IL VII - The Berserkers of Uran (thread 1)

[bluntblade]

I imagine it'd be one and the same to them. But either way, their devotion to Raktra would be without compare.

 

Fluff draft:

 

+++++

 

While most of the primarchs fight accompanied by a retinue of Terminators, Raktra's sheer speed on the battlefield necessitated a much faster group of bodyguards. Indeed this was something the White Devil himself had realised long before being found by the Emperor.

 

On Uran, he had recruited prisoners condemned to execution or conversion into a servitor, forming them into a shock-attack force of terrifying speed and aggression for his battles against the “angels” and the civilian rulers of Uran. Over time, he came to appreciate their devotion towards their saviour even as he began to understand that he was not invincible, and refashioned them into a unit which could guard his flanks in battle.

 

As a private joke, he named them the Milewalkers. They had once been fated to walk a mile-long corridor to their execution or conversion. Now, he noted with bleak humour, they walked a bloody path to their eventual doom, just as every Berserker would die to pay his “debt” to the White Devil. However, the Milewalkers seemed not to care or even heed the irony.

 

To allow them to keep up with him, he outfitted them with jet-thrusters akin to his own. For weapons, each carried a pair of shivs which became known as Hell's Teeth. These armaments exist in a more refined form in the modern Milewalkers, along with the best power armour given to the VIIth Legion. Individual Milewalkers round out their arsenal with bolt-pistols and larger melee weapons.

 

The leader of the Milewalkers is the infamous Dominator Dorran Kldier, who has served Raktra since his days on Uran and earned a macabre reputation of his own as the "Black Hood". Under his command, they are reckoned among the most deadly assault marines in the Legiones Astartes.

[bluntblade]

An exemplary battle. I'll crack on with a second shortly:

 

The Vilja Cleansing

 

When an expeditionary fleet of the Steel Legion discovered a Hrud infestation in the Vilja Strait, they concluded that nothing less than extermination was in order and petitioned the Berserkers of Uran for aid. Once their request was acknowledged they garrisoned nearby Imperial worlds, knowing that the VIIth Legion had no inclination to set up defences of their own. For two months they led the Imperial response, containing the xenos, but at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Imperial lives as Army troopers aged to death in the presence of the Hrud. Then the Berserkers arrived, some 40,000 Astartes led by their Primarch.

 

Raktra Akarro elected for a strategy which was simple and brutal, but highly effective. First, he deployed penal regiments to several densely populated Hrud worlds, which the Imperium would want to conquer relatively intact. Set down with little in the way of artillery or vehicular support, the mortal troops were used to draw the xenos out into the open, where a combination of orbital bombardment and drop-strikes by the Berserkers devastated their ramshackle armies.

 

The White Devil was well aware of the danger the entropic fields of the Hrud posed, and was pursuing a strategy that would incur minimal losses to his Legion. Apart from potential casualties, temporal distortion threatened to cause severe losses to the Legion's wargear, to say nothing of gene-seed rotted and dessicated past usefulness. Mortal losses he would accept without a second thought, but he guarded his Legion's power jealously. Thus, as the strategy took shape, he orchestrated a grand trap for the aliens.

 

On planets deemed unviable for human colonisation, he unleashed the Blood Boilers with sanction to use every weapon in their terrible arsenal. The results were horrifying, even to Imperial commanders who had spent decades waging war against the alien. Led by Riktus Innorvak, the Blood Boilers unleashed alchemical and nuclear scourges on the Hrud, inflicting damage vastly disproportionate to their numbers. The Legio Cruciatus walked with them, their weapons modified to wield the same alchem-weapons. The Hrud, lacking anything like the Eldar Wraithkind or Ork Gargants, had no answer for such monstrous power.

 

The Hrud fled across several systems with the Berserkers in pursuit. This was the most dangerous part of the operation, and several vessels were lost to the ravages of the entropic fields during void engagements, their hulls corroding and collapsing even as they fought. However, led by the flagship Hooded Guillotine, the VIIth successfully hounded the vast majority of the Hrud into a single system, the Steel Legion and Army vessels helping to herd them where the Primarch demanded.

 

With the prey run to ground, Raktra ordered the largest planet to be destroyed completely. Hardly bothering to engage the enemy fleet, the Berserkers' vessels bombarded the planet with murderous precision, boring straight to the core. The world simply collapsed under the onslaught, the cataclysm swallowing up most of the Hrud fleet as the rest scattered. After two years of bloodshed, it only took a month to eradicate the survivors.

 

The Legion won a rare degree of acclaim for the campaign, for Raktra had completed it with remarkably little loss of materiel and even life. Even those who detested the White Devil were forced to admit that it was an astoundingly thorough victory, if not one that anyone would call “clean”.

[Raktra]

Good news Brothers, Kehl Dorahk will soon have a model! Today's lovely limited Praetor is going to become the disgusting lunatic over the next week, grand times ahead.

[Nomus Sardauk]

http://i.imgur.com/WiB3KYR.jpg

[bluntblade]

The Hermeka Compliance

 

The conquest of Hermeka has gone down in the annals of the Great Crusade as one that illustrated both the unique talents of the VIIth and the drawbacks of their savage nature. It began as a joint expedition by the Berserkers and the Godslayers, which scoured several worlds of their xenos occupiers until it came across a human civilisation. At this point, the differing ethos of the two Legions surfaced.

 

The Hermeka System lay under the aegis of the Knight House Achaea, which had gradually come to govern the entire system after losing touch with the tech-priests of Mars. They agreed to hold talks on the system’s fourth planet, but balked at Raktra's blunt demands for submission. Koschei Kharkovic attempted to salvage the situation, but the situation degenerated too quickly and within minutes war was declared.

 

The Godslayers’ primarch lamented this turn of events and prepared to return to orbit, but Raktra ordered him to wait. Seconds later, several squads of Milewalkers and Blood Boilers teleported into the courtrooms where negotiations had taken place. Raktra had made contingency plans for the failure of diplomacy in his inimitable way, knowing that the majority of the system's political and military leaders would be gathered in one place. Having been instructed beforehand, they slaughtered every man and woman present. Koschei was appalled, but the momentum and initiative clearly lay with Raktra and the Godslayers were dragged along in his wake as the Imperial forces seized the capital.

 

The fighting was brutal, as Achaea, led by the High King's son Aeneas, quickly rallied their forces in the city, but the Berserkers landed troops both within and outside the walls. Caught off guard and outnumbered, the defenders were massacred. Raktra led the battle against their Knight Walkers, personally destroying the Swift Arrow and killing Baron Aeneas. The Godslayers participated, recognising an irretrievable situation, but were largely sidelined amid the carnage.

 

Raktra's next move was to position ships above every other major city, damping communications in the capital. After leaving the populace to stew in their confusion and fear for a day, Godslayer and Berserker forces deployed to each settlement, demanding they surrender. Those that resisted were crushed underfoot by the invaders, the Godslayers reluctantly going along with Raktra's scheme while the Hermekan fleet was scattered by Army warships.

 

Koschei set off for the remaining worlds. Finding that their leaders would not negotiate with him, he broadcast images of the carnage to them. Some historians draw parallels with Pionus' actions on Punicia, but unlike his brother, Koschei was unable to set aside his emotions, pleading with the Hermekans to surrender and avoid adding to the carnage that had befallen their capital. To his relief, they did so, shaken by the distress of this mighty warrior. However, his elation was dashed when Raktra congratulated him for his “help.” Koschei realised that he had been manipulated every step of the way, Raktra using him to ensure clean compliances across the rest of the system. No record exists of Koschei's response, but rumours suggest that he actually struck Raktra in his fury.

 

Whatever the truth, the Berserkers departed soon after. The Godslayers did the best they could to ease the Hermekan people into the Imperium, but it was decades until the planet would know true compliance. Moreover, relations between the two Legions were in ruins, and it would take a very dark turn in the Godslayers’ path to set them beside the Berserkers again.

[bluntblade]

I think I have my mental image for a post-bleeding Slynnat sorted:

 

Among the ravening packs of Berserkers, one walked alone. From a distance he might almost be mistaken for part of another Legion. The blackened armour he wore had once clad a knight of Askar, and its defilement was dreadful to behold. Spines protruded from his joints.Through gaps in the dried gore that coated him, brass glimmered in the firelight. A spiked muzzle sat before the grille of his helmet, catching the red glow as clawed hands raised a spiked longsword, disruptor field crackling red.

 

Everything about him was wrong for what the Berserkers had become. The Halcyon Wardens knew that they raved and howled, fighting in a frenzy of bloodshed. But this creature was somehow more monstrous. While the others were raw, it was if the pressure of his madness had hardened it to diamond. He did not raise his voice until the jagged blade was rising and falling, cleaving through armour and bone to send blood splattering through the air. Then it was a spittle-flecked rasp, mantras of wrath and slaughter.

 

For a further two Terran months, the reborn Slynnat would only be known to the Imperials through snatched vox-bursts and the silent testimony of his kills. What they gleaned from these fragments was this; among the hordes closing on the Throneworld was the distorted reflection of a knight, his sole purpose to keep the blood flowing.

[Sigismund229]

I wanted to check this story with you before going any further with it Raktra

 

Two giants stood next to each other. One was clad in a massive suit of cataphractii plate, clearly custom built for the warrior's bulk. Painted dark red, the suit bore many scars from its decades of service in the Great Crusade, the remains of a plasma blast here, deep grooves from some xenos creature's claws there. The deep growl emitted by it's motors served to mirror the soul of the warrior contained within, hungry for war, ferocious, born to kill. Over one of the warrior's hands there was an enormous power fist, whose fingers the warrior was curling and uncurling constatly for want of flesh to tear through with it. The warrior's other hand rested on the handle of his chainsword, an enormous blade that was as long as an unaugmented human was tall. Next to him was another giant, clad in an oversized suit of terminator armour, reinforced to withstand the backwash from the dreadful, flesh destroying weapons he used. Like the first, this warrior's armour was scarred and dented from decades of service on battlefields of such a horrifying brutality, many mortals couldn't imagine it, even in their worst nightmares. Unlike the first, this warrior's armour was painted black with white arms, although the white was increasingly obscured by a coating of dried blood from past battles. At the side of the first giant was an unaugmented human, as if to provide a contrast to the almost absurd size of the two terminator clad astartes.

 

"It's bad enough that you've taken a personal remembrancer" grunted Riktus Innorvak "But did you have to bring him with you to this battlefield? What we do here isn't for the eyes of the weak". "It isn't" agreed Gathos of the Improdoi "But if he's going to be my remembrancer he needs to see what the Great Crusade is first hand". Innorvak just grunted at that, his indifference to how humanity remembered the Great Crusade clear in his manner.

 

Unhelmed, neither legionnairy's face was a pleasant sight. Innorvak's features were marred by half of them being augmetic and the other half being so scarred and changed by radiation as to be unrecognisable to any who had known him prior to his induction into the VII^th, an appearance not helped by his fearsome augmetic jaw, a grimace of sharpened adamantium fangs. Gathos' weren't much better. After having had his teeth gradually knocked out over the course of his service, he had a mouth full of ugly adamantium replacements, while his face was a contorted mess of scar tissue and his left cheekbone had an odd, somewhat caved in look about it, the legacy of a blow dealt to him by the warrior now at his side in the training cages. Gathos held no grudge over that last injury. War was hard, injuries happened. Why should training be any different? He must have inflicted half a dozen serious wounds on Innorvak during their various sessions in the training cages over the years. Despite their legion's differences, Innorvak and Gathos counted each other as friends and they were both the oldest friend the other had left and while neither could be called sentimental, being born killers as they were, that fact had only drawn them closer over the years. While each had brothers within their respective legion's, their friendship.had been forged in the fires of a hundred wars of unparallelled brutality on the fringes of the Imperium. While their fellow legionnaires were their brothers by blood, Innorvak and Gathos were each the brother the other had chosen.

 

"I believe" said Innorvak, his jaw mangling most of the words, "Our primarch's wish us to act as emissaries for our legions. Diplomats" he said, spitting out the last word like an insult. Gathos laughed, his augmetic throat turning the sound into something more like a land raider's engine starting up. "You're probably right" he replied "We're probably the only officers in the III^rd and VII^th who have anything even approaching a friendly relationship. For the rest of our legions, it's a good day if our brothers don't spit at each other during briefings". Innorvak nodded and growled "You lot still fight like bastards. I'll give you that". Gathos nodded and then shook his head and chuckled quietly. "To think that we need to be diplomats" he said and laughed. Innorvak's features twisted into an ugly smile at that and he said "Two of the most brutal killers in the Legiones Astartes forced to act as diplomats. Who would have though it". The two astartes then laughed, their laughs becoming something more like a bellow.

 

Then the two astartes clasped each other's vambraces and brought their armour clanging together with the dull ring of ceramite on ceramite. With their heads close together, Riktus Innorvak whispered "I'm sorry it had to end this way brother" and Gathos thought he saw something resembling tears in Innorvak's eyes and he saw Innorvak's face twisted into an ugly scowl of self loathing. Before Gathos could ask why, he felt Innorvak's chainfist hacking through his abdominal plates and into his stomach. Dark, rich blood sprayed from the wound, covering both Innorvak and Gathos in its redness. Gathos felt several organs sustain severe damage from the chainfist's teeth. When Innorvak withdrew the blade from the deep wound it has created in Gathos' stomach, Gathos staggered back as his lifeblood poured out of his stomach onto the dirt beneath his feet. Snarling, he energised his power fist and began to draw his chainsword. However, before he could a spiked fist slammed into his face, digging deep wounds and gouging out his left eye as a chainfist dug into the gap between his thigh and his crotch, gobbets of flesh and geysers of blood coming from the wound.

 

Withdrawing his chainfist, Innorvak let Gathos fall to his knees. While his body was working to try and repair itself, laraman's cells trying to stop the bleeding from his deep wounds, secondary organs kicking in to replace those damaged too badly to function properly and his secondary heart pumping enormous amounts of adrenaline through his system, Gathos knew these were wounds he'd need bionics to heal. Seeing Riktus Innorvak turn his back on him and start towards Hapshur, Gathos' remembrancer, Gathos began to push himself back onto two feet. Clenching his adamantium teeth shut, feeling blood flowing between the gaps down onto his chin, Gathos activated his power fist and fingered the activation rune on his chainsword. "I'm not dead yet you bastard" he growled through gritted teeth.

[bluntblade]

I'd add that Innorvak's the dark red is dried blood and his armour's covered in chem-weapon scars too. I reckon his grammar should be coarser, if you know what I mean.

 

Other than that, it just needs seperate paragraphs when each character speaks

[Sigismund229]

Here we have Innorvak vs Gathos.

 

Gathos pushed himself up onto two feet. Ignoring the pain coursing through his body, he broke into a lumbering charge at Riktus Innorvak, smashing into Innorvak who stumbled back from the sheer force of having a legionnairy as large as Gathos clad in terminator armour collide with him. Following up on his charge, Gathos brought his power fist crashing into Innorvak's chest, smashing apart the right side of his breastplate, smashing apart the right side of Innorvak's rib cage and sending fragments of bone flying into Innorvak's right lung and forcing his body to start using his secondary lungs.

 

Grunting from the pain of having his ribcage splintered, Innorvak raised his chainfist to block Gathos' chainsword cut aimed at Innorvak's head, causing Gathos' chainsword's teeth to chew harmlessly into Innorvak's ceramite gauntlet. When Innorvak brought his fist up to punch Gathos with his spiked gauntlet again, Gathos caught Innorvak's wrist in his power fist. Swinging his chainsword up into Innorval's armpit and allowings its teeth to bit into his once brother's flesh, Gathos looked Innorvak in the eyes as he began to crush Innorvak's wrist in his fist. He saw a multitude of emotions in Innorvak's one remaining eye as he felt the bone in his lower arm splinter under Gathos' grip: hate, sadness, rage, self loathing.

 

Then Gathos felt a knee slam into his stomach and he was forced back by a series of punches to his face by Innorvak's free arm. Bone shattered and blood flowed under the force of the blows. Blood poured down his face from a wound in his forehead, obscuring his vision. Stumbling back under a hail of punches, Gathos swung blindly with his chainsword. Feeling the punches stop, he heard it ripping through flesh and began to drag down. As it came away from the flesh it was chewing through, Gathos wiped the blood away from his eyes with his spare hand to see that he had just torn his chainsword through the remaining flesh of Innorvak's face, leaving behind a bloody mess of mangled and torn flesh and flaps of skin hanging off Innorvak's face.

 

They then charged each other once more, two giants in terminator armour colliding with enough force to destroy battle tanks. Innorvak drove his chainfist into Gathos' armpit as Gathos clubbed Innorvak's face with the guard and pommel of his chainblade and they grappled with their spare arms. Blood flowed from the dozens of wounds they had inflicted upon each other that their bodies were trying to heal. By all rights, they both should have been in a coma if not dead. Hate was the only thing keeping them on their feet.

 

As Innorvak withdrew his chainfist from Gathos' armpit, Gathos smashed his chainsword's pommel into Innorvak's bionic eye. He saw the lens crack and the circuits begin to malfunction, sending electricity straight into Innorvak's brain as he drove his chainfist up through Gathos' chest, carving through both flesh and bone. Both warriors had been gene enhanced to endure the worst the galaxy could throw at them without showing an outward sign of pain but if they had been able, they would have screamed then, Innorvak due to the agony of having volts of electricity sent into his brain by his own malfunctioning bionics and Gathos from the excruciating pain of having his chest carved open.

 

Feeling Innorvak's cold, armoured hand reaching inside his chest, Gathos drove his head into Innorvak's face, shattering whatever unbroken bones remained there as he rammed his chainsword into Innorvak's thigh, sending blood spraying all over both their suits of armour. Then he felt Innorvak's hand grip it's quarry and he let loose a howl through his gritted teeth as Riktus Innorvak wrenched his secondary heart from his body.

 

Falling to his knees in pain, Gathos gasped in air as his superhuman physiology and advanced armour tried to cope with injuries that even it couldn't stop him feeling. He could hear his primary heart hammering in his chest as it futilely laboured to do the work of two hearts. Blackness tinged his vision as his body tried desperately tried to drag him into a coma, a last resort. Forcing the pain down and shoving the blackness to the edges of his vision, Gathos rose once more, his every limb feeling like it was made of lead and filled with acid.

 

Looking at Innorvak, he saw that he was in no better shape. Wounds covered his body, not counting the internal bleeding and broken bones that Gathos couldn't see. Innorvak's head was twitching and his face spasming, a tell tale sign of the electricity coursing through his brain and the heamoraging his brain was suffering. His jaws were locked together and he was drooling both blood and saliva. Feeling hate and adrenaline come pumping through his exhausted limbs once more, Gathos let loose a bellow that was nothing short of ursine and hurled himself into one last charge.

 

Innorvak charged to meet him but Gathos saw cracks in his defence that wouldn't have been there a minute ago. He drove his chainsword up into the existing wound in Innorvak's armpit, driving up with all his might as he felt Innorvak's spiked gauntlet hammer into his face yet again. Opening his mouth, he brought his adamantium teeth biting down into Innorvak's head, tearing away a chunk of flesh to reveal the bone underneath. Innorvak drove his chainfist into Gathos' left eye, turning the area around it to bloody ruin. However, the chainfist fell dead before it could drive far into Gathos' skull and the arm it had been on flopped to the ground like so much dead meat. Gathos bellowed again and brought his power fist up, ripping off Innorvak's augmetic jaw, shaking off the coma that threatened to engulf him once more and then brought his chainsword up and sheared away much of Innorvak's trachea as Innorvak drove his fist into Gathos' left leg, shattering his thigh bone into a million pieces. They disengaged and Gathos prepared to throw himself at Innorvak again as Innorvak started to slump to his knees, vomiting forth blood from what was left of his mouth, but he felt strong arms grip him and begin to drag him away. He roared "LEAVE ME! LEAVE ME!" as his men, the Improdoi, dragged him away from his quarry. He tried to shake free and desperately tried to force back the coma his body was trying to force him into. Despite his terrible injuries, for a moment he broke free of his men's grasp and leapt torwards Innorvak once more but then his men grabbed hold once more and began to drag him towards a waiting gunship. "LEAVE ME!" he roared again and he kept roaring as his voice grew gradually weaker and he stopped struggling against the arms that restrained him and gradually gave in to the enclosing darkness of a coma.

[bluntblade]

As of Drak's sketch, he's got chainclaws rather than fists

[~Drakzilla~]

A description I read mentioned a chainfist and I assumed that was his main weapon, Atrocity.

[bluntblade]

I like how it's panned out in your sketches, so I'm happy for that to be what he wields

[Raktra]

Oh man, how did I miss your art thread D: I have just two small changes I'd like to ask for Innorvak - Atrocity in his right hand, and the chainblade bits on the inside, like Tyberos. Though then again, the inside chain could be saved until after he gets Blood-ed... Otherwise, grand, now I know how I'm gonna model him >:D

 

To the story, I quite like it. I can actually tie this in (if Blunt's alright with it, seeing as he's the chief writer) to Innorvak's Old Blood-ing. 

[Nomus Sardauk]

Innorvak's getting the Old Blood treatment eh? Hmm, that gives me an idea, Raktra, what do you think of Innorvak developing the ability to spit/spray/vomit/etc literally-boiling blood from his mouth after he mutates? Like a joking gift from Khorne given his leadership of the Blood Boilers?

[Raktra]

Oh yeah, that's why his rules/stats (still a draft, admittedly) are bonkers. I do like the doomy blood spray idea!

[Nomus Sardauk]

Perhaps he could have two method of attacking with it, the first being a Flamer Template-using ranged attack and the second a Melee-ranged "focused" spray akin to a Ursarax's Volkite chest gun thingy (I forget it's name) where he just grabs the poor schmuck fighting him and horks a real nasty loogie directly into their face. :lol:

[~Drakzilla~]

@Raltra: Hey, change away! That was literally just a rough sketch I whipped up in 30 minutes. I actually had a couple concepts for Atrocity rolling around in my head that I wanted to run by you for consideration if that was alright. Just some more possible options if the Tyberos-style fist isn't finalized. I'll put them on paper as soon as I get the chance.

[Darkshreaders]

I oddly imagine the legion of the damned is what later became of the surviving berserkers of uran since that seems to fit them pretty well but thats just me

[bluntblade]

I wonder which canon Chapter fits them best. Maybe Minotaurs.

[Raktra]

Use the mkII thread, guys