CHAOS TURN 4
The snipers barely knew what hit them. Harawicz and his squad, down to five men after the red-armoured Eldar had incinerated them at point-blank range, leapt onto the plateau and fell upon the Eldar with a savage frenzy.
It was over in a matter of seconds. Harawicz raised his flamer and blasted the snipers with a torrent of liquid fire, dropping one instantly and taking another out of the fight for good. Harawicz watched with disinterest as the sniper writhed on the ground, ablaze and unable to smother the flames that consumed him. As Harawicz looked on, the other Raptors leapt, chainswords whirling, and presently the only evidence of the snipers' passing was a pile of chopped meat and tattered rags. One of the Raptors knelt down to pick up an Eldar rifle and break it over his knee, throwing the remains over the edge of the plateau.
"And now?" a Raptor asked, his off-white livery caked with splotches of blood and dust.
"Reload, regroup, and wait," Harawicz snapped immediately, checking the fuel gauge on his flamer. It still read as mostly full.
Below them, the daemon summoned into de Geer stomped towards the battle tank below them. Harawicz recognised the giant prism cannon on its turret.
"And take cover, there's a tank below us. Fire Prism class."
The Raptors cautiously crept away from the edge of the plateau and Harawicz hoped the daemon would take care of the Eldar tank sooner rather than later. Further away, the Caged stomped towards the Ghost Lord they had injured, and Szymaczek's squad vanished from sight, breaking into a run on the other side of the Ghost Warriors. Harawicz tried to hail Szymaczek, but could receive nothing. He supposed the Eldar were jamming his communications, or perhaps Szymaczek was already dead. He heard muffled grenade blasts, but even despite Lyman's Ear and his autosenses, he could barely tell anything from them.
Harawicz was distracted by a flare of light and stared at the Caged as first one, then the other opened fire on the wounded Ghost Lord. For a second Harawicz stared, eyes wide in amazement as the Ghost Lord shrugged off energy blasts that should have shattered a battle tank. The Ghost Lord put its shoulder down and bull-rushed the Caged, but the monstrosities fired again and the Ghost Lord collapsed in a heap, still running as it pitched forward and fell down at the base of the hill, its upper body reduced to slag.
Harawicz watched as the red Eldar, Dragon Warriors wielding meltaguns, turned to face Commander Durante and levelled their fluted guns at him, but for all their courage, there were few foes that could stand against a champion of Chaos. Durante smashed one to the ground and squashed the Dragon Warrior like an ant beneath his Terminator-armoured boot. The Dragon Warriors' resolve failed them and Harawicz suppressed a childish giggle as they fled before Durante, the giant Champion gunning them all down with marksman-like precision as they tried to run away. Further off, he could see Vratusa haul his enormous form into the ruins, crushing the unlife out of a Ghost Warrior with his power claw, and pounding the remains into another until it, too, fell limp. The Seers accompanying the Ghost Warriors lashed out with glowing blades of fire, but if Vratusa noticed the blades slicing through his more redundant systems he couldn't have cared. Even so distant, Harawicz could literally smell the bloodlust radiating from Vratusa as the insane Space Marine thrashed about with his claw, backhanding Ghost Warriors to the floor and weathering the impact of their fists as they pounded against his hull.
A horrible crunching sound echoed up from below and Harawicz dropped onto his belly, peering down from the edge with horror as the daemon finally charged the Fire Prism tank. The tank was swinging wildly, attempting what looked like an aggressive set of evasive manoeuvers as the daemon leapt. The tank somehow managed to bat the daemon away, catching it in the chest with a side sweep of its port wing. As the daemon closed again, the tank tried to circle around it and ram it from behind with the same wing, but the daemon was ready and leapt onto the tank's side. The giant mace in its left hand hammered into the tank's cockpit and smashed its canopy, pulverising the pilot in a gruesome instant. Without stopping to appreciate its handiwork the daemon put its hooded face to the wound in the tank's cockpit and its hood, ever billowing outward, closed around the tank's armour like a lamprey's mouth as the daemon started devouring the tank's interior. Bright yellow flames burst around the edges of the daemon's cowl and a noise, somewhere between a roaring fire and the shrieking of a chainblade, rent the air as the daemon started burrowing into the stricken tank, already swaying wildly as it tried to keep itself steady, almost as if there were something inside still trying to pilot it.
Something flashed in the tank's interior and its thrusters spluttered, and as Harawicz watched, the daemon was catapulted out of the tank's interior by a glowing fireball that, impossibly, screamed like the souls of the damned. Perhaps the daemon was shrieking, its triumph evident even as it picked itself up proudly, but Harawicz suspected it was the cry of an Eldar soul, or multiple Eldar souls, vanishing into the aethyr and plunging into hell; came Harawicz's own death, those Eldar would be paving the way for him as his comrades waited to walk with him.
(RL Note: Yes, the weird terminology continues; I figured Harawicz wouldn't ever have learned to recognise any Lam-Eldannar, so he'd never have known the real names of the various parts of the Eldar army, and so he'd only have known names used by other, equally ill-informed renegades.
also, rules blip that slipped our minds -- we each had one -- for some reason the Wraithguard were all going for Vratusa's rear armour, whereas Durante somehow managed to Sweeping Advance. both of those, I accept, were wrong)