"He has that effect on people. We didn't rig up any seating for spectators, but the once the game starts the sideline boundaries will be visible. Hope you're okay with standing. There aren't any rules for outside interference, the game just stops if you cross the line before the end."

"I don't mind standing," she confirms.

Good, they're getting along. It's always hit or miss when trying to get Bronwen to socialize with other people. She's only recently graduated from sticking to Cassian's side at all times like a limpet to occasionally wanting total seclusion – not precisely the direction he was hoping for her to grow in, but he'll take what he can get.

He checks his watch. "Shall we get the armies set up? Mine's still in the trunk, I don't know about yours."

"In my pockets. I'll take the far corner." She gets up, swaying gently as though the effort has cost her dearly, then steadies herself and walks away.

Juno does not comment on this. If Cassian thought his younger sister being sickly and adopted was relevant he would've mentioned it. Instead, she follows him towards the trunk. It's shoved into the corner with terrain mounded up against the sides, lid ajar, an open padlock hanging from the rim. Physically on the small side, not that its size matters.

"We've already committed to the units we're going to field," he explains as he removed a tall wooden cabinet from the trunk. "We declared the type of army in advance, so we each had an overview of what could be in the enemy's forces while drafting, but you have to finalize your list without consulting your opponent's list along the way. Otherwise you enter a loop of picking specialized units to defeat your opponent's exact setup, which they can then counter in the same way, and so on. It might be better to have a drafting rule with more flexibility, like alternating choices, but this one came with the game and it works."

He opens the cabinet, sets a single piece of dark plastic on the top shelf, then closes the door again.

"Just going to test this first," he mutters, and locks the cabinet. Then he unlocks it again.

He still has memories of his homeworld, but his clearest memory is of the sky.

They'd begun to reach for the stars long before he was born, relying on massive orbital shipyards and launch platforms as stepping stones into the cosmos. Those titanic arcs of plasteel and tritanium were as visible as the moons and sun, their lambent signal lights flickering across the hulls like artificial constellations in the night. He remembers the sky more clearly than the face of his own mother – a shining symbol of civilization, the combined efforts of myriad races and creeds and nations united under one banner. How could you not know that you lived in a golden age of prosperity when the proof of it was always hanging overhead?

He remembers the sky during the invasion: the arrival of foreign capital ships, the brief exchange of fire, the way the satellites twisted and burned and gradually disintegrated under their own weight as they fell into the atmosphere. As a child he'd been sheltered from the impact of the collapse, though with hindsight he knows the xenocide would've been carried out swiftly after the Federation surrendered to the Imperium. The ancient armies of humanity had outpaced Earth's former colonies in the rush to reclaim the galaxy, and in a matter of years the system and its people were repurposed into engines of that glorious conquest.

Khan doesn't remember why he was chosen. Maybe it was because his parents had invested heavily in his genetic welfare. Maybe it was because he could recite the tenets of the Imperial Truth by heart when prompted by the recruiters. Maybe the recruiters had a quota to fill. Who can say? The rest of his memories from before they crammed five synthetic organs into his cranial cavity and grew him into an instrument of war are blurry and fragmented.

His experiences are disjointed. Endless years spent lurking in the depths of an unknowable monstrosity of a space ship; battles fought on the surface of a hundred planets, against a thousand foes. Khan's life, extended far beyond its natural span, became a homogeneous procession of tedium and slaughter. Home faded behind him until it was nothing but the burning sky and a feeling of deep-seated loathing for everything the Imperium stood for.

The irony is, turning to Chaos had been almost exactly the same: a brief period of becoming something more, followed by an interminable slog between worlds in the carcass of an ancient ship, accompanied by a legion of delusional maniacs. The hope of personally taking revenge for long-forgotten Ceti Alpha died after mere decades, but at last even the final embers of his desire to build anything good or righteous in this universe have begun to dwindle. Orbital shipyards never seem to last.

It is in the midst of another bout of maudlin introspection that Khan finds himself staring up at…

A mutant! Though he has the form and proportions of a baseline male homo sapiens, he stands nearly 400' tall, clad in dark robes cut from an impossible volume of black fabric. In one hand he holds a log from a massive fallen tree, and in the other he holds what appears to be a Land Raider.

Khan is a veteran of several campaigns spearheaded by daemon princes, so he has precisely the survival instincts he needs for this situation. He immediately prostrates himself before the skyscraper-sized psyker, or as close as he can manage while wearing power armor. The hip joints are too bulky to support the range of motion needed to touch the faceplate to the ground while kneeling, which means that proper deference to one's superiors means going all the way to prone. As an afterthought he removes the helmet, in case this one wants to directly observe him looking down to avoid eye contact.

See, this is why he wanted to start early. Now he has time to troubleshoot before the match starts.

"There's something wrong with it… not a total mobility failure, it was fully animated for a moment there before it fell on its face. Could be one of the tertiary enchantments misfiring, or maybe the core segment is fine but the armor is sophisticated enough qua technology to short out in this atmosphere. I'll try turning it off and back on again, that usually works."

Wait, what—

Door closed, locked, unlocked, opened, closed, locked, unlocked, opened.

"All right, how about now?"

He remembers the last twenty seconds of his life, but feels like a book that's been rapidly re-shelved and removed to riffle through again in quick succession. He's standing up once more, helmet back on like he never took it off in the first place, trapped under the questioning gaze of the same titanic mutant as before. Clearly it wasn't interested in grovelling.

"Reactor online, sensors online, weapons online – all systems nominal. Thirteen deployments remaining before mandatory scheduled maintenance."

"Check that you have the full range of motion. You're looking for—" parts of your power armor that weren't assembled properly "—unexpectedly loose or tight joints, panels that won't move, clogged valves, missing parts, any extraneous material or broken pieces…"

What does he think "all systems nominal" means Khan will perform a full diagnostic scan while rotating his arms and legs in place without complaining, in case the mutant does… whatever that was, again. Nothing seems to be off, apart from the fact that at least one person here is very much the wrong size.

"Report: no moderate or severe problems detected, lord. Battery capacity degraded to 85% of maximum, coolants need to be recycled sooner than expected, and several armor plates have minor cosmetic damage."

Cassian has no idea why that works for both computers and magic, but it does work. He relocates Khan to the top of the cabinet and begins stuffing the shelves with all manner of similar plastic miniatures.

He's running Chaos Space Marines in this battle, and not just because he had a blast while kitbashing and painting them. Their scale model of Hogwarts only occupies a small fraction of the floor space, but its magical defenses will make it a strategic linchpin for both players: among other things it blocks teleportation, both inbound and outbound, and it suppresses firearms^†. An army that has guns can fight almost everywhere on the battleground, but an army that doesn't need guns has an impregnable bastion to take cover in and sally from. Traditional siege tactics won't help anyone who gets permanently shoved out of Hogwarts during the initial stage of the fight, since they have neither the manpower to construct investments nor any need of external resources even if the castle were besieged. Furthermore, since Bronwen helped build it and knows exactly what it's capable of, the ideal army would also be able to hold Hogwarts against an opponent that naturally wants to occupy it as well.

Chaos fills this niche exceptionally, with such a variety of strong build options that no one-trick pony army list can hope to win within or without Hogwarts proper. He has three flavors of psyker disciplines at his disposal, powerful melee mixup attacks, really good offensive buffs, and a plethora of tools he didn't even pick up but can bluff with should the need arise. Plenty of Chaos divisions don't lose a jot of firepower when they holster their guns, something most Imperial and Xeno factions can't boast of. Space Marines over daemons was a closer call, but big guns and heavy armor were ultimately too valuable to leave out – ignoring Hogwarts entirely is not the optimal play here, but if Bronwen does it anyways he needs to be able to capitalize on the advantage and win, something he can't do if she runs a gunline army and dares him to close in with sword and sorcery.

^†The exact nature of Hogwarts' actual magical defenses was changed slightly in the adaptation.

Despite the improbability of what Elric is seeing, this is no illusion. He's been magically summoned to join a platoon in some godsforsaken cul-de-sac of reality where the square-cube law doesn't apply. This is… not categorically impossible? Stranger things have probably happened to someone else, somewhere in the galaxy?

The size discrepancy isn't that surprising – organisms that large only evolve in low-gravity environments, but as a pointlessly humanoid entity this is clearly the product of dark age bionics and a rogue Imperial black budget. What's surprising is the number of Marines who've just appeared in an enclosed space with seemingly no advanced warning. What on Holy Terra is going on? Were they all drugged? Space Marines can survive exposure to ludicrously high poison concentrations, but beyond a point the augmented excretion process itself tends to induce a coma… no, that's not it. Not only does he not feel the aftereffects of sedation, his suit telemetry claims he's not missing any time. So how did he get here so suddenly? Comprehensive illusory environments? Covert teleportation beacons?

("Magic" does not particularly occur to him as a reasonable explanation. Astral projection is a rare skill even amongst legendary psykers deep into the long tail of the distribution; maintaining an astral form for multiple unwilling victims is almost unthinkable.)

Well, however it happened, it was organized by someone who felt capable of abducting a dozen Chaos Space Marines from as many different chapters in one fell swoop. Such brazen overconfidence is… uncommon. As a practical matter, his hand is stayed from retribution. For now.

Yeah, naw. The rangefinder can't seem to make up its mind on the ballistics, but lascannons don't care about drag or bullet drop and the target has exposed eyeballs. Time for some sunshine.

Man-portable lascannons take a few seconds to noisily charge their capacitor banks before firing from a dead stop, which gives him time to react. Not that Cassian is scared of a toy weapon, exactly, but there is a funnier solution than simply ignoring Adam Smasher. He drops the Land Raider on him.

"Glad to see everything is fully mission capable! Would you please leave all of your wargear on the floor before I move you out of the way? Your loadout for today has already been selected, no need to worry about kit or weaponry."

Being flattened by a main battle tank is less debilitating than he was expecting. Sure, every rivet in his power armor popped simultaneously and the pressure inside the dented vessel that holds his remaining organs is creeping towards 75 mmHg as his limbs writhe uselessly against the ground, but he really ought to have been turned into a grease stain. It's almost like the Land Raider is lighter—

The lascannon fires, and a torrent of molten debris from the underside of the Land Raider smothers Adam entirely.

He deserved it. Didn't even try to dodge.

(And even if he had.)

Marines do not easily capitulate, even facing down overwhelming disadvantages that would send lesser men running, but in situations such as these the better part of valor is discretion. Elric unholsters his ancient sidearm, whispers an apology to the machine spirit within for the rude treatment, and lays it atop the small pile of weapons now growing at the front of the cabinet.

Then this batch of newly-disarmed Space Marines can be relocated to the top of the cabinet with Khan. Cassian spares a moment to toss the ruined Land Raider back into the chest and mend the one that destroyed himself before adding another stack of miniatures to the cabinet and repeating the process. The damaged vehicle doesn't matter (it needed to be a Rhino anyways), but the miniatures are important.

His list runs one vehicle, two special characters, five psykers, and seven terminators. The rest of his points have gone to scores of regular units and their wargear. The most obvious exclusions from this list, from the perspective of a real military, are heavy artillery and close air support – both of which exist in the game, but aren't entirely necessary given their high point cost and relatively low damage output.

(It has been three years since Cassian first saw televised combat footage from the Gulf War, a conflict between foes with such lopsided capabilities that the whole affair can only be called unsporting. In Cassian's view, the future of nonmagical war is an oncoming technological marathon to develop weapons that can identify and kill targets at progressively greater ranges, with progressively less human assistance, at progressively lower prices. The idea of being close enough to an enemy to shoot them with a rifle already seems quaint, and that distance is only going to grow longer. Wargames centered on missile launches and advanced radar systems will no doubt have their day in the sun, but to counteract the obvious incentives they have done some judicious rebalancing. To wit: power armor is harder to penetrate with shells than light weapons, which are less able in turn than chainswords and power fists. Not the cleanest solution, perhaps, but better than turning the Astra Militarum into the only faction worth picking.)

He's also passing on daemon summoning paraphernalia, bikers, defilers, tanks, and dreadnoughts. Nothing that can't fight comfortably in the effect radius of a Chaos battle standard has made the cut. The biggest hit is to his army's overall mobility, but between the psykers, the terminators, and the Rhino, he's comfortable with the amount of rapid response.

Adam is something of a connoisseur of being gratuitously destroyed and reassembled from scraps, but even he is not entirely sure how he went from drowning in slag to virtually unharmed. It's almost as if it never happened in the first place…