City of Pillars
The City of Pillars had recovered somewhat from the minor civil war instigated when Ikit Claw last came to the stronghold of clan Mors. The scorch marks that had riddled the tunnels where the Hellprobe had been extensively prototyped had faded. The district the mad scientist had claimed as his research space had been reclaimed, with a fair few casualties due to the various dangerous constructs Ikit had left lying around tending to messily explode when mishandled, or touched at all in some cases. An entire generation of skaven children that had grown up skittering around the outskirts of the competing Skyre and Moulder compounds had taken the place of those unfortunates who had been forcibly conscripted into the assault on Zharr Naggrund. Crowded ghettoes had sprung up in the formerly abandoned districts, a hubbub of skaven that remembered the manufacture of the Drillfiends only as a vague blur of terror and bestial roaring haunted by the specters of the agents of the Underlord.
This, of course, meant it was due time for Ikit to make a return to the city in which he had become a minor bogeyman.
He was accompanied by an army that seemed to have come straight out of the common clanrat's nightmares of the stormvermin quartered higher in the city. Thousands of uniformly black furred warriors, silent and grim and thick with muscle. Each one of them bore elaborately forged plate armor, and carried fearsomely gleaming halberds and menacing blunderbusses. Every one of them smelled of sulfur and blood, and they wore fearsome metal masks in the likeness of fearsome beasts and daemons. They were the Infurnal Legion, stolen from the Bull God by the Horned Rat, and their legendary strength of will had not been lessened any by their collective transformation.
In a single night they cleared out Ikit's former residence, their lockstep discipline and massed blunderbuss fire easily shattering the morale of those young emboldened skaven who tried to resist their eviction, leaving many putative clans naught but spattered gore on flame-illuminated debris as the Legion burned out the ramshackle dwellings that had sprung up in Ikit's absence. The screams and flames gradually died down as the hours went on, until there was naught but embers.
Two skaven walked in the ashes of the community. Ikit Claw was as jagged and imposing as ever, his metallic exoskeleton hissing and rattling with every step. Magically charged lightning played idly around his frame as his internalized warpstone generators hummed and whirred, and his halberd Storm Daemon gleamed in his grip. His other arm was wholly covered by a device that almost resembled a gigantic gun barrel, though its width was that of a clenched fist. Spotting a few straggler skaven, the mad warlock lazily raised his gun-arm and fired, the contraption expelling an apple-sized warhead that was propelled by a burst of flame from its end. It rocketed swiftly after the unfortunate stragglers and detonated in a searing shockwave that boiled their blood and cracked their bodies open with concussive force as it set them aflame. As their screams echoed back to his amused ears, he turned to his companion and commented, "Your kin-brood made good-good weapons, I will admit. My enhancement of them has yielded-brought dividends, you must-must agree."
His companion merely snorted and replied, "The alignment of the tail fins is off-shoddy. It unsteadies the flight of the warhead," before continuing onward, leaving Ikit irritatedly fumbling with his ammunition to check for the alleged flaw. Though he had been converted to the superior species by the might of the Underlord, Drazhoath Ash-Fur still retained many dwarfish qualities. He retained his dwarfish height - which is to say slightly shorter than skaven average - but his frame was heavy and dense, packed with slablike muscle, and his voice was thick and grating. He wore armor that seemed to be moulded from the deepest shadows, hundreds of overlapping shards of black stone that moulded perfectly to his form and did not make any sound when he moved. A crimson talisman was affixed to the front of his throat, glowing subtly as he breathed, and he gripped a heavy scepter that bore a tangible aura of heat in his claws. He was the picture of dismissive expertise, uncaring of the ash permeating his environment as he marched to convey orders to his sworn subordinates.
Ikit hated him already.
---
Reconstruction of Ikit's workshop went smoothly; no one in the City of Pillars dared to naysay the heavily armed legion of skaven who had brought Ikit Claw with them when the unstable warlock-engineer demanded a large portion of the city's metal, as well as stockpiles of whatever blackpowder they could scrounge up and various other eccentric demands. Under the red-eyed gaze of the Infurnal Legion, there were no objections.
Within a few weeks the raucous buzzing and clanking that defined Ikit's presence had reestablished itself in the city, punctuated by periodic explosions of varying intensity. The Infurnal Legion periodically plunged into the extensive warrens the slave-rats of Mors dwelt in to bring test subjects back to the encampment, and their coal-black sillhouettes were constantly seen standing sentry around the perimiter, allowing none who might disturb the experiments of their master in.
As much as it rankled at Ikit's ego, Drazhoath was indeed very good at building the weapons of his former race. Within a few weeks the City of Pillars was echoing with the nonstop thunder of guns as the duo tested the viability of mass-produced prototypes of the Legion's guns. For while the war machines of the dawi zharr were of peerless quality, capable of falling off a mountainside and still outperforming their human-made counterparts, that formidable might meant nothing to the skaven if they could not be produced in large enough numbers to arm the vast hordes of the Under-Empire. So as Drazhoath and Ikit took apart and reassembled countless barrels, steam engines, and nefariously constructed warheads, their discussions ranged for many days on how they could streamline the production of their instruments of death.
Thanks to his prior experimentation with the Bazuka, Ikit found it simple to comprehend the working of the Inferno Gun, a portable cannon that fired red-hot blasts of shrapnel. Drazhoath's knowledge of the precise measures needed to forge it made it easy to simplify enough to easily churn them out, and they proved their efficacy as turrets around the exterior of their complex; many an unwary skaven was turned to paste for stepping too closely. Admittedly the versions that were churned out from the forging districts of the City tended to have their barrel warp or even explode after prolonged use, but the backblast rarely killed anyone other than the operators, which was well within acceptable limits.
The Dreadquake Mortar proved to be of great interest to both Ikit and Drazhoath - for the Skyre engineer it was an opportunity to better the lacklustre Poisonwind mortars, which had long been disappointing in its range. For Drazhoath, the warpstone engines of Skyre offered the promise to increase the firing rate of the Dreadquake, which had long been hindered by the rate at which their coal-fired steam engines could generate sufficient power to launch a shot. With the raw stuff of magic itself at his disposal, even the enchanted coal he had used paled in comparison. The two designs were extensively analyzed and then fused, favorable aspects from each being taken into the greater end product, which ended up being dubbed the Deathflinger. The curiously deadly shells the Dreadquake was famous for were sadly absent, as they were the product of an advanced application of the Lore of Azgorh, and only the glut of sorceror-prophets the dawi zharr had possessed had enabled them to produce the shells in practical quantities. Thus while any mortars produced by Drazhoath himself would still fire the massive orbs of red death, most everyone else would have to content themselves with conventional explosives. Ikit privately resolved to look into obtaining knowledge of this lore of magic - he knew some Grey Seers that could be extorted sufficiently.
The Magma Cannon was another weapon that provided great opportunity for improvement. The skaven Warpfire Thrower had long been a deadly weapon in Skyre's arsenal that was hamstrung by a short range and tendency to explode and cover everything around them in toxic flaming goo. The Magma Cannon perfectly countered both of these, even the less reliable frames that were produced en masse standing up far better to the stresses of firing molten warpstone at an unfortunate area, and the larger size and clever construction of Drazhoath's own design made it able to fire to much greater distances. The Warp-Lava Cannon that was produced was a searingly powerful weapon that had the potential to burn dozens of targets alive in but one three-second burst, scaling up to hundreds depending on how large the cannon was manufactured.
Some months in, the subject of missiles came up. Ikit was understandably eager to improve upon the lacklustre design of the Doomrocket, and Drazhoath was mildly bemused that the skaven hadn't come up with viable missile technology at this point, given the other extremes to which portions of their technology had advanced. After a relatively minor spat concerning Ikit percieving some insult toward his eccentricities in that statement that culminated in thirty-four legionaires dead and the Iron Rat's spine shattered by Drazhoath encasing him in a torso-sized fist formed out of the stone beneath their feet and squeezing, they convened to discuss how the Deathshrieker Rocket design possessed by Drazhoath could be improved upon. The subsequent examination of both designs resulted in an extremely rare event - Ikit threw out his own design entirely in favor of Drazhoath's. The similarities between their rocket designs were too close to be coincidence, and upon learning that the Doomrocket had been copied from observing Cathay's weaponry, it was understood how. The dawi zharr had had dealings with Cathay at many times in the past, Drazhoath explained, and at some point had managed to pick up the secret of effective aerodynamics for their own attempts at ballistic weaponry. Thus the Doomrocket, which was based in turn off of observation of that inferior imitation of chaos dwarf, was effectively a throwaway copy as far as their purposes went.
Nevertheless, progress was swiftly made on re-designing the Deathshrieker, and Ikit picked up the intricacies present in rocket science swiftly. After a series of disastrous experiments in which Drazhoath attempted to bind the spirits present in the embers of warpstone fires, it was decided that they would stick to conventional munitions for the time being. As they watched the spiked rockets they settled on soar gracefully into an unsuspecting settlement of clanrats on a higher level of the city and detonate quite effectively, their opinion was validated - a full three quarters of the missiles landed on target, and judging by the shade of red their test site had been painted, their explosive force had not been lessened by their alterations.
The year dragged on and the variety of designs flowing out of Ikit's laboratories kept increasing in deadliness and efficiency. The Infurnal Legion conducted operations to seize the forging district of the City to streamline the production of the new weapons, and often tested them on its unwitting populace, who increasingly drew back from the area and began launching sporadic raids, which were all torn to pieces by the sentries and their guns. But the attacks kept increasing in both intensity and frequency, and eventually it reached the tipping point.
---
Late in the year, the stormvermin of Mors grew tired of their underlings being slaughtered for no discernible reason and marched on the encampment of guns with an army of five thousand irate rats clad in iron armor and bearing steel weapons. They'd decided they had had enough of this foreign clan and insane warlock mucking about with their city, and were going to show them how Mors ran business.
Somewhat strangely, the occupied quarter seemed almost abandoned when approached. The sentry gunners that had earned the reputation of being eerily accurate with their blunderbusses were absent, and much of the haze of smoke that had hung over the area had vanished along with the cacaphony of noise Ikit Claw's machinery had made. It was as if the mad warlock and the Legion had just packed up and left.
They made their way into the soot-covered district, seeing everywhere signs of industry - gargantuan forges had been set up, and spare parts littered the ground, oddly shaped tubes and fiddly gears and other engineering-related things. Giant sheets of metal lay discarded next to piles of metal wheels, and what little dwarfen residential buildings were left were few and far between, divided by great strips of empty space. But nowhere was there hide or hair of any of the skaven that had terrorized the City of Pillars.
The only warning they recieved was a slight humming, a vibration in the ground they could feel in their toes. Then, the entirely unexpected occurred.
Great behemoths of steel and steam leapt out from hidden caverns where they had been constructed, giant snakes of metal the height of a house mounted on wheels that screeched and hissed and roared as they galloped across the ground. Sporadic gunfire popped out from within the ranks of the stormvermin, but the warp-tinged bullets were deflected off of the thick armor the trains bore. Many were crushed under their wheels as they scrambled to get out of the way, and were left dying slowly on the ground with their guts half-squeezed out of them, feebly grasping at their uncaring comrades' ankles.
Ikit clambered up onto the roof of one of the trains, holding a crank-powered ratling gun in his enhanced grip. He laughed uproariously as he unloaded into the teeming crowds of stormvermin before the trains vanished into the Underway.
Chaos Dwarf War Machines have been fully unlocked with the exception of machines that require daemonic binding, such as the Hellcannon. Designs included: Shratnel Guns, Deathflinger Mortars, Warp-Lava Cannons, Deathsqueaker Rockets, and the Gnawmulcher Locomotive. See Skyre technology tab.
Some Skyre technologies have been improved or replaced as a result of research: Poisonwind Mortars, Warpfire Throwers, Doomrockets. See Skyre technology tab.
Knowledge gained about the Infurnal Legion!
- They currently have very small numbers (~3500) but all are either former dawi zharr or homegrown recruits. They possess at least one Broodmother, though not one that gestates very quickly.
- They have established a settlement in the Dragon Isles.
- They have access to all chaos dwarf equipment and wargear at max quality, since they don't have to compromise on quality yet due to their relatively low numbers.
