(This is a little story to practice writing combat scenes, using a couple of minor characters from some upcoming stuff I am working on.)

Pretty One

by Tim Sweeney

“Well you’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”  said Urska Junn of the Executioners Chapter, his vicious, gap-toothed grin peeking through a fanning beard of coarse black hair

The ork responded with a snarl, thick ropes of saliva hanging from lopsided tusks.  Bizarrely, it wore a uniform of a vaguely Imperial cut, white material showing through the blood and grime of the battlefield.  Both sides of the greenskin’s chest were covered in dozens of crude medals, seemingly made from battlefield detritus, each emblazoned with the symbol of an ork skull and crossed axes.

“You like axes do you, xenos?” Junn continued his taunting.  He raised his own chain-axe, gunning the motor, the jagged teeth growling with their need to rend flesh.  “I like axes too.”

“Waaagh!” the Blood Axe boss roared in response.  The greenskin, even taller than the Space Marine, reared back, raising its own weapons to the sky in a  warrior’s display of strength.  It wielded a buzzing chain-axe at least as big as Junn’s own in one hand.  The other was encased in a rusted power claw, the finger-blades crackling with deadly energy.

“Impressive,” grunted Junn as he snapped his bolt pistol up, releasing a burst of explosive shells at the ork’s face.

It must have expected the move, the claw darting up to intercept the shots, the shells detonating harmlessly within the coruscating blue lightning encircling the weapon.  The ork grinned, one of the few beings alive in the galaxy with a smile more hideous than Junn’s own. Read the rest of this entry →