But the Stratix XXIII had all lived out childhoods in the vicious underhives of their lost homeworld, and were happier fighting with bayonet and guile than out in the open. For many of them it was like coming home, and the Stratix were slowly, savagely, bleeding the Septiams dry, drawing more and more enemies from the south of the city into a meat grinding killing zone. Most of their officers were dead - but they had mostly been outsiders brought in by the Guard to tame the savages, and the Stratix fought this battle better on their own.
The Jouryans made good speed through to the palace quarter, which had formed the elegant marble core of the city before death and disease turned the place into a charnel house mockery of splendour. Grand buildings stripped of their roofs formed sheer-walled canyons of priceless marble, often with gilded decorations still coiling gracefully along the scorched stone. Tanks rumbled through the broader streets and blasted the ill-disciplined Septiam snipers off the tops of the walls.
A brutal jungle fight erupted between several Jouryan platoons and the blood-streaked retinue of a corrupted Septiam noble in the lush botanical gardens of a senator's villa. The noble hunted Jouryans with a silver-chased groxrifle in his rotting hands while the Jouryans waded through a tiny square of death-world terrain. One of the city's forums became a critical objective for staging armoured thrusts towards the senate-house, and Guardsmen fought almost toe-to-toe with thousands of Septiams over a space barely a hundred metres wide. Leman Russ tanks formed mobile strong-points to hold courtyards and gardens as Jouryan platoons leapfrogged from one shattered residence to the next. Wounded men drowned in ornamental pools. Shells airburst in the boughs of trees in the city parks and killed dozens with splinters of exotic hardwood.
And at the front of the slowing tide of Jouryans were the Space Marines, charging into labyrinthine villas with bolters blazing and chainswords sparking on the stone, flushing concentrations of walking dead out into Jouryan fire-zones and taking strong-points for the Guardsmen to occupy behind them.
The Jouryans followed them, because any man who valued his life chose to consolidate the path of destruction they blazed rather then venture into the enemy-held quarters.
When the Marines veered to one side and began to fight their way towards the Enforcement Division barracks instead of the senate house, the Jouryans backed them up with little argument from senior officers who were having trouble following the rapid advance anyway. The smooth, towering walls of the barracks formed a formidable barrier between the attackers, and the plan had been for the Jouryans to bypass the fortified compound entirely, leaving it to elements of Gathalamorian artillery to move up and hurl high explosives over the wall until the barracks were dust.
The Space Marines had other plans. When they went into direct assault against the most fortified structure in Septiam City, the Jouryans began to wonder why the Space Marines were actually here.
'OVER THE WALL! NOW!' yelled Captain Karraidin, a huge tank-like figure in his Terminator armour, waving the Assault Marines forward with his enormous power fist.
Tellos knew that was his cue. He wasn't a sergeant any more - he had no rank at all, not even battle-brother, officially. But the Assault Marines of the Soul Drinkers followed him anyway, because to them there was no better symbol of the resolve that had taken the Chapter so far. Tellos was more severely mutated and crippled than any of them, and yet he loved nothing better than to be at the forefront of the assault where he could do the Emperor's work in destroying His enemies. He was an inspiration. He was the very tip of the spear.
Tellos broke cover and sprinted from the shadows of the collapsed Administratum building across the corpse-littered road from the barracks wall. He wore no armour on the upper half of his body and the wind was hot and grimy against his skin, sharp and painful against the stumps of still-red flesh where his hands had once been. He had lost both hands during the betrayal when the Soul Drinkers had first been forced to turn against the Imperium. Now he had replaced them with twin chainblades from the Chapter armoury, old-pattern chainswords with broad, curved blades like machetes.
Gunfire spattered down from the Septiams manning an autocannon post on the wall, surrounded by razor wire. Shrapnel and a couple of shots hit Tellos but they passed right through his shockingly white, strangely gelatinous flesh, cutting through skin and muscle that knitted itself back together again leaving scores of tiny white scars.
A burning Leman Russ tank had crashed into the wall, its blazing form" reaching halfway up the wall. Tellos ran through the rain of gunfire and leapt onto the tank, scrambling quickly up onto its turret, chain-blades scoring gouges in the armour. He could hear the footsteps of twenty Assault Marines as they followed him and they felt exactly what he did - the enemy were just a few steps away, crowded into the barracks, practically begging for the Emperor's justice.
Tellos leapt onto the crest of the wall. It bulged outwards at the top to prevent anyone climbing it but Tellos's chainblades dug deep into the plasti-crete and he hauled himself up onto the crest of the wall.
Two autogun shots punched through his abdomen. He felt the pain, but he welcomed it, because that meant his body was healing as quickly as it was wounded. Bolt pistol fire crackled from the Marines beside him and the fire point on the wall fell silent. Tellos barely glanced at the Marines following him up, and he jumped into the compound.
The main barracks was an imposing building of black metal with gun-slits for windows, surrounded by a wide plasticrete plaza criss-crossed by fire points on the building and on each corner of the compound's walls. A makeshift village of hovels and tents had grown up around the building and there were scores of Septiams here, massed near the main blast-doors in the opposite wall, ready for the Jouryans to blow the doors and try to take the compound.
If the Soul Drinkers hadn't been there, perhaps that was what would have happened. But with Tellos leading the assault from an unexpected direction, every one of those Septiams was dead.
Tellos hit the ground running and twenty Marines followed him. Every second he spent here was a second when the enemy were beyond his reach and so he charged headlong through the jerry-built shanty-town. He ran heedlessly through the walls of flimsy dwellings and brushed hovels aside with his chainblades, barely breaking step to slice through the few defenders who managed to turn and face him.
The Septiams - several hundred of them, clustered around barricades to form a killing zone inside the blastdoors - barely had time to notice the assault charging in behind them.
Tellos was a good dozen paces ahead of the assault squads. When he hit the Septiam lines, he didn't stop to fight. He dived into the mass of Septiams and kept going, carving deep into their ranks, twin chainblades swinging in great arcs that severed limbs and head with every stroke. The Septiams turned and tried to counter-charge but they just ran straight into the storm of death.
Tellos strode deeper into the Septiams, leaving a gore-soaked channel of broken bodies that gave the Assault Marines a crucial gap to get a foothold against them.
Rotting faces lolled as they died a second time. Knobbed, grey-skinned limbs swung clubs and knives uselessly. Short-range lasbursts and autogun shots spat from the throng but Tellos ignored them, absorbing the ill-aimed shots with his mutated flesh and slicing off the hands that tried to bring weapons to bear too close.
It was the purest butchery. The rage came on Tel-los again, the same rage that had first been sparked in him when he lost his hands on the Geryon weapons platform, and had continued burning inside him as he stormed the beaches of Ve'Meth's stronghold and battled daemons on the deck of the Brokenback. It took hold of him and pushed him further than any Marine could go. It was the fuel that fed his mutated flesh and the impossibly fast, deadly strikes he made with the improvised weapons thrust into the stumps of his wrists.