Saul Tarvitz - The Traitor's Strike: The Primarch of the World Eaters, Angron, realising that the Virus Bombs had not been fully effective at eliminating all the Loyalists, flew into a rage and hurled himself at the planet at the head of 50 companies of World Eaters Traitor Marines. Discarding tactics and strategy, the World Eaters Traitors worked themselves into a frenzy of mindless butchery fed by their growing allegiance to the Blood God Khorne.Brother-Captain Ehrlen led the surviving Loyalist World Eaters, a warrior whose tally of victories had been long in the service of the bloody creature he now faced. With him, were a force of Loyalist Space Marines some 2,000 strong, a core of World Eaters who had sheltered with their commander in nearby garrison bunkers to wait out the storm of what they had been told by Tarvitz (for believability's sake) was an Isstvanian suicide bio-weapon about to be unleashed, the rest of their Legion contingent scattered far and wide across the cityscape.In the resulting carnage, Tarvitz barely escaped with his life as Ehrlen and his brave warriors were butchered by the Red Angel and his berserker followers. Horus was furious with Angron for delaying his plans, but Horus sought to turn the delay into a victory and was obliged to reinforce Angron with troops from the Sons of Horus, the Death Guard, and the Emperor's Children.Following the World Eaters assault, the Emperor's Children under their Lord Commander Eidolon were next to deploy, no doubt smarting over the actions of Captain Tarvitz and keen to redeem themselves in the eyes of the Warmaster. With typical precision and exacting patterns of deployment, the Traitor Emperor's Children selected a scorched-flat area that had once been an open market and park a few kilometres south of the Precentor's Palace for their staging area.No sooner had Eidolon's taskforce dismounted their conveyers then he ordered his forces to immediately precede in column formation to the Precentor's Palace with the intention of taking it by storm and overwhelming what he clearly assumed would be a disorganised and broken group of survivors.Meanwhile, further World Eaters support forces started to land, preparing for a lengthy battle of attrition, while Death Guard and Sons of Horus gunships began to conduct reconnaissance sweeps to the northwest and south of the Choral City, respectively, searching for Loyalist survivors amid the still-burning ruins, firing on targets of opportunity and dropping off Seeker Squads and outriders to hunt down isolated groups of Loyalists still reeling from the planet-killing attack. Within hours, however, it became clear that this would be no simple mopping-up operation for the superior Traitor forces.Eidolon's column found the Precentor's Palace staunchly and expertly defended by the Loyalist Emperor's Children forces who Eidolon had arrogantly underestimated. Instead of succeeding in a storm assault, his column came under heavy fire and was blocked from even reaching the palace walls and forced to retreat, leaving dozens of damaged and wrecked vehicles in its wake. Further attempts to send infantry squads through the ruins fell afoul of hastily set-up but effective redoubts and pre-arranged ambuscades, hurling his men back bloodied and without gain.Elsewhere, the use of roaming gunship detachments had proved equally ineffective; Auspex sweeps in the burning, tangled ruins could provide no more than a vague indication of enemy concentrations, while the vast blasted cityscape was a perfect haven for the enemy to lie in wait and loose missiles and Lascannon blasts at the low-circling aircraft, the particular vulnerabilities of which were as completely familiar to the Loyalists as they were their Traitor attackers.The overconfidence of the Emperor's Children had brought failure, and Angron's World Eaters had dispersed into the northern city in an uncontrollable and untrackable horde. Probing sweeps by Traitor aircraft had done little but suffer casualties, and revealed the scale of the Loyalist resistance and their bitter resolve to fight. Under the command of Saul Tarvitz and other Loyalist Captains such as the newly-renamed Luna Wolves Captains Garviel Loken and Tarik Torgaddon, the Loyalists mounted a cohesive defence that saw the outnumbered Loyalists seeking to equal the strategic odds in their favour by dragging their enemies into conflicts in built-up areas and ruined landscapes where the full panoply of their Traitor foes could not be brought to bear upon them at once, resulting in running battles through corpse-strewn streets and shattered habitation blocks, blackened by fire and ash.Again and again Eidolon's Emperor's Children attempted to take the great granite bulk of the Precentor's Palace, only to be hurled back by Captain Tarvitz and his warriors, displaying implacable resolve and tactical excellence in their defence of the shell-shot edifice and its precincts. The palace was now further reinforced with recovered heavy weapons and patch-repaired vehicles claimed from the spoils of Eidolon's first failed attacks, and with the Loyalist Emperor's Children fought the mighty Ancient Rylanor, mighty Dreadnought and Ancient of Rites of the IIIrd Legion, and to them he was like an undying icon of past glory and honour the Traitors had so hatefully cast aside.Many times was the Venerable Dreadnought thought lost, only to rise again from the rubble and fire his weapons to punish those who had betrayed the Emperor whose name they bore. The Traitors' attacks against the palace were further blunted by the need to guard their own flanks in the dust and darkness, as roving war bands of World Eaters, mostly Loyalist but some perhaps merely uncaring of their "allies" lives, attacked from the ruins and rubble, slaying and plundering arms and munitions before being cut down by disciplined fire or disappearing victorious back into the darkness.