Isstvan III Atrocity - The Traitors Strike: The Warmaster was incensed with Angron's disobedience and disruption of his carefully laid plan to eliminate the Loyalists with a minimum of casualties, a plan now almost in ruins. In retrospect it is clear to see the invidious position the World Eaters Primarch had placed Horus in. He could have continued with his preparations for a second orbital bombardment and carried it out, firing on both the Loyalists and Angron to punish him, but that at best would see the World Eaters' fleet turn on Horus' allies and start a second civil conflict the Warmaster could ill afford, and at worse, leave Angron alive and an enemy. No, there were far too many Loyalists left on the surface to leave to the World Eaters, and if they were not attacked soon they would become dug-in and organised, and therefore infinitely more dangerous, while orbital bombardment was no longer a viable option. Horus was committed to the fight and now had to forge victory from disorder. So it was that Horus had no choice but to back Angron's headlong assault, and the general order to prepare for a ground attack was given across the Traitor fleet.Once the die had been cast for a brutal war on the ground, the Arch-Traitor Horus appeared to have made a decision to turn the situation to a wider advantage in regards to the loyalty of those that had pledged to fight at his side to usurp the Throne of Terra. Rather than utilise a single Legion to press the attack to the Loyalists' destruction and spare his other forces intact for later battles, he chose instead to employ each and every division at his command to some degree in turn. In this Horus clearly showed his wider grasp of the greater scale of war to come, ensuring every element of his command was bloodied in the field against their former comrades, with the deaths of the Emperor's Space Marines laid squarely at their door. With this pact sealed in blood, there could be no going back for those that had turned against the Emperor and no forgiveness, only final victory or death.The Emperor's Children under their Lord Commander Eidolon were next to deploy, no doubt smarting over the actions of the Loyalist Saul 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.Worse, one Sons of Horus Storm Eagle returning to the bay of its mothership, the Strike Cruiser Minotaur, after displaying the proper codes had conducted a suicide attack inside the launch bay, Voxing its intentions to, "...avenge the blood of Terra" before ramming itself into a line of rearming gunships, Lascannon blazing, wreaking carnage and killing a full company of Horus' Legionaries in the process. Comm-channels and Vox-codes already switched when the attack began were hastily being changed once more, causing further disruption as the Minotaur incident added to a death toll that was already rising rapidly and shockingly in the Loyalists' favour.