Sicarian Ruststalkers

The Sicarian battle-automata are the elite close-quarters killers of the Skitarii, and the Ruststalkers are the pattern honed for hunting living prey. Each is a Skitarius stripped of all but the barest humanity and rebuilt into a lithe engine of murder, their reflexes accelerated and their senses sharpened until they move with a speed the eye can scarcely follow. Wrapped in cloaks woven to baffle sound and sensor alike, they slip toward their targets in an eerie, gliding silence.

Their weapons are instruments of precise butchery. Transonic blades and razors vibrate at frequencies that shiver apart armour and bone once their killing edge builds to full pitch, shearing through plate that would turn a lesser weapon. Paired with these is the chordclaw, a strangling gauntlet tipped with a venom-injector that stops a heart in an instant. So armed, a single Ruststalker can lay low a champion in the space of a breath, and a full cadre can gut an enemy unit before the alarm is even raised.

In the cold doctrine of the forge worlds, the Ruststalkers are loosed to decapitate and dismember. They are sent against command squads, war-leaders and armoured elites, targets whose deaths unravel the enemy's plan, and they carry out these killings with the dispassion of a scalpel. There is no fury in their work and no mercy, only the flawless, humming efficiency of murder rendered into a sacred art.