Servomotors squealing, Gdolkin leapt into the air. The servo-assisted exoskeleton of his power armour carried him over the fallen body of a Death Guard with a worm-ridden face and sent him crashing into the plague Terminator. As he hit his target he swung his power axe at the cultist, removing the trophy spikes as his opponent doubled up under Gdolkin's impact.

The Terminator crashed back into the mud and slime filling the bottom of the trench, sending a spume of filth fountaining into the air. Gdolkin landed awkwardly and compensated as best he could, coming into a crouched position. The Terminator struggled to rise, as it did so, raising the baroquely ornamented muzzle of its storm bolter.

The Iron-Father flung himself sideways as the storm bolter roared into life.

Gdolkin heard the impact of shells and a cry behind him. He dared a glance over his shoulder and saw Brother Oved standing exposed within the middle of the trench, shorn cables and ceramite splinters hanging from where his bionic right arm had been sheared off.

Despite the neural shock, Oved returned fire with the boltgun clasped tightly in his gleaming gunmetal left hand. Then Gdolkin was on his feet and bringing his own axe down on the Chaos Terminator. The first blow struck the thick armour and was half-deflected in a spray of sparks as the Nurglite shifted again as it tried to get up. A round from Oved's bolter found the pus-sac beneath the creature's chin. It burst with a wet pop and Gdolkin recoiled as the greaves of his armour were splashed with viscous yellow fluid. Anger flared inside his chest and he drove in again with the axe.

The crackling tip of the energy-sheathed blade pierced the Terminator's deformed neck where it was exposed above the rim of its corroded helmet seal. Gdolkin twisted and the cultist's head came away in a torrent of corrupted black blood.

Joab XIII's heavy bolter exploded into life with a chugging roar, and one of the Death Guard, slime oozing from between the joints of its armour, faltered, millennia-aged ceramite plates fracturing under the impact of the high-calibre missiles.

Gdolkin turned his attention back towards the pack choking the trench. The Plague Marines were determined to halt the Iron Hands' advance but the destruction of the Terminator tempered their zeal born of a devotion to the corrupted Lord of Flies.

A cancerous black growth deforming the belly of another plague-creature, ruptured under a blow from Gdolkin's power axe, spewing tar-like slime from within its diseased mass. Brother Erastus had grasped a tentacled limb in his augmetic left hand as it tried to wrap its suckered, rubbery flesh around him, and tore it from the shoulder socket of the Plague Marine it was attached to.

Iron-Father Gdolkin's axe connected with the shoulder plate of a buboe-disfigured Marine. The corrupted ceramite splintered with a shearing of tortured metal. A black void opened up beneath it and a cloud of black bodies erupted from the hole with a buzzing roar. Gdolkin's vision went black as the flies bombarded his helmet, crawling all over its surface, looking for a way in. With even his augmetic eyes blinded by the dense living morass, Gdolkin swung at the tiny plague-carriers, but it was a futile effort. The energy field of the power axe sizzled and crackled as it burnt a path through the insects but it made little difference to the pestilential mass pouring from within the depths of the Death Guard's armour.