Asteroid Blues

Second round of Battle at the Beach! One more coming (Final round was a mirror match and so not reportable) after this, but this one will likely be slightly longer. This time, Frontline v USAriadna!

I've included some mood music. It was bloody.

So I took deployment, he took first turn. I probably picked the wrong side for myself, as several firelanes and defensive positions I thought I wanted turned out to be pretty crap and the entire thing turned into desperate improvization pretty swiftly. Thankfully he failed all but one of his Grunt Infiltration rolls, giving me a relatively clear deployment area. Then he forward deployed almost his entire army, which was worrying but also meant that my Fiday got to start overlooking an entire fireteam with his shotgun. Of note, both of his Desperados were rad conversions that were riding antipodes!

His first turn consisted of a push to try and decapitate Saladin. He eventually succeeded but lost his entire MI Haris and half his Grunt link in the process thanks to Lasiq overwatch and the Fiday's shotgun. The Fiday went down but, like, job done, y'know?

I was in LoL on turn one, so I ran some Ghazis up, downing one of his Desperados and revealing a camo token, sniped another member of his Grunt link off the field, had my Khawarij kill some dudes, Largely, however, I maneuvered units into a defensive cordon so I could push once I had regular orders again.

Miles sat in a bunker, well behind the lines, and watched the war he was here to cover. He had cameras, video feeds from the soldiers, hijacked cameras from the station.

It wasn't the first battle he'd seen. He'd covered hotspots before. Seen the horrors of the Uprising, as true war returned to the Homeworld for the first time in a long, long while. But experience didn't make it more pleasant. Didn't make the violence and chaos more palatable. It just meant that he knew what to expect.

It made him realize, when he saw the cavalryman on the antipode, when he saw the teams of infantrymen waving him past with a cheer, that Majnu was about to reveal himself, and those pleasant, smiling faces were going to die. It made him realize that Majnu would die in turn once he was revealed, separated from his allies. It made him question the mad bravery of the Marauder team as they were picked off by shrapnel and viral rounds. It made him question VV's sanity as they died in a shootout with the last of the Marauders.

Then, their leadership decapitated, the Haqq lines devolved into something close to chaos. A half-dozen independent firefights along the front. Frantic yelling and contradictory orders. A jagged, brave, and utterly uncoordinated push away from their own lines.

Then Omar Mukhtar's voice cut across the comms channel. Silenced the burgeoning panic and erratic command.

"I am retaking control," proclaimed the Lion of the Desert, "Saifullah, proceed on my mark."

On his second turn the remaining Desperado drives forwards but doesn't manage to really get anywhere. One of his camo tokens drops some mines and downs my Lasiq, while a grunt (Or possibly Rosie?) and a hardcase drop both of my Kameels and two ghazi.

Now I have proper regular orders. My Mukhtar drops a hardcase, my remaining Mutts work together to kill the last Antipode-riding Desperado and prepare for next turn, while my Khawarij jumps onto a building and shoots down more grunts.

The convenience of choosing your own name is that you get to make sure that it fits.

Saifullah knew that he would be a Khawarij well before he knew that his name was Saifullah. Well before he even knew that he was a he. He picked the name because it fit his role, in the army, in Bouraki society, and in Allah's plan for the universe. It was the only name that ever felt right for him and his body: aggressively toxic, inhumanly resilient, and capable of leaping buildings in a single bound, was the only one he had ever been comfortable with.

So when Mukhtar gave the order to engage, Saif relished it.

He kicked off the ground, dust and debris billowing beneath him as the wind pressed against his face. A woman wheeled, rifle in hand, but too slow. She dropped, a burst of bullets ripping through her face and upper chest, as Saif landed on a nearby roof. He set his eyes upwards, the roof of a building three stories above him and more than a dozen feet away. He heard Mukhtar call the next target, a team of grunts on the other side of the building.

He took a running start. Feet pounding, arms pumping, until he reached the edge of the roof and kicked against it, high into the air. Metal and plastic deformed from the sheer force of his departure. He hit the next roof running, and allowed himself a wide smile as an astonished "Yallah! Look at him go!" echoed over his comms. He dropped another Ariadnan, pulled V's cube from his corpse, and then slumped behind a railing to report in.

"I'm in position, Commander," said Saifullah, "Give me a moment, I'll have this handled."

He gets nothing more complicated than an 'affirmative' in return. Of course he does. After all, Omar knows he can handle this.

Last turn, he pushes an airborne ranger onto one flank and manages to shock my doc off the field but doesn't have the orders or gear to try and take the Mukhtar or bypass him to hit my Barid. As such he retreats and tries to hold position just outside of my DZ. He maneuvers his revealed foxtrot and drops some mines to pin down my liaison officer, but otherwise doesn't manage much besides swinging some Grunts into his zones.

My Ghazi kill the foxtrot during their impetuous actions, then my Khawarij gets to work. He takes a cross-the-board shot to drop the airborne, leaps down from his building, and starts gunning down Grunts while the Ghazi sprint towards his DZ and my Mukhtar leaves mine. By the time I run out of orders, he can't contest any of the three scoring zones. We both succeed on our liaison officer roll, resulting in a 10-1 finish.

Mistakes: Saladin was out of cover and too vulnerable, my Lasiq didn't actually have cover against three of her likely opponents. Both of my Kameels were ridiculously vulnerable to attack. The game went well but there were significant deployment mistakes made on the way in.