Landing

Slowly the ramp of the lander opened with a slow clicking from the gears as they pushed against the wind outside the craft. As it opened Euric felt a breeze press against his carapace armor. He imagined it would smell nice of clean air if he didn't have his respmask array on. He walked to the edge of the ramp and looked down at the terrain below him, miles below him. His advanced occulum showed him heat signatures of various ground settlements and formations shining brightly in the cool of night. Behind him stood almost a hundred other scions, looking eager as they waited. From a still stance looking at the ground Tempestor Prime Euric Aquilius said one word, "Go." Quickly after, the scions ran and jumped off the assault ramp as Euric watched and quickly assigned landing positions on his arm mounted data slate to the squads as they went. As soon as everyone else was off the ship Euric lept himself.

Air rushed past him as he fell through the sky taking in the data from his assessment of enemy positions, bases, and movements. This would be the last time he would get such a complete understanding of the land as his dropships were returning to the frigate that brought him, which itself was leaving to assist in merchant escorts on a frequently raided route. It wasn't the first time he was left without support and it wouldn't be the last, the prospect of such a long mission bothered him though.

His soldiers were expertly performing maneuvers to glide to their assigned positions. By the time they were 30 seconds out from grav chute range 90% of the scions were already above their positions and ready to deploy. The rest who were given the farthest positions engaged their grav chutes early to make it to where they needed to be. Apart from those exceptions the entirety of the group engaged their grav chutes at full thrust just at the right time to slow their descent enough to prevent injury. Something only accomplishable with an extreme amount of training.

Once reaching the ground Euric quickly took out an auspex and looked for any energy signatures of enemy weapons in case anyone saw them on their descent. As he was doing so without orders the scions were finding suitable hiding places among brush and rocks to hide their grav chutes while others formed perimeters of their positions and awaited orders. Euric quickly followed suit and then the mission began. With only a few orders the scions moved leaving their landing clear from any signs of them apart from footprints that would fade by the morning.

Tempestor Angela Verus led the secondary force of the regiment. A similar, yet slightly less coordinated insertion was led by her. It was still better than anything a platoon commander of a standard regiment could hope to acheive though. Deployed out of vox range from Euric, she arranged her troops in optimal formation for attacking the base in front of her. The base was several solid structures with a perimeter fence. Angela determined it to contain roughly 500 people, likely a company. The most intimidating and well armoured building seemed to be the center one, the HQ, that one was of no concern to her. The other buildings were mostly barracks and armories with a vehicle station filled with some tanks and APCs. Around the base were mostly flat plains, except for a forest on one side. That is where Angela and most of her scions were. She assigned targets and prepared for the attack.

A barrage of weapons fire lit up the base all at once. The vehicle station's promethium tank was hit by a plasma shot, the superheated promethium gushed out on fire and sprayed all over the vehicles around it. The vehicles farther away were quickly targeted by the plasma gun one after the other. A window on the largest barracks was hit by a krak grenade putting a hole in it, then a melta was shot through incinerating many of the soldiers with scorching heat. The screams of those that weren't completely incinerated could be heard from around the base as many of them ran out from the building with half of their body in flames. Another two barracks had most of the sleeping soldiers blasted apart by shaped explosives put on the sides of the buildings by scions that snuck into the compound and were out by the time they detonated. The same type of explosives were put on the armories which detonated with a giant boom and some of the munitions even got scattered across the base by the blast before themselves detonating. The fortified weapon emplacements were quickly eliminated by Hot-shot volley gun fire, sending quick barrages of penetrating beams into each of the weapons and their crew. Hot-shot lasgun fire from the bulk of the scions lit up the base and killed anyone unfortunate enough to be outside of a building at this hour of the night. 

By the end of the opening salvo half of the garrison was dead while the other half scrambled to get ready for a defense. Once the opening salvo was finished the weapons slowly stopped firing as the hot-shot lasfire became sporadic. As the squads and formations gathered together they faced less and less lasfire as the scions retreated until they marched out into the forest and found nothing waiting for them. The scions left the base in utter disarray while not sustaining a single casualty.

About twenty minutes later Angela made it into vox range of Euric. "Mission accomplished." She said over the vox like it was a simple fact. Euric quickly responded, "Move onto second objective."

"Sir."