Asteroid Blues

VIDEO: A call to prayer as the new phase begins.

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Rashida Ghali hit the ground, swatting at her flak jacket. The Liu Xing trooper stood over her, his own armour smoking from where it ejected a hurricane of debris. He leveled his shotgun at her, and Rashida was torn between trying to roll off the edge of the building or try to bring her flamethrower to bear. She closed her eyes.

The Liu Xing trooper then spun around, impacted by a salvo of bullets. He maintained his footing long enough to turn to face the shooter, but fell to another burst of rifle fire. He fell to one knee, then to the side, landing like a discarded gunny sack of rotten produce.

Rashida rolled on to her stomach to smother the light flames caused by the explosive impact of the now-dead Yu Jing trooper, and saw Jamila, the medic, crouched low and reloading her rifle. Jamila winked and Rashida smiled – Jamila was a surgeon in more ways that one.

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This was a game of odd luck. I went first, and got lucky by getting the same objective card twice. Now, in TACOS, one trooper can't score the same card twice, so you need a second one to get the second card. My Khawrij Doctor scored one, then Tarik Mansuri hightailed it across the board, dropping Yu Jing troops with his spitfire, and used his status as LT to get the second card. Then my fireteam spread out, knowing full well that as many as four Liu Xing were going to drop bombs on their heads.

RazorsEdge went, and his luck went terribly wrong. First, despite dropping blast templates on my head, the fireteam mostly survived. The HMG Ghulam went down, and the Khawarij all failed their Dodge rolls, but then passed all their ARM rolls. Then I killed most of his acting troops in ARO.

At the top of round two, RazorsEdge conceded. I was up too many objective points and he only had three or four models left standing.

It was a weird game, because by all rights his Liu Xing should have cut my army fully in half, but I apparently refused to fail any ARM rolls. I also got crits on something like half of my attacks, which also did a lot to, y'know, massacre his troops.