[center][color=9e0b0f][h3][b]Pentious[/b][/h3][/color][/center]

Efforts to purge the orkish infection of Pentious were going at a relatively smooth and timely pace. Or at least as smooth and timely as any effort to expunge the greenskins from a world in which they had managed to dig their fungi roots into could statistically go. The orks were naturally trying to fight back, but with the forges and their resources torn from their vile grip, the remaining brutes had suffered something of a degradation in regards to weapons and technology... which to orks, were largely the same thing. 

This wasn't an overnight development and a fighting force less experienced with fighting orks could have easily missed the signs. First the more alien and exotic weapons that the orks could field started to disappear as they were being lost as their wielders were killed and destroyed, but not replaced. They were a rarity to begin with of course, but the lack of solders and wreckage torn apart from the inside out by an insane, teleported squig was largely considered an overall boon to morale.   

Then the more advanced pieces of the orkish arsenal started to vanish from the field of battle. Battle Wagons had become a rarity after the death of Warboss Kracker'Lacker and the reclamation of the forges saw the only Orkish tribes who could build and maintain them disappear off the planet, their mechanical abominations torn apart and melted down to be purified of the xenos taint. The 'Killa Kan' also started to disappear from the field, alongside the variety of tanks that were both looted by the greenskins at some point or built by the brutes from scratch; Considering just how destroyed something needed to be before the orks couldn't rebuild it in some fashion as a war machine, even the raising paragon of Rik couldn't figure out what some of the captured ork armor had originally been. 

Orkish 'Shootas' (because calling them either a gun or a firearm hurt the soul) remained a common sight on the battlefield, but due to the policy of assassinating high target orks such as the Mek Boys, an increasing number of greenskins were resorting to more primitive weapons to arm themselves. Most were melee in nature, through slings were not a strange sight... and after a number of injuries and deaths caused by the discover of just how effective and dangerous orks were when it came to lobbing rocks at something, became a factor calculated into battle plans.   

The plans themselves were crafted and put into practice on the field with machine like efficiency and brutality. At this stage, emotion had to be tempered least the tunnel vision of hatred and rage allowed something to escape in the moment. But it was on the scale of the operation were the flames of righteous fury would be allowed to fuel the furnace. Every Ork. Every Gretchen. Every single misbegotten wretched creature that was apart of the orkoid fungi family tree in some fashion was hunted down, put to death and had their bodies destroyed with radiation and flame. 

Once the physical creatures were gone, radiation and flame was turned on the planet of Pentious itself. Sector by sector, the planet was scourged of every last trace of the ork fungi or their wretched spores until a burned and slightly irradiated Pentious was purified of the xenos taint. It would be many years before terraforming attempts could be restarted as they had been before the orks arrived, but the delay was considered acceptable in the face of being free of future greenskin outbreaks. 

When the final sector of Pentious was undergoing purification, every man, woman and child on the planet was allowed to listen in on the vox-call as completion of the operation was confirmed. 

There was a silence that covered the whole planet afterwards. As if everyone believed, for just a moment, that they were sharing a collective dream. That the slightest noise or sudden movement would cause them all to wake up to the reality of yet another day fighting the long war... or worse, awaken to the nightmare that Warboss Kracker'Lacker was still alive and about to lead the final siege of Forge Alpha and that all they had seen and witnessed was just their mind torturing them with a beautiful but impossible what if.

When the dream didn't end and the reality dawned on them... the roar of jubilation echoed all the louder due to the silence that came before it. 

Pentious was free of Orkish kind. Pentious was purely a human world, [b]their[/b] world once more. 

Their home was free. Their home was at peace. They were at peace.

That would change as all things did. But for this moment in their embattled lives, the people of Pentious didn't care what loomed in the future, for the present had given them a gift many never dared to consider possible for decades.

They had a future.