[DW: Solo Play] Operation Hellstrike (IC)

[Mazer Rackham]

The battered and pulped carcass staggers under the pulverising inflicted by the metal monster, until finally, Zvarog grips it's leg, and with a strange sound of snapping mega-elastic bands, shears off in a ruddy hunk of meat and spilling ichor. Stinking bile erups from ruptured bile organs and starts to hiss and sizzle as it bubbles what it touches into nothing, before thinning out, and drying into malodourous wisps. Any human inhaling them would of course die quite horribly to the toxic vapour.

 

It soon burns off.

 

The Carnifex gives out a last, baleful roar of defeat, and collapses into a crumpled, jumbled, almost unreconisable heap of bloodied chum.

 

The oddly muted absence of brutal war is punishing, leaving you to the charnel house of victory.

 

Edited August 1 by Mazer Rackham

[Necronaut]

Revenant Zvarog

 

He had done it. He had won.

 

Ferrum Invictum.

 

Zvarog stood triumphant but battered and battle-scarred over the ruin of his enemy. The heat of kill-urge, combat stimulants and bloodlust slowly drained from his system and was replaced by the numbing chill of his sarcophagus, his prison. The return to his inhuman existence somewhat muted his sense of victory.

 

The stubby manipulator claws of his immense armoured gauntlet snapped open and grasped the skull of the felled tyranid. With a sickening crunch-snap-twist-ripping noise, the dreadnought wrenched the head of the enormous predator free from its neck and hauled it over to where Brother Jocelyn lay silent and recumbent.

 

+Here is your killer, brother,+ the dreadnought intoned with uncharacteristic softness.

 

He laid the massive, bloody trophy beside the fallen astartes, and relayed the coordinates of Ojuka and Jocelyn’s last remains to the Deathwatch strike cruiser lurking somewhere in orbit via the Imperial comms channels, such as they were, with an added priority message: "Gene-seed in perpetuum amissus."  

 

+You died well, just like Sergeant Ojuka. You may rest easy now that vengeance has been served. Forgive me that I could not make it to your side before the end.+

 

The last words were uttered with a metallic bitterness borne of ages of war and loss and estrangement from the living.

Edited Saturday at 04:44 PM by Necronaut

[Xin Ceithan]

Ekatron Axios
 

Gears grinding, the massive cargo elevator came to a grinding hold as the hymnal of occluded ascension faded      away - 7.56668 nano pulses out of sync, barely within tolerance  - and the lifting platform’ s auto-choir began  to announce the slow opening of the hidden access bay inner pressure gate by intoning the overture of unsealing.   Beams of yellow light strobed from caged lanterns  and klaxons blared in return in ritual patterns of warning which were older than even the blessed Cult of the Mechanicum itself.

 

 

A deep rumbling sound accompanied grinding and stuttering noises as the huge metal Iris of the inner airlock began to open.

 

Ekatron Axios watched, momentarily distracted, as the noise and vibration caused by this transference of the Motive Force momentarily stirred up the layers of dust and rust particles around the Forgemaster into evolving geometrical patterns until they were washed away by in sailing eddies as minuscule difference the currents of the slight difference in hyperbaric ventilation between  the elevation chamber  and the cavernous inner airlock bay strove for equilibrium. He’d  mediate on these patterns later, seeking of solace and wisdom in these minuscule manifestations of the Great Work.

 

Currently, however, there were more pressing duties to attend to.

Duties whose precise nature, like the patterns blown from the armored floor of the access bay,  were slowly unspooling from the restricted inloads stored in his memory core compartments.

 

As the maw of the air lock iris widened, the Forgemaster strode forward, each thundering step precisely in tune with the sharp sequence of cracks echoing through the chamber beyond as a row  of  lumen strips flashed into life on it‘s edges. Hardwired gun  emplacements whirred to life along the walls, their crews of embedded servitors convulsing into readiness. 

 

Sigma-Six-7745 boasted several such  hidden access bays along it’s lines, intended  to provide a means of resupplying the bunkers during a siege even if it meant holding back a significant enemy force during the attempt. From his observations, Axios grimly calculated the odds of such an attempt succeeding during the virtual collapse of the world‘s atmosphere and ecosystem at this late stage of the xenos invasion cycle as mostly negligible and had shunted away his projections already for possible later improvements after his memory core’s ( highly unlikely) recovery. 

 

Even the efforts of another member of the Deathwatch, Brother Jocelyn, who had operated on the fringes of the Sima-Six-745 complex perimeter had failed to enable Jocelyn‘s squad to reach the installation. A failure that had further reduced the Calculus of Axios completing his own, still misted objectives from absurdly low  to statistically impossible. 

 

Ekatron Axios, however, would not allow his mission to fail based on means of mere statistical computations. He‘d seen both the simulus-prognostications and heuristic seance-patterns. A more mortal might have called his conviction „faith“ but Axios had literally experienced the subatomic routines of the Great  Maker’s work itself, even if only in what nano-iota of data even his genhanced and augmented brain  might glimpse could glimpse. Axios did not need faith. The Omnissiah needed him to proceed and so the Omnissiah would see to it. 

 

The rapidly cooling corpse of the Maximus Threat Bioform outside would have been proof that the Omnissiah would indeed provide. And with overwhelming firepower of the fractured inloads of the remaining perimeter sensorium was anything to go by.

 

Dispatching something like a Xeno Majoris of the kind the soldiers of the Militarum often referred to as a “Screamer-Killer” ( those that survived, anyway ) would have been a noteworthy achievement for any force of the Adeptus Astartes and the least Axios could offer was a place of respite to  rearm and recover from such an ordeal but even a  simple estimation of the probabilities of a force  of such magnitude arriving at this time and place defied the idea of this being  just a coincidence.  

Axios  canted a binharic prayer and acknowledged this obvious divine call  to action  by bringing his weapons and armor to full readiness. Not missed a step, he sang bingaric praises as the appendages of his servo harness whirred up with throbbing power cables and feeding tubes. Targeting augments ran runic cascades of test engramms, autoloaders cycling and the Forgemaster felt the heat as the atommantic brazier atop his warplate flared up.

 

Another series of rotating lights and klaxons accompanied the noise of the outer hatch opening.

 

 

Axios gripped his axe in both  hands and felt his heart rate rise, saw his cerebralchemical outlines spiking. 

Outside, amidst the carnage of slain xenoforms stood the bulky shape of the fury of the Emperor and Omnissiah given form - a Dreadnaught, battered but unbroken, displaying the colours of the Desthwatch.

 

The Forgemaster shunted thoughts of praise to the prayer centrifuges along the back of his warplate, unashamed of his joy at this turn of events.

Even more auspicious as Axios noticed as he scanned the hulking cybernetic war shrine, the blessed warrior on front of him hailed from the lineage of great Ferrus Manus also! 

 

Stepping forward, he raised his axe in salute and opened a vox channel while streaming  noospheric patterns of blessing and greeting.

 

+ Honoured Ancient! Frater of the Apocryphal Oaths and   Fellow  Descendant of the WarClans of Medusa! 

In the name of the Omnissiah and the Emperor of Mankind, HE who is IT‘s  blessed vessel, I , Forgemaster Ekatron Axios, welcome you to Sigma Six 754 +++