29: Chapter 29 The Defense of Vulcan-IV (4)

The next to speak was the Gauss Machine Gun Tower.

Despite being called a Gauss machine gun, its caliber was a full 52mm.

[The Main Brain Background Note: Who designed this? A 20mm mounted on a plane is called an autocannon, yet this thing is called a 'gun'? Oh right, the Warhammer universe—caliber is just a reference; who's using it is what matters.]

The moment the Ork assault buggies charged into the range of the Gauss Machine Gun Towers, the entire defensive line suddenly roared to life!

The 23 Gauss Machine Gun Towers closest to the assault buggy cluster took only 0.3 seconds to complete target locking and trajectory calculations once the Orks entered range.

0.3 seconds is barely the time it takes for a human to blink once.

But for Icarus's fire control system, it was enough to complete all attack preparations.

The next second, a continuous, high-frequency sound like tearing fabric—'Zzzzzzzzz—'—echoed across the entire wasteland.

The Gauss machine guns relied on electromagnetic acceleration to propel metal slugs to hypersonic speeds, each one carrying world-ending kinetic energy.

Each tower had four barrels, and each barrel could fire 120 slugs per second.

23 towers, 92 barrels—11,040 slugs fired every second!

The dense barrage, like an invisible scythe, swept ruthlessly through the Ork assault buggy cluster.

The Ork assault buggies were caught in the barrage 4.8 kilometers from the defensive line.

Front ends, engines, and cockpits were all shredded. Metal tore, parts scattered, and fuel ignited. In an instant, they turned into tumbling debris in the air, crashing onto the earth trailing flames.

The Ork Boyz on the vehicles, who were still excitedly shouting 'Waaagh!', didn't even have time to react before they were scattered in pieces.

The 800 assault buggies of the Ork vanguard had all vanished within 12 seconds.

Like chalk writing wiped off a blackboard, or footprints on a beach washed away by waves.

Gluck watched the entire process through his mechanical prosthetic eye from the observation post.

He had discarded his emotions and appeared cold, but a voice in his heart was screaming frantically: This isn't right!

"This is too efficient. So efficient it doesn't feel like war, but rather like a cold assembly line."

War should have back-and-forth, sacrifice and victory, despair and hope.

But there was none of that here.

Only a one-sided, cold, and precise slaughter.

It was like a hot knife through butter. The butter wouldn't resist or scream; it would only be sliced through.

"Sir..." The young Skitarii beside him spoke with a voice trembling uncontrollably—this was a recruit who had just been assigned to him.

"They... they're still charging!"

Gluck looked up, curled his lip, and gave the recruit a solemn reminder:

"Orks have no concept of 'fear'.

Even if they did, it would be completely suppressed by the violent WAAAGH! field."

He truly hoped this recruit would survive after this Ork war.

The assault buggies in front were being erased.

The buggies behind saw it, but instead of stopping, they became even more excited.

Because it was cool, because death was thrilling, and because it was WAAAGH! enough!

Thus, the second wave of Ork assault buggies charged even faster.

There were more this time, a full 1,200 vehicles, and they were spread out further.

Some even tried to perform zigzag maneuvers to evade—or at least, it looked like evasion to humans.

To the Orks, this was a performance.

Every tire track was improvised; every turn was without reason.

If a turn happened to dodge a barrage, the greenskins would excitedly pound on the roof: "We's too smart!!"

Where was the smarts? No one knew.

But they believed it, so it became true evasion.

The Gauss Machine Gun Towers fired again, the barrage remaining dense.

However, the killing efficiency decreased.

So, this time, new defensive units within the line spoke up.

High-frequency Laser Towers!

63 Laser Towers were distributed throughout the defense line.

When they fired, they emitted precise, continuous, scalpel-like beams of red energy.

The target of the Laser Towers wasn't the buggies, but the Orks on them.

Especially those Ork Nob elites!

Gluck clearly saw an Ork Nob standing on an assault buggy—he was a size larger than the average Boy, wearing a breastplate modified from tank treads, carrying a double-barreled big shoota, firing wildly at the defense line as he got more and more Waaagh.

The next second, a thin red line shot from a Laser Tower and precisely hit its head.

The Ork Nob suddenly froze, and then its head—starting from the eye level—developed a five-centimeter diameter hole with neat edges that went straight through.

The Ork Nob swayed and crashed down.

The assault buggy kept driving forward, but the driver was soon picked off by another laser.

Then a third, a fourth...

Five seconds later, every Ork on the vehicle had been precisely sniped.

"Icarus is picking off the important ones?" Gluck understood instantly.

The Gauss Machine Gun Towers were responsible for clearing fodder and vehicles, harvesting on a large scale.

The Laser Towers were responsible for clearing elites and Commanders, picking them off with precision.

Clear division of labor, maximized efficiency.

But there were simply too many Orks.

Eight hundred died, twelve hundred came; twelve hundred died, two thousand came.

Moreover, it wasn't just assault buggies charging anymore—Ork infantry began to appear.

Those Ork Boyz running on foot, though slower, were more numerous, more scattered, and harder to intercept entirely.

Some Ork Boyz managed to luck their way through the Gauss machine gun barrage zones—there were always gaps in the barrage; it was impossible to cover every inch of ground.

They charged into the three-kilometer range.

Then, the Missile Defense Towers fired again.

Fragmentation damage—the warheads would detonate twenty meters above the targets, releasing three thousand titanium alloy fragments. Each fragment was the size of a palm with razor-sharp edges, covering a fifty-meter radius.

A single missile could cover an area the size of a football field.

There was no loud explosion, only a muffled 'thud'.

Then, a cold rain of metal fell over that area.

Then the rain stopped.

Nothing was left standing in that area.

Only piles of twitching green flesh cut into pieces and frozen earth riddled with titanium fragments.

Three hundred Ork Boyz, completely wiped out.

Time taken: three seconds.

Consumption: one missile.

"Efficiency..." Gluck murmured softly, a sentence Icarus had said suddenly coming to mind: "War is production. The enemy is the raw material."

Now, he finally saw the entire process of "production": inputting Orks (raw material), outputting Ork corpses (damage).

From the Battlefield Analysis Station, a group of Construction Drones flew out—specialized "Battlefield Recovery Units."

They rose from behind the defense line and flew toward the area that had just been cleared.

The drones had scanners on their bellies. They hovered over the piles of corpses, quickly scanning and identifying, then used teleportation technology to send the corpses directly back to the Battlefield Analysis Station.

The recovery priority was clear: first locate the corpses of Mekboyz, as they had usable metal components; then the Ork Nob elites, as their biomass quality was higher; and finally, the ordinary Ork Boyz.

The located corpses would be teleported back into the internal space of the Battlefield Analysis Station and then sent via conveyor belt to the "Large Storage Warehouse" behind the defense line—

There, different materials would be sorted and sent to Negentropy Furnaces responsible for decomposing different substances for smelting and transformation. Then, they would be transported via conveyor belts to the Recombination Assembly Table (metal) and the Quantum Chemical Plant (biomass).

Ultimately, these "raw materials" would be made into new defense towers, new base buildings, new ammunition, and the food to sustain a population of 87 million—Protein Bars.