Helstalker

LordDiscordant1 — A Lord Discordant of the Black Legion riding his Helstalker into battle.

A Helstalker is a type of Daemon Engine that serves as a mount for a Chaos Space Marine Lord Discordant. It provides him a potent ally in combat, and helps him to target tanks and anti-gravitic skimmers in particular.

Beyond its potent claws and whipping tail, a Helstalker can also be armed with a carapace-mounted Autocannon or Baleflamer as its Lord Discordant master wills.

Some Helstalkers use Magma Cutters to slice open the vehicle they have pinned, whileothers have enormous hypo-armour syringes that -- after piercing the outer shell of their prey -- inject viral scrapcode and daemonic dataphages directly into the machine's circuitry.

The Lord Discordant himself lunges forwards with his Impaler Chainglaive, its whirring blade gouging into metal and exposing the vehicle's internal workings, while his mechatendrils rip at its panelling. He hears the machine's pain, he feels it struggle to reroute vital functions to maintain system integrity, and his Helstalker feeds on this suffering. The Daemon Engine parasitically devours the motive force that powers its prey, be it a Machine Spirit (artificial intelligence) or some other esoteric datasentience employed in xenos technology.

As it does so, its own metallic frame swells with ingested code and subroutines, while rents in its casing crackle with Warp energy and seal closed. The Lord Discordant siphons off the pained spirit of the dying vehicle, his mechatendrils lapping up the spasmodic electrical discharges and corrupting their information signatures. This harvested energy is then used to reinvigorate other Daemon Engines, or is released as a screaming beam to infect the systems of other enemy vehicles.