Dreghgor smiled… then struck it, hard across the temple. Even bowed, the daemon-engine was a head taller than the warlord, but his blow was fearsome enough to send it reeling to its feet and back a step.

Its eyes flared with red-hate and an array of weapons – sharp, spiked and bladed things, festooned with chains and dripping oil – snapped from its arms, greedy for blood. Dreghgor fed it his rage and his fury, it boiled within him like a tempest. He sensed the thing that had hollowed out his champion’s corpse for its own, slaved to the engine. It struggled against its bonds. Let slip, it would devour him and all of his warriors.

Dreghgor liked that. The daemon-engine would cause such carnage. His smile became a snarl.

‘Slay our enemies. Bleed them. Bring me what I seek.’

The streets of Sepulchre IV were drowning in blood. Ecclesiarchy troops lay tangled in the rubble like broken alabaster dolls. Survivors fell back by degrees, sloshing through vital fluids and avoiding the corpses choking up the once proud avenues.

Despite their defiance, the shrine world’s defenders were wilting before the Chaos battalions. The Battle Sisters were losing. Several combat squads were trying to hold their ground in Unity Square of Monast, Sepulchre’s capital. All other cities had been evacuated or overrun. Here in Monast, the Red Rage fell hardest. Here in Monast they bracketed the defenders’ escape routes, destroyed the bridges before reinforcements could be brought in and ensured dominance of the blood-soaked skies. Here in Monast they sought something, a relic to satisfy their warmongering god. The Red Rage surrounded the convent-bastion but, as of yet, hadn’t broken through.

But time, Tsu’gan was acutely aware, was running out.

‘Enhance magnification.’

The image resolved itself in his occulobe.

A bare-headed Battle Sister was holding her power sword aloft, rallying the troops, when she took a round to the neck. She fell seconds later as the mass-reactive shell exploded, staining her skull-white armour crimson.

Sustained bolter fire met her demise.

Tsu’gan was reluctantly impressed. The Battle Sisters had adopted a long firing line and kept it steady in spite of casualties. He watched another sister superior step into the dead one’s place and try to anchor the defenders.

No war cries, nor screams. It was… unnerving. At first, Tsu’gan thought it was pique at having to call on the Adeptus Astartes to retrieve their holy artefact. Now, he wasn’t so sure. The Battle Sisters were almost automatons.

A few shattered rockcrete barricades and a pair of half-destroyed tanks stood between them and the enemy. Red Rage Traitor Marines wielding boltguns and chainblades, their power armour baptised in arterial blood, came at them in a mob. Cultists, those they had brought upon their graven ships and desperate converts, former natives now driven insane by the carnage, ranged ahead of them like pack dogs.

Tsu’gan sneered contemptuously.

Weak.