- Location
- USA
That happens but I would take a look at them for some inspiration, could help with building the Tyranids even more. Or if not at lest get an idea on a fun concept.
The Young Xian of the Celestial Realm: Space Cathay 4x Warhammer 40k Quest
- Thread starter Spartakrod
- Start date
- Sci-Fi
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
If they can regenerate mass from nothing, somehow squeeze the 30% larger than a Carnifex Laius Horror inside of a normal human being, incubate rippers from a single injection sting into a whole swarm in actual seconds, spew Tyranids out of spawning chambers made from mutated plants or just dropped from orbit, their organs and biomorphs are all tyranids in and of themselves, and via the Ymgarl factor and Ymgarl Genestealers alter their physiology on the fly; they can adapt in real time. It's basically taking already extant stuff about the tyranids or things that can be done with warp juju and taking them to their logical conclusion rather than them being random one-offs. To help convey why they are a threat no matter the level you're at.
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
I'll sort out slot costs after I finish writing the battle post.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
Hm, it looks like the Death Companies weren't enough for Ka'Bhanda and co. to feed off of. Was it just a numbers issue, or was it because the Black was angry at Horus, who wasn't there, while the Red were too deep in bloodlust to actually recognize who they were bloodletting?
Sort of adjacent to the Tyranid solipsism issue.
Sort of adjacent to the Tyranid solipsism issue.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
Welp, Sparta says we can make Revolutionary Projects for other races.
Eldar Revolutionary Project: Wishcraft
The Eldar are a race that has fallen from lofty heights to a degree few can claim. They've lost the majority of their pantheon, their holdings, and even their very souls are constantly at risk. Once they had an army of psychic automatons, not unlike Tian'Choren Automata of vastly greater power, could push themselves to their fullest potential in any field, wield psychic might sufficient to rearrange solar systems on an individual level, and possessed psitech such as the Reality Engines, which could overwrite reality in ways only the Qlippoth, Sefirot, and Strangers really compare to, in modern times. In these dark times, with their race splintered to a degree that is likely irrecoverable, many means of scrounging up any advantage whatsoever are unbarred.
The connections to the Fae and Life, Light, Preservation, the Dark, and even choosing to ignore the esoteric in favor of materium-based knowledge and technology, for all it's derided by many as aping the Necrons, are all paths significant fractions of the Eldar have taken. However, some have sought a deeper bond with the Epsilon Advent, not unlike the Dawi and the Votann. Part of it is a mutual desire for the continued containment of the Strangers, and part of it is that, while their connection to the Warp might be fraught, a connection tot he Dreamtime would be less so.
Before, the Eldar more or less ignored the infrareality-based plane, as they had psychic might aplenty, and would have to all but start from scratch as humanity did their the Age of Strife, but they no longer have the luxury of leaving such avenues untapped. As such, they seek to trade their knowledge of the Warp, among other things, for the the Advent's knowledge of the Leng.
The Epsilon are slow to trust much of anyone outside their circle, but the Eldar have proven their commitment to the cause of pushing back the tides of infrareality, and so they have begun sharing secrets.
It is believed the Reality Engines of ages past and their common use on the Eldar have had an effect on them that is being felt in their Psions, as the first major power to manifest was Wishcraft.
In essence, the user accumulates actualized potential, most commonly in the form of a coin if they bother to ground it in some fashion, and they may spend it to make a 'Wish' dependent on their power and knowledge. A minor wish is obtained roughly every month, and can be used to actualize anything they might have accomplished in a month's effort, as if they'd devoted every waking moment to the task. From slaughtering a huge number of Orks, to recovering resources, to learning a new language, even research breakthroughs are a valid means of spending them.
They additionally gain a Least Wish every year, and a Lesser Wish every century, with similar caveats, and they may stockpile these with no limit to accomplish greater feats. However, they remain dependent on the user. A powerful warrior would get more utility out of burning it on slaughter than a scholar would, whereas a scholar would get more out of a Wish for a research breakthrough than their martial counterpart. Obviously, this is a power that favors the already-powerful, so Psionic Lords get a great deal more out of it than the common Psion. Still, as utility effects go? It's no Reality Engine, but it's a start.
If nothing else, it makes Psions much more useful in industry and the like, as a month's work in much of anything done in an eyeblink, every month, can do wonders. It's also useful for flash-building defenses and the like, as a month's worth of fortification accomplished in a second, even if they're effectively a normal person beyond Wishcraft, can quickly add up when a thousand Psions burn a Minor Wish.
If there is any weakness to Wishcraft, it's that it is limited by the possible. Many things are possible, but if the task could not be done, the effect will not take hold. Most Psions have a sense for when a wish is impossible to grant, and will generally shift tactics upon encountering one. This can be useful. If, for example, a seemingly ordinary foe cannot be felled even with a month's effort concentrated on it, that says something about their opposition.
Eldar Revolutionary Project: Wishcraft
The Eldar are a race that has fallen from lofty heights to a degree few can claim. They've lost the majority of their pantheon, their holdings, and even their very souls are constantly at risk. Once they had an army of psychic automatons, not unlike Tian'Choren Automata of vastly greater power, could push themselves to their fullest potential in any field, wield psychic might sufficient to rearrange solar systems on an individual level, and possessed psitech such as the Reality Engines, which could overwrite reality in ways only the Qlippoth, Sefirot, and Strangers really compare to, in modern times. In these dark times, with their race splintered to a degree that is likely irrecoverable, many means of scrounging up any advantage whatsoever are unbarred.
The connections to the Fae and Life, Light, Preservation, the Dark, and even choosing to ignore the esoteric in favor of materium-based knowledge and technology, for all it's derided by many as aping the Necrons, are all paths significant fractions of the Eldar have taken. However, some have sought a deeper bond with the Epsilon Advent, not unlike the Dawi and the Votann. Part of it is a mutual desire for the continued containment of the Strangers, and part of it is that, while their connection to the Warp might be fraught, a connection tot he Dreamtime would be less so.
Before, the Eldar more or less ignored the infrareality-based plane, as they had psychic might aplenty, and would have to all but start from scratch as humanity did their the Age of Strife, but they no longer have the luxury of leaving such avenues untapped. As such, they seek to trade their knowledge of the Warp, among other things, for the the Advent's knowledge of the Leng.
The Epsilon are slow to trust much of anyone outside their circle, but the Eldar have proven their commitment to the cause of pushing back the tides of infrareality, and so they have begun sharing secrets.
It is believed the Reality Engines of ages past and their common use on the Eldar have had an effect on them that is being felt in their Psions, as the first major power to manifest was Wishcraft.
In essence, the user accumulates actualized potential, most commonly in the form of a coin if they bother to ground it in some fashion, and they may spend it to make a 'Wish' dependent on their power and knowledge. A minor wish is obtained roughly every month, and can be used to actualize anything they might have accomplished in a month's effort, as if they'd devoted every waking moment to the task. From slaughtering a huge number of Orks, to recovering resources, to learning a new language, even research breakthroughs are a valid means of spending them.
They additionally gain a Least Wish every year, and a Lesser Wish every century, with similar caveats, and they may stockpile these with no limit to accomplish greater feats. However, they remain dependent on the user. A powerful warrior would get more utility out of burning it on slaughter than a scholar would, whereas a scholar would get more out of a Wish for a research breakthrough than their martial counterpart. Obviously, this is a power that favors the already-powerful, so Psionic Lords get a great deal more out of it than the common Psion. Still, as utility effects go? It's no Reality Engine, but it's a start.
If nothing else, it makes Psions much more useful in industry and the like, as a month's work in much of anything done in an eyeblink, every month, can do wonders. It's also useful for flash-building defenses and the like, as a month's worth of fortification accomplished in a second, even if they're effectively a normal person beyond Wishcraft, can quickly add up when a thousand Psions burn a Minor Wish.
If there is any weakness to Wishcraft, it's that it is limited by the possible. Many things are possible, but if the task could not be done, the effect will not take hold. Most Psions have a sense for when a wish is impossible to grant, and will generally shift tactics upon encountering one. This can be useful. If, for example, a seemingly ordinary foe cannot be felled even with a month's effort concentrated on it, that says something about their opposition.
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@Spartakrod i have quite a few questions and some headcanons, and i would greatly appreciate if you would indulge me by answering them and telling me where i am absolutely incorrect.
is the Thexian Trade Empire a thing in the galaxies of darkness? If they are i see them being a younger power like the Draxian Hegemony, the Spheres of T'Au'Va, and the Dracolith Church.
Are the Draconith a thing in the Galaxies of Darkness? Because they are pretty cool, and would be great additions to the lore. There ancient empire helped to defeat the Dragon Ogors, and are pretty important to the story of Kragnos, who i am pretty sure is a thing in the galaxies of darkness. I can see there two princes being gods in the Sigmarite pantheon, and the Pact Draconis could easily be fprged during the Ullanor campagin and also be one of the reasons why Horus has a hard time fighting the holy alliance.
Given the increased number of winds of magic, there can be a lot of cool Draconith. I can see them being raised in the Collegia Arcana and the Eldritch Council (the winds of magic studiers/users of Sigmar) and have various epic fire breath weapons based on the winds, both canon and the ones introduced in this setting. Like the wind of ice could give a Draconith fire so cold it burns, while the winds of space and time have two different effects. the time wind can either rapidly age a being to dust, or cause them to de age until they are unborn. the space wind could either shrink a being until it becomes nothing, or expand a being until it becomes too big for there body to support. Thousands of space draconith working together could collapse a world into a singularity.
I see the Draconith also being close to the lizardmen, due to them being vital to there continued existence, having saved them from the betrayal of Kragnos. Also during M35 or around that a force of Druchii and Drukhari got there grubby hands on a clutch of Draconith eggs, corrupting them into beasts of Dhar and forcing them into the service of Malekith or the arenas of the dark cities.
Is Commoragh the only Druhkari city, or are there many?
i see the wind realms as essentially the mortal realms, is that about right?
if they are the mortal realms, i see Syhish as essentially being controled by the powers of death not obedient to Nagash and the Primarch mortarchs, because Nagash's realm is obviously in the deep warp where the Nepheroith dwell.
For the Ettins and Ixitatchil, i see them being aquatic/amphibious, and having fueds with the Idoneth and many great war leaders assasinated by the Marinus Temple (the amphibious imperial assasins). Is that right?
On the Ettins, since there two headed Orca giants, do they use terms like Gubbins and Shiniez? Or are those Greenskin exclusives?
On the Ixitatchil, how do they get around? Since they are evil manta rays, do they fly in the air as easily as swimming in the water? Or do they have reverse scuba suits/water filled life support vessels when they must deign to walk on dry land?
I also see the Ixitatchil's seeing land dwellers as savages unworthy of respect, only working with them when they absolutely must. Is that about right?
Is realmstone a thing in the Galaxies of Darkness? I know Warpstone is a thing, but what about Chamonite, Nullstone, and things like that? Also, if it is a thing, maybe it should be called Windstone, given the realms are a warp layer.
Which gods/warp powers are able to manifest avatars in the galaxies of darkness? I know that Sigmar and Nagash can, which leads me to believe that the only gods who can't do it are the Chaos gods, the Order Gods, and the twin headed god Gorkamorka, who is both Gork and Mork. This could easily let things like the Bad Moon appear in combat. Am i about right or completely wrong?
Ok, thats it for this question barrage. More will inevitibly cpme in the future, because i love the galaxies of darkness so very much, and i will always want to learn more about it. Even if you don't answer @Spartakrod as is your right i will still love this project.
is the Thexian Trade Empire a thing in the galaxies of darkness? If they are i see them being a younger power like the Draxian Hegemony, the Spheres of T'Au'Va, and the Dracolith Church.
Are the Draconith a thing in the Galaxies of Darkness? Because they are pretty cool, and would be great additions to the lore. There ancient empire helped to defeat the Dragon Ogors, and are pretty important to the story of Kragnos, who i am pretty sure is a thing in the galaxies of darkness. I can see there two princes being gods in the Sigmarite pantheon, and the Pact Draconis could easily be fprged during the Ullanor campagin and also be one of the reasons why Horus has a hard time fighting the holy alliance.
Given the increased number of winds of magic, there can be a lot of cool Draconith. I can see them being raised in the Collegia Arcana and the Eldritch Council (the winds of magic studiers/users of Sigmar) and have various epic fire breath weapons based on the winds, both canon and the ones introduced in this setting. Like the wind of ice could give a Draconith fire so cold it burns, while the winds of space and time have two different effects. the time wind can either rapidly age a being to dust, or cause them to de age until they are unborn. the space wind could either shrink a being until it becomes nothing, or expand a being until it becomes too big for there body to support. Thousands of space draconith working together could collapse a world into a singularity.
I see the Draconith also being close to the lizardmen, due to them being vital to there continued existence, having saved them from the betrayal of Kragnos. Also during M35 or around that a force of Druchii and Drukhari got there grubby hands on a clutch of Draconith eggs, corrupting them into beasts of Dhar and forcing them into the service of Malekith or the arenas of the dark cities.
Is Commoragh the only Druhkari city, or are there many?
i see the wind realms as essentially the mortal realms, is that about right?
if they are the mortal realms, i see Syhish as essentially being controled by the powers of death not obedient to Nagash and the Primarch mortarchs, because Nagash's realm is obviously in the deep warp where the Nepheroith dwell.
For the Ettins and Ixitatchil, i see them being aquatic/amphibious, and having fueds with the Idoneth and many great war leaders assasinated by the Marinus Temple (the amphibious imperial assasins). Is that right?
On the Ettins, since there two headed Orca giants, do they use terms like Gubbins and Shiniez? Or are those Greenskin exclusives?
On the Ixitatchil, how do they get around? Since they are evil manta rays, do they fly in the air as easily as swimming in the water? Or do they have reverse scuba suits/water filled life support vessels when they must deign to walk on dry land?
I also see the Ixitatchil's seeing land dwellers as savages unworthy of respect, only working with them when they absolutely must. Is that about right?
Is realmstone a thing in the Galaxies of Darkness? I know Warpstone is a thing, but what about Chamonite, Nullstone, and things like that? Also, if it is a thing, maybe it should be called Windstone, given the realms are a warp layer.
Which gods/warp powers are able to manifest avatars in the galaxies of darkness? I know that Sigmar and Nagash can, which leads me to believe that the only gods who can't do it are the Chaos gods, the Order Gods, and the twin headed god Gorkamorka, who is both Gork and Mork. This could easily let things like the Bad Moon appear in combat. Am i about right or completely wrong?
Ok, thats it for this question barrage. More will inevitibly cpme in the future, because i love the galaxies of darkness so very much, and i will always want to learn more about it. Even if you don't answer @Spartakrod as is your right i will still love this project.
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Kairos123
Insomniac Extraordinaire
Revolutionary breakthrough:
Sub space creation: Through harmonious usage of psychics, cultivators, tianren, and alchemy a new layer of reality has been created. Shallower than both the Warp and the Dreamtime, but still inaccessible to real space without a deep understanding of Yin and Yang, it serves as both a prototype of what is possible, and allows for the creation of fortifications within subspace. Allows fortifications to be brought into offensive battles. Revolutionary Breakthrough, esoterics. Opens up further Subspace branches and tech.
Sub space projection: Allows ships able to use a layer of sub space as an additional ablative shield, sending incoming munitions into empty sub space. Until the designated subspace is filled with energy or mass, serves as a solid defense against mundane weaponry. Less effective against warp or leng based weapons.
Sub space defenses: Fortifications held in subspace brought to its logical conclusion. Allows spending of resources to reinforce a mobile sub space pocket that can be taken with a fleethorde into battle. Also allows for fortifications to integrate subspace pockets into defense, creating new hazards as a hallway may lead to an entirely different fort. Esoteric, enhances fortifications and allows them to be brought offensively.
Individual sub space usage: Rings allowing one to seamlessly switch weapons, armor, and talismans. Training allows for line infantry to switch between tools to respond more effectively against various enemies or situations. Esoteric, increases ground forces effectiveness as they are able to switch between load outs tailored to different situations.
Research mega project:
Auspicious Seven Sects of Progress: Cultivatiors, Warpcraft-users, Alchemists, Physicist, Psychics, Tianren, Automata, and Biohackers each form a pillar of the of the seven sects. Brought together under this massive undertaking this school seeks to cooperatively advance each branch of science as Tien'Chao understands it. Each school of thought working harmoniously to push the boundaries of what is known and understood (though perhaps a bit competitively).
Super weapon mega project:
Summoning the Guardian Beasts: through an astounding feat of warpcraft, alchemy, and belief, Tien'chao has animated the mythical guardian beasts.
-Běifāng Xuánwǔ: Summons the black tortoise-snake of the north. (Very poor mobility, extreme defenses, long and short range focus with tortoise water beams and snake strikes)
-Dōngfāng Qīnglóng: Summons the Azure dragon of the East. (Medium range focus with wood control, battlefield control, boarding enhancement)
-Nán Fāng Zhū Què: Summons the Vermillion bird of the south. (Medium range focus with flame aura, regeneration, may respawn after first death)
-Xīfāng Báihǔ: Summons the white tiger of the west. (Extreme speed, deadly close range with star-metal claws/teeth, stealth, stealth detection, deep strike)
Giga project idea:
Establishing the Celestial Bureaucracy: Forms a Divine Realm within Celestial Space, where Celestial Buraecrats work to govern the cosmos. Each part is managed by special attendants, and their influence can be uses to fight other immaterial patrons in the warp, or through the warp fight those in Leng. Tian'Chao dead that wish to protect their descendants or continue to assist their home may elect to remain in this realm rather than reincarnate. Those that stay can train to become Celestial Bureacrats themselves, or the more militarily inclined Ancestral Guardians. All Subspace tech becomes Celestial Space, more defined within the warp, more narratively significant, and stronger. Items, equipment, and ammo stored within becomes celestial-touched.
Esoteric: Creates afterlife, complete with ancestors and administers monitoring and affecting the real world. Blesses all weapons, armor, ammo stored in subspace. Gives Tien'Chao units more narrative weight as they are watched over. Allows more powerful ancestor summoning, fate shenanigans, and greatly empowers all aspects of Tien'Chao esoterics.
Basically what I am looking forward to is creating a new branch of revolutionary technology that leans heavily into creating subspace pockets for utility before completely pivoting in conjunction with the giga project to be enchant near everything and push our advantages into parity with the Elder races. Or at least comparable to them.
The superweapon and science megaproject are just fluff that I think would be interesting as opposed to a typical school or big gun go boom superweapon. Each Guardian Beast would have different areas it excels in, White Tiger at anti-stealth or decapitation strike, Azure Dragon at tangling up planetoids to whale on and making boarding/anti boarding easier. Vermillion Bird to burn a lot of tiny enemies to a crisp, and keep burning them. Black Tortoise Snake to bombard the enemy fleet at range while protecting our fleet.
Sub space creation: Through harmonious usage of psychics, cultivators, tianren, and alchemy a new layer of reality has been created. Shallower than both the Warp and the Dreamtime, but still inaccessible to real space without a deep understanding of Yin and Yang, it serves as both a prototype of what is possible, and allows for the creation of fortifications within subspace. Allows fortifications to be brought into offensive battles. Revolutionary Breakthrough, esoterics. Opens up further Subspace branches and tech.
Sub space projection: Allows ships able to use a layer of sub space as an additional ablative shield, sending incoming munitions into empty sub space. Until the designated subspace is filled with energy or mass, serves as a solid defense against mundane weaponry. Less effective against warp or leng based weapons.
Sub space defenses: Fortifications held in subspace brought to its logical conclusion. Allows spending of resources to reinforce a mobile sub space pocket that can be taken with a fleethorde into battle. Also allows for fortifications to integrate subspace pockets into defense, creating new hazards as a hallway may lead to an entirely different fort. Esoteric, enhances fortifications and allows them to be brought offensively.
Individual sub space usage: Rings allowing one to seamlessly switch weapons, armor, and talismans. Training allows for line infantry to switch between tools to respond more effectively against various enemies or situations. Esoteric, increases ground forces effectiveness as they are able to switch between load outs tailored to different situations.
Research mega project:
Auspicious Seven Sects of Progress: Cultivatiors, Warpcraft-users, Alchemists, Physicist, Psychics, Tianren, Automata, and Biohackers each form a pillar of the of the seven sects. Brought together under this massive undertaking this school seeks to cooperatively advance each branch of science as Tien'Chao understands it. Each school of thought working harmoniously to push the boundaries of what is known and understood (though perhaps a bit competitively).
Super weapon mega project:
Summoning the Guardian Beasts: through an astounding feat of warpcraft, alchemy, and belief, Tien'chao has animated the mythical guardian beasts.
-Běifāng Xuánwǔ: Summons the black tortoise-snake of the north. (Very poor mobility, extreme defenses, long and short range focus with tortoise water beams and snake strikes)
-Dōngfāng Qīnglóng: Summons the Azure dragon of the East. (Medium range focus with wood control, battlefield control, boarding enhancement)
-Nán Fāng Zhū Què: Summons the Vermillion bird of the south. (Medium range focus with flame aura, regeneration, may respawn after first death)
-Xīfāng Báihǔ: Summons the white tiger of the west. (Extreme speed, deadly close range with star-metal claws/teeth, stealth, stealth detection, deep strike)
Giga project idea:
Establishing the Celestial Bureaucracy: Forms a Divine Realm within Celestial Space, where Celestial Buraecrats work to govern the cosmos. Each part is managed by special attendants, and their influence can be uses to fight other immaterial patrons in the warp, or through the warp fight those in Leng. Tian'Chao dead that wish to protect their descendants or continue to assist their home may elect to remain in this realm rather than reincarnate. Those that stay can train to become Celestial Bureacrats themselves, or the more militarily inclined Ancestral Guardians. All Subspace tech becomes Celestial Space, more defined within the warp, more narratively significant, and stronger. Items, equipment, and ammo stored within becomes celestial-touched.
Esoteric: Creates afterlife, complete with ancestors and administers monitoring and affecting the real world. Blesses all weapons, armor, ammo stored in subspace. Gives Tien'Chao units more narrative weight as they are watched over. Allows more powerful ancestor summoning, fate shenanigans, and greatly empowers all aspects of Tien'Chao esoterics.
Basically what I am looking forward to is creating a new branch of revolutionary technology that leans heavily into creating subspace pockets for utility before completely pivoting in conjunction with the giga project to be enchant near everything and push our advantages into parity with the Elder races. Or at least comparable to them.
The superweapon and science megaproject are just fluff that I think would be interesting as opposed to a typical school or big gun go boom superweapon. Each Guardian Beast would have different areas it excels in, White Tiger at anti-stealth or decapitation strike, Azure Dragon at tangling up planetoids to whale on and making boarding/anti boarding easier. Vermillion Bird to burn a lot of tiny enemies to a crisp, and keep burning them. Black Tortoise Snake to bombard the enemy fleet at range while protecting our fleet.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I like this a lot, and each territory can basically have their own branch of the School.
due to my paranoia acting up again, i will be asking some questions and giving some headcanons that i would like answered/replied to by @Spartakrod or someone who would know the answer.
since it was said on the discord that Nagash's Daemons (to use a blanket term for warp entities) are based upon the psycopomps and daemons of pathfinder (which i will so be using to make a few breeds of them), would darkness daemons take inspiration from the devils and kytons of pathfinder? Similarly, would there be Malal daemons based on Shakils?
Does the Nightbringer consider Nagash to be a worthy opponent, or some punk taking his style?
Do the Ogor's have a fear of death? In 40k canon, the fear of death is a result of the Nightbringer traumatizing all life, except for the Orks. I am wondering if like the greenskins (with the likely exception of Grots), the Ogors are fearless of death.
When the Star Father does arise, will it have any servants coming from Xenos? I personally am thinking it's a hard no, because its born from the worst of the Imperial Truth, the Imperial Creed, and the Cult Mechanicus, all of which have xenophobia as a core value. But then again, in the galaxies of darkness Vershiv has non-skaven worshipers, despite being a mono-skaven god in most depictions.
i see the emperor and empress being typically seen in two roles in the views of the Imperial Creed. essentially the empress is the protector, and the Emperor is the smiter. does not mean they can't do the others role, the emperor does protect and the emperess can smite.
since it was said on the discord that Nagash's Daemons (to use a blanket term for warp entities) are based upon the psycopomps and daemons of pathfinder (which i will so be using to make a few breeds of them), would darkness daemons take inspiration from the devils and kytons of pathfinder? Similarly, would there be Malal daemons based on Shakils?
Does the Nightbringer consider Nagash to be a worthy opponent, or some punk taking his style?
Do the Ogor's have a fear of death? In 40k canon, the fear of death is a result of the Nightbringer traumatizing all life, except for the Orks. I am wondering if like the greenskins (with the likely exception of Grots), the Ogors are fearless of death.
When the Star Father does arise, will it have any servants coming from Xenos? I personally am thinking it's a hard no, because its born from the worst of the Imperial Truth, the Imperial Creed, and the Cult Mechanicus, all of which have xenophobia as a core value. But then again, in the galaxies of darkness Vershiv has non-skaven worshipers, despite being a mono-skaven god in most depictions.
i see the emperor and empress being typically seen in two roles in the views of the Imperial Creed. essentially the empress is the protector, and the Emperor is the smiter. does not mean they can't do the others role, the emperor does protect and the emperess can smite.
Moradash War Part 1
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
Gonna split this into several posts so that you can get the finished stuff as it's done rather than wait which should help with the speed of updates, especially as I prep to get back into my university and for the spring event crunch at my job at the undisclosed gacha game company.
I was originally going to show a lengthy duel for each character but that was bloating the post's word count massively.
"No loyalists amidst their ranks?" One of the Chaos Space Marines asked as he looked over at the hololith at the centre of the command Dais. His seat was unpadded and made no concession to comfort. Which suited Ordermaster Armagednon just fine. His terminator armour was seat enough for him, the fingers of his clawed power fists rapping on the armrests of his dais and pointing at the glyphs displayed on the holograms.
"None my Lord, Certainly none of Dorn's children." A warpsmith reported, getting an extensive exhalation from her superior as he increased the rate at which his fingers tapped.
"Nothing but Xenos and Pagans...what a joke." He growled with crocodilian menace.
"Centuries of grinding siege warfare and for what? The Fists won't even come to stop us?" He complained before shaking his head.
"Have our ships readied. Lay these curs to waste." He commanded, the reserve ships prepared for any intrusion burning retro and lateral thrusters to turn themselves into proper position.
His Invicta class superdreadnought, the Ferrodomina, a more than forty-eight kilometre long brick of a warship that was produced at an Iron Warrior dockyard around the Gas Giant Sondus Duodecus centuries ago. Though while it shared the name of the Imperial counterpart, it was modified greatly from the original STC according to the material circumstance sand preferences of Iron Warrior doctrine, which included greater bombardment capability and command and control systems at the expense of some troop transport capabilities, all so that they wouldn't have to rely on auxiliaries as much.
Across just about every star system in this ten kiloparsec cube, the battle was joined, and the Ferrodomina would be part of it. Some battles would be clashes of small fleets and combat groups, others would be sprawling melees between blizzards of opposing warships, this would fit somewhere in between, where the Ferrodomina would be the largest ship in the traitor armada. But every battle, even small pissing matches between destroyer picket groups mattered, this system, with its great Promethium clouds contained in its myriad gas giants, was in essence a great fuel depot and refinery to provide natural fuel to the war machine.
"We will not let these perfidious Aeldari break our lines. Keep moving forward and saturate their positions with area of effect weapons, they can't dodge us forever." He commanded with a proud tone to his voice as the engagement raged on. Hours would pass, then days; drones returning with reprocessed material to restock depleted ammo stores to continue bombardment.
A Despoiler class battleship came apart, torn apart by Eldar star-ballistae weapons that overpenetrated its hull, a dying strike cruiser vomited its cargo of Stormbirds and boarding torpedoes into an Asur Falcon Cruiser, Caestus Assault Rams and Dreadclaws following suit and disgorging a lethal payload of space marines and the means with which for them to construct bases after abandoning their serfs to die.
Bombardment cannons and lance turrets erupted with the spite of the Fourtieth at long range. The void would open up with brilliant colours and the unending streaks of little shapes representing missiles, torpedoes, and strike craft.
Their formation was tight enough to maximise firepower, loose enough to allow for manoeuvre in the face of incoming enemy torpedoes that had slipped through flak and defense laser screens. But his craft had already been targeted for annihilation. After days of off and on bombardment and often frantic boarding engagement with the Aeldari warriors; the army of the starless night crawled out of the spaces between.
The Ythalnzids' vaguely cephalopoid ships threw forth a wave of mind controlled warships of a distant xenos culture, bulbous vessels of plasma torpedoes and energy projectors who died and died and died in large numbers as they were raked by the superior technology of the Eldar and the Iron Warriors, but it was enough for enemy to get close enough for the enemy to psychoport masses of uninova gas inside the craft's slave holds where humans were kept as fodder for whatever the warpsmiths would need.
The purple gas spread with malignant intellect, and each man exposed to it underwent a transformation as miraculous as it was hideous. Muscles swelled,s kin turned ashen and gunmetal and scaly, hairs lengthened into quills, jaws split apart and eyes multiplied while hands grew into claws. Others changed into other shapes that the tentacled masters had carefully designed to cause havoc; the beasts turning on their handlers whose sealed gear gave them enough time to scream for help.
It was enough of a distraction for him to dither long enough to avoid getting out between a double-broadside with an Asur ship to the port and an Ythalnzid ship to the starboard. His shields caught in a recharge cycle, the bombardment included a point-blank barrage of torpedoes before a withering bombardment of plasma and psi-kine weapons that strained at the adamantium laced hull, before a carefully hidden Asuryani Wraithship had slipped out of cloak and released a barrage of distortion blasts to cast his craft into the warp on the seventh day, sending his ship in bits and pieces into the warp whereas Black Holes opened by the Ythalnzids in the other portion sucked other parts down the cosmic drain pipe.
He died tearing his way through the abominations his former slaves had become, roaring defiance as he felt the bony fingers of the realm of Nagash pull him towards the pit of Death itself. Even his plasteel armour and bones twisted into nothing, and his soul plummeted towards a realm of waiting Nephirot and the vision of his end. Though he had commanded many armies and laid many worlds to waste, he would go before the courts of the judges of what men once called Sheol, Duat, Yomi, Naraka, Mictlan, or Irkalla alone.
Even before the Iron Warriors could adjust the roster of leadership, the Lizardmen would arrive afterwards with a dreadnought battle group to drive the Brain Eaters and the traitors back, Slann casting dreadfully powerful wind magics and psychic furor to drive the outversers back until they pulled away. Their ships seeming to fold upon themselves to slide between the invisible directions while the followers of Perturabo's folly shanghai'd their sorcerers to call on pacts to let them leave with the offering of whatever slaves they had remaining. And now the Promethium stores could be cleansed, denied to the enemy and these worlds restored to their functions according to the star charts of the Old Ones.
Such were the battles in this place. Deadly, myriad, plentiful, but never pointless.
...
Nothgyth the Slayer was especially devoted to Khorne, though unlike much of his legion he retained a great deal of a sense of purpose. Not honour however, he was aware enough of the truth of his patron to know that Khorne did not actually care for honour. What the Great Goddess; for one of her deviations from what many human followers of chaos believed in was to perceive Khorne as female; wanted was the blood of those who were capable of spilling blood themselves. The weak, the useless; those who were too small to truly hate and had lead lives too unimportant to rouse wrath and fury had nothing to offer save their lives as fuel. They were unworthy to decorate the skull throne of hated champions. This she believed, was the only way to please the black lady of the brass citadel, to gain her favour and notice, to petition her for a chance at immortality as one of her blessed daemons.
She claimed the skull of a Kroot Blademaster, gazing into the eyes of the xenos. Those filthy, wretched, alien eyes that had betrayed no hate for his foe, nor fear at his death. He had accepted it when Nothgyth's armour proved to be too potent a determining factor for the Kroot for all his skill to overcome. He had given a compelling fight, but not a challenging one. No matter, she was no Slaaneshi; it was not the fight he craved, nor the pain or terror, it was the simple ending of a hated life, and the consigning of another skull to the Bloody Master.
"Cousin, are you going to recite old plays or will you be rejoining us?" The Iron Warrior's adjutant asked with a hint of a sneer in her voice.
"You have no appreciation for faith, cousin." She sighed, grinding her teeth in response.
"If you start talking to me like one of Lorgar's, I am firing you out of the dread claw cannon into the sun." She hissed, gesturing towards a hall leading towards the loading bay of one of the warworld's dreadclaw launchers.
But she sensed a challenger approaching, one that her great goddess told her would be a far greater challenge than these mere Kroot.
"Perturabo's get remains as void of higher aspiration as ever I see, do you ever get tired of fighting for no reason besides your father's glory Anice?" She replied.
"Yeah well your primarch died to fulfill the whims of your precious gods. Cry me a river about our secularism somewhere else." Anice spat as she could feel righteous rage towards her cousin in her twin hearts. She wrapped her fingers around the heft of her favoured axe, tightening her grip and glaring at the grey armoured marine.
"Blaspheme in my presence again you technophilic bitch, and we will see how much your contract protects you." She snarled, pointing the daemon infused chainaxe at the other marine.
"Give me a reason to shoot you, I dare you." She growled as the combi-weapons mounted on her power fists clicked into ready position, her terminator guards following suit while the blood-brass terminator armour clad Skull-thresher fraternity that joined her in battle revved their axes and chainfists to life.
"Beg your pardon my lords...if you will allow such a humble slave as myself to interrupt." An auxiliary admiral said, dropping to her knees and averting her eyes from the two helmet clad astartes.
"The enemy is already here...and foul sorceries have crippled one of our sister battleworlds already...we think they are bringing in High Eldar, Squats, Reptiles, T'au, and Celestials." She reported with as calm a voice as she could manage. Stumbling with her words could make them think it was her fault, Nothgyth surmised. Lucky for her that she had no interest in her skull anyway, she was merely doing as duty required.
"Rise, Telesia. You do have earned the right to stand before me." She said, there was no avuncularity to his tone, but she did have a respect for her managing to climb to the rank of admiral from a simple slave-officer in a legion that regarded people like her mostly as fuel and ammo.
"You will remain on your knees mortal worm." Anice howled.
"Were only the corpse emperor and empress wise enough to allow us to breed true so we could be rid of your kind." She snarled, flexing the clawed digits of her power fists.
"You can produce scions guaranteed to be compatible with your geneseed already. What more do you wish?" Nothgyth asked, hoping to get her choler rising.
"If children born of such ways came with the geneseed implanted within the womb already the Astartes would ascend to their destiny as humanity's replacement. Now, we must content ourselves with being its overlords and deal with the busy work of sifting through the rare flecks of gold in their endless sand." She explained with an exasperated sigh, frustrated by how often this conversation had repeated.
"Where would you find people to feel superior to if we didn't have humans to lord over?" Nothgyth chuckled.
"We have a Squat planetcraft on approach my lords. Perhaps it would be best to table this discussion for now?" The admiral posited.
"More than that, we have a celestial planetcraft, identified as the flagship of Zhu Xinyi." One of the terminators reported after checking his datafeeds.
That got her attention, Nothgyth's head turning towards the Astartes as she polished her axe and murmured a thought. A dragon child of Yin and Yang? That would be a worthy skull indeed. But why was she here? She looked to a passing beastman and decided their entrails were as good as any, stepping forward and swinging her axe into the surprised Neochgor who let out a donkey like bray of confusion before she had bisected it neatly in a quick swift and looked at the patterns in the blood.
Sacred words in Daemontongue were said, clawed gauntlet fingers tracing Khorne's sigil until a revelation in blood was made, showing an image of the blue dragon coming for a terminator armoured warrior of khorne. Yes...she was here for her.
"Fascinating...with her blood, I can anoint myself in Her glory." She said rapturously.
She would wait, studying the void battle unfolding. A titanic clash of warring worlds and blizzards of warships. The Stranger fleets of the Xel-Cthagora were crushed between the chaotic and orderly armadas, blasted apart in the crossfire of titanic war machines and void beasts, unnatural semi-organic horrors dying equally unnatural deaths as they were swarmed by daemon ships, hacked apart by saurian boarding warriors, shredded by railgun salvos, or crushed under wave after wave of lance fire in the void.
On the surface, the last of them died under a wave of Khorne's anointed daemons, drawing power from the hate that the faithful here had for the monstrosities from beyond and the blood of their sacrifices for there was no useful fluid from the corpses of the mechano-organisms, though from the vox there were claims that it was the Kyn who had dealt the final blow with a charge of Einhyrs and a roll of Colossi megatanks.
Whatever the case, now the intruders would be out of the way for now, and she could focus on her kill, watching the skies of the war-world flash with the colours of void fields under intensive weapons fire and the inchoate volleys of cannonades spat into the heavens. Night had become endless day from nova like explosions blossoming in the stars, and a billion little battles, each of vital importance to those fighting them if nobody else, each seeking to turn the wheel of history in their own little way; unfurled in her vision.
Glorious...even with the crushing headache the empowered field of harmonic shadow gave her. Daemons were harder to coax from the empyrean and dissipated more quickly, sorcerous powers often refused to work and many of the lesser slave psykers' heads promptly exploded when the perils of the warp fed back into them, while many a thrall wizard ruptured into gates for the daemons of Malal to step through. But her destined quarry was so close now...
She need only wait.
...
Xinyi found herself, once again, having to limit her usage of her dragon form. The winding inferior of an Iron Warriors fortress Moon was ill-suited for the strengths of that form, and it was generally easier to use her spellcasting when she wasn't manifesting such a large body. Of course, as a true dragon, her flesh was more a sort of garment than a true body. She was a spirit being, like the Tianren were as a whole. Not wholly of any realm in particular. To say she had a true form would be a misnomer, her human form was as comfortable as any of her dragon forms, and in places like this; it was more convenient.
Winding hallways arranged according to a demented math that was mad only in the way those who believed themselves the only sane men in the room could be. Ambushes were common, fed at precisely calculated intervals that she didn't take very long to figure out. A problem inherent to chasing efficiency at any price is that once one's definition of efficiency was discovered, they became predictable.
Her shield absorbed many incoming blows, both her defensive screens and the circular discus-shaped shield decorated with her personal symbol, made of Shen Bin Tie, a divine material that had never known violation, her helmed head often being the last thing that her attackers saw. The normal human soldiers were cut down with little fanfare, usually simply being engulfed by cryokinetics or simple spells she could release with little more than a thought.
Torrents of lashing water manifested from thin air or tore their way from pipes to crush enemies or block off shots with walls of liquid that condensed to be harder than metal, dancing into spiralling whips that cut through armaplas like paper as they swirled little filings of metal inside of them at incredible speeds. Water was her element, the ocean her ally, the waves her tool. Whether frozen into sheets of ice with inflections of anti-energy to entomb her foes in prisons of frigid crystal, crushing waves of liquid, or violent bursts of steam and vapour, or even the blood in many of their bodies, water was an element that demanded respect.
Chaos Warriors and heavy War Servitors in her way lasted little longer. While they could bulldoze their way through ordinary soldiers and fight many of her cultivators and other elites to a standstill, her blade was something she had tied to her soul and her desire to win, forged from metal found from a comet that had the ability to transition between dimensions in its intergalactic wanderings. Power armour and shielding would give way shortly, hissing briefly against her blade before caving to the pressure of the edges of the Comet's Tear. She had a number of other weapons prepared for herself, but this was a weapon that a primarch would have approved of, though likely not have wielded it themselves; a sign of her growth over the centuries. She would not be stopped by no-names trying to interpose themselves between her and her objective.
And she would have it, even with the bloodshed on both sides being formidable indeed. No matter, there were reserves. Hallways stank of corpses, floors were slick with blood and ash. There was no two ways around the fact that planetcraft boarding, even a planetcraft struck by powerful Slannic ritual magics; was always a bloody affair. Especially when the entire vessel was created to be a killing field. She lost count of how many times she had to resort to spellcraft to clear away walls made of the corpses of her own soldiers.
A sight that made her feel gloomy and upset, but ultimately could not discourage her from her objective. She pushed it to the back of her mind, away from her thoughts as she confirmed the death of the Planetsmith Anice, the Space Marine falling off a balcony after being decapitated by the Einhyr Grand Champion Svan Ullr, the Kyn giving her a nod of acknowledgement as her shield equipped Azure guards shattered the last door in her way with a burst of anti-energy weapons for her to kick over the now brittle gate and bring herself into a chamber where she found a burst of plasma cannon fire waiting for her from the shoulder mounted weapons fitted onto the terminator armour of her enemy.
Her shield bounced some of them back, bouncing into the Terminator's own burning defensive aura before she opened up with a spell of deathfrost that formed the sigil of a snowflake in the air, turning the atmosphere, the ground, and the unfortunate meatshields accompanying the rapidly approaching tactical dreadnought squad to ice that shattered beneath its own weight while the rotary gun fitted in the haft of her large axe spun to life and vomited out a barrage of daemonic lead. Fate was bent, altered so that the churning serpent's tail of bullets twisted away into hitting nothing but reinforced walls.
The Kyn arrived, Exo-armoured and coming with blades that combined plasma cutting blades and power fields; or power fields and mass drivers for blunt weapons such as mauls and gauntlets. Plasma, volkite, bolter, melta, and ion fire washed out from their weapons, hammering into the waves of fodder that were in the way of the ruthless Clone and Ironkyn without pity or remorse.
Svan Ullr stepped into the fray, with his crackling Hurricane Hammer thrumming to life in a power fist clad hand while a RAM shield in the other hand opened up with intense grav-weapon fire, to turn the armour of his foes against them with arcanotechnology to dial up the effects of gravity pulling the armour down until even chaos warrior flesh liquified in sickening crunches.
The Einhyr Champions closed to be at only a short distance from the Azure Guards, kinetic thrusters on their backs propelling them at shocking speeds for short and bulky beings such as themselves to barrel into the fray. Thunderclaps from magnetically and gravitically accelerated hammers and their discharging power fields rang out, shields splintering in protest while the propulsion fields simply reversed to allow swings to easily flow into one another.
The Azure Guards were each dragons themselves, closing around Xinyi to ward her against the chattering weapons fire of Chaos Havocs who used their peons as meat shields. Astartes pattern lascannon blasts pulsed and strobed, bouncing off of presented shields while the Azure Guardians turned their spellcraft on the anti-tank gunners. Cometary impacts of ice and frost rang out, pushing over the heads of Kyn and Celestial soldiers who had followed their champions this far into the fray.
Even as jade banner troopers were chopped down by the tusk helmed Chaos Terminators who pushed the evil tides forward and even as Warkyn Elites were dragged down by the waves of possessed Chaos Space Marines unleashed into their flanks; they did not falter. Ironkyn and Automata without fear braved storms of Khornate gore magic, engulfed in tidal waves of crimson death or fiery convocations of hate and offering no precious blood to spill for the fanatics.
Chaos cultists and Beastmen were butchered with only somewhat less effort than the traitor guardsmen were going down with, Xinyi's blade sending out torrential serpents of water every time it bit into them that cut them down in greater and greater numbers, each one who fell having their blood washed away and diluted to nothing while others were frozen solid by the touch or proximity of her shield, shattered into cleanly breaking pieces.
She knew that these dregs were being offered up as meat shields, that the Doom Harbingers here were simply buying time for their champion to get off the charge. So she let forth the mind razors of Ulgu, reaching into the minds of the weak with daggers that cut at the spirit and will to fight rather than the flesh. The cowards, or those who were not truly brave but rather forced by implants to fight fell over as each shadowy mist blade stabbed into them while the warriors and astartes shook their heads and growled.
Daemonic furies called forth from the othersea shrieked as their forms came undone, the cowardly wretches spiralling back into the warp in frenzied flashes of colours to prevent them from stopping Xinyi.
A Khornate Berzerker rushed forward, the butcher's nails compelling him to kill even after being soaked in the blood of Kyn and the many peoples of the Realm. He had discarded his pistol for a chainsword to go with his chainaxe, babbling incoherently while he leapt at her.
Her blade cut through shielding, ceramite, and flesh in a clean stroke, water erupting to flense the body into diluted viscerae while the Kyn provided crushing walls of firepower to cover the Azure Guard's advance, now only a few body lengths away from Nothgyth.
The fires of wroth waxed bright, heavenly snows wilted like frosted morning dew before the rising sun as the two women locked gazes.
"At last! A challenge! Face me spirit and offer your blood to the blood god!" She laughed as her axe roared to life and the fingers of her lightning claw crackled with tainted energy. Nothgyth radiated killing intent, a sensation like spiders crawling on the neck and being a finger nail's length away from a radiator all in one.
"There will be no offerings here this day. But you are welcome to surrender and repent for your crimes before you are executed for them. Perhaps if you truly show remorse we might even rehabilitate you." She said calmly, cooly while she let her sword dance in a quick flourish of challenge before bringing it to resting position.
"I have done no sin! I have merely been awakened and freed from the shackles of slavery to those lesser than I. Who sacrifices for you dragon?"
"Is that why you offer yourself to your temper like a toddler? To be a big and strong woman who others sacrifice to?"
"Stay your blaspheming tongue you horned serpent."
"If it is indeed your god who is the one in question, I am happy to blaspheme." She replied, composing herself with serne placidity.
Xinyi's own aura was becalming, harmonic, orderly, pulsing and progressing like well composed music as she called forth the water in the plumbing to tear through fracttures in seals, washing forward as a great wave to sweep away the Chaos Warriors of Khorne who sought to get in the way. Swearing was drowned out by the muffling effect of crushing tendrils of water that squeezed and whirled at her command as the warriors were swallowed by the wave, but a Goremage of Khorne spat forth a tide of blood from the fallen to push back against it.
No matter, she had not invested much of her will into the water, focused as she was on sizing up her opponent. Nothgyth had greater bulk in her armour and mass, but Xinyi's form was one as big as she wanted it to be, and so the marine's height advantage was nonexistent; to her brief conversation before she dismissed it as sorcerous tricks.
The Axe hungered for blood, and every swing that especially resonated with Khorne's murderous intent could find its way through nearly any means of outright avoiding damage whether that be deflector screens, armour hardness, or agility; only raw durability and the most unnatural of resilience could resist those occasional lucky swings. Much like with her own sword, agile and glimmering as water started to whril around it to match the fire that crowned Nothgyth's axe.
A claw swung out, heavy and vicious as its taloned fingers screamed towards Xinyi at mach speeds, blocked by her circular shield while her sword lashed forwards, shimmering and diving tendrils of water into the corona of hate around the Executioner.
The Marine's axe whipped forwards, raking against her shield while its daemon fire tried to find weakness only for Xinyi to let her blessed liquids smother the flame, her shield radiating frost as it came in edge on towards her foe's head.
The Marine stumbled to the left, the sword tusks and bladed horns of her Indomitus pattern terminator armour collecting flakes of snow from the impact as Xinyi pulled back and made a series of rapier like thrusts to push her foe back; the Azure Guard clashing with the executioner praetorians around them in the circle of exclusion created by water and fire.
"So quiet are you. Where is the legendary sharpness of your tongue dragon?" Nothgyth hissed, her corona sparking as they fought.
Her wrist-mounted meltaguns burst fired waves of obscene laser-heat that produced actinic flashes, once again batted away by Xinyi's shield, though the well timed intervention of one of the executioners to swing a massive zweihander daemonblade to help his master made her stumble into one of the melta blasts to the chest, grunting as her shielding dimmed.
"Banter is reserved for those who may learn from it. You are already damned by choice. What more is there to say?" She replied as she let forth her dragonfrost to retaliate against the Khornate, entrapping her legs in walls of ice that ate away at her barriers; anti-energy feeding on it to produce yet more ice while her will and power crept up the victim; trying to engulf her.
Nothgyth's choler spiked, furious at such a cheap trick as her aura resurged in fire and flame, heat distortions radiating off of her as her heavy frame opened up with the plasma cannons once again. Little suns burst into equally little supernova, striking at Xinyi while her shield's focus was brought to block the attentions of a grav-weapon.
An opening was made, her claws raked against Xinyi's shielding, and her axe struck true, slipping between the veils of fate to bite into her last ditch defensive runes which groaned in protest while Xinyi's sword stabbed forward towards one of Nothgyth's hearts. Blocking the talon arm with her shield arm, the sword slipped through the shielding after another stabbing motion and scraped into reinforced plasteel armour laced with adamantium, digging furrows into it.
Nothgyth's axe came down again, cutting into the guard of Xinyi's neck and roaring to life to taste her blood, the scream of chainteeth and the daemon within producing brief feedback in her audioreceptors before it adjusted, sensitive ears making her wince.
"A brilliant battle to be sure! But I cannot be denied! Khorne cannot be denied!" She snarled.
"But why do you fight? Where is your hate for me? Your wroth? Why do you insist on calm?" She demanded before Xinyi pulled herself forwards in a headbutt to knock the Master backwards before releasing her dragon breath directly into her face to chew through her shielding enough for her shield to come around and smash into her face, sword dancing and cutting a line across the furrow dug earlier.
"So that the universe is rid of people like you and I can spend my days reading to small children rather than worrying about whether maladjusted bullies like you are going to burn down planets full of people who do more of worth in a single morning than you do in a hundred of your lifetimes." She said as she danced around her foe's lightning claw gropes, adjusting the power field of her blade to allow her to make a murderstroke into the Khornate's neck, water sanding down resistance and washing out blood in such a way as to deny Khorne his resonance.
Nothgyth howled, not in pain but in fury at being blinded as her helm was clouded over by ice and water, lashing out entirely by her warrior's instincts and the body cameras mounted in recesses of her armour to offer some vision from disorientating, non-head level perspectives.
The natural thing to do would be to stab into the furrows scratched into the terminator plate before it could regenerate, but Xinyi used the opportunity to back away while her foe was recovering; stepping over the body of a fallen Executioner laid low by one of the Azure Guard before she filled herself with power and energy; muscles hardening like adamantium and might flowing into her hands like hammers, speed weaving itself into her being while glowing ancestral runes swimmed around her.
As Nothgyth's talismans of Khorne melted away the ice around her helmet, Xinyi stabbed forward like a railgun projectile and put all of her power into a thrust not at the heart or the head, but into the groin in a blow that made even some of the space marines trying to gauge what was going on behind the barrier wince with sympathy.
Even with the fury of Khorne and all her augmentations, that hurt Nothgyth something fierce, enough for her to scream it.
Before Xinyi could pull upwards through the resistance of her armour, Nothgyth's claw grabbed at her helmeted head and dug its talons into her collar, her axe swiping across her chest until her skin felt the teeth started to run against it, cutting through skin-scales as it was pressed further and further until she felt blood spilling, shock shutting off her ability to feel the injury of massive lacerations beyond a terrible wetness from her chest.
Her shield came around and smashed into the joints of her claw arm, the augmentations she had run through herself smashing the implement with enough force to create a sickening crunch sound while she grabbed her sword and drew it out, blood dripping off of it as the two women's injuries healed over.
"You're a mean little bitch aren't you? A low blow like that..." Nothgyth said with genuine venom in her voice as she adjusted her stance.
She rushed forward while Nothgyth was busy finding the rest of her sentence, accepting a stab to the gut from her Talon when she prepared another spell to harden herself even further, grunting through the pain and shutting it off before she raised her sword high and SMASHED it into Nothgyth's eye, the water, lashing across Nothgyth's guard; spiralled through her head like cutting beam helixes, shredding her body to a degree not even Astartes Regeneration could repair, diluting her blood to little more than washed out broth as it sprayed out of every opening it could.
She pulled her blade out and kicked her foe over, looking at the blood clotting from the wound in her stomach, sighing as she felt her body repair itself; her armour likely taking greater time to heal itself than her flesh.
"I suppose that concludes negotiations. Thank you for your time." Xinyi said as the darkly armoured Doom Harbingers chattered amidst themselves while Xinyi twirled her sword around and drew a flask from her satchel to accelerate her armour's repairs, shielding crackling back to life while the barrier dropped.
While champions bloated with the powers of chaos and bedecked in items of power could hold their own against the likes of the Azure Guard or Custodes; the average traitor Astartes was far below such lofty heights. A whirlwind of destruction to be sure, but their best had already been cut down and the middling would follow suit.
However, Space Marines did not know fear the same way humans did. Fight or flight was broken into fight or follow orders depending on what their instincts read as more favourable. They never actually panicked, as the rewiring of their brains was carefully designed to remove such a capability from their nervous system. This meant that when backed into a corner; the natural instinct was never to surrender.
With no way out and the rest of Xinyi's detachments cutting off this chamber from escape avenues, the Space Marines shot their auxiliaries whom they deemed lacking in bravery and roared their final defiance.
"RUIN UPON ALL YOU SPIRIT SPAWN!" One shouted, the power armoured aspiring champion firing off his jump jets to launch himself forward to the fray, lightning claws extended before Xinyi simply took flight and then came down hard with her sword pointing downwards to break through shield, ceramite, black carapace, flesh, and bone to decapitate the raptor cleanly as the other marines started firing away.
"You know the procedure." She said to her forces, glaring at the remaining chaos marines as the Votanni finished off the greater possessed champion Gargalaxar the Grim, letting the power fields on his hammer clean off the blood.
"Aye, clear these madmen out." Svan said as the two charged into the fray once more
I was originally going to show a lengthy duel for each character but that was bloating the post's word count massively.
"No loyalists amidst their ranks?" One of the Chaos Space Marines asked as he looked over at the hololith at the centre of the command Dais. His seat was unpadded and made no concession to comfort. Which suited Ordermaster Armagednon just fine. His terminator armour was seat enough for him, the fingers of his clawed power fists rapping on the armrests of his dais and pointing at the glyphs displayed on the holograms.
"None my Lord, Certainly none of Dorn's children." A warpsmith reported, getting an extensive exhalation from her superior as he increased the rate at which his fingers tapped.
"Nothing but Xenos and Pagans...what a joke." He growled with crocodilian menace.
"Centuries of grinding siege warfare and for what? The Fists won't even come to stop us?" He complained before shaking his head.
"Have our ships readied. Lay these curs to waste." He commanded, the reserve ships prepared for any intrusion burning retro and lateral thrusters to turn themselves into proper position.
His Invicta class superdreadnought, the Ferrodomina, a more than forty-eight kilometre long brick of a warship that was produced at an Iron Warrior dockyard around the Gas Giant Sondus Duodecus centuries ago. Though while it shared the name of the Imperial counterpart, it was modified greatly from the original STC according to the material circumstance sand preferences of Iron Warrior doctrine, which included greater bombardment capability and command and control systems at the expense of some troop transport capabilities, all so that they wouldn't have to rely on auxiliaries as much.
Across just about every star system in this ten kiloparsec cube, the battle was joined, and the Ferrodomina would be part of it. Some battles would be clashes of small fleets and combat groups, others would be sprawling melees between blizzards of opposing warships, this would fit somewhere in between, where the Ferrodomina would be the largest ship in the traitor armada. But every battle, even small pissing matches between destroyer picket groups mattered, this system, with its great Promethium clouds contained in its myriad gas giants, was in essence a great fuel depot and refinery to provide natural fuel to the war machine.
"We will not let these perfidious Aeldari break our lines. Keep moving forward and saturate their positions with area of effect weapons, they can't dodge us forever." He commanded with a proud tone to his voice as the engagement raged on. Hours would pass, then days; drones returning with reprocessed material to restock depleted ammo stores to continue bombardment.
A Despoiler class battleship came apart, torn apart by Eldar star-ballistae weapons that overpenetrated its hull, a dying strike cruiser vomited its cargo of Stormbirds and boarding torpedoes into an Asur Falcon Cruiser, Caestus Assault Rams and Dreadclaws following suit and disgorging a lethal payload of space marines and the means with which for them to construct bases after abandoning their serfs to die.
Bombardment cannons and lance turrets erupted with the spite of the Fourtieth at long range. The void would open up with brilliant colours and the unending streaks of little shapes representing missiles, torpedoes, and strike craft.
Their formation was tight enough to maximise firepower, loose enough to allow for manoeuvre in the face of incoming enemy torpedoes that had slipped through flak and defense laser screens. But his craft had already been targeted for annihilation. After days of off and on bombardment and often frantic boarding engagement with the Aeldari warriors; the army of the starless night crawled out of the spaces between.
The Ythalnzids' vaguely cephalopoid ships threw forth a wave of mind controlled warships of a distant xenos culture, bulbous vessels of plasma torpedoes and energy projectors who died and died and died in large numbers as they were raked by the superior technology of the Eldar and the Iron Warriors, but it was enough for enemy to get close enough for the enemy to psychoport masses of uninova gas inside the craft's slave holds where humans were kept as fodder for whatever the warpsmiths would need.
The purple gas spread with malignant intellect, and each man exposed to it underwent a transformation as miraculous as it was hideous. Muscles swelled,s kin turned ashen and gunmetal and scaly, hairs lengthened into quills, jaws split apart and eyes multiplied while hands grew into claws. Others changed into other shapes that the tentacled masters had carefully designed to cause havoc; the beasts turning on their handlers whose sealed gear gave them enough time to scream for help.
It was enough of a distraction for him to dither long enough to avoid getting out between a double-broadside with an Asur ship to the port and an Ythalnzid ship to the starboard. His shields caught in a recharge cycle, the bombardment included a point-blank barrage of torpedoes before a withering bombardment of plasma and psi-kine weapons that strained at the adamantium laced hull, before a carefully hidden Asuryani Wraithship had slipped out of cloak and released a barrage of distortion blasts to cast his craft into the warp on the seventh day, sending his ship in bits and pieces into the warp whereas Black Holes opened by the Ythalnzids in the other portion sucked other parts down the cosmic drain pipe.
He died tearing his way through the abominations his former slaves had become, roaring defiance as he felt the bony fingers of the realm of Nagash pull him towards the pit of Death itself. Even his plasteel armour and bones twisted into nothing, and his soul plummeted towards a realm of waiting Nephirot and the vision of his end. Though he had commanded many armies and laid many worlds to waste, he would go before the courts of the judges of what men once called Sheol, Duat, Yomi, Naraka, Mictlan, or Irkalla alone.
Even before the Iron Warriors could adjust the roster of leadership, the Lizardmen would arrive afterwards with a dreadnought battle group to drive the Brain Eaters and the traitors back, Slann casting dreadfully powerful wind magics and psychic furor to drive the outversers back until they pulled away. Their ships seeming to fold upon themselves to slide between the invisible directions while the followers of Perturabo's folly shanghai'd their sorcerers to call on pacts to let them leave with the offering of whatever slaves they had remaining. And now the Promethium stores could be cleansed, denied to the enemy and these worlds restored to their functions according to the star charts of the Old Ones.
Such were the battles in this place. Deadly, myriad, plentiful, but never pointless.
...
Nothgyth the Slayer was especially devoted to Khorne, though unlike much of his legion he retained a great deal of a sense of purpose. Not honour however, he was aware enough of the truth of his patron to know that Khorne did not actually care for honour. What the Great Goddess; for one of her deviations from what many human followers of chaos believed in was to perceive Khorne as female; wanted was the blood of those who were capable of spilling blood themselves. The weak, the useless; those who were too small to truly hate and had lead lives too unimportant to rouse wrath and fury had nothing to offer save their lives as fuel. They were unworthy to decorate the skull throne of hated champions. This she believed, was the only way to please the black lady of the brass citadel, to gain her favour and notice, to petition her for a chance at immortality as one of her blessed daemons.
She claimed the skull of a Kroot Blademaster, gazing into the eyes of the xenos. Those filthy, wretched, alien eyes that had betrayed no hate for his foe, nor fear at his death. He had accepted it when Nothgyth's armour proved to be too potent a determining factor for the Kroot for all his skill to overcome. He had given a compelling fight, but not a challenging one. No matter, she was no Slaaneshi; it was not the fight he craved, nor the pain or terror, it was the simple ending of a hated life, and the consigning of another skull to the Bloody Master.
"Cousin, are you going to recite old plays or will you be rejoining us?" The Iron Warrior's adjutant asked with a hint of a sneer in her voice.
"You have no appreciation for faith, cousin." She sighed, grinding her teeth in response.
"If you start talking to me like one of Lorgar's, I am firing you out of the dread claw cannon into the sun." She hissed, gesturing towards a hall leading towards the loading bay of one of the warworld's dreadclaw launchers.
But she sensed a challenger approaching, one that her great goddess told her would be a far greater challenge than these mere Kroot.
"Perturabo's get remains as void of higher aspiration as ever I see, do you ever get tired of fighting for no reason besides your father's glory Anice?" She replied.
"Yeah well your primarch died to fulfill the whims of your precious gods. Cry me a river about our secularism somewhere else." Anice spat as she could feel righteous rage towards her cousin in her twin hearts. She wrapped her fingers around the heft of her favoured axe, tightening her grip and glaring at the grey armoured marine.
"Blaspheme in my presence again you technophilic bitch, and we will see how much your contract protects you." She snarled, pointing the daemon infused chainaxe at the other marine.
"Give me a reason to shoot you, I dare you." She growled as the combi-weapons mounted on her power fists clicked into ready position, her terminator guards following suit while the blood-brass terminator armour clad Skull-thresher fraternity that joined her in battle revved their axes and chainfists to life.
"Beg your pardon my lords...if you will allow such a humble slave as myself to interrupt." An auxiliary admiral said, dropping to her knees and averting her eyes from the two helmet clad astartes.
"The enemy is already here...and foul sorceries have crippled one of our sister battleworlds already...we think they are bringing in High Eldar, Squats, Reptiles, T'au, and Celestials." She reported with as calm a voice as she could manage. Stumbling with her words could make them think it was her fault, Nothgyth surmised. Lucky for her that she had no interest in her skull anyway, she was merely doing as duty required.
"Rise, Telesia. You do have earned the right to stand before me." She said, there was no avuncularity to his tone, but she did have a respect for her managing to climb to the rank of admiral from a simple slave-officer in a legion that regarded people like her mostly as fuel and ammo.
"You will remain on your knees mortal worm." Anice howled.
"Were only the corpse emperor and empress wise enough to allow us to breed true so we could be rid of your kind." She snarled, flexing the clawed digits of her power fists.
"You can produce scions guaranteed to be compatible with your geneseed already. What more do you wish?" Nothgyth asked, hoping to get her choler rising.
"If children born of such ways came with the geneseed implanted within the womb already the Astartes would ascend to their destiny as humanity's replacement. Now, we must content ourselves with being its overlords and deal with the busy work of sifting through the rare flecks of gold in their endless sand." She explained with an exasperated sigh, frustrated by how often this conversation had repeated.
"Where would you find people to feel superior to if we didn't have humans to lord over?" Nothgyth chuckled.
"We have a Squat planetcraft on approach my lords. Perhaps it would be best to table this discussion for now?" The admiral posited.
"More than that, we have a celestial planetcraft, identified as the flagship of Zhu Xinyi." One of the terminators reported after checking his datafeeds.
That got her attention, Nothgyth's head turning towards the Astartes as she polished her axe and murmured a thought. A dragon child of Yin and Yang? That would be a worthy skull indeed. But why was she here? She looked to a passing beastman and decided their entrails were as good as any, stepping forward and swinging her axe into the surprised Neochgor who let out a donkey like bray of confusion before she had bisected it neatly in a quick swift and looked at the patterns in the blood.
Sacred words in Daemontongue were said, clawed gauntlet fingers tracing Khorne's sigil until a revelation in blood was made, showing an image of the blue dragon coming for a terminator armoured warrior of khorne. Yes...she was here for her.
"Fascinating...with her blood, I can anoint myself in Her glory." She said rapturously.
She would wait, studying the void battle unfolding. A titanic clash of warring worlds and blizzards of warships. The Stranger fleets of the Xel-Cthagora were crushed between the chaotic and orderly armadas, blasted apart in the crossfire of titanic war machines and void beasts, unnatural semi-organic horrors dying equally unnatural deaths as they were swarmed by daemon ships, hacked apart by saurian boarding warriors, shredded by railgun salvos, or crushed under wave after wave of lance fire in the void.
On the surface, the last of them died under a wave of Khorne's anointed daemons, drawing power from the hate that the faithful here had for the monstrosities from beyond and the blood of their sacrifices for there was no useful fluid from the corpses of the mechano-organisms, though from the vox there were claims that it was the Kyn who had dealt the final blow with a charge of Einhyrs and a roll of Colossi megatanks.
Whatever the case, now the intruders would be out of the way for now, and she could focus on her kill, watching the skies of the war-world flash with the colours of void fields under intensive weapons fire and the inchoate volleys of cannonades spat into the heavens. Night had become endless day from nova like explosions blossoming in the stars, and a billion little battles, each of vital importance to those fighting them if nobody else, each seeking to turn the wheel of history in their own little way; unfurled in her vision.
Glorious...even with the crushing headache the empowered field of harmonic shadow gave her. Daemons were harder to coax from the empyrean and dissipated more quickly, sorcerous powers often refused to work and many of the lesser slave psykers' heads promptly exploded when the perils of the warp fed back into them, while many a thrall wizard ruptured into gates for the daemons of Malal to step through. But her destined quarry was so close now...
She need only wait.
...
Xinyi found herself, once again, having to limit her usage of her dragon form. The winding inferior of an Iron Warriors fortress Moon was ill-suited for the strengths of that form, and it was generally easier to use her spellcasting when she wasn't manifesting such a large body. Of course, as a true dragon, her flesh was more a sort of garment than a true body. She was a spirit being, like the Tianren were as a whole. Not wholly of any realm in particular. To say she had a true form would be a misnomer, her human form was as comfortable as any of her dragon forms, and in places like this; it was more convenient.
Winding hallways arranged according to a demented math that was mad only in the way those who believed themselves the only sane men in the room could be. Ambushes were common, fed at precisely calculated intervals that she didn't take very long to figure out. A problem inherent to chasing efficiency at any price is that once one's definition of efficiency was discovered, they became predictable.
Her shield absorbed many incoming blows, both her defensive screens and the circular discus-shaped shield decorated with her personal symbol, made of Shen Bin Tie, a divine material that had never known violation, her helmed head often being the last thing that her attackers saw. The normal human soldiers were cut down with little fanfare, usually simply being engulfed by cryokinetics or simple spells she could release with little more than a thought.
Torrents of lashing water manifested from thin air or tore their way from pipes to crush enemies or block off shots with walls of liquid that condensed to be harder than metal, dancing into spiralling whips that cut through armaplas like paper as they swirled little filings of metal inside of them at incredible speeds. Water was her element, the ocean her ally, the waves her tool. Whether frozen into sheets of ice with inflections of anti-energy to entomb her foes in prisons of frigid crystal, crushing waves of liquid, or violent bursts of steam and vapour, or even the blood in many of their bodies, water was an element that demanded respect.
Chaos Warriors and heavy War Servitors in her way lasted little longer. While they could bulldoze their way through ordinary soldiers and fight many of her cultivators and other elites to a standstill, her blade was something she had tied to her soul and her desire to win, forged from metal found from a comet that had the ability to transition between dimensions in its intergalactic wanderings. Power armour and shielding would give way shortly, hissing briefly against her blade before caving to the pressure of the edges of the Comet's Tear. She had a number of other weapons prepared for herself, but this was a weapon that a primarch would have approved of, though likely not have wielded it themselves; a sign of her growth over the centuries. She would not be stopped by no-names trying to interpose themselves between her and her objective.
And she would have it, even with the bloodshed on both sides being formidable indeed. No matter, there were reserves. Hallways stank of corpses, floors were slick with blood and ash. There was no two ways around the fact that planetcraft boarding, even a planetcraft struck by powerful Slannic ritual magics; was always a bloody affair. Especially when the entire vessel was created to be a killing field. She lost count of how many times she had to resort to spellcraft to clear away walls made of the corpses of her own soldiers.
A sight that made her feel gloomy and upset, but ultimately could not discourage her from her objective. She pushed it to the back of her mind, away from her thoughts as she confirmed the death of the Planetsmith Anice, the Space Marine falling off a balcony after being decapitated by the Einhyr Grand Champion Svan Ullr, the Kyn giving her a nod of acknowledgement as her shield equipped Azure guards shattered the last door in her way with a burst of anti-energy weapons for her to kick over the now brittle gate and bring herself into a chamber where she found a burst of plasma cannon fire waiting for her from the shoulder mounted weapons fitted onto the terminator armour of her enemy.
Her shield bounced some of them back, bouncing into the Terminator's own burning defensive aura before she opened up with a spell of deathfrost that formed the sigil of a snowflake in the air, turning the atmosphere, the ground, and the unfortunate meatshields accompanying the rapidly approaching tactical dreadnought squad to ice that shattered beneath its own weight while the rotary gun fitted in the haft of her large axe spun to life and vomited out a barrage of daemonic lead. Fate was bent, altered so that the churning serpent's tail of bullets twisted away into hitting nothing but reinforced walls.
The Kyn arrived, Exo-armoured and coming with blades that combined plasma cutting blades and power fields; or power fields and mass drivers for blunt weapons such as mauls and gauntlets. Plasma, volkite, bolter, melta, and ion fire washed out from their weapons, hammering into the waves of fodder that were in the way of the ruthless Clone and Ironkyn without pity or remorse.
Svan Ullr stepped into the fray, with his crackling Hurricane Hammer thrumming to life in a power fist clad hand while a RAM shield in the other hand opened up with intense grav-weapon fire, to turn the armour of his foes against them with arcanotechnology to dial up the effects of gravity pulling the armour down until even chaos warrior flesh liquified in sickening crunches.
The Einhyr Champions closed to be at only a short distance from the Azure Guards, kinetic thrusters on their backs propelling them at shocking speeds for short and bulky beings such as themselves to barrel into the fray. Thunderclaps from magnetically and gravitically accelerated hammers and their discharging power fields rang out, shields splintering in protest while the propulsion fields simply reversed to allow swings to easily flow into one another.
The Azure Guards were each dragons themselves, closing around Xinyi to ward her against the chattering weapons fire of Chaos Havocs who used their peons as meat shields. Astartes pattern lascannon blasts pulsed and strobed, bouncing off of presented shields while the Azure Guardians turned their spellcraft on the anti-tank gunners. Cometary impacts of ice and frost rang out, pushing over the heads of Kyn and Celestial soldiers who had followed their champions this far into the fray.
Even as jade banner troopers were chopped down by the tusk helmed Chaos Terminators who pushed the evil tides forward and even as Warkyn Elites were dragged down by the waves of possessed Chaos Space Marines unleashed into their flanks; they did not falter. Ironkyn and Automata without fear braved storms of Khornate gore magic, engulfed in tidal waves of crimson death or fiery convocations of hate and offering no precious blood to spill for the fanatics.
Chaos cultists and Beastmen were butchered with only somewhat less effort than the traitor guardsmen were going down with, Xinyi's blade sending out torrential serpents of water every time it bit into them that cut them down in greater and greater numbers, each one who fell having their blood washed away and diluted to nothing while others were frozen solid by the touch or proximity of her shield, shattered into cleanly breaking pieces.
She knew that these dregs were being offered up as meat shields, that the Doom Harbingers here were simply buying time for their champion to get off the charge. So she let forth the mind razors of Ulgu, reaching into the minds of the weak with daggers that cut at the spirit and will to fight rather than the flesh. The cowards, or those who were not truly brave but rather forced by implants to fight fell over as each shadowy mist blade stabbed into them while the warriors and astartes shook their heads and growled.
Daemonic furies called forth from the othersea shrieked as their forms came undone, the cowardly wretches spiralling back into the warp in frenzied flashes of colours to prevent them from stopping Xinyi.
A Khornate Berzerker rushed forward, the butcher's nails compelling him to kill even after being soaked in the blood of Kyn and the many peoples of the Realm. He had discarded his pistol for a chainsword to go with his chainaxe, babbling incoherently while he leapt at her.
Her blade cut through shielding, ceramite, and flesh in a clean stroke, water erupting to flense the body into diluted viscerae while the Kyn provided crushing walls of firepower to cover the Azure Guard's advance, now only a few body lengths away from Nothgyth.
The fires of wroth waxed bright, heavenly snows wilted like frosted morning dew before the rising sun as the two women locked gazes.
"At last! A challenge! Face me spirit and offer your blood to the blood god!" She laughed as her axe roared to life and the fingers of her lightning claw crackled with tainted energy. Nothgyth radiated killing intent, a sensation like spiders crawling on the neck and being a finger nail's length away from a radiator all in one.
"There will be no offerings here this day. But you are welcome to surrender and repent for your crimes before you are executed for them. Perhaps if you truly show remorse we might even rehabilitate you." She said calmly, cooly while she let her sword dance in a quick flourish of challenge before bringing it to resting position.
"I have done no sin! I have merely been awakened and freed from the shackles of slavery to those lesser than I. Who sacrifices for you dragon?"
"Is that why you offer yourself to your temper like a toddler? To be a big and strong woman who others sacrifice to?"
"Stay your blaspheming tongue you horned serpent."
"If it is indeed your god who is the one in question, I am happy to blaspheme." She replied, composing herself with serne placidity.
Xinyi's own aura was becalming, harmonic, orderly, pulsing and progressing like well composed music as she called forth the water in the plumbing to tear through fracttures in seals, washing forward as a great wave to sweep away the Chaos Warriors of Khorne who sought to get in the way. Swearing was drowned out by the muffling effect of crushing tendrils of water that squeezed and whirled at her command as the warriors were swallowed by the wave, but a Goremage of Khorne spat forth a tide of blood from the fallen to push back against it.
No matter, she had not invested much of her will into the water, focused as she was on sizing up her opponent. Nothgyth had greater bulk in her armour and mass, but Xinyi's form was one as big as she wanted it to be, and so the marine's height advantage was nonexistent; to her brief conversation before she dismissed it as sorcerous tricks.
The Axe hungered for blood, and every swing that especially resonated with Khorne's murderous intent could find its way through nearly any means of outright avoiding damage whether that be deflector screens, armour hardness, or agility; only raw durability and the most unnatural of resilience could resist those occasional lucky swings. Much like with her own sword, agile and glimmering as water started to whril around it to match the fire that crowned Nothgyth's axe.
A claw swung out, heavy and vicious as its taloned fingers screamed towards Xinyi at mach speeds, blocked by her circular shield while her sword lashed forwards, shimmering and diving tendrils of water into the corona of hate around the Executioner.
The Marine's axe whipped forwards, raking against her shield while its daemon fire tried to find weakness only for Xinyi to let her blessed liquids smother the flame, her shield radiating frost as it came in edge on towards her foe's head.
The Marine stumbled to the left, the sword tusks and bladed horns of her Indomitus pattern terminator armour collecting flakes of snow from the impact as Xinyi pulled back and made a series of rapier like thrusts to push her foe back; the Azure Guard clashing with the executioner praetorians around them in the circle of exclusion created by water and fire.
"So quiet are you. Where is the legendary sharpness of your tongue dragon?" Nothgyth hissed, her corona sparking as they fought.
Her wrist-mounted meltaguns burst fired waves of obscene laser-heat that produced actinic flashes, once again batted away by Xinyi's shield, though the well timed intervention of one of the executioners to swing a massive zweihander daemonblade to help his master made her stumble into one of the melta blasts to the chest, grunting as her shielding dimmed.
"Banter is reserved for those who may learn from it. You are already damned by choice. What more is there to say?" She replied as she let forth her dragonfrost to retaliate against the Khornate, entrapping her legs in walls of ice that ate away at her barriers; anti-energy feeding on it to produce yet more ice while her will and power crept up the victim; trying to engulf her.
Nothgyth's choler spiked, furious at such a cheap trick as her aura resurged in fire and flame, heat distortions radiating off of her as her heavy frame opened up with the plasma cannons once again. Little suns burst into equally little supernova, striking at Xinyi while her shield's focus was brought to block the attentions of a grav-weapon.
An opening was made, her claws raked against Xinyi's shielding, and her axe struck true, slipping between the veils of fate to bite into her last ditch defensive runes which groaned in protest while Xinyi's sword stabbed forward towards one of Nothgyth's hearts. Blocking the talon arm with her shield arm, the sword slipped through the shielding after another stabbing motion and scraped into reinforced plasteel armour laced with adamantium, digging furrows into it.
Nothgyth's axe came down again, cutting into the guard of Xinyi's neck and roaring to life to taste her blood, the scream of chainteeth and the daemon within producing brief feedback in her audioreceptors before it adjusted, sensitive ears making her wince.
"A brilliant battle to be sure! But I cannot be denied! Khorne cannot be denied!" She snarled.
"But why do you fight? Where is your hate for me? Your wroth? Why do you insist on calm?" She demanded before Xinyi pulled herself forwards in a headbutt to knock the Master backwards before releasing her dragon breath directly into her face to chew through her shielding enough for her shield to come around and smash into her face, sword dancing and cutting a line across the furrow dug earlier.
"So that the universe is rid of people like you and I can spend my days reading to small children rather than worrying about whether maladjusted bullies like you are going to burn down planets full of people who do more of worth in a single morning than you do in a hundred of your lifetimes." She said as she danced around her foe's lightning claw gropes, adjusting the power field of her blade to allow her to make a murderstroke into the Khornate's neck, water sanding down resistance and washing out blood in such a way as to deny Khorne his resonance.
Nothgyth howled, not in pain but in fury at being blinded as her helm was clouded over by ice and water, lashing out entirely by her warrior's instincts and the body cameras mounted in recesses of her armour to offer some vision from disorientating, non-head level perspectives.
The natural thing to do would be to stab into the furrows scratched into the terminator plate before it could regenerate, but Xinyi used the opportunity to back away while her foe was recovering; stepping over the body of a fallen Executioner laid low by one of the Azure Guard before she filled herself with power and energy; muscles hardening like adamantium and might flowing into her hands like hammers, speed weaving itself into her being while glowing ancestral runes swimmed around her.
As Nothgyth's talismans of Khorne melted away the ice around her helmet, Xinyi stabbed forward like a railgun projectile and put all of her power into a thrust not at the heart or the head, but into the groin in a blow that made even some of the space marines trying to gauge what was going on behind the barrier wince with sympathy.
Even with the fury of Khorne and all her augmentations, that hurt Nothgyth something fierce, enough for her to scream it.
Before Xinyi could pull upwards through the resistance of her armour, Nothgyth's claw grabbed at her helmeted head and dug its talons into her collar, her axe swiping across her chest until her skin felt the teeth started to run against it, cutting through skin-scales as it was pressed further and further until she felt blood spilling, shock shutting off her ability to feel the injury of massive lacerations beyond a terrible wetness from her chest.
Her shield came around and smashed into the joints of her claw arm, the augmentations she had run through herself smashing the implement with enough force to create a sickening crunch sound while she grabbed her sword and drew it out, blood dripping off of it as the two women's injuries healed over.
"You're a mean little bitch aren't you? A low blow like that..." Nothgyth said with genuine venom in her voice as she adjusted her stance.
She rushed forward while Nothgyth was busy finding the rest of her sentence, accepting a stab to the gut from her Talon when she prepared another spell to harden herself even further, grunting through the pain and shutting it off before she raised her sword high and SMASHED it into Nothgyth's eye, the water, lashing across Nothgyth's guard; spiralled through her head like cutting beam helixes, shredding her body to a degree not even Astartes Regeneration could repair, diluting her blood to little more than washed out broth as it sprayed out of every opening it could.
She pulled her blade out and kicked her foe over, looking at the blood clotting from the wound in her stomach, sighing as she felt her body repair itself; her armour likely taking greater time to heal itself than her flesh.
"I suppose that concludes negotiations. Thank you for your time." Xinyi said as the darkly armoured Doom Harbingers chattered amidst themselves while Xinyi twirled her sword around and drew a flask from her satchel to accelerate her armour's repairs, shielding crackling back to life while the barrier dropped.
While champions bloated with the powers of chaos and bedecked in items of power could hold their own against the likes of the Azure Guard or Custodes; the average traitor Astartes was far below such lofty heights. A whirlwind of destruction to be sure, but their best had already been cut down and the middling would follow suit.
However, Space Marines did not know fear the same way humans did. Fight or flight was broken into fight or follow orders depending on what their instincts read as more favourable. They never actually panicked, as the rewiring of their brains was carefully designed to remove such a capability from their nervous system. This meant that when backed into a corner; the natural instinct was never to surrender.
With no way out and the rest of Xinyi's detachments cutting off this chamber from escape avenues, the Space Marines shot their auxiliaries whom they deemed lacking in bravery and roared their final defiance.
"RUIN UPON ALL YOU SPIRIT SPAWN!" One shouted, the power armoured aspiring champion firing off his jump jets to launch himself forward to the fray, lightning claws extended before Xinyi simply took flight and then came down hard with her sword pointing downwards to break through shield, ceramite, black carapace, flesh, and bone to decapitate the raptor cleanly as the other marines started firing away.
"You know the procedure." She said to her forces, glaring at the remaining chaos marines as the Votanni finished off the greater possessed champion Gargalaxar the Grim, letting the power fields on his hammer clean off the blood.
"Aye, clear these madmen out." Svan said as the two charged into the fray once more
Due to the amount of text I have to write for each of these, I'll generally just provide the statlines and only break down the rolls on request. The Influences from Age of Sigmar and Warhammer Fantasy battles also lead to a far greater emphasis on magic gear than in 40k. Since I switched to a D12 system I'll have to redo a lot of stats so the other duels will remain rolless for the time being. Though stats based on the old D6 system were tested on to get the other duel results.
M = Movement
WS = Weapon Skill
BS = Ballistics Skill
S = Strength
T = Toughness
A = Attacks
W = Wounds
SW = Shield Wounds
I = Initiative
LD = Leadership
AS = Armour Save
IS = Invulnerable Save
FNP = Feel No Pain
IWND = It Will Not Die
SR = Shield Recharge
DTW = Deny the Witch (can be typed to specific esoterics)
CFW = Contempt for Witches (Resistance to Denial penetration)
Do=Dodge
CD = Counterdodge
AoC = Armour of Contempt
IoC = Invulnerability of Contempt
WR = Wound Reduction
WC = Wound Cap
AP = Armour Piercing
IP = Invulnerable Piercing
D = Damage
MD = Mortal Damage (May only be saved by FP and special saves)
R = Range
FR = Fire rate
ML = Mastery Level (Can be typed to specific esoterics, PML for psychic, and WML for Wizard for example. Truespeech/Ennuncia, Esper/Psionic abilities, Unnatural Biology, Acts of Faith, Cosmic Powers, and Supertechnology have different rules.)
NoTP = Number of twelves to roll perils
NoGP = Number to Generate (power) Points
IDP = Inherent Denial Penetration
IA/M/IoC = Inherent Armour/Invulnerability of Contempt
IAS = Inherent Armour Save
IIS = Inherent Invulnerable Save
IAP = Inherent Armour Piercing
IIP = Inherent Invulnerable Piercing
Nothgyth the Slayer, Terminator Armour wearing Master of Execution
Zhu Xinyi (Human form)
M = Movement
WS = Weapon Skill
BS = Ballistics Skill
S = Strength
T = Toughness
A = Attacks
W = Wounds
SW = Shield Wounds
I = Initiative
LD = Leadership
AS = Armour Save
IS = Invulnerable Save
FNP = Feel No Pain
IWND = It Will Not Die
SR = Shield Recharge
DTW = Deny the Witch (can be typed to specific esoterics)
CFW = Contempt for Witches (Resistance to Denial penetration)
Do=Dodge
CD = Counterdodge
AoC = Armour of Contempt
IoC = Invulnerability of Contempt
WR = Wound Reduction
WC = Wound Cap
AP = Armour Piercing
IP = Invulnerable Piercing
D = Damage
MD = Mortal Damage (May only be saved by FP and special saves)
R = Range
FR = Fire rate
ML = Mastery Level (Can be typed to specific esoterics, PML for psychic, and WML for Wizard for example. Truespeech/Ennuncia, Esper/Psionic abilities, Unnatural Biology, Acts of Faith, Cosmic Powers, and Supertechnology have different rules.)
NoTP = Number of twelves to roll perils
NoGP = Number to Generate (power) Points
IDP = Inherent Denial Penetration
IA/M/IoC = Inherent Armour/Invulnerability of Contempt
IAS = Inherent Armour Save
IIS = Inherent Invulnerable Save
IAP = Inherent Armour Piercing
IIP = Inherent Invulnerable Piercing
Nothgyth the Slayer, Terminator Armour wearing Master of Execution
- Stats
- M: 36
- WS: 16
- BS: 16
- S: 8(12)
- T: 8(12)
- A: 6
- W: 10
- SW: 5
- I: 10
- LD: 20
- FNP: 8+
- IWND: 10+ (Twice a Turn)
- SR: 6+ (Twice a turn)
- DTW: 5+
- Do: -2
- CD: -4
- Sorcerer Bane: Can launch a free attack phase out of initiative order if in combat with a caster when they attempt to manifest spells.
- Rage: Gains 2 additional attacks in the first round of combat in addition to the normal one added by charging
- Rampage: Gains d3 attacks when outnumbered
- Furious Charge: Gains +2 strength as well as +2 initiative in the first round of combat
- Hatred: Rerolls all to hit and wound rolls in the first round of combat.
- Doom Harbinger: Chaos units with this Legion trait gain an additional contempt modifier integer.
- Weapons
- Axe of Executions (Melee, Daemonic Chainaxe, Swung with a power fist hand)
- S:+6
- AP:-6
- IP: -3
- D: 3+d3
- Mortal Blow: On a natural roll of 12 to hit, automatically deal 4 mortal wounds.
- Cleave: On a roll of 11 or 12, gain another attack, on a kill, roll a d12, on a 6+ gain another attack.
- Shred: Rerolls to Wound
- Sunder: Forces rerolls on successful saves
- Blood Drinking Axe: Foes wounded by the axe must take a toughness test (including gear) against the Axe wielder's total strength or suffer 3d6 additional wounds at the end of Nothgyth's attacks. For every 3 wounds taken in this way, the user recovers one. Shield wounds do not count.
- Claw of Slaughter (Daemonic Lightning Clawl)
- S: User
- AP:-4
- IP: -2
- D: 2
- Shred: Rerolls to Wound
- Sunder: Forces rerolls on successful saves
- Cleave: On a roll of 8+ gain another attack, gain another attack automatically on a kill
- Sweeping Fury: Make two attack rolls per integer on the attack stat with this weapon instead of one
- Hungering Talons: Rerolls to hit
- Wrist-mounted twin-linked Astartes pattern melta guns
- S: 16
- FR: Assault 2
- AP: -8
- IP: -2.
- D: d6. d6+2 at half range or in melee.
- R: 48
- Twinlinked: (Fires twice, four times if rapid fire)
- May be fired in melee
- Daemon Blessed Reaper Chain Cannon (Mounted in the haft of the Axe of Executions, cannot be used in melee if the Axe of Executions is being used in melee)
- S10
- FR: Rapid Fire 16
- AP: -2
- IP: -
- D: 1
- R: 96
- Master crafted: Rerolls tt hit
- Shred: Rerolls to wound
- Sunder: Rerolls armour penetration
- Solar Malice (Shoulder Mounted Plasma Cannons)
- S14
- FR: 2d3 (Blast)
- AP: -6
- D:2
- IP: -2
- R: 144
- Twinlinked: (Fires twice)
- Overcharge: Can be charged to increase to S:16 and D:3, but on a roll of 1 to hit the user must roll a save or take a wound, losing the attack if the wound is unsaved. It can be hypercharged to S:18 and D:4, but in this case if a 1 is rolled the wound is now a mortal wound. It can be cataclysm charged to S:20 and D:5, but in this case if a 1 is rolled they are removed from the field barring a successful toughness test vs the weapon's (modified) strength, in which case they take 3d3 mortal wounds.
- Axe of Executions (Melee, Daemonic Chainaxe, Swung with a power fist hand)
- Armour: Vengeance's Reward (Terminator Armour)
- T: +4 (12)
- S: +4 (12)
- W: +4 (14)
- SW: +2 (7)
- AS: 2+
- IS: 8+
- AoC: -4
- IoC: -1
- WR: -3
- Miscellaneous
- Mark of Khorne: +2 Strength to all Attacks
- Icon of Khorne: +2 AP to all attacks
- Locus of Khorne: +1 to number of attacks
- Blood Mantle: +2 to Toughness, +1 to attacks, +2 to wounds, +1 to shield wounds
- Helm of the Endless Gore: +1 to IWND and +1 to Shield Recovery, Can make IWND and SR rolls an additional time per phase, +1 to number of attacks
- Talisman of Swift Slaughter: +4 to movement, +2 to initiative, +1 to attacks, +1 to Invulnerable and FNP saves
- Belt of Cursed Endurance: +2, +2 to wounds, +1 to shield wounds, Can make IWND and SR rolls an additional time per phase
- Bloody Halo: +1 to Invulnerable Save, +2 to wounds, +1 to Shield wounds, +1 to shield recovery
- Banner of Ample Bloodletting: +2 to number of attacks, +4 to Movement, +2 to Initiative
- Final Stats
- Final Saves: 2+ AS, 5+ IS, 7+ FNP
- Final Base WS/BS: 16/16
- Final Base initiative: 14
- Final Base Attack: 12
- Final Base wounds: 20, 10 shield wounds
- Final base movement: 26
- Final Base Strength: 10 (14 with armour, 20 with axe of dismemberment)
- Final base Toughness: 12 (16 with armour)
- Final Movement: 40
- Final IWND: 9+ (4 rolls)
- Final SR: 4+ (4 rolls)
- Final AoC: -5
- IoC: -2
Zhu Xinyi (Human form)
- Stats
- M: 60
- WS: 18
- BS: 18
- S: 12
- T: 12
- A: 10
- W: 12
- SW: 6
- I: 15
- LD: 23
- FNP: 7+
- IWND: 7+ (Four times a turn)
- SR: 4+ (Four times a turn)
- DTW: 7+
- Do:-4
- CD:-4
- PML: 8
- WML: 5
- NoTP: 12 (Never rolls 1s on Perils of the Warp)
- NoGP: 4+
- IDP: -4
- Twin Dragon Worthies: Characters with this subfaction type generate and deny on two better steps than normal
- Hit and Run: With an initiative check this character may disengage from combat to gain another charge phase or attack from range
- And they Shall Know no Fear: May reroll failed leadership checks
- Weapons
- Azure Comet (Melee, Jian sword)
- S:+2
- AP: -6
- IP: -4
- D: 3
- Shred: Rerolls to Wound
- Waterfowl Dance: On each roll to hit of four or above gain another attack. On a kill, automatically gain another attack
- Waterfall Cut: On a roll of 11 or higher to wound, deal an additional 3 mortal wounds automatically
- Hydroblade: Every attack may damage up to two other units in combat at a time.
- Water's Grace: Always rerolls to hit
- Azure Rending: Rolls of ten or higher to hit deal damage automatically, ignoring armour saves
- Sunder: Successful saves against the Azure Comet must be rerolled
- Glacier's Blessing (Melee, Shield)
- S:+4
- AP: -4
- IP: -2
- D: 3
- Invulnerable Save: Improves to 4+, Improves Armour Save to 1+, Improves contempt modifiers by 1.
- Crippling Chill: Up to twice per turn on a successful hit, roll an opposed Strength vs Toughness test, if the enemy fails the enemy loses 1 WS, BS, Strength, Toughness, Initiative and Attack. Shielded enemies may not be affected by this.
- Adds +1 to all Saves, if over 2+ it adds further buffer against AP
- Waterfowl Dance: On each roll to hit of four or above gain another attack. On a kill, automatically gain another attack
- Water's Grace: Always rerolls to hit
- Reflection: A ranged attack successfully saved while the Glacier's Blessing is equipped can be fired back at the attacker at Xinyi's ballistic skill
- Frostbite: If successful in dealing an unsaved wound, the enemy must roll a strength test against Xinyi's strength or take the weapon's damage value in mortal wounds from the waves of lethal cold it emits.
- Azure Comet (Melee, Jian sword)
- Armour
- Sapphire Fortress
- T: +4
- S: +4
- AS: 3+
- MS: 3+
- IS: 7+
- AoC: -4
- IoC: -2
- WR: -3
- Wounds: +6
- Shield Wounds: +3
- Sacred Fortification: Reduces enemy to wound rolls by two steps
- Immune to Cold type Weapons
- Sapphire Fortress
- Miscellaneous
- Xinyi's Talisman: Improves IS to 3+, Improves initiative and attacks by 1, Adds 2 wounds and 1 shield wound
- Belt of Bountiful Might: +2 to Strength, Toughness, +2 to wounds, +1 to shield wounds
- Cloak of Life: Improves FNP, IWND, and SR by one step, Adds 2 wounds and 1 shield wound
- Ring of Speed: Improves Initiative by 2 and adds 4 Attacks and 8 to movement
- Ring of Warp Shield: Improves Deny the Witch by two steps, offers 2 DTW modifier resistance, and increases leadership for purpose of spellcasting by four
- Helm of the Water Dragon: Allows for an extra IWND and SR roll per turn, allows for rerolls of anything testing on Xinyi's toughness (such as being wounded), Adds 2 wounds and 1 shield wounds
- Gauntlets of Frost: All attacks deal an additional cold-type wound and gain an additional penetration point
- Headband of the Arcanist: Allows for an extra power dice to be created per mastery level
- Boots of the Waterfall: Improves Initiative by 2 and adds 4 Attacks and 8 to movement, Allows Ethereal Movement
- Final Stats
- Final Saves: 1+ AS, 2+ MS, 2+ IS, 3+ FNP, 3+ IWND, 2+ SR, 1+ DTW, 2+ Against Statline Modification
- 26 Wounds
- 13 Shield Wounds
- Final Attacks: 18
- Final Initiative: 19
- Final Strength: 9 (13 with Sword or Shield)
- Final Toughness: 9 (13 with Armour)
- Final Movement: 76
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
Okay, that's one of their Named down, and with the way that fight was going, I suspect that planetcraft is going down shortly as well. Plus, Xinyi wins another fight, which, while not as important for us as, say, Orkoids, is still great for earning Character XP.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
On the bright side, closer fights should give more XP, like how the Ork Bosses had a higher payout than the Tutorial fight since they weren't jokes.
Moradash War Part 2
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
Finished this before the Kexin & Kais vs Fon'Du vs Stranger character duel so I'm posting it first.
...
Several suns gleamed weakly through the plumes of soot and debris, some more strongly than others upon the benighted world of Siladar. The T'au, the Asur, and the Itzecan generally disdained indirect fire artillery, with what they had mostly serving in supporting roles. They weren't entirely absent, but their methodology of war sought other answers to the question of firepower, whether that be mobile strike teams, superior range on standard units, or sheer mystic force varied.
The People's Celestial Revolutionary Army however lived and breathed artillery, as did the Iron Warriors, as did the vaguely piscean Aphra; the Deep Ones; who found lobbing fire and death from afar was often more convenient than crossing the land themselves for great distances, more fond of the briny depths that gave them their nicknames. This meant that the ground suffered, day after day. Hurricane bombardments to weaken defences before an attack or disrupt an offensive; short but intense. Grand volleys to pin a foe in place; long and drumming. Creeping barrages to carefully support the movement of soldiery. And of course, simple supporting strikes on foes who had revealed themselves or were engaging friendly forces.
One would learn to become a connoisseur of the sounds of explosions and weapons fire in short time, able to distinguish between patterns of weapons by nothing more than the pitch, volume, and tenor of its discharge or the impact it made. The sharp cracks of Basilisk earthshaker cannons for example, contrasted to the deeper booms of Tian'Chaoren Type-396 Inferno Cannons followed by a deep, bassy rumble in contrast to the roar of black promethium firestorms that would burn hot enough to break down rockcrete into its component ingredients before melting them. The distinctive howl of Manticore Storm Eagle rockets versus the harsher "Dragon's roar" of Alchemobaric Rocket launchers, thunderclaps contrasted to fizzles followed by sounds like hammers impacting each other.
The Aphra's artillery would explode into heavy shockwaves of pure force, flattening and compressing what it came into contact with and tossing whatever was too solid to be squashed aside like toys. Others would bring forth explosive fields of dissolving force that made victims decompose into glowing slop and blackened bone helplessly liquefying as they melted. Even odder devices would also make themselves known, such as all manner of terrible long-term weapons and war-things difficult to describe as machine or beast.
Spartan Assault tanks raced forwards ahead of Crassus Armoured Assault Transports, bearing the marks of the Iron Warriors and their auxiliaries. The standard spartan was an armoured box equally dangerous from any approach. Quad-sponsons made flanking suicidal, quad-hull and turret guns would hose down lesser foes on approach, and the mini-turrets bearing Heavy-Autoguns or Havoc Launchers stitched across the noisome pests trying to bother these hulks of ceramite and plasteel. High temperature weapons absorbed largely harmlessly into specially treated hulls and shielding, and each Spartan fitted a demi-company of power armoured Astartes or a platoon of Terminators ready for assault the second their exit ramps lowered.[1]
Skull-mask wearing auxiliaries would make it a few steps in the face of Tian'Chao rotary cannon turret fire before the accelerator rounds tore through their shields and then their bodies, bloody pulp spraying into the air as the rotor cannons spun faster and faster and faster, sweeping from left to right, stitching the insides of crassus transports to denude the Chaos Space Marines of their cannon fodder. But the Iron Warriors moved calmly, absorbing hits they were confident in their armour's ability to withstand and picking out targets.
Missiles were loaded and then released, first shield disruptors to weaken the barrier defences, then demolition missiles to smash apart the turrets, bolter fire stitching across the lines with practiced ease. Some Blaze troopers poked their heads out for less time than a human eye could blink and still got beaned by three shot bolter bursts, two shield popper runds and a kraken penetrator round to quickly kill an armoured target.
Tactical Dreadnoughts walked through the fusiliades of anti-personnel fire like mildly inclement weather, anti-tank missiles exploding uselessly against shields or plasteel armour built to withstand the star-heat and pressure of reactor cores. Reaper autocannons fitted onto power fists[2] chugged as they released brackets of heavy munitions propelled to hypersonic velocities, HE rounds pluming with enough force to crush a solid cube of steel as tall as a human teenager flat, shrapnel striking shields which glowed brilliantly on impact.
The Aphra moved into the fray, testing themselves against the outer-base defences with eager aplomb while the Ythalnzids' thralls assumed position. Traitor Baneblades rolling into the fray to meet the PCRA Warlord tanks that were being committed found themselves brought to a stop by strange Ythalnzid psychotrons that altered the laws of attraction in what they targeted to root their enemies to the ground and cause enemy forces to pull to one another like iron filings to magnets. Frantically traversing turrets to meet the more advanced but slighter tanks of the foe; many would fall victim to the psionic barrages of the pulse blasters on intimidating twin-barelled enemy supertanks that seemed to move simply by willing it to be so; volley after volley raking into vulnerable armour after the Aphra stripped shields with sinister purple electricity.
These foes too would be met with fire and flame from the Celestials, who designated the most concerning opponents to the T'au who were fighting alongside them in the trenches. Hammerhead 2 Gunships, which shared the same overall silhouette as the design made famous in Damocles but had been improved in every way; hovered into position with railguns at the ready. Though still inferior to Iron Warrior Sicarian tanks whose accelerator autocannons could kill them long before they could; when used with room to manoeuvre they could wreak a terrible toll, especially while using the much sturdier Qilin tanks and shield drones as mobile cover.
While their railgun slugs might bounce clean off the shielding and armour of the Sicarians and the traitor Leman Russ tanks could take them on at a largely even basis, the masses of cultist Urdeshi series AT tanks were fodder. Shields would burst in one shot, maybe two, and generally one shot was more than enough to put an AT70 brigand out of action no matter how it tried to angle its armour or whatever hull down position it took. A problem when the masses of Urdeshi pattern tanks were being used as filler to screen for more valuable vehicles and ensure that the "flesh" as they liked to call it would be of some use whenever they were dragged out of the slave pits with cerebro-implants to ensure loyalty.
Broadside Battlesuits that had taken positions in specially designed shielded bunkers opened fire, punching one round after the other into the masses of enemy tanks after holding their fire long enough to avoid attracting the notice of enemy artillery. Heavy Railrifles and High Impact Missile pods may make little impression on the side and front armour of a Leman Russ and even less on Astartes tanks, but they'd tear through the Urdeshi cultists as well as the lighter IFVs with ease.
Soldiers piling out of burning wrecks were targeted and scythed down by Blaze Lancers and Jade Troopers, some of them armed with the much feared Hard-Neutron weapons. Odd blue light from cherenkov radiation made when their beams added or knocked away enough neutrons from surrounding matter to turn targets glow-in-the-dark radioactive would manifest as a killing light, many enemy troops rather grotesquely liquefying as the neutron activation caused their chemical composition to degrade into luminescent sludge. But this atomic modulation also made them quite effective against heavily armoured targets, bypassing many conventional forms of durability to transmute the target directly.
Again and again the attacking waves who braved the mine-fields, the artillery, the airstrikes, and the long ranged guns would meet the blue death of Neutron radiation, leaving ghostly husks of degraded vehicles and armour behind while toxic flesh boiled away into basal gasses. Sometimes the gas masked cultists and renegades would simply vomit and shit themselves to death as their intestines broke down, discoloured blood leaking out as even this life essence degraded in the face of radiation.
The T'au of course considered this to be...grotesque, the sort of savagery they consigned to the Vespids and their neutron technology while they regarded themselves as above irradiating the enemy to death. But then their "bouncing be'gel" mines that popped into the air at waist level to fire off pulse submunitions into the waist in a move that generally obliterated the genitals (as well as the abdomen and thighs) of the target were hardly winning any prizes in the contest of pleasant ways to meet one's maker.
But the enemy still pressed on, with the Iron Warriors themselves brushing aside many lesser formations. Havocs moved into position by Thunderhawks tore through formations unready for the concentration of firepower that thirty space marines all carrying heavy weapons could bring. Predator Light, Sicaran Battle, Kratos heavy and Fellblade superheavy tanks would roll in formations with Land Raider, Spartan Assault, and Mastadon infantry fighting vehicles and battle rhinos fitted with twin combi-weapons, dual pintle mounts and havoc launchers and a wave of stomping dreadnoughts under the cover of powerful void fields.
Caestaferrums, Contemptors, Deredeos, Leviathans, and Telemons to name some of the patterns in increasing order of size while their pet house knights and titans thundered with blaring war horns. In the shadow of colossi did giants do battle, Overlord tanks firing into Fellblades, Nuwas battling with Kratosi, Steel Sentinel War Automata dueling with defilers, Celestial Shi walkers trading blows with Chaos Knights all while Titans redefined geography with each and every step and every shot.
They would meet with the monstrous things of the strangers as often as they would their intended targets; huge things walking on tendrilled legs with an eerie swiftness and hideous techno-organic or biomehanical beasts or fractal patterned abominations whose forms were shambling cognitohazards that would make the less firm of mind and spirit at best die for the crime of beholding them. But to mistake this for a reluctance to face the might of the Wyrd was a fatal mistake, they relished in the challenge.
Three sided battles would rearrange topography with a speed nature could not manage in a thousand times a thousand times a thousand years as tectonic plates cracked down to the mantle from the strain as competing geomancers sought to weaponize the power locked within as just another form of artillery. Magma and pyroclast tore from the ground in devastating plumes while the ground shook and simply broke, whole ecosystems plunging into fissures where panicked wildlife would fall screaming into yawning abysses of upswelling lava.
Fortresses rooted in with special systems to survive this would find their positions altered as faultlines tore themselves into being and cataclysmic tsunamis swept through the surface, forcing warring armies to find shelter in a world they were actively giving the most agonising sort of death a planet could suffer. Where the plumes of mushroom clouds were a simply regular occurrence, where one could see god machines fall as many deemed it was necessary to stop Haoyu's ritual at all costs.
A falling Benediction Titan's thirteen kilometre bulk tore at the skin of the planet as gravity brought it into a ruinous collision with the ground that proved so very much softer than its adamantium hull. The mountain range it fell upon shattered like a child's playset, ancient mounds of metamorphic rock crushed by the weight of the titan without resistance, simply disintegrating as if never more than a dream. Ejecta the size of buildings launched into the air to rain fire down across the world as the debris flew high, but not high enough to escape gravity's inevitable redirection of its paths downwards.
Day was cast into nuclear night from the dust kicked up, the ejecta of other battlefields on this world casting the planet into a devastating nuclear night, illuminated by the fire of descending ejecta and ship wreckage knocked out of orbit that made the world bleed fire and magma with each devastating impact. Over the course of this battle, this unfortunate world suffered hundreds of impacts equivalent to the K-T asteroid that laid low the kingdom of the dinosaurs, and yet still the stubborn armies fighting in its surface endeavoured to fight in the shade.
Tracers, beams, pulses, bolts, and power fields crackled through the choking dust of extinction, warring armies unconcerned with the biota of the world screaming and dying because the ritual taking place here was so much more important than anything as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things as the ecosystem of one little planet. Let the animals scream, let them die, let the plants wither and even the Bacteria suffocate, there would be other planets, other worlds. And such things could be fixed later, when the dust settled and the corpses cleaned away.
Even viruses, prions, and viroids would begin to die in these conditions, swept by radioactive dust storms and raining fire and soil choked by artillery barrages that could be measured in terms of Verduns per Hectare infusing poison into them. Even decomposing bacteria would breathe its last, bereft of the means that the warring armies used to support themselves in this all-death, leaving bodies that dessicated but did not rot.
It was a great dying in very little time at all, what life there was being actively preserved by users of the winds of magic and other esoteric means as well as terraformed bubbles that were being used to create food supplies for ravenous armies. Patches of artificial green made to live in the face of a battlefield where bombs fell like rainstorms for days on end and the noise of cannon fire blended into a long, low pitched tearing sound as the individual booms were no longer distinguishable to the human ear.
But the war would keep going, for none involved could afford to withdraw just yet, and Warpsmith Fon'Du would bring his host to the Grand Bastion where Kexin's brother was preparing his leg of the ritual to protect the allied forces from the myopic corruption sweeping through the territories being fought over by these warring armies for the decisive clash of this battle.
[1] I'm going with somewhat different takes on some canon tanks, like more heavily armed Land Raiders and Spartans able to fit more marines because nothing about the Land Raider and Rhino's transport capacity differences makes any sense and also because the treadhead in me is bewildered by the idea of the anti-tank weapons being on the sponson mounts when sponsons were generally used to clear trenches or ambushing infantry and light vehicles as well as just about every other 40k tank having anti-personnel sponson guns. Generally assume doubled transport capacity from canon if that helps you picture how things go.
Standard Land Raider would be a pair of twin-linked heavy lascannon turrets, two twin-linked bolt-cannons (one front, one back) and dual Twin-Volkite Cannon sponsons with four twin-heavy autogun (the autogun version of a heavy stubber) mini-turrets with attached hunter-killer missiles and of course, the grenade rack attachments with a transport capacity of 25 standard Astartes and 12 Terminators. A Spartan would be four sets of sponson mounted volkite quad-cannons (two per side), a pair of Twin-linked Spartan Turbo-Laser turrets, and hull-mounted twin heavy bolt-cannons (one per facing) as well as eight quad-heavy auto-guns and HK missiles; all to support 50 Marines and 25 termies as a moving defensive position/dakkadakkadakka.
[2] This is a personal taste thing but I up-arm Tactical dreadnought armour by quite a bit with wrist-mounted weapons fitted onto power fists being standard issue. Standard devastator or terminator weapons can fit onto the wrist of a terminator without taking the entire arm, but doubling up requires an arm cannon more or less. Standard issue will also include some form of shoulder mounted weapons, as well as a grenade launcher harness fitted onto the torso to free up the hands because they're not really suited for arming and throwing a grenade. Ammo is fed by linked belts drawing from compartments within the suit which contributes to its bulk, reloading is generally done by Cybernetica MULE auxiliaries which are designed to restock ammo even in the middle of intense firefights.
As for round calibres, an Astartes pattern bolter, as deduced by this redditor; is a lot bigger than the old (and now not often repeated) listing of 0.75 caliber but a whole 2.5 caliber or for those of us using rationally designed units, is 63.5mms. I'll assume some scale exaggeration and go with 40mm rounds. My take on astartes are a nice even 50% taller than normal humans and tower over Chaos Warriors to a similar degree that they tower over normal humans and so a bit bigger than typical GW canon, so their bolters can fit a full magazine of those rounds pretty easy. Astartes pattern heavy bolters are even bigger of course and come in at 60mm. Standard autocannons are like late WW2 medium tank gun calibre (85-90mm) but use internal propellant caseless rounds which cut out a lot of the bulk of the ammo. Especially as improvements in propellant allow for a very tiny amount to propel rounds to hypersonic speeds and thus save massively on cartridge size.
A predator destructor's main cannon comes out to a 150mm fully automatic caseless doom-gun, while the Leman Russ' battle cannon is 240mm. The Baneblade Cannon clocks in at an extra thicc 500mm but firing rounds with far more kinetic energy. Then you have goofy shit like the Behemoth Cannon on the largest of Imperial behemoth grade megatanks where the bore is measured in hundreds of meters and the shell's impact is generally measured in "number of mass extinction event equivalents" which is why Behemoth grade megatanks are mostly used on megastructures because using them on planets tends to require terraformation after the fact to prevent biosphere death (also one being destroyed has even worse consequences.)
...
Several suns gleamed weakly through the plumes of soot and debris, some more strongly than others upon the benighted world of Siladar. The T'au, the Asur, and the Itzecan generally disdained indirect fire artillery, with what they had mostly serving in supporting roles. They weren't entirely absent, but their methodology of war sought other answers to the question of firepower, whether that be mobile strike teams, superior range on standard units, or sheer mystic force varied.
The People's Celestial Revolutionary Army however lived and breathed artillery, as did the Iron Warriors, as did the vaguely piscean Aphra; the Deep Ones; who found lobbing fire and death from afar was often more convenient than crossing the land themselves for great distances, more fond of the briny depths that gave them their nicknames. This meant that the ground suffered, day after day. Hurricane bombardments to weaken defences before an attack or disrupt an offensive; short but intense. Grand volleys to pin a foe in place; long and drumming. Creeping barrages to carefully support the movement of soldiery. And of course, simple supporting strikes on foes who had revealed themselves or were engaging friendly forces.
One would learn to become a connoisseur of the sounds of explosions and weapons fire in short time, able to distinguish between patterns of weapons by nothing more than the pitch, volume, and tenor of its discharge or the impact it made. The sharp cracks of Basilisk earthshaker cannons for example, contrasted to the deeper booms of Tian'Chaoren Type-396 Inferno Cannons followed by a deep, bassy rumble in contrast to the roar of black promethium firestorms that would burn hot enough to break down rockcrete into its component ingredients before melting them. The distinctive howl of Manticore Storm Eagle rockets versus the harsher "Dragon's roar" of Alchemobaric Rocket launchers, thunderclaps contrasted to fizzles followed by sounds like hammers impacting each other.
The Aphra's artillery would explode into heavy shockwaves of pure force, flattening and compressing what it came into contact with and tossing whatever was too solid to be squashed aside like toys. Others would bring forth explosive fields of dissolving force that made victims decompose into glowing slop and blackened bone helplessly liquefying as they melted. Even odder devices would also make themselves known, such as all manner of terrible long-term weapons and war-things difficult to describe as machine or beast.
Spartan Assault tanks raced forwards ahead of Crassus Armoured Assault Transports, bearing the marks of the Iron Warriors and their auxiliaries. The standard spartan was an armoured box equally dangerous from any approach. Quad-sponsons made flanking suicidal, quad-hull and turret guns would hose down lesser foes on approach, and the mini-turrets bearing Heavy-Autoguns or Havoc Launchers stitched across the noisome pests trying to bother these hulks of ceramite and plasteel. High temperature weapons absorbed largely harmlessly into specially treated hulls and shielding, and each Spartan fitted a demi-company of power armoured Astartes or a platoon of Terminators ready for assault the second their exit ramps lowered.[1]
Skull-mask wearing auxiliaries would make it a few steps in the face of Tian'Chao rotary cannon turret fire before the accelerator rounds tore through their shields and then their bodies, bloody pulp spraying into the air as the rotor cannons spun faster and faster and faster, sweeping from left to right, stitching the insides of crassus transports to denude the Chaos Space Marines of their cannon fodder. But the Iron Warriors moved calmly, absorbing hits they were confident in their armour's ability to withstand and picking out targets.
Missiles were loaded and then released, first shield disruptors to weaken the barrier defences, then demolition missiles to smash apart the turrets, bolter fire stitching across the lines with practiced ease. Some Blaze troopers poked their heads out for less time than a human eye could blink and still got beaned by three shot bolter bursts, two shield popper runds and a kraken penetrator round to quickly kill an armoured target.
Tactical Dreadnoughts walked through the fusiliades of anti-personnel fire like mildly inclement weather, anti-tank missiles exploding uselessly against shields or plasteel armour built to withstand the star-heat and pressure of reactor cores. Reaper autocannons fitted onto power fists[2] chugged as they released brackets of heavy munitions propelled to hypersonic velocities, HE rounds pluming with enough force to crush a solid cube of steel as tall as a human teenager flat, shrapnel striking shields which glowed brilliantly on impact.
The Aphra moved into the fray, testing themselves against the outer-base defences with eager aplomb while the Ythalnzids' thralls assumed position. Traitor Baneblades rolling into the fray to meet the PCRA Warlord tanks that were being committed found themselves brought to a stop by strange Ythalnzid psychotrons that altered the laws of attraction in what they targeted to root their enemies to the ground and cause enemy forces to pull to one another like iron filings to magnets. Frantically traversing turrets to meet the more advanced but slighter tanks of the foe; many would fall victim to the psionic barrages of the pulse blasters on intimidating twin-barelled enemy supertanks that seemed to move simply by willing it to be so; volley after volley raking into vulnerable armour after the Aphra stripped shields with sinister purple electricity.
These foes too would be met with fire and flame from the Celestials, who designated the most concerning opponents to the T'au who were fighting alongside them in the trenches. Hammerhead 2 Gunships, which shared the same overall silhouette as the design made famous in Damocles but had been improved in every way; hovered into position with railguns at the ready. Though still inferior to Iron Warrior Sicarian tanks whose accelerator autocannons could kill them long before they could; when used with room to manoeuvre they could wreak a terrible toll, especially while using the much sturdier Qilin tanks and shield drones as mobile cover.
While their railgun slugs might bounce clean off the shielding and armour of the Sicarians and the traitor Leman Russ tanks could take them on at a largely even basis, the masses of cultist Urdeshi series AT tanks were fodder. Shields would burst in one shot, maybe two, and generally one shot was more than enough to put an AT70 brigand out of action no matter how it tried to angle its armour or whatever hull down position it took. A problem when the masses of Urdeshi pattern tanks were being used as filler to screen for more valuable vehicles and ensure that the "flesh" as they liked to call it would be of some use whenever they were dragged out of the slave pits with cerebro-implants to ensure loyalty.
Broadside Battlesuits that had taken positions in specially designed shielded bunkers opened fire, punching one round after the other into the masses of enemy tanks after holding their fire long enough to avoid attracting the notice of enemy artillery. Heavy Railrifles and High Impact Missile pods may make little impression on the side and front armour of a Leman Russ and even less on Astartes tanks, but they'd tear through the Urdeshi cultists as well as the lighter IFVs with ease.
Soldiers piling out of burning wrecks were targeted and scythed down by Blaze Lancers and Jade Troopers, some of them armed with the much feared Hard-Neutron weapons. Odd blue light from cherenkov radiation made when their beams added or knocked away enough neutrons from surrounding matter to turn targets glow-in-the-dark radioactive would manifest as a killing light, many enemy troops rather grotesquely liquefying as the neutron activation caused their chemical composition to degrade into luminescent sludge. But this atomic modulation also made them quite effective against heavily armoured targets, bypassing many conventional forms of durability to transmute the target directly.
Again and again the attacking waves who braved the mine-fields, the artillery, the airstrikes, and the long ranged guns would meet the blue death of Neutron radiation, leaving ghostly husks of degraded vehicles and armour behind while toxic flesh boiled away into basal gasses. Sometimes the gas masked cultists and renegades would simply vomit and shit themselves to death as their intestines broke down, discoloured blood leaking out as even this life essence degraded in the face of radiation.
The T'au of course considered this to be...grotesque, the sort of savagery they consigned to the Vespids and their neutron technology while they regarded themselves as above irradiating the enemy to death. But then their "bouncing be'gel" mines that popped into the air at waist level to fire off pulse submunitions into the waist in a move that generally obliterated the genitals (as well as the abdomen and thighs) of the target were hardly winning any prizes in the contest of pleasant ways to meet one's maker.
But the enemy still pressed on, with the Iron Warriors themselves brushing aside many lesser formations. Havocs moved into position by Thunderhawks tore through formations unready for the concentration of firepower that thirty space marines all carrying heavy weapons could bring. Predator Light, Sicaran Battle, Kratos heavy and Fellblade superheavy tanks would roll in formations with Land Raider, Spartan Assault, and Mastadon infantry fighting vehicles and battle rhinos fitted with twin combi-weapons, dual pintle mounts and havoc launchers and a wave of stomping dreadnoughts under the cover of powerful void fields.
Caestaferrums, Contemptors, Deredeos, Leviathans, and Telemons to name some of the patterns in increasing order of size while their pet house knights and titans thundered with blaring war horns. In the shadow of colossi did giants do battle, Overlord tanks firing into Fellblades, Nuwas battling with Kratosi, Steel Sentinel War Automata dueling with defilers, Celestial Shi walkers trading blows with Chaos Knights all while Titans redefined geography with each and every step and every shot.
They would meet with the monstrous things of the strangers as often as they would their intended targets; huge things walking on tendrilled legs with an eerie swiftness and hideous techno-organic or biomehanical beasts or fractal patterned abominations whose forms were shambling cognitohazards that would make the less firm of mind and spirit at best die for the crime of beholding them. But to mistake this for a reluctance to face the might of the Wyrd was a fatal mistake, they relished in the challenge.
Three sided battles would rearrange topography with a speed nature could not manage in a thousand times a thousand times a thousand years as tectonic plates cracked down to the mantle from the strain as competing geomancers sought to weaponize the power locked within as just another form of artillery. Magma and pyroclast tore from the ground in devastating plumes while the ground shook and simply broke, whole ecosystems plunging into fissures where panicked wildlife would fall screaming into yawning abysses of upswelling lava.
Fortresses rooted in with special systems to survive this would find their positions altered as faultlines tore themselves into being and cataclysmic tsunamis swept through the surface, forcing warring armies to find shelter in a world they were actively giving the most agonising sort of death a planet could suffer. Where the plumes of mushroom clouds were a simply regular occurrence, where one could see god machines fall as many deemed it was necessary to stop Haoyu's ritual at all costs.
A falling Benediction Titan's thirteen kilometre bulk tore at the skin of the planet as gravity brought it into a ruinous collision with the ground that proved so very much softer than its adamantium hull. The mountain range it fell upon shattered like a child's playset, ancient mounds of metamorphic rock crushed by the weight of the titan without resistance, simply disintegrating as if never more than a dream. Ejecta the size of buildings launched into the air to rain fire down across the world as the debris flew high, but not high enough to escape gravity's inevitable redirection of its paths downwards.
Day was cast into nuclear night from the dust kicked up, the ejecta of other battlefields on this world casting the planet into a devastating nuclear night, illuminated by the fire of descending ejecta and ship wreckage knocked out of orbit that made the world bleed fire and magma with each devastating impact. Over the course of this battle, this unfortunate world suffered hundreds of impacts equivalent to the K-T asteroid that laid low the kingdom of the dinosaurs, and yet still the stubborn armies fighting in its surface endeavoured to fight in the shade.
Tracers, beams, pulses, bolts, and power fields crackled through the choking dust of extinction, warring armies unconcerned with the biota of the world screaming and dying because the ritual taking place here was so much more important than anything as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things as the ecosystem of one little planet. Let the animals scream, let them die, let the plants wither and even the Bacteria suffocate, there would be other planets, other worlds. And such things could be fixed later, when the dust settled and the corpses cleaned away.
Even viruses, prions, and viroids would begin to die in these conditions, swept by radioactive dust storms and raining fire and soil choked by artillery barrages that could be measured in terms of Verduns per Hectare infusing poison into them. Even decomposing bacteria would breathe its last, bereft of the means that the warring armies used to support themselves in this all-death, leaving bodies that dessicated but did not rot.
It was a great dying in very little time at all, what life there was being actively preserved by users of the winds of magic and other esoteric means as well as terraformed bubbles that were being used to create food supplies for ravenous armies. Patches of artificial green made to live in the face of a battlefield where bombs fell like rainstorms for days on end and the noise of cannon fire blended into a long, low pitched tearing sound as the individual booms were no longer distinguishable to the human ear.
But the war would keep going, for none involved could afford to withdraw just yet, and Warpsmith Fon'Du would bring his host to the Grand Bastion where Kexin's brother was preparing his leg of the ritual to protect the allied forces from the myopic corruption sweeping through the territories being fought over by these warring armies for the decisive clash of this battle.
[1] I'm going with somewhat different takes on some canon tanks, like more heavily armed Land Raiders and Spartans able to fit more marines because nothing about the Land Raider and Rhino's transport capacity differences makes any sense and also because the treadhead in me is bewildered by the idea of the anti-tank weapons being on the sponson mounts when sponsons were generally used to clear trenches or ambushing infantry and light vehicles as well as just about every other 40k tank having anti-personnel sponson guns. Generally assume doubled transport capacity from canon if that helps you picture how things go.
Standard Land Raider would be a pair of twin-linked heavy lascannon turrets, two twin-linked bolt-cannons (one front, one back) and dual Twin-Volkite Cannon sponsons with four twin-heavy autogun (the autogun version of a heavy stubber) mini-turrets with attached hunter-killer missiles and of course, the grenade rack attachments with a transport capacity of 25 standard Astartes and 12 Terminators. A Spartan would be four sets of sponson mounted volkite quad-cannons (two per side), a pair of Twin-linked Spartan Turbo-Laser turrets, and hull-mounted twin heavy bolt-cannons (one per facing) as well as eight quad-heavy auto-guns and HK missiles; all to support 50 Marines and 25 termies as a moving defensive position/dakkadakkadakka.
[2] This is a personal taste thing but I up-arm Tactical dreadnought armour by quite a bit with wrist-mounted weapons fitted onto power fists being standard issue. Standard devastator or terminator weapons can fit onto the wrist of a terminator without taking the entire arm, but doubling up requires an arm cannon more or less. Standard issue will also include some form of shoulder mounted weapons, as well as a grenade launcher harness fitted onto the torso to free up the hands because they're not really suited for arming and throwing a grenade. Ammo is fed by linked belts drawing from compartments within the suit which contributes to its bulk, reloading is generally done by Cybernetica MULE auxiliaries which are designed to restock ammo even in the middle of intense firefights.
As for round calibres, an Astartes pattern bolter, as deduced by this redditor; is a lot bigger than the old (and now not often repeated) listing of 0.75 caliber but a whole 2.5 caliber or for those of us using rationally designed units, is 63.5mms. I'll assume some scale exaggeration and go with 40mm rounds. My take on astartes are a nice even 50% taller than normal humans and tower over Chaos Warriors to a similar degree that they tower over normal humans and so a bit bigger than typical GW canon, so their bolters can fit a full magazine of those rounds pretty easy. Astartes pattern heavy bolters are even bigger of course and come in at 60mm. Standard autocannons are like late WW2 medium tank gun calibre (85-90mm) but use internal propellant caseless rounds which cut out a lot of the bulk of the ammo. Especially as improvements in propellant allow for a very tiny amount to propel rounds to hypersonic speeds and thus save massively on cartridge size.
A predator destructor's main cannon comes out to a 150mm fully automatic caseless doom-gun, while the Leman Russ' battle cannon is 240mm. The Baneblade Cannon clocks in at an extra thicc 500mm but firing rounds with far more kinetic energy. Then you have goofy shit like the Behemoth Cannon on the largest of Imperial behemoth grade megatanks where the bore is measured in hundreds of meters and the shell's impact is generally measured in "number of mass extinction event equivalents" which is why Behemoth grade megatanks are mostly used on megastructures because using them on planets tends to require terraformation after the fact to prevent biosphere death (also one being destroyed has even worse consequences.)
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Haoyu's doing the High Magic. It's Kexin who's going up with Kais against Fon-Du. Fortunately for us, she has enhanced physicals and regen.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
Wow. They really don't want us doing that ritual. Were they counting on us being more inconvenienced by the Strangers' and their mind control/cognitohazards in their battle plans?
I mean, I would have figured the boosted Harmonic Broadcaster ritual to be more pressing for them, considering the knockon effects for the others, but I guess that popped first.
I mean, I would have figured the boosted Harmonic Broadcaster ritual to be more pressing for them, considering the knockon effects for the others, but I guess that popped first.
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- Location
- Warsaw
Is this going good or bad for us?
Kairos123
Insomniac Extraordinaire
It's good. I misunderstood. We have a different wizard teamed up with the Tau's strongest legendary lord gonna be fighting this Warpsmith (and a stranger Lord).
I thought the wizard doing our high magic was gonna be forced to stop and fight. We want lopsided character fights like this, the way the defense was shown I thought our strategy was failing, rather than ganking them as they come to us.
- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
Undead Revolutionary Project: Blackened Pillar.
One part reference to Nagash' Black Pyramid, and thus shrine, and one part Necromantic amplifier. This structure is intended to enhance the ability for the dead to rise, allowing them to do so without direct Necromantic aid, and is capable of giving simple commands such as directing the newly risen to create more corpses to raise. It can also stimulate cell growth in a crude parody of life, allowing the more fleshy undead to regenerate or simply play Frankenstein with their parts to reassemble old creatures or assemble new ones.
This draws on encounters by the Undead with the Pale Wasting, and more recent encounters with the Tyranids in treating the bodies of lesser creatures as little more than fodder for the collective force that can be mixed and matched to that end.
Taking direct inspiration from the latter, they can gather the infinitesimal dead, dead skin cells, bacteria, and so on, into a mass of undead flesh to be used in making necromantic constructs or in rituals therein, allowing for a reserve force to be rapidly assembled, either to protect the Pillar, or for more general use, or for a vessel for a high-tier Nephiroth or the like to be constructed in short order.
One part reference to Nagash' Black Pyramid, and thus shrine, and one part Necromantic amplifier. This structure is intended to enhance the ability for the dead to rise, allowing them to do so without direct Necromantic aid, and is capable of giving simple commands such as directing the newly risen to create more corpses to raise. It can also stimulate cell growth in a crude parody of life, allowing the more fleshy undead to regenerate or simply play Frankenstein with their parts to reassemble old creatures or assemble new ones.
This draws on encounters by the Undead with the Pale Wasting, and more recent encounters with the Tyranids in treating the bodies of lesser creatures as little more than fodder for the collective force that can be mixed and matched to that end.
Taking direct inspiration from the latter, they can gather the infinitesimal dead, dead skin cells, bacteria, and so on, into a mass of undead flesh to be used in making necromantic constructs or in rituals therein, allowing for a reserve force to be rapidly assembled, either to protect the Pillar, or for more general use, or for a vessel for a high-tier Nephiroth or the like to be constructed in short order.
...
Why in high heavens would we give Nagash&Co. more toys to play. Even if we gave them commands, Nagash is the God of Undeath and probably could take them over without breaking a sweat through sheer conceptual/narrative weight. Besides, it's a textbook case of meddling with dangerous forces beyond your understanding. It's just asking Fate to kick our ass.
Moradash War Part 3
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
As said before, the initial rolls were done on a D6 system so I have to restat for D12, but I'll show stat sheets later.
...
Chen Kexin and Shas'Shan'Uash'O'Va[1] T'Au Kais made for strange partners, commanding this force tasked with ensuring that Haoyu's ritual to both ward their force sand disrupt the foe's movements would succeed. Kais made no attempt to express any particular understanding of how it worked, but he knew enough of many a strange foe to know it had to be done.
While they would have preferred to clear off the chosen ritual site where Haoyu was leading the mages in accordance to what the Fenghuan, now in his magnificent avian form; had foreseen would be needed to anchor the ritual in place, working together with the Kroot Shaman Aikorx as they compared and contrasted their respective understandings of magic and sorcery. Scattering loci of power and totemic icons in an auspicious confluence of Leylines that converged on this planet.
Kexin knew that such a challenge would not go unanswered for too long, and soon enough, the shambling form of the Lord Discordant and Great Warpsmith Tchiez Fon'Du would make himself known, teleporting into the fray atop some dreadful beast of pseudo-animalistic metal with a host of lesser warpsmiths riding on their own daemon engine steeds following in close order as an honour guard.
Kais would, to Kexin's surprise, insist on accompanying Kexin, regarding himself as having the experience needed to counter the madness unfurling on this world.
Given Chaos Discordants were a hard counter to most of the T'au way of war, so reliant it was on machines that were vulnerable to scrap code and their technological hexes that would require continual patchwork from the T'au to attempt to outrace the malignant technoviruses of the Iron Warriors, she was surprised that any of them would dare to take on a Warpsmith and Lord Discordant alongside her.
But knowing that she was the main obstacle between them and her brother, she would take them on at the helm of her honour guard, the Fenghuan emerging from her war-nest with spread wings and melting into human shape to make herself a smaller target, wings assuming a rest position behind her back as she clutched her staff.
Her guards readied themselves, each a Fenghuan student of hers who had spent many centuries learning underneath her after she had achieved accreditation as a master of the mystic arts herself. Each had a name known to her. Quiet and contemplative Jiang Li, brash and excitable Peng Jing...
She would look into the horizon and will the wind of shadows to part and take away obscurity rather than add to it, letting her see in detail the monstrous threat approaching her, the skull-masked Iron Warrior barking commands at the rest of his kin, gurgling in his hateful tongue as he sized up the fortress before him as he had a thousand others before.
His stench in the empyrean was rancid, like the smell of something rotten following him wherever he went. His aura had the colour of bruise and faeces and his soul was like that of stagnant, corpse logged water; a rotten and filthy green. There was no saving such a man, no point in reasoning with him. To even hear him talk would invite disaster, so he would simply have to be killed.
"A waste of life..." She sighed, starting the chant and releasing the shards of inscribed paper into the air, balancing the elemental winds and the churn of her own avian soul into a brilliant orange.
Her army felt the power of beast and plant invigorate them, to make them fight with a power beyond their own to stop the horde. The desire and the ability to live suffused into her guard and her soldiers like the rays of the sun, and from her Y-visored helm, her eyes would open to look upon the foe, the wings on the sides of her helmet flaring out along with her own actual; armour plated wings as she leapt into the sky.
The Warpsmith's legions bowled through the Knight Lances put in front of him. They were good fighters, disciplined comrades and blooded on a hundred battlefields, Tchiez Fon'Du had Space Marine tank formations, dreadnoughts, daemon engines, and his own knights to hammer them to bits even when his air support was chased from the skies and his artillery was cut off by glowing theatre shields. Simple, brute power at the right location was often all that was needed. And to be fair, she couldn't fault Fon'Du for it, there were always levels of properly applied force no amount of skill or finesse could overcome.
"+We have markerlights on the Gue'La armoured formation. Awaiting your orders to engage.+" A call came in from one of the Pathfinder Shas'Os. From the datafeed she was getting, they probably were using a battlesuit of some kind.
"+Strike when ready, don't wait for my specifics, I would hope you know your own doctrine better than I do.+" She replied.
"+I am grateful for your confidence in my cadre's capabilities, but you are a master of Mind Sciences and these are the spawn of mental pollution. Give us your preferred targets to disrupt their momentum, then fight on the front we cannot. Such is the way of the Greater Good.+" Shas'O Kio'Res responded.
"+Strike the vehicles with the greatest density of symbols first, then the ones that are covering their aerial approaches. After that, follow what your training would tell you.+" She answered with less than a moment of thought given to it.
"+Acknowledged.+"
"+It would be advisable to steer clear of the regions she focuses her mind sciences on, Shas'O. The effects are likely to be spectacular.+" Kais cut in.
"+Affirmative, we will be providing you with cover fire, ensure your safety Shas'Shan'Uash'O'Va. We have other battles to wage.+" Kio'Res replied.
"+I would not indulge this madness in personal combat were I not certain of victory, but thank you for your confidence.+" He replied.
"+Keep them pinned for as long as you can, I want as few of them escaping this as I can manage.+" She said, slowly rising into the air as she spoke.
Even in a world as poisoned by war as this, there were roots and there was life. Perhaps no longer amidst the presently living, but the dead still had the components for life. She reached her hand into that dead life, the corpse of branches and roots trampled underneath this war. She sang to it, and let the jade wind blow while her psychic presence reached into its spirit-colours; faded and grey, but not yet fully dissolved into the soul-foam of the recently dead.
With a final component, she spoke a few words in a language that the eldest had once used to shape reality. Humans called it Ennuncia, the Aeldari called it Truespeech, she called it Dehua; simply the words.
Once the eldest; her kind; could write dissertations and epics in this language and carried out casual conversation in this primeval code. Now the sentence she was about to speak, which amounted to "Plants I see now with my mystic, live again and grow" was the hallmark of a master with a deep knowledge of how to conjugate her words to specify the right plants for best effect.
A human speaking this would have risked growing plants in their esophagus and died choking on roots and branches if their word choice wasn't exacting enough. She however, was built for it, and so all she felt was a warmth in her throat and upon her tongue.
All at once, the roots tore free from the ground, rich with fresh life and growing beyond what should have been possible. Swelling beyond what thermodynamics would allow and coruscating with powerful jade energies as thorns sharpened to invisible edges and leaves began to sprout in brilliant viridian.
Tanks were seized by vines as thick as buildings, lifted into the air while their leafy stems slipped into nook and cranny, growing carnivorous jaws at her will once inside to snap up the crew. The space marines and warriors more often than not fought off the intruders in short order, but the mortal men would be engulfed with little struggle.
Other vehicles were crushed like cans of soda, little droplets of blood squeezing out from the unfortunates on the inside. Dismounted soldiers firing away with flamers and shouting warnings would be sprayed by pitcher plants vomiting digestive fluids or engulfed by hungry petals that left nothing but bleached bone or shattered by barrages of fruit grenades that ruptured into sprays of molecule sharp razor-seeds.
"Xenos witch!" She could hear some of them shout as her acolytes added their own spellcraft, raising walls of angry, hostile life to isolate her quarry from his army. It would not last forever, not when Titans were turning their attentions to the flows of magic; forcing the titans of the Celestials to move to intercept.
"Oh so you've come to play then birdy? Perhaps I could make something...more brutal out of those overly elegant wings of yours?" Fon'Du laughed.
"There is nothing I need to say to an overgrown child like you. Save your breath." She responded as her staff made a quick circular motion while her hand pinched thrice, words of spellcasting uttered to give shape and voice to the ideas she formulated.
Kais shimmered into position, the plasma weapons on his heavy duty stealth suit, similar in principle to the armour he used in Kronus; but using a new XV-92 Phantom Suit to provide him with more bulk, protection and more importantly power for weapons.
He did not waste time with words, opening fire with twin plasma-cannon barrels into the insectile Helstalker that Fon'Du rode into battle, striking against scintillating shields while the Warpsmith turned his head with clear displeasure in his optics before a barrage of high-yield missiles exploded in a series of small fusion detonations all around him, arcing from Kais' launchers to catch him further off balance.
The obliterator fleshmetal in the Helstalker shifted, producing lascannons to bite back against kais while the Warpsmith's servoarms melted into heavy bolters to pump round after round at the flying Kexin; forcing her to dodge around the guided bolt rounds while Kais jumped to jink the Daemon Engine's aim.
"You really do take all the fun out of this, so serious, so dour, it's like an entire nation of my brothers and sisters, where's the art, the passi-oh shit" He started before his eyes widened a fraction beneath his helmet and the storm of crimson firebolts leaping towards him, dragon like jaws forming at their heads as they sought out their targets.
His shielding flickered to life, his head shaking while he got his bearings again before growling out about her rudeness as he kneed his metal steed. He was already in motion, scuttling away, moving to avoid the amber spears that impaled into the ground with violent force, his insectile warbeast letting rip with a hades cannon that chugged a storm of heavy shells into the air while she weaved through.
But the fourth party would not long stay out of the developing brawl, the forces of the army of the starless night also wished to partake in this, and had dispatched one of their bizarre champions. It was bizarre, its body twisting in ways that seemed to make it...clip like a clumsily animated three-dimensional model, bending through itself without regard for its own dimensions, particularly its overly plentiful limbs that just passed through each other in total defiance of the fact that its limbs didn't have the room to bend in such a way.
Its six wings were like some bizarre compromise between a pterosaur and a bat, as if a fan-like array pterosaur wings were joined together in each wing to form the fingers of a bat's appendage. Its three heads were like backwards cephalopods with horns instead of tentacles, and a "front" made out of a column of beak mandibles that rippled as it babbled nonsense, and in three clusters of three it had circles that were ghostly white glowing lights rather than eyes. The left head had hooked beak-mandibles, the middle had beak-mandibles that ended in axe like tips flaring outward, the right with dunkleosteus like guillotine scissor edges. Six arms each with fingers that split into subfingers emerged from its torso, while six legs like some primeval reptile's splayed in a way that should have broken ligaments. Three long tails trailed out behind it, each forming a mouth with beaks unsettlingly like those of a parrot to speak.
Its mottled greyed and purple body cut an odd figure, but it spoke a name. "Olzongcthorag", in a cant that seemed to manifest from nowhere but everywhere as it wielded great swords in two hands hand and a pair of king scepters in two others, two lower arms cannons the vague humanness of this gesture only adding to the disconcerting appearance of it all. Speaking again and again as trailing cilia from its head splayed in a frill as it sought to strike first, the twisting sword carving an arc through the air that sliced a Traitor Rogal Dorn tank in twain while it scuttled with menacing speed.
"Eyes open to the end, noses ready for the present, ears closed to the beginning, Olzoncthorag was not here, Olzoncthorag is here, Oloncthorag will not be here. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill." The voices rattled off in strange cant, the beast snapping its beak at the Warpsmith and reaching a spiralling fractal claw to deflect the Helstalker's warp-scythes in a scream of distorted noise while Kexin cast forth a burst of bio-electric smiting.
Olzoncthorag's guards were of somewhat less sanity defying form, like half of Olzoncthorag, though each had their own unique traits and characteristics to the careful observer, assuming one was willing to look for that long at walking cognitohazards that instilled the idea that one should drink of the strangers' bizarre pseudo-living matter and embrace the path of becoming one of the twisted.
"Get out of my battle you absurd winged pest!" Fon'Du snarled, his daemon enhanced omnissian axe swinging in a two handed sweep while a Vashtorrian hammer wielded by mechatendrites crashed on Olzoncthorag's head, spiralling barriers that removed avenues of space for the attack to pass through driving one blow to miss and another to sweep at emptiness.
Futile, at least until the daemon in the axe roared and imposed the idea of assault on the Xel-Cthagoran Bladeking's shields, a ripple forming across them while the helstalker's scorpion tail released inchoate warp power into the jittering mad-spawn before it, its head spitting forth hades cannon rounds at Kais' last known position.
"+Gun drones on target, engaging!+" Kais shouted over the comms, burst cannon, rail rifle, missile pod, ion blaster, and plasma gun fire erupting around the dueling pair from a swarm of cloaked and shielded drones that coordinated to form better evasive patterns.
Kais himself would let the drones part as some were swatted aside by heavy bolter rounds or bleaching blasts that left little but faded distortions. He took impacts on his shields, staggering slightly from feedback to squeeze off melta-bursts, invisible waves of heat forming incandescent brilliance that could vapourise building sized lumps of tungsten.
Fon'Du snarled, his mount reeling and Olzoncthorag pushed back, stumbling onto its tails as the heat formed a deadly bow wave before Kexin snapped her fingers and let an eruption of fire engulf the pair.
Fiery dragon shapes twisted out in other directions, engaging the guards of the duo to assist their own protectors trying to prevent interference in the battle from outside parties. But this brief dimming in her magics to spread them out was enough for Olzoncthorag to step between space and emerge in front of her, a house-sized mass of oddity whose sword wound into fractal patterns that sawed into her defences.
"We have seen, we are seeing, we shall see. Your opposition always fails, it shall always fail, it has always failed. We are, we were, we shall. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill" They spoke as one maw opened to reveal basilisk patterns that sought to burn Kexin's very brain out, the images and lights seeming to crawl out of their mouth while others released gouts of anti-energy to turn her defensive energy fields into enervating quasi-ice.
She was not an ordinary person, she could look into this memetic death and feel only a mounting pain as the spirit's body fought to live, her suit and eyes scrambling the vision to assist her own fortitude while her staff swung out, trying to parry the wriggling blows before Fon'Du could intervene as his mount started to form wings from obliterator fleshmetal.
The T'au commander's thrusters briefly caught in Kexin's vision before Kais' suited hoof booted the quasi-machine in its central head, plasma cutter blades firing up in one hand stabbing down into the colourful barriers.
A Fenghuan guard in bird form's talons clawed at its side, pushing it into the onager gauntlet of another one of Kais' invisible protectors, one heavy blow knocking it into a swing from Kexin to send it reeling back.
A Lord Discordant's hades cannon tore across her side, another's baleflamer washing admittedly harmlessly over her before Fon'du's daemon axe crunched into her barriers, a grunt of protest coming from her as she was brought down to the ground.
"Our business has not concluded, xenos skinwalker." Fon'Du chuckled.
"You're still alive, so yes, it hasn't. Let me correct that." Kexin replied as she let biomantic power course through her, eyeing the sorcerous talismans the Warpsmith wielded and the shifting of his fleshmetal into new tools.
She moved at a speed that to even a high speed camera rated for following stub gun bullets would come off as teleportation, appearing with the apparition of a bird of prey enveloping her outstretched fist to rock the Helstalker back, the second blow being an uppercut with the staff wreathed in flame as her muscles turned to living adamantium, striking the machine's jaw skywards and shooting towards him for an overhead blow to Fon'Du's helmet; crushing one of his shield layers in a bomb like impact.
She lacked Xinyi's finesse and skill, and on pure natural strength she was considerably less powerful, but Fon'Du lacked Nothgyth's own grace and skill in battle himself, relying more on sheer number of attack options and angles and calculated machine logic.
The mutilator afflicted servo-arms on his back glistened and shifted, chainfists swinging in a boxing manoeuvre to close off her avenues of escape.
She'd back off, autocannon rounds would smash into her to throw her back, each detonation erupting against her shielding while her wings flexed to shield her head, giving her just enough space for the helstalker to form boltcannons and rake at her with exploding munitions. The first were incendiary, but when he noted they had no effect, he switched over to cryogenic with a thought.
"Immune to heat...fascinating. But I have weapons for every occasion. For you see, my greatest work is in controlling and manipulating the obliterator virus. Technology is mine to command, and the tools of war are as my skin and meat." Fon'Du boasted, some of his guards moving to intercept her as she tried to approach.
Reaper chaincannons barked with a fusiliade of heavy autogun rounds, laser like lines of tracers pushing her towards hades autocannon fire for the much heavier rounds of these larger rotor guns to tear at her; her shielding dimming and splintering layer by layer until her guards wreathed her in a barrier of power.
Letting frost fall off her armoured feathers, she drew power from the nearby flames into her suit to restart its shielding, warily paying attention to the skeins of fate.
Olzoncthorag whipped into view, a fallen Fenghuan Guard hanging limb at the ends of a tail, body faded and broken like a mannequin as the abomination closed.
Busy bombarding Fon'Du with a series of penumbral pendulums that swept dark power through the chaos space marines to push him towards a telekinetic barrage to cause an actual wound to his mount, blowing off a leg from one slug; she was a touch too slow to avoid the Cthorag.
Its scepter struck first, crushing into her chest by warping around space to avoid her back and hit from an unexpected angle, armour plating denting and cracking from the impact before its sword stabbed through a portion of leg armour weakened by its bleach breath.
She let out a grunt, shock and training suppressing pain as the loss of feeling below the knee confirmed it was just about severed, hanging by a few scrips of skin and muscle.
Biomantic and Ghyranic power flowed into her, sealing the wound shut and repairing the bone of her humanoid raiment, Fon'Du's missiles intercepted by Kais' drone swarm and the Warpsmith himself struck in the chest by blue-white sunlike plasma blasts that burnt deep into his midsection.
Olzoncthorag's ice breath engulfed an arm, encasing it in ice as she let the fire-wind and crackling psycho-electricity engulf it.
"We have fought, we are fighting, and we shall fight. You were a spirit, you are a spirit, you shall be a corpse. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill" So what they babbled wasn't just complete nonsense...
De-telescoping her staff with a smirk, she activated a teleportation homer fitted into her armour to fill her outstretched weapon with an altogether different sort of weapon; a double-headed polehammer whose sharp ends were as hooked talons and whose flanged, crushing ends would convexly focus the power field and psychic energy channeled through them for brutal close quarters business; sharp, dagger like mini-blades topping each end of the Talisman and character decorated weapon that gleamed a brilliant orange as she let her power fill its being.
This was "Star Iron Wrath", her tool of choice when she needed to get much more violent than her staff generally entailed, the twin braided girl shifting her stance; orange black and purple armour starting to glow with greater force and power than before.
"Now, you want my attention for a fight yes? Good. And when whatever passes for a soul among your kind fades into whatever dismal underworld awaits you, tell your "unfathomable masters" that I will be waiting to send every last one of you back to them." She said as she gritted her teeth and pointed one of her hook blades at the three headed monstrosity which seemed to crane its heads in interest, unused to such brazen defiance from beings that could barely look at it for very long without their minds and bodies splintering and crumbling.
Letting herself be wreathed in a pyronic avatar that gave her an appearance more like a Phoenix than a Fenghuang, she spread her wings wider, feathers scorching lesser Xel-Cthagora mechanosymbionts away as magical and psychic fire engulfed them, bursting shields like bubbles and reducing unnatural materials to clouds of vapour.
"We have acknowledged, we are acknowledging, we shall acknowledge. You have challenged us, we challenge you, you shall die. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill" They declared before letting out a cognitohazardous roar that turned many who heard it into distortions, basilisk energy erupting from its mouths afterwards to sweep across the battlefield while she rushed towards them, flying like a comet.
Olzoncthorag took to the air, wings rippling with odd movements and mighty swords swinging in heavy, sweeping movements, trying to catch the more nimble fighter who let fire and flame spread from her pinions while she spoke her own words of death, drawing a roar of pain from a creature forced to try and fight off having death be written onto its being.
Elsewhere, Kais flickered in and out of Fon'Du's vision, dodging around his shots with practiced ease, one of his guards after the other falling while Kais never gave Fon'Du a consistent target.
"Come out Xeno scum, you cannot hide from me forever." He whispered through his helmet in a voice that seemed everywhere at once.
"Are you afraid to face a true astartes? Will you run away again, like when you failed Shio'Res in Kronus?" The Warpsmith taunted as he extended tendrils of obliterator fleshmetal to absorb the remains of his fallen acolytes, laughing as he and his steed swelled with the offerings of the fallen.
Machinery transformed at a moment's notice, forming a battery of volkite serpentas whose "CHOOM" noises presaged setting the entire battlefield on fire, joined by a cascade of flamer, melta, plasma, and laser bursts, some of the XV-25 and 85 teams that had hoped to aid Kais simply swept from existence for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
"I have been gathering data, Mont'Gue'Auk'Sha. You rely on diversity and volume of weapons rather than true expertise, unlike many of your kin." Kais said simply through one of the stealthed drones, opening up with charged cyclic ion cannon blasts to try and catch his foe off guard while their mutilator limbs formed heavy shields to intercept.
"Do not misunderstand my lack of care to put any effort for a lack of ability alien. To exercise a mind such as myself, one who had fought under my genefather from the Crusade to the Present, in earnest fighting a dog like you? What could be more shameful."
"A most curious idea of what constitutes honour. Tell me, do you honour Perturabo with your charred corpse?"
"A mere xenos such as you dares to speak his name without reverence? Oh the things I am going to do with your tongue when I get my hands on you long enough to squeeze the life out of you, Kais."
"Interesting proposition! Unfortunately I must decline. You lack the skill needed for such a feat, so I leave this to the realm of your fantasies, Fon'Du." Kais' words were infuriating. Who did this alien think he was, mocking a veteran of the long war?
Fon'Du's next barrages were far more accurate this time, triangulating the likely position of his foe and releasing a cascade of uncharged plasma bolts, one after the other to flush Kais out of his hiding spots. Each erupting in a wash of ectoplasmic green that created angry heat distortions while the ground bubbled away in bursts of nova heat.
Kais had already jetted into position with the heavy railrifles mounted on his shoulders locking into position, burst cannons from slaved drones peppering his foe as long as they could manage before his rapid fire weapons swept them aside.
With the click of a confirmed lock-on, a small hum preceded the whipcrack of the world, burning streaks of projectiles flying into Fon'Du's steed with with mushroom detonations of pure kinetic force; haywire grenades launched by drones having managed to weaken the target's defences somewhat.
A flatline indicated that one of Kais' honour guards had fallen, their XV-92 armour falling lifeless as a Lord Discordant's helstalker tore a corrupt scrap code ladened tail from their corpse before his servo-arm started to wash Kais' likely position in fusion fire from their servo-torch.
Kais jumped into the air, thrusters thrumming silently as he released pulse grenades and another volley of missiles, a leg from the discordant's helstalker coming off before he landed heavily on the other end of Fon'du; ion and plasma weapons firing away into Fon'Du's back before he could bring his axe around to block.
"Vashtorr's blood you are quite the pest little alien." Fon'Du snarled, fleshmetal flowing back into place right before Kais got close enough for his chest mounted fusion blaster to erupt with a wave of incandescent heat great enough to cause the air to erupt in a plume of nuclear wrath.
That should have been enough to finish Fon'Du, but the Warpsmith looked at the hole where his chest was and simply let out a snarling roar to Kais' shock. With a wound like that he shouldn't have been able to vocalise.
"You are going to have to try a lot harder than that." He snarled as his tendrils shifted to form sensors, figuring out the measure of much of Kais' stealth systems while ropes of bloody quicksilver started to knit his ruin of a chest back together.
Kais projected his plasma bayonets from his cannon, bringing them into a crossing block to use their magnetic fields to provide extra resistance against the calculated cut towards his chest made by his Daemon axe, the power field and daemonic malice within the axe screaming against his energy blades.
Magnetic containment fields and plasma streams splintered and gave way to the crackling axe with a moment more of pressure, Fon'Du letting the lashes of his mount's power scourges explode outwards to stab into Kais' shielding to drain at their strength and find weakness.
"Getting close to a Space Marine when you don't even have the proper equipment? Foolish, stupid, naive. What do you hope to accomplish?" Fon'Du taunted, Kais reigniting his plasma blades to buy time with heavy handed parries and the sacrifice of one shield drone after the other. But the Omnissian axe was something of far greater quality than simple energy blades and his "lightsabres" were getting cut down as fast as he could summon them. He could maintain the parry longer...but only at the expense of his shields.
"Your reflexes are slow, even with your computerised assistance. Your technique is mechanical, textbook, but I have written textbooks on this particular science myself. Your weapons sloppy, inferior." Kais managed to get free of the scourges, missiles filled with haywire warheads disrupting Fon'Du's shield regeneration and fusion warheads biting into its hull plating, plasma blasts erupting only to be deflected by servo-arm blades and that damnable axe.
Fon'Du's steed moved as fast as a nightmare, a feint being followed through with a reversal of the axe and a solid blow into the chest compartment of Kais' armour once the baleflamer had worn down his own shielding. The armour held, but Fon'du pushed harder and the daemon blade forced its way through, gnawing for Kais' soul.
"Now that I have deigned to take you seriously, I am going to end this, quickly. You cannot win against me, and you will die here Kais. Then I can get back to more interesting subjects than some slit-nosed blueskinned cow." He said while Kais' drones shadowed his movements, waiting for the signal to open fire.
"You are correct, your skill in this field of combat surpasses mine by far. But drawing you into it is distraction enough for your senses for my purposes." Kais replied with a smile within his cockpit before the rail rifles, ion-chargers, fusion blasters, and plasma guns of his drone swarm opened fire; striking Fon'du from all angles.
Blue and white light struck him from all sides while Kais backed away, avoiding a stumbling kill-saw swing from one of Fon'Du's mutilator servo-arms and turning all power he could manage into firepower.
Pulse grenades, high impact missiles, fusion projectors, plasma cannons, heavy rail-rifles, ion blasters; everything he could throw.
It would have to be focused on the Warpsmith himself, to try and end the monster quickly. He saw its tail trying to lash out at him to fill his suit with corrupted data and did not flinch.
He trusted in his cadres and held position, rewarded for his trust by Ghostkeel team fusion colliders to reduce the tail to slag now that they had broken through the site of the battle, letting Kais finish off the Helstalker once Fon'Du was reduced to an incoherent cloud of high-temperature plasma.
"+Inform the Earth caste drones that I will need to repair my armour.+" Kais said, flatly and humourlessly, which in a way was funnier to the other people on the line than if he had tried to make some sort of quip.
All the while, Kexin was twisting around her foe, often stopping her momentum abruptly to crunch all that velocity into herself and then explosively redirect herself with a gust of empyreal energy to give a series of windmilling strikes, pounding away at the reality distortion shielding of Olzhoncthorag.
Once, twice, thrice, flying past her foe before smashing her hammer bottom blade first into the ground. Whereas Haoyu was someone who was more demure and placid; she honestly enjoyed fighting. The exhiliration, the excitement, the contest of strength and skill. She understood why the Shouren; the Orks; loved this so much.
She had bled from a dozen rents in her armour from every penetration Olzhoncthorag had made, but she wasn't discouraged; her regeneration being followed by self-repair systems in her armour to seal holes where it could. Pain was something she was good at pushing aside, and more of it from her foe wouldn't discourage her.
She swung a leg up and then shifted the whole of her body in a wide swing, not exactly a graceful or skillful manoeuvre; just an expression of raw, bestial power coursing through her body like mad as the warp and the winds of magic pumped into her, her words of ennuncia to proclaim her strength shifting the hammer with meteoric violence. Energy discharged through broken shields, smashing a crater into the thing's left head hard enough to obliterate it down to the neck stump.
Then the wind of shadows tore open the pit of shades over the creature; the black, yawning hole in existence trying to drag in her opponent with devastating tidal forces and grabbing tendrils of darkness and obscurity. Ulgu hungered, and this monster would feed it as well as anything. But her foe would step between the spaces one again.
It would not be able to flee the field of battle with the scrambler fields operational, not without risking disruption to itself in the wave of harmonic interference. But it would preserve itself to glare back at her, knots and ropes of bizarre tissue splitting open from the neck wound before it grabbed at an injured arm with one of its sword hands.
With a roar, the middle head cannibalized the others, swallowing the right head down to the stump and biting down while its right sword hand tore its left out of its socket by the shoulder, letting it solidify into a scythe-like shape, three fingers bending and breaking backwards to form handles for the new scythe.
The middle head finishing its grisly feast, vomited out its own end, splitting its head into a tri-petal flower like formation recalling the features of each of its three prior faces while it impaled the scythe arm with the other sword to produce a longer and more rigid weapon, held by a hand whose scepter had been knocked away by its foe, the other scepter melting back into itself and forming a thrid hand to grab at the new scythe with.
Taking on a lighter hue, the white lights it had instead of eyes glowing a strange orchid hue while its legs shuffled and bent, stapling into each other to allow it to drop down like some sort of feralised humanoid before bouncing into the air and bounding back down with a colossal impact.
She hadn't slipped away entirely, her helm reading her a loadout of nonsense as the corrupted reality at the end of the scythe had gouged deep into its visor and respirator; forcing her to dispose of it, discarding at first just the faceplate and then the rest when the auditory feedback proved to be too much of a nuisance.
A young woman's face stared out, orange eyes adjusting their aquiline pupils while her twin braided hair, connected to a pair of triangular hair scoops slightly suggestive of ears started to float and glow; purple at the base; orange at the tips. Tassels framing her face started to wreathe like fire, and her expression shifted to one of anticipation. She looked almost too young, too soft faced for a battle like this. But the look in her eyes betrayed a relish one would never find in a fresh out of recruitment academy graduate.
"Take care of that for me." She said to one of her guards, rushing into the wounded beast, spinning her dual-hammer like a propellor to deflect an incoming untime blast that would have sought to strip away years off of whatever it impacted until there was nothing left. Letting her magic handle the reflecting of the anti-aging energies, she shuffled the power she could extract into the ends of the hammer, freeing up her psychic might for a rhapsody in fire.
Dancing pillars of fire tore at the thing's feet as it shuffled away like a loping beast, spinning into dragon-shaped swirls that formed tornadoes to hound it, forcing it into avenues she deemed allowable before her biomancy kicked in. Pushing her forward with a field of warped time and acceleration she stabbed into the thing with the dagger blades, impaled into a blue not-eye with a hook and crushed into a wing as she flew above with the hammer head. Her flame form mirrored her movements, blessed flame curling into her opponent with each movement while it roared and shriekd in a more avian way than the woman herself did.
Her opponent spun around, cannon arms firing away at her with bursts of pure deathfrost, forcing her fiery avatar to shift to a falconid form to get more coverage with its wings, bringing them forward to be devoured and crumbled by anti-energy.
Ghur's hunting spears rained from an outstretched hand, impaling into weakness where the predatory wind smelled it, little invertebrates released from a pouch infused by the wind to become a deadly flock of doom shortly after; engulfing her foe in a tornado of hellish beast-birds whose feathers were as razors and beaks were like blades.
Olzoncthorag spun, dicing through the swarm, a few repeat blows that twisted into the same place impaling one of her wings at the shoulder, a second stabbing into her chest and only avoiding fatality because as a spirit her body was merely a raiment.
It didn't stop it from hurting, or spitting out fiery blood, but she would endure. She was good at enduring, it was why she was the one holding the line rather than her softer brother.
She moved with a swift, breathless brutality, her counterblow striking the thing's scythe to turn it aside and Ghyran flowing into her with renewed strength. Flesh hardened and strengthened, muscles twitched and accelerated, already absurd regeneration growing faster. Cuts dealt sealed up no matter how ragged or bloody, and when some of the armour had too many damaged components for its self repair to keep up, she simply discarded it to let it be fixed elsewhere.
Gauntlets hit the ground, her armoured skirt was cast aside, leg armour discarded to bring out her avian form's talons when it was starting to slow her down, half her face had to regenerate from scratch after being engulfed by anti-energy, but she didn't quit. Her fire raged brighter, she healed quicker, and she was faster. The creature had many shattered legs, it fell from the sky with the breaking of its other wing, and she fell upon it like a meteor, taloned feet squeezing into its neck.
Her armour was not the sort of relic that the Zhu twins' were; it was a masterwork, but ultimately it was eminently replaceable. Still, it was in a rather sorry sight, cast in a brilliant light by the flames she funneled through her enemy before withdrawing the hammer and the absence of many pieces of it meant she had to rely more on innate power to make up for the lack of powered servo-muscles.
But she was winning this fight, every blow driving more and more strength from her foe while it frantically fought back, its shrieking having long since dispensed with its bizarre ramblings. When it staggered, she saw her chance, using her telekinetics to bring her staff around to delay its scythe swing long enough to start windmilling her weapon into its head.
Blow after blow, not stopping, not resting until she finally bludgeoned it off her opponent and grabbed at her staff with her raptor's claws on her feet and slammed its head into her opponent's stump, letting incendiary heat flow through into her enemy until she had thoroughly vapourised it. She enjoyed the fight, but she wanted to be thoroughly sure of the thing's death. As much as these things died anyway.
Breathing hard as she stepped back, she looked to one of her mechanical adjutant offering her replacement parts from her stock of spares and nodded in appreciation as Haoyu's ritual split into the heavens and skies, radiating outwards across the astronomical leylines and making many things of chaos and madness peel back. The calming harmony in the warp grew louder, stronger, and she could briefly close her eyes and focus on fitting the spares without distraction.
She had only her helmet left to re-equip when Kais appeared before her, offering a barely perceptible nod through the sensor-cluster of his battlesuit while Haoyu apparated in a flash of teleportation before her, seeing that this helm had somewhat different markings than normal.
"Disregarding the grief you're going to give the forgemasters...it is done...and not too soon, the Jianyi have orders coming in. We are to clear up here, and then we will be needed to deal with another thrust by our strange foes and movements by the forces of Chaos." He said, concern briefly apparent on his lips before he decided to just be relieved for his sister and sharing a brief moment of embracing one another's wings.
"You are welcome, Haoyu." She said, slightly teasingly for his forgetting of something important, quirking a brow at him.
"...Thank you Kexin...your valour was...greatly appreciated." He said with a humble nod while she exhaled, satisfied now.
[1]T'au ranks can be a bit odd but this literally translates to "Supreme Greater High Commander of Fire Caste Forces in area" which is roughly the equivalent to the Imperial Rank of Lord Grand Marshal. Kais is, with the other disciples of Puretide; considered one of the very best and most decorated commanders of the Spheres, and is also a highly accomplished personal combatant, one of the very best the T'au have ever produced. And it's not just because he has an incredibly fancy custom mark of XV-22 stealth armour with enough firepower to outshoot a small country with enough durability to canonically survive orbital bombardment.
...
Chen Kexin and Shas'Shan'Uash'O'Va[1] T'Au Kais made for strange partners, commanding this force tasked with ensuring that Haoyu's ritual to both ward their force sand disrupt the foe's movements would succeed. Kais made no attempt to express any particular understanding of how it worked, but he knew enough of many a strange foe to know it had to be done.
While they would have preferred to clear off the chosen ritual site where Haoyu was leading the mages in accordance to what the Fenghuan, now in his magnificent avian form; had foreseen would be needed to anchor the ritual in place, working together with the Kroot Shaman Aikorx as they compared and contrasted their respective understandings of magic and sorcery. Scattering loci of power and totemic icons in an auspicious confluence of Leylines that converged on this planet.
Kexin knew that such a challenge would not go unanswered for too long, and soon enough, the shambling form of the Lord Discordant and Great Warpsmith Tchiez Fon'Du would make himself known, teleporting into the fray atop some dreadful beast of pseudo-animalistic metal with a host of lesser warpsmiths riding on their own daemon engine steeds following in close order as an honour guard.
Kais would, to Kexin's surprise, insist on accompanying Kexin, regarding himself as having the experience needed to counter the madness unfurling on this world.
Given Chaos Discordants were a hard counter to most of the T'au way of war, so reliant it was on machines that were vulnerable to scrap code and their technological hexes that would require continual patchwork from the T'au to attempt to outrace the malignant technoviruses of the Iron Warriors, she was surprised that any of them would dare to take on a Warpsmith and Lord Discordant alongside her.
But knowing that she was the main obstacle between them and her brother, she would take them on at the helm of her honour guard, the Fenghuan emerging from her war-nest with spread wings and melting into human shape to make herself a smaller target, wings assuming a rest position behind her back as she clutched her staff.
Her guards readied themselves, each a Fenghuan student of hers who had spent many centuries learning underneath her after she had achieved accreditation as a master of the mystic arts herself. Each had a name known to her. Quiet and contemplative Jiang Li, brash and excitable Peng Jing...
She would look into the horizon and will the wind of shadows to part and take away obscurity rather than add to it, letting her see in detail the monstrous threat approaching her, the skull-masked Iron Warrior barking commands at the rest of his kin, gurgling in his hateful tongue as he sized up the fortress before him as he had a thousand others before.
His stench in the empyrean was rancid, like the smell of something rotten following him wherever he went. His aura had the colour of bruise and faeces and his soul was like that of stagnant, corpse logged water; a rotten and filthy green. There was no saving such a man, no point in reasoning with him. To even hear him talk would invite disaster, so he would simply have to be killed.
"A waste of life..." She sighed, starting the chant and releasing the shards of inscribed paper into the air, balancing the elemental winds and the churn of her own avian soul into a brilliant orange.
Her army felt the power of beast and plant invigorate them, to make them fight with a power beyond their own to stop the horde. The desire and the ability to live suffused into her guard and her soldiers like the rays of the sun, and from her Y-visored helm, her eyes would open to look upon the foe, the wings on the sides of her helmet flaring out along with her own actual; armour plated wings as she leapt into the sky.
The Warpsmith's legions bowled through the Knight Lances put in front of him. They were good fighters, disciplined comrades and blooded on a hundred battlefields, Tchiez Fon'Du had Space Marine tank formations, dreadnoughts, daemon engines, and his own knights to hammer them to bits even when his air support was chased from the skies and his artillery was cut off by glowing theatre shields. Simple, brute power at the right location was often all that was needed. And to be fair, she couldn't fault Fon'Du for it, there were always levels of properly applied force no amount of skill or finesse could overcome.
"+We have markerlights on the Gue'La armoured formation. Awaiting your orders to engage.+" A call came in from one of the Pathfinder Shas'Os. From the datafeed she was getting, they probably were using a battlesuit of some kind.
"+Strike when ready, don't wait for my specifics, I would hope you know your own doctrine better than I do.+" She replied.
"+I am grateful for your confidence in my cadre's capabilities, but you are a master of Mind Sciences and these are the spawn of mental pollution. Give us your preferred targets to disrupt their momentum, then fight on the front we cannot. Such is the way of the Greater Good.+" Shas'O Kio'Res responded.
"+Strike the vehicles with the greatest density of symbols first, then the ones that are covering their aerial approaches. After that, follow what your training would tell you.+" She answered with less than a moment of thought given to it.
"+Acknowledged.+"
"+It would be advisable to steer clear of the regions she focuses her mind sciences on, Shas'O. The effects are likely to be spectacular.+" Kais cut in.
"+Affirmative, we will be providing you with cover fire, ensure your safety Shas'Shan'Uash'O'Va. We have other battles to wage.+" Kio'Res replied.
"+I would not indulge this madness in personal combat were I not certain of victory, but thank you for your confidence.+" He replied.
"+Keep them pinned for as long as you can, I want as few of them escaping this as I can manage.+" She said, slowly rising into the air as she spoke.
Even in a world as poisoned by war as this, there were roots and there was life. Perhaps no longer amidst the presently living, but the dead still had the components for life. She reached her hand into that dead life, the corpse of branches and roots trampled underneath this war. She sang to it, and let the jade wind blow while her psychic presence reached into its spirit-colours; faded and grey, but not yet fully dissolved into the soul-foam of the recently dead.
With a final component, she spoke a few words in a language that the eldest had once used to shape reality. Humans called it Ennuncia, the Aeldari called it Truespeech, she called it Dehua; simply the words.
Once the eldest; her kind; could write dissertations and epics in this language and carried out casual conversation in this primeval code. Now the sentence she was about to speak, which amounted to "Plants I see now with my mystic, live again and grow" was the hallmark of a master with a deep knowledge of how to conjugate her words to specify the right plants for best effect.
A human speaking this would have risked growing plants in their esophagus and died choking on roots and branches if their word choice wasn't exacting enough. She however, was built for it, and so all she felt was a warmth in her throat and upon her tongue.
All at once, the roots tore free from the ground, rich with fresh life and growing beyond what should have been possible. Swelling beyond what thermodynamics would allow and coruscating with powerful jade energies as thorns sharpened to invisible edges and leaves began to sprout in brilliant viridian.
Tanks were seized by vines as thick as buildings, lifted into the air while their leafy stems slipped into nook and cranny, growing carnivorous jaws at her will once inside to snap up the crew. The space marines and warriors more often than not fought off the intruders in short order, but the mortal men would be engulfed with little struggle.
Other vehicles were crushed like cans of soda, little droplets of blood squeezing out from the unfortunates on the inside. Dismounted soldiers firing away with flamers and shouting warnings would be sprayed by pitcher plants vomiting digestive fluids or engulfed by hungry petals that left nothing but bleached bone or shattered by barrages of fruit grenades that ruptured into sprays of molecule sharp razor-seeds.
"Xenos witch!" She could hear some of them shout as her acolytes added their own spellcraft, raising walls of angry, hostile life to isolate her quarry from his army. It would not last forever, not when Titans were turning their attentions to the flows of magic; forcing the titans of the Celestials to move to intercept.
"Oh so you've come to play then birdy? Perhaps I could make something...more brutal out of those overly elegant wings of yours?" Fon'Du laughed.
"There is nothing I need to say to an overgrown child like you. Save your breath." She responded as her staff made a quick circular motion while her hand pinched thrice, words of spellcasting uttered to give shape and voice to the ideas she formulated.
Kais shimmered into position, the plasma weapons on his heavy duty stealth suit, similar in principle to the armour he used in Kronus; but using a new XV-92 Phantom Suit to provide him with more bulk, protection and more importantly power for weapons.
He did not waste time with words, opening fire with twin plasma-cannon barrels into the insectile Helstalker that Fon'Du rode into battle, striking against scintillating shields while the Warpsmith turned his head with clear displeasure in his optics before a barrage of high-yield missiles exploded in a series of small fusion detonations all around him, arcing from Kais' launchers to catch him further off balance.
The obliterator fleshmetal in the Helstalker shifted, producing lascannons to bite back against kais while the Warpsmith's servoarms melted into heavy bolters to pump round after round at the flying Kexin; forcing her to dodge around the guided bolt rounds while Kais jumped to jink the Daemon Engine's aim.
"You really do take all the fun out of this, so serious, so dour, it's like an entire nation of my brothers and sisters, where's the art, the passi-oh shit" He started before his eyes widened a fraction beneath his helmet and the storm of crimson firebolts leaping towards him, dragon like jaws forming at their heads as they sought out their targets.
His shielding flickered to life, his head shaking while he got his bearings again before growling out about her rudeness as he kneed his metal steed. He was already in motion, scuttling away, moving to avoid the amber spears that impaled into the ground with violent force, his insectile warbeast letting rip with a hades cannon that chugged a storm of heavy shells into the air while she weaved through.
But the fourth party would not long stay out of the developing brawl, the forces of the army of the starless night also wished to partake in this, and had dispatched one of their bizarre champions. It was bizarre, its body twisting in ways that seemed to make it...clip like a clumsily animated three-dimensional model, bending through itself without regard for its own dimensions, particularly its overly plentiful limbs that just passed through each other in total defiance of the fact that its limbs didn't have the room to bend in such a way.
Its six wings were like some bizarre compromise between a pterosaur and a bat, as if a fan-like array pterosaur wings were joined together in each wing to form the fingers of a bat's appendage. Its three heads were like backwards cephalopods with horns instead of tentacles, and a "front" made out of a column of beak mandibles that rippled as it babbled nonsense, and in three clusters of three it had circles that were ghostly white glowing lights rather than eyes. The left head had hooked beak-mandibles, the middle had beak-mandibles that ended in axe like tips flaring outward, the right with dunkleosteus like guillotine scissor edges. Six arms each with fingers that split into subfingers emerged from its torso, while six legs like some primeval reptile's splayed in a way that should have broken ligaments. Three long tails trailed out behind it, each forming a mouth with beaks unsettlingly like those of a parrot to speak.
Its mottled greyed and purple body cut an odd figure, but it spoke a name. "Olzongcthorag", in a cant that seemed to manifest from nowhere but everywhere as it wielded great swords in two hands hand and a pair of king scepters in two others, two lower arms cannons the vague humanness of this gesture only adding to the disconcerting appearance of it all. Speaking again and again as trailing cilia from its head splayed in a frill as it sought to strike first, the twisting sword carving an arc through the air that sliced a Traitor Rogal Dorn tank in twain while it scuttled with menacing speed.
"Eyes open to the end, noses ready for the present, ears closed to the beginning, Olzoncthorag was not here, Olzoncthorag is here, Oloncthorag will not be here. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill." The voices rattled off in strange cant, the beast snapping its beak at the Warpsmith and reaching a spiralling fractal claw to deflect the Helstalker's warp-scythes in a scream of distorted noise while Kexin cast forth a burst of bio-electric smiting.
Olzoncthorag's guards were of somewhat less sanity defying form, like half of Olzoncthorag, though each had their own unique traits and characteristics to the careful observer, assuming one was willing to look for that long at walking cognitohazards that instilled the idea that one should drink of the strangers' bizarre pseudo-living matter and embrace the path of becoming one of the twisted.
"Get out of my battle you absurd winged pest!" Fon'Du snarled, his daemon enhanced omnissian axe swinging in a two handed sweep while a Vashtorrian hammer wielded by mechatendrites crashed on Olzoncthorag's head, spiralling barriers that removed avenues of space for the attack to pass through driving one blow to miss and another to sweep at emptiness.
Futile, at least until the daemon in the axe roared and imposed the idea of assault on the Xel-Cthagoran Bladeking's shields, a ripple forming across them while the helstalker's scorpion tail released inchoate warp power into the jittering mad-spawn before it, its head spitting forth hades cannon rounds at Kais' last known position.
"+Gun drones on target, engaging!+" Kais shouted over the comms, burst cannon, rail rifle, missile pod, ion blaster, and plasma gun fire erupting around the dueling pair from a swarm of cloaked and shielded drones that coordinated to form better evasive patterns.
Kais himself would let the drones part as some were swatted aside by heavy bolter rounds or bleaching blasts that left little but faded distortions. He took impacts on his shields, staggering slightly from feedback to squeeze off melta-bursts, invisible waves of heat forming incandescent brilliance that could vapourise building sized lumps of tungsten.
Fon'Du snarled, his mount reeling and Olzoncthorag pushed back, stumbling onto its tails as the heat formed a deadly bow wave before Kexin snapped her fingers and let an eruption of fire engulf the pair.
Fiery dragon shapes twisted out in other directions, engaging the guards of the duo to assist their own protectors trying to prevent interference in the battle from outside parties. But this brief dimming in her magics to spread them out was enough for Olzoncthorag to step between space and emerge in front of her, a house-sized mass of oddity whose sword wound into fractal patterns that sawed into her defences.
"We have seen, we are seeing, we shall see. Your opposition always fails, it shall always fail, it has always failed. We are, we were, we shall. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill" They spoke as one maw opened to reveal basilisk patterns that sought to burn Kexin's very brain out, the images and lights seeming to crawl out of their mouth while others released gouts of anti-energy to turn her defensive energy fields into enervating quasi-ice.
She was not an ordinary person, she could look into this memetic death and feel only a mounting pain as the spirit's body fought to live, her suit and eyes scrambling the vision to assist her own fortitude while her staff swung out, trying to parry the wriggling blows before Fon'Du could intervene as his mount started to form wings from obliterator fleshmetal.
The T'au commander's thrusters briefly caught in Kexin's vision before Kais' suited hoof booted the quasi-machine in its central head, plasma cutter blades firing up in one hand stabbing down into the colourful barriers.
A Fenghuan guard in bird form's talons clawed at its side, pushing it into the onager gauntlet of another one of Kais' invisible protectors, one heavy blow knocking it into a swing from Kexin to send it reeling back.
A Lord Discordant's hades cannon tore across her side, another's baleflamer washing admittedly harmlessly over her before Fon'du's daemon axe crunched into her barriers, a grunt of protest coming from her as she was brought down to the ground.
"Our business has not concluded, xenos skinwalker." Fon'Du chuckled.
"You're still alive, so yes, it hasn't. Let me correct that." Kexin replied as she let biomantic power course through her, eyeing the sorcerous talismans the Warpsmith wielded and the shifting of his fleshmetal into new tools.
She moved at a speed that to even a high speed camera rated for following stub gun bullets would come off as teleportation, appearing with the apparition of a bird of prey enveloping her outstretched fist to rock the Helstalker back, the second blow being an uppercut with the staff wreathed in flame as her muscles turned to living adamantium, striking the machine's jaw skywards and shooting towards him for an overhead blow to Fon'Du's helmet; crushing one of his shield layers in a bomb like impact.
She lacked Xinyi's finesse and skill, and on pure natural strength she was considerably less powerful, but Fon'Du lacked Nothgyth's own grace and skill in battle himself, relying more on sheer number of attack options and angles and calculated machine logic.
The mutilator afflicted servo-arms on his back glistened and shifted, chainfists swinging in a boxing manoeuvre to close off her avenues of escape.
She'd back off, autocannon rounds would smash into her to throw her back, each detonation erupting against her shielding while her wings flexed to shield her head, giving her just enough space for the helstalker to form boltcannons and rake at her with exploding munitions. The first were incendiary, but when he noted they had no effect, he switched over to cryogenic with a thought.
"Immune to heat...fascinating. But I have weapons for every occasion. For you see, my greatest work is in controlling and manipulating the obliterator virus. Technology is mine to command, and the tools of war are as my skin and meat." Fon'Du boasted, some of his guards moving to intercept her as she tried to approach.
Reaper chaincannons barked with a fusiliade of heavy autogun rounds, laser like lines of tracers pushing her towards hades autocannon fire for the much heavier rounds of these larger rotor guns to tear at her; her shielding dimming and splintering layer by layer until her guards wreathed her in a barrier of power.
Letting frost fall off her armoured feathers, she drew power from the nearby flames into her suit to restart its shielding, warily paying attention to the skeins of fate.
Olzoncthorag whipped into view, a fallen Fenghuan Guard hanging limb at the ends of a tail, body faded and broken like a mannequin as the abomination closed.
Busy bombarding Fon'Du with a series of penumbral pendulums that swept dark power through the chaos space marines to push him towards a telekinetic barrage to cause an actual wound to his mount, blowing off a leg from one slug; she was a touch too slow to avoid the Cthorag.
Its scepter struck first, crushing into her chest by warping around space to avoid her back and hit from an unexpected angle, armour plating denting and cracking from the impact before its sword stabbed through a portion of leg armour weakened by its bleach breath.
She let out a grunt, shock and training suppressing pain as the loss of feeling below the knee confirmed it was just about severed, hanging by a few scrips of skin and muscle.
Biomantic and Ghyranic power flowed into her, sealing the wound shut and repairing the bone of her humanoid raiment, Fon'Du's missiles intercepted by Kais' drone swarm and the Warpsmith himself struck in the chest by blue-white sunlike plasma blasts that burnt deep into his midsection.
Olzoncthorag's ice breath engulfed an arm, encasing it in ice as she let the fire-wind and crackling psycho-electricity engulf it.
"We have fought, we are fighting, and we shall fight. You were a spirit, you are a spirit, you shall be a corpse. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill" So what they babbled wasn't just complete nonsense...
De-telescoping her staff with a smirk, she activated a teleportation homer fitted into her armour to fill her outstretched weapon with an altogether different sort of weapon; a double-headed polehammer whose sharp ends were as hooked talons and whose flanged, crushing ends would convexly focus the power field and psychic energy channeled through them for brutal close quarters business; sharp, dagger like mini-blades topping each end of the Talisman and character decorated weapon that gleamed a brilliant orange as she let her power fill its being.
This was "Star Iron Wrath", her tool of choice when she needed to get much more violent than her staff generally entailed, the twin braided girl shifting her stance; orange black and purple armour starting to glow with greater force and power than before.
"Now, you want my attention for a fight yes? Good. And when whatever passes for a soul among your kind fades into whatever dismal underworld awaits you, tell your "unfathomable masters" that I will be waiting to send every last one of you back to them." She said as she gritted her teeth and pointed one of her hook blades at the three headed monstrosity which seemed to crane its heads in interest, unused to such brazen defiance from beings that could barely look at it for very long without their minds and bodies splintering and crumbling.
Letting herself be wreathed in a pyronic avatar that gave her an appearance more like a Phoenix than a Fenghuang, she spread her wings wider, feathers scorching lesser Xel-Cthagora mechanosymbionts away as magical and psychic fire engulfed them, bursting shields like bubbles and reducing unnatural materials to clouds of vapour.
"We have acknowledged, we are acknowledging, we shall acknowledge. You have challenged us, we challenge you, you shall die. Olzoncthorag has killed, is killing, and will kill" They declared before letting out a cognitohazardous roar that turned many who heard it into distortions, basilisk energy erupting from its mouths afterwards to sweep across the battlefield while she rushed towards them, flying like a comet.
Olzoncthorag took to the air, wings rippling with odd movements and mighty swords swinging in heavy, sweeping movements, trying to catch the more nimble fighter who let fire and flame spread from her pinions while she spoke her own words of death, drawing a roar of pain from a creature forced to try and fight off having death be written onto its being.
Elsewhere, Kais flickered in and out of Fon'Du's vision, dodging around his shots with practiced ease, one of his guards after the other falling while Kais never gave Fon'Du a consistent target.
"Come out Xeno scum, you cannot hide from me forever." He whispered through his helmet in a voice that seemed everywhere at once.
"Are you afraid to face a true astartes? Will you run away again, like when you failed Shio'Res in Kronus?" The Warpsmith taunted as he extended tendrils of obliterator fleshmetal to absorb the remains of his fallen acolytes, laughing as he and his steed swelled with the offerings of the fallen.
Machinery transformed at a moment's notice, forming a battery of volkite serpentas whose "CHOOM" noises presaged setting the entire battlefield on fire, joined by a cascade of flamer, melta, plasma, and laser bursts, some of the XV-25 and 85 teams that had hoped to aid Kais simply swept from existence for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
"I have been gathering data, Mont'Gue'Auk'Sha. You rely on diversity and volume of weapons rather than true expertise, unlike many of your kin." Kais said simply through one of the stealthed drones, opening up with charged cyclic ion cannon blasts to try and catch his foe off guard while their mutilator limbs formed heavy shields to intercept.
"Do not misunderstand my lack of care to put any effort for a lack of ability alien. To exercise a mind such as myself, one who had fought under my genefather from the Crusade to the Present, in earnest fighting a dog like you? What could be more shameful."
"A most curious idea of what constitutes honour. Tell me, do you honour Perturabo with your charred corpse?"
"A mere xenos such as you dares to speak his name without reverence? Oh the things I am going to do with your tongue when I get my hands on you long enough to squeeze the life out of you, Kais."
"Interesting proposition! Unfortunately I must decline. You lack the skill needed for such a feat, so I leave this to the realm of your fantasies, Fon'Du." Kais' words were infuriating. Who did this alien think he was, mocking a veteran of the long war?
Fon'Du's next barrages were far more accurate this time, triangulating the likely position of his foe and releasing a cascade of uncharged plasma bolts, one after the other to flush Kais out of his hiding spots. Each erupting in a wash of ectoplasmic green that created angry heat distortions while the ground bubbled away in bursts of nova heat.
Kais had already jetted into position with the heavy railrifles mounted on his shoulders locking into position, burst cannons from slaved drones peppering his foe as long as they could manage before his rapid fire weapons swept them aside.
With the click of a confirmed lock-on, a small hum preceded the whipcrack of the world, burning streaks of projectiles flying into Fon'Du's steed with with mushroom detonations of pure kinetic force; haywire grenades launched by drones having managed to weaken the target's defences somewhat.
A flatline indicated that one of Kais' honour guards had fallen, their XV-92 armour falling lifeless as a Lord Discordant's helstalker tore a corrupt scrap code ladened tail from their corpse before his servo-arm started to wash Kais' likely position in fusion fire from their servo-torch.
Kais jumped into the air, thrusters thrumming silently as he released pulse grenades and another volley of missiles, a leg from the discordant's helstalker coming off before he landed heavily on the other end of Fon'du; ion and plasma weapons firing away into Fon'Du's back before he could bring his axe around to block.
"Vashtorr's blood you are quite the pest little alien." Fon'Du snarled, fleshmetal flowing back into place right before Kais got close enough for his chest mounted fusion blaster to erupt with a wave of incandescent heat great enough to cause the air to erupt in a plume of nuclear wrath.
That should have been enough to finish Fon'Du, but the Warpsmith looked at the hole where his chest was and simply let out a snarling roar to Kais' shock. With a wound like that he shouldn't have been able to vocalise.
"You are going to have to try a lot harder than that." He snarled as his tendrils shifted to form sensors, figuring out the measure of much of Kais' stealth systems while ropes of bloody quicksilver started to knit his ruin of a chest back together.
Kais projected his plasma bayonets from his cannon, bringing them into a crossing block to use their magnetic fields to provide extra resistance against the calculated cut towards his chest made by his Daemon axe, the power field and daemonic malice within the axe screaming against his energy blades.
Magnetic containment fields and plasma streams splintered and gave way to the crackling axe with a moment more of pressure, Fon'Du letting the lashes of his mount's power scourges explode outwards to stab into Kais' shielding to drain at their strength and find weakness.
"Getting close to a Space Marine when you don't even have the proper equipment? Foolish, stupid, naive. What do you hope to accomplish?" Fon'Du taunted, Kais reigniting his plasma blades to buy time with heavy handed parries and the sacrifice of one shield drone after the other. But the Omnissian axe was something of far greater quality than simple energy blades and his "lightsabres" were getting cut down as fast as he could summon them. He could maintain the parry longer...but only at the expense of his shields.
"Your reflexes are slow, even with your computerised assistance. Your technique is mechanical, textbook, but I have written textbooks on this particular science myself. Your weapons sloppy, inferior." Kais managed to get free of the scourges, missiles filled with haywire warheads disrupting Fon'Du's shield regeneration and fusion warheads biting into its hull plating, plasma blasts erupting only to be deflected by servo-arm blades and that damnable axe.
Fon'Du's steed moved as fast as a nightmare, a feint being followed through with a reversal of the axe and a solid blow into the chest compartment of Kais' armour once the baleflamer had worn down his own shielding. The armour held, but Fon'du pushed harder and the daemon blade forced its way through, gnawing for Kais' soul.
"Now that I have deigned to take you seriously, I am going to end this, quickly. You cannot win against me, and you will die here Kais. Then I can get back to more interesting subjects than some slit-nosed blueskinned cow." He said while Kais' drones shadowed his movements, waiting for the signal to open fire.
"You are correct, your skill in this field of combat surpasses mine by far. But drawing you into it is distraction enough for your senses for my purposes." Kais replied with a smile within his cockpit before the rail rifles, ion-chargers, fusion blasters, and plasma guns of his drone swarm opened fire; striking Fon'du from all angles.
Blue and white light struck him from all sides while Kais backed away, avoiding a stumbling kill-saw swing from one of Fon'Du's mutilator servo-arms and turning all power he could manage into firepower.
Pulse grenades, high impact missiles, fusion projectors, plasma cannons, heavy rail-rifles, ion blasters; everything he could throw.
It would have to be focused on the Warpsmith himself, to try and end the monster quickly. He saw its tail trying to lash out at him to fill his suit with corrupted data and did not flinch.
He trusted in his cadres and held position, rewarded for his trust by Ghostkeel team fusion colliders to reduce the tail to slag now that they had broken through the site of the battle, letting Kais finish off the Helstalker once Fon'Du was reduced to an incoherent cloud of high-temperature plasma.
"+Inform the Earth caste drones that I will need to repair my armour.+" Kais said, flatly and humourlessly, which in a way was funnier to the other people on the line than if he had tried to make some sort of quip.
All the while, Kexin was twisting around her foe, often stopping her momentum abruptly to crunch all that velocity into herself and then explosively redirect herself with a gust of empyreal energy to give a series of windmilling strikes, pounding away at the reality distortion shielding of Olzhoncthorag.
Once, twice, thrice, flying past her foe before smashing her hammer bottom blade first into the ground. Whereas Haoyu was someone who was more demure and placid; she honestly enjoyed fighting. The exhiliration, the excitement, the contest of strength and skill. She understood why the Shouren; the Orks; loved this so much.
She had bled from a dozen rents in her armour from every penetration Olzhoncthorag had made, but she wasn't discouraged; her regeneration being followed by self-repair systems in her armour to seal holes where it could. Pain was something she was good at pushing aside, and more of it from her foe wouldn't discourage her.
She swung a leg up and then shifted the whole of her body in a wide swing, not exactly a graceful or skillful manoeuvre; just an expression of raw, bestial power coursing through her body like mad as the warp and the winds of magic pumped into her, her words of ennuncia to proclaim her strength shifting the hammer with meteoric violence. Energy discharged through broken shields, smashing a crater into the thing's left head hard enough to obliterate it down to the neck stump.
Then the wind of shadows tore open the pit of shades over the creature; the black, yawning hole in existence trying to drag in her opponent with devastating tidal forces and grabbing tendrils of darkness and obscurity. Ulgu hungered, and this monster would feed it as well as anything. But her foe would step between the spaces one again.
It would not be able to flee the field of battle with the scrambler fields operational, not without risking disruption to itself in the wave of harmonic interference. But it would preserve itself to glare back at her, knots and ropes of bizarre tissue splitting open from the neck wound before it grabbed at an injured arm with one of its sword hands.
With a roar, the middle head cannibalized the others, swallowing the right head down to the stump and biting down while its right sword hand tore its left out of its socket by the shoulder, letting it solidify into a scythe-like shape, three fingers bending and breaking backwards to form handles for the new scythe.
The middle head finishing its grisly feast, vomited out its own end, splitting its head into a tri-petal flower like formation recalling the features of each of its three prior faces while it impaled the scythe arm with the other sword to produce a longer and more rigid weapon, held by a hand whose scepter had been knocked away by its foe, the other scepter melting back into itself and forming a thrid hand to grab at the new scythe with.
Taking on a lighter hue, the white lights it had instead of eyes glowing a strange orchid hue while its legs shuffled and bent, stapling into each other to allow it to drop down like some sort of feralised humanoid before bouncing into the air and bounding back down with a colossal impact.
She hadn't slipped away entirely, her helm reading her a loadout of nonsense as the corrupted reality at the end of the scythe had gouged deep into its visor and respirator; forcing her to dispose of it, discarding at first just the faceplate and then the rest when the auditory feedback proved to be too much of a nuisance.
A young woman's face stared out, orange eyes adjusting their aquiline pupils while her twin braided hair, connected to a pair of triangular hair scoops slightly suggestive of ears started to float and glow; purple at the base; orange at the tips. Tassels framing her face started to wreathe like fire, and her expression shifted to one of anticipation. She looked almost too young, too soft faced for a battle like this. But the look in her eyes betrayed a relish one would never find in a fresh out of recruitment academy graduate.
"Take care of that for me." She said to one of her guards, rushing into the wounded beast, spinning her dual-hammer like a propellor to deflect an incoming untime blast that would have sought to strip away years off of whatever it impacted until there was nothing left. Letting her magic handle the reflecting of the anti-aging energies, she shuffled the power she could extract into the ends of the hammer, freeing up her psychic might for a rhapsody in fire.
Dancing pillars of fire tore at the thing's feet as it shuffled away like a loping beast, spinning into dragon-shaped swirls that formed tornadoes to hound it, forcing it into avenues she deemed allowable before her biomancy kicked in. Pushing her forward with a field of warped time and acceleration she stabbed into the thing with the dagger blades, impaled into a blue not-eye with a hook and crushed into a wing as she flew above with the hammer head. Her flame form mirrored her movements, blessed flame curling into her opponent with each movement while it roared and shriekd in a more avian way than the woman herself did.
Her opponent spun around, cannon arms firing away at her with bursts of pure deathfrost, forcing her fiery avatar to shift to a falconid form to get more coverage with its wings, bringing them forward to be devoured and crumbled by anti-energy.
Ghur's hunting spears rained from an outstretched hand, impaling into weakness where the predatory wind smelled it, little invertebrates released from a pouch infused by the wind to become a deadly flock of doom shortly after; engulfing her foe in a tornado of hellish beast-birds whose feathers were as razors and beaks were like blades.
Olzoncthorag spun, dicing through the swarm, a few repeat blows that twisted into the same place impaling one of her wings at the shoulder, a second stabbing into her chest and only avoiding fatality because as a spirit her body was merely a raiment.
It didn't stop it from hurting, or spitting out fiery blood, but she would endure. She was good at enduring, it was why she was the one holding the line rather than her softer brother.
She moved with a swift, breathless brutality, her counterblow striking the thing's scythe to turn it aside and Ghyran flowing into her with renewed strength. Flesh hardened and strengthened, muscles twitched and accelerated, already absurd regeneration growing faster. Cuts dealt sealed up no matter how ragged or bloody, and when some of the armour had too many damaged components for its self repair to keep up, she simply discarded it to let it be fixed elsewhere.
Gauntlets hit the ground, her armoured skirt was cast aside, leg armour discarded to bring out her avian form's talons when it was starting to slow her down, half her face had to regenerate from scratch after being engulfed by anti-energy, but she didn't quit. Her fire raged brighter, she healed quicker, and she was faster. The creature had many shattered legs, it fell from the sky with the breaking of its other wing, and she fell upon it like a meteor, taloned feet squeezing into its neck.
Her armour was not the sort of relic that the Zhu twins' were; it was a masterwork, but ultimately it was eminently replaceable. Still, it was in a rather sorry sight, cast in a brilliant light by the flames she funneled through her enemy before withdrawing the hammer and the absence of many pieces of it meant she had to rely more on innate power to make up for the lack of powered servo-muscles.
But she was winning this fight, every blow driving more and more strength from her foe while it frantically fought back, its shrieking having long since dispensed with its bizarre ramblings. When it staggered, she saw her chance, using her telekinetics to bring her staff around to delay its scythe swing long enough to start windmilling her weapon into its head.
Blow after blow, not stopping, not resting until she finally bludgeoned it off her opponent and grabbed at her staff with her raptor's claws on her feet and slammed its head into her opponent's stump, letting incendiary heat flow through into her enemy until she had thoroughly vapourised it. She enjoyed the fight, but she wanted to be thoroughly sure of the thing's death. As much as these things died anyway.
Breathing hard as she stepped back, she looked to one of her mechanical adjutant offering her replacement parts from her stock of spares and nodded in appreciation as Haoyu's ritual split into the heavens and skies, radiating outwards across the astronomical leylines and making many things of chaos and madness peel back. The calming harmony in the warp grew louder, stronger, and she could briefly close her eyes and focus on fitting the spares without distraction.
She had only her helmet left to re-equip when Kais appeared before her, offering a barely perceptible nod through the sensor-cluster of his battlesuit while Haoyu apparated in a flash of teleportation before her, seeing that this helm had somewhat different markings than normal.
"Disregarding the grief you're going to give the forgemasters...it is done...and not too soon, the Jianyi have orders coming in. We are to clear up here, and then we will be needed to deal with another thrust by our strange foes and movements by the forces of Chaos." He said, concern briefly apparent on his lips before he decided to just be relieved for his sister and sharing a brief moment of embracing one another's wings.
"You are welcome, Haoyu." She said, slightly teasingly for his forgetting of something important, quirking a brow at him.
"...Thank you Kexin...your valour was...greatly appreciated." He said with a humble nod while she exhaled, satisfied now.
[1]T'au ranks can be a bit odd but this literally translates to "Supreme Greater High Commander of Fire Caste Forces in area" which is roughly the equivalent to the Imperial Rank of Lord Grand Marshal. Kais is, with the other disciples of Puretide; considered one of the very best and most decorated commanders of the Spheres, and is also a highly accomplished personal combatant, one of the very best the T'au have ever produced. And it's not just because he has an incredibly fancy custom mark of XV-22 stealth armour with enough firepower to outshoot a small country with enough durability to canonically survive orbital bombardment.
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