BRUTAL

Gordrakk took a breather. A fiery sensation pulsing through his bunched and swollen muscles as he stood in the shadow of an alleyway, axes dripping blood. It was a good pain, the kind you got after a full day’s battle without any of the boring bits like trying to find new heads to lop off, and it was making him feel a bit better. The burning, screaming city around him was full of humies to kill, after all.

Not just humies, neither.

The siege was a total mess, the city so big that mustering a proper horde had become impossible. His attack was in tatters, and he’d lost Bigteef, who was still half-mad after his wounds in the big fight. When Gordrakk had last seen him, the Maw-krusha was bowling through a knot of humies as he went for the harbour, likely in search of a shark to nibble on.

The Waaagh! had started well, a thunderous landslide of greenskin muscle that he’d kept more or less intact all the way to Donse. He’d seen an opportunity when that god-thing had turned up, the horse-looking one with the earthquake hooves that Skragrott had called Krag-Nostrils or something. Seemed like a decent asset, so Gordrakk had offered him a proper fight to test him out. It’d been a good scrap, one of his best, and he smiled at the recollection. At the end of it, when the Bad Moon had called it a draw, Gordrakk had grudgingly agreed to let the god live – just like when Gorkamorka had joined forces after his duel with Sigmar. One battering ram was good, but two was better, and he had a city to smash.

Hammergord was so huge and slow that he knew the humies would have got word of it ages ago. Sure enough, they put some kind of glyph-magic on the gates that had blown up the battering ram real good. He could feel the rage rising every time he thought of it. But they were expecting one big punch, not two.

Gordrakk looked at his twin axes Kunnin’ and Smasha, each nasty enough to cut an ogor in half – even an ogor spell-belcher, in the case of the former – and smiled. He’d learned the value of using two hitty things rather than one a long time ago. So he’d made his loud, obvious attack, and then, with a nice loud Waaagh!, he’d brought his secret weapon into play. The god-thing had bust open the city walls good and proper with his attack, letting the horde’s Gore-gruntas through the breach to start the killing for real. And what do you know, it had worked.

That should have been enough. Should have got them where they needed to be. But in truth, he hadn’t really got a plan after getting past the walls and beating everything inside to a pulp. Turns out the city had a secret weapon of its own, coming from the sea – aelves, and lots of ’em. No match for him on the open plain, but in the tangled streets, where it was all alleyways and rooftops, they’d broken the Waaagh! like the rocks break a wave.

Now the greenskin army railed, hollered, and stormed around sacking the city in a directionless morass, led down dead ends and pelted with rocks from above where they couldn’t get up to kill the humie defenders. Skragrott had fled into the tunnels as soon as he had sensed things going south, as usual. Even now, Gordrakk could see grots running like maniacs towards him from the other end of the alleyway, red eyes glinting and froth spilling from their mouths. One had a cauldron slopping gruel left and right as he waddled forward, another wore the mask of the hated sun-god they called Frazzlegit, and a third was clinging on hard to a giant shroom with spider legs.

Pretty normal, for grots, but it put Gordrakk’s back up nonetheless. They were supposed to be killing, not mucking about like they were yoofs at a shroom festival. Just his luck to get separated from the boys and stuck with a bunch of weedy, hallucinating runts for company.

‘Oi, you lot!’ he said, stepping in their path. ‘What do you fink you’re—’

The one on the shroom glowed green-blue, light pouring across the alleyway as cyan froth poured from discoloured lips and stained teeth. He convulsed, the other grots recoiling as if stung, as thick smoke billowed from his mouth. Weightless, the grot rose, arms flung outwards and giving out a thin scream like the whistle of a pot-grot’s kettle.

‘Gordrakk,’ he said, the voice echoing weirdly in the alleyway as the rest of the grots scarpered like startled rats. ‘Gorrrr-drakkkk…’

‘Wot?’

‘This is Morrrrk, Gordrakk! You done it all wrong, Gordrakk.’

The Fist of Gork tipped his head to one side, lips curling, but his axes stayed put for the moment.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ said the Mork-grot. ‘You shoulda got them uvver artefacts.’

‘Not these fings again,’ growled Gordrakk. ‘I broke open the city didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, but problem is it’s the gods, mate,’ said the Mork-grot, flailing its arms wide as its eyes span. ‘Ya got the snake one and the big frog lad, he ain’t a god but he’s close. Then ya got that horn-head running about. You gotta find a way to level the field, Gordrakk. That’s wot them artefacts woulda done. Like the prophecy said, innit. Too late now.’

‘I got one of ’em didn’t I? Fat lot of good it did me.’

The Mork-grot screeched in frustration. ‘You got it, ya big lunk, but without the gubbinz to protect it! To meet all these magic-flingers on even terms! This city’s getting stomped flat, but they ain’t gonna let you sit on the top of the pile, and that Kragnos don’t care about nothin’ but stampin’ on stuff! You got all the brutal an orruk can have, but not enough of the kunnin’!’

Gordrakk shrugged. ‘Dunno. Sounds like a lot o’ fetchin’ and carryin’ to me.’

‘You gotta be both if you want to be the biggest boss of all. Not just da Fist of Gork, but da Fist of Gorkamorka. Fink on that!’

‘I’ll show ’em, when I get through the big glowy gates and smash the Hammer God. I’ll show the lot of ’em.’

‘They’re all the way up there!’ the Mork-grot flailed his stick-thin limbs in the general direction of a vast sheer-sided fortress jutting from the edge of the city. ‘And protected by hundreds of them storm-gits, with them lizards an’ all! Nah, ya got impatient like usual and ya blew it. Ya gotta go a different way now.’

‘I’m da biggest, and the fiercest. I can take ’em.’

‘This is Ghur, mate. No matter how tough you are, there’s always a bigger beastie.’

‘Huh,’ said Gordrakk, jaw jutting as he stepped forward. ‘You talk too zoggin’ much for a god. You ain’t no Mork.’

‘Yeah I am too!’ squeaked the Mork-Grot. ‘I am him!’

Gordrakk ripped Kunnin’ around hard, the edge catching the hovering grot in the neck so hard his head popped off like a cork. As the decapitated body fell to the ground, a ghastly, distorted figure with a giant mushroom for a boss-hat and a sharp metal nose shimmered purple in a cloud of spores for a moment. Snazzgar Stinkmullet, or rather his spirit; somehow he’d taken over the mewling grot through some horrible shroom-magic. Gordrakk caught the gurning spirit with Smasha’s backswing, the enchanted axe tearing the apparition into tatters of dissipating ectoplasm and spore-smoke. He spat on the ruined corpse bleeding out before him.

‘Some gits ya just gotta kill twice.’

‘But he was right.’

Gordrakk span round, temper flashing hot. Behind him was a Bonesplitter, hulking and near-naked, his chest painted with squigstain spirals and a four-legged glyph of the Earthquake God. His posture was bent, as if he was used to carrying heavy armour, and his physique was far bulkier than your average spirit-chaser; by Gordrakk’s reckoning he’d been an Ironjaw not so long ago, and by his scars he was one that had taken a right clobbering at that.

‘Oi! Bokkrog!’ came a distant orruk voice. ‘Get back here! We found some more!’

The newcomer ignored him. This one had glowing eyes, too, but they were green, and as they bored into Gordrakk’s own, something about them made his soul roar loud.

‘Find a new path,’ intoned the Bonesplitter, his voice so deep and rumbly it shook mortar from the alley’s walls. ‘Find the gate you lost, then find yerself the Mouth of Mork. Two heads is better than one, Gordrakk. I should know.’

‘You know wot,’ said the orruk warlord, looking up at a sky already lit by the light of a new dawn as the Bonesplitter shuffled off. ‘I might just do that. Thanks, Gork.’

He hefted his axes, sniffed for the salt tang of the sea, and made for the carnage at the harbour.

PRODUCED BY GAMES WORKSHOP IN NOTTINGHAM

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