‘For Guilliman! For Ultramar! For the Emperor!’ the Space Marines roared.

Free of the tainted river, they ran into the fray. Thousands of guns replied to their battle cry, felling dozens of them in a firestorm of exploding bolt-rounds. The flower of Ultramar were riddled with shot and blasted apart. The first rank fell, then the second, but Malcades strode among the warriors of many Chapters and opened fire. His great cannon blasted through the trench lips, hurling the Death Guard into rotten chunks. The Space Marines surged forwards under the cover of his fire, leaping over the trench line and into the foe with the dull crash of power armour slamming into power armour.

As soon as the first lines of loyalists were into the trenches, the Death Guard’s fire discipline was interrupted, allowing hundreds more Space Marines to pour into the siege works unharmed.

Their disposition was in chaos. Felix’s ad hoc company was scattered across two hundred metres of earthworks. There was not a complete squad in that section. Without their brethren to work alongside or their sergeants to guide them, the Space Marine attack became a war of duellists, individual warriors picking their targets on a whim.

There was no time to regather his forces, so Felix fought alone. He crashed down onto a pair of hulking Plague Marines and was swallowed in the fierce clouds of flies that surrounded them. The insects rattled off his armour, obscuring his vision, but he saw enough of the enemy’s vileness. They were not so tall as him, being of the older gene-stock, but in every other way they were more massive. Monstrous things, bloated beyond the capacity of the human organism to sustain, somehow they remained alive. Their bodies bore many other marks of Chaos in the form of hideous mutations. One had a slobbering insect’s head in place of a human face; the other, tentacles for fingers. Felix drove the fly-faced traitor from the wall with a volley of bolt-rounds. Using the momentum of his fall, he punched the abomination in the face. Felix’s gauntleted fist flared. The traitor’s mutated head exploded into scraps that were snatched mid-flight by its attendant insects. The corpse fell down to twitch in the mud.

Its companion was hardier, fully armoured, though his plate was rotted through in places, and punctured with the thick tubes of phage-harvesters through which the ubiquitous flies crawled like bees in a hive. The traitor brought his plasma gun up to fire, the charging chamber blazing bright green as his writhing, vermicular fingers wrapped themselves around its trigger. Felix launched himself forwards, the superior systems of his Aggressor armour making him preternaturally nimble. He slammed into the hulking traitor, barely rocking him, but got in close enough to punch down and shatter the containment chamber of the gun. Plasma gases burst outwards. The resulting explosion sent them both reeling backwards.