Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Few creatures take to the skies at night — and Rathalos are no exception. Flight is an extraordinarily energy-intensive act; outside of migration, taking to the air in the dark when prey cannot be spotted is pure waste.

But when daylight came and sight returned, the sun's rays awakened the Silver Rathalos's instinct for flight — and dragged the battle into its second phase.

The Silver Rathalos had grown sick of his current predicament. Lunge after lunge at Lieutenant Admir had produced nothing; his relentless pursuit had reduced Admir to scrambling desperately out of reach, but that same relentlessness had left the Silver Rathalos unable to reset his own attack posture.

Recognizing that this grinding close-quarters stalemate was keeping him boxed into a narrow range, the Silver Rathalos abandoned the melee with Admir the moment dawn broke.

He ignored the Astartes who had slipped beneath him and were attempting to carve into his belly with their Power Swords. Instead, he spat a fireball as he lurched backward, then shoved off with both legs and vaulted straight into the air.

The hastily-launched fireball ran cooler than usual — but it was still damage no Astartes could simply tank head-on. While those tin-cans scrambled to dodge, the Silver Rathalos was already climbing to low altitude, sweeping his wings in great beats. The violent pressure wave he kicked up caught several Astartes mid-dodge before they could recover their footing and pinned them in place.

He tilted his head down, lining up on the cluster of Astartes below. Savage fire gathered in his maw — an explosive fireball running several times hotter than the one he'd just spit — clearly intending to end this ground-bound annoyance in a single devastating shot.

But this was exactly the moment Lin had been waiting for.

The Silver Rathalos had grown complacent about the threat from range. The gauss rifles had been hitting him all fight and not putting a scratch worth worrying about through his armor — so when he bowed his head to concentrate fire on the tin-cans below, Lin gave the order:

"Bolt volley first — clear his guard! Archers, loose!"

Five ballistae concealed in the jungle were rolled into the open. Astartes drew back bowstrings strung with wyvern sinew, and arrows cast from dragon bone were loosed at the Silver Rathalos in low hover with thunderclap speed.

Lin had arranged each ballista to target a different part of the Silver Rathalos's body: the membrane of both wings, both wing-bones, and the comparatively soft underbelly.

Five ballistae set up in five different directions caught the Silver Rathalos completely off guard. He had already lowered his head to charge his attack when the bolts came screaming in — there was no time to evade.

The Silver Rathalos wrenched himself sideways, snatching the bolt aimed at his belly out of the air with one claw. A second bolt, deflected by his turn, grazed his right wing-bone and buried itself in his back. The remaining three flew true — punching clean through their targets, piercing the left wing-bone and tearing holes through the membrane of both wings.

Snarling in pain, the Silver Rathalos snapped his gaze to the ballistae. He discharged the explosive fireball still building in his jaws, hurling it at them — and though the Astartes manning the machines fell back in time, the blast still engulfed two of the ballistae in the explosion.

Scorching flame reduced one ballista to ash on the spot. The other was hurled end-over-end by the concussive wave. The Silver Rathalos was on top of that flipped ballista in a heartbeat, snatching it up in his claws and smashing it to splinters.

Lin narrowed his eyes, watching two ballistae disappear in the blink of an eye. After seeing what that explosive fireball could do, all he could be grateful for was that the shot hadn't detonated in the middle of the Astartes fighting up close.

The three remaining ballistae kept firing, but they could no longer generate a real threat against a Silver Rathalos who was now on guard. He climbed higher into the sky, using altitude to stay above the trajectories of the bolts while exploiting a Rathalos's core advantage — strafing the ground below with relentless, sweeping flame from mid-air.

Sheets of fire torched vast swaths of jungle. With their tree cover stripped away, the remaining ballistae were quickly spotted by the Silver Rathalos — and though the Astartes tried to withdraw with their equipment, two more were chased down and burned to nothing.

Faced with that, Lin could only shake his head.

Flight was a simply absurd ability. In theory a Rathalos and a Tigrex should be roughly matched opponents — but a Rathalos's airborne capability was the nightmare of any hunter cursed with limited ranged options. Against a mutant Silver Rathalos whose flight surpassed even a standard Rathalos, the situation was even more dire.

Still — the ballistae were gone, but Lin had already gotten what he'd wanted from the initial ballista ambush. The punctured wings and damaged right wing-bone meant the Silver Rathalos had to burn significantly more effort just to hold altitude and stay balanced in the air. The strain showed quickly; the creature so recently dominating the skies began visibly flagging.

The Rathalos was forced to tilt his tail up to compensate and let himself drop lower — and the sharp-eyed Lin caught that small shift instantly, using the full read of his golden finger to strip the Silver Rathalos's hand bare.

"He's going to dive and follow with a venomed talon strike — Admir, watch his feet!"

Admir was already fully locked in. Forewarned by Lin, the instant the Silver Rathalos folded his wings and plunged into a dive, Admir twisted to the side — leaving the high-speed dive to punch through empty air.

The Silver Rathalos used the last sliver of glide before touchdown to complete a mid-air spin, landing to face Admir, who had already rolled clear. His failed attack left him snarling with frustrated fury, and he let out a roar.

But against Admir in his Tigrex set — which made him practically deaf to roars — it had no effect whatsoever. Admir didn't so much as flinch, pressing forward with the man's wife still in hand. The sheer audacity of it sent the already-furious Silver Rathalos into something approaching madness.

He began sweeping his tail at the encircling Astartes and Admir alike to drive them back — but with thirteen Astartes taking turns probing from every angle, the Silver Rathalos ended up spinning himself into a near-perfect automated top.

The exposed spine the Silver Rathalos presented while whipping his body around also opened opportunities for Lin's ranged fire team. Using the time bought by the grounded Silver Rathalos being tied down, Lin issued another order:

"Aim for the wound the arrows opened in his back — keep shooting!"

The twenty-plus-man fire team unleashed several times the firepower of before. A torrent of gauss rifle rounds poured straight into the already-broken wound, freely compounding the damage. Recognizing the situation was turning against him, the Silver Rathalos lost all interest in continuing the ground brawl — even if his injuries weren't yet critical, he had no intention of staying on the dirt in a war of attrition.

The Rathalos gathered power to take back to the sky — but the instant his wings beat, a Flashbomb hurled by Lieutenant Vigan burst right in front of his face, turning the Silver Rathalos's world into a total whiteout.

Robbed of the spatial awareness needed to launch, the Silver Rathalos stumbled, his attempted takeoff collapsing into an ungainly sprawl on the ground. Admir seized the opening and led the charge, but the Silver Rathalos's armored skull and tightly-shut eyelids denied them any front-facing opening.

They could only drive their Power Swords deeper into the wounds on his belly and back, while simultaneously hacking at his wings — working to further degrade what remained of his ability to fly.

The first Flashbomb's effect was dramatic. The Silver Rathalos thrashed on the ground for a full twenty-five seconds before hauling himself upright. Drenched in blood, he didn't even bother with a roar — just fixed the warriors of Baifeng Company with a gaze of pure, concentrated hatred, then vaulted back into the air and took to flight once more.

Lin knew full well that for all the Silver Rathalos looked pitiful right now, these were superficial wounds. Yet the hunt had gone almost suspiciously smoothly — not a single Astartes had been pulled from the fight yet, and that gave Lin confidence that sheer attrition alone could grind these surface injuries into the fatal exhaustion that would finally bring the creature down.

But it was precisely because things were going too smoothly that Lin felt a quiet, creeping unease.

Would the World Soul just sit back and watch them sail through this? It had already turned an ordinary male Rathalos into a Rathalos subspecies through the process of hunting Astartes — and then bent the rules entirely, letting that subspecies evolve post-birth into a Silver Rathalos, a form normally determined by constitution from the very beginning.

Now the Silver Rathalos looked like he was losing to this well-armed Astartes warband. Would the World Soul truly stand by and let that happen?

The quiet unease became reality soon enough. Two Felynes came sprinting up to Lin, urgently shoving a handcart ahead of them. They tipped it over in front of him, and an Astartes rolled off the cart and came to rest at Lin's feet.

"The creature previously identified as Deviljho has appeared." The Astartes — a veteran of the earlier Tigrex hunt — was spitting blood, his condition clearly deteriorating, but he forced himself to hold together long enough to report: "Instructor Sergeant Arlo, who was stationed on the outer perimeter, is currently engaging it with his team!"

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