Editing Quest:Iron Hearts (section)

===The Story so Far===

The story of Iron Hearts begins with the Fall of Sylvia.  On that fateful July day in the 656th year, the Voss Empire marched across the borders of Ragnyll and began their attack.  The response army shattered, the Cross Military Academy was the next target of the Voss forces.  The cadets fought bravely, but ultimately had to make their escape as Ghouls overran their defenses.  With the images of the dying academy burned into their memories, the cadets quickly swore revenge, christening themselves the Hellghast.  The Hellghast soon found themselves thrust into deployment after deployment; at Norwood Forest, still raw from their first deployments, the unit routed the Vosskon offensive; at Stilemar, they became liberators, and at Dandelion, they became heroes.

It was not until the Battle of Five Fingers that the Hellghast started to form alliances with the various factions that populated the land.  How opportune, it seemed, then, when a Clovis cargo plane dropped out of the sky, disgorging its cargo of supplies and soldiers in the midst of traded cannon shells and whistling death!  The unit, then under the command of the fiery Captain Iceval, immediately stepped forward to protect the Clovis units and secure the precious cargo.  The battle, though successful, saw the end of Iceval, and the passing of the torch to Mana Lanista, a Vanguard Knight, and one of the original survivors of the Fall of Sylvia. In the Battle of Solstice, Mana, then a Captain, was caught in the middle of an artillery barrage, breaking her body and leaving her for dead.  Fortunately, a process was revealed wherein Mana could be rebuilt.  She became more machine than human, her flesh and bone replaced by armor and wires.  Black-gold oil pulsed through veins where blood would have pumped.  She had become something not quite human.

Under Mana's leadership, Hellghast's next battle came in the form of sweeping the undead-infested mines of Kolstec.  The town held high strategic value to both sides;  a massive store of Ibonyte lay within the town's mines, and both parties wished to control it.  Though Hellghast took the several losses and Mana was heavily damaged, the mines were liberated, and a massive parasitic worm creature that had been feeding on the Ibonyte deposits was destroyed in a rather large, rather impressive explosion that made the inside of the mine momentarily glow as bright as midday.  For their efforts in this battle, the unit was rewarded handsomely:  alternate weapon choices were procured for the infantry, and new armor was introduced into the unit's vehicle pool.

The next test for the Hellghast came deep in the forests of Wassau.  Under commission from an Aeon Inquisitor, the unit's objective was two-fold:  first, to rescue a band of Aeoni missionaries holed up in a small chapel in the woods; and second, to exterminate a fellow Ragnyllian Army unit that had decided to use unholy magicks, shaping themselves into beings that were more beast than human.  The extermination effort, however, did not entirely go as planned:  while searching the forest for the unit, A Voss contingent made itself known, and both Ragnyllian units formed a temporary truce to beat back the Voss.  The battle shifted, though, when a Scout Sniper took a wounding shot at the targeted Ragnyllian unit's commander.  The veil pulled back and the Voss all but routed, Wilder's unit turned on the Hellghast, some of their number turned into fierce were-beasts.  The fighting became fierce, as brother turned against brother, but the Hellghast prevailed at a high cost:  the units that had not been outright killed by the were-beasts were to succumb to lycanthropy themselves unless something was done quickly.  Fortunately for the unit, a mystical Aeoni artifact, a sword known only by the name of Sol, was housed in the missionaries' church.  The good Captain, seeing the potential of the weapon, took the sword as her own.  The sword purified those who had been bitten; amputation of the infected limb stopped the lycanthropy from overtaking the afflicted.

With the Voss offensive halted and progressively pushed back, Hellghast's next priority came in the liberation of the military airfield at Albane, Voss' last firm stronghold in Ragnyll. Though resistance was heavy, and casualties were taken, The Hellghast Armored Unit prevailed, accomplishing two feats. The first of these was the liberation of the airfield, thereby ensuring Voss had no more footholds in Ragnyll. The second of these feats was an opportunistic boon: from intelligence gathered prior to the mission, it was perchance learned that the Voss were using the airfield to house a prototype airship, capable of dropping weaponized biological agents across city-wide areas. The Hellghast, in a rather bold move, boarded the aircraft as it was taking off, killing or capturing the Voss crew and securing the airship for Ragnyll.

The Voss, not wanting to be outdone, soon staged a counterattack. Hellghast chose to intercept the Voss force at the site of a previous battle, Five Fingers Valley. It was here that Hellghast had its darkest moment, sustaining heavy casualties due to a mixture of reasons--thinly forces, miscommunication, the list could go on and on, though Ragnyllian historians debate on just what was the key moment that determined that the second battle of Five Fingers shifted in the Voss' favor. Among the dead, Hellghast lost several officers, one of its top Pilots, and all of its deployed Casters. All was not lost, however; with his last actions, Lieutenant Rip van Winkle was able to eliminate the first of the three Voss Generals of Terror, high commanding officers of the Voss Empire known for their tactical genius and ruthlessness.

Their forces routed, Hellghast had no choice but to retreat to the town of Kolstec and lick its wounds, regaining its strength for the next battle. It was not long after the second battle of Five Fingers that the Voss began to march once again. Of special note during the defense of Kolstec is an event that happened shortly after the battle had began: a young Caster by the name of Magus, misinterpreting an order from a commanding officer, dropped away the stone bridge that connected the town to the outside world, leaving a majority of the forces stranded at the foot of the city, their backs against a deep ravine filled with the valuable black gold Ibonyte. The battle was fierce, pitting the tattered unit against a plethora of enemies, among them two Monotanks and an airship not unlike the one fielded by the Voss at Albane. Hellghast, proving themselves starved for vengeance since their defeat, valiantly stood their ground, even with the unit's heaviest armor units, its tanks, stuck ineffectively on the other side of the ravine.

It was at this battle, too, that the second of the three Voss Generals of Terror, Asmodeus, made himself known. A wicked figure, the demon-general drew power straight from the Ibonyte in the ravine of Kolstec, the black material turning blood-red, the bones of fallen soldiers seemingly phasing in and out of existence within, their moans filling the air. The good general then challenged the Hellghast commanding officer, the increasingly robotic Captain Mana, to a duel. The duel went along splendidly, until Mana was, much like previous missions, chopped into still-living but annoyed bits, and Asmodeus was ripped apart in a hale of machine gun, cannon, and blessed railgun rounds.

While this was happening, an odd turn of events was being had for an Aeoni force some distance from the city of Kolstec. Originally inserted deep into Ragnyllian lines to determine the existence of the Vinculum Gate, a portal through which demons creeped from dimensions most foul, had been under constant attack from Voss forces scattered throughout Ragnyll. With the death of Inquisitor Derf, command of the unit fell to Brother-Adjutant Makkor. The Aeoni force had been backed up against The Fist, a geological formation that jutted out from the Ragnyllian landscape, and had thus deemed to make their stand there, to fight to the last man. With only a handful of units, the Aeoni force cut a violent swath through the Voss, though as the night continued, it became clear that the seemingly endless tide of Ghouls and tanks would overwhelm the holy warriors. It was here, though, that something...strange happened. In the light of the moon, as Kolstec blazed with the fires of war behind them, the beleaguered Aeon force was visited by reinforcements. Spectral soldiers, all of them Ragnyllian casualties from previous battles, materialized around the Aeoni soldiers, giving them a chance to claim their second wind. Their spirits raised to a zealous fury, the Aeoni soldiers then marched against the Voss hordes, routing them completely with the first rays of the dawn. Their jobs completed, the spectral warriors dissolved as well, leaving the soldiers of Alexander in peace.

The days passed somewhat more peacefully from here. Legio Aurora, as the remaining soldiers of the unit came to be known, soon made its way into through the gates of Kolstec. The newly christened leader of the unit, Chapter Master Gabriel Wight, met up with Father Zwei, Hellghast's Aeoni liaison since the unit's timely rescue of the Aeoni missionaries in the forests of Wassau. Other soldiers from both units began to mingle in other ways, with one unfortunate scuffle between an Aeoni Knight pilot and a Hellghast Strider pilot ending only after a member of an Aeoni Sheperd's flock fired a gunshot into the ceiling of the vehicle bay, said gunshot being heard all around the base and attracting an undue amount of attention. In light of this incident (among several others), it was soon agreed upon by both forces that a friendly skirmish match was to be had between the two concerned parties. Hellghast won.

With the Aeoni unit rested and gone, Hellghast turned its attention back on the warpath. Now that Voss had been cleared from Ragnyll, now came the time to go on the offensive. Higher command chose the Hellghast's striking point to be the coastal town of Stallion, a former trading port for both Voss and Ragnyll. With support from Major Thaneus Kane's Ragnyllian Legion, the Hellghast Armored Unit deployed in force, quickly taking the beaches and fighting their way inland. As they fought deeper into the town, a Private Henessian Kess captured a seeming small, unremarkable hut situated on a small island in the middle of a river that ran through the town, naming the small structure HinzerHaus. Upon capturing the hut, Kess discovered a Ghoulified, though still somehow human, inhabitant, a certain miss Mary Susan.  She detailed herself as a corpsier, a practitioner in the occult arts of the Voss.  What was unknown to anyone, though, was that the structure, as well as its inhabitants, would have a deeper role in a future deployment (more on that later). The fighting past HinzerHaus was fierce, Hellghast and Ragnyllian Legionnaire forces both pushing hard against the seemingly insurmountable wall of Vossian massed infantry and tanks. The Hellghast's priorities shifted, though, when a Captain Gunther called down an artillery strike on a mass of Voss Infantry that, coincidentally, had an allied Stork positioned right above it. The Stork, torn to pieces by the artillery strike, proceeded to crash land deeper into Voss lines, its pilot, though unharmed, in danger of being captured. 

Hellghast moved quickly to recover the downed pilot, ripping apart his captors in a hail of minigun fire.  Meanwhile, Kane's Legionnaires brought the landing craft deeper into the town, deploying more reinforcements as the Hellghast continued to press their assault.  It was at this point in the battle that the Hellghast noticed two things:  one, that there was a very large, very imposing statue in the town square some distance from them; and two, that the civillians were being herded onto train cars, no doubt to be sent ontward to some Ghoulifying Processing Center.  The unit promptly blew up the statue and rescued the civillians, Major Kane's Legionnaires plodding forward behind them.  It should not be ignored, however, that the Hellghast lost yet another CO in the midst of the fighting:  Major Mana, the last survivor of the original Hellghast unit that survived the Fall of Sylvia, that glorious close-combat beatstick whose power could rival that of that one [[Abaddon|armless asshat of a failure in another universe]], was unceremoniously blown apart in a flurry of artillery fire.  Captain Gunther became the overall commander of the Hellghast in her place.

It was here that the story came to a shift:  A sickly green light pulsed at the base of the broken statue, before shooting upwards in an awesome display.  Weapons could not pierce this column of light, nor dissipate it.  The green light gave way to black, and a form materialized in the middle of this column.  The monster bellowed out its challenge to the Hellghast:  for disrupting the ritual and denying the beast its sacrifice, it swore that it would claim all of the Hellghast, 99 days after Stallion.  After giving this proclamation, the column of light promptly collapsed in on itself, leaving the battle-scarred town to lick its wounds and bury the dead.

Through the help of Mary Susan, it was determined that the entity's name was Thanatos.  He was a Death God, a being formed from malevolence incarnate, and that the Voss had been serving this being for some time before the unit's unaccounted-for interruption. The Hellghast had two options:  submit to the Death God and proclaim all its kills in its name, or destroy it.  Naturally, the unit chose the latter option. The apprentice corpsier gave the unit an opportunity to lend her assistance to the unit in its search for more information on the Death God and how to defeat it on one condition:  they had to go into the basement of Hinzerhaus and take care of a certain bug problem.  Not wishing to waste an opportunity on finding out how to kill this new nemesis, the unit gladly accepted the offer.

What followed was a grueling ordeal that went on for a week.  Roaches, beetles, and mantids--creatures unseen since the days of Skirmish Quest--reared their ugly heads, descending upon the unit.  Undaunted, the Hellghast cut through the mindless droves, discovering that the basement was less of a basement and more of an underground research facility, complete with lab, office, observatory, and library.  The fighting was intense; what the bugs lacked in firepower they compensated for in sheer number.  For every Roach killed, 3 more took its place; on top of this, if the bodies weren't outright destroyed, eggs could spawn in the corpses, leaving a nasty surprise for the wayward soldier that moves close to the dead Roaches.  On top of this, soon flying beetles that could slice through armor and flesh harassed the infantry as horned beetles that spewed fire ripped apart the armor support.  

[More to come.]
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'''Volume 2:  The Rise of the Voss'''
[[Image:IRONHEARTSCOVERVOSS.png|center]]


15 years before the Voss offensive into Ragnyll, a Vosskon unit of war orphans known as the Terrible Children saw their first deployment. In the sands of the Sansik Empire they rescued a child from the corrupted grasp of his sacrificed mother, and found a new Emperor to wear the Crown of Dead Kings: Vilkas von Voss. In his name they fight against the Skylands and her people, the Kashir, a group of desert-dwelling warriors who worship heathen Death Gods.

The Voss Royal guard are the main players of IronHearts Volume 2. Unlike Ragnyllian basic soldiers, Voss "Royals" are considered a level higher than the standard voss trooper. As such, they can only deploy at the start of games and upon death may only redeploy as members of the regular army ("mooks"). Playing as a standard regular soldier is also fine.

The Royal Guard is comprised of various tactical fighters, rear line supporters, and even Officers that can fall under either category. Any Royal can ORDER nearby mooks to join them, causing the lower soldats to gain a command bonus. COs can choose their command auras as indicated by the base of their cards, but the blanket of units they can affect is dependent on Rank.