Emissary of the Imperator
Tobias Caine was hurt, and Warboss Snogritz was on fire. Neither of them looked like giving up on the fight. Snogritz, despite being on fire, was able to react first.
The Warboss picked Caine up off the ground and laughed as the fire from his skin began to ignite Caine’s elegant overcloak. With one hand on the scruff of Caine’s chestplating, Snogritz used his other hand to swing an axe at Caine’s head.
Caine pushed himself to ignore the heat and laughing Warboss, and focused instead on blocking the axe. His twin power swords gouged huge metal chunks out of the axe’s blade and deflected the weapon away from his head. Despite the damage, Snogritz could still use the axe as a weapon, or at least a very hefty club.
The blow had been powerful, and Caine had not been in a perfect blocking position, but he still came away from the parry in a better position to react next than Snogritz did.
With the huge, toothy grin of Snogritz in his face, Caine flipped one of his power swords around and thrust it up to its gold filigree-inlaid hilt into Snogritz’s gripping arm. The sword tore through flaming skin and gouged a deep cut through thick bone and pierced all the way to the other side of Snogritz’s arm. It also tore apart the tendons keeping Snogritz’s arm clamped around Caine’s chestplate.
Caine lost hold of the power sword embedded in Snogritz’s arm as he fell, but kept a firm grip on its twin. Wreathed in glowing electric blue, Caine tore into Snogritz’s lower torso with a follow-up that cut even more muscle off of the Warboss’s frame from between the crudely matched plates of thick armor protecting him.
Snogritz was now dripping vile green blood onto the broken deck of Caine’s warship, and breathing heavily through a mouth that contained tusks big enough to gut Caine on their own. The Warboss did not look happy.
Caine realized he had broken his leg in the fall.
He was now standing there, half-crippled, with a still-standing Warboss in front of him. Around him in the open expanse of his collapsing macrocannon deck, las fire ripped back and forth from shrinking positions and roaring Ork shot rang off the armored plating of the ship and her armored crew. Above, the Pack was doing what they could to hold back rampaging mobs of Orks with pinpoint Hellgun fire, but there were too many Greenskins to hold all of them back at once.
In the midst of his realization, Caine began praying to the God-Emperor for help.
Gilt statues of the Emperor stood at every major crossroads in his ship, and the massive cathedral to the Emperor Ascendent in the heart of the Emissary represented Caine’s devotion to the Cult. In front his bridge, the sixty meter tall replica of the Emperor slaying a serpent was a perfect replica of a piece by the Artisan-Saint Leopold housed in the Imperator’s Basillica on Terra.
If there was a person and a ship that the Emperor should look down on now, it was Caine and his Emissary .
The Emperor Protects.
Like a bolt of divine justice, Wolfe’s Lascannon struck Snogritz in the upper thigh. With the crack of a lightning bolt, the shot pierced Snogritz’s still flaming skin and shattered the bone beneath into tiny shards of shrapnel that caused even more destruction to the Warboss’s leg.
Without something to stand on, the Warboss toppled backwards onto the hard deck plating. A few Orks in the circle around the fight stepped back in fear as Caine stood higher on his own broken leg and raised his power sword in an incantation against Xenos.
Snogritz was in shock as Caine limped over. The Warboss tried to swing the remains of his axe at Caine’s head one last time, but Caine refused the strike with a textbook parry. The axe embedded itself in the deck plating at Caine’s feet as he stepped over Snogrtiz’s arm.
There was defiance in the Warboss’s eye, but even Orks suffered from shock and blood loss if the scale was significant enough. With his wounds still bleeding, and his leg pouring green ooze, Snogritz was losing the fight to stay conscious.
Caine wouldn’t let him feel that release.
Instead, he took the power sword that Wolfe had given him and lopped Snogritz’s head from the Warboss’s body.
Caine wasn’t sure if the head lived long enough to regret its decision to attack Damaris, but he knew that he would reap vengeance from those Orks that were left on his ship. Around him, the greenskins seemed to realize that the fight had turned.
In a wave of shock, the Ork fighting loosened and a wail of fear swept through their ranks. Bolstered by this turn, the armsmen of the Emissary redoubled their efforts and started pushing the Ork invaders back.
Caine, shattered and exhausted from his wounds, collapsed on the floor where he stood.