White Scars - The Chisel: Jaghatai ordered his fleet to prepare for immediate departure from Chondax. All across the vast battlefront, White Scars Escort craft moved as one, sweeping towards the encircling Alpha Legion forces in a unified screen. Inter-fleet communications were shut down and incoming bursts blocked -- the enemy had had their chance to make themselves understood.Anything that they said now would be disregarded. The White Scars coordinated to perform a standard zao (known in Low Gothic as "The Chisel") manoeuvre -- full-fleet, enacted on a single command from the Vth Legion's flagship Swordstorm.Every starship in the service of the Imperium was different. The secrets hidden within their reactor hearts were jealously guarded by the lords of the Red Planet and shared with no one outside the privileged circles of the elect. Every Primarch asserted various preferences during construction: Corax had worked obsessively to make his vessels as stealthy as possible, Vulkan to make them durable and Fulgrim to make them beautiful.Primarchs had ways of circumventing standard Imperial command structures -- they could bend rules, uncover hidden data-cores and suborn Mechanicum Magi to their desires. So it was, as the Great Crusade progressed, that each Legion fleet slowly took on the character of its master through an endless programme of refits, retrofits and base modifications. In the case of the White Scars, only one change had ever been requested of the Tech-priests and only one metric was ever improved upon -- speed.The Vth Legion's Techmarines spent solar decades boosting reactor power-feeds and finding ways to hone manoeuvrability far beyond the tolerances that each standard starship class had been designed for. The endless pursuit of velocity came with its costs: gunnery captains had been heard to complain of reduced Lance range, and it was well known that a White Scars warship would not carry as many troops or dropships as the equivalent vessel in a standard fleet, but such factors carried little weight in a Legion drenched in the wild-riding tradition of the Chogorian plains.Under standing orders from the Khagan, the Legion had never shown off its drives' modified capabilities outside of active warzones. Since so few of the other Legions had ever fought alongside the White Scars, this specialisation had not become widely known, except for a few speculative reports here and there of strangely elongated engine-housings, extravagant thruster formations and oversized fuel lines. It all made for a ferociously fast set of warships, from the largest behemoths to the most slender of system-runners.As the White Scars' vessels began to move, the Alpha Legion reacted. They maintained the integrity of the cordon, warding the routes to the nearest suitable Mandeville jump-points and keeping the White Scars corralled within the vicinity of Chondax. As they had done ever since arriving, each ship of the blockade matched the movements of its White Scars counterpart, maintaining a gigantic mirror-image across space.The gap between the fleets slowly closed. The Alpha Legion formation reacted just as a blockade ought to react, maintaining a rigid web across the widest area of space, each node backed up by a second rank of warships held in reserve. Their movements remained cagey, as if they wished to do nothing more than hold the impasse for as long as possible. As the two vanguards closed to within Lance-range, for the first time the White Scars noticed incoming Vox-requests from the enemy on the sensorium array, and ignored them. The Alpha Legion had already been given every chance to explain themselves.It was then that the Alpha Legion opened fire on its former brothers. All along the front, White Scars ships probed the line and Alpha Legion ships resisted them. It was a classic containment pattern, designed to hem the Vth Legion formation in and prevent isolated warships from running the cordon.The standard breakout response was a full-scale assault on the containment net, aiming to drive it back through a massed volume of concentrated ship-to-ship fire. Such an order was not taken lightly -- the result would be ruinous for both sides, and only hotheads like Leman Russ or Angron enjoyed taking such risks. The Alpha Legion clearly judged that the Khan was not so cavalier. In this, of course, they were entirely correct.The White Scars' vanguard began to drift spinwards, pulling clear of their jump-point trajectory and dragging the centre of the engagement back towards Chondax's gravity well. It looked almost careless, as if aimless commanders had launched a half-hearted breakout without the commitment to see it through.The drift became more pronounced as the intensity of the las-fire picked up. For all that, the individual engagements were muted, probing, restrained. No torpedoes were launched, no gunship wings were unleashed. The two walls of minor warships grappled in a bizarre half-embrace of limited ferocity.All across the engagement zone, Vth Legion positions began to collapse, withering in the face of steady, professional pressure from the enemy. White Scars vessels dropped formation, protecting their own flanks and leaving holes in the offensive wall. As if fighting a strong headwind out on the Altak back on Chogoris, the vanguard's momentum faltered.When the chronograph reached 0, the White Scars vessels moved, every one of them, all at the same time, into full attack speed. Everything quickly changed as the Vth Legion's fleet formation morphed in an instant, suddenly switching from an aimless drift-pattern into an arrowhead shock assault of astonishing precision. The White Scars vessels took on new trajectories and moved in perfect concert, suddenly leaping from semi-committed holding patterns into a single attack vector. The Alpha Legion most likely had never witnessed such ship mastery.The best Imperial naval officers could not have performed such a manoeuvre in less than five solar minutes, and it would have required hundreds of course-correction warnings and solar hours of preparation to bring off. The White Scars had done it, as one -– with no extraneous prompting -- in five seconds. The White Scars' deployment was now a single spearhead. Escorts shot out, pulling together into a single mass and punching a hole through the enemy cordon. Their sudden burst of speed and concentrated Lance-strikes wrong-footed the Alpha Legion vessels in their path, and three bronze-prowed Destroyers were overwhelmed almost immediately, lost amidst a whirlwind of plasma and exploding torpedo trails.More White Scars Destroyers screamed through the wreckage, corkscrewing and diving like plunging pods of cetaceans. Everything was aimed at a single point: the flanks were discarded, surrendered to the enemy as every Vth Legion asset in the battlesphere shot into close formation and boomed up to top velocity.The encircling Alpha Legion cordon was now compromised and fractured, its constituents struggling to respond to the lone column of ships that burned its way through their heart. Their capital ships were even slower, unable to take advantage of modified engines or the White Scars' almost preternaturally-skilled ship crews. The Swordstorm pulled up to the forefront of the Chisel formation, propelled by its monstrous, raging plasma engines and surrounded by a swarm of racing Escorts. Bulky vessels of the Alpha Legion's second rank tried to bar its path, sliding into a hurried defensive formation with what now looked like ponderous clumsiness.All around their Legion flagship, other White Scars warships launched forward-facing barrages, vomiting las-beams and plasma bolts and torpedo salvoes in a vast, intense column of pure destruction. The Chisel had hammered its way through the Alpha Legion cordon, breaking it open at its weakest point. The entire formation -- tightly-knit, long and slender like a throwing javelin -- raced out into open space. The Alpha Legion struggled to regroup in its wake, pulling warships from the far-flung cordon formation like an octopus clutching its many limbs back to itself.They had not lost critical numbers of ships, but the sudden attack run had blown their formation wide open and destroyed the cohesion that they had so painstakingly built. The White Scars' run did not slow. If anything, free of the need to maintain a barrage of las-fire, it accelerated.As the orb of Chondax fell rapidly away aft, it was mediated by the glowing corpses of a dozen burned-out Alpha Legion warships. The starships of the White Scars fleet soon reached their Mandeville Points and translated without delay into Warpspace, their destination unknown.