A member of the Wildlings, a sub-surface criminal gang fighting to defend Mygor. To the surprise of Imperial authorities, dozens of gangs offered to serve in the defense of the city. The all-female Wildlings, despite their outrageous manner of dress, have proven themselves fierce urban fighters.,

The Death Guard  is being “bled white” by the tenacious defense of Mygor, one of the largest Imperial cities still held by Imperial defenders of the war-torn planet of Dozaria.

Two Imperial Guard regiments, three Planetary Defense Force (PDF) regiments, and a company of the Blood Angels Space Marine Chapter have held stubbornly against eight major assaults of the city by a besieging traitor army that is estimated at more than 500,000 strong.

“The fighting for Mygor is a brutal war of attrition,” declared High Marshal Mikhail Botha, supreme commander of Imperial forces on Dozaria. “Bitter fighting rages for every ruin, street, manufactorum, residential housing unit, and every meter of the city’s underground sewer system.”

“A gallon of blood has been spilled for every square centimeter of this city.”

The stubbornness of Imperial troops in Mygor could tip the course of the war, some military analysts speculate. More than 100,000 cultists and scores of traitor astartes have fallen in the brutal fighting, and the deployment of traitor forces to the battle has kept enemy troops from supporting other Death Guard operations.

The ferocity of fighting around Mygor is beyond comprehension, military analysts say. Nearly a quarter of the city is little more than bombed-out debris, and, in the city center, many buildings still standing are shorn of rockcrete walls or roofs.

The battle for control of the Cathedral of the Imperial Creed raged for weeks, day and night, until the Death Guard finally prevailed.

Within these ruins, loyalist and traitor soldiers engage in ruthless close-quarters combat,  marked by combatants firing through holes in walls and floors, throwing grenades at point-blank range, or turning to flamers and the bayonet to win control of a single room in a single building.

“Each platoon, company, and battalion in the army is assigned a swath of ground, and the soldiers swear oaths to the God-Emperor that they will  hold their position,” Botha said. “There is no retreat.”

That’s not to say that enemy forces have not made some progress in their assault. In the eastern quarter of the city, a Death Guard warband known as The First to Fall led 15,000 cultists and 10,000 zombies in an attack on the Cathedral of the Imperial Creed.

After enemy artillery dropped hundreds of canisters of warp-tainted toxins on the Imperial defense line, The First to Fall advanced 200 meters through the miasma of pestilence to assail the well-defended cathedral, slaughtering the defenders and despoiling the holy citadel after three days of fighting.

Three battalions of the Death Guard of Krieg, always equipped with their iconic gas masks, were the only troops available to counterattack the traitors, and they succeeded in retaking the cathedral.

But, over the course of several weeks, the grounds of the cathedral changed hands half a dozen times. Ultimately, the Death Guard prevailed, took firm control of the cathedral, and have since advanced several hundred meters closer to the city’s center.

But the battle continues.

“The battle for Mygor is far from over,” Botha promised. “We will prevail.”

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Click here for more background on the war on Dozaria.

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The Corvus Cluster is a Warhammer 40K blog documenting our gaming adventures in the fantastical sci-fi universe of Games Workshop.