Battle of Biel-Tan - Daemonstorm: Howling, crying, and screaming they came, blades gripped tight and snarling smiles displaying pointed teeth. The daemon hordes of Slaanesh and Khorne scoured the twisted forests of Ursulia for more heads to claim.A cruel frenzy was upon them, their jibes and imprecations cast aside in their desperate need to prove their supremacy. With the psychic tempest raging all around, the daemons paid little heed to the craftworld forces descending through the clouds.Only the Masque watched the heavens from the corner of her coal-black eyes. She knew full well that Biel-Tan could not help but take the bait she had laid so carefully before them. They would attack with pitiless fury, as they always did -- and in doing so, would not drive off their foes, but trigger a devastating counterattack.Slaanesh revels in every kind of excess, especially that which involves the spilling of vital ﬂuids; Khorne, for his part, is empowered just as much by the slaughter of his own armies as he is those of his enemies. The same could be said of his minions. Blood was blood, no matter its provenance.The Eldar attack was sudden and devastatingly effective. At a single word from the Autarch Meliniel, the Swordwind dived from the skies, pulse lasers and plasma weapons ﬂickering in such profusion it seemed a hail of killing light slanted down from the heavens alongside the squalls of ectoplasmic liquid.Explosions blossomed through the canopies of the forest, blasting grotesque anatomies high into the air. Each fusillade was aimed not at the larger throngs of Warp creatures darting through the twisted foliage, but the largest and most elaborately ornamented of their number.The Swordwind had long practiced the strategy of assassination as a way to even the odds for their small but elite forces. Despite the ethereal nature of the daemon hosts, the same strategy worked on the immortal legions of the Great Enemy. Within Terran seconds, the Eldar had slain dozens of the heralds that had given a semblance of leadership to the daemon hordes.It was then that the Eldar launched a multi-faceted assault, devised by Autarch Meliniel in the space of a few intense minutes once he had ascertained the disposition of the daemonic hordes. Marshalling his troops into several warhosts, his layered attack saw the cloud-borne Eldar encircle the daemon war bands closest to the Obsidian Gate.First to press home the assault were the Edruth Enfaolchú, the Flight of Falcons. Tight squadrons of grav-tanks veered through the splashing rain to engage the Soul Grinders smashing aside corrupted foliage in their haste to close with their attackers.The Daemon Engines spat a hideous amount of firepower into the skies, their Harvester Cannons sending dirty chain explosions into the oncoming warhost's path, but their fire was largely ineffective. The sheer speed of the surprise attack had robbed their fire of any real accuracy.At the fore of the airborne assault came the Crimson Death. Two squadrons of Nightshade Interceptors shone like wedges of polished ruby in the sky, weaving to and fro with the grace of raptors on the hunt. One of the elegant aircraft was torn from the sky by a lucky shot, its wreckage spiralling knives of psychoplastic that stabbed into the jungle below. The others evaded the fusillades with barrel rolls and steep dives.At the last moment, the scarlet craft crisscrossed one another in a series of interlocking attack runs, their Bright Lances stabbing pinpoint death into the ranks of the enraged Soul Grinders. The attack was intended to blind the giant Daemon Engines, just as Khaine's hurled blades took the eyes from the White Wyrm, Oghanothir, in the cycles of Eldar myth.In practice, their laser beams were so vicious they took the heads from most of the iron-skinned monstrosities they struck. The clanking, piston-legged advance of the war engines slowly came to a halt as their daemonic animas were violently unbound from their ﬂeshmetal bodies and ripped away into the eldritch storm. The Crimson Death was already gone, the clouds spiralling in their wake.Seeing their anti-air firepower snatched away, the daemons of the greater host gave a roar of frustration so loud it caused the foliage all about to shake and shiver. Their bellows and shrieks were answered by the sizzling hisses of laser beams from the gravtanks that descended by the dozen in the Crimson Death's wake.With their holo-fields blending them into the cloud banks behind and a canopy of weird organic foliage covering much of the sky, Meliniel's Cloudstrike Squadrons were all but invisible. Only when the killing began did the daemons realise the doom that was upon them.Fire Prisms sent lancing beams of killing energy into daemonic riders that were crashing through the forest atop brass-bound Juggernauts. The laser shots, concentrated by exotic crystal focusing arrays, blasted great craters in the enemy host, their edges steaming with boiling daemonic remains.The brazen corpse-stuff left over from each strike bubbled away into little more than the stench of brimstone and hot brass.Roaring down from the skies came Skarbrand himself, plummeting from the Warp into reality in a trailing ball of ﬂame. The carnage had drawn him as surely as a sky-shark is drawn to magic in the air. With a thunderous boom he smashed through a squadron of grav-tanks, sending their mangled hulls spinning, and landed hard in the valley.Elder trees were blasted to splinters at the impact, and scarlet fires burned in his wake. Skarbrand stormed out of his impact crater, axes swinging to lay low the Lesser Daemons scrambling out of the way. The giant daemon made a choice target for the gunners of the Eldar grav-tanks. Many a blinding beam lanced into Skarbrand, but they just made him all the angrier.As the grav-tanks hit from above, the Windrider Jetbikes of the Biel-Tan host were riding into the wide mouth of the Greenlush Valley. Taking aim at the greater host, they levelled such a fierce hurricane of razor-edged shuriken that they sliced down plant and daemon both. The war for Ursulia was raging once more.