But the rest of the Death Guard continued to push from behind. The bloated bodies of those in front soaked up the bullets of the Iron Hands until their corrupted forms could take no more and they exploded in a mess of blood and cancerous tissue, rusted armour pulverised to ceramite dust. Then there was no more room to wield firearms effectively and the two sides joined in close-quarter combat.

A gaunt, shadowed face was suddenly before Gdolkin, one cheek eaten away by the voracious red of a suppurating abscess. The unclean warrior was completely hairless, scabbed sores on the dull grey flesh of its pate crusted with brown and green filth. The Iron-Father blocked a jab from a corroded plague knife with his power axe as he hastily locked his bolt pistol back inside the holster-space inside his left leg.

His left hand free again, he threw a servo-assisted punch into the Plague Marine's head. The bionic replacement connected with the warrior's face. There was an audible splintering sound as the front of the Traitor-Marine's head caved inwards in a spray of blood and stinking yellow pus. The Death Guardsman staggered back, putting his hands instinctively to his face. Gdolkin followed through with a swing at his opponent's body with his axe. The curved blade smashed through a ruptured fissure in the Plague Marine's distended gut, cooking the organs inside.

Gdolkin pulled the axe free again only to find ropey intestines knotted around the blade. Making pathetic, unsettling mewling sounds, the Nurgle worshipper began to advance again, rolling in the viscera connecting it to the Iron-Father.

There was the staccato roar of a heavy weapon letting rip and the Plague Marine faltered again as armour-piercing shells pounded its body. The servitor Gibeon XII put a fusillade of shells into the resilient plague-thing's body from its rattling belt-fed assault cannon arm, one of the rounds detonating inside the corpulent body, finishing the Nurgle worshipper dramatically.

Still more of the blasphemous Marines pressed in on the Iron Hands. Every one of the enemy was unique in some vile way. Some wore necklaces of rotting fingers and ears cut from the dying and the dead, others had shrunken heads hanging from their belts. The metal and ceramite of their armour was pitted and scarred by corrosion. Injuries that would have felled other soldiers, even the superhuman warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, barely even caused the Plague Marines to falter in their relentless, zombie-like advance.

Fat flies buzzed over the heads of the Death Guard, drooping pallid white abdomens pregnant with virulent infections. Gdolkin swept his power axe through the air above him, incinerating several of the rancid insects in the weapon's coruscating energy field.

A Nurgle Marine larger than the rest forced its way between its fellows, rising above them like a corpulent colossus, made big by the disease multiplying within every fibre of its body. The newcomer was without a helmet and clad in a patched suit of Terminator armour, emblazoned with the triple-sectioned fly badge favoured by some of the plague devotees. Rising from the backplate of its suit were three spikes, each skewered with a human head, faces elongated in death-screams, one still wearing the helm of a Cadian. A grotesque pus sac, barely contained within a bag of almost transparent skin, bulged and wobbled from its neck.