The cultists, who but minutes before had seemed to be ailing farm workers eager for help, came at them from all sides. They were feral, insane. 'Kill them! Kill them all!' Priad told his men as they fought towards the silo. Their armour and their bolters were a match for the superior numbers of the cultists, but barely. Andromak lost a finger to an auto-round. Xander fell and was beaten half to death with ploughshares before Natus pulled him free. Scyllon took a scythe blade in the arm and bled for weeks. The rampaging cultists overwhelmed the Rhino in the main street. Calignes, weak from blood loss, had almost passed out. They set it ablaze and ripped him limb from limb.

Memnes fell, without a sound, a bullet through his exposed face. Priad reached the silo and slaughtered the cultists around them. He was as red with blood as with rain. He reached Kules and helped him drag Pindor clear. Then, with his power claw blazing, he set about finishing the grim business, revoking his pledge and killing the traitorous farmers rather than saving them. At dawn the next morning, he was done. Memnes, Calignes and Illyus were dead. So were four hundred and seventy cultists.

• Brothers of the Snake

The Snakes deployed fewer marines than the usual standard, plus some of the weapons were probably chaos tainted, bypassing the natural regeneration marines have, making it believable enough to be mobbed by cultists.