Kabalite Warriors

"WHO WOULD LIKE TO SUFFER TODAY?"

Kabalite Warriors are your basic Dark Eldar foot soldiers and are analogues of the Eldar Guardians. Unlike their Guardian counterparts, they are actually front-line warriors as their namesake implies. Thus, they are arguably more Awesome than your typical Elfdar. Kabalite Warriors usually comprise most of the manpower (delfpower?) during a Dark Eldar raid.

Life in the Dark City is defined by constant backstabbing while trying not to end up as either fodder for the arenas or as material for some Haemonculus' next project. As a result, most individual Dark Eldar citizens have bigger brass balls than you'd find on half of an entire Eldar Craftworld. In short, Dark Eldar society is very dangerous, and because of the need for some measure of safety almost all citizens of Commorragh attempt to become Warriors in one Kabal or another.

Kabalite Warriors are individuals who have excelled enough to be noticed by a Sybarite. They are then granted increased status and inducted into the warriors of the Kabal. The Kabal furnishes weapons and armor in return for lifetime service to the Kabal. Despite this, the new warrior generally has no loyalty to the Sybarite, seeing him or her as just another stepping stone to power in the Kabal. And for those who wonder what the hell a Sybarite is, they are the squad's best warrior and thus its leader. New Sybarites are often decided by warriors of a squad killing their superior officer in order to take their title.

Equipment

The standard Kabalite Warrior is very lightly equipped, carrying only a Splinter Rifle for armament. Unfortunately for their foes, the Splinter Rifle is quite decent as far as basic weapons go, being a 24" range rapid fire weapon that always wounds living targets on a 4+. The squad's more experienced Warriors are also sometimes assigned powerful support weapons such as Splinter Cannons, Dark Lances, Shredders and Blasters. The Sybarite has a splinter rifle as standard, but also has access to a wide variety of other options including the splinter pistol, blast pistol, power sword, agoniser, and/or phantasm grenade launcher.

In terms of protection, Warriors benefit most from armor that relies on speed and agility. Thus their armor is a thin, light-weight flexible bodysuit, pressurized to allow Warriors to traverse the vacuum of space. Just like standard-issue Eldar suits this armor responds to neural impulses from the wearer and hardens when struck in combat, allowing for a reasonable level of resistance to basic attacks. The lightness and flexibility of this armor allows Warriors to fully utilize their superior speed and reflexes in combat. However, simply wearing armor is too tame for most Dark Eldar. Therefore the plates of their bodysuits are often fitted with barbs and hooks that dig into the user's skin. In typical Drukhari BDSM fashion, rather than being a painful distraction this actually sharpens and maximizes their senses. In some cases the armor is only staying on its wearer because putting it on requires the use the hooks on the inward-facing parts of the armor to pierce the skin.

More practical Warriors will sometimes make use of wraithbone components salvaged from Eldar aspect warrior and guardian armor, up to and including complete stolen suits. The Warriors seldom stick to a standardized uniform beyond a general color scheme and the symbol of whatever Kabal they choose to fight for, so many of them turn up with differently-stylized wargear. Some are scaled back with less plating, some feature different adornments, others may have more or less conventional armor designs, and so on.

The armies of Edge amass...