Accatran - Battle of Calth: The Third Quinternary Division was a long-standing veteran formation which had over the years served many masters during the Great Crusade on a score of battlefields, and thus warranted a specific assignment within the Traitors' ranks as their nemesis when battle was joined.This nemesis was to be the Ordo Reductor Covenant of Mormoth-Null, who remained in orbit before the attack and was also given the task of destroying a number of strategic targets in the void-dock city of Ithraca where the bulk of the Taghmata Xerxes were based. When the Word Bearers and their Chaos-aligned Traitor allies revealed their perfidy and turned their guns upon their erstwhile brethren, those Loyalist forces still loyal to the Throne of Terra were caught completely by surprise.While the internecine slaughter was at first largely confined to the forces of the Imperial Army stationed around Ithraca and in the mustering camps beyond, other off-world forces from the Taghmata Xerxes to the Titans of Legio Praesagius were at a loss as to how to react, unsure of just who the enemy was or whether some vast accidental calamity was unfolding around them, the true danger not apparent until it was far too late.The Battle-Automata cohorts and armoured squadrons of the Taghmata Xerxes miraculously weathered the storm. After suffering initial losses from the orbital attack, they also fell back towards the city, selecting a heavy industrial zone in its southern quarter as affording the greatest cover.Traitor Imperial Army auxiliaries in the form of the Mordechai Occlusion regiments had thought to bar their way, but the Feudal World-raised troops possessed only relatively light armaments and proved no match for the Taghmata, which pitilessly eradicated the chanting assault waves, killing thousands, while Mechanicum-affiliated Knights secured the Taghmata's flanks as it advanced en masse into the industrial zone. The initial wave of slaughter and destruction was over. Now the stage was set for the Battle of Ithraca's second bloody phase.By the end of the first solar hour of the Battle of Ithraca, the western sectors of the city had become the scene of a deadly conflict between Titans, the most powerful of all the Imperium's war machines, in a clash of unprecedented scale and ferocity.Meanwhile, wave upon wave of other Traitor Auxilia and Chaos Cult forces began to hurl themselves against the improvised defences and barricades the Taghmata Xerxes had quickly set up in the southern industrial zone they had marked for their stand against their foes. These waves came so thick and so fast that the carefully calculated kill zones became swamped with bodies, and the weapons of the defenders began to overheat and magazines ran dry, such was the relentless, suicidal fury of the enemy.Spurred on by Heretic Astartes of the Word Bearers Legion's Chapter of the Unspeaking, who brought with them recognisable Legiones Astartes heavy armour and weapons, as well as devices of unrecognised pattern and murderous power which, in conjunction with the relentless human and Abhuman attack waves, started to cause significant damage to the hard-pressed Battle-Automata and Adsecularis cohorts of the Taghmata Xerxes.Vastly outnumbered and now seriously threatened, the Taghmata were forced to slowly begin giving ground so that they could fall back in an ever-shrinking series of redoubts and hastily, though efficiently organised, defensive perimeters. After several solar hours of intense fighting, matters for the Taghmata Xerxes were becoming increasingly desperate.The arrival of a house of Loyalist Knights from the stranded House Vornherr detachment at Ithraca had bought a temporary respite, but the Xerxes had shortly afterwards found themselves pinioned between the living waves of Word Bearers-driven cult troops and the crimson and black liveried Siege-Automata of the Ordo Reductor of the Traitor cohort of Covenant Mormoth-Null, which had sought them out for destruction.While the scions of House Vornherr bought time with their steel and their blood, the Magi of the Taghmata Xerxes, cut off from outside contact and aid, enacted a desperate plan, working feverishly to dismantle and reconfigure a large Plasma Reactor unit which had been until then the beating heart of one of the great manufactoria of the city, the plasteel-clad ruins of which now constituted the Taghmata's final redoubt.Seven point six solar hours after the battle had commenced, the Taghmata Xerxes launched its counterattack. Utilising its last reserves of Castellax-class Battle-Automata as a fighting wedge, relying on their servo claws and power blades to cut their way through the enemy, the charge of the Battle-Automata cleared a path to the heart of the Word Beaers-driven horde.Into this breach, three damaged but still-functional Thanatar-class Siege Automata dragged the modified reactor, now rebuilt into a highly unstable plasma bomb of prodigious explosive power. Oblivious to their fate, the cultic horde drove on afresh to the attack, while high above aboard the Dirac's Lament, the master of Covenant Mormoth-Null, the Archmagos Barbatos Hexad, known as "the World" to the commanders of the Great Crusade, perceived the danger and ordered an immediate withdrawal, but it was too late.Having determined that victory was logically impossible, the Magi of the Taghmata Xerxes activated a program of mutual destruction, detonating the bomb. An area of roughly a half kilometre in diameter was immediately burned to vapour, while beyond that, the blast wave reached out to ravage an area equivalent to twenty-three city blocks, charring flesh to cinder and twisting metal into smouldering wreckage.The sacrifice and determination of the Taghmata Xerxes would not be in vain, as the Loyalist forces would ultimately turn the tide against the hated Traitor forces.