Liberation of Numinal - Manticore: The twin landers burned down through the skies of Numinal, heavy flak missiles streaking up to strike them, but doing nothing more than adding fresh scars to the slab-like armour plates which covered their blocky hulls. The landers came in fast and low on their powerful engines, but rather than slam directly into the roiling mass of Knights and Battle-Automata quickly dispersing themselves from the crushing attack, they roared overhead, skimming the crackling Void Shield mantle and sending shivers of blistering lightning coursing through the skies.In the wide scrubland wastes beyond the loading docks, the landers settled their vast bulks, side-ramps splitting open. Then across the wastes came a siren howl older than the Imperium, a complex, eardrum-splitting dirge. It was the ancient challenge, that of Knights to others of their warlike kind to partake in deadly combat.The ground shuddered as the Knights thundered forth, the bulk -- some fifty armours in all -- cast in quartered sable and deep amethyst blue, bearing the golden manticore heraldry of the dread House Orhlacc, missing from their homeworld of Dark Haven since before the Warmaster's talon had touched the Coronid Deeps. They were not alone. With them came Freeblades and outcasts in liveries both gaudy and strange, a maniple of Knights in the crimson-hued armour of House Hermetika, oath-sworn of distant Mezoa, and a warband of House Ærthegn, outcasts from their brethren that had taken up the cause of Horus and now come to make war upon their kin in bitter feud.It had been the sinisterly told-of House Orhlacc that had brought to the Agatheans' cause the galleass of the Rogue Trader that had in her folly come to Dark Haven to subjugate them and paid the price. It had been Valdemar Orhlacc, High Seneschal of his house, that Ireton MaSade had bargained with for his might on this day of reckoning, at a price no less than the dominion of the dim world of Wychval, far from prying eyes at the edge of the Agathean Domain, and the Knights of Orhlacc had come to make good that bargain in blood.There was nowhere to hide from the savagery to come; the wasteland, and the dockyard span upon which it ended were all but featureless, an expanse of emptiness that in an instant was transformed into a killing ground which no mortal creature could have crossed and lived. There was no room or opportunity for trickery or subtle tactic, no time even for orders to be given; there was only the storm of steel and fire. The Loyalists charged, their weapons blazing sun-heat and thundering deadly shell fire, and the Traitor forces turned as one to meet their oncoming attack, answering with their own shimmering arcs of pale Volkite rays and cracking bolts of dark lightning.The thunderous combat walkers closed the distance between the two and immediately Draykavac saw the danger. His Knights were marginally outnumbered, but his oath-sworn Atrax were primarily equipped with the Mechanicum Styrix and Magaera Pattern armours, superior in their protection from damage, but also slower than most of his foe's forces, many of which were equipped with the swift Cerastus Patterns designed to outflank an enemy at speed.Even now the House Orhlacc Knights and their allies' faster units were breaking into two horns of battle to encircle his own forces, while the Loyalist Paladins and Errants made direct assault on his centre, formed up in fighting wedges so that their Ion Shields created an all-but-impenetrable overlapping barrier against incoming fire. Draykavac extended his will and his army moved as one, tessellating into a hexagon formation, its own Ion Shields presented outwards, defending the core within, at the centre of which hovered Draykavac and his bodyguard of dark-armoured Battle-Automata.The complex manoeuvre was barely complete when the two tides of metal and fire met, the Orhlacc and their allies crushing round the Atrax in a murderous grip. The ground shook and rattled, the air was rent with an indescribable cacophony as Knight met Knight in shattering impact. Battle Cannons roared at point blank range, Power Lances pistoned forth to smash explosively through armour plate, Ion Shields flared and guttered. The white-hot beams of Thermal Cannons speared through hulls, sending adamantium running like molten wax, and mighty metal limbs were torn from their sockets by crushing servo-claws and shimmering Solar Blades.Where the Atrax fought with cold, calculating brutality, the Orhlacc fought like madmen suddenly unleashed, but the bitterest savagery was the domain of the Ærthegn, as brother fought against brother to the death. In such a tumult of inhuman war and incalculable power even the Castellax Battle-Automata of the Taghmata Cyclothrathe were nothing compared to the fury unleashed, as the Reaper Chainblades of the Orhlacc lashed through them like kindling before a falling axe, and Draykavac's bodyguard of Thallax fell in droves as they were caught in an annihilating crossfire of Castigator bolt cannon shells.The archmagos was not without power of his own, however, and the crimson-armoured Knights-Castigator of House Hermetika which had made the attack found themselves slowly crushed under the weight of a fusillade of Graviton Cannon blasts, staggering to their doom. Swiftly they were swamped by murderous Vorax Battle-automata, their sickle-bladed arms hacking and slashing through joints and power cables, crippling them, until Draykavac himself tore the living pilots from the control thrones within and liquefied their bodies to dripping gore.The clash of Knights, apocalyptic in its destruction, raged on, but even at the centre of this hurricane of chaos, Draykavac's half-machine mind was holding watch over a hundred other conflicts raging on Numinal. On the northern archipelago, his diminished second wave, robbed of their reinforcements, was being driven back into the sea as the invading Agathean cohorts broke out of their fortified landing zone and attacked in full force. Obedite-led native resistance was destroying the Mechanicum's cybernetic conversion crawlers all across the globe, vulnerable now that Draykavac had withdrawn their supporting Knights.New and unknown forces had also entered the fray as a trio of mismatched Javelin Attack Speeders, one in the umbral black of the Raven Guard and the others in the ochre yellow of the Imperial Fists, had flown in under the Void Shield mantle and were now striking at the machines that generated it, threatening the shields' integrity more with each passing attack.At one primary flesh-processing facility, no more than eleven kilometres away, a lone Space Marine had appeared in armour scoured clean of all markings and was now systematically killing every servitor, Tech-priest and Automata in the complex.In orbit, the void battle had proved bloody too, but inconclusive to both sides, and even now the Sacra Astra was badly damaged and on an outbound orbit to effect emergency repairs, and would not likely survive another close pass against the Hammer of the Deep. Were Draykavac one of the Emperor's Angels of Death, defeat would have been impossible to countenance, and he would have fought on regardless of the odds of victory, but he was of the Mechanicum, and the cold equations of bloodshed told him he had lost.Immediately, the Cyclothrathine Knights' hexagonal formation of defence began to shift, and what was a defiant battle became instead stalled, a fighting retreat with a single purpose, to deliver Draykavac to safety at any cost. Soon the dockyard complex running back to the Mechanicum command centre was a fire-strewn waste, littered with the burning hulls of broken Knight armour and the twitching, dismembered remains of Battle-Automata as the House of Atrax and the Taghmata Cyclothrathe were sacrificed for their master.Once within the fortified bastion, Draykavac made good his escape off-world, his salvation-rocket blasting off from its position of concealment in one of the bastion's storage silo-towers, leaving fiery ruin in its wake. The last baleful command he issued to each and every surviving servitor, Automata and Tech-priest of the Taghmata was to kill, kill relentlessly and indiscriminately until their own destruction came.Numinal had fallen to the Loyalists.