On the cruel jungle world of Vardan IV, a young Guardsman experiences the horror of conflict for the first time against an overwhelming greenskin horde.

Read it because

Told in an unusually ambiguous first-person perspective, this story examines what it truly means to be a hero in a universe where few heroic acts are remembered.

The story

The battle on Vardan IV has been an absolute disaster for the Imperium. Two million soldiers of the Astra Militarum have died among the jungles of the world, lost to the fury of a horde of vicious alien orks.

For one trooper, escape from the slaughterhouse seems assured—until a disaster puts him back in the heart of the enemy, with just a handful of allies. Has the Emperor spared them for a purpose, or does their future contain only horror and death?