The battle for the chaos arcano-engine erupting through the surface of Bonner's Reach continued all across the planet--including downstream from the epic struggle won previously by the Mordant 13th Imperial Guard and their allies. This final struggle was smaller in scope, but no less critical--and so was left to the Space Marines, Imperial masters of the fast surgical strike, to seize: a potent alliance of Space Wolves, Jade Legion, Void Phantoms and Grey Knights!
The opposition mustered against them the full force of greenskin infantry--Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thrakka, Warboss Big Killy, Mad Doc Grotsnik, a Green Tide of over 120 Nobs and Boyz and a Stompa-led Dread Mob, Gilyazza's Goregashas, along with Khornate Daemons and Traitor Space Marines and several waves of Genestealers. Disorder also brought a Traitor Baneblade and an Ork Skullhamma to this final conflict--giving them the edge in both numbers and superheavies!
Momentum in this second battle shifted back and forth: the Allies took four of the five objectives early, by the end of Turn One...but Disorder threw them off the two on the furthest flanks by the end of Turn Two, and the Chaos Vindicator Linebreaker Squadron obliterated the central objective, as well, to draw things even again. The third Turn proved decisive: Space Wolf Scouts destroyed first the Baneblade then the Skullhamma with meltabomb attacks, allowing a Grey Knight Brother Captain and his bodyguard of terminators to seize the objective the superheavies had been protecting in Disorder's own zone, and veteran Grey Hunters worked their way amongst the Chaos elements on the left flank--a Soulgrinder, a sorceror and terminator warband, obliterators and a Defiler--to retake that objective and hunker down, never again to be shaken off it. The Stompa ran wild down the opposite flank, but its mightiest efforts to either destroy the objective in the Allied home zone, or failing that to blow the claiming Eldar allies and Jade Legion Scouts off of it, came up short.
In the end, though the Green Tide--which waaaghed the length of the battlefield, despite the most heroic efforts of various Imperial heroes to hold them up in combat--managed to claim that flank objective for Disorder, the others were retained by Allied control (including their home zone objective, which they had used a Strategic Asset to declare Vital, and thus worth two objective points), for a 4 objective to 1 Imperial and Eldar victory! Following up on the great Allied win further upstream previously, the climactic weekend of the Lucky 13s campaign went decisively for the Imperium!
Kudos to Disorder players Mason, Alex, Blake, David and Warboss Avery, and congratulations to Order players Josh, Paul, Kyle and Great Wolf Eric for a memorable grand finale to the year-long campaign. Award of merit for outstanding units was clear on both sides, and fittingly they were controlled by each side's force commander: nothing could stop the rampage of Avery's Stompa except time, and Eric's Wolf Scouts accounted for over 20% of the opposing points' worth of models by themselves (though Alex's genestealers eventually avenged themselves upon them). Mason's Ork characters also acquitted themselves well, accounting for overall Allied Commander Wolf Lord Emryk, Void Phantoms Chief Librarian Lord Liche and several Rune Priests...then had their rampage halted in hand-to-hand combat by radical Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Rhadamanthus Goh, no less, in the final turn. Fittingly, it was an final Apocalypse battle dominated not by spectacular formations and towering superheavies, as wonderful as those are...but rather was decided by the deeds of rank-and-file troopers, and the courage of individual heroes taking a stand.
And with the Space Marine strike force decisively securing this final battlehead, to protect the flank of the Mordant 13th and the main Allied army further upstream, the Imperium--in this sector of Bonner's Reach, at least--has definitively denied to the archenemy access and control of the subsurface chaos arcano-engine. The yearlong struggle of the Lucky 13s, which has spanned much of known space and flung them against every enemy known to Man, has come to an end...with the Mordant 13th Imperial Guard still victorious...still standing fast.
