To view the previous report in this series, click here. To view the next report in this series, click here. To view more battle reports in The Hand of the King series, click here.
To view the tactical overview for this report, click here.
***
The armored column slowly moved forward. The ground beneath them shook and groaned under their treads. The sky above them was drenched in blood.
They were rolling forward inside a living womb; the planet was encased in the nutrients of the warp. Soon, it would come forward as a new birth. Its transformation into a demon world would become complete. Every victory over their enemy removed a force that was hurting this new creation. Every victory spilled more life-giving blood as a sacrifice to the gods of ruin.
Those whose souls could feel the presence of the warp were beginning to tingle with dread anticipation. It was almost like a heartbeat. The slow rise of a new life up to its unwithstandable climax.
Zogfeldt thought it sort of felt like when you had to sneeze, but you can't quite get it out. So it just kind of sits there.
The warlord was still getting accustomed to his new form. He had died, that much of which he was pretty certain, but he had exchanged most of his soul to his new patron god for a second chance. His flesh was restored, but he somehow didn't feel comfortable in it anymore. Moreover, he was now, he supposed, at least part demon now. That meant, among other things, that his mind was now constantly forced open. Unblinkably staring into the Empyrian void.
It was a little unsettling, to be honest.
But that was just part of the price one had to pay, he supposed. He had a chance, now. The ability to keep fighting. The longer he went, he hoped, and the more he grew and pleased the Lord of Triumph, that, despite this new handicap, he'd be able to become more than he ever could have hoped to be.
And so now here he was. He had taken out a mortgage on his soul, and it was time to repay the debt. And what a place to do it.
All around him, arcane and horrible forces of chaos were gathering. Miles and miles long, an invincible tide of tainted steel prepared to smash forward. Zogfeldt could not but stand in awe of the sheer scale of it all. He was excited just to be a part of it.
Before him, the small piece of the line to which he had been assigned gathered ranks and prepared for battle.
Zogfeldt fumbled over his mind like a person might tongue over a new filling in a tooth. It still felt the same, but different, somehow.
The strangest thing about it was that he could now communicate directly with others so psychically intuned. The problem was that it was all so intuitive. Rather than hearing a separate voice talking to him, it was more like he was talking to himself. He didn't so much as hear orders, so much as he came up with doing what he was supposed to do on his own. He just understood when it was time to do things, like he had always intended to do them that way in the first place.
He could swear that on more than one occasion, his body had acted instinctively to a command that hadn't originally been his own...
But, in a way, that was better, he supposed. No garbled messages. No independent egos screwing everything up. It was almost like a single mind. A single great, psychic entity, and at its core was the bloody god, directing them all.
It all made his physical form seem small by contrast. It made his environment seem impossibly compact. Zogfeldt stood up and opened the top hatch of his transport. He needed some air, or whatever one could even call it anymore.
He stuck his head and then his whole torso out. He could feel the sticky breeze on his face.
He looked around him and could see the massive wall of armor. His own tanks were getting into position. He smiled. He had TANKS at his command now. Things were definitely still on an upward trajectory for him.
His eyes closed as he gathered his thoughts. They should start moving forward now, he decided. At least, he thought HE decided. Not that it REALLY mattered. In turn, he reached his mind out towards those of his tank commanders. Instantly, they began to speed up in unison. It was as if he was each of the individual tank commanders, and they were extensions of his being.
Well, though, that wasn't quite it. It was more like he was the conductor, and the orchestra, with the smallest cuing, intuitively understood what kind of music was to be made.
Zogfeldt had gotten annoyingly poetic and abstract since his personal transformation. He shook his head to clear everybody else out of it.
The massive pile of tanks and witch-fired mechanical monsters began their assault.
The endless blood mist made it difficult to see the enemy on the wide plain in front of them. The haze flickered before them, and the dull, mist-dampened sounds of gunfire told of action ahead.
In his pondering and observing, Zogfeldt had fallen behind the rest of his armor. He reached his soul around until he found what he thought was the driver of his transport. As if by the power of his mind, the vehicle sped up to the speed he wanted, and traveled in the direction he wanted it to go.
Soon, he had caught up with the rest of his tanks.
With a groaning crash, the barricades in front of them gave way, the massive bulk of the tanks knocking them over to clear a path for the others to follow through. As the first of the corrupted Russes made it over the barricade, the air began to pop and flash around it in a firecracker display. It was anti-personnel mines. They would need to be careful if they were ever dismounted.
Off to the left, a massive, defiled baneblade cruised forward, and further off, chaos vindicator siege tanks were already sprinting across the field.
The momentum was building. Soon they would crush over everything.
Zogfeldt winced.
There was something there. A threat and a rumor in his mind. Grating laughter broke like shards of glass on the air.
Before them, an entity removed itself from the warp.
Dressed head to toe in the most garish pink possible, it swirled thickly in the congealing air before making its presence known. Zogfeldt frowned. It was some sort of being of the God of Excess.
The warlord had always approved of the purity of his own patron deity. The meaningfulness of His impact on the cosmos. The blessed servant of ruin inspired everyone to be the best that they could possibly be, and for the best to triumph. It was about building a new, better society, ruled by a true meritocracy, where mere mediocrity was always winnowed, and only the fittest survived.
Meanwhile, the Lord of Pleasure was devoted to being a bunch of hippie loser slackers taking drugs in their parent's basement and hoping to get laid. He could respect the Grandfather's use of entropy, or the Contriver's use of wisdom to better the universe. He had no time whatsoever for a bunch of selfish, lazy hedonists that weren't any good to anybody.
And, true to form, this new entity was nothing but a spoiler. He screamed at the top of his lungs and threw some sort of a device at the baneblade.
In an instant, reality screeched in horror as it was blown around in a swirling maelstrom. A bubble of pure immaterial substance ripped a hole in the material world around it. With unintelligible violence, the abominable orb began to roll around, sucking in everything hapless enough to be caught in its path.
Zogfeldt braced himself as the swirling storm threatened to pick him up out of his transport and cast him uselessly thrashing into the abyss. He watched as the spinning ball of null space sliced through the baneblade next to him, causing a huge path of it to simply cease to exist.
The mighty war machine snapped and shot into flame as fuel lines ruptured and ammunition stores briefly exploded before being consumed by the warp. The phenomenon then lolled over to the right over the barricades. The minefield suddenly exploded as all of the small metal canisters were sucked out of the ground, their charges bursting in the cloud of gravel all at once.
"Look out!" Zogfeldt finally managed to scream as the otherworldly tempest shrieked gale-force winds about them. The hole in space, black upon black, wobbled in the center of the blinding fury. Slowly but implacably, it rolled over the front tank, completely obliterating it. There was absolutely no recourse as, bit by bit, the lumbering vehicle disintegrated into maddening warpspace.
With a sudden jerk, the vortex began to move upfield, causing a ruined building to collapse and then lift up into the spinning field. As it slowly moved away, and reality began to sigh back into normal around him, he looked down at their assailant. He stood there smiling, holding a curved blade and a meltabomb in his hands.
Zogfeldt furrowed his brow in anger. He unsheathed his plasma pistol and pointed it straight into his enemy
"Die, hippie!" he shouted, before pulling the trigger.
The pistol bucked violently in his hand as the energy discharged a shot directly into his target. It nearly exploded in a shower of warpfire and gore.
The warlord sneered in contempt. Probably the last thing that went through that wretch's mind was "Well, this is new".
Pathetic.
Unfortunately, Zogfeldt was about to experience something new as well. The Lord of Desire wasn't content with spoiling his perfect plans by a single action alone.
From out of the warp, another threat emerged.
The gaudy shrine to excess flopped out into realspace. It didn't have to look long to find a target.
With inhuman sound, the tank started up its speaker systems. Its guns began to spin up.
Zogfeldt was suddenly slammed back into the chimera. His mind went completely blank as his body began to tear itself apart. The sheer, indescribable blast of glam rock music pinned down his body and began to unseat his soul. The tank began to shake apart at the fantastic tsunami of sound.
And then the guns started firing. The massive gatling cannon of the tank poured fire into the chimera. Between the disintegrating effect of the riot of noise and the nearly equally disintegrating effect of a few thousand 15mm cannon shots slamming into the rear armor, the transport quickly began to tear apart.
So did the cultists inside. Some were instantly splattered by the barrage of gunfire as it tore through the steel walls of the chimera. Others began to vomit blood and impale themselves on their own close combat weapons rather than have to endure another moment of the blitzing cacophony.
Zogfeldt and his survivors quickly attempted to flee their vehicle.
As they desperately attempted to clear the ruining hull of their transport, even more threats began to appear out of the warp behind them.
More and more soldiers of the Lord of Desire.
More and more enemy to be slain.
Mercifully, a nearby monstrous mechanical walker managed to silence the tank's speaker system, leaving it, thankfully, with only its multimeltas and gatling cannon.
Deafly, Zogfeldt tried to get his bearings. The now thrubbing silence in his ears cast a strange effect over the sights of combat.
Slowly, the enemy tank began to break apart, and the enemy infantry started to take incoming fire as well.
The warlord looked around in a haze.
Only then did he see it. Chaos space marines devoted to the Lord of Pleasure. They were upon him.
Caught unawares, the trailing tank in the column suddenly found itself attacked from the rear.
The enemy rushed in with their horrible rending weapons.
Zogfeldt watched in horror as the marines began to rip apart the vehicle with their bare hands. Treads were chopped at, and pried off. They began to swarm up against the turret.
One managed to throw a krak grenade into the fuel tank causing a massive explosion that blew the vehicle into a twisted wreck and scattering the enemy everywhere. No doubt they had enjoyed themselves.
This would not do. Zogfeldt rallied his men with the power of his mind and they began to run over to face the regrouping space marines.
He shouted at them as best he could, but he was completely deaf to his own words. He'd have to let his pistol do the talking for him.
A slick breeze wafted over them. Everywhere, the battle was raging. Allied units had pushed ahead and were making a breakthrough.
This left Zogfeldt and his men shockingly alone.
The last of them that were bogged down where they had started fended off the threats around them as best they could.
With brutal savagery, the enemy space marines beset themselves upon the next tank up the line. Once again they lept up onto the side of the armor and scrambled up the rear. Once again they began to tear apart their quarry with drug-fueled rage.
Zogfeldt fired his pistol again and again, but it seemed to little effect. They managed to get into the turret. First one and then two of them.
Then, suddenly, the vehicle exploded in a catastrophic detonation, sending the warlord and his men collapsing to the ground. He watched as twisted metal began to fall out of the sky in great, silent hunks. The massive fireball rolled up into the bloody sky.
Something would have to be done to stop this, and stop this now.
Zogfeldt got to his feet. He climbed up onto the twisted wreckage of his precious tanks.
There were the surviving enemy.
Charging.
He leveled his pistol.
He would show these scum just how little he thought of them.
And their stupid punk-face music.
He glowered.
***
Melchoir sat, slumped, in a folding chair. The room was dark, except for a single, bright light pointed directly at his face. The air was filled with some sort of cigarette smoke.
He didn't really understand what he was doing here. He hadn't been tortured. He hadn't been killed. He hadn't even been properly restrained. Really, he had only been disarmed. Well, and blindfolded.
For the first time in a long time, the officer's mind was quiet. He just sort of sat there, silently.
His blindfold had been removed when he was put into this holding cell, but he didn't have the strength or inclination to bother looking around. There wouldn't be much to see anyways. Dark shadows fell on the creases of his face.
The person on the other side of the room let out a long exhale. His face was hidden from Melchoir, but the strange, aromatic fragrance of whatever he was smoking quickly assaulted his senses again as the billowing cloud shifted in the stagnant air.
The hazy silence was finally broken by his interrogator coughing violently a few times. After a moment of spasm, he began to control himself. He cleared his throat and took another drag on his cigarette.
Melchoir sat still under the glare of the lamp.
"So," the other man finally said, "You are Folera?"
The man spoke with such a thick accent that he was nearly unintelligible to the officer.
"Yes," Melchoir replied eventually. His interrogator seemed willing to let things play out in their own time.
"You have name?"
"Yes," Melchoir spoke again, "Melchoir Theleos." He would have given his rank as well, but he didn't want to confuse things.
"Yes, you are Folera Melcarr. I find this interesting."
He let out another long plume of smoke with an exhaled breath.
What was going on here?
"I find Folera interesting," he continued. "Your soldiers are coming here, and this we seem unexpected."
Melchoir frowned. What was he talking about? Was he talking about Foleran forces making planetfall? Was he talking about him and his tank crew coming to wherever they were now? Were there other of his kindred guardsmen here? The language barrier was more than frustrating.
"Just where do you think you are, Folera Melcarr?" his interrogator asked coolly.
"Drop Zone Beta," he replied quietly.
His interrogator coughed violently again. The bright air swirled with his smoke.
"Well," he finally replied, flicking the stub remain of his cigarette off into the darkness. He cleared his throat loudly.
"Well," he continued again, "You are not the first Folera who brings me this story, Folera Melcarr."
Melchoir looked up. He searched through the haze to see his interrogator.
"No you are not. I find this to be very... interesting."
"Where am I?" Melchoir asked.
A lighter flashed in the room. Another cigarette lit up against the darkness.
***
The Empire 
1500 pts
: 
KHADOR 
X-Wing (Empire Strong) 
