Knight Rampager

A Knight Rampager is a type of Questoris Pattern Chaos Knight that excels at melee combat. Knights Rampager are the Knight equivalent of uncontrolled berserkers, launching themselves into close combat with the foe without care or concern for their own survival or the tactics of their allies.

Knights Rampager are known to storm into battle with frenzied, metallic howls. They charge full-tilt towards the foe with no thought for their own defence, servos straining, Plasma Reactor dials running red and attitudinal alarms wailing as the war engines threaten to topple themselves in their desperation to reach the foe. For the Fallen Nobles who pilot these lunatic war engines, it is like having their minds and souls tethered to a blazing meteor.

They can do little but fight to direct the bloodthirst of their Knight suits as best they can, and many are rapidly worn down by the experience until their sanity snaps and they are left as little more than slavering beasts themselves.

So ferocious are Knights Rampager, so utterly bereft of discipline or restraint, that they are often dropped from a low-flying macro-hauler directly into the thickest fighting of a war zone. Other times they are teleported from within adamantium hexcages aboard orbiting war ships, or even transported to the front lines chained into super-heavy transport frames that bind them like armoured straight jackets until it is time for their fury to be unleashed.

More than one such raving war engine has broken free of its restraints en route to the front, and wrought mayhem amongst its erstwhile allies in its mindless need to sate its battle-lust.

Role
For all the risks inherent in their deployment, once the Knights Rampager hit the enemy lines it is not hard to see why the Fallen Noble houses employ them in battle. These towering war engines fight less like machines and more like frenzied daemons.

Their carapace warps and twists, weapon limbs over-articulating in ways that should be rationally impossible for their limited mechanical frames. Adamantine sinews and hyper-stressed servos scream as the Knights Rampager stab and bludgeon with their Reaper Chainswords and Thunderstrike Gauntlets, attacking with terrifying speed and ferocity.

They rain down punishing blows that sunder the guard of even the most skilled war engine pilot, staving in the helms and chests of Loyalist Knights or tearing the heads from elegant Asuryani Wraithknights. The Knights Rampager stab and hack with their screaming chainswords, lopping limbs off Tyranid bio-horrors before eviscerating them in gory sprays.

Knights Rampager have been seen to hoist war engines aloft in the grip of their Thunderstrike Gauntlets before sawing them in two with their whirring blades, scoop up infantry and hurl them screaming through the air to splatter bloodily against the flanks of their own bastions, or pummel victims into the ground before tearing chunks from them and bloodily devouring them with the gnashing maws of their mutated face-plates.



Throughout their berserk onslaught, the Knights Rampager ignore incoming fire altogether. Their Ion Shields swivel and tilt, but this is likely merely the Fallen Nobles within attempting some modicum of self-preservation while they let their steeds maraud at will.

Charging at the forefront of every assault, fighting with inexhaustible ferocity until they are too damaged to take another stride, Knights Rampager take catastrophic casualties.

It is rare for a single such war engine to leave a war zone under its own power. Of course, many Fallen houses count on this fact; it is far easier to haul wrecked Knights Rampager from the battlefield and effect repairs than to entrap them again by force...

Unit Composition

 * 1 Knight Rampager

Wargear

 * Heavy Stubber
 * Reaper Chainsword
 * Thunderstrike Gauntlet
 * Ion Shield
 * Titanic feet

Ordo Malleus Departmento Analyticus Technical Specifications
The technical specifications of the Knight Desecrator have not yet been obtained by the Holy Ordos of the Inquisition.