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Elites · Infantry

Ork Painboy

An Ork battlefield surgeon whose glee for cutting, stitching, and improving patients with bioniks keeps the mob fighting and thoroughly terrified.

Painboyz are the closest thing Ork society has to doctors, a class of specialist greenskin, sometimes called Doks, whose twin passions are surgery and extremely aggressive dentistry. Since teef double as Ork currency, the second passion tends to fund the first, and a Painboy will happily yank a mouthful of payment from a patient in the middle of an operation. His real love, though, is the cutting itself, and there is very little a Painboy enjoys more than an excuse to open somebody up and have a good look inside.

On the battlefield a Painboy is invaluable, patching wounds that even Ork resilience cannot mend, reattaching severed limbs, and dragging fighters back from injuries that would kill anything softer. His methods are crude and his tools cruder, but Orks are astonishingly hard to kill, and a Painboy's rough handiwork succeeds far more often than it has any right to. Most are trailed by a scuttling grot orderly or two, clutching bloodstained instruments and bracing for the inevitable mess.

A Painboy's other great delight is the eksperiment, and in this he becomes the biological cousin of the Mek. Working with bioniks hammered together by their engineering counterparts, Painboyz graft whirring blades, mechanical limbs, and stranger additions onto their patients to create Cyborks, unstable fusions of muscle and machine. Whether the patient actually wanted the upgrade is rarely a question that troubles the Dok, and Orks approach his table with a mixture of gratitude and genuine dread.

Notable Orks charactersMeet the heroes and legends who lead this faction.