To the credit of the Warhound’s crew, the lithe engine veered away from the discharging volcano blast, avoiding the certain death of its fusion heat. To the credit of the Scion’s crew, however, the unleashing of its primary weapon had merely been a way to shepherd the Warhound to where it wished it to go. Dodging the inferno sent the Daughter of the Red Star striding directly into the rain of falling missiles.
The first impacts arrested its evading stride, forcing it to brace back on its own hydraulics to prevent itself toppling over. It was already dead, dead the moment it weaved away from the volcano cannon: the Warhound’s voids rippled, blistered, sundered, burst in the span of a human heartbeat. The missiles were dozens of falling blades, each one knifing into the Daughter’s carapace and gouging away great chunks of blackened ablative metal. One rocket shattered its knee joint, another hammered into its sloping canine forehead and ripped away half of its cockpit-head, leaving its crew’s burning corpses dangling from its halved skull, still connected to their thrones by their hardplug cables, hanging like executed criminals.
<Foedeath,> the Scion canted, coding her tone with silken malice. She received an answer – snarling, patient hate from the Warlord ahead.
She was rising again, forcing pressure back into depleted hydraulics. Restoring pressure to vented metal bones took time, and she had precious little of it. A barrage from the enemy Warlord struck her front shields with punitive whip-cracks.
Alarm chimes became wailing sirens as her voids thinned and buckled. She silenced her internal warnings with a thought; she knew how much pain she was in and the danger surrounding her. She didn’t need automated systems caterwauling to drive the point home.
She was at half-extension when her voids went dark. She braced, leaning into the punishment striking her forward arc, shaking even before the sonic boom of her voids finally giving out. Hard las-fire raked and gouged her armour plating, cutting into her, rending her apart while she still stood.
Mercifully, the battering ceased almost at once. The approaching Warlord had expended itself in shattering the Scion’s shields. Both engines strained to reload, fresh rockets racking into place, plasma generators roiling as they recharged.
She was deeply wounded now, sparks lighting up the inside of her cockpit-skull through the windows of her eyes. Fire suppressant sprayed through her insides in soothing rushes. Half of her missile racks had jammed, their mechanisms fouled by damage.
Closer the enemy Warlord came, an executioner’s confidence in the shieldless tilt of its wounded prey, needing to be within a kilometre to trust the accuracy of its webway-misted firing solutions. Spraying blind-fire and estimating trajectories was no longer enough. The time had come for the killing blow.
The Scion started walking. Bleeding fluid and streaming smoke, the way she still rose on her resetting hydraulics gave her a distinct, shoulder-charging hunch. The enemy Warlord ceased locomotion at an approximate kilometre, unwilling to draw closer. No doubt its crew was trying to ordain a hasty, coolant-dump weapon recharge.
She started running. A stabiliser-wrenching, metal-stressing lean as her ugly, stomping stride gained speed. She dumb-fired, systemless and trusting her gunners’ eyes, volleying every missile that had managed to reload and lancing a beam from her volcano cannon. Her assault hammered into her foe’s void shields in the precious seconds before the enemy Warlord fired. The Scion felt the brief, electric sweetness of vindication as her foe’s voids stuttered and snap-died with the telltale thunder-crack of overloading generators. Failed shields could be swiftly relit, but overloaded systems required a more lengthy restart. The two engines were as defenceless as each other.
A moment later the return barrage took the Scion high in the torso, exploding along her shoulder, detonating the cache of unloaded rockets in a cacophonic fireburst. Stabilisers braced and held. Others braced and tore free of their housing. She was barely a skeleton now, blackened and stripped of a third of her hull-bulk. Where two immense missile arrays had stood proud of her shoulders there now burned a halo of flame. She left her gunlimb on the bridge where it had fallen, blown free of her carapace by the detonations ripping through her.
<Lexarak!> the Warlord canted its name in confident fury. Even so, it began to back away. The Scion’s stride-eating charge was bringing both engines dangerously close, and Lexarak needed range to use its primary armaments.
The Scion’s overburdened ankle shattered, spraying iron and fire across the bridge. She stumbled, grinding down on the stump of a clawed foot, and strode forwards another step.
Lexarak recognised that its backwards retreat was too slow and risked heading into a turn. Too late now, as well as too slow. Incidental, instinctive fire spat from its defensive turrets, too little, too late.
The Scion crashed forwards on its final step, her power fist slamming against opposing armoured metal and clenching closed. Lexarak fired its volcano cannon at terminal range, careless of the consequences in its need for panicked retaliation. For several seconds the Scion stood motionless, disembowelled by the last shot, lightning snaking its way through her innards, beating out from her critical core.
Fortune was with her for a few moments more. Between the Hexarchon’s momentum and her own weight, she pulled her fist back on squealing hydraulics, wrenching her prize free of the enemy Titan’s body.
The most glorious Titan-kills, and accordingly rare, involved the close-combat taking of an enemy’s head, severing it or dragging it from an engine’s still-living form. The cockpit-heads of eldar Titans made for the finest trophies in a forge’s halls. Lexarak had turned aside, preventing such a triumph. Instead, the Scion’s armoured hand had plunged through the damaged plating of its upper rib armour, just beneath the armpit of its left gunlimb. When she drew her hand back, in her scorched fingers was the hourglass-shaped, cable-strewn heart of the plasma reactor, leaking with fireflash containment breaches.
She held to it, fingers locked. She couldn’t drop it. Her digital gearings had melted and seized.
<Fall, apostate.> Her canting to Lexarak was weak, her war-horns even weaker. <Reap the rewards of treason and heresy.>
Lexarak began to topple, unpowered, unbalanced. It fell forwards in a painfully protracted pitch, first shattering the lip of the wraithbone bridge beneath the weight of its legs, then falling – sluggishly, end over end – into the abyss.
The Scion watched it eaten by the golden mist.
<Foedeath,> she canted.
As if her words were a signal, the reactor in her fist went critical, the resulting detonation peeling away the armour on her left side and tearing away her remaining arm at the elbow.
She stood stunned and ruined on the precipice of the chasm, weaponless and unarmed, crowned by fire with sparks raining from her joints.
The bridge was hers.
Wounded unto death, the Warlord Titan stood alone now, leaking life and streaming with the smoke of internal injuries.
<Scion of Vigilant Light!> she canted in unison with her failing war-horn. Hear me, she prayed. Hear me. Hear the last words of Princeps Nishome Alvarek and the regal Scion.Hear us both. Let us not die unremembered.