Felix raised his foot, put it down and felt nothing beneath. He lost his footing and fell with slow inevitability. The mud closed completely over his eye-lenses. It pressed against him in cold embrace. Not even during his many immersions in stasis had Felix felt such all-consuming claustrophobia. Muted explosions throbbed the liquid earth. A nearby detonation sent him staggering to the side; the stabilisation nozzles on his backpack were closed, the internal gyros of his boots confused by the delayed action of his fall. He stumbled, drifted. Heat alarms screamed in his ears. His position moved across his cartograph, until with a muffled metallic impact he connected with the leg of the mighty Malcades. The collision arrested his progress, and he found solid ground beneath his feet again. He was still submerged in the filth, and was forced to rely on his suit telemetry so he did not get turned about and lost. Using Malcades as a marker, he headed for the shore.

The riverbed rose under him. He felt the grind of a shingle bank lost in the mud beneath his boots. He forced his way out, his backpack emerging first, then his head, then the domes of his pauldrons. He strode forwards the last ten metres towards the trench line, the way becoming easier with every step, though he needed to use his auto-senses to see while gritty filth ran from his eye-lenses. The enemy homed in on him quickly, and let fire. Dozens of bolts sped at him. Most exploded on the protective energy field generated by his iron halo. Aggressor armour had been designed with boltguns in mind and the thick battleplate protected him from the worst of the bolts that got through. His heat vents opened, squirting mud. Air roared from them, and the temperature gauges shrank back to their normal size. Other warnings took their place as his energy field and suit were battered.

‘Forward!’ he roared again. A wailing machine bellow announced Malcades’ emergence from the mud. The Dreadnought came out of the river streaming filth from every plane of its armour, its rotary cannon already spinning up to fire.

Without waiting to see if any others were near him, Felix rushed at the enemy line. Bolts crashed against his energy shield. Nine strides – that was the distance. In the second that it took him to cover the ground, he activated the energy fields around his power sword and boltstorm gauntlet. They crackled spectacularly, the disrupters instantly baking the mud and sending it cascading from his weapons as beads of dirty glass.

‘For Ultramar!’ he roared. Selecting a target, he levelled the gun built into the back of his boltstorm gauntlet and opened fire. He drove the enemy back from the lip of the trench with his attack, bolt-rounds blasting divots of soil from the lip and whining off the corroded pauldrons of the enemy. Other guns joined his, in ones and twos and then in hundreds.