Plateau of Leng
Somewhen
Clouds of acrid sulphur-yellow smoke smother the battlefield, a shallow pass across a short ridge-line, a gaping wound in the blighted heath of the Plateau of Leng. Musketry crackles continuously, like angry fire-crackers, crashing volleys in metronome timing. Prentice fauns run the ranks inside the square, distributing ammunition boxes, wooden crates full of copper-foil and card-board cartridges, and precious water from the company's tank-cart. Bayonets flash and flicker in the red-light of the setting orbus and fauns and things scream and cry piteously where the assault presses close. And sounding out over all, the bellowing metallic basso profundo of a corpse-eater consumes all other sounds. The biomechanical dragon-ogre has pushed its way through the screaming ranks of the T'cho-T'cho line, smashing many of the pygmy pikemen beneath its corpulent bulk.
If it stood up straight, the front portion of the crocodilian centauroid would stand fifteen feet tall if it stood an inch, but in form it was hunched over and crooked, spine twisted with mutations and tumors, and the living machinery common to all the Dragon's possessed husks. Blind scabbed over eyes glow a sickly corpse-green, all three of them, as the beast crawled forward upon six clawed limbs, with a powerful segmented tail with wicked spikes on the end whisking back and forth. In its’ clawed hands it cluches a brutal cleaver of a pollax, which it lifts up to fanged reptilian maw to lick the dripping edge with rolling and grey forked-tongue.
Tennant Tummnas looks up from where he has a picked-party of walking wounded, cooks, medics, apprentices, and other supernumeraries turning the baggage train into a final redoubt and nods, they have cleared the first hurdle, now for the second. Leaving over-turned carts and wagons and piled crates and hastily piled mounds of earth marking a forlorn hope, he calls for his runners. He is too tired to feel anything but numb at this eventuality, but a Tennant's work is never done, for there is no rest for the wicked. The company sergeants and corporals have the lines firmly in hand, dressing the ranks with partizans and curses, and the corpse-eater's assault bends that side of the square, but does not break it. Yet.
"You, break open the panzerfausts," Tummnas eyes the lad to make sure he selects the correct crate to break into, then turns to another, "my sword, and hurry, Colour Sergeant Mourne!"
"Sah?!"
"Fall out your picked gors, its time to form up a flying column. Load for bear."
"Sah! You come 'ere, follow me." The grizzled one eyed veteran Dusigor wastes little time in grabbing a combination of those on his list; the troublemakers, the volunteers, the malingerers, and the daydreamers, filling them out with semi random picks from the heaving ranks, as the war-luck moves him.
By the time Tummnas has finished belting on his ancestral bright-blade and picked out a powder-packed brass tube with shaped-charge grenade on the end for himself, his chosen are awaiting his command, to files of eight fauns, each with service carbine slung and a rocket tube in hand, belts crowded with stick-bombs, pioneer knives, and short handled shovels. And the Colour Sergeant himslef, leaning on a partizan bearing the company streamer.
"If ye packed that relic lad, why not a set of mythmail and a fookin' kite then?" asked Mourne converstationaly, the laughing-twinkle in his one remaining eye taking the sting out of the barb.
"Tradition Sergeant, tradition," Tummnas replied as he drew forth the singing, shimmering blade, eyeing the ornate and swept hilt, displaying a proud family crest; a single winged flying wyrm circled ourobouros around a hollow triangle. Then he loosed himself up with a few test swings cutting the air, "Although I will admit, I wouldn't mind having more than an issue tunic between myself-myself and that beast."
"So say we all," Mourne shot back, then spat a stream of yellow spit from the worked plug of pipe-weed in his lips, "ready sire?"
Tennant Tummnas snorted as he sheathed his blade and shifted the rocket-grenade to both hands, "Aye, Flying Column! Follow me!"
He led them at the trot to where the corpse-eater was smashing its way through the first rank of the square's front face. A dusigor went flying overhead with a short, sharp scream as Tummnas brought them to a halt, the poor bastard left a trail of gore and entrails in his wake, before splashing down into a watery crater, staining the scabrous, putrid water red.
Tummnas lifted his ‘faust, pocketing the tube under his armpit, flipping up the brass filigree sighting leaf so he could center the roaring beast in the twenty-five cloth-yard hole. Then his thumb smashes the release for the striker and with a double bang, the beast roars in pain, as its saurian head snaps back in a fountain of copper colored blood and flame, before slowly turning back to focus single remaining slit-pupil yellowed eye directly at Tummnas, and bellowing his rage in metal-tinged roar.
Tummnas breathes out with a hiss, a sub-vocal litany to the Parthenos on quivering lips, as he turns with deliberate and practiced calmness that is entirely performative and not at all felt, reaches out his hand to the Faun next to him and yells, perhaps with a little more heat than intended.
"Another!"