As Angron's death drove the intensity of the war ever higher over the course of just a few days, the World Eaters, sworn to avenge their primarch, fought with utter disregard for their own lives.
Tens of thousands of World Eaters appeared on the battlefield, annihilating mortal forces with utterly disproportionate numbers. There were simply too many of them—so many that the Space Marines could fight on the scale of mortal auxiliary armies.
Every force standing before this tide of vengeance, whether mortal auxiliaries, heavy armored vehicles, Titan war engines, or even Ultramarines clad in terminator armor, faced only one fate: being crushed.
Orpheo had no choice but to commit every available force to slowing and blocking the World Eaters' advance. Amatara's capacity for war was being drained day by day.
There were so many critically wounded battle-brothers that the entire stock of Dreadnoughts had been emptied. Ultramarines who might otherwise have survived could only die helplessly for want of Dreadnought chassis.
When the second large-scale Astartes engagement erupted, the World Eaters became so deranged that they directly launched indiscriminate orbital bombardments.
Orbital bombardments that completely disregarded friend and foe alike.
In this battle, the Ultramarines lost more than four hundred warriors, while the World Eaters and Word Bearers suffered four to five times that number in casualties.
Without air superiority, the side on the defensive had no way to deal with warships in orbit. And besides the two Gloriana-class Battleships eyeing Amatara from space, there were also two even more terrifying Abyssal Fury-class battleships.
Any one of those warships could subdue an entire rebellious planet and stand against an entire stellar fleet by itself.
If Amatara's void shields had not been strong enough, then no matter how capable Orpheo's command had been, he could not have changed the world's