another person in the Galaxy was using one of his titles. After filling the blood vessels of the unfortunate messenger who brought him these news with molten lead through an infusion pump, Ampere started preparing a punitive expedition against the audacious impostor.

The poor fool who had provoked his ire, Big Mek Zorbo Da Zundera, had never heard of Jove Ampere. His nickname was given to him by the boyz of the Stone Knuckles clan for his tendency to get electrocuted by the badly insulated electric wires of his Mega Armour. Resting on an abandoned Landfill World Dommoc after his most recent Waaagh!, he was working on a new doomsday weapon, already the fifth one this week - the Magnet Shoota. According to his ingenious design, a built-in solenoid magnet pulled the bullets shot by the gun back from the enemy corpses into its magazine, ensuring that it never ran out of ammo. The only problem was that every time he activated the magnet, he got hit in the face by his own wrench attracted by the it. He had spent hours trying to figure out how to make the magnet attract only the bullets before he found an elegant solution: painting the magnet and the bullets the same colour. The Big Mek was in process of implementing his innovation when a stupid looking space shuttle with enough plasteel spikes to make a hundred sluggas landed near his clan's encampment. A Kaos boy looking like a complete poof exited the spacecraft and demanded to see the so-called "Thunderer". Zorbo was annoyed by this intrusion, but went to chat with the uninvited guest nonetheless on the small chance that he might be an expert in magnets. He understood about ten percent of what the Kaos poof said, but one thing was clear to him: the 'ummie threatened to annihilate the Stone Knuckles if Da Zundera didn't change his name. Although the ork didn't care for his nickname in the least, he wouldn't be a true Ork if he refused a fight offered to him. And so he refused the 'ummie's offering by splashing him with orange paint from the paint bucket he was still carrying.

The ensuing battle was truly intense. Ampere might have been a deranged egomaniac, but his claims to greatness were not entirely unfounded. The best student of Wieland and the one who assisted him with the sacrificial ritual back in Batavium, he was a vicious warrior with millennia of experience. But even so, he nearly met his match in Zorbo, who proved to be surprisingly competent as a commander. His mad inventions also gave the Greenskins an edge, in no small part due to his penchant to simply hit his enemies on the head with them if they didn't work the intended way. Nevertheless, the Death Smiths were slowly pushing the Stone Knuckles back until Zorbo got the brilliant idea to teleport a whole Stompa into the enemy's rear. Before exploding in a hail of smouldering scrap metal, the tellyport megablasta managed to tear off the Stompa's head and teleport it several miles above the battlefield. Like a huge meteorite it fell down on the ranks of the Death Smiths, instantly killing dozens of them and forcing the rest to retreat to their ships. With his pride deeply wounded by a defeat from an uncouth brute, Ampere immediately started planning his terrible revenge on the Stone Knuckles.

But all of his planning turned out to be unnecessary, as Zorbo was more than capable of destroying his clan himself. Once the enemy forces were gone, he ordered his boyz to loot all of the equipment left on their corpses, particularly their lightning-based magical weapons that drew his attention during the battle. Soon a Daemon sword was brought to him, the blade of which could turn into a bolt of lightning. The ork immediately began trying to reverse engineer it the only way he knew: by smashing it to pieces with a sledgehammer and trying to recreate it using similar pieces from his great heaps of scrap metal. Unfortunately, this method did not really work with Daemon weapons. As soon as he broke the sword, he released an ancient Daemon trapped inside it, a thunder spirit known to the Inquisition as Hevioso. Filled with blind fury from centuries of his imprisonment in the weapon, the Daemon immediately went on a rampage, destroying everything he saw with powerful blasts of lightning. Not entirely sure where the Daemon came from and what his deal was, the Big Mek initially wanted to try and ask him about magnets, but on the second thoughts decided to flee the planet while he was still alive. Even though Ampere had nothing to do with his enemy's sudden flight, it wasn't hard for him to convince himself that everything went exactly as he had planned. To commemorate his great victory against the Greenskins, Ampere awarded himself with a pompous new title: the Picker of Mushrooms.