Iron Hands - Hour of the Gorgon: The Xth Legion, under their Primarch's command, would become, perhaps more than any other Legion, a literal "engine of war"; a purpose-built machine: unsubtle, efficient and dedicated to a particularly brutal and direct method of warfare. Under his tutelage and direction, the Legion's already evident preference for order and systematised combat was refocused and increased, while the Primarch, no doubt seeing an echo of his own belligerent soul within the Legiones Astartes which bore his blood, harnessed the wellspring of anger and pride which burned in the hearts of the Legion with unbreakable chains of discipline, logic and order. In response to their Primarch's own values, the newly renamed Iron Hands valued superiority in terms of weaponry and wargear as much as they did zeal, valour or discipline, and the Legion saw a concentration of technological expertise seldom matched by other Legions. Victory, by the most direct and efficient means possible was the Legion's mantra; they would be the hand that reached out and crushed the enemies of Humanity, as unfeeling, relentless and coldly implacable as the Iron Hand they had so fittingly taken for their name.From the beginning, it was clear Ferrus Manus would prove a harsh but constant overlord. The Primarch was utterly intolerant of failure and swift to anger, but also rigidly and rationally controlled in the application of the wellspring of wroth that was never far from the surface of his thoughts and actions. To his Legion -- just as he had been on Medusa to its barbaric inhabitants -- he was "the Gorgon"; a figure from myth come to life; a being whose strength and intelligence was more than superhuman, in whose veins hot metal flowed like blood and whose silver gaze it was said, could kill. Quick to scorn and rare to praise, Ferrus Manus set utterly uncompromising standards for his Legion, which he saw as an extension of his own body and will. In truth the Primarch also held himself to those same unmatchable standards and despised duplicity and dissembleage as much as he did weakness, and for these reasons, more than any others, the warriors of the Xth Legion loved him as sons love a hard-hearted father, with a scrap of his praise worth more to them than any laurel of victory.Very quickly because of the Primarch's influence, a mind-set was crystallised in the Legion that meant that failure to the Iron Hands was intolerable. Failure was weakness, and weakness was the greatest sin -- weakness had led to the terror of Old Night, just as on Medusa the weak endangered those around them in the daily battle for survival -- weakness threatened all. Where this weakness manifested in others who succumbed to degradation of the body or mind such that they denied the Great Crusade (and in doing so threatened the safety of Humanity), it engendered the coldest hate in the Iron Hands. Likewise, if weakness was found in their own ranks, that of their aspirants, or in those who fought beside them, it would be purged so that only the strong remained and so were further strengthened. Such was the harsh and absolute creed the Iron Hands' father ingrained in his children.The Legion quickly added their efforts to the Emperor's ongoing Great Crusade, becoming the heart of the 52nd Expeditionary Fleet. With the Gorgon at their head, the Iron Hands Legion quickly became renowned for its ability to confront the enemies of the Great Crusade head-on; gaining a reputation as a ruthless, calculating Legion at its strongest and most effective where the din of battle was the greatest, and the clash of arms as its most absolute and direct. Building on the talents and tactics of the Xth Legion had already displayed, Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands excelled at high-intensity warfare both against technologically advanced opponents and xenos species such as the Orks, whose sheer physical power and vast numbers constituted an overwhelming threat to the success of the Great Crusade. This ability in the Iron Hands being recognised by the Emperor, and the challenge such foes represented being relished by Ferrus Manus and his Legion alike, the "Iron Tenth" as they became commonly known, was deliberately deployed to battlefronts where set-piece engagements against massed armies of advanced war machines were likely, creating a circular effect which caused the Legion to both become more specialised at its chosen field, and in ever greater demand as the Great Crusade's favoured weapon to meet this need. As a consequence of this, the Legion's common opponents in battle often included intransigent Human factions who actively resisted unification and had retained some fragment of the technological might of the lost Dark Age of Technology.In such conflicts it was common, due to strategic necessity, for the Iron Hands to fight closely alongside elements of the Mechanicum and the Titan Legions, with whom a cultural relationship inherited from Medusa was shared, and over years of battle these ties of allegiance grew. In these battles, the Iron Hands' rapidly developing skill and renown as weapon-smiths and artificers would also come into play, allowing them both to innovate new forms of armaments and defences where needed, and to quickly counter previously unknown weapons employed against them, acquiring them alongside the Mechanicum for the Imperium's later study and use as required. The Great Crusade would also see the Iron Hands serve alongside many other Legions directly, often employed as shock troops in major campaigns, as well as a senior element in a larger army group, with Ferrus Manus taking an overarching battlefield command role over other, later-found Primarchs on many occasions. The long term results of these joint endeavours would be mixed for the Legion, leading to close and lasting allegiances in some cases, as with the Emperor's Children and their Primarch, and lingering resentment and malcontent bordering on internecine strife in others, as with the Alpha Legion.In distinct counterpoints to the Iron Hands' noted strengths, as time progressed it became clear that there were certain avenues of warfare and exigencies of the Great Crusade to which the Iron Hands were decidedly unsuited, either by doctrine or temperament. Where once on Rust, the Xth Legion had been mindful of the cost to the allies of their tactics, such niceties were now forgotten, viewed as weakness that would no longer be tolerated to go on; better the bloody price paid on the battlefield now, went the Iron Hands' reasoning, rather than risk the prize of unifying Humanity and the peace that would bring one day. This stance brought them further to their notoriety, particularly with elements of the Imperial Army, as the years passed the Iron Hands also gained an increasingly belligerent reputation with the fellow Legions as lacking both patience with others and subtlety of action, both in the person of their Primarch and the character of the Legion's rank and file.While the ill-feeling these negative factors provoked in some quarters was still far from the acrimony and distrust the nearly uncontrollable bloodlust displayed by the World Eaters or the catastrophic cost of the arts of war practiced by the Death Guard engendered, or indeed the suspicions created by the fickle unpredictability of the White Scars, the Iron Hands' ruthlessness in battle and their seemingly callous indifference to the price of victory made them conquerors, not liberators. This plain fact was acknowledged both by the Iron Hands themselves and by the Emperor in employing them accordingly. It is also consequently true that Ferrus Manus and his Legion cared little for the minutiae of the Great Crusade, they saw their task as a clear one; to expand the borders of the Imperium and destroy its enemies -- nothing more -- they disdained the politics of the Imperial Court and the pursuit of glory as empty trifles, and left the task of winning over the hearts and minds of those they brought into Imperial Compliance and the rebuilding of what they had shattered to those better suited to the task. When once asked of his Legion's role in the Great Crusade, Ferrus Manus is apocryphally held to have simply said: "Make war and move on, and again, and again, until nothing breathes which stands against us. All else is sophistry and pretty lies."As the Great Crusade progressed, the Iron Hands Legion was in constant service at the front lines of expansion, both at the head of its own battle groups, compliance and extermination taskforces, and wielded as a part of larger Expeditionary fleets, fighting alongside other Legions where needed. After more than a century under its Primarch's command, the victories of the Iron Hands could not be easily counted and, indeed, it is believed many of its battle went unrecorded, as the Legion itself became increasingly insular in many ways, and uninterested in sharing the details of its independent operations in anything but the most perfunctory way. To the wider Imperium it presented a cold, brutal facade; the Legion as a calculating, prideful and powerful engine of war that did not stoop to deal with petty concerns or affairs of state. Such secrets the Iron Hands Legion did keep, it kept well.