For the longest time, all the Noble Houses fielded their own Spyrer Suits and participated in The Most Dangerous Game. Maybe they weren't as fancy as the suits the Helmawr's used, but considering the sacrifices the strongest suits required, the lesser houses Spyrers functioned roughly as efficiently.

But then the ruling Helmawr house decided that participation in The Most Dangerous Game, was a privilege that should be exclusive to them and seized any remaining suits for their sole use. 

It has been hundreds of years since that proclamation. Helmawr spyrers, seldom seen but presences often felt, continue The Most Dangerous Game and even broadened their scope into monster haunted delves into Secundus. A few minor houses run their ancestral suits in secret, and the nouveau rich prey upon debt ridden Helmawr cousins, hoisting them from 'poverty' in exchange for marriage into an armour owning family unit, or for an indefinite loan of their suit.

House Artamidae, mechanicus approved manufacturer of flight systems and sheen birds, willingly relinquished their suits when the ascendant Helmawrs demanded it. But as tech adepts of the highest caliber, they never gave up the technical side of Rig ownership, keeping their arming stations and diagnostic units in pristine condition, waiting upon the Helmawr's eventual fall from grace and the day they are able to return to the tradition of their ancestors.

But as dramatic events signal the upheaval of the established order , acts of pride and pettiness from the ruling Helmawrs have pushed the dying house to the edge of rebellion.

 And so with the technology at their disposal, they evened the odds and returned to The Most Dangerous Game without the ruling houses blessing, a spiteful claw in their all seeing eye. 

In response to threats sent from House Delaque.

Your tireless efforts to monitor the Spyrers of House Artamidae are fragmentary and beset by constant and unexpected setbacks. 

Mixed into their visual telemetry are feeds from uncountable sheen birds scattered through multiple layers of the hive, fighting, feeding, watching.

A fertile new source of information, were it not for the deeply frustrating and near constant synth-mimicry of their calls, replicating all manner of social or industrial sound in a raucous cacophony of underhive whitenoise.

High gothic words strung together across multiple feeds deliver a reply only deciphered after days of constant surveillance and dedicated man hours.

"Control is fleeting, lives meaningless. Do not interfere with our revenge."

Their souls are no easier to locate, tiny frayed things, barely there and hard to pinpoint. But upon finally viewing one,  it is a concentrated red globule of hate, rage and pain, ghastly to view and uncomfortable to examine. Nothing like the towering narcissists of House Helmawr, their golden souls,  rotted from wealth, shining with boundless hubris, each thought hidden behind pretense and plot. 

House Artamidae's will is strong, their thoughts unshrouded. Destruction. Disorder. Terror. Justice.

But finally, underpinning everything you've learned, some malignant prescence that defies even your technological and wyrd understanding. Other Spyrers are insulated from the programming of their suits by multiple layers of Mind Impulse Units, their machine spirits elegantly contained within hardware altogether separate from the individual. Not so the Spyrers of House Artamidae, seemingly jacked directly into the archaeotech which lets them run rampant amidst the sump, via neuroconductive cabling insperable from the form and function. 

It sees you. 

Data Slate Log #1

It had been a hab block, once. Bunk housing for workers at the coolant recycling center. 
At some point in the distant past, the pox swept through and all it left in its wake was an immortal hotbunking rotation forever locked into artificial circadian rhythms of the dead dome.
The other gangs activated the munitorum's strikebreaking system and fried them all rather than clean them out manually.

We decided to put our new 'suits' through their paces before we lit the pilot lights, and spent a productive afternoon testing the average viral load of the walkers. 
This didn't feel like some step in a grand plan, we were never in enough danger to even trip our adrenal stabilisers. 
At least the flames meant we didn't have to clean up any corpses.  

Data Slate Log #2

The ancient scaffolding surrounding the ruined cathedral was held together by rust and graffiti. It was probably erected to expedite the reconstruction of this once grand edifice, long left to languish.
This was, in true underhive style, not how it was being utilised.

No great works were being restored, instead the remains were being cannibalised by Squat scavengers who weren't too proud to repurpose Imperial architecture. I'm sure there's a parable from the Imperial Creed that would be applicable to this scenario, but those are memories I unburdened myself of when I was interred in this ambulatory sarcophagus. 

There was a rhythmic throbbing in the back of my head that even my full body diagnostics could not account for. Theoretically, I shouldn't get headaches anymore lacking the most fundamental prerequisites, but my parts weren't built to be spliced together, and the software was designed for Spyrers with significantly more of their fleshly bodies remaining.

The hazards of being on the bleeding edge.

The others were now out of sight, as were the scavengers. I linked my visual feed to the Sheen birds, and located the team and our adversaries. I could not say if our House held any grudge against them, but time was past due to introduce ourselves to this expeditions denizens and these prospectors simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

By the time I'd slammed the third body against a wall, the throbbing had ceased and all my components had stabilised. I won't pretend to understand every complexity of interaction between software, hardware and wetware, but smoothing the boundaries between them needs to be my most prominent focus going forward.

As I mused on this, shots burst against my armour and I dropped to one knee. I had been careless. The process has not rendered me inviolable and allowing my thoughts to drift like this was an easy way to squander the sacrifices we've all made.

My loyal Valet was by my side before any permanent damage was done, interposed between me and the bolter shells as he'd always been before.

The squat firing them, some manner of Foreman, was already a limp bundle on the ground before I could get to my feet.

Which left only one thing to do, a grim necessity.

THE HELMAWRS CANNOT SAVE YOU

Written on the Cathedral's buttressed marble facade.

In blood.

Data Slate Log #3

A mortal man would be dead. It's that simple. Melta blast, point blank range. Testing my reflexes still produces unpredictable results.
One arm was gone in an instant, steam and liquid metal splashed across the rest of my suit in an expanding cloud.
The vaporised remains of my blade arm acted as soft cover in which to escape.
My compatriots witnessed my 'death' with stoic calm and only engaged the enemy when the exchanges were within acceptable parameters. They slid into and out of cover, the suits recovery modules whirred and whined. I remained perfectly stationary in the rafters and observed, the drip of fluid from my stump collecting in a puddle beside me.
They took risks that only we could take, following my lead.  They were all willing to temporarily falter in exchange for delivering a coup de grace or forcing a serious injury.
In the end, the Delaque looted whatever resources they could, kicked our sheen birds out of frustration and slunk away into the shadows. 
My beloved was left upon the field, making certain that the dwellers in the dark could not surreptitiously clean up the evidence of their defeat.
Signs of our passing must never be hidden from public view, for what point is there to engaging in violence if it is not freely available for the plebs to wonder over. 
The whisperers will say I died.
I look forward to seeing their expressions upon learning that rumours of my death were greatly exaggerated

Data Slate #4 Orlock Roadsters with humorously alliterative nicknames were looting an old hab block full of surplus rations that have catalysed into the psycheractive drug Ghast. Our birds felt the stirrings of their temporary awakenings, leading us to them like moths in thrall to a flame. Something about their fleeting connection with a power beyond imagining spoke to us. We were content to watch, for a while, before it became obvious that unfettered access to these abilities could tip the balance of power and prove greater hindrance in the coming nights. My aunt flew high and took aim, rockets threading their little needles. My sister dashed to the flank, her beau following her closely. But not close enough.
I didn't want to build my sister into something hard and uncompromising. So I can't be angry that she would balk at killing a dog, even were that failing to throw our plan into jeopardy. My brother in law dashed to her aid and threw her spasming suit over his shoulder, backing slowly away from the twitchy stimmed out rocketeers and the snarling beast, scarcely fleshier than any of us. 

All we had to do was chase them away. A bodycount now would be inconvenient later, harder to split the action around evenly if there were five of us and any demonstration of the success of my endeavour would inevitably draw my older brother away from our society presence and into the fray.

But then I felt an impulse, a signal. A desire.

I surged up the field, my wings and my twine pulling me towards the only thing in the world upon which I could focus. I closed quickly on the heartbeat, the quick breaths, the falling shells and the smell of cordite. My whip lashed and applied its numbing agent, and the naga blade tore a thin red line across a belly, armoured sections falling clean away. The wound bloomed into a flower of blood and viscera, intestines spilling from the gap, but before I could finish the job, the desire faded. The chemicals pumped directly into my brain told me 'this is enough', a sentiment conflicting with the desire to grab a handful and start pulling.

He grasped feebly at his open gut, and the red glow from my eye lenses beneath my hood was the last thing he saw before he passed out from the immense pain. 

My little birds tell me he survived. Isn't modern medicine marvelous. What a time to be alive. 

Data Slate #5 

I don't have a strong feeling one way or another about squats, nor prospectors. These Squat Prospectors of the Blue Sky mine, however, have drawn my ire again. They brought an Exo-Driller into this underhive to begin some manner of heavy industry. The heavy bolter it is equipped with is powerful enough that it can circumvent our armour and hardware. My family were tasked with distracting the rest of the crew while I sought out the behemoth and rendered it nonfunctional, hopefully allowing me to access the operator and make him aware of our displeasure.

I thought I was concealed, but the sensor suite on the Exo-Driller is built dwarf tough. It rounded a silo stack and opened fire on me immediately, and the heavy bolter shells pushed me backwards into the supports of a gantryway. In the background I could hear the engagement begin in earnest but nobody else was in range to witness the fury with which this machine was addressing me with.

And there it was again, that desire to engage and kill. Outside of my regular desire to wreck a high value target, irrespective of the adrenal injectors pushing the remains of my body to the redline, I was driven to commit acts of savagery cognitively dissonant even with our overall goal of mounting terror.

Again and again I was struck with mass reactive self propelled bolts, armour plating flaking away, synthetic musculature tearing and the pneumatic rods rupturing, gas hissing away into the hive around me.

My hardware was desperately trying to reroute power to my motive systems but I'd lost integrity on every major component and my vision was reduced to a long, cracked tunnel of red light.

And a fire. A fire over which ancient men roasted the haunches of megafauna whose names are now lost to the millennia. Around which they danced, into which they sacrificed so that the sun might rise in the morning.

My Warbling Doom took a hit that would have punctured my cerebral shielding had it connected, but it's a hardy little bird. It survived the direct hit and flipped back off the ground like a children's clockwork toy.

And the fire, by this point, had filled me completely, tearing dominance away from the chemical impulses the suit was feeding into my brain and the lucid sliver of my mind that I always liked to consider was calling the shots.

The memories of my engagement with the Exo-Driller from that point forward were both vivid, like a perfectly realised dream, and simultaneously hazy like I was watching my own life from behind glass. 

My twine flicked in between the armour plating and connected with the Squat underneath, slowing his movements and reducing his aim. The Naga Blade tore through the joints like they were oxidised examples recovered from the wastes, having never seen a day of care or maintenance in the millennia the charter had lived here.

I lifted the pilot in my claws and said words I don't know in a language I don't speak and I am embarrassed to say that this, more than the physical drubbing or the campaign of fear I have been managing, was what finally drove him into the peaceful gulf of catatonia.

My family took care of the rest, and while none of them asked me about the fire, they were all unknowingly basking in its glow.