Site 5:Khol and his few squads of guardsmen hurry through the ruins, not making good time due to the treacherous nature of the ground. Overhead they hear the distinct sound of astartes jump packs as Albrect and Lucius easily overtake them.
For Lucius and Albrect, the city was like a ghost town. Clearly the PDF put up a fight as they desperately sought to give the population a chance to escape. Most of the buildings were half skeletal frames and many sections were complete rubble. The sounds of battle echoed far and near, as you left the cliff faces and proceeded towards the soft 5th location. Within the hour, you make it, finding a perch atop a dilapidated administratum building.
The situation wasnt good, not good at all.
The brentonians had failed to take the coast, and wer inned down to a small beachhead, barely 20 meters across. A large force of tyranids bore down on them as they used wrecked chimera's and bodies as makeshift cover. What cover wasn't obliterated by packs of warriors armed with venom cannons was bypassed completely by bio-vore artillery pieces.
Three barges loaded with 2 basilisks each sat useless in the black water, merely 20% of what had been allocated to this landing.
"Im going in, praise be" Albrect says before leaping towards the nearest warrior pack, leaving Lucius atop the structure. There were no options availble, nothing else could be seen but a desperate gamble.
"Listen up." he voxes the barges.
"Unless we do something reckless, theres no chance of victory. I need you to bring your weapons to bear on the forces pinning your men down."After a second, he got a response, "We cant do that. The recoil will tear the floats apart and they'll drown."
"A small victory is still a victory. No choice."He awaited a response. After a second, he got a reply. "Understood, we'll do it."
They began to set up the munitions, Lucius saw where he could next best be utilized, he jumps for the small strip of land the brentonians clung to.
Albrect landed in the midst of the pack and began tearing into them with the power axe. Limbs were severed and scything talons were parried but the warriors had stopped advancing on the beachhead-Holy Mission complete, praise be.
Lucius galvanized the men on the beach while the basilisks set to work. Large craters opened up where guants and biovore's had been before.
Soon, the vox burst open with new cries for help.
He turns to the barges, seeing one of them begin to sink. It was a small price to pay in the long run, Two more basilisks were lost to the inky black, but many of the men were rescued by Chimera's that had swooped in for survivors. At least some of them were saved.
New holes in the formations began to open up. Looking to the east, Lucius knew somewhere that Khol and his bunch had arrived.
Khol had the veteran squads set up atop a small building, well out of view from the battle going on. With them in place, he had moved in closer through the ruins. He found a perch not too far away from where Albrect and Lucius had landed in the first place. He stays hidden, and out of sight, and calls firing solutions to the light mortar squads.
Soon, the beachead expands, and more troops are able to land as the tyranids are driven back, eventually retreating.....
Site 2:Bleda, Hydrako, and Cassiel move in with the forces landing at the port. They soon find themselves in heavily shelled buildings and piles of debris, the sounds of battle cast from ahead of them.
Cassiel issues the instructions, trying to take the cleanest streets with the least amount of barricades and dragon's teeth tank traps.
A column of tanks heads up the rough street. The buildings on the sides turned the street into a valley of sorts. Bleda saw they trap just before it was sprung.
"Contacts in the buildings!"
As soon as he says it fire rained upon the column. Most of it was ineffectual, harmlessly scraping paint from the heavy battle tanks.
What caught you by surprise was that the weapons were human weapons. Grenade launchers and heavy cutting lasers scythe down from the broken windows above, cracking treads and immobilizing the MBT's
"Return fire!" Cassiel orders, and they obeyed. Cassiel had underestimated the destructive power of the battle cannons, not used to the combat of metal beasts. He preferred heavy weapons, yes. But his specialty was destroying tanks, not using them.
The buildings crashed and crumbled all around, unable to take any more damage than they had.
Miraculously, neither he nor Bleda was injured, and the surprise attack was quashed. What this did, instead, was cause a blockage from the column that profoundly set them back. The relief force ground to a halt four km from the first site.
"Back the vehicles up and find a way around." he orders the redeployment. Now he was wiser, they needed to spread out to avoid more ambushes like that one.
If those tyranids had more AT capability.....he thinks. The damage could have been worse. A few tanks were total loses and some were buried and would be out of commission for the time being.
Bleda crawls from the rubble as Cassiel was redeploying. It would keep them from arriving to the main landing en masse, hampering the aid.
"Hydrako, take those chimera's and crawl over this mess. The chimera shape should allow it to traverse these collapsed buildings easier than a leman russ can."
He was right. The chimera's lower center of gravity and longer hull meant they could climbs the mountains of rubble like a boat could traverse a monster wave. Hydrako had wisely held back with them, in order to boost his considerable mobility even further.
The streets ahead were full of tyranid ambushes.
They climbed the piles and kept moving on, spreading out to avoid another large scale assault.
Hydrako's chimera moved a pace, then something exploded and the chimera stopped. The driver was dead, they would have to foot slog it now. He and they exit the chimera and he orders them into an effective assault formation. Just as they did, they were under attack. Lightning fast genestealers weaved in and out of the broken windows and walls, drawing fire before attacking from opposite sides. Hydako cuts them down with his chainaxe and his storm bolter. But he finds that his school of little fish had been gobbled up by Dagon by the time he had finished.
He moves away from the scene of death, in order to assist another squad.
Again and again, Hydrako linked up with a squad, just to have a sudden ambush wipe out his new school of fish to the last man-him.
Something bothered him about the situation, it shouldn't of, but it did.
The men he led to their deaths were nothing to him, but their deaths ate at his consciousness. For days, even weeks, he would see relieve scenes of grisly death in his geneseed induced half dreams.
Why did this rankle him so?
He slowly comes to the realization that the odd sensations would only go away if he improved his command capability. If men under his command didn't die, then their ghostly faces wouldn't haunt him. He had never been interested in command before, but now.......
The whole front had devolved from a coordinated push into deadly games of cat and mouse throughout this section of the city. Human-tyranid genestealer hybrids led the ambushes alongside the genestealer beings they idolized. This happened to the forces arriving from the sea
AND those coming in from the port. Even the ministorum forces suffered badly, most notably the frateris militia.
What they lacked in endurance they made up for in sheer tenacity. The Exorcist tanks were zealously guarded by battle sister squads as the organ-miester played the keyboard. Missiles shot up from organ tubes alongside great battle hymns that invigrated even the dying. Their progress was excruciatingly slow, but it held up reasonably well as they set fire to any shadows that sat in their path. Only the penitent engines rushed forwards to clash with re purposed promethium mining tanks. Mutant humans chunked heavy explosive charges from the backs of the vehicles even as they were crushed by the penitent engines.
Site 5:Serephan wondered what he should do. The rest of draco left and he was all that was left.
He would show them....he would prove his worth to the kill team once again. He boosts his jump pack, headed in the opposite direction, East towards the main landing.
He was alone, like a solitary bird of prey among the treetops. Like those predators, he had the benefit of a bird's eye view. He soon finds himself upon the edges of the main battle. The front must've extended for at least 7 straight KM. In the distance he saw a lumbering bio-titan, taller than most of the surviving buildings. The major would have to take that thing down on his own with his own weapons. Serephan wanted something to kill- no an enemy to kill.
The blood thirst was setting upon him again. He could feel it. The first victims of his wrath were large mutant-human hybrids with ugly faces and powered mining tools. He landed in the center of them as they sought to flank the landing site. Without any preamble he begins slicing them, fully under the thirst.
The heretics were tough, he couldn't make out the insignia's on the pauldrons, but they must've been mortarions. He slices them messily with the chainsword. Blood and foul ichor spray everywhere.
The chainsword cut through the armor easily enough, but even with such grievous wounds they fought back, using powered hammers they had acquired somewhere to replace bolters and power swords.
"Traitors!" he yells ncoherently as he hacks them to pieces, one by one.
Red slowly overtook his vision and for a while, he was lost......
He came to his senses in a field of bodies, not entirely human, but not entirely xenos. They could only have been genestealer abominations, setting in from what remained of the local populace.
The large bio-titan he had spotted earlier sat still in the distance, having sometime been felled by the Major's forces.
With a sharp grin, he again moves towards the main battle, eager to show them his worth.
The wastes....Makradon and Ambrose had set out with the ministorum forces headed for ironbound, wherever he was.
No one spoke to or even acknowledged them.
Just outside the city, they split up to cover a wider area. The mounted dominion squads easilly outpaced the lumbering Ambrose and the slightly faster Makradon.
All the while Ambrose shouted:
"SMALL FELLOWS! DONT LEAVE ME BEHIND! WE SHALL KILL GREENSKINS TOGETHER! I WILL NOT HOG THE GLORY THE TIME! THERE IS ENOUGH FOR ALL!"Makradon followed silently, making calculations based on the differing directions the immolator mounted squads went. They had a 67% chance of finding Ironbound before draco at this rate.
He looked up to find thim in the middle of a hard-pan desert. The alien wastes stretched out before them as far as the eye could see. It was desolate and isolated to say the least.
His optics on his HUD blinked on a fleck in the distance. His armor's spirit had locked onto something.
He instructed the machine spirit to magnify and enhance.
The small square grew larger and line of coding swept downwards, attempting to digitally remaster the image. In the end, all that remained was a pixilated mush.
"Brother Ambrose, direct your auspexes North by northeast 14.67 degrees, Tell me what you see."
Ambrise swiveled in the direction indicated and finally grew silent again as his auspex took its readings.
"There is a structure in the distance....ORKS! It can only be ORKS! Haha! TO BATTLE BROTHER!"Makradon sighed inwardly. Venerable Amrose was even less acclimated than he had been when he had freed him from the bonds of sarcophigal slumber. He would need to look again at the stability of the spirits of the ancient armor, and make sure Ambrose had not been corrupted by faulty data. Such tasks could only be done in a well-equipped forge.
In any case, they had a spot that could be a possible location for Ironbound. The likelihood the ministorum was already there was substantially high; but if those paths converged, maybe he could slow them down until the rest of the kill team arrived.
"Let us face the orks," he goads Ambrose, "To battle brother." as they start off in that direction.....