[center][h1][u][b]Ursh: The Charge[/b][/u][/h1][/center] [hr] Radiation had long stripped the tundral wasteland to the South East of the city of any lingering life, a long past disaster leeching any vitality remaining in the scorched rock. Even generations of twisted technobarbarian warlords had not bothered to attempt further building or settlement of the territory, a few haunted ruins all that spoke of a long dead metropolis. The Emperor’s forces were better equipped against such lingering death, however. The power of technology providing defence against a problem of its own making. The grand firepower of the Emperor's armoured legions, vehicle and astartes both, could at least linger in the shadow of the clicking death, and so they rolled forth in number, preparing to bring the heaviest guns of the Imperium to bare on the citadel from a direction it would have been weakest. Ursh did not care for the survival of its people, but mortal men would die before they could even be of use to their final purpose. So, as the Emperor's vehicles ground on, they found the earth beneath them bursting with activity. Forms made of flesh and metal, towering above even the largest of the Emperor's armour erupting from the rock, intent on carving open the metal shells before them, unaware that to breathe the air around them would mean a slow death to even their twisted forms. Would such things even care if they had the mind to know? The armoured vanguard that raced to meet them had resolved to render any such question hollow, bearing a far swifter demise. A fleet of light vehicles, rapid and temperamental like wild steeds, had fanned out across the plain ahead of the heavier bulk behind. Rhinos and their manifold cousins from all across the hemisphere, a few wolflike Predators, even armoured and converted rigs of dubious origin made up this scything blade, their drab colours and wreaths of savage trophies marking them as the war-convoy of the Reviled. To cross forbidding wastelands and strike at the enemy’s weakest point was their way, as it had been that of their ancestors, and they would not be halted by either the rad-fields or their monstrous guardians. Beneath the strung bodies and studded chains, the vehicles had been readied for their greatest battle yet. Their guns were primed and charged. Improvised weapons had been affixed to their prows, giant spikes, boring lances and threshing blades to aid in the slaying of the foe. Most striking however were the shapes that crouched on top of the armoured hulls, uncaring of the radioactive phages that soaked the air. These were Astartes of the Ninth in the final throes of their curse; those afflicted by swollen flesh, plagued by piercing bone or the many consumed by decay until they were almost more machines than men. Their faces were daubed in ash, running with blood as the exposed skin blistered and cracked in the foul air. They knew this would be their final charge, for they had vowed to die for Unity that day rather than slowly rot away. Engines clashed with mutated muscle, and battle was joined. The guns of the Reviled spat steel and flame, prow-blades impaling monstrous gargantuans even as they flipped transports to the side and cracked open their hulls. Those Astartes within who were not crushed outright spilled out to join their ash-painted brothers, bones broken and skin torn, but their warlike spirits undimmed. From the top of their vehicles, the overgrown bloat-giants fired weapons as heavy as the Rhinos’ own, autocannons and beam carronades bellowing in concert. The plagued and the crippled vaulted onto the colossal bodies of Mosvoroth’s beasts, clambering over them like murderous beetles as their blades sought openings for a mortal strike. They cut, they fell and they died, harsh warcries on their corroded lips. The beasts of Mosvoroth, their minds of singular searing purpose, seemed to revel in the bloodshed. Bloated warmachines, taller than a Rhino and consisting of crab-like appendages and ballooned, fleshy bodies, hulked weapons meant only to be fired until their short ammunition supplies were drained. They let loose great barking reports from cannons fused to the centers of their bulbous bodies, rending armored vehicles to smoldering hulks with every muzzle flash. Smaller, more agile monstrosities skulked in their shadows. While their larger allies wrought death en masse, these creatures leaped and bound with a berserker's grace. They wielded wicked swords of barbs, twice their own height, and employed them with brutal efficiency. The monsters left from the shadows of the artillery walkers, descending upon passing transports of the Ninth in pairs and threes. Rending swipes of their swords took the Reviled closest to them from atop the Imperial machines, and the beasts, skin as red as hot embers, bellowed in excitement as the Astartes of the Ninth turned to face them. Each vehicle had soon become a tassel in the restless mosaic of battle. Red and brass was everywhere, washing over grey and drab green. The Astartes who clashed with the screaming assailants had found an enemy to their measure, one whose way of fighting unsettlingly mirrored theirs and whose ferocity was no lesser than their own. Fighting in small squads was for the Reviled as much of a necessity now as a well-accustomed tactic, and the narrow space of the transport roofs constrained them while the fiendish creatures bounded about with superhuman agility. Every struggle among dozens swiftly became its own contest of skill and strength. Space marine chainswords interlocked to block the slashes of incandescent blades before unfolding like roaring petals of predatory plants, the pointmen of each squad hacking at the snarling faces while their brothers kept their sides covered. It was a cruel game of attrition, a stricture the Ninth Legion was loath to be forced into. Yet for now the bestial warriors struggled to pierce the nigh-instinctual coordination of each band’s sworn brothers, and a concerted dance of strikes and parries tipped the balance time and again between the evenly matched numbers of each clash. A struggle no less dire was being fought under their feet by the Legion fleet’s drivers. Harried by the crimson skirmishers and now pummeled by the fire of the crablike monsters, they were at the same time given very little space to manoeuver. The vanguard of the Imperial armoured advance depended on them. The Charge could not afford to lose momentum, or, bogged down in a chaotic battle, its ponderous engines would be easily picked apart by the enemy. The Legion vox network, until that point tensely silent, came alive with rapid, clipped coordination chatter. In the heat of the moment, communicators barked into their sets louder and louder to overwhelm the strange and grating interference that mounted the closer they came to the walls of Mosvoroth. [i]“Zathrin cohort command to third, fourth, shift to unakna!” “Turning by fifty, clear the path!” “Voithir, firing on tungal center-two!” “Ruptured, advancing till graachal! Glory!” “Sikigal cohort, clear fire path!”[/i] Embattled as they were, the Astartes pilots worked wonders with their scarred machines. Here two Rhinos swerved abruptly from their formation, crushing a pack of snarling assailants under their treads, and at the same moment a salvo from their fellows tore through the air where they had been and blasted a segmented leg from under one of the crawling monstrosities in a shower of bilious fluid. Here another, its ramming spikes still stuck in the fallen carcass of a colossus from the first wave, was joined by four more, who together pushed the great corpse forth like a macabre bludgeon that swept foes from its path and slammed a crab-beast to the ground. There a command Predator burst through the burning ruins of a Rhino, smearing the remains of fallen brothers over the irradiated earth in its unmerciful advance, and wreathed in smoke it struck a crawler from its blind side, felling it with a ferocious burst of autocannon fire. Yet for all their formidable efforts, they were losing more than blood and men - more grievously yet, they were losing speed. Even the smoothest turn into a firing position shaved precious instants from the counter, and that was the purpose and victory of Kalagann’s defenses. Delay was impardonable. The Reviled could welcome death, but they would not accept failure. [i]“Legion command to breacher force!”[/i] Legion-Master Skorr’s voice called out over vox-waves issuing from the Ninth’s command vehicle. It was a trophy from the whisper-shrouded Mallaund Sen campaign, a relic machine of strange and unique form: alike in size to a Mastodon, but vertically towering and bristling with turrets where it lacked a landing ramp. Festooned with chained and impaled bodies of felled foes, it was an inviting target for the crimson-skinned marauders, but none had thus far breached past its autoguns and the defensive circle of lesser transports that surrounded it. [i]“Forward elements, match our fire!”[/i] the Master spoke with a hurried yet precise hardness that brooked no disobedience. Wary though many in the Exercitus Imperialis may have been of the aptly-surnamed Reviled and their uncomely features, a far more hideous enemy lay ahead now, and in the field the authority of Astartes was not to be contested. [i]“Strike at Legion-marked targets as given!”[/i] [i]“Understood, Legion command. Executing.”[/i] The reply had come with some slight delay, no doubt to organise the input of multiple channels into a singular communication, yet faster than such an operation ought normally to have been possible. The reason became evident when elongated plumes of radioactive dust from the southeast heralded the approach of an armoured division that was detaching itself from the rumbling Imperial column and nearing the crux of the combat. The cold teal markings on their battle tanks and their unit heraldry, a circle asymmetrically ringed by four lesser ones, marked them as Timaini Cragrunners, dwellers of the cratered lands far east of Arkhangelsk. Word had it that they had often traded with the Terrawatt Clans, and that machinery dug deeply into their bodies as well as their traditions. Their cybernetic coordination, however, had left them no less eager to visit their homeland’s vengeance against Ursh. The forward tanks began to fire long before optical contact. As imposing as the monstrous crab-beasts were, the Timaini’s cannons could not possibly strike them past the chaos of battle unless their gunners minutely tracked the Reviled’s signals by the instant. But once again augmented bodies and unity of purpose worked miracles. The first Cragrunner salvo gouged the earth close to their targets; the second, guided by cybernetic eyes and wire-strung brains, cut down two of the crawling brutes, shreds of muscle and warpborn armour rattling like shrapnel from the nearest Legion transports. Again and again came the directed fire, more intense by the volley. Rhinos and Predators swerved and scattered ahead of it, Astartes and hell-warriors both clinging grimly to their shells even as they indefatigably traded blows. The rad-field had become a chaos of fire, wreckage and mangled bodies, but the charge was not about to be stopped. The sudden arrival of the Cragrunners began to tip the scales back into Imperial favor. Artillery beasts, battered and bleeding, lost legs to the incoming fire and toppled over with ponderous speed. Other beasts burst into viscera and flames as the Cragrunner’s shells found ammunition stores and esoteric energy reactors buried within the masses of flesh and metal that strode the battlefield as gods mere moments before. The Cragrunners ran up their tally with machine precision. The reinforcing mortals were solidly engaged with the line of hell-beasts, trading fire and lives even as their most forward vehicles were still several kilometers out from joining the XI Legion’s advance. Then, new nightmares arrived. Auspex warnings screamed inside the Cragrunners’ vehicles. Two new contacts closing fast, ghosting in and out of detection, were advancing from behind. Tank commanders, torn between trading fire with the beasts ahead and facing an unknown advance from behind, divided their attention. The inhuman speed of coordination between the mortals saw the reaction measured out in heartbeats rather than confused minutes. A platoon of tanks split from the main advance, five tanks, their cannons still smoking and targeting auspexes growling in anticipation turned to face the new threats. Five tanks versus two new vehicle contacts. The Cragrunners, cold logic, and experience their guide, had by all accounts overcommitted to the new auspex blips. The lead tank fired, the shot seemingly random through the dust and smoke of the armored battle raging around them. The shell screamed into the dark, disappearing long before the telltale flash of a detonation heralded the end of its brief flight to a target the tanks could not see. Auspex, unreliable against the backdrop of burning vehicles and the titan claps of battlecannons, screamed a warning to the platoon. ++PROXIMITY ALARM++ The contacts emerged from the smoke as nightmares given steel flesh and unholy purpose. Pistons slammed home as four legs carried each beast too fast and too far for their size. Furnace heat vented from maws of steel teeth and between red-hot ribs. Balefire, cold and white, thrashed against steel as if attempting to escape. The first tank was batted aside without a thought. Tracks screamed as the fifty-five tons of armor and steel slid at speed across the radwastes. A tread bit deep, and the tank levered over, ejecting its turret and pulping the crew as it slammed into the mud. The rest of the platoon fired. The beast took three rounds to the chest, not so much as losing an ounce of momentum as it charged with a gleeful machine smile toward the next nearest tank. Auspex warbled and failed to lock as the first beast closed. The second beast leapt into the air, landing atop a tank with ease as it sank its bladed claws through armor meant to stop tank shells. To observers, it appeared to flex its hands, almost testing the strength of the steel it clung to before it ripped the tank in half as a rusted can opener might similarly open a canned ration. The Cragrunners began to take the threat seriously. More tanks peeled off the main thrust to assist the IX Legion. Targeting solutions returned null errors, auspex wailed in horror as instruments tried and failed to lock and track the pair of beasts, and gunners vomited in their rebreathers as they attempted to sight the nightmares manually. An iridescent beam of energy lanced out from the reinforcing tanks, a single Destroyer Tank Hunter finding its mark as it came to a stop and let the true tanks continue headlong against the pair of mechanical horrors. Armor dripped away in molten slag, and the nightmare screamed not in pain, but in anger. The second nightmare shifted its focus from the tank in its grasp, the turret whining in steel pain as it attempted to traverse against the creature's grip, and simply crushed the tank between two clawed arms before taking off at a sprint to end the Destroyer. The new counterattack began to meet the same fate as the original five tanks to advance on the pair of nightmare engines as clawed limbs and balefire dissected Imperial armor and laughed at incoming fire. Waves of unnatural disorder spilled from the bodily carnage into the ether. The fevered vox-chatter of the Imperial fleet suffered no less from the metal monsters’ mere presence than its hulls did at their hands. Unearthly wails and shrieks of white noise cut through the chatter in operators’ ears, deafening and wounding as surely as blades. Invisible tendrils of chaos slithered through the communication networks, threatening to spill into the backlines. More than one vehicle screeched to a halt or spun wildly off-course before even reaching in sight of the beast, and the Cragrunners, bound as they were to their machinery, suffered all the more grievously. Yet the Astartes were made of sterner stuff. Severed from one another by the failing comms, their crews fell almost by reflex into the order of scattered battle, where every unit was its own force. Three of the Rhinos closest to where one of the metallic terrors had broken past the vanguard swivelled about in roaring turns, brushing hairs past each other as their pilots forcefully drove their stocky machines into feats of agility. Their topside complements had been decimated in the skirmishing against the daemonic boarders, only a few legionnaires hunkering stubbornly on the bloodstained decks. Badly wounded and doomed to a swiftly approaching end by rad-exposure, they did not flinch as the transports under them swerved and careened into a broad semicircle, nor when they were brought to face with the blasphemous hulk itself. Beneath the hulls, drivers and gunners ground their teeth, biting into their cheeks and tongues as their eyes began to dim and throb from the baleful power of the monster’s very sight. Pain. Blood. Real as the ground under a warrior’s feet. Too real, perhaps, in this cauldron of madness - hands clenched violently around their levers, eyes grew wide and bloodshot, the already misshapen features of the Reviled appeared to change with dreamlike ease, growing longer, feral, less human. But they were set on their courses. The Rhinos’ fire thundered against the monster’s metallic hide. It looked up from its latest prey with an eerily lifelike movement, almost visibly amused by the harmless rattle of heavy shells. In a sickeningly fluid lunge, it swung an arm out to strike one of the transports, gargantuan talons tearing into it too fast to evade. No sooner had the vehicle crumpled under its force, however, than the other two abruptly accelerated, the full vigour of their engines withheld until the last dearly bought moment. Their prows slammed into the beast’s forelegs, folding under their own momentum. The survivors topside, seized by some bloodthirsty madness, threw the weight of their bodies into the tangle of metal and leaking fuel. As the monster struggled to free its limbs from the ruinous mass, one of them braced his flamer and wildly sprayed forth. The conflagration shook the ground and hurled up clouds of tainted ash atop a pillar of flame. The beast’s grotesque frame listed forward as its front pair of legs were blasted from under it. It swiftly drew itself up on its arms, ape-like, venting balefire from its jaws in a strange imitation of animal fury. Its head snapped from side to side, as if seeking upon what best to vent its rage, but what caught its eye first was not prey. As the destructive crash unfolded, the ponderous Legion command tank had been slowly rotating its turrets, angling them so as to expose the fewest possible of its crew to its target’s corrosive presence. Now was its moment, and as the monster stood mired in the wreckage of the Rhinos, the superheavy unleashed at once a salvo of its ordnance. Cannon shells and heavy missiles arced through the poisonous air and struck the metallic amalgam like the Emperor’s own fist. Sickly fire and shrapnel burst from among the black smoke as the crippled monstrosity was pummeled into scrap, the otherworldly force animating it bleeding out from its fractured shell. Yet the barrage had marked the Reviled’s relic vehicle as a threat. The Cragrunners’ reinforcing waves had only briefly distracted the second beast, and now its snarl turned to the large and inviting target. In a few ground-quaking bounds, it was among the command tank’s encircling force, flipping a Rhino on its side as a gutted carcass with a single swipe. The other armed transports froze or gave disorderly jolts, their drivers momentarily stunned by the psychically disruptive enemy suddenly in their midst, as the superheavy began to sluggishly crawl backwards. This hesitation only lasted seconds, however, as almost at once the Astartes operators found the presence of mind for a simple command. The landing hatches of a score of Rhinos rattled open, like so many mouths recklessly gasping for irradiated air, and out rushed the warriors of the Ninth. They were more remote from death than their hull-riding brothers had been, not bound by oath to precipitate their end on the contaminated field, but each of them was just as ready to meet it, eager to perish in glory rather than be gnawed to nothing by their flaw. Their cries rose above the roar of engines, and for a moment even the turbid pall over the vox seemed to part before their voices. [i]“Raptor Imperialis!”[/i] [i]“Graachal!”[/i] [i]“The Oath of Death!”[/i] [i]“Qasechik!”[/i] [i]“Reviled by flesh!”[/i] [i]“Death walks with us!”[/i] [i]“Unity!”[/i] Even the abominable construct appeared, for the merest of moments, incredulous before this madly single-minded charge. It swatted away contemptuously at these minuscule rushing figures, crushing them like insects, but more of them came from every side. They climbed its jagged shell, heedless of the disorienting throbs of bile in their throats, of the infernal incandescence heating their own armour to the point it burned the skin beneath, of their struggling organs failing one by one. One after another clung to spurs and edges of metal and set alight the grenades in their hands, the suicidal blasts cascading along the bandoliers strapped around their chests. Each detonation was less than the sting of a gnat to the colossus, but beast-like it snapped and struck fruitlessly at the tiny pests that dared to needle it. In these moments of bloody diversion, the Legion’s drivers had regained their bearings, and their guns now stood aligned at the same target. The command vehicle vomited fire once more, and this time it was joined by the chorus of its escort. The last of the rushing Astartes were caught in the roaring blasts along with their foe, blood and scrap and pale flames crushed into a hellish display of inorganic mutilation. When the cannons and missile pods quieted at last, the monster’s unnatural fire was extinguished, its remains a mountain of blades thrust skyward. Behind, the rumbling of the Imperial armoured force approached, its fury soon to rain upon Kalagann’s walls.