Achilus Crusade - The Acheros Salient: The Acheros Salient is the central arm of the advancing Achilus Crusade. Ever since the launch of the three salients by the Lord Militant Tetrarchus, it has been bogged down in blood and infamy.It has shown the least progress in terms of worlds captured and, even given the recent massive losses suffered by the Orpheus Salient, has consumed the greatest amount of Imperial lives and war materiel on the pyre of battle.Assigned the majority of the crusade's heavy line regiments, the Acheros Salient was given the task of driving directly into the heart of the inhabited core of the Jericho Reach.This area was known to be plagued by Warp-worshipping human Renegades and xenos slavers. It was home to several petty stellar empires, and dominated astrographically by the Hadex Anomaly, a Warp-realspace distortion known to have swallowed the former sector capital within its vortex a thousand standard years previously.From the beginning, the crusade's assault into the region that had once been the Cellebos Sub-sector of the Jericho Reach ran into trouble. Tetrarchus' plan disregarded intelligence dossiers -- in part based on data provided by the Deathwatch -- compiled by former adjutants of Lord Militant Achilus as "exaggerated and over-cautious."The Lord Militant called for a dispersed assault on several fronts. He believed this plan would allow the crusade to make steady progress and "flush out" serious resistance. The new Lord Militant was soon proved correct in this assessment, but the scale of that resistance was far greater than anything the most pessimistic projections had warned of.The crusade was confronted by a massive, well-organised enemy counterattack. Although the crusade was expecting smaller, Warp-capable raider vessels, this new foe also possessed deadly space hulks and several cruiser-class capital ships, some of which were known to be in the hands of the dread Chaos Space Marines of the Traitor Legions.The Acheros Salient's Imperial Navy fleet assets operated in a dispersed formation across more than twenty sub-battlegroups. Faced with such opposition, the result was an unmitigated disaster. Dozens of naval ships were isolated and destroyed, while troop convoys with woefully inadequate escorts were hunted down and systematically ravaged. In these assaults, thousands of Imperial Guardsmen, who would not live long enough to fire a shot in the crusade's service, were slain in the cold vacuum of space.Only the bravery and skill of the Acheros Salient fleet's naval commanders and the resolute skill of the Space Marine contingent assigned to the crusade forces prevented the sudden, savage losses from turning the salient into a disorganized rout.These determined survivors organised a fighting withdrawal back to the security of Karlack and the Iron Collar. Losses were heavy, rated afterward at over 160,000 troops and ancillary personnel in less than six weeks Terran standard.The majority of these casualties were killed either inside their transport ships or cut off on the world of Khazant, itself a former crusade conquest when it was overrun by the forces of the enemy in an orgy of slaughter.In addition, more than a dozen ships of the line were either lost outright or captured by the enemy. The most grievous loss was that of the Storm Wardens Chapter's Battle Barge Warchilde, whose lifeless hulk was left drifting in orbit amid the radiation-swept storm zone of the Magog binary pulsar.