The attacking Imperial forces had earned glorious victories, but the traitors holding the line were hardly nobodies. Among the forces of Chaos, Chaos Champions gathered all manner of small Chaos thrall groups to build armies in pursuit of their ambitions, and the scale and strength of different factions varied as vastly as heaven and earth.
Among them, traitor guardsmen were one of the finest forces among all Chaos thralls, whether in military discipline, quality of equipment, or mental fortitude. Armies made up of beastmen and mutants were savage and uncontrollable; to ruthless Chaos Champions, such creatures were less than cannon fodder.
The traitorous Imperial Guard had abandoned their faith in The Emperor and cast aside their duty to protect the Imperium and humanity, with anything from a single company to an entire regiment throwing itself into the embrace of Chaos. In the process, they carried off every weapon and piece of equipment they could seize. They were like the opposite of the Imperial Guard, merely more deranged in mind and more brutal in the adornment of their weapons.
All the damage borne by the bodies of the mechanical beasts had been inflicted by weapons well known to the Imperial Guard. The most dangerous Chaos Space Marines and clusters of Degraded Ones in the rebel defensive positions had yet to appear.
The Chaos army had established five lines of defense in the area before Blackstone Spire No. 7. The closer a line was to the spire, the stronger it became. A buffer zone 3,333 meters wide lay between each line, and Nurgle's decaying sorcery had been poured into the earth in advance, turning the area into a bog that was almost impossible to cross. Any force advancing from one defensive line to the next had to overcome mud pits of varying