Snow White Hills Blood Bowl Chronicles

First time I served under General Krugmeister, I was barely more than a boy, fourteen years old and with a sword nearly as big as I was. He'd forgotten more about fighting Beastmen than I've ever learned, but one of the things that stuck in my mind was his tactic of getting their leaders to fight amongst themselves. I saw him use it half-a-dozen times, and it only failed once. He did the same thing every time, no matter the size of the Beastman gang—even if there were only two or three of them, they'd always have a hierarchy of some kind. The Beastman leader was always easy to spot, but the real trick was spotting the Pretender, as he called it, the next-most-powerful Beastman, always looking to take down the leader, to pounce on any moment of weakness and tear him apart. If he could communicate with the Pretender, get him riled enough to attack the leader... well, all their discipline was shot to hell, they'd be too busy watching the two hard cases fight, they were barely capable of defending themselves—not that we ever attacked till both were near-dead anyway. The day it failed, the General had ordered me and half-a-dozen of the younger, fitter men to give chase to a Beastman band in hopes of finding where they laired, because they were carrying off a score of captives they'd taken in a skirmish with our foragers. The idea was we'd pursue at full speed to keep them in sight, while Colonel Schmidt gathered the rest of the army and followed. The General himself came with us, nigh as fast on his feet as the best of us, even with the grey hairs peppering his beard, yes, even more than in my beard now, lad. We'd expected to find one of their temporary camps, the sort they use just as a base for raids, then abandon a few weeks later, but the place they carried the foragers to was in the darkest depths of the forest, marked out by one of their great stone monuments. I'm not one for superstition but you could feel the reek of Chaos coming off that thing. We watched and waited, concealed in the trees. All their attention was on the captives, whom they were dragging towards this heap of wood on a big flat section of ground stained with blood and ashes. Krugmeister hissed 'Stay put here, whatever happens.' Then he circled round and stepped into the clearing, bold as a Marienburg merchant collecting on a bad debt. He nodded at the beast leader, a huge thing it was, twice the height of a tall man with horns like sabres, but his eyes were on this misshapen great Beastman with crusted black pincer-tipped tentacles where its arms should be. 'You going to let him have the glory of sending them to the Dark Gods, when you did all the hard work capturing them?' he calls. A look passed between the two Chaos-spawned monstrosities, and then they both stared at the stone, stared back at each other with a gaze that said 'We'll settle this later.' Without a word they turned on the General. Oh, he fought—fought like a maddened badger he did. He had his war-sword out in a blink, sliced deep into the beast leader's neck as its first charge shattered his shield. In the hollow we all tensed, frozen in place by the spectacle, the instinct to flee warring with our loyalty to Krugmeister. Before we decided what to do, he'd spitted the black-pincered beast on his blade, but the leader—ichor still oozing from the gaping wound in its neck—had its arms round him and was biting at his head. Last we saw of him, he was struggling to pull his sword out from black pincer's corpse. An instant later he vanished under a mass of roaring Beastmen. We heard a last yell of defiance and pain, carrying over the bellows and grunts of his attackers, a moment before they tore off his arms and head and hurled them into the air.: — Captain Schultz, Mercenary Commander