The park’s paths were overrun with rotting profusions of sickly vegetation. Trees had swollen into twisted giants, their shapes corrupted into menacing silhouettes in the murk. People had been overcome by the swift growth and incorporated into their seeping trunks, the change happening so swiftly that it appeared they had no time to flee. Their limbs were trapped in wooden prisons, and their bodies hardened by lignacious intrusion. Only their eyes, moist and wide in skin like bark, had movement, and they were wild and full of madness.

From behind these rotting bowers, the enemy – bloated Heretic Astartes in filth-brown armour, their plate cracked and dribbling polluted fluids – fired at the emerging Primaris Space Marines.

Felix took up station behind a broken statue of an ancient Ultramarine hero in the dome’s centre. Bolt fire cracked off its chipped body. A mat of slippery vines carpeted the paving and seats around, blending what had been an open, circular area into the diseased jungle of the park.

‘All squads, advance. Secure the landing zone,’ he ordered.

The Overlord opened fire with the heavy bolter turrets fixed on its lower wing surfaces. They thundered out fire, the passage of the bolts themselves enough to saw down swathes of diseased plant life. They exploded within wood made soft by overgrowth and rot, spraying sodden pulp everywhere. The dome juddered with the explosions, and Felix looked dubiously at the ground, half expecting it to shear and fail.

Outside the algae-speckled armourglass dome, another Overlord roared past, the backwash of its quintuple engines shaking the entire park. The fabric of the dome was as corrupted as the plants within it; its metals were rusted, and the armourglass, a substance that could persist for millennia in the most hostile environments, was pitted with incipient corrosion.

‘We are going to have to get out of this deathtrap immediately,’ Felix voxed to his sergeants and officers. ‘The park is close to collapse.’

His warriors voxed back their understanding.

‘Overlords Adriaticus and Scion of Ultramar, find somewhere else to land. This structure is unsound. Overlord Jove, take off – we cannot risk losing you. Stand by to extract upon my order.’

‘Affirmative,’ replied the Overlord pilot. Lascannons spitting fire still, the ship’s wing-tip engines screeched, pivoted downwards and forced it up and back through the hole it had created in the dome. The park shook, showering the strike team with flakes of rust and stringy, black leaves.

Felix did a rapid scan of the dome. There were twenty or so Death Guard in the park. Bolt-rounds were being traded back and forth between them and the Primaris Intercessors, while roaring plasma streams burst from the Hellblasters’ guns, to be answered in kind by the Death Guard’s own special weapons troopers.