His boltstorm gauntlet roaring, he led his men against the damned. His boots crushed corpses flat, threatening to mire him in traps of broken ribs. He brought his power sword into play, using it like a machete to hack down the foe. He needed none of his considerable skill to kill them. Hundreds fell to Felix and his men. No matter how many they slew, the dead came on in seemingly endless tide.

Metre by metre, they forced a way through. Felix raised his sword to strike at a skull-faced warrior, and halted his blow just in time.

The skull was the helm of a Primaris Reiver.

‘Cease fire!’ he commanded.

The last line of the dead fell down, their souls released. Sparking power blades were yanked back out of chests.

‘Sergeant Lyceus, well met,’ said Felix. ‘Do you have vox? Ours is not functioning beyond our immediate proximity.’

The Reivers’ leader reloaded his bolt pistol. ‘The enemy are jamming our communications across the battlezone. Lieutenant Astium ordered us to seek you out. We heard your gunfire. We fought our way from the Palace Spire.’

The Reiver squad was armed with oversized combat knives glimmering with disruption fields, and heavy bolt pistols. Their helms were death’s heads, and their left pauldrons enlarged to provide better protection in melee. Their armour was eerily silent, adapted for stealth work. Reivers were an infiltration and close-combat specialisation.

‘Do you have the location of Lieutenant Tobias also?’

‘This way, brother-captain,’ said Sergeant Lyceus. ‘They are together, and under attack close to the mission target. The device is within the chapel off the feasting hall.’

‘The enemy despise the notion of the Emperor as god,’ said Maxim. ‘There is power to be courted by defiling His holy places.’

‘The Emperor is not divine, so says our creed,’ said Felix, who had heard the sentiment expressed forcefully from the lips of Guilliman himself.

‘It does not matter whether he is or not – it is the act that brings the power, not the truth of it. The plague zombies cannot be “true”. They are an impossibility. Yet they exist,’ said Maxim. ‘That is the power of Chaos.’

‘Speaking of which, there are thousands more dead coming behind us,’ said Felix. ‘We must hurry, identify the target, assess its threat level and destroy it.’