Feats for Void Stalker:
Weapons and armor:
How curious, he thought, as she manifested. She stepped from a heat shimmer in the air itself, falling a dozen feet to land on her toes, with arms outspread. Her armour consisted of silver plating, shaped like slender musculature over a black bodysuit that shimmered like fish scales. In one hand was a staff – scimitar-bladed at both ends and wet with slow ripples of liquid lightning. In her other fist, she clutched a throwing star the size of a battle shield, ending in three hooked dagger blades. The fire that danced along the alien steel was black, forged through a craft Lucoryphus wasn’t certain he wished to know.
Her face was shielded by a silver death mask, sculpted in the cold-eyed image of a screaming goddess. A high, long crest of black hair flowed down her shoulders and back, somehow immune to the wind sending dust-wraiths haunting through the ruins.
Everything about her radiated wrongness, even to a creature as warp-touched as he. For several seconds, the heat haze remained around her, as if she were at risk of being rejected by reality.
This is no eldar maiden, the Raptor knew. Perhaps she was, once. Now… she is something much more.
Speed and strength feat (Void Stalker were injured during this):
Lucoryphus wasn’t part of First Claw, and lacked the unity of purpose that showed so clearly in the other two brothers. He leapt ahead of them with a roar that wouldn’t have shamed a Nostraman lion, clawed fingers curled and aiming for her heart.
The spear met him in the chest, annihilating his breastplate and casting him to the ground. Even as the maiden rammed her spear one-handed through the prone Raptor’s stomach, she was hurling her throwing star.
Cyrion’s enhanced reactions were honed from centuries of battle, and years of training even before that. In his lifetime, he’d blocked solid-slug bullets on his vambrace, and weaved to avoid laser fire without feeling its heat. His reflexes, like all of the warriors within the Legiones Astartes, were so far beyond human
that they bordered on supernatural. He was already moving to dodge aside before the blade left her fingers.
It wasn’t enough. Not even close. The spinning knives took him in the chest, crunching deep as they bit, and black fire burst across his armour.
The witch-queen held her hand to recall the throwing star. As it flashed through the air, Talos broke it in half with a swing of his power blade. The maiden tried to wrench her spear back out of Lucoryphus’s belly, but the Raptor gripped the haft in his metal claws, keeping it lodged inside his body and the stone ramparts beneath.
The prophet was on her a heartbeat later. She weaved aside from the first swing, and the second, and the third, leaping back and dodging each ponderous carve. Despite moving faster than the human eye could follow, his heavy swings wouldn’t land.
On another flip, her wounded leg gave out again. Talos swept her leg out from under her as she staggered to recover her balance, and at last Aurum struck home. The golden sword cleaved through her right arm, severing the limb close to the elbow.
She shrieked, then – an unamplified shriek of pain and frustration that sounded almost mortal. Dirty alien blood hissed and crackled as it burned away on the blade.
Her reply was a firm-fingered chop to the soft armour at his throat, crunching the cables there and thudding into his larynx hard enough to kill a human outright. It was enough to make him fall back, raising his blade defensively, struggling to catch his breath.
Void Stalker against terminators and other spacemarines:
She came from the darkness, just as her sisters had done. Varthon was the first to see her, and shouted a warning to the others. The cry died in his throat as soon as it started, ended by the spear blade punched through his breastplate, bursting both of his hearts in a single blow. A full metre of the black spear thrust out from his spine for a single moment, until the weapon slid back from his flesh with vicious patience.
She watched each of them as she let the body fall, while a flatline tune played out in every Night Lord’s helm.
Every figure moved at once. The legionaries lifted their bolters and opened fire, each of them unleashing a torrent of explosive shells and none of them coming close to striking her.
Flatline wails rang in Talos’s ears as he fired at the dancing, flickering figure. Centuries of training and battle aligned with the targeting processors in his Terminator plate and retinal display, guiding his aim as much as instinct. The storm bolter bucked and banged in his grip, spitting shells in a tide that only relented when he had to reload.
He backed away, crunching another magazine home. All of them were reloading out of sync, all sense of unity and covering fire gone in a moment. Talos saw, in one blurry scan of the chamber, how their bolter fire had savaged every single wall without once hitting their prey.
Jekrish White-Eyes died next, his head cleaved clean from his shoulders. As the body started to topple, Talos lifted his fist to block his brother’s spinning helm from hitting him. It clanged aside, dropping to the floor. He was already firing at the black blur, aiming in the places instinct and his targeting reticule said she’d be. More stonework died in detonation craters and splintering chips.
She didn’t even slow down to kill. The spear reaped right through Gol Tatha’s waist, severing him from his legs. In the same second, Faroven died halfway across the chamber, a three-bladed throwing star forged of alien iron and black fire cracking his head down the middle. Both bodies fell, twinning their thuds as they struck stone.
Mercutian cried out, his bulky suit of armour arching its back as he cursed. Talos caught a flicker of movement in his visor display as the spear lanced back out from his brother’s back. Mercutian staggered forward, only prevented from falling by the artificial ironclad muscles in his armour’s joints. His storm bolter boomed once more, before spilling from his grip.
When the throwing blade hit Uzas, it crashed against his horned helm, sending ceramite chunks clattering off the walls. He didn’t stagger as Mercutian had; he tumbled one step and
dropped to his hands and knees, heavy enough to send tremors through the floor. Talos saw blood drip to the dark stone ground, pooling between Uzas’s shaking hands.
‘Talos…’ crackled the vox.
‘Not now.’
‘Brother,’ said Variel, ‘when are you returning to the surf–’
‘Not now!’
He followed the blur with his storm bolter, just as it danced behind Korosa, the last soul standing in Third Claw. Korosa turned, as fast as a genhanced human body was capable of moving, lashing out with his howling chainsword. In the single second it took Talos to draw aim, Korosa was lurching backwards, blood gouting from his severed arm. He made it two steps before the spear’s backswing disembowelled him, spilling a wet slop of innards down the front of his war plate.
Talos fired over Korosa’s shoulder. The single crack and the throaty burst that followed were the sweetest sounds he’d ever heard. He saw the blur resolve into a female figure, as tall as any of them in their Terminator ceramite, falling back with her head snapped to the side.
Mercutian was struggling to reach for his dropped bolter and Uzas was still down, but Cyrion aligned his aim the same moment Talos fired again. A silver crescent arc blurred before her, detonating shell after shell before they could touch her. It took the prophet’s eyes a couple of precious seconds to adjust to the speed, before he realised she was blocking their incoming fire with the blade of her spear.
She couldn’t shatter them all. A withering spit of shells crashed against her black-and-bone armour, sending her reeling again.
Talos broke off to reload. Cyrion did the same, a second later. Both of them froze with their bolters empty, staring at the damaged wall where she’d been a moment before.
Korosa crashed to the ground, breaking the sudden silence.
For a long moment, Cyrion turned in place, unwilling to believe she was gone. Other, less intrusive sounds filtered back into being: Mercutian’s choking breaths, Uzas’s pained grunts, and the hiss of cooling bolter muzzles.
‘I can’t see her,’ Cyrion voxed over their squad link. ‘And I’m out of ammunition.’
‘As am I.’ Talos resisted the need to check on Uzas and Mercutian, never taking his eyes from the walls as he turned, back-to-back with Cyrion.
‘She’s still here,’ said Cyrion. ‘She must be.’
‘No.’ Talos gestured with his power fist. A trail of blood spatters led from the chamber, back into the tunnels. ‘She’s running.’
Cyrion threw his empty storm bolter away, discarding it without care. ‘We should be doing the same.’
////
‘I’ll miss this armour,’ Cyrion said. ‘Uzas and Mercutian are only still alive because of this war plate. That spear went through battle armour like a knife through flesh.’
vs
Who will win and why?
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