Foetid Bloat-drone

The Foetid Blote-drone is an aerial Daemon Engine of Nurgle designed to provide aerial combat support for the forces of the Death Guard Traitor Legion. Labouring through the air on buzzing turbines and driven by the trapped essence of a Nurgle daemon, the Foetid Bloat-drone drifts towards the enemy like an armoured plague fly. This hideous war engine bears monstrous weapons onto the battlefield to annihilate the enemies of the Death Guard. Clad in rusting plates of rot-iron armour, their hulls overflowing with flabby foulness, Foetid Bloat-drones can withstand ferocious amounts of punishment and still keep fighting. They are designed to hover in close, drifting lazily through the most treacherous of terrain to provide supporting fire.

Role
Many Foetid Bloat-drones are equipped with a pair of Plaguespitters. As the Daemon Engine floats over the battlefield, its trailing pipes and tubules suckle rot and filth with idiot hunger to fuel these revolting weapons. The Bloat-drone slurps up diseased innards and maggot-thick mud until its putrid flesh is straining and pulsating, refining a hideous cocktail of hyper-concentrated toxic slime. Then, with a disgusting spasm of regurgitation, the drone squirts the resultant soup through its Plaguespitters, spraying it in great fans across the foe. No cover or defence can protect the target from this lethal rain of filth. Victims find their bodies convulsing and twisting in the grip of a thousand maladies, rotting and bloating until they collapse into a heap of decaying, highly infectious matter. Many are still screaming when they do.

Other Bloat-drones are equipped for long-range bombardment. Fitted with a heavy blight launcher, these Daemon Engines suck armour-piercing blight shells from their rusting drum magazines and fire them in rippling volleys. This rain of disease-ridden shells can reduce a battle tank to a corroded, collapsing wreck in moments, or bring whole squads of heavily armoured infantry to their knees.

The entities that possess Foetid Bloat-drones are more aggressive and spiteful than most Daemons of Nurgle. Some are so wilful that they cannot be entrusted with ranged weaponry at all, their desire to smash themselves into the enemy ranks all too evident. These rebellious engines are instead fitted with the macabre devices known as fleshmowers. Heavy cylinders of rusted iron blades, flesh mowers thrust out in front of the Bloat-drone on bulky arms and whir frenetically as it flies into battle. These weapons can be used in thrumming passes through the enemy ranks, or more deliberately pressed against resilient targets to rip them apart. Either way, the result is a hideous red spray and a mulched strew of body parts. The mashed remains of flesh-mower victims make excellent slop-fuel for those Bloat-drones armed with plaguespitters, and so the two variants often form parasitic war packs.

Created in festering manufactoria on Nurgle-dominated Daemon Worlds, the cost in blood sacrifice to create these engines is significant, and the binding rituals are hazardous in the extreme. Yet their enduring popularity with the Traitor Legion’s Lords ensures that Foetid Bloat-drones are ferried in great numbers to the war zones in which the Death Guard fight, and deployed in swarms that darken the skies. This is especially true in vectoriums of the 5th Plague Company, with warbands such as the Sons of the Maggot, the Suppurant Sting, and the Smogrot Brotherhood fielding great numbers of Foetid Bloat-drones in varying pack strengths and configurations. These airborne attack waves featured strongly during the opening battles of Mortarion’s Creeping Doom offensive against Ultramar, descending upon the enemy like flies onto a corpse before butchering and feasting upon their victims.