This story here is inspired by the outrageous luck and ballsy decision of a fellow player and good friend during a roleplaying game called Black Crusade. We were taking part in a stage called 'massed combat', which is essentially how a battle is run when two units of large armies meet one another. On this stage, the player characters' ability to do damage is limited to a certain extent. Anyway, long story short, my character and two others rolled poorly, and it looked like we were going to lose this phase of the engagement, and quite possibly make things impossible for us to win the wider battle.
So my friend opted to throw all the bonuses she had in reserve on her roll, and decided she would do the equivalent of a personal charge into the enemy, which grants positive modifiers but also doubles any failures she rolls. Now, 1 Degree of Success is a basic success, and whilst that would mean her character would've killed a handful of enemies, she'd need 5 Degrees of Success to undo the damage we had done to ourselves.
She managed 10 Degrees of Success.
So yeah, this one's for you J.
On the cursed water world of Furia, where leviathans rule the waves, men and women died beneath the lifeless sky. The lure had been deployed, and the more bellicose servants of the serpent charged into the snare. All that was asked of the Castaway King's meagre forces was to hate and hold. Hate and hold, until the Marauding Fleet arrived. To help them hold was a warband known as the Lost Legion, the name itself being a misnomer – they were but three chaos marines, a servant girl and a woman with a halberd.
When the lost legion arrived to bolster the line, they brought with them all the tactical acumen and skill at arms expected of veterans of the Long War, as one after another they committed to the battle. The Word Bearer exhorted his human charges to wrath and death with sermons as old and as tested as the Heresy itself, but the enemy absorbed the punishment and came back for more. The Thousand Son sought out the enemy commanders, but they were well protected from his machinations, bodyguards and psi-screens halting his attempts to damage their chain of command. The Son of Horus stood his ground and reaped a great tally in his initial charge, but the crude plasma torches and support weapons of the mundanes eventually found their mark, driving the mighty warrior back.
As all this happened, the halberdier in crimson power armour lounged against her weapon, the barge she stood upon gently bobbing over the waves. She tried not to be angry at Borgir, the Son of Horus, who had counselled caution, who had told her to stay back and maintain formation… only to rush in against the forces of the Serpent acting the hypocrite. Borgir's words had been galling, but what she resented all the more was the lack of fighting up until this point; kowtowing and begging for scraps at the hands of feral warlords, facilitating this alliance, all of it tawdry, all of it boring.
And yet, she was told to hold position. As though she was subservient to the astartes.
"Borgir is assailed on the left. He will be overwhelmed and the flank will fail, if nothing is done." Spoke the cowled radio operator on Volta's barge.
The sneer ruined the lovely features of her heart-shaped face, only enhancing the leer of her empty right eye-socket. She tilted her head, allowing the pearl-white horns that sprouted from the side of her head to graze and shave at the shaft of her polearm, the psy-reactive metal pointed skyward. The operator's fingers drummed urgently on the horn of his radio as the tumult of blade strokes, gunshots, roaring engines and dying soldiers filled the air.
"Shall I issue orders for a fighting withdr-"
"Shut up, neanderthal." She said, the tone airy, wooden, wavering.
The radio operator mutely obeyed. The sound of the progressing battle wore at him, but he could sense the rage boiling beneath the surface of his commander.
At last, she spoke. "To the warp with this waiting. Drive us forward."
"Forward? To support Borgir, or to-"
There was a whir of power servos as Volta rounded on the operator with a punch, the mailed fist flooring him.
"Forward! Into them! Stop, and I'll kill you!" She bellowed, pointing the force-halberd at the rest of the crew, the long snout of the flamer mounted on her arm pointing their way. They each knew that to charge into the enemy's forward elements would leave them unsupported, boarded and slain in short order. But none of them could stand to defy that wild, yellow eye of hers.
The helmsman got them underway, and steamed towards the bloodshed. Volta donned her helmet, the junction slit in it allowing the enemy to look her in the eye and hear her words as she killed them. She prepared herself, plying the immense, twisted power of the warp, preparing herself for the snapping, inconsistent but immensely gratifying experience that was fighting in warptime.
Initially, the enemy didn't react to her, not really. Serpent ships breezed past her, their occupants in their oil-smeared smocks and scrap metal breastplates leaning over and swinging clogging chainswords and firing their desperate, makeshift plasma torches and slug throwers. Volta was dismissive in her ripostes. A lazy torrent of promethium here, a choice cut there, and these chancers flopped into the ocean or back onto their boats, bisected and burning beneath the waves. As the smell of cooked flesh and blood filled the air, Volta began to smile, satisfied with the graceful, final gifts she had given to her adversaries.
By the time the enemy commanders had realised what was rushing through their ranks, it was far too late to do anything. More of the enemy moved to stop her, but that only made her fight with more violent energy, her death-strokes becoming more brutal - but no less precise - with each fallen foe. By the time they had formed a blockade to stop her advance, she was in full flow. Her eye was wide open, her pupil a pinprick, her teeth bared in a predatory grin, savouring the test of her skills, the oppurtunity to please 'mother'.
This world was her canvas, and she would work only in red.
She leapt aboard the first blockading ship, goring the first man who rushed to meet her with her horns. With a flick, she tossed him into the unquiet sea before the real killing began. The occupants of the first barge, six in all, dressed in soiled fabrics and scrap armour, drew weapons and charged her, but they moved slowly. Even without her ability to warp time around her, they were sluggish, grim determination locked on their features all the same.
She weaved through them, her halberd flicking out, licking a neck, an arm, a leg, every time separating a limb from the whole with its long edge. No blade or bullet could hit her, her form seeming to phase around their strikes, her reflexes beyond that of mortal men; it was as if the laws of real space did not apply to her. Her gifts made her an exception. Blood shone on her blade and streamed behind it as she moved.
Far too quickly, she had killed them all, leaving them red ruins on the decking. Her eye flashed to regard the ramshackle ships that had been rushing to support their comrades begin to bank away. The damage was already done, and they feared death at her hand.
Her grin widened as she started forward, breaking into a sprint, raising the halberd's butt high before stabbing it onto the armoured lip of the ship's side, and leapt, vaulting off of the boat's rusting barrier by way of her weapon.
The greaves of her power armour crushed a man as she landed, his bones snapping like rotten bark as the others panicked and readied weapons far, far too slowly. Volta's halberd hacked, gouged and tore them asunder. When her blood-lust and contempt reached its height, fire and light would leap from the mouths and eyes of her impaled victims, her psychic might coursing through the blade and purging their very souls from their bodies. The other ships rallied, their crews rushing in to help repel boarders, to try and stop the unstoppable.
They may as well have been trying to stop a hurricane by beating at it. Volta's axe-head lodged fast in the chest of a hunch-backed creature wearing aviator goggles. She parried an incoming blow from a scale-skinned mutant with the shaft, a second, before she twisted and pulled the blade, dragging it from the hunch-back and taking the eyes of the mutant, hacking off an elbow, letting a hammer blow roll off of her helmet before she swung about to burst the hammerer's brain with another burst of screeching psy-fury. Dozens danced with her, and she cast them all down. She had barely killed a quarter of their number before they began to rout, unable to match her taste for this butchery. Angered at their cowardice, she triggered the arm-flamer, and their cries for mercy rose into shrieks of agony. She sighed, exultant at the killing as the enemy began to give way, preparing to give chase, until the vox in her helmet squawked.
++Lady Volta, we require assistance. Borgir's last known position is as follows…++
Volta shook her head to herself as she went to the boat's controls, familiarising with the crude instruments by trial and error alone.
"Fine. Fine!" She responded over the vox, her expression sullen as she noticed her own barge listing to a halt behind her, the crew fearfully silent.
I'll bail you out, if only to hold it over your head.
Volta's circuitous route found the exposed flank of the enemy's main line.
Her arrival there was like a thunderclap. Reports surged down through the ranks that a beast in red armour, sporting horns, one eye and sinfully fast had wiped out their reserves and was now in their hindquarters. Rumours of daemons and dark patronage ran rampant through the Serpent's forces, terror and superstition seizing them and they began to collapse. The Castaways sped forward on their barges in pursuit, running down and slaying the Serpent's men, heavy stubbers chewing apart their fleeing vanguard. As they whooped and gave praise to their king and gunfire to their enemy, Volta linked up with Borgir. The giant of a space marine, clad in a cloak of furs and power armour that better resembled medieval plate, leant hard on the long, iron kite shield. There were half a dozen punctures, scorch marks and rents in his helmet alone.
"You told me to stay back, and yet you went forward."
The slit of Borgir's helmet lifted to regard her. "The line was crumbling. I had no choice but to put my shoulder to the wheel. I know my craft, witch." There was an unpleasant stress placed on that last word.
Volta pouted, her single eye giving him a heavy-lidded stare. "Leave me some blood to shed next time, Borgir, or I'll slake my thirst on you."
The chaos space marine stared down at her, the gauntlet behind the shield cupping the pommel of the khopesh he wore at his waist, wondering if he should have need of it - but Volta was already turning about to survey the battlefield. Borgir snorted in amusement. A human, bold enough to challenge a mighty astartes?
The girl would be formidable.
"There!" Volta declared, pointing her halberd towards a flotilla of Serpent ships sporting their snapping command flags and vox masts, "Follow me to those banners!"
She signalled the helmsman of her craft, goading at the command flotilla with a stab of her halberd, and before long they were crashing over the waves towards victory or death.
Author's Note: Not a lot of context given or depth of character explored, this really was an homage to a moment that swung things our way. THAT SAID, constructive criticism is always appreciated!