TURN ONE- Blood Angels (Brian): The Blood Angels arrived literally on the winds of death as the charnel scent of the previous battle still hung in the air. The Death Company hovered in over the scrubland; their bodies inert as if waiting for a switch to be thrown. A group of vultures flew parallel with them briefly, until the sputter of one of the droning jetpack engines warded them off. The Company was silent, like crucified men who had breathed their last, or marionettes dangling from their string with no master to guide them. As the outskirts of the battlefield were reached, that master emerged from the center of the brood: Chaplain Argus, who commanded the Company to land near a camouflaged Whirlwind as he surveyed the opposition.
After the rest of the detachment arrived, the Attack Bikes sat quietly for several seconds, as if listening to the battle plan on their helmet headsets. The thrusters of the Death Company jetpacks were awakened again as the taciturn supermen moved forward and clustered behind the corroded steel walls of the pump station. Pistols were drawn and weapons were unsheathed, yet none of their pulses rose above normal--as fear and anticipation had no grip on them.
The Chaplain raised his gauntleted hand in the air, and the bikes began revving their engines, kicking up a wave of dirt and gravel behind them. A Rhino laden with Tacticals veered around and in front of the bikes, providing cover for them as it launched its smoke canisters. The bikers swirled their chainswords in the smoke as they throttled the engines with their free hands, and the Chaplain's hand came down as the Whirlwind fired a volley of rockets into the air. Before the missiles impacted, the Blood Angels were charging forward--their charade of military discipline ended. There would be no quarter this time, as always: words notarized by a column of fire and body parts erupting in the midst of the Imperial Guard defenders as the missiles found home.
TURN ONE- Blood Angels (Jeff): The jury-rigged Reaver Titan dwarfed everything around it; the buildings were as crates and the trees as grass. The pilot gazed out across the battlefield as it was dissected into pixels and reassembled on the Heads-Up-Display in the shadows of the cockpit. A woman's electronic voice, ageless and proper yet with an accent from a society over a thousand-years extinct, spoke: "Target Acquired: Shadowsword. Target Acquired: Hellhound. Target Acquired: Chimera..." and continued to monotonously describe the host of enemy tanks.
The pilot interrupted her, "Baby, you should always go with your first instinct," and pressed the stick-trigger that unleashed a legion of incendiary demons upon the Shadowsword. The massive Imperial Guard tank soaked the brunt of the hit, as the impact pushed it back several feet and crippled the supertank's treads. Had it not been for the copious amounts of cover sheltering the Shadowsword, the damage would've been far worse.
The rest of the central Blood Angel force wheeled out to the left: a Rhino launching smoke as a vanguard and fire magnet, and a multimelta-mounted Land Speeder careening to the right--trimming the tops of the trees that struggled to grow nearby. Behind, a Predator and Razorback completed the motorcade. A round of shooting from them happened all around, with little effect, and nothing remotely as dramatic as the salvo from the Reaver.
TURN ONE- Blood Angels (Greg): The bog into which poured the refuse from the Biotech Outpost seemed like just as good a place as any for the Scouts to conceal themselves. Strange serpentine things slithered through the murk that rose to their waists. The only sound they made was the occasional ring of a steel machete hacking through a branch or other offensive life-form, or the slap of a mutant mosquito off their exposed patches of skin. These infrequent blunders were well-masked by the blare of the Land Speeder engines that carried the fragile recon skiff into the fray.
Met'is, the chapter's Librarian, sat in the back of the Rhino's passenger hold, rousing his men into the fury that was necessary to win the battle. Howls and screams were traded back and forth as one Marine thrashed in his seat with foam dripping from his lips. "KILL THEM!" he screamed in a spray of saliva--his head shaking back and forth as if he was ready to burst. Met'is yelled to the Rhino pilot, "Drive through the outpost! I want to see it razed!" ...and so the pilot did, slamming the tank into the control console hard enough to immobilize the vehicle.
The Blood Angel Dreadnaught did not stop in its advance to think at all--and instead kicked through a wall of sandbags and lunged out into the open as all matter of glass instruments within the Biotech Station crashed to the floor. The seismic disturbance of the ancient Blood Angel hero was intense. With accuracy known only to men with almost no breathing or pulse, the Dreadnaught fired its massive lascannon at a distant Immolator: the pristine beam of highly-agitated photons severing the entire right section of treads. The Immolator was now a large paperweight.
The noisome Land Speeder confidently rocketed forward, jinking as incoming bolter fire threatened the delicate craft. It swooped down and cut right just as the gunner triggered the multimelta--sending a fireball of superheated energy packets straight at the Sisters' command Rhino. The front end of the tank exploded outwards in a gush of molten slag, with the remains of the vaporized drivers bubbling out of the liquid steel as streams of red mist. The occupants bailed out in a haze of smoke, with soot-covered faces. One of the Sisters was dragged out, clutching at her face reddened and blistered by the steam. The Hospitaller quickly treated the wound with a chemical spray, and the casualty rejoined the battle with a gruesome visage.
TURN ONE- Imperial Guard (Andy): "Sir, the troops and I think it may be...well...not good how we're set up here," the Lieutenant said to the Captain after saluting. "How so?" the Captain inquired, chomping on a fresh yet unlit stogie.
"INCOOOMMMING!"
As the Blood Angel's Whirlwind volley exploded in the midst of the army and a steaming corpse landed a few feet from them, the two men didn't seem to notice. The Lieutenant looked at the ground and traced a vague shape with his boot. "Well, just look at it. Doesn't anything seem wrong?"
"Certainly not. Are you telling me how to run the show here, boy?" the Captain returned.
"Ah, no sir. I must be mistaken. Forgive me."
The only guns able to do some good were the mortars and Basilisk. Nearly everything else was blocked, including the artillery crews and support troops. The mortar crews dropped their rounds into the barrels and watched them sail upwards and impact amid the Death Company. The barrage pocked the earth in the dead-center of the Death Company. One of the mind-gone Marines was kicked around by the geysers of shrapnel bursting about him, and fell to the ground. The mortar company cheered and high-fived each other but then gazed in dismay as the black-garbed soldier picked himself up and took again to the air. The Basilisk, on the other hand, did a much better job, as the Earthshaker shelled the ground all about the lone straggler who...simply wasn't there anymore when the smoke cleared. Had the round not deviated, the entire Death Company would've shared the same fate. That would prove to be a critical err.
TURN ONE- IG Armored Company (Ben): With all of the firepower clustered in such a small area, line of sight limited the Armored Company to shooting at either the Reaver or the gnat-like Land Speeder hovering to line up a multimelta blast. The Commissar signaled the company to pour every available gun out at the Reaver, hoping to at least cripple it as it did the Shadowsword. Her voice was shrill and grating on the comm-links even over the cacophony of so many cannons, and was almost indistinguishable from the ringing in the Company's ears after the initial salvo was fired.
The concerto of raw firepower far surpassed the earlier performance of the Reaver, and the squad of Blood Angel Scouts that were hiding between its legs had to constantly dodge flaming bits of debris that fell all around them. Blossoms of flame and spark exploded all over the hulking construct, and eventually the towering figure was wreathed in thick smoke. The Land Speeder ducked low as dozens of rounds whizzing by pinned it to a small area with suppression fire.
Like out of some "horror movie" of times past, when the defenders of humanity shot every superweapon they had at the approaching rubber monster or mechanical puppet--and THE THING STILL KEPT COMING, so too did the Reaver. If only there were some power lines in its way!
Eager to lend their weight to the battle, the Iron Chimera raced forward. Inside the passenger comparment the squad swung their pintle-mounted lasguns around and brought them to bear on the Titan, rapid firing into it. To the shock and dismay of the Titan crew, the normally ineffective guardsmen with their pathetic lasguns actually scored a lucky hit, bringing down one of their void shields with a deafening sizzle-and-pop. And then the big guns opened fire...
When the smoke finally cleared, the Reaver's leg actuators had been damaged, and a great plume of acrid smoke exhaled from the right arm that once bore a fiendish gun. Not the best the Guard could've done, but at least they accomplished something.
TURN ONE- Sisters of Battle (Jeremy): With two of their three tanks either destroyed or immobilized, the remaining Immolator was waved on to confront the Blood Angel scouts now visible at the edge of bog. The driver nodded, biting her lip, and rumbled the relatively slow and cantankerous vehicle forward. The pilot drove out on an angle, hoping the Scouts would think they had not been seen as a small squad of Seraphim hovered closely by (editor's note: the Armored Company rules started to kick in here). Just as the Scouts took the bait and leapt from the bush, the gunner pivoted on her turret and utterly enveloped the unit with twin streams of blazing napalm. The moist vegetation in the bog was set alight as the silhouettes of the Scouts spasmodically fell into the murk in an attempt to put out the flames--only to surface and realize the fuel was also burning on the surface of the water. The survivors fell back, disappearing into the wall of smoke and leaving three floating motionlessly in the burning bog.
Nearby, one of the Battle Sisters squads charged from the cover they formerly huddled behind. A meltagunner heated her weapon and took aim at the Rhino hung up in the Bio Tech station, and scored a hit with the wash of celestial heat. The entire roof of the tank was softened to pudding consistency, destroying the storm bolter but otherwise doing nothing but turning the tank into a convertible.
Another squad all fell to one knee. They chanted as they hoisted their bolters in unison, begging the Emperor's blessing as they opened fire on the Blood Angel Librarian's squad. One of the Honor Guard was killed instantly as his head exploded and his last thoughts were carried off on the wind. A second Honor Guard caught a bolter round in the chest, with the HEP round managing to penetrate a weak spot in the thick armor and go off like a grenade in his rib cage. The Librarian caught his body as the casualty fell back, then dropped him in disgust as it was obvious the man was gone.
Another squad peppered the side of the Land Speeder that had fragged the Command HQ's ride, one shot penetrating the cabin and blowing through the pilot's leg. As the entire cockpit was misted with blood, the gunner hurried reached over and wiped the windshield while the pilot attempted to regain control from being stunned.