Khepris-ra lifted her ornamented head, straightening her forelegs to loom high into the air even as her multifaceted gaze stared down into the valley. She could see the frantic flickering of torches and hear the clangour of alarm bells as the inhabitants of the tiny Alliance settlement that was present there tried to ready themselves for invasion. Peasant men rushed from their homes and tried to scramble into a meagre militia, under the guidance of the few actual soldiers that were stationed at the outpost. Even at this distance, Khepris-ra could see the well-armoured man carrying a giant war hammer: a Knight of the Silver Hand. A Paladin. Khepris-ra looked forward to taking him down herself. It would please her master, Ner'zhul, to know that one less of the holy knights was about in the world.

Brandishing her scythe-claws, holding them high into the night air, Khepris-ra screeched her war cry. Her army cried with her, two hundred fiendish voices raised in eagerness to kill and destroy. Ghouls snarled, eagerly licking claws that would soon be bloodstained. Abominations howled, waving their cleavers and meat hooks in the air, clouded by the putrescence emanating from every pore of their rotting, stitched-together bodies. Banshees screeched, their inhuman voices music to Khepris-ra's ears, but pain and death to their enemies'. The meat wagons groaned as they unloaded their grisly burdens of decaying corpses, and the Necromancers chanted as they waved their staves and brought the bodies to unlife and armed them with magic-made weapons.

The sound Khepris-ra took the most pleasure from, however, was the chittering of the Crypt Fiends, the undead Nerubian warriors who were her own brethren, gnashing their mandibles and calling up the hordes of flesh-eating insects they would cast upon their enemies.

Khepris-ra, Crypt Lord, signalled the attack and charged forwards as the point of the wave of undead warriors. They thundered down the hill, heralded by the ratcheting clanks of the meat wagons throwing corpses over their heads to soften up the enemy with the quick-acting contagion that infested them.

Fragments of the militia were already trying to flee when Khepris-ra's army contacted the feeble defence-line, and overran it. Two hundred warriors were a mere blood cell in the body that was the army of the Scourge, but it was all that was necessary to take on this pathetic outpost.

Kheprisa-ra charged a footman, rearing up on her hind legs as he tried to hide behind his shield. She brought her weight down on him, impaling him on a spiked 'foot' that pierced his armoured breastplate if it had been tinfoil. Then she swung a scythe-claw and his head flew from his shoulders in a spray of blood, his features frozen in the expression of pain and shock he died with.

With a screech to announce her victory, Khepris-ra kicked the cooling body off her claw and wheeled about, her armour and carapace clattering as she hunted for another foe, of which she found herself with fewer and fewer to pick from. Her army was a flood the defenders could not stop. Already some of the bodies had risen from the ground, called and commanded by the Necromancers to attack what was left of their living kinsmen.

She watched a dwarven rifleman be pulled to the ground by a pair of her Ghouls, his screams only beginning as they began to feast on him.

A militiaman ran by with screams of his own, clutching at his body and then falling to the ground, where he lay thrashing as the insects summoned by one of her Crypt Fiends swarmed under his armour, and started to eat him alive as well.

A knight spurred his charger towards a Banshee, only for the vengeful spirit to lunge at him and possess him, and turn his sword on the men who had been his comrades heartbeats before.

An Abomination lurched into a fray between more Ghouls and armoured footmen, bowling over men and undead alike with its massive girth, though while the Ghouls shook themselves and got up again, those men that the Abomination hadn't already crushed with its weight slowly began to choke on the murky green cloud of disease it had brought with it.

She saw the Paladin swing his hammer and shatter the skull of one of her Ghouls with the mighty blow. He looked up as the skeletal beast fell and spotted her in turn, and his features darkened with holy rage. He bellowed in challenge and charged for her, holding his hammer tightly with both hands.

Khepris-ra shrieked in return and lunged forward to meet him, lowering her head and the great gilded horn of her helmet. The Paladin dove to the side, as she expected, and she spun to follow him, jabbing for his legs or torso with her claws. A swing of his hammer drove her back for a moment, to avoid losing her head as the Ghoul had, but she leapt again while he was still trying to rebalance the massive weapon.

Blue light flared around the Paladin, meeting her claws and forcing her to recoil from the shock of striking an unyielding barrier. As Khepris-ra staggered back, the Paladin got back to his feet while the blue light wove runes of protection in the air around him. She clicked softly and pulled back a bit, undisturbed, knowing the holy knight's protection could only last a short time, and that he was only delaying his death. This outpost had no Altar to call back his heroic soul when he fell.

The Paladin pointed his hammer to the sky, and a golden beam of light blasted down from the stars, enveloping Khepris-ra with radiance. She screeched again, but this time in true pain as the holy magic burned her cursed flesh. The giant Nerubian reared onto her hindclaws, then fell forward to strike the ground again with all her weight behind her forefeet.

The very earth shuddered beneath her, then great spikes of earth as wide as dinner tables burst from the ground in a line that stretched before her, one after the other, jabbing up from the ground then pulling back again, leaving only churned soil behind. The Paladin's eyes went wide, but had to time to react before one of the spikes erupted directly beneath him and shot him high into the air.

He tumbled through the air, still within his ball of light, and Khepris-ra raced to meet him where he would come to earth again. The Paladin hit the ground and rolled, his protective runes flickering and then disappearing in a flash of light as he lay stunned upon the ground. Giving the action no ceremony, Khepris-ra struck, driving her scythes so deeply into his chest that she pierced the ground beneath him.

The Paladin jerked once, then shuddered into stillness. For a moment, she could see his soul as it flickered out of his body, but then it vanished, lost to whatever void awaited fallen heroes on the other side of life.

Khepris-ra had to rip his corpse in half to free her serrated scythe-claws, and did so with indifference. Stepping out of the way of a Ghoul that eagerly rushed over to consume the remains, she turned her head to survey the outpost.

The battle was over. The only Alliance men standing were the corpses her Necromancers had raised as labour to reload the meat wagons with the corpses this massacre had produced, and the unfortunates that had become possessed hosts for some of her Banshees.

The Lich King would be pleased.